by Kate Ledger
But in their Upper East Side apartment, shoes were joy. Shoes were life. He drew them on an easel like a painter, working in black ink, sketching each shoe from several angles. Then he added watercolor or pastel or oil paint. Each sketch had notes for the men at the shop in New Jersey, scribbled in ink up and down the sides, detailing creative inspiration and reading almost like poetry: “straps fit like a bangle of jewels,” “small heel holds her aloft but not in jeopardy.” Then he carried his artwork rolled up under his arm and had a car drive him to the Jersey shop to have prototypes made. In the years he was designing, shoes were everywhere in her parents’ East Side home, on the sofa, on the dining room table, on the kitchen counter. Emily once asked whether they could have the prototypes made in their sizes, but they were tall girls and apparently it wasn’t economical for the company to make a size nine or nine-and-a-half to test out a style.
The fervor for St. Bern Design grabbed the fashion world. St. Bern himself was a gift to style writers: gabby, eager to be accessible and capable of giving fearless, well-parsed sound bites. He socialized with celebrities, persuading them to wear his lines. Everywhere Emily went, to parties, openings or shows, as soon as people found out whose daughter she was, they gushed about her father’s visionary designs as well as his flair for self-promotion. By the time she was a student at Barnard, she knew that a normal life—a quiet existence with a workaday job out of the limelight—was tantamount to failure. The problem was, she couldn’t figure out how to distinguish herself. The impulse to create bubbled up inside her, but what? How? She took several art classes, but never possessed any flair for drawing and was not admitted to the upper level art courses. Aileen, by then, had said to hell with them all and after graduating college had joined the Peace Corps, an angry humanitarian digging irrigation ditches in Indonesia. But Emily believed in her father’s sense of ambition. She just didn’t know what to do with herself.
More than anything, she hoped to join her father’s empire. Whatever it was she needed—artistic talent, creative inspiration—she believed she could learn if she had the right mentor. If she could place herself under his tutelage, she could develop the skills to follow his direction. On the day after graduation ceremonies, with a cobbled-together degree in art education, she asked her father if she could join his design team. At Judith’s insistence, he agreed to make her an administrative assistant to the deputy designer. “You’ll work your way up,” promised her mother, surprisingly optimistic for a frustrated woman who’d been excused from the business world to be what seemed, even to Emily, an unrewarded and unrespected figurehead.
In the brightly lit office, Emily set up her own easel with a broad and hopeful sketchpad. She bought black ink pens. “I want an assignment,” she told her father. He set her to the task of designing a line of shoes for young women new to the working world, just like herself. “Young,” he declared, “and fresh—but also earnest, demure and smart.” She created a shoe, a simple black pump, and brought her father the illustration.
“Look,” he said, pulling a two-year-old catalog from a drawer. He thumbed to page 12 and pointed out an out-seasoned black pump with many of the same features as her sketch. Even she had to agree, the shoe in the book had a more aristocratic look. “It’s not about functionality,” he instructed. “Not at first. It’s about attitude. This shoe,” he pointed to her sketch, “doesn’t say anything. Our women”—that was how he’d come to speak about his clientele—“know that shoes speak worlds. Make the shoe speak.”
For two years, she struggled in his office like a tourist trying to piece together the syntax of a foreign language without a dictionary or a sympathetic guide. “A shoe is an extension of the personality,” he would say. “Shoes are about intrigue and possibility.” Nothing he said prompted ideas; none of the cryptic directions made her see anything new in the stretch of an arch, the angle of a buckle. Instead, something else happened. Her mind began to freeze. She stared at the easel and drew a heel. Then she erased the heel. She drew a toe. There was a blank page in front of her and a winter in her head. She doodled and crumpled paper while answering the phones.
Then, one day as the company was gearing up to produce a spring catalog, she was instructed to wheel boxes of new shoes from the basement for a photo shoot. On the set, she noticed Will, the photographer’s assistant. What she noticed about him, in truth, was that he had noticed her. Distracted, flustered, grinning like an idiot, he nearly crashed a studio light over the set displaying the spring open-toe selections.
