by Nicole Kelby
She was holding an evening gown that she’d been repairing for the Wife. The Ladies had made it, even though they knew that Mrs. Newhouse, the magazine publisher’s wife, had her own version of it. She’d bought hers during the runway show at Lanvin. It was the same show that the Ladies had stolen the design from for the First Lady. The gowns were nearly identical. Same color. Same beadwork. Same fabric. If the two women ever found out, it would be a disaster.
Kate held the dress like a barrier between Patrick’s world and hers. It was quite heavy: floor length, with an ivory satin skirt. The bodice and shawl were completely beaded in a pattern of red roses over ruby silk. The beadwork was always unraveling. It was unraveling at that very moment, too. Small ruby beads slowly spilled onto Patrick’s polished shoes.
“Kate,” he said, “these women are objecting to us on moral grounds. It’s not good. Do you understand?”
She did.
The beadwork would not stop unraveling, no matter how many times Kate fixed it. The threads kept snapping, and so the Wife left a trail of iridescent beads behind her everywhere she went. The problem was too much for Provy to fix. It was too much for anyone. It was a design flaw. The silk thread required for such fine fabric would never hold up under repeated wear.
And now Patrick was demanding a wedding.
It was an impossible situation on both fronts.
“I’m working,” Kate said.
Perry was still singing. “When we finally kiss goodnight—”
The blue of Patrick’s eyes no longer seemed blue but a thin, dull gray.
“Do you understand what I’m saying, Kate? A lot of my business is the parish.”
“Let it snow,” Perry sang. Someone turned the radio off. The workroom went quiet.
The gown felt so heavy in Kate’s arms.
The rain of red beads continued on.
“This is the Wife’s,” Kate said.
She held the gown out to Patrick, as if the silk’s memory of Her were sacred. “It was designed originally for an embassy dinner with Prime Minister Nehru. He wears very severe jackets, but always with a red rose boutonniere. To honor him, the Ladies decided that I should bead the entire silk bodice in red roses—even though we could get in trouble, because that’s the same exact way the original was made.”
Kate took Patrick’s callused hand and ran his finger along a single rose. The beads unraveled and stuck to his skin. The rose disappeared. All that remained was the outline, the series of tiny holes in the fabric where Kate’s needle had once moved deftly.
“It’s too fragile,” she said. “It’s just too fragile.”
Kate bit her bottom lip hard. It was a trick Miss Sophie had taught her to keep from crying. The Ladies didn’t like it when back-room girls cried. “Even if you try to fix it, it can never really be fixed. Nothing can be done.”
Kate wasn’t talking about the dress. Patrick rubbed his fingers, and the beads fell onto the floor. He watched as they rolled off his shoes and under a mannequin. He looked so helpless, standing there with his bad shave and crooked tie. There were so many things that could have been said at the moment, but neither of them said a word. Patrick gently took the dress out of her arms. He laid it on her table carefully. The silent mannequins were a forest around them. The back-room girls forgotten, Patrick held Kate in his arms until their racing hearts slowed a bit.
“I love you,” she said, and was surprised how fiercely she meant it.
“I know,” he whispered.
The radio went back on. The workroom began to hum again. Kate, embarrassed, looked at the tinsel hanging off the lights above their heads. It looked more like brass than silver. “I need to get back.”
“Of course.”
Patrick hesitated as if he hoped she’d change her mind, hoped she’d grab her coat and run through the snowy streets with him, all the way to the courthouse, because that was what her heart wanted—but she couldn’t. It was nearly Christmas. There was still too much work to be done.
As soon as the door closed behind Patrick, Kate missed him.
At six o’clock, Miss Sophie caught her by the arm. Kate thought that the Ladies had heard about Patrick’s visit and weren’t pleased, but it wasn’t that at all.
“Maison Blanche called,” she said. “Provy used all the material that you’d sent. For the pink suit. Cigarette burns. Reweaving. They need another yard to fix it for the India trip. Two would be best.”
