I had first heard of Mr. Ferri from my friend Sarah. We were on the beach in late August, talking idly of things we planned to do in the fall. Sarah needed a new rug. I had a jacket—I think it was a jacket—I needed altered, and Sarah directed me to Mr. Ferri. When Sarah and I were young we worked in the office of a magazine, and in those days—it was the early 1980s—she dressed out of bandbox. Her shoes matched her dress, and she had the sheeny beauty of the girls who advertised Breck shampoo. One afternoon many years after this—it was fall, and the red leaves of the turning maples were flush against the window of the house where we were sitting together, because it was raining—we made a list of those outfits. There was a white pleated wool skirt with a matching sweater appliquéd with a blue and red anchor; a pink sleeveless dress with what used to be called a jewel neckline and for all I know still is; a navy-blue linen shirtwaist with a rope belt. Over time these outfits were shed for loose blue jeans and men’s shirts, never ironed. Instead of a Breck girl she now looks like a gelatin print of Georgia O’Keeffe. It did not occur to me that she would know of a tailor, then, on the Upper East Side. But she did know of Mr. Ferri, as I knew of a rug dealer, to whom she subsequently went, although I do not know if she bought a rug from him, because by that time she had also bought a house, and was then in that state in which it is difficult to buy just one thing.
I am trying now to remember my first visit to Mr. Ferri. I had a shopping bag over my arm, and I had stopped first at one of the jewelry stores across the street, the shop on the corner whose door and portico were made of bronze: I had once written a story about a pair of emerald earrings at that shop which had been stolen from a pirate ship, and since then my girls and I had made it a regular stop on our walks up and down the East Side, from their school, to visit their great-great-aunt, who was immobilized by a stroke in her apartment, which smelled of beeswax and Norell, next to the Guggenheim Museum, or to buy school shoes, at a place called Ricky’s, where my mother had bought shoes for me as a child. The staff at the jewelry store, which was owned by a man who had started his career by selling Mexican wedding dresses in the East Village, was genial about letting them try on tiaras and necklaces that had belonged to queens and grand dames, and I had made a friend of a girl who worked there, who wore her cap of black hair in a helmet, like a Valkyrie. “What’s in the bag?” she asked.
It was a disreputable-looking large plastic bag, with the kind of hard plastic handles that click together if you line them up properly, which is hard to do, and it was printed in red and blue letters with the name of a local drugstore chain. In the hushed space of the shop it was outré, a nanny goat in the Tuileries. I pulled out the contents to show her.
The first thing was the jacket I had been thinking about on the beach. It was a heavy wool houndstooth hacking jacket. The teeth were brown, moss green, and gold, and the top of the collar was lined with wool flannel like cat fur. I was then under the impression that the jacket had belonged to my immobilized aunt. She had given it to me two decades ago. Since then I had replaced the buttons. When I held it up we could both see that the pale lining was torn to shreds. The other item in the bag was a pair of dark brown velvet trousers. The velvet was made of silk, and it had been rubbed almost away in some places. Those places, on the knees, looked mottled. I had bought the trousers almost twenty years ago. They had a high, fitted waistband and bell-bottoms. I had been happy in them. I had worn them with a white poet’s blouse and flat shoes, and in the winter, when I went out, with a black velvet hooded parka with a drawstring waist. The worst of the wear was on the seat, which had split, which I had tried to fix, but had torn again. The Valkyrie looked at the jacket and the trousers. She reached out a hand and felt the velvet. “Well,” she said, “waste not, want not.”