She hadn’t meant to fall in love, but being with him felt new to her and intoxicating. They ate bratwurst—which seemed like the unhealthiest and most base of all foods—on a bench in Central Park. They picked through knickknacks in pawn shops, and rode the subway to the end of the lines. One time, in a Salvation Army store, he bought her a pretty watch that didn’t work. The band was like nothing she’d ever seen, double tortoise-shell tubes bound with silver hinges, and the face, an oval, like a Dali painting. “I can have a new battery put in it,” she said, admiring it on her wrist. He just shrugged. He was easygoing, willing for things to happen to him, happy to sit back and simply feel what was happening. Within the cramped, cool walls of his East Village basement apartment, she encountered the antidote to all the pressures of trying to prove herself. His creative yearning was nothing like her father’s. It came out of a free place, a desire to explore, and for the first time in her life, she felt buoyed by a kind of happy, childlike energy. One lazy afternoon when they were still naked, she lifted his camera to her face and aimed it at him. Surprised by its weight in her hands, she said, “Tell me what to look for. What do I do?” He reclined on the bed with his half-smile and shrugged. “Just see what you see.” She wasted a whole roll of film just snapping pictures of him, his face, that look in his eyes, that gnawed and healed patch on the side of his jaw. They weren’t good pictures, she knew—they didn’t say anything—but it was a powerful experience to isolate each part of him with the lens of the camera.
She loved him in all of the fragments: his nimble-moving fingers, his simple laugh, the patience and admiration that lit up his eyes. It was the totality of him that didn’t add up.
So she tried to take charge. “Look, Daddy.” She sneaked samples of Will’s work from wax-paper folders in his apartment and smuggled them to her father’s office. Will’s photos of people—a pregnant woman on the subway, hugging her belly as though she were trying to protect her unborn fetus from the riffraff around her; a policeman eating a hotdog as if he imagined it needed to be overpowered; a woman in a fur coat sauntering alone into the cinema, the look on her face testifying to her loneliness—each one was a world you could disappear into. The sampling enthralled the design team, suddenly taken by the concept of projecting glamour shoes into real-world grittiness. Al St. Bern outlined the proposal himself: He wanted Will to photograph an upcoming ad series to run in full-page installations in The New York Times. Though she shouldn’t have been, she was surprised when Will declined. “It’s just not for me,” he explained. But turning down the job was the end of being in Al St. Bern’s good graces.
“That young man’s got a troubled relationship with money,” her father announced. “Can’t figure out how to earn it.”
She began to see it, too. What Will lacked was a sense of direction, a drive to compete. Suddenly it bothered her that he didn’t have a clear goal in sight for his life. He didn’t even have a savings account. Even though she wasn’t sure what she wanted yet, she knew she’d eventually know how to succeed.
Then Will said, “Let’s go to India.”
What was India to her? No colors, no shades of light, no faces she needed to see that she couldn’t see right there in New York. The idea sounded to her like more of his immaturity, his love of the impractical. But when she hesitated, Will misinterpreted and suggested they get married. Get married first, he said, and go to India on a honeymoon. She could still recall his face during their breakup, the way it bl
anched and then composed itself again around the wound, but she closed herself like a fist. “It just won’t work,” she told him.
It turned out to be a healthy break, too, because it terminated many delusions she’d had about herself. Shortly after breaking off with Will, she quit her father’s business. Using one of his contacts, she became an intern at a public relations firm. Public relations involved managing events, but you dealt with things as they were, instead of issuing them from the mysterious, inaccessible recesses of your consciousness. You made people understand what you needed them to see. When her mother died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage during the next year, Emily had already secured a full-time job with another firm and was about to be promoted again. She wasn’t as good at the unreserved enthusiasm of basic promotions, but she turned out to be particularly resourceful in crisis management. Public relations involved fighting back when you were cornered. It involved having a sense of conviction about the world and a game plan to turn it around. It wasn’t creative. It didn’t require brilliance, ingenuity or poetry. She understood decorum, was well-spoken, liked parties. She could banter with just about anybody, steering a conversation like an expert equestrian with just the right hold on the reins.
