I didn’t come from a wealthy family but happened to live across the street — oops, road, we were never permitted to call it a “street” — from one very wealthy lady, a memorable woman who had the economic resources to build what she insisted was a white “Connecticut Farm House” breezily overlooking the fact that it was on Staten Island in New York. Lovely place. She even stocked it with bucolic, Renaissance painting–looking farm animals to wander her estate, behind whom she never had to walk with a shovel. Staff was available for that. These creatures grazed bucolically about the grounds looking much like a Grandma Moses painting while the lady of the house sat above in her bucolic lanai sipping tall drinks beneath her huge summer straw hats, sometimes crowned with real flowers from her picking garden.

Her name was Mrs. Alice V. Remington and she was most assuredly to the manor born. No one ever checked her background. No one ever dared question The Lady Alice. She claimed she was once one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting; must have been the Queen Mum, which was a bit of a stretch because I don’t know as the royals ever hired colonized Yanks for lady in waiting gigs, although it made for a very good story.

But Alice was remarkable — beautiful, graceful, impeccable from sculpturally coiffed head to perfect shoes. She entertained at high tea every afternoon at 4 p.m. sharp, and one did attend and one did it properly or one didn’t bother to show up. I recall once when my sister and I were summoned for the famous high tea when my poor sibling very nearly fainted into a cold heap onto Mrs. R’s gen-U-ine hand-knotted Persian carpet in her elegant garden room because I left my spoon — oh, gasp and choke — sticking up from the cup when I stood up to go to the loo. My dear sister’s face got positively chalky and she kept gesturing wildly with her head and glaring at me, eyes rolling from my face to the teacup. I finally said, “Sister dear! Are you having some sort of seizure?” I was that concerned. Eventually, I figured out the source of her angst and pulled the offending spoon from the cup and clattered it to the saucer. Seriously. She was that horrified. I’ve never seen such batty drama.

Alice, whose daughters all came out at — what, the Waldorf-Astoria? I forget — that place with the big clock everyone met under, and you had to drink your teas and lemonades with your gloves on and they got wet and gross and eventually became quite grey. Oh, now I remember; meeting someone “under the clock” meant the big elegant clock at the Biltmore Hotel.

Anyway, the debutantes at their comings out there wore long, white, strapless dresses that scraped their tender chests quite cruelly while the boys, all potentially good-catch husbands, sweated horribly in white tie and tails, none having marriage on their minds at that party or at that age, although that was the original, centuries-old strategy behind those dreadful assemblages. The ladies in virginal white were “coming out,” aka being available as an appropriately appointed and, with hopes, abundantly loaded bride.

Thus, at a dinner party once at which my presence had been requested, Goddess knows why, Lady Alice picked up a soup bowl to drink the soup left in it, after she’d spooned, away from her from the opposite side of the bowl of course, most of the soup still in the bowl. A bowl, not a soup plate, mind you. It’s important to remember that as this story progresses. It was at the ladeeda Richmond County Country Club (RCCC to those in the know) on Staten Island on that evening where she delicately drank from her bowl, and I well recall staring with horror at that dignified, beautiful grand damme, finally blurting rather too loudly, “Mrs. Remington!! Are we allowed to DO that?” She looked at me with that haughty, icy, I-must-be-kind-to-the-lower-classes-no-matter-how-difficult-it-may-be smile only she could manage and opined in her silky, upwardly mobile voice that in fact it is permitted, but of course only if the soup bowl has two handles. Two. It did. Relief!

Handles?? Who the bloody hell makes up these addle-brained rules?? One can slurp from a bowl like a thirst maddened mule as long as the trough has two handles on it? Please, where is the logic in that?

But there you have it. I know I could look up the handles rule in my old Emily Post book, but it’s been holding up the back corner of an ancient cabinet of ours for years. It was just the right size for propping when that leg got kicked off by a sullen teenager who has our last name, and there it remains. The book, that is. The teenager grew up and moved out. Anyway, I figure if Alice Remington can drink from a soup bowl with two handles, then we mortals can also, and since Mrs. R has died (she managed to frost people, but kindly of course, for 103 years) I think the rules can be bent a bit and that we can with no shame suck up soup from a bowl with no handles whenever we damned well please, but maybe with just a tiny homage to the remarkable, indomitable, one of a kind, never to be seen again and very classy Alice V. Remington.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer. You can reach her at lcvs@comcast.net.