The last thing in the bag was wrapped in white tissue paper. I drew it out and unwrapped it. I had not meant to show it to her out of a kind of shyness; the jacket and trousers had come a little close to airing dilapidation, or even dirty laundry. But maybe because of that, I wanted to create a frisson of surprise to detract from my feeling of haplessness. Inside were the two yards of silk I was bringing to Mr. Ferri, to replace the jacket’s shredded lining. I had called to make an appointment. The man who answered the telephone had repeated the number when he answered. He sounded if he had a mouthful of pins. I thought, unbidden, of the tailor of Gloucester, with his fine silver whiskers, a story which I had read aloud to my children countless times, and which had always terrified me. A tailor sends his cat, Simpkin, out to buy a twist of cherry-colored wool. The mayor is getting married the next morning, and the sumptuous waistcoat he has ordered is unfinished. We know, though Potter does not tell us, that the tailor is disorganized, untidy, prone to fits and starts. Before the cat leaves (we understand, too, that the tailor can talk to the cat, and that he is the only helper the tailor can afford) the cat imprisons his enemies, a family of mice, under a set of teacups. The mice scrabble under the teacups. The tailor discovers the captives, releases them, and angers the cat, who hides the twist. The tailor falls ill, in despair, realizes he cannot finish the waistcoat, but grateful mice creep out at night and embroider the waistcoat so magnificently that the enfeebled tailor is overwhelmed when he arrives at the shop the next morning, wringing his hands. The shop is empty. One button is left undone. A note next to the buttonhole, written in tiny script, reads “No more twist.” The cat, cajoled, recovers his good humor, and supplies the bit of cherry thread. It is based on a true story. The ratting of teacups, filled with fur and tails, the malignant cat, the sheer improbability of it coming right.
“Nelson Ferri, YUkon 8–5850” said the voice, full of pins and needles. I came to. The mouse headed out for the territories. My grandmother’s telephone number was CHelsea-3. My great-aunt’s was ATwater-9, another aunt’s, TRafalgar-7. These numbers, all of them abandoned, made a ticker tape in my mind. I could not remember my first New York telephone number. The exchange at the magazine where Sarah and I had worked, to which she wore her matching shoes and bag, was ALgonquin-4. These numbers, all of them abandoned, were colored places on a folded map. On the telephone, speaking to the voice of the man holding pins in his mouth, I explained I needed the lining of a jacket replaced, that he had been recommended by my friend. Length? Size? “Two yards,” he said.
In the jewelry store I unwrapped the fabric. I had bought it the week before, in the pouring rain, in the garment district, in a shop I had visited obsessively years before. It was during a time in my life when the amount of time that I devoted to thinking about upholstery fabric was in inverse proportion to everything else I wasn’t thinking about: chief among these was how a person like me, untrained in domestic arts or stick-to-itiveness, could be responsible for a baby, who would quickly grow up into a child. I slipcovered one hand-me-down sofa in ill-advised pale duck linen, with striped piping. By the second year I had dyed it with tea, to hide the stains. But by the time I found myself propelled to Mr. Ferri I had long given up on slipcovers and upholstery—draping the multiplying chairs and sofas with old tablecloths and shawls, as one child, by hook or crook, had followed another, and many of my sentences, then, were prefaced by the words “there’s just no point in … ” I had not looked at the fabric since I bought it—the shop had wrapped it, like a present, in carefully folded tissue paper. It slid across the glass counter, like a half-vanished dream.
