First, she’d pour through racks of impossibly expensive clothes in the Wanamaker’s designer salon, debating the merits of Dior and Balenciaga as if her life as a civil servant at the Frankford Arsenal called for spangled chiffon evening gowns. (If she had a trace of vanity, it was about her feet.) I can still see her in her Ann Fogarty dresses, white gloves and extra-narrow Andrew Geller shoes.
Every Saturday, I met Aunt Betty at the Eagle at John Wanamaker’s. Although no one ever told me the details, it seems she had never been in love or, more to the point, no one had ever proposed.
It was also a derogatory term, not to be spoken in front of Aunt Betty, my mother’s unmarried older sister who had “bad skin” and lived with my grandmother in a row house in South Philly.īetty was to be pitied. When I was growing up, Old Maid was a card game that, along with Go Fish and Gin Rummy, occupied us kids on rainy days.
