The Pink Suit: A Novel (11 page)

“Very good,” she said, and kissed Little Mike on his forehead. The boy needed a trade, after all.

Kate had never seen the couple before.
They must have come from the Dyckman Houses,
she thought. The new housing development was on the other side of Broadway. Very nice: lots of families were moving there. It was a massive place. In the 1930s, before the project was built, it was the Dyckman Oval, the legendary sport complex that had served as the home of the New York Cubans, part of the Negro leagues. The team had brought Satchel Paige and the Pittsburgh Crawfords to their collective knees. All of New York had loved the Oval—“Harlem's own”—even Babe Ruth, who played an exhibition game there. He was an old, bleary drunk by that point, with cow eyes; the world was woozy around him. The Sultan of Swat, the Behemoth of Bust, the Big Bam, the Caliph of Clout, the King of Swing, the Colossus of Crash—Bambino—that day he took swing after swing and then, miraculously, his lumbering body finally remembered what to do, and the ball soared out of the park without looking back and nearly touched the ragged clouds, just as it did in the days when Ruth was the Babe and was every boy's dream, back before the women and the booze and the car accidents, and the too-much-of-everything, including life. At the crack of that bat, the splintering of it, ten thousand fans did not just cheer, they screamed. There were no newsreels or cameras or mayors or aldermen to preserve the memory of that swing, but for a moment, the Dyckman Oval was the finest ballpark in all of Manhattan, maybe the world.

Now it was gone.

Kate and Little Mike sat side by side on the subway bench. Their knees knocked into the backs of the legs of the people standing in the aisle: sleepy, arguing, whispering, shouting, praying to their own gods, bobbing above the crush of their own lives. Rocking back and forth and moving in and out of darkness. Kate knew that trains frightened Little Mike, but he would have to learn how to ride the subway eventually. She held his hand tightly. Not because she was concerned that he'd run away or get lost—he was a smart boy, a well-behaved boy, anybody could see that—but because she liked the feel of his hand in hers.

An elegant man with a cane boarded at the Harlem stop. He had a thin mustache and skin like midnight. He looked like he came from Sugar Hill. “Clothes are like maps,” Kate whispered to Little Mike. “They tell where a man has been and where he can go.”

The boy had no idea what Kate was talking about, but he stared at the tall man in his beautiful clothes, and he said, “Pretty.”

“No.
Handsome
.”

Sugar Hill was an expensive neighborhood, made up mostly of musicians like Duke Ellington and all the rest. The man touched the rim of his gray bowler hat and nodded to the couple. He seemed surprised to see them.

“Brother Taj,” he said. “Honored.”

The man in the bowler sat across from the couple. He held his ebony cane between his knees. His tie was red raw silk, probably from Florence, as it had that particular sheen of Italian silk. There were tailors in Harlem who'd learned their trade in Italy and catered to the music crowd. Leighton's, Cy Martin's, and House of Cromwell—they were the best of the best. Kate had seen their work on the train before. “Fine vines,” as they were called. Like all couture, they were handmade. Silk and mohair suits, cashmere topcoats, and alligator shoes in every color of the rainbow. The Blye Shop had the softest alpaca sweaters, softer than any other, anywhere. Nat King Cole wore them on his album covers.

The man in the bowler kept staring at the couple, and so Kate did too. After a while, the preacher began to look very familiar to her. She'd seen him before but couldn't remember where—maybe the newspaper? Finally, the man from Harlem leaned in and said, “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you for it all. You're a good man.”

Then Kate knew. He was that preacher who was trying to ban segregation on buses. He was a good man. And brave.

At the next stop, two college students huddled onto the train together. Kate noticed that the girl was neatly dressed, in pearls and patent-leather shoes: Columbia University. The boy—he really seemed to be a boy—was wearing wrinkled, ill-fitting khaki pants. His coat was secondhand and needed a good cleaning. City College, of course. There were no seats available, which seemed to make the young man upset. The two wrapped themselves around the pole next to Little Mike. They were dangerously close to toppling over onto the child. Kate pulled her nephew closer and looked away, out the window. The world flashed by as if they were in a silent film, the frames slipping, then catching, then slipping again. No piano to accompany the scene, just the rhythm of their breaths.

“Last stop, Africa,” the young man said.

He was clearly trying to make a scene. Kate pretended not to hear it. The man in the bowler looked as if he were about to say something but had thought better of it. The wheels on the train sparked against the rails. Kate pulled her nephew onto her lap, out of the way, just in case. The train was flooded in sunlight—this was the part of the route that Little Mike liked the best: it was all aboveground. Kate pointed out the train window. “Look, birds,” she said. “Seagulls.”

“Hawks?” Little Mike loved hawks.

