One day, as I was rummaging through a box of old photos, I came across a picture of a gentleman dressed in a formal, three-piece morning suit. Planning to appropriate its silver frame, I pulled the picture apart and found a package of notes hidden behind the photo. The serious, dour, young man in the suit turned out to be the Duke of Kent, otherwise known as Prince George, once third in line to become the King of England. In a note dated June 14, 1926, from H.M.S. Bee, Yangtze, China Squadron, the Duke had written;

To, Sally,

Thank you for teaching me the Charleston. I know I couldn't have learned it from any one else and only wish I could have had more practice with you as you do dance marvelously! I enjoyed our conversation on psychoanalysis but still don't understand what you meant by opportunities and you refused to explain during our last dance at the Majestic. Won't you tell me what I won't understand? I will do my best not to have an inferiority complex and anyway I am certainly better than I used to be...

On the back of a menu from the Royal Hotel in Shanghai, he wrote to Sally's traveling companion, Sally is the queen of the Black Bottom. In ten minutes she could teach more about life than the Philippines could in ten years. In other letters he reports his progress on the Charleston and his wish to learn the Black Bottom, a dance that had originated in rural Mississippi and then adopted by high society. The Duke regrets that the books she sent him on psychoanalysis never arrived, and hopes that when I get home I will lose my inhibitions.

Sally was my maternal grandmother, christened Sarah Jane Bush, called Senior by me, short for Sally Senior. An early proponent of facelifts, I remember her features as oddly stretched and misshapen, her eyes drawn back into elongated slits, her hair perfectly quaffed. The only time I saw her without her signature blonde bubble wig, she was a frightening figure with frizzy grey hair and sagging flesh. But from a distance she looked ageless; thin, spry, always impeccably dressed in bright, flowery silk dresses in summer and Chanel suits in winter. My mother dubbed her, 'Auntie Mame' because, like the movie character, she was vain, stylish, daffy, imperious, unconventional and full of pep. She loved clothes, exotic travel and the attentions of men and had gotten rich by marrying up. Four times.

But during my childhood, she seemed like a foreigner from a remote country with a questionable allegiance to my own. She would show up at our house at random intervals, and throw everything out of kilter. During these visits my mother became more flustered and insecure than usual as she rushed around fluffing pillows, polishing the silver and cooking her dinner party meal of beef bourguignon with instant mashed potatoes. Senior would arrive, breathless, talking non-stop about people none of us knew and foreign places I'd never been. She'd always ask in an astonished tone, "Patsy, when did you become such a good cook?" My mother would beam. My father would nod politely, but I knew he was annoyed by Senior's inability to remember from visit to visit that her daughter had learned to cook years ago.

Sally's skill as a ballroom dancer was well known to me. She was reputed to have introduced the rumba to New York cafe society in the 1930s after touring South America. By the time I came along she was still dancing at El Morocco and the Copacabana. She tried to teach me the rumba in my parent's living room. With the first beat of this strangely vibrating music Senior straightened up to her full five feet two inches, thrust her shoulders back, and rotated her hips. No longer a grandmother, she became the femme fatale of her younger days: sexy, flirty Sally. I squirmed and complained that she was holding me too tight. Without missing a beat she retorted, "You will have to get used to this when you have a Latin lover." This was a shocking prediction for a scruffy, 12-year-old tomboy growing up in the 1950s in a prudish Wasp enclave of Long Island. A Latin lover was as removed from my experience as an astronaut or a transvestite.

I was intrigued that Senior could challenge a duke on his insecurities while doing the Charleston and further impressed to learn that she'd heard of psychoanalysis in 1926 when it was still an obscure science practiced by Freud and a few followers. I wondered if she'd she read Freud, or if she was she dropping the name of an au courant idea tossed about in fashionable circles. The grandmother I knew had no books in any of her houses and read only the society column in the Daily News.

