I’ll call her Mrs. L. Even all these years later, I feel she would strongly disapprove of my mentioning her family name in a magazine and might well come back from the dead to berate me, so let’s leave it at that. She was in her late 70s when I knew her, an old-school, gravel-voiced WASP acquaintance of my wife’s mother, living alone on New York City’s Upper East Side and decanting herself to Maine for the summer. She drank whiskey on the rocks and smoked Parliaments. Strong disapproval came easily to her.
Mrs. L. was fond of a crepuscular French boîte on East 60th Street called Le Veau d’Or. When my wife’s mother came to town, Mrs. L. would invite the three of us to dinner there. It had been one of the hottest restaurants in New York back in the 1950s and ’60s; it is now, in the hands of restaurateurs Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, one of the hottest restaurants in New York once again. But in the early 2000s, when we went there with Mrs. L., it was all but forgotten.