And then, at a party thrown by a college friend, she met Simon Bear, who seemed to her to be everything Will was not. He was a doctor, part of a group practice in Baltimore. She liked his face at once, broad and striking and full of expression, looking right into her eyes as he talked to her. He got so excited, in fact, that he spilled his drink all over his wrist and arm, taking her cocktail napkin right out of her hand to blot the streaks of rum and Coke. There was none of that shy nodding, that awkward self-effacement. Everything about him was like an uncoiling spring of optimism, even a lock of his dark hair that popped forward as he spoke, as if it wouldn’t be held back. Sheer ambition had gotten him from his modest upbringing to medical school. He was unreserved in his critiques of other people (as she was) and in his ideas about how to improve the world. He was awed by her and, she sensed, a little afraid of her too, and she liked the way it felt when he wanted desperately to please her. A fit between two individuals, she realized, was only part electricity. That was necessary, of course, but you could find attraction a million places. The rest involved having a rational sense of what you needed from another person in order to grapple with life, and Simon Bear’s vigor and hope were capable of propelling her toward the kind of life she wanted to live. Some of his notions were as odd-sounding as her father’s, but most of them were undeniably interesting and teeming with both the expectation of success and, breathtakingly, the goal of altruism, which, it seemed at the time, trumped everything.
The airplane chugged as it headed into its descent. Emily looked toward the window where the sun shone blindingly off the Atlantic horizon. Given the opportunity, she could speak emphatically about her job, but deep down she believed that anyone with a clear head, a bright smile and a basic command of decorum could be a mogul in public relations, just like anyone with a shopping list and the right number of chairs could pull off a reasonable dinner party. She tried to imagine how she would have explained herself to Will if they had been able to keep their Thursday meeting. Her finesse in PR had helped her achieve the kind of respect and social presence she’d longed for in her youth. But even in smaller ways, her talents had come in handy, like at the beginning of their marriage, when Simon was fired from the group practice. She had not let him become consumed by worry, and she’d helped him reestablish a reputation to build a thriving private practice. (Simon bragged about her; he thought she was brilliant and marveled at what she was capable of. “I’m the doctor, she’s the spin doctor,” was what he invariably said when they were introduced together, a line that always prompted a chuckle and made her grin sheepishly.) Her prowess had come in handy, too, in subtler ways, perhaps. After Caleb, she’d made sure people didn’t know them simply as the couple who’d lost a child as she’d navigated their professional and social steps. Right away, she’d connected Simon with influential people so that he could spread the word about his Boardwalk Diet. (It hadn’t been received well, though Simon, himself, had been spoken of in some circles as a brilliant proactive clinician, possibly ahead of his time.) Socially, she’d been quick to smooth their interactions with friends, putting everyone at ease with emphatic, directive comments. Thank you, you’re kind to ask, we’re doing so much better now, which made the asker feel good, or It was hard at first, but we’re doing everything we can to move ahead, which emphasized that they’d turned a corner. Art may have eluded her, but success had come to her when she’d acknowledged her best skill and put it to use. She’d gone on to use that skill like a knife, carving a life with it.
The hospital where Charles was recovering was called Landesmont Memorial, and it wasn’t easy to find with the free map from the rental car agency. Their path was rerouted by orange detour arrows at every construction site on the highway and then down the palm-tree-studded side streets. Simon refused to accelerate even a single mile per hour over the speed limit, and not too long after leaving the Fort Lauderdale airport, they were lost. Emily stared out the window of the front passenger seat, knowing that if she said anything—anything—they’d fight. When Jamie asked for the map, Emily passed it to the backseat and sat with her lips pressed together.
