by Nicole Kelby
“And we have a present for you,” Miss Nona said.
“Yes, we do.”
Miss Sophie crossed the blue glass floor in slow, halting steps, which made the tiny skirt and the frilly lace of pirates seem all the more tragic. She opened the closet and took out a large white box with a red ribbon. Miss Nona watched with great concern as her partner, the “younger” one, made her way slowly back to the gilt desk that they shared. The package seemed bigger than the woman.
How much longer can they do this? Kate thought.
By the look on the old woman’s face, she could see Miss Nona was wondering the same thing too. She turned to Kate and said, “Money. Did we mention the money?”
“I don’t think we did!” Miss Sophie said as she sat, slightly winded, and placed the package in front of Kate.
“Well, Kate. It will be twenty dollars a week more for you. The two girls will do most of the finishing. You can take the Wife, Mrs. Paley, and Mrs. Astor for yourself.”
“You’ll remain in the back room for now, but you’ll be, more or less, Mr. Charles.”
“Is that agreeable? You’ll get the present either way, so don’t let that sway you.” Miss Nona pushed the large package over to Kate, as if to tempt her.
“Thirty dollars a week extra. It’s a supervisory position and a lot of work,” Kate said.
“Twenty-five,” Miss Nona said.
Sharpen your pencils and recalculate, thought Kate. “Twenty-five dollars and one percent of the profit if the Wife buys the miniskirt and it catches on.”
“Twenty-five dollars and half of one percent if the miniskirt trend still holds by October 1963.”
It was a deal. Miss Sophie pushed a stack of Vogue magazines across the faux French desk. “Study up,” she said. The model on the cover had her hair wrapped in a length of gold lamé.
Miss Nona tapped the photo with a crooked, tiny finger. “See, you could make a skirt out of that! Think of the profit! It’s barely a yard of fabric!”
Miss Sophie pushed the gift-wrapped package closer to Kate. “Now open it.”
The Ladies seemed as excited as children at Christmas.
The ribbon fell to the floor when Kate pulled it. She took the lid off the box. Even the tissue paper was pink. Kate was speechless.
Miss Nona said, “I saw the man from Linton at the Chanel show, and he had some samples left over from last year. It’s not an exact match, but it’s close enough.”
It was the pink bouclé, about three yards of it, neatly folded and wrapped in tissue.
“I don’t understand.”
“I felt so badly when you unraveled it,” Sophie said. “I hated to make you do that.”
The Ladies looked so very pleased with themselves. “Thank you,” Kate said, and bit her lip so she wouldn’t cry.
Miss Nona stood. “The model will be here any minute.”
Kate hugged both the Ladies, something she’d never done before. Miss Sophie tapped her watch. “Time is money,” she said, but hugged her back.
The Wife’s model, Suze, was late, detained by reporters again. The press made it a practice to follow her ever since she had gone to The Carlyle for a drink after work with friends. Reporters were in the bar, hoping to catch a glimpse of Her Elegance, and overheard Suze talking about the Wife. The poor girl’s life had now become impossible.
An hour later, Suze called from a pharmacy somewhere in Midtown to check in. The photographers had been trailing her all morning. “I’m not sure how to get rid of them,” she told Kate on the telephone. The girl was nearly hysterical.
“Stop crying and get on the bus,” Kate said firmly. “No one who is going to see the Wife would ever take a bus.”
And it was true. The model arrived ten minutes later, which made Kate quite proud. Being a Mr. Charles, even a More-or-Less Mr. Charles, was obviously her calling.
That day, the fitting did not go well.
“I miss the Wife,” Miss Sophie said and sounded more forlorn than usual. Suze was a very sweet young woman, very good at modeling, and very pretty, in a First Lady sort of way, but she was such an exhausting and expensive complication. In the past, Mrs. Molly Tackaberry McAdoo and her dog Fred would simply meet with the Wife and show her the Ladies’ sketches. They would have champagne and discuss all the options. It was very civilized. Now, because of Maison Blanche’s memo, every season—including Pre-Winter and Cruise—when the Ladies came back from Paris with drawings for the Wife, they had to quickly knock off copies, often sewing them directly onto the model in large, loopy stitches. When done, a number was assigned, and the model would pose for photos.
