She always had lots and lots of things going on and particularly she was busy in the kitchen. She had a secret recipe for mayonnaise, for instance, and a way to make cheese puffs really billow when they came out of the oven. Her sandwiches were always served on this paper, paper thin Melba bread with no crusts, absolutely no crusts. More than anything, I think she had this soft spot for bacon. There was always lots of crunchy bacon sizzling on that stove, a riot of bacon in that house. I mean, there was bacon on the salads, there was bacon on water chestnuts, there was bacon on meatloaf, bacon on BLT’s, there was even peanut butter and bacon, which was my favorite sandwich. But one day the bacon ran out and I’m not exactly sure why. Fanny seemed very perplexed, as I’d come for lunch as I generally did on the weekend and she did not know what to do. So I gamely suggested “Why don’t we have liverwurst for lunch?” She just looked at me, in horror; I mean real, real horror, as if some terrible odor had permeated the room. She said “Liverwurst?” And she repeated it “Liverwurst?” as if it was the most disgusting thing she had ever imagined. Then she recovered and said “Well you know dearie, we’re running low on mustard today, so I don’t think so.” It was really the closest thing I remember that she ever came close to saying no to me, the one time that I didn’t get what I asked for.
Eventually I grew up, sort of, and was shuffled off to boarding school. Which was a good thing at the time, I must say, because I was becoming a very roly-poly little boy eating all that bacon. I missed Forty East Sixty-Two a lot, although my parents continued to live there, the Brennans moved out and it was a very sad day when I came home from boarding school and realized that they no longer lived there, that they had moved on to Kew Gardens. It was a sad thing but I never really, obviously, forgot about her and we did lose touch. But, about ten or twelve yeas ago, our lives kind of came back together when I started working at Christies. I used to visit her when she had moved to Fifty-Fourth Street. We’d often have drinks after work. As an adult, I didn’t find Fanny quite as foreign as I had when I was young, but she was every bit as inspiring, obviously, and I absolutely loved her to pieces. When I thought about it, I really think it was her love of details, her love of the double entendre that moved me and that any sense of visual trickery or trickery with words and ideas were often very high on my list of favorite character traits.
I’ll always remember the day that she said to me that she wanted to give me a present. I went over after work for a drink and Fanny asked me if I would like to choose a lithograph. I didn’t own a painting, I didn’t own a lithograph and I had wanted to correct that. She said she really wanted to give me one. It seemed like sheer agony to have to choose one. She laid them all out and I poured over them, all of these different ones.

Fanny Brennan, Chateau, hand-crafted lithograph on Arches Cover. Image size: 1.625 x 3 inches. Paper size: 6 x 7 inches. Signed and numbered in pencil.