Tea for two

My dear friend B. and I have a pleasant tradition of celebrating our shared birthday, usually a month or two late, with tea and cakes and endless unwrappings.  This year I found a perfectly lovely new place to forgather, the Courtyard Tea Room at the Boston Public Library,  How had I not heard of this? 

As it's Copley Square, we dressed.  We have our hats, you know, though we didn't bring them.  I wore my teal cut-velvet scarf that B. gave me for another birthday, wound up in a wentletrap or Cumean sibyl's crown; B. wore pert red velvet ribbons in her hair.

For some reason, I hadn't been in the historic part of the BPL in ages, and I'd forgotten how absolutely beautiful the McKim building (1895) is.  Of course, I've always loved the wrought-iron flambeaux at the entrance, like witches' hands with diamonds on each finger, warding off and beckoning in.  I'd forgotten the signs of the zodiac inlaid in brass on the vestibule floor.  And then you turn right, down the tessellated hallway, and there it is, a stoplight-red neon sign:  BAR.  Bwah?  All the drinks have book names:  Tequila Mockingbird, Dorian Grey.

But through the bar is the Courtyard Room, serene and elegant.  It's the sort of place Mrs. Oliphant would bring Randy Melendy after the ballet, disentangling her dozen necklaces from all her scarves, having checked the Albatross.  And it's a marvellous, extravagant tea.  All loose-leaf, well chosen, properly made pots (I had several pots of a very nice second-flush Darjeeling).  There's a three-level curate stacked with exquisite canapes (cucumber!  salmon!  lobster!); scones (not a patch on Madame Buttery's, but whose are?) with cream and lemon curd and blood-orange marmalade; and alluring little cakes.  We ate and drank and unwrapped for hours.

I gave B. the stack of books I'd been stockpiling all year, one by one (non-fiction, especially memoir; hilarity; oddity; above all, excellent prose); she said she wasn't going to get out of bed for a month.  If I had to choose which of B.'s bagful of gifts I love best, it would have to be the gorgeous Tiffany scarf with peacock feathers woven into it, so very Nine-ish, and oh! such a hand:  mingled wool and silk.  But I also adore the little French pro-vaxx pamphlet, "Petite piqûre, grand effet," illustrated only with infectiously cute portraits of hedgehogs.  B.'s fabulous at found oddments.

And we talked, my heavens.  We go back a-ways:  to 1971, when she signed my Independent Study Card, and I wrote an E. Nesbit-ish novella.  B. denies ever teaching me to write; what she did was make a space in which I could write.  Anyway, B. reminisced about seeing Beyond the Fringe in 1962, and nearly falling off the balcony for joy.  We mourned Jonathan Miller.  We compared notes on Little Women; she recommended Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð).  Speaking of women and film, I told B. about my mother's brush with Hollywood.  Over fifty years after the event, she told me that she'd written a Nero Wolfe treatment, and had been in talks with Spyros Skouras (20th Century Fox).  "What happened?" I gasped.  "I met your father."

Of course, B. (in her Barbish way) chatted with the Uber driver (a Syrian) in Arabic.  She likes to know at least a few words of greeting in any language an immigrant might speak, but her Arabic is a passion.

It was such a delicious afternoon/evening that I floated off out of the car in a haze, leaving behind one of my bags of swag, and the driver had to come round the block again.  The tip I gave him was a thank-offering for the whole day.

Nine