“Think Cole Porter!” Schwinn would shout.
The girl would hold a cigarette in a long, sleek holder and tilt her chin in a bored but beautiful way.
“Think Lunch at the Ritz!”
She would hold a champagne glass as if to toast and tilt her chin in a bored but beautiful way.
“Think I am so sick of Lady Bird going on endlessly about Texas!”
The girl would just appear profoundly bored.
And then they’d do it all again for the next outfit. Hours upon hours, day after day, the model would stand motionless while the two old women cackled and stitched around her. When the piece was done, she’d be photographed, and then they’d start all over again. It was exhausting to watch.
Neither bothered to remember the model’s name. She was either “darling girl” or “dear girl.” It was an enormous amount of work for two women in their late seventies. The Ladies were quickly winded. How much longer can Chez Ninon continue? Kate often thought.
That morning, when the first miniskirt was snipped and basted and then photographed for the Wife, Miss Sophie handed Kate the drawings and said, “I need toiles for these in sizes eight to fourteen, which you will clearly mark as if they were sizes two to eight. Understand?”
She did.
“And be very careful,” Miss Sophie said. “This is groundbreaking. True originals.”
Originals that we copied from André Courrèges, Kate thought. The Ladies apparently still had some life left in them.
It was half past one when Kate finally sat down to lunch. It was another banana-and-butter sandwich, which she’d grown quite sick of, but since Patrick always cut off the crust, just as her mother had always done, she couldn’t tell him to stop. That was the last moment of calm Kate would have in a very long time.
She looked up from her sandwich; Maeve was dressed to leave. She looked bloodless, and she was holding Kate’s coat and hat out to her.
“There’s been an explosion. The New York Telephone Company. A boiler in the lunchroom.”
Maggie Quinn usually brought Big Mike lunch on Fridays so she could make sure his paycheck found its way to the bank instead of the pub.
“The entire street was destroyed.”
Patrick.
Smoke had shut down the trains; the subway was closed until further notice. The buses weren’t running either. No cabs. No phone service. Hundreds of cars were detoured, and some had been abandoned in the clogged streets. Kate and Maeve took a bus as far as it was willing to go and then ran all the way to Washington Heights. They couldn’t get closer to home than 175th, and that was miles away. They hitched a ride on a milk truck and then ran up Broadway. It looked like a used-car lot.
Out of breath, cold, their feet aching, they kept on running, past the abandoned cars, past the others who were running too. The closer they got to the telephone company, the heavier the smoke got. Maeve gave up somewhere on Dyckman. “I can’t go on,” she said. Kate didn’t hear her. She didn’t notice her drop away.
When Kate finally arrived at Patrick’s butcher shop, the intersection was overrun with police and firemen. They were covered in ash, darting in and out of the big building across the street, panicked as ants. “Everyone stay calm,” a man on a loudspeaker said over and over again, but his voice was tinny, and it had rained glass and steel and concrete—the request was impossible
.
Kate tried to make her way down to Patrick’s shop, but she couldn’t get through the crowds. She crawled on top of a car that someone had abandoned. The smoke was thick, but she thought she could see that the windows at Harris Meats were blown out. The hanging sign was gone. The shop was dark. It was difficult to see anything else.
“Get down,” a police officer said. Kate pointed toward the shop. The car rocked back and forth in the crowd. He reached his massive hand up to her.
“It’s not safe here.”
It was true. Behind her, the telephone company was no longer a building but a huge, wounded beast, creaking and moaning. There was not just a fire, although the fire was still burning. There was not just an explosion, although the walls were still collapsing.
A group of women jumped out the windows, onto the street. Some were caught. Some were not.