Every last inch of the remaining pink bouclé was in Kate’s suit. There was no fabric left. Miss Sophie put her arm around Kate and whispered, “I know some of the girls take bits with them.”
Kate was too embarrassed to speak.
That night, in Kate’s small apartment, amid the chaos of fabric piled everywhere—the bolts and swatches and rolls—she sat with her pink suit on her lap. In the kitchen, Maggie’s copies of the Wife’s clothes still remained stacked in chronological order. The boxes were gathering a thick layer of dust. Those clothes were beautiful and could be remade to fit Kate. But they were not the suit. The suit was a Chanel. And it was hers.
Kate desperately wanted to keep it.
She wore her white cotton gloves. Her seam ripper was too rough for such delicate material, and so she’d sharpened the thin Jowika fish knife that her father had given her. REPUBLIC OF IRELAND was stamped on its blade. It was amazingly sharp and always provided a clean cut. The Old Man made her fillet everything they caught for dinner with it. “It will keep you humble,” he said.
The irony did not escape her now.
It was snowing outside. Patrick would be at the pub for dinner in a couple of hours. If Kate hurried, she could catch him there. She didn’t want to go to sleep without seeing him again. Didn’t think she could sleep at all, if things were left the way they were between them at Chez Ninon. But that meant she had to work quickly, and very carefully. Since the silk was quilted to the bouclé in hundreds of perfect stitches that were exactly one inch apart, to remove even one improperly could cause a run, and the yardage would be ruined, unusable.
At best, Kate knew that she could only provide Provy with a little over a yard of fabric. And it would have to come from the skirt. The jacket was not cut from a single piece of bouclé but from several pieces that had been sewn together, and so none of that could be saved. It would completely unravel if she undid the stitching.
The skirt would have to do.
The hem was the place to start. St. Jude’s scapular, with its inscription, Whosoever dies clothed in this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire, was removed first. Kate put it around her neck. She wanted to pray for forgiveness but couldn’t. She didn’t even know where to start. She’d gone too far. She’d broken too many rules.
Kate carefully picked at the stitches with her father’s blade and thought about the Island. Some still believed in Brehon’s law, the laws of honor there. The regulations of proper behavior were quite clear. Of course, it’s easy to be clear when your world is very simple: The sun rises. You fish. You work. You fish again. The sun sets.
The more she thought about home, the more Kate realized that the pink suit was not hers to have. It had nothing to do with her life. It wasn’t a part of her. If it had come from the Island, the wool would have been dyed in variations of wild pink thyme and the deep rose of St. Dabeoc’s heath and that particular geranium pink-magenta of the bloody cranesbill. And while the bouclé was spun and woven and blocked, the secrets and dreams and fears and laughter and cups of tea and sweet-cream cakes and blue jokes and awful puns and razzing and anger and songs and prayers and tears and love—yes, love—of those who were born on the Island would have brought it to life.
It would be of the Great Island and of Cobh, the port of County Cork. It would not be of Cumbria or New York. But home.
This is merely an unraveling of another person’s life, not mine, Kate thought. And the work went much quicker for it.
After a couple of weeks, Patrick stopped asking Kate to marry him, but P
eg’s ring remained firmly on her finger. It was not because it was stuck there: she’d had it stretched so it fit properly now. Kate wore the ring because she could not imagine a day passing when she would not hear Patrick’s voice. Every day, on the way in to Chez Ninon, she would stop by the apartment to make porridge for them both. He liked his with bitter fruit—unsweetened mashed strawberries were his very favorite. He made a very nice pot of tea, which was a skill that Kate had never quite mastered. She brought over her mother’s Belleek teapot for them to use. And he brought out Peg’s bone china cups.
Breakfast together was about the past and the present. The future was never mentioned. Patrick pushed the kitchen table to the front window. While they ate, he’d prod Kate into a running commentary on the fashion sense of the telephone operators as they went in and out of the building across the street.
