She was the psychiatrist who lived next door and spent her weekends in Connecticut in a family home that had been there forever. The older aunt who hadn't had children and who had divorced her husband decades earlier. She would speak of her lovers with a quiet Kate Hepburn voice, softened by her light golden brown hair and the blush of a youngster. She would spend hours in Central Park listening to a musician who always performed in the same place. I believe that though there were generations between them, that she flirted with him in a way that only an aging woman can get away with. She loved music and would play the classics in her apartment but never loud enough for us to hear. She worried about it constantly. We told her that loud would be fine if she played Chopin or Beethoven's seventh.
She was a Mayflower baby and descended from the MacLeod clan. We had plenty to talk about.
Charles was publisher of jewish books whose office was down the hall from our KolDesign HQ. He would visit often, usually with a slightly off color joke, sometimes way too off color. He would sit in the office and tell us stories about his life, and just as Helen would do, he would flirt with me in that way an aging man could without repercussion. He once brought by a photo of his father as a young man. We always thought he had to have been quite the looker as a young man, but this photo of his father in his uniform from the Great War was astonishing. Charles was a chip off the old block. He wanted me to design some of his book covers, but time caught up too quickly, and soon he was gone. We thought he must have missed his grown children to spend so much time visiting us. It was confirmed when his son came by to visit several weeks later. He knew who we were.
Helen and Charles were both my friends. Both died of cancer in their 70s, and they never knew each other.
In my mind, they are far away having a conversation slightly off color and laughing about it. I can still see Helen blush.
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