The silk was printed with figures. The colors were red and gray and slate blue and moss green—I see now the colors on my telephone map, the same sepia palette—as if the fabric had overlaid or colored in that paint-by-numbers graph of the city. The figures were between four and six inches high: they were Japanese people, in nineteenth-century dress, fingering abaci, mending shoes, surveying their own collections of silk. The signal note was quiet industry. There were no conversations: each figure was intent on its own business. The men wore blue or red pantaloons, and pigtails. Their hats were tied underneath their chins with
ribbons. When I was a child my grandparents came back from a trip and gave me a book of lavishly illustrated Japanese folktales, by Lafcadio Hearn. There was a story about a talking fish, and another about the fountain of youth, which held no interest for me, and one in which a dragon shed ruby tears. It was called “The Boy Who Drew Cats,” and it was the title story which frightened: a boy loves to draw cats; he is the youngest child of a large family, and instead of doing his chores, he draws cats leaping, sleeping, eating, dreaming. In despair, his parents take him to the village monastery in hopes that he might become a priest. But still, he draws cats. The abbot, too, despairs of him, and sends him off, advising him to avoid large places at night, and favor small ones. He wanders, despondent, and then sees a large temple, where a light is burning. The temple is deserted. He does not know it, but a huge goblin-rat has scared the priests away, and the warriors who have been sent to capture the goblin have all vanished. All that remains in the temple are some large screens, covered with white rice paper. Unable to resist, he takes out his pen and draws cats on the rice paper walls: the most beautiful cats he has ever drawn, and then, recalling the priest’s advice, he climbs into a tiny cupboard, and falls asleep. He is woken in the night by the sound of a terrible battle: hissing and sharp cries, but when he wakes in the morning the temple is quiet and full of light. In the center of the room is the gigantic goblin-rat, dead, and the cats he has drawn on the screen have blood on their mouths. Twist, twist.
I recognized the pantaloons from the illustration in the story: they were the costume worn by the priest in the temple, who sends the little boy who drew cats to slay the goblin. “Goodness,” said the Valkyrie, about the silk lining, and ran her hand over the silent faces. A customer had come in; one who was more likely than I ever would be to buy a pair of drop rosette earrings, which I had tried on a few weeks earlier, and admired. I was late. I folded up the fabric and put it in the plastic bag with the trousers and the jacket, and went out the door and across the street, to find Mr. Ferri.
Later, when I brought my daughter there, with a jade silk dress over her arm that needed to be altered, she said, “Are you sure?” We disregarded the tiny elevator, which I knew was at the end of the hall, and instead climbed the three flights of listing steps, which were covered in cracked linoleum. But the first time I went I wasn’t sure. The distance from the jewelry shop and the Valkyrie, and even the flower stand and the fashionable restaurant, called, I think, Fred’s or Jacques, was too abrupt. The shabby hall and the zigzag staircase were a split seam. That Mr. Ferri’s business was to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, and that the look of the place where that happened didn’t matter, hovering as it did between the seen and the unseen, in proximity to possibility, I didn’t know yet, or understand. At the pasteboard door I rang the bell. When no one answered I turned the knob. The door opened to a rectangular room divided, at one end, by a counter, and behind the counter were some cutting tables, covered with rolls of fabric and measuring tapes. At the other end was what looked like a dressing room, with a curtain across it on a wooden pole. The gray carpet was so littered with pins it glittered. The room was dominated by a tall open three-sided mirror. In front of it was a low wooden stool. Two men with black hair shiny with brilliantine, in their late twenties or early thirties, were working behind the counter. A small elderly gray man, his shirt stuck here and there with pins, his eyes magnified behind his glasses, was Mr. Ferri. I had made an appointment, and he greeted me by name. “You have the jacket with you?” he asked.
I nodded. I took the jacket out of the bag. I had not repacked the lining fabric as neatly as I’d hoped. A foot or two came out with it, a fan of faces, so I piled it on the counter as well, with the jacket, which Mr. Ferri immediately took up in his hands. “Johnny, can I have a hanger, please?”
A hanger appeared. It was an old heavy wooden hanger with a worn peeling label, black with gold letters, which read THE NEW YORKER HOTEL. Mr. Ferri hung the jacket on the hanger, on a hook. Then he began to touch the fabric and turn it over in his hands, looking at the sleeves and then the shoulders. He touched the buttons, and then turned back the lapels. Once I had seen a man look over a horse he was thinking of buying, and Mr. Ferri and the way he appraised the jacket reminded me of that day, the sun and shadow and smell of hay. It was hot in the room. I was wearing a black cardigan sweater and I took it off. Mr. Ferri gave me a long look, considering. “Could you turn around, please.” I did. Again, I thought of my friend and the horse. He took the jacket off the hanger and handed it to me. “Could you put it on, please.”
