Tastes
Nancy Hale
Increasingly—perhaps because there are so few of her sort around any more—I think of my Aunt Nancy. My first, strong picture of her is before she was married: golden, curly hair ablaze, singing in her high and happy voice, "Yip I Yaddy I Yoodly Yay!" It was about 1913; I would have been five. Her hair really was golden, not yellow, not red, but the color of gold wire. I thought it looked glorious with the jade green scarf she occasionally put on. My grandmother considered such a strong color unladylike, while my mother could not conceal from her expression how cheap she thought the effect, even though she adored her big sister.
To me, however, Aunt Nancy was the voice of the morning, counseling up, up, and away. "I don't care what becomes of me, as long as you sing me that sweet melody," the song went on. She was the Girl of the Golden West except that she lived in Hartford, Connecticut and gave violin lessons. My mother explained to me Aunt Nancy was a concert violinist— their mother had decided on careers for both her girls, a grave decision in those days. Aunt Nancy, however, had no gravity about her; she was laughter and gaiety, and took such adventures as diving into the surf with me in her heavy black alpaca bathing costume, coming to her knees, and long black stockings and black canvas shoes.
We had known each other since long before 1913, though. Aunt Nancy loved to tell people of how she was sitting in a pension drawing room in Brussels, the year she studied with Ysaye (a signed photograph of him, looking pensive, hung on the wall of her stucco house later on), entertaining a German baron, when a telegram was handed to her which announced my arrival.