Panic will not do, Kate told herself. She pointed toward Patrick’s shop again. “I’m the butcher’s wife,” she said, and it felt true.
The policeman understood. He pushed his way through the crowd, with Kate following in his wake. Don’t panic, she thought. But it was difficult not to. What was once the sidewalk outside Patrick’s shop was now the edge of a crater filled with drifts of debris, spikes of glass and twisted steel. In front of his shop, in neat rows, there were bodies. Mostly of women. Some had blankets over them; some were covered only with coats or sweaters. Some looked as if they were sleeping. Some seemed to have stopped speaking midthought: their eyes were blank, and their mouths were slack.
“I’m sorry,” the policeman said to Kate. “You’ll have to stay back.”
The streets of Inwood were no longer filled with music. Tears fell like sheets of rain. Kate wandered for hours through the crowd, searching. She overheard snips of stories from those who could still speak.
“Like an atomic bomb.”
“Like ten thousand cars backfiring.”
“It was as if two trains collided.”
Five hundred people had been in that building; the hospitals were overflowing.
Kate asked everyone she met, “Do you know the Irish butcher? Have you seen Mike Quinn? Or his wife, Maggie? They have a little boy; he would have been with them.” Most knew her family, but no one seemed to know where they were. Kate kept walking in circles until finally she found a man who said he knew Patrick.
“The butcher ran in,” he said. He looked like an accountant, wearing a thin cotton shirt rolled up at the sleeves and a tie.
Kate wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “In?”
“Into the building after the explosion. He and some of the transit fellas—the uniform men, subway maintenance. Last I saw, they were pulling debris off people. Carrying them out.”
“They ran in?”
“They did.”
The man didn’t remember seeing Patrick come back out again. “Walls were toppling over. Tough to see anything.”
Kate’s breath was irregular. Fear is such a silent thing, she thought. It winds its way around you until it holds your heart in its hands.
“You need to sit, before you go down,” the man said.
“I need to know what happened.”
“All I know is that most of the survivors are in the hospitals by now. But if you go to the triage area in the parking lot, my boss is making a list of the others.”
“The others?”
“The ones that didn’t make it.”
The parking lot was next to the garage where Rose was kept. It looked like a war zone. Someone had written the words triage and morgue—with arrows pointing in different directions—and taped it over the EMPLOYEE PARKING ONLY sign. Men and women were lying across the hoods of cars, as if they were beds, talking to nurses who moved quickly from one to the next. Some were sitting in chairs, wide eyed and panting. Priests and ministers and rabbis were leaning over the dead and dying. Kate didn’t see Father John, but she was afraid to look too closely.
In the midst of all this chaos, a man sat at a card table, calmly making notes. He seemed to be an executive. He was wearing a suit and looked unaccustomed to making lists of any kind. His jacket had been burned in several places. His face was dirty.
“Name?”
“Patrick Harris. The butcher.”
The man looked at her oddly. “Harris Meats, across the street?”
“Yes. The Irish butcher.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The word made her go cold. “Sorry?”
“Next of kin only.”
The man obviously knew the shop well enough to know that Patrick was unmarried. Kate’s heart was pounding so fast, she felt dizzy.
“Then Mike Quinn? My brother-in-law.”
The man checked. Then checked again, just to be sure. “No Quinn. You’ll have to call all the hospitals. Have you tried their house?”
Kate ran all the way home.
For the rest of her life, Kate would remember the stench of burning oil—and running. The sun slipped into the river as if exhausted. Without electricity, the neighborhood was dark and smoky. Candles flickered in some of the windows that she passed. She kept on. She ran up the 120 steps of Step Street, straight up, and then down her street, to her building. Once inside, she took the stairs two at a time. She’d lost her shoes. Her feet were bloodied. Her bones felt as if they would break. The door to Maggie’s was ajar. The apartment was dark, as was the rest of the neighborhood. Kate knocked.
“I hope that’s room service.”
Patrick Harris.
