Part 2
Lena pressed the fold flat and reached for the ribbon. The moment in which she might have said more passed while Nathaniel watched her tie a neat, economical bow.
He thanked her. Outside, he walked past the corner where he should have turned and did not notice until he reached the next block.
That evening, he called Philip Brandt into his office.
Philip had been his assistant for eleven years. He kept an accurate calendar, remembered what Nathaniel preferred to forget, and possessed no particular reverence for his employer’s moods.
Nathaniel gave him Lena’s name and workplace.
“I’d like to know something about her.”
Philip uncapped his pen. “Are we checking a reference or preventing a catastrophe?”
“The second, possibly.”
“An ambitious assignment.”
Four days later, Philip brought a slim folder assembled through discreet inquiries and routine records. Lena’s life occupied very little paper.
Nathaniel first noticed the applications. A design school had accepted her in 1987 and again in 1989. Neither admission had become an enrollment. Tuition had not been paid.
He looked at the fee. It was less than the last buying trip he had approved without examining the expense account.
The rest came in short entries. Born in Harrisburg. Mother, Bianca Ferraro, seamstress, deceased in 1986. No father listed. A grandmother, Vera Santini, seventy-nine, sharing the Wexley apartment. Five years at Vellori. No absence from work in the past two years.
Philip remained by the door.
Nathaniel closed the cover. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Then start by introducing yourself.”
“I’ve spoken to her.”
“You purchased a dress for an imaginary child. Try again.”
Nathaniel looked toward the window.
Philip put his pen away. “The view from up here won’t make it easier.”
On September 13, Nathaniel came out of Aveline while Lena was examining the skirt. He stood far enough away that she could leave without brushing past him.
“That section catches everybody,” he said.
She glanced at him, then recognized the customer from Vellori. “Did the gift work out?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Another small deception, delivered so easily that he scarcely heard it until afterward.
He looked at the gown. “Denise tells me Thursday is your day here.”
Lena straightened. “I’m clear of the entrance.”
“I didn’t mean that. I wondered what keeps bringing you back.”
She studied him for a moment, measuring something he could not see. Then she pointed toward the place where the draping swallowed a seam.
“I can get almost all the way there. Then I lose him.”
“Him?”
“Whoever worked it out.” She glanced at his face. “You probably don’t want the whole explanation.”
“I do.”
She began with the skirt, not the bodice. Her hands stayed low, marking shapes in the air rather than touching the window. There were eight principal sections, she thought, though one might be doubled. The folds carried more of their own support than they appeared to. The visible boning could not be doing everything people assumed it did.
“That top edge needs another structure,” she said. “Two layers of firm cotton, perhaps. Set on the diagonal and stitched against each other. Otherwise it would turn out when she breathed.”
Nathaniel’s hand tightened around the handle of his folded umbrella.
She went on. Twice she took a wrong turn. Twice she reached a detail so exactly that he could almost see his original drawing under her words.
Eleven minutes passed before she stopped.
“Now you know why I haven’t gone inside,” she said. “They’d have to listen to all that.”
Four people in the house knew how the hidden cotton had been arranged. None of them had told Lena Ferraro.
“Have lunch with me,” he said.
She checked her watch. “I can spare forty minutes. And I’m choosing.”
The diner she chose had scratched tables, a pie cabinet, and a waitress who brought water without asking. Lena ordered vegetable soup. Nathaniel ordered the same and discovered he was hungry.
He asked about Harrisburg. This time he listened without building the next question.
She described a block of immigrant families, front steps full of children, and her mother’s machine under the only window that received good afternoon light. Neighbors arrived carrying trousers over their arms. Nobody left Bianca’s kitchen without having something else pinned.
“When I was twelve, she spent three weeks on a wedding dress,” Lena said. “The bride’s mother brought a box of tomatoes. That was the payment.”
“You minded.”
“I was furious. I thought my mother ought to learn how to charge.” She broke a cracker above her soup. “The bride had never owned anything made just for her. I remember her standing in our kitchen when she tried it on.”
Nathaniel lowered his spoon.
“What would you make, if you could?”
“Clothes a woman can actually buy. Good ones.”
He waited.
“Everything at my end gets made a little worse every year. Cheap linings, hems you can’t lower, sleeves cut so badly you can’t reach a shelf. Then there’s that.” She nodded toward the avenue. “Wonderful work, priced like a house down payment. I’d like somewhere between them.”
Nathaniel had spent his adult life protecting the distance between those two worlds. Aveline’s customers paid for the dress, certainly, but also for the knowledge that almost nobody else would own it.
“Closing the distance changes what the upper end is worth,” he said.
“Only if the distance is what’s worth buying.”
He laughed before he could stop himself. It surprised them both.
When their bowls had been cleared, he asked if they could meet again.
“Thursday morning. The public library,” she said. “I’m there most weeks.”
“For the fashion books?”
“For everything the bookshops won’t let me read without buying.”
A week later he reached the library at opening time, having canceled three appointments. He found her upstairs beneath a frosted lamp, with a large book open beside a sheet of notes.
“You got away from work,” she said.
“I’ve already heard what they were going to tell me.”
She pushed the book toward his side of the table.
The photographs were from 1947. Full skirts, tiny waists, an extravagance of fabric in a continent still dealing with shortages. They spoke quietly for nearly two hours, disagreeing over the sleeves in one photograph, then over what had made the collection matter.
“People had spent years turning old things into less-old things,” Lena said. “Then somebody said they could have something beautiful without apologizing for it.”
“People attacked those skirts in the street.”
“And then copied them.”
He told her his grandmother had attended the original presentation. She had stood outside afterward unable to speak, then come back to Philadelphia and produced four new designs in eleven days.
“The papers accused her of copying.”
“Had she?”
“She understood what had happened. She worked from that.”
Lena turned a page by its corner. “That’s what I’m trying to learn. I don’t want somebody else’s sleeve. I want to know why they chose it.”
He answered with a remembered sentence from the couturier, speaking it first in the original, then offering an English translation about the private dream of beauty a woman carries within her.
Lena looked up sharply.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s quite a memory for a man who needed help buying his niece a dress.”
He could have told her then. Her notebook lay between them; there was nothing to interrupt him.
Instead he said, “I design clothes. I’ve done it professionally for fifteen years…”
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