Part 5
Nathaniel set a single-page proposal before the board later that month. Lena’s line would have its own name and sell dresses between $125 and $295.
The board had seven members: two from the family, two representing the bank, and three outside directors. Howard Beckett, sixty-eight, had occupied the same chair since 1974. Usually he listened until everyone else had finished. This time he removed his glasses before anyone spoke.
“A woman will be able to buy our work out of an ordinary paycheck.”
“The new line’s work,” Nathaniel said. “Under a different name.”
“And no one will discover who owns it?”
“They’ll know.”
Beckett laid his glasses across the proposal. “Then you’re asking us to surrender the thing people pay us for.”
Nathaniel looked along the table. “Our average customer is fifty-four. Ten years ago she was forty-eight.”
“Our customers have money.”
“They also have birthdays. So do we.”
Beckett leaned back.
“The house is sixty-nine years old,” Nathaniel continued. “I’d like it to outlive the people currently buying from it.”
There were more questions, most of them financial. At the end, four members voted in favor and three opposed.
Beckett put his papers into his case.
“A house can survive a poor season,” he said at the door. “It has a harder time surviving foolishness.”
Lena began on Monday, October 29. Her fourth-floor room contained a table, shelves, two assistants, and a budget she scarcely touched during the first week.
People were courteous in ways that made conversation difficult. They answered the question she had asked and immediately turned to someone else. The fabric buyer neglected three written requests until Nathaniel questioned him about them in a room full of colleagues.
In her second week, Lena heard one of her assistants, Joanne, speaking to a friend in the corridor. The words were precisely the ones she had feared in the blue dress.
She stood still until they had gone. Then she returned to her table, checked a sleeve measurement, and worked until eight.
That evening she told Nathaniel what had happened.
“I’ll deal with it,” she said. “Please don’t make another announcement on my behalf.”
He put down the glass he had been holding. “All right.”
By December, Lena had twelve pieces ready to show.
Inez spent two hours handling them. She sat in the skirt, reached forward in the jacket, lifted the dress hem to inspect the stitching. Lena waited with a pencil in her hand until the wood left a mark on her finger.
Finally Inez said, “She understands fit.”
After that, people began bringing their questions into Lena’s room instead of discussing her outside it.
The clothes were straightforward: a skirt that recovered after a subway ride, a jacket that accommodated more than one kind of figure, a dress with enough seam allowance to survive a change in its owner’s life. Lena called the line Bellora, after the street where her mother had sewn by the window.
The first jacket sample was remade eleven times.
At the seventh, Inez told her it was good enough to proceed.
“Not when they reach,” Lena said.
They had tried it on five women. On three, the underarm pulled when an arm went forward.
Lena altered the pattern again. At the eleventh fitting, all five could reach without lifting the jacket out of place. Inez copied the finished pattern into her own reference book. She did not mention that she had done it, but Lena saw the open page on her desk.
Nathaniel visited once a week. He asked a few questions, examined whatever Lena handed him, and went back downstairs. Sometimes one question kept her occupied for the rest of the afternoon.
Once, looking over all twelve garments, he asked why none fastened at the back.
“Who’s supposed to do it up?” Lena asked.
“The wearer.”
“Then I put it where she can reach.”
He nodded. Out in the corridor, he stopped with his hand on the stair rail before continuing down.
Vera returned to the Wexley apartment in the middle of November. Two weeks later, she slipped in the bathroom. She broke nothing, but it took forty minutes to get herself far enough across the floor to open the door.
Nathaniel went to see her without Lena.
Their conversation lasted two hours.
“I’ve lived here forty-one years,” Vera said. “You can’t put me in one of your rooms like an extra chair.”
“The second floor has been empty for fifteen years.”
“That sounds like your problem.”
“It is. You could be useful.”
She gave him a suspicious look.
He glanced at the plants crowding the sill. “There’s better light.”
In December, fourteen pots arrived at his house, followed by Vera’s suitcases and Bianca’s sewing machine. The machine went into the studio beside the window.
Lena watched the movers lower it into place. She checked the wheel, opened the accessory drawer, and found a spool of thread her mother had wound years before. Vera stood beside her until she closed it again.
Slippers appeared under the hall bench. A radio took up residence on the kitchen counter. In the mornings, Nathaniel came downstairs to coffee and bread frying in a pan he had never used.
Vera did the weekend cooking. First she invited Inez. Then Philip came. Then Nathaniel returned one afternoon to find Denise helping set out plates while somebody argued about how long the sauce needed.
“Wash your hands,” Vera told him. “You can cut the bread.”
One February evening, he paused in the kitchen doorway. Vera was correcting the way Lena pressed her fingers into a piece of dough. Flour lay on the table, and the radio was playing too loudly for either woman to hear him enter.
He hung up his coat and took another chair.
In March, after dinner, Lena joined him on the small balcony above the garden. The brick under the railing still held a little of the day’s warmth.
“Does it worry you?” she asked. “How different all this is from what I know?”
He waited for her to finish.
“I still add up the groceries before I reach the register. Maybe a year from now that will irritate you.”
“I’m more concerned you’ll get tired of a man who never learned he ought to.”
She smiled and slipped her hand into his.
“We’ll have to compare notes.”
The Bellora show was scheduled for April 13, 1991. Three weeks before it, Lena brought her presentation plan downstairs.
Nathaniel read the first page and looked up.
“No professional models?”
“No…”
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