All I had to go on to unravel the mystery of how Senior found herself dancing with a duke in Shanghai was a fading family tree, a few stories and a box of newspaper clippings from the 1930s. My grandmother was born in St. Paul, Minn., in 1894, the youngest of eight. Her father, Avery Bush, originally a pharmacist, became head of the corn department for Northrup King Seed Company. In a favorite boast, Senior claimed that he was the real inventor of hybrid corn though he never got credit for it. In the only picture I have of the Bush family, the children have long, rectangular faces with determined jaws. Avery looks grim and stern, every bit the iron fisted patriarch.

Divorced twice by the time she was 30, Senior married Martin Foss, an older, dynamic, president of a publishing house and moved to New York when she was 35. As Mrs. Foss of 784 Park Ave., she became a "prominent socialite" whose comings and goings were featured in Cholly Knikerbocker's gossip column in the New York Journal American throughout the 1930s and 40s. The dalliance with the Prince turned out to be the first of many. In a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from this period Senior was seen everywhere, traveling with "the smart set" at the Stork Club and El Morocco or dancing at charity balls at the Plaza, exquisitely dressed and always smiling. In one such column, entitled These Fascinating Ladies, Sally was described as "petite with oblique Oriental eyes...looking so jeune fille...her parties are always fun and have a definite 'go' about them...loquacious and peppy...She's the type who never wants to leave the party....bubbles over with vitality and she's likely to wear you down with her energy. Plays a good game of bridge and backgammon but doesn't know the first thing about cooking. The housekeeping in her home 'just happens'...She prefers costume parties to picnics al fresco...

Her love of costume parties was documented in publicity photos where Senior gazes at different unidentified men, her head tilted coquettishly to one side. In one, she's decked out as a Chinese girl in embroidered silk pajamas, in another she's a gypsy fortune teller, in a third she's a Siamese harem dancer in a pointed, beaded headdress. In the only picture that included her husband, Martin, he's dressed as an Arab sheik while she's in a slinky, white, empire style, satin dress with a train that's attached to her wrist. On the back of the photo, she notes that this costume, modeled on an outfit worn by Napoleon's wife, Josephine, won first prize at the Everglades Club costume ball in Palm Beach, 1931.

In some ways my grandmother was the quintessential man's woman; flirtatious, vivacious, sexy, athletic enough to play a decent game of golf, always game for the next adventure. She was a good sport, who never complained about physical discomfort, and a superb follower on the dance floor. She encouraged men to feel suave and graceful in her presence. In a society column circa 1940 she was quoted as saying, "I prefer the company of men."

In spite of this statement, I'm not convinced Senior liked men as much as she claimed. They were described more as essential adornments, who were good for squiring her around at parties or garnering access to information, than as people with hearts and minds of their own. The only husband I knew was her fourth, Col. Henry Thorne, an aloof man with a shiny, bald head and bristly mustache who never so much as smiled at me. With Senior he acted more like a grumpy escort than a husband. But he was graceful on the dance floor and looked good in a white dinner jacket. After divorcing Henry, Senior was reputed to have said. "No man is worth more than 10 years of my life."

Toward the end her life, Sally Senior and I had our first, and only, personal conversation about her past. We stumbled into it over lunch when I asked about a recent visit with my mother and stepfather. I knew my mother's marriage to a deteriorating alcoholic was in trouble. Senior answered my question with a non sequitur.

"I didn't know any better," she said, her eyes welling up. I'd never seen her close to tears before. I asked her what she meant.

"My father told me he'd give me a house if I married Mark Hurd (her first husband). Everyone thought we were a good match. I liked flying in his plane, but I didn't know anything about how babies were made. Nothing. A neighbor came over one afternoon when Patsy (my mother) was a baby and told me Mark was having an affair with someone we both knew."

"What did you do?" I asked, stunned to see Senior, the dancing dervish and charmer of men, look so small and crumpled.

"I moved back home and got divorced. I was the only person I knew to get divorced." There was a slight quiver in her voice and a collapse in her usually erect posture after sharing this humiliation from 60 years ago.