“Thumbs up?”
“Her lipstick’s too red—it betrays her intentions.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It depends on what her intentions are, doesn’t it?”
It was certainly more entertaining than television.
Patrick had taken to packing Kate a lunch of banana-and-butter sandwiches on white batch bread, which he made himself. There was also a thermos filled with raspberry squash, rasa, as it was called, or orange juice when it wasn’t too dear. For teatime, he sometimes included his own version of Marietta biscuits, which were dead plain digestives, just as they were on the Island, but lovely all the same.
They had both learned to cook, somewhat. Kate could assemble a breakfast with the best of them, and Patrick was gifted with Peg’s ability to bake. That pleased them both. Baking helped Patrick forget how badly business had fallen off since all the talk began. “It’s really quite therapeutic to bang around some dough,” he told Kate. If it made him happy, it made her happy, too.
They were determined not to let the gossip get to them. Late suppers were still taken at the pub, always with a proper pot of tea during the week and a halfie on the weekends. Mrs. Brown served them kindly every night and tossed anyone out who gave them a second look. Sometimes they would come in for sessions night. Patrick would bring his guitar, and Kate would sing a chorus or two. If Mrs. Brown wasn’t there, they came in anyway, because it felt like home, like Cork, and they weren’t willing to give that up, no matter who made a snide remark about them or told a pointed joke or two.
They carved out a bit of happiness for themselves, but it was still difficult to know that Patrick spent his days standing behind the shop counter, in his starched butcher’s coat with his white wool fedora angled just so, just looking out the window. Waiting. Only the telephone operators came in now, which wasn’t quite enough to keep the place going. After a time, Patrick started talking about selling the beloved Rose and her Oldsmobility. But Kate hoped that was just talk.
After—there was that word again—after everything, they couldn’t return to the Good Shepherd, despite Father John’s reassurances that people would forget, especially if they married. It just didn’t feel like their church anymore.
On Christmas morning, they took the A train into the city, to St. Patrick’s. It was all gold and glory there, not like at the Good Shepherd, where God had a pulse and a heart, and it was Ireland’s, not some high-and-mighty version of it. After the mass was finished, a plaster Jesus was laid in the crèche. His arms were outstretched toward them, but Patrick and Kate turned away.
After was a very difficult word, indeed.
In March, the Wife traveled to India, and Kate told Patrick that the pink suit had gone along, too. “It’s like you’re with her,” he said. And so the ritual began. Every day, Patrick would gather newspapers and magazines with articles about the trip, and he and Kate would go to the pub, eat their dinner, and search for the suit.
“Why not?” he said. “Just for laughs.”
The First Lady’s trip began with a caravan of steamer trunks being loaded onto the Pan American jet, along with the Wife’s entourage: the ambassador, the Wife’s sister, the Secret Service detail, the assistants, the secretary, the hairdresser, and Provy—who Kate thought looked quite glamorous for a personal maid. The Wife was not wearing the pink suit.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Patrick said, and he was kind enough not to mention that most of the articles went on at great length about the seemingly endless amount of trunks filled with “unworn gowns from the most expensive couture houses in the world, Lanvin, Oleg Cassini, and Chez Ninon” and how shameful it was to have all these fancy things made up for India, “a land of extreme poverty.” When Kate read that, she was embarrassed enough for the both of them.
Every night after, the press covered the First Lady’s trip in excruciating detail, from her elephant rides with her sister to her visits with children at a hospital. Her radiant smile and gentle charm seemed to make people happy, but the reporters also dwelled on the protests over her Somali leopard coat and smart mink sweater.
On St. Patrick’s Day, a Saturday, the First Lady took a barge across a lake surrounded by stone tigers. The photograph was in color. It was daytime, but she was wearing a sleeveless apricot silk cocktail dress gathered at the waist with a bow. It was a Cassini, designed specifically to be photographed. The silk was sturdy. It dazzled in the sun. You couldn’t take your eyes away from her. All the crowds who lined the shore knew it was the First Lady making her way to the Maharana of Udaipur’s white marble palace to a lavish party in her honor. They cheered and threw marigolds and lotus blossoms in her wake, although many of them looked like they hadn’t eaten for days.