“Just gulls,” Kate said.

The child seemed disappointed but leaned in to her to look out the window, his arms around her neck. The river was far below them, and a few men in overalls stood on the shore. “Do you think those men are lawyers?” Kate asked.

Little Mike shook his head. “Union.”

Big Mike had apparently given the boy a lesson or two of his own.

“Union is good,” Kate said, and focused on the cold blue of the river beneath the train, the workmen, and the squawking seagulls. The preacher turned and smiled at her. Kate smiled back. “That's a very nice tie you have on, sir,” she said. She didn't know what else to say.

“Thank you. They are my weakness.”

When Kate and Little Mike finally reached Chez Ninon, the back room was filled with headless mannequins, but no one was working. The pink bouclé had arrived from England. Across the worktable there was an ocean of bouclé in shades of pink. Everyone was leaning in to get a closer look. They all glowed pink.

“Pretty,” Mike said.

“No,” Kate said. “Stunning.”

On the end of the yardage, there was a brown cardboard tag from Linton Tweeds. It was used for inventory control. In neat block letters, someone had written a piece number and a pattern number. The customer was identified as Chanel, as she'd granted the rights. There was also the name of the “warper,” who was Ann. She had signed the card herself. As did the weaver, who was Susan. Finally, there was the darner, whose name was signed in joyous, loopy letters and quite wonderfully was Kate.

B
y Friday, it was snowing pink in the back work room. The bouclé did not just shed, it came undone.
Bouclé
means “to curl” in French, and so the soft wool curled and snagged even after they had had the yardage dry-cleaned. It was imprudent in its color and insolent in its impossible weave, and every time scissors were sharpened and then taken to it, puffs of cloth floated like dandelions in the wind.

When Kate touched her hair, the pink hid in her bangs. If she rubbed her eyes, it hung from her lashes. It made her sneeze. Made her cough. Made her itch. It had the scent of old sheep and coal fires. There were tiny piles of fluff on her table and on her lap. Pink tumbled toward the floor, catching on her nylons, hanging on her shoes. Even her navy wool coat, which she had hung on a hook by her desk, was covered in pink. Pink had worked its way into cups of tea—tiny puffs floated on top of thick cream. And into sandwiches—pink stuck in the grape jelly. Chewing gum. Chocolate. Doughnuts. Pink had even found its way into her coin purse and buried itself among her subway tokens. It was the dust over everything.

Chez Ninon worked with Linton's bouclé on a regular basis, but this particular yardage was reckless, improbable, and not merely pink but a tweed of pinks—it was ripe raspberry and sweet watermelon and cherry blossom running through an undercurrent of pink champagne. In full light, it was like a vibrant wall of fuchsia growing wild in the Mexican sun. In half-light, it reminded Kate of Japanese peonies blooming in the winter: the iridescence was intense but fleeting. It was like the memory of roses; it was the kind of pink that only the heart could understand.

This pink-on-pink weave was not just unruly—it was unnervingly insistent. Like most couture fabric, it would require twenty stitches per inch at the beginning and end of each seam and twelve stitches per inch everywhere else. Not the usual SPI of nine. And everything had to be sewn twice—every seam, every cuff—first in a straight line and then in a zigzag line, to reinforce the seam. Given the maddening nature of this particular ream of fabric, instead of taking eighty hours to sew the jacket, it would now take ninety. The skirt would probably take thirty.

Only Kate had that kind of skill. She didn't usually do the fabricating, but since the suit was for Maison Blanche, the Ladies thought it would be best. By the end of the day on that Friday, Kate was covered in pink.

Pink took the train home with Kate and followed her into the 207th Street station. When she waved at Pete the Cop, a few stray tufts caught on the blue wool of his coat sleeve. When Kate walked across Broadway and then past the Good Shepherd Church, to the river's edge, to stand on the dock and watch the hawks flying low, she left a trail of pink behind her.

At that hour, Inwood seemed not like a part of the city of New York but like the Island, more like Cobh. That evening the sun set, ripe as a persimmon, staining the horizon and river below it. At the moment when it seemed to slip into the darkened water, a handful of bats flew out of the caves that lined the river. Small and black against the red sky, they banked left out of instinct, then swooped low over the water for a drink, and then swirled up into the red clouds as if toward heaven. The rest then followed: ten, twenty—and then hundreds. They poured out from the caves like a waterfall into the river and instinctually banked left, into the deep blue of the ultramarine sky. It was nearly October; they were migrating to Mexico for winter, as they always did.

Winter,
Kate thought. It was such a lonely word.

She walked along the edge of Inwood Hill Park and decided that she would rather be hungry than face Maggie, especially covered in whorls of pink. When she reached Broadway, she could go either left or right. If she went right, her copy of the Chanel toile would be waiting for her on her sewing table. If she went left, there was Patrick.

