Call me a hedonist, peg me as hopelessly bourgeois – I don’t
care. What I enjoyed most about this week’s issue is Judith Thurman’s
description of Betty Halbreich’s apartment, particularly her bureau and
closets:
After the cheese course, we started with the drawers in a
massive bureau, where silk flowers and scarves, Bakelite “bug pins,” wooden
bangles and beads, evening bags in toile sleeves, gloves from Florence and
Paris, monogrammed handkerchiefs, chunky stone necklaces, silver pens and
pillboxes, clip-on earrings, and her mother’s jewels all have separate
compartments. Then came the clothes. Each of her closets (perhaps a dozen – I
have lost count) is a deep stall with high ceilings, sturdy poles along both
sides, and, above them, shelving. The larger stalls might accommodate a
Lipizzaner, with its tack. Their heavy doors are fitted with custom-made wooden
shoe racks that open like a steamer trunk.
I readily confess that I’m a sucker for description such as
this. Like a rich, seventeenth century Dutch still life, it conveys pleasure in
the representation of pleasurable things. The passage is from Thurman’s
delightful “Ask Betty” – this week’s Pick Of The Issue.
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