They passed one strip mall after the next, pastel-colored, with endless parking lots.
“Left on Seventeenth Street,” Jamie was saying. “It’s on Seventeenth.”
“We already passed Seventeenth,” Simon said.
Emily could hear the map in the backseat being rotated sideways. She wouldn’t have guessed her daughter knew how to read a map, and she felt pleased to note Jamie’s skill at the same time that she smarted with another reminder of how distant they had become.
“Okay,” Jamie suggested, “then how about East Davie?”
“Closed,” Simon said.
“Well, the map ends,” Jamie said, exasperated. “I can’t tell you what to do, the map ends.”
“I’ll just try to turn around somewhere,” Simon said with what Emily thought was surprising patience. “Do you see Las Olas? How about Brow ard Avenue?”
“Dad,” Jamie said. “We’re off the map.”
And so they were, Emily thought wryly, off the map. The whole family. She put her best face forward with the rest of the world, but it didn’t work at home. What she knew for certain was you couldn’t force love out of people. Either it flowed toward you from them or it didn’t. “Why don’t we call?” she interrupted finally. “I have my cell. I’ll phone Information at the hospital and get directions from this intersection.”
“Not at all,” Simon objected. “Jamie’s doing a fine job. Okay. South-west Fourth. What about now? Are we back on the map?”
“Left on East Davie,” Jamie said, “and then right on Third.”
Let them have their confederacy, Emily thought, determined not to extend herself in any more unwanted intervention. By the time they pulled into the hospital parking garage, it was nearly eleven.
“More construction,” she commented when they approached the entrance of the hospital. The double glass doors were blocked by a wall of pressboard, spray-painted with arrows pointing to the side of the building. “They seem to be redoing all of Florida.”
Inside Landesmont Memorial Hospital, the maze of temporary walls continued, and they turned one way and then backtracked before locating the reception area. Simon approached the desk with great strides. “I’m looking for Charles Bear,” Emily heard him say to the receptionist. He leaned so far over the reception desk, he looked as though he might hurdle it. “I’m a doctor.”
“Is one of your patients admitted?” The receptionist reached for a list marked with neon pink and yellow highlighter.
“It’s his father,” Emily clarified at Simon’s side, sensing the way Simon’s neck muscles tightened. He liked to handle things his own way, especially in medical settings. What
he didn’t realize was that the receptionist might have two separate lists. Or that they might be treated better, in fact, being family. She was only trying to help. “What?” Emily said to Simon’s glare, neither expecting, nor getting, a response.
“Everyone visiting?” the receptionist asked, smiling, reaching for rectangular guest pass stickers, which she informed them were to be worn at all times in the hospital. “Bear, you said?” She ran a finger with a French manicured fingernail down the second page of her neon list, then across. “Fourth floor. Room 417.” With the same finger, she directed them to the elevators, down the temporary hallway to the right, through the make-shift corridors.
In 417, Charles looked remarkably well. His cheeks were pink and only a mild shiner darkened the feathery skin beneath his right eye. The bed in his private room was propped up, and he sat tall against the pillows with the sheet pulled to his waist. An IV drip dangled above his head, like a hovering jellyfish, Emily thought, its shiny tail trailing to his inner arm. When she, Simon and Jamie entered the room, they found Lucille sitting at his bedside, reading aloud to him from a newspaper. She wore a sleeveless pink tank top that glowed against her flabby tan arms, and tilted her dyed-black head to see through bifocals. As she read, Charles surfed through muted channels on the television mounted near the ceiling. His hair, Emily noticed, was impeccably combed and the quiet between them, even with the hospital bed and the IV pole, struck her as something Norman Rockwell might have captured in a painting, a kind of pastoral, all-American illness. Lucille had been right. They had everything under control.
Simon didn’t seem to perceive this. “There’s almost nobody working this floor,” he exclaimed as they stepped into the room. “What kind of hospital is this? Where’s the nursing staff?”