Part 3
Lena considered him across the table, then nodded and drew the book back. She wanted to show him a detail in the next photograph.
He let her.
They had lunch at a small family trattoria with paper squares over the tablecloths. The waiter greeted her by name. Over a plate of pasta, she told Nathaniel how she had once brought discarded hems home from the dry cleaner and opened them to see what manufacturers hid inside.
He laughed hard enough that the waiter glanced over.
When the check arrived, Nathaniel reached for it. Lena moved her hand onto the paper first.
“Half,” she said.
“I asked you.”
“I’d like to be able to come back without working out what I owe you.”
He started to object, caught her expression, and put down his share. It was seven dollars. He hadn’t eaten a seven-dollar lunch in years.
Outside, she invited him to Sunday dinner.
“My grandmother will interrogate you. I ought to warn you.”
“About what?”
“Whatever occurs to her.”
Vera opened the apartment door wearing an apron with a darned pocket. She inspected Nathaniel, glanced at Lena, and stepped aside.
“He’s missed a few meals.”
The apartment had three rooms, a hallway scarcely wider than a coat rack, and plants balanced on anything that would hold a saucer. Dinner was served in the kitchen. Vera said the other room was for visitors, and began passing dishes before Nathaniel could decide what that made him.
There was chicken with herbs, pasta, and red wine made by a neighbor who kept his equipment in a basement. Vera spoke of Bari, which she had left in 1936, and the glove factory where she had spent her first working years in America. Her husband had repaired elevators in the city’s tall office buildings. Bianca had begun sewing at thirteen.
“And your mother?” Vera asked. “Is she still here?”
“She died twelve years ago.”
“Did she work?”
Nathaniel set down his fork. “She was a cutter.”
Pauline had entered Aveline as a sixteen-year-old apprentice. By the time she married the founder’s son, she could cut a silk jacket with less waste than anyone in the house. For years afterward, people behaved as though marriage had supplied the ability.
He told Vera more than he intended: about his mother returning to the workroom after family dinners, about the shears she would allow nobody else to sharpen, about how praise always seemed to arrive with a qualification.
Vera reached across the table and rested her hand on his.
“Then you belong here.”
Lena watched over the rim of her glass.
Nathaniel left at eleven. His car was waiting a little way down the street. He walked past it and continued to the subway.
On Monday morning he arrived at Aveline before seven and handed Philip his calendar.
“Clear it.”
Philip studied the appointments. “Including the bank?”
“Including the bank.”
The studio lamps made separate circles on the worktable. Nathaniel took off his jacket, found a pencil, and sat down.
By evening, eleven sheets lay around him. Ten held versions of the same blue dress: sleeves ending at the elbow, a high neckline, a back left open with no other demand for attention. He kept adjusting the shoulder because he could remember exactly how Lena had held herself while passing a bowl to her grandmother.
Inez, the head cutter, came down after her workroom had emptied. She had been with the house thirty-one years and had known Pauline.
She examined the drawings without speaking, then stacked them squarely.
“Not the collection,” she said.
“No.”
“For someone.”
He reached for an eraser he did not need.
“The blue silk from the August delivery,” Inez said. “A little silver work at the neck. Hand stitching.”
“How soon?”
“Allow three weeks. I’ll need two people.”
“Take them.”
Philip stopped him in the corridor the following day.
“You’ve eaten at her table now.”
Nathaniel knew what was coming. “I intend to tell her.”
“When?”
He looked toward the stairs.
Philip waited long enough for the absence of an answer to become uncomfortable.
“She’s letting you know her,” he said. “You haven’t returned the courtesy.”
Nathaniel could have explained that she spoke to him without calculation, that her grandmother had taken his hand without knowing what it could sign, that he dreaded watching their manner change. None of it would have answered Philip.
He told Lena that Saturday, walking beside the water in a public garden. The morning was cold enough that she had fastened her coat to the throat.
“I’ve left something out,” he said.
She turned toward him with an openness that made the next sentence difficult.
“The red dress is mine. I designed it.”
She waited, uncertain whether he had finished.
“I own Aveline. My grandmother founded the house.”
A gull landed on the far bank. Lena watched it fold its wings, then moved a small distance away from him.
“You came out of your own building.”
“Yes.”
“And asked what I thought.”
“I wanted to hear you.”
She drew a breath through her nose. “When did you first see me?”
“From my office. Late August.”
“Upstairs.”
“The second floor.”
She looked at the water again. “I stood there explaining your own work to you.”
“You understood it.”
A short laugh escaped her. He wished he had not said it.
“I feel humiliated,” she said. “Not angry. Humiliated.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I told you about my mother getting paid in tomatoes. I brought you home. I made sure you weren’t stuck with a restaurant check you might not want.”
He opened his mouth, but she was already speaking again.
“You had all the information. I had what you chose to leave me.”
“I never meant—”
“I know.” She pulled her cuffs down over her wrists. “I need some time.”
“How much?”
“I can’t tell you that. And I need you to let me leave alone…”
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