Gerard van Honthorst, The Match-Maker (1625); Centraal Museum, Utrecht

By Joan L. Cannon

Picture a petite (under five feet) little lady with wavy grey hair tidily confined in a genteel bun. Her features are unremarkable, refined and even, in the way that a very pretty girl could be expected to age. She wears pince-nez. I remember her when she must have been in her early fifties.

It's become a preoccupation to try to evaluate old notions of people and events from my youth, now that experience has so broadened my imagination and perspectives. Embarrassing to realize how shallow and mistaken some of my former impressions appear to be. I hope I’m not alone in that. She was nearly ten years older than my mother. They were close all their lives. The two shared a piano teacher in their youth, and I suspect it was Catharine (with an A in the middle) who engineered a meeting between my mother and the man who would become my father.

Catharine (called by everyone Mimi) was a single lady all her life, most of the adult part of which she spent living abroad in Switzerland. World War II brought her back to the US and several years spent in a residential hotel not far from where we lived in lower Manhattan. She often invited friends and my mother and me to tea. Now as I look back on these afternoons, they seem like something out of a BBC television mini series. Yet I always felt at home with Mimi.

Those were my teenage years — filled with school, the war, my after-school jobs, and a serious boy friend. It’s not surprising that a great many things escaped my notice. Mimi took an interest in me that often surprised me even then. Many of her kindnesses were gifts of unusual books. The first was a one-volume edition (boxed) of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. I was then eleven years old, according to the date inside. Her choice mystified me. To this day I've merely looked at scattered pages without finding an impetus to make real use of it — something I intend to rectify forthwith.

Some time later came The Diary of Samuel Pepys. For my seventeenth birthday, she sent a single volume of  The Works of Shakespeare in a soft leather cover tooled in gold. Over the years, that one has been used when larger formats were inconvenient, and I've always treasured it. Even at the time, I wondered if Mimi were trying to make sure I had a more liberal education than I was being offered at the really good school I attended from the first through the twelfth grades, but I didn't dwell on the thought. Somewhere along the way, I think, Mimi understood I was captivated by literature.

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