“What’s the point of that?” Kate asked.
“Beauty,” Patrick said. “Isn’t beauty its own reward?”
Kate had thought that all her life, but now she wasn’t so sure. So many of the starving were children. Patrick leaned across the booth and kissed her.
The next night, Patrick did not bring the Times to the pub for dinner. Instead, he covered the table with old newspapers that he’d found in his basement. “Your girl may not be that much of a Holly,” he said. The papers were peach from age and brittle. There was a picture on the front page of the Wife, back before everything, back when the President was just a senator. He was being wheeled on a gurney, to his second back surgery in seven months. He seemed to be dying. The look of fear on the Wife’s face was thinly hidden.
“You have to look beyond the clothes,” Patrick said. “She loves him quite clearly. You can’t let the clothes get in the way. They’re just things.”
That day he’d taken all of Peg’s belongings and boxed them up for charity.
“Things aren’t people,” he said. And Kate loved him all the more for it.
The pink suit was finally worn by the Wife on the way home from India. Much to Kate’s delight, the press took color photographs. Although the pink was not as bright as she remembered it to be, not as bright as her own jacket, the women of India had never seen a color like it before, and a newswoman was quoted as saying, “I would love to have a sari like that.”
The suit was worn with a single strand of pearls and pearl earrings, which made it seem plain to Kate. But there was finally a matching hat. Unlike Schwinn’s version, this one had a thin line of blue trim, which made it stand out when photographed and drew the eye to her beautiful face. When Kate told that to Patrick, he laughed. “They really are a clever lot,” he said. “It makes her look like a sweet, playful girl.”
It did, but Kate was no longer sure that mattered. “She’d look better if she were doing something useful.”
Chapter Twenty
“We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.”
—Karl Lagerfeld
October 1962
It had been more than a year since the pink suit was made. Chanel was no longer the latest thing. When the Ladies arrived back from the Paris shows that October, they were wearing Shetland-wool miniskirts. Everyone could see the Ladies’ knees, which was a sight that seemed to make only the Ladies
ecstatic.
“André Courrèges! The man is visionary!” Miss Sophie said.
The back-room girls were not so sure.
Miss Nona’s knees were like two shriveled apricots; Miss Sophie’s were like blushing grapefruits.
“Do they not have mirrors in France?” Maeve asked.
The trip was a great success. The Ladies had copied every single dress Courrèges had presented, and it was their intention to fill the racks of the showroom with skirts that looked like bath towels. It was a new year and a new collection.
“The First Lady, circa 1962,” Miss Sophie announced.
After the meeting, Kate was called into their perfumed office. Lilacs, she thought. Apparently Mr. Charles had started a trend. Kate tried not to stare, but Miss Sophie and Miss Nona, in their tiny plaid skirts, were a remarkable sight—and not in a good way. They’d paired their skirts with frilly lace blouses that looked as if they had been stolen from the wax pirates at Madame Tussaud’s museum. Ropes of gold chains and pearls wound round their necks.
“We’d like you to be in charge of fabrication at Chez Ninon,” Miss Sophie said. “We’ll mock up the designs. You can create the patterns.”
Kate wasn’t sure she’d heard that correctly. “You don’t want me to do the finishing anymore?”
“In addition,” Miss Nona said.
“Yes. In addition.”
In addition? There weren’t enough hours in the day already. The Ladies sat there smiling at Kate and waiting for an answer. They seemed so happy, Kate didn’t know how to tell them no. Miss Sophie leaned over and patted Kate’s hand, as a mother would. The gold bracelets on her arms rattled. “We’ll need you to help train the new girls, too. They’ll be two.”