I had not worn it for some time and it smelled faintly of cedar and old dry cleaning fluid. He walked around me, and then took some pins out of his mouth and hovered for a moment behind me. I felt the weight of the jacket shift. “If we take it in here, then it will hang better, so. And when the lining is replaced the jacket will hang better, too, because it will know what’s what.”
What’s what. “What’s what,” I would learn on my visits to Mr. Ferri, was a magical term. It meant that a garment was finished, and it also referred to that state of precise rightness to which every dress, jacket, or pair of trousers aspired: to be itself, but more so, to be, as far as he could make it so, perfect. Before I took the jacket off he considered shortening the sleeve one-quarter inch, then rejected the idea, and in doing so touched the inside of my wrist, briefly, with his thumb, as if taking my pulse. No, fine, fine. The moment was gone. When I took out the lining I had brought he did not blink. He unrolled it on the countertop, then said that as there was not enough for the sleeves, could they (he said “we”) use another lining instead? He showed me a bolt of silk the color of pale tea. We agreed. The lining of the sleeves would not show, in any case.
“And you will have your nice secret anyway,” he said, his finger passing over the faces of the silent marketplace.
The torn trousers were the work of a moment. He would try to replace the place that had been rent and worn through by taking a patch from the inside of the pant leg hem; he wasn’t sure it would hold. Did I want to try anyway? The material was beautiful but like many beautiful things it wore easily. About this he spoke less like a Prospero and more like a physician: Was the patient worth saving? We agreed on life support.
“Now we will get busy, busy, and you will come back next week.” Sarah had warned me that the custom was to pay half the bill, in cash, up front. I had just enough for the astronomical bill which Mr. Ferri’s Johnny wrote up and presented to me without a word.
It was October, and it got colder. I picked up my jacket with its iridescent panels of silent faces, and the trousers, which I would wear twice before they split again. I walked through Central Park with the large plastic bag that Mr. Ferri had carefully folded and saved for me. I did not know, that day, that as I walked through the park, which seemed to turn from Indian summer to autumn in an afternoon, that the house that I was walking toward was slowly splitting apart, nor that I would wear the jacket almost constantly through the next several winters, the secret lining close to my skin. I had recently heard from an old friend, to whom I had written when his father died, and whom I had not spoken to since we were young. We had lived together in New York and often walked through the park together, and I found myself on that afternoon missing him: he had grown up with his friends in the park, and because of that the park to me was part of not only our history together but his dream-life, which had become mine, when we lived together and for long afterward. The fall was the beginning of a gyroscope, in which I would come out the other end and there would be another voice, not my friend’s, but someone else’s whose I had known even longer, whom when I told him that I had walked across the park would immediately ask what shoes I was wearing, because he is trying to dissuade me from the fashionable shoes he loves—his great-grandfather was a shoemaker in Italy, and I think he longs to have been one—which I persist in wearing, and which tear at my feet.
But
then I had no inkling of this. It got colder, and because the teetering house was so expensive to heat, I was sitting in a room at the front of the house one evening wrapped in a blanket, looking out at the street, which was covered with snow, and pretending to write a letter, when the telephone rang. It was my friend, E——. Her husband had decided he would like to buy her a new fur coat, and would I like her old one? As she pointed out, I am always cold. The coat, a mink, was twenty years old. She had thought of using it to line a raincoat, but she already had a fur-lined raincoat which was perfectly functional. She didn’t need another. It was old, but it was warm—the mink, that is. The wool blanket I was wrapped in was black-and-red-plaid. It had belonged to my first husband’s grandmother, and the moths had long ago webbed the corners. For a while, it had covered one of the tattered sofas in the living room, but when it became tattered itself, I had taken it upstairs. As I talked on the phone, I stuck my finger through the holes the moths had made.
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