The thin moon shone through the living-room windows. Kate could make him out, but just barely. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against Maggie’s ugly couch, wrapped in Big Mike’s stadium blanket, which was a blue plaid of suspect origin—not the Quinn tartan. He turned on a flashlight.
“That blue suits you,” she said.
Kate was afraid to touch him; she was afraid that if she did, he’d disappear.
Patrick was covered in soot. His face was burned. His hair was singed away in places. He had never looked more wonderful to Kate.
“You look like a building fell on you.”
“They’re heavy things.”
“And Maggie?”
“She’s excellent. Your sister was halfway to the bank when it happened. She and Little Mike stopped by the shop on the way, so I know they were unhurt. Thank God she’s such a mercenary when it comes to Mike’s pay. She swooped in early and avoided the show.”
“Mike?”
Any hint of a smile disappeared from Patrick’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Couldn’t find him. Nobody was here when I got here, either.”
“He wasn’t on the list, though. I had them check. That’s something.”
For a moment, Patrick appeared confused, and then he understood what kind of list she was talking about. He looked relieved. “Good,” he said. “That’s a bit of good news.”
Kate held out her hand to him to help him up. He wouldn’t take it.
“I don’t want to get the sofa dirty.” He handed her the spare key that Maggie kept under the front mat instead. “Don’t lose it.”
She held out her hand to him again. “If you wreck her beige carpet, Maggie will be unforgiving.”
“My leg’s asleep.”
Kate didn’t believe him. She pulled back the blanket. Patrick’s leg was bleeding. It was wrapped in someone’s cotton shirt, which was soaked with blood.
“It’s fine,” he said. “Keep it clean, they told me.” Patrick tried to get up, as if to prove that he was fine, but couldn’t.
“It is not fine.”
Patrick’s leg was clearly not fine, but they both knew there wasn’t anything either one of them could do about it. The hospitals were filled. There were no doctors to call. Kate was suddenly furious.
“You went in. After?” She was nearly shouting, speaking in fistfuls of words. “After it exploded? How could you?”
“How could I not?”
Patrick’s eyes
were rimmed in tears. He pulled Kate into his arms and held her for a very long time.
When the telephones were working again, Kate called the Old Man. She’d kept the number of Fogarty’s Pub in Newtown, even though her father told her that she shouldn’t phone unless she hit the National Lottery. The call was passed from a local to an overseas operator, there was ringing and then more ringing, until finally Mrs. Fogarty herself answered. It was half past five in the morning in Cobh. “Kate! Dear!” she shouted over the static. “Are you coming home?” The woman sounded so far away. Kate suddenly missed her so. She had a kind word for everyone, and that always meant a lot.
“I’m sorry if I woke you, Mrs. Fogarty.”
“Woke me? Been up for hours. I’ll send one of my boys to get the Old Man. He’ll call you back.”
“No. I’ll hang on.”
It was a small fortune for every minute, but Kate didn’t care.
“Well, aren’t you the great success, wasting money on telephone calls? Of course, I’m not surprised. It’s hilarious the way the Old Man shows off your pictures. He’s got them all hanging on his brag wall.”
For a moment, Kate thought that the woman was confused. She’d never sent the Old Man any pictures of herself. “This is Kate, Mrs. Fogarty. Not Maggie—”
“I know that. I’m not daft. He’s got the newspaper photos of all those frocks clipped up nice and hanging on the wall. Quite impressive. I hear you’re quite tight with She Who Must Be Obeyed—the Wife. What’s she really like?”
“I couldn’t say—”
“Of course. Sworn to secrecy and all that.”
In the background, Kate heard one of the Fogarty boys shout, “He’s got one leg in his trousers. He’ll be here in a flash.”
Then Mrs. Fogarty said, “Just between us girls, the Old Man misses you something fierce. We all know you’re doing well, but he stands out on the docks every morning and watches the ships come in. He’s done it ever since you left. Are you coming home? Is that why you called? Because if that’s why—”