Kate was beginning to envy the instinct of the bats. Free will was entirely overrated. At the children's zoo, a volunteer had told Kate and Little Mike that bats exit caves by flying left first, out of instinct. So Kate turned left.

Harris Meats was still open. The white-tiled store looked clean and comforting. Patrick was behind the counter in his old-fashioned white fedora and white butcher's coat. The bell on the door jingled when Kate walked in. He looked up and smiled. “I'll be right with you,” he said. Then he winked, which made her blush. Patrick was packing an enormous order for a middle-aged woman Kate had never seen before. She had dyed black hair, wrapped into a chignon, and bright red lips. He wrapped the last of his pork chops and ribs in white freezer paper and marked it with a black wax pencil.

“That side of bacon, too?” she asked.

She looked like a telephone operator. She had an independent air about her and wore the kind of impractical shoes, high heeled and strappy, that someone who sat all day could wear. She smiled at Kate. “I'm afraid I've nearly cleaned him out. Sorry.”

In the glass case, there were a couple of smoked fish and a few links of black-and-white pudding, but that was all that was left. The woman leaned over and picked a bit of pink from the shoulder of Kate's coat. Patrick walked around the counter with the bag. “It's heavy, Mrs. Strout. I double-bagged it, but be careful on the way home.”

“See you Monday.”

“Monday.”

He opened the door for Mrs. Strout. The bell jingled. “Have a good night,” he said. The bell jingled again. And then he turned to Kate and said, “Would you like a ride?”

“A ride?”

“It's Friday night. I've got a car. What do you do in America on a Friday night? You ride around. So why not?”

Why not, indeed?

It only took Patrick a few moments to clean up. The car was in a parking garage around the corner, where telephone company executives parked. Patrick's Oldsmobile was new, a red-finned boat of a thing with a matching carpet and a cream leather interior. It was a convertible. “A Ninety-Eight,” he said. “The Ninety-Eight was the pace car at Indy.”

Kate had no idea what he was talking about, but even in the fluorescent light of the parking garage, the car shimmered.

“Can you call a car beautiful?” she asked.

“Rose is the very picture of Oldsmobility,” Patrick said.

The car was named Rose, after the President's mother. Kate had never heard of anyone naming a car and talking about it so indecently, as if it were a real, living thing. It was daft, but Patrick looked so proud, she couldn't bear to tell him that “Oldsmobility” made Rose sound like she was fast, and no one wanted to think of the President's mother as being fast. He patted the car door lovingly and settled Kate into the passenger's side.

“Peg loved the real Rose, you know,” he said. “Only seemed proper to name her after the great matriarch. I couldn't name her Peg, could I? That would be strange. ‘Mam' would be awkward, too.”

There was an odd sort of logic to that which Kate felt she nearly understood. The car was immaculate. There were rubber mats on the floor. The front bench was cream leather but wrapped in plastic, which Kate was grateful for, because once she took her coat off, she was still covered in pink tufts.

“Should we put the top down? We could turn the heat up,” Patrick said.

Why not? The night sky was freckled with stars. While Patrick took the top down, Kate took off her hat and gloves. She ran a quick brush through her hair. There was pink wool in the bristles, but she tried not to worry about that. Kate was about to shame her entire family in a way that would give Maggie fits, and, frankly, she didn't care. Maggie was correct—there were rules. One was, You don't ride around with the top down past Labor Day. It was as bad as wearing white. But Kate didn't care. Patrick was handsome. He was happy to see her, even though Kate was covered in pink.

“People will talk,” he said.

“That they will.”

Kate shrugged and squeezed his hand as a friendly gesture. She was surprised that he held it tightly as they pulled out of the parking garage and onto Broadway, where people in the streets were going to dinner or movies or bowling or the pub. They turned to look as Rose passed by. Some turned all the way around. Some of them even pointed as Kate and Patrick passed.
Poor Little Mike,
Kate thought, but knew there were worse things in life than having an aunt who didn't always obey the rules—like having an aunt who mindlessly obeyed them.
What a frightful way to be.

Above them, a stainless steel moon, utilitarian and common, shone bright enough. The air carried the rusted scent of Indian summer. Patrick continued to hold her hand as they drove down Broadway. Bagpipes, Elvis, and opera—the music of the street—provided the sound track. Kate was nervous. She couldn't seem to stop talking as she picked away at the pink that had stubbornly clung to her nylons.

“It's the poetry of sheep. That's what bouclé is—”

“Poetry? Yeats, then. Less bleating.”

Patrick was nervous, too. He wouldn't let Kate finish a single sentence.