Before this conversation I'd assumed that Senior had joined the café society world of international travelers to escape something about her midwestern family. I thought it might have been her invalid mother or her puritanical father or the harsh winters. Or maybe there had been intense sibling rivalry for sparse supplies of affection. But now I wondered if she'd fled the midwest to avoid the shame of having been publicly cuckolded or the burden of unwanted motherhood.

The pieces of Senior's life that came to me after her death in notes hidden behind a photograph or in a box of publicity photos and newspaper clippings are difficult to sort. Growing up, much of what I knew about my grandmother was colored by my father's critical eyes. He held Cholly Knickerbocker's version of Sally as "a fascinating lady" in contempt. For him, "socialite" was a dirty word, associated with phony, shallow people with money but no values. He criticized Senior's multiple marriages and insisted that she'd been a disastrous mother. I saw the advice she offered, which focused on surfaces, as proof of her superficiality. Whenever we met for lunch, Senior would chide me, "Don't eat the bread, you'll get fat," said at a time when I was 17 and rail thin. While neutral about sex, she warned me to be discreet because doormen talk. She advised me never to say anything romantic in a letter. A written "I love you" was recriminating evidence. Other bits of wisdom included: never drink too much, always be cheerful, never critical and hang up your clothes immediately because the residual body heat eliminates wrinkles. Envisioning a life where I would be a frequent weekend visitor at country estates, she explained that I should always make my own bed and write a thank you note within two days. These tidbits were offered at a time when I'd never seen an estate or knew anyone who lived in a doorman building.

After everyone died, my father, mother and grandmother, I looked for a new narrative. Adopting my father's view of Sally Senior as "a superficial society gal who hung out with the space wasters at El Morocco" was too easy. It left out how unusual she was. By the time I came along, she was an independent woman, beholden to no one. She owned several houses and traveled extensively on her own long before feminism made this seem desirable. An early health nut, she avoided sweets, swam daily and was the first person I knew to hang upside down in a yoga pose. She learned the twist in her 70s at Arthur Murray's Studio. Though her financial independence was seeded by alimony from advantageous marriages, she was a talented investor in her own right. Her broker still tells stories about how she would insist he purchase stock in an unknown company she'd heard about at a party that went on to double and triple in value. Although she was a careless, inattentive mother, she was generous to her daughter in the end, leaving her what she valued most, money and a sense of style.

Ultimately Senior remains a mystery, a collection of fragmented stories and controversial opinions. Was she a model to be admired for her spunk, a pioneer of sorts, who parlayed her charm and talent for dancing into a livelihood that afforded her a place in the most glamorous society of her day? Or was she a hard-boiled, selfish, conniver who used men to accrue a fortune? Whoever she was, I've come, somewhat belatedly, to respect her. Like Senior, I've lived by my own lights, taking independence for granted. I built a house in my 30s and had a child on my own in my 40s with the help of her inheritance.

Dr. Sally Donaldson is a psychologist/psychoanalyst who has a private practice in Greenwich Village, N.Y. She is a Master of Fine Art candidate in creative nonfiction at Stonecoast in Maine.

Transformations
We tell stories.
We tell stories to make sense of our lives.
We tell stories to communicate our experience of being alive.
We tell stories in our own distinct voice. Our own unique rhythm and tonality.

Transformations is a weekly story-telling column. The stories are written by community members who are my students. Our stories are about family, love, loss and good times. We hope to make you laugh and cry. Maybe we will convince you to tell your stories.
— Kathrin Seitz, editor, and Cheryl Durbas, co-editor

"Everyone, when they get quiet, when they become desperately honest with themselves, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there." — Henry Miller

Kathrin Seitz teaches Method Writing in Rockport, New York City and Florida. She can be reached at kathrin@kathrinseitz.com. Cheryl Durbas is a freelance personal assistant in the Midcoast area. She can be reached at cheryldurbas@tidewater.net.