I always wanted to do this when the Brennans came to dinner because I wanted to see what Fanny would be wearing. She always looked so elegant. She would have some taffeta dress on for instance and she had his raven hair and these black, black eyes behind these glittery, sparkly glasses.
Our housekeeper, who took it upon herself to instruct me in the fine distinctions in judging personal appearance, pronounced Fanny “stunning”. Certain other women, she said, “were merely pretty but Mrs. Brennan is stunning.” Her style extended naturally to her own décor, a study that Angus has pointed out, in black and white, accented with faux malachite screens and table top assemblages of carefully chosen objects as deliberate and suggestive as the contents of a Joseph Cornell box.
Then there were the wrappings on her Christmas presents. Remember them? The purple tissue or the glossy paper, the corners that were never, never crumpled, the couture-quality ribbon that was tied in a perfectly elliptical bow with the absolutely right little ornament or pine cone or flower tucked in and then the little white tag, the kind that you buy at a stationery store to put on keys or on luggage – a little tag with your name very, very carefully written on it in Fanny’s exquisite, beautiful, neat, round script. I always opened these packages very, very carefully because I was trying to deconstruct them so I could learn how to do the same myself.
Even Fanny’s cooking combined originality and refinement. I remember a summer dinner chez Brennan in a hot New York July which began with cold Senegalese soup and proceeded to an absolutely astonishing terrine, a cold terrine, which was the first that I had ever eaten that was not in a restaurant. Then there was the Lebanese buffet that she served for lunch in East Hampton one summer. There were stuffed grape leaves; there was moussaka, maybe the first baba ghanouj and the first tabooli that I had ever eaten in my life. Even the most mundane dishes were transformed by Fanny’s attention to detail, like those crustless tomato sandwiches she would serve for tea, and sometimes as an hors d’oeuvre, for which she would peel the tomatoes and slice them very thinly, and salt them and place them between layers of paper towel and put a weight on the top so that all the moisture would be drawn out and they wouldn’t make the sandwiches soggy. Remember those? And she would have made them on bread that would have been slicked with a little bit of her own fabulous mayonnaise. I can taste it now. To my mother, Fanny’s taste, speaking of taste, was a yardstick by which all things were judged. And when I was a surly teenager, and we were making a family trip to Europe, mother was consulting Fanny on which shops and restaurants and stately homes that would have you which should merit our urgent attention. When mother reported that Fanny says we must see or do or eat at whatever, for the third or fourth time I bridled and I said “Oh mother, anyone would think Aunt Fanny was perfect.”

Fanny Brennan, Picnic, hand-crafted lithograph.
Paper size: 6 x 7 inches. Signed and numbered in pencil.