“But this wool is—”

“It is just hair, isn't it? Sheep's hair. Odd, when you think about it that way. That's probably why no one ever says, ‘That's a fine bit of sheep's hair you're wearing, Mrs. Miller.'”

They both laughed, although Kate was only trying to be polite. It was, after all, Chanel's bouclé, Chanel's poetry.

“Her tweedmakers are always invited to her shows, you know. Second row. Right next to the movie stars and jet-setters.”

“The Ladies told you this?”

They did. “They see it every season. After the show, Chanel holds court with the
fournisseurs
—that's what they're called—the suppliers of tweed and braid and buttons. She ignores everybody else. She once pushed a photographer all the way down two flights of stairs so she could talk to the
fournisseurs
alone. One by one they tell her how very wonderful she is. And she tells them the same story about Churchill—‘Currkell,' as she'd say. She tells the one story over and over again.”

“Currkell?”

“Yes. Currkell. Chanel speaks in this slipstream of words and dreams, and the only way you can tell she's done with you is that she's suddenly talking to the person behind you as if you've disappeared. She'd just start the Currkell story all over again—”

“Not Churchill?”

“No.
Currkell.
But it doesn't matter. She could read a grocery list to them if she wanted to. The tweedmakers are honored that Chanel speaks to them alone. That kind of respect means more than money.”

Most of the pink was gone from Kate's nylons. Just a few whorls remained.

“What clever crows the Ladies are,” Patrick said, although his voice was not unkind. “I suppose this story first came up when you'd asked for a raise.”

It did. It didn't matter, though. Kate liked the story anyway.

“You tell me a story, then.”

“I don't know any grand people.”

“About Peg.”

Kate did know a lot about Peg Harris. Kate's and Patrick's mothers had both worked together in the back room at John W. Dowden & Company Limited, in Cork City, when they were young girls. It was a high-society shop for the posh—“Like Chez Ninon, but utterly huge,” Peg once told her. Kate's mother's stories always began with Peg bewitching one delivery boy or another. They were cautionary tales. Mrs. Harris, in her day, was quite a looker, and that was a sorrowful thing, according to her mother.

“Those kinds of girls, the pretty ones, even if they are dear like our Peg, breed trouble,” she'd say, but she sounded wistful about it, too.

“Tell me something noble about Peg.”

“Noble? It's Mam. She put up with us. That's noble.”

“True. But what about her work?”

“She worked hard.”

“She loved it, though.”

“She loved the check.”

“And the Ladies, of course.”

Patrick laughed hard. “Mam did not love the Ladies. She liked the other girls, though. Maeve in particular. ‘The Great Conspirators,' my pop called them. Mam and Maeve would sit on the back stoop, drinking gin in teacups, and go on for hours about the Olé Chez. They called it that, always with a hard
z
.”

“But she loved the Ladies. She told me they were wonderful.”

“Mam was just luring you in. The shop needed another good kipper, and you fit the bill.”

“She lied?”

“If you think they're wonderful, then it wasn't exactly a lie, was it?”

Kate picked a bit of pink from her skirt.
That's the problem with cars,
she thought.
You sit too close. You tell secrets no one wants to hear.

The stars were not shy about shining, and so the ride was quite lovely. The street was quiet; not many families had cars. Only the occasional bus passed them—delivery trucks were done for the day. Driving in the open car at night made Kate feel like a tourist in her own neighborhood. She'd never realized how many shops there were. Some flew Irish flags. Some had windows painted with leprechauns and shamrocks. They were all Irish, in a postcard sort of way. They were not like the great, dark sea of her youth, or the smoky peat air after a winter's rain, or her father, with his wide, red face and booming laugh.

Patrick kissed her hand. “Marry me,” he said.

He said it so simply, it took Kate a moment to understand. When Patrick asked for Kate's hand in marriage, he wasn't even looking at her. He was driving, focused on the road. He patted Rose's dashboard, maybe for luck, and then continued on. “I should have asked you years ago. Mam said you were the girl for me—not those fast girls, but a loyal girl, a real Irish girl.”

Looking back, Mrs. Harris's Sunday offerings of cake and song were a bit of a soft sell, but Kate had never imagined that Peg had thought so highly of her. For a mammy to turn over her dear son to a girl of any sort was a high honor, and it took at least forty years for the handoff to be complete. Still, Kate missed those Sundays, with Peg singing like the girl she once was and Patrick sitting in his chair with his sleeves rolled up, playing his guitar with his eyes closed, lost in the rhythms of the ages. It was lovely, really, but sometimes it made Kate even more profoundly lonely. Just the three of them like that seemed very sad. Sundays at home with all the distant cousins were more to Kate's liking.