Later that week I picked up the coat from her doorman. Like many buildings in New York, it was a building I had known a long time ago. Almost every day when she was small I had picked up my youngest daughter at her school and ridden through the green river of Central Park. The bus stopped in front of the awning of this same building before turning right and then left, to the subway, which would take us farther uptown, and before that, when I was a girl, a friend of mine knew a girl who lived there, whose mother, she told me, was clairvoyant. No matter what her friend was doing, or where she was, her mother would later describe places she herself had never seen. When the girl went to college, her mother would call, and tell her what she was wearing. The story—the mother, peering through the ether at the other end of the phone—haunted me. The girl was rich, and always had plenty of pocket money, but one of the things she liked to do was hail a cab that was about to go through the park at Eighty-first, and get the driver to take her across the park for free, since, she reasoned, he was going anyway. Part of this story was always that she told the cabbie she “didn’t have a nickel.” What difference a nickel would have made was unclear, but the point was the old-fashioned diction, the plaintive quality—she was a small, fine-boned girl, with hair the color of toffee, who looked a little like a mouse. Often she would succeed—my friend had been with her on more than one mission—and implicit, too, was the sense of danger, of getting away with something for nothing, of lying, and also, the neatness of the solution: Why not? The upshot of this is that when I went to see my friend and her husband at their immaculate apartment, with walls made of planed timber from exotic trees, and when I got off the bus with my daughter after school, and when I tried to get a cab on that corner, I was at once there, at no. 7, and also the girl looking through the wrong end of a telescope, all those years ago, a fortune-teller, who could see me, from the distance of all those years ago, who had become, too, a woman at the end of the phone being offered a fur coat, or squinting, wrapped in an ancient red-and-black blanket, listening to her own children on the phone, who were away at school, and trying to picture where they were calling from.
I picked up the coat and went around the corner to take the subway home. At home, I left it in the hall and went to make supper. It wasn’t until later that evening that I remembered the coat. I brought the bag upstairs and tried it on. It felt hot, heavy, and stiff. I thought of the rule about fires that had never made intuitive sense to me: if someone is burning, wrap them up in a carpet. It was hot outside the coat. In the inadequate bedroom mirror, all I could see was my face peering out of a cloud of fur. I went upstairs to the third floor, to ask the children. Two of them were sitting on a long red sofa by the top landing, with what looked like a set of math problems on the floor, abandoned, beside them. When they saw me, in the coat, they immediately began to snort with laughter. What is that? they demanded. The general opinion was that it looked like I had had a fight with a bear and it had won. I looked, my daughter said, like a gigantic black cat. I pointed out that it wasn’t bear or cat, it was mink. They asked whether I really intended to wear fur. When I replied that in all likelihood the mink had been dead many many years and whether I wore it or not it was not going to bring it back to life, the response was gagging noises and sobs, and then the sound of a tom-tom made by hitting an old leather chair cushion with a stick, and I decided to leave them to it.
I went back downstairs and looked at the fur in the mirror. What’s what? I thought. The coat was too big. There was a tear in the left sleeve and a hole in the pocket. A button was missing. Twist, twist. When I was in high school I’d found a lipstick in the pocket of an old coat of my father’s. The case was heavy gold metal, and when I unscrewed it the dried red lipstick broke in my hand. There was nothing in the pockets of the coat. I had never imagined myself as the owner of a fur coat, and I was having trouble imagining it now. A friend of many years had an aunt who had owned a dress business on Madison Avenue in the sixties and seventies: Perhaps she would know what to do with the coat? I had called on her before, my friend’s aunt Susan: she had led me to the shop where I’d found the Japanese silk lining. The advice was definite. There was a furrier called Jerry Sorbara, and I was to take the coat to him. She didn’t have his address, but as far a she could recall he was in the East Thirties. Out of loyalty, I called Mr. Ferri. He was regretful but firm: no fur. I had an evening dress of my mother’s I was thinking of having him look at—we arranged a time that week. Then I called Jerry Sorbara. The woman who answered the telephone had a high nasal voice: she sounded like the telephone operator at the switchboard at the magazine where Sarah and I had worked so long ago, a Gorgon matched by her Medusa of wires. She asked me how old the fur was, which she called “your mink.” I told her. Then added, out of nervousness—here was a new gamut to run. “Approximately, I mean, I think.” There was a long silence. Then she said, “Anytime.”
It was not a neighborhood I knew well. On the way downtown I had had lunch with a friend, in a restaurant behind the Fifth Avenue Public Library, which looks out on Bryant Park and the pigeons scuffling in the fall leaves. She started when her foot knocked into the bag under the table, which I had refused to check. The fur felt electric and alive, and she said, “What is that?” I had walked the ten blocks south on Fifth Avenue, past the Public Library and the old B. Altman. When I found the address, between a Korean grocer and a restaurant advertising fried pork and kimchi, the porter at the desk waved me in: I wanted, he said, the eleventh floor. There was a long mirror in the lobby and in it, I saw an arm of the coat hanging outside the bag, like the arm of a beaver or a badger. It gave me a feeling of distress. In the mirror I looked blanched and uneasy, fish-eyed.
It was the kind of elevator my youngest child once called two-faced. The door that opened onto the eleventh floor was not the door which had opened in the lobby: it was another, secret door, and it opened behind me. I walked into a small white cubicle, where a woman was seated behind a glass partition. There were pieces of fur on hooks on the wall behind her, and it was hard not to think she was stuffed. I said my name. “You have your mink?”
Immediately I wanted to say that it wasn’t my mink, it was my friend’s mink: the idea of having a mink, which seemed to me, in that moment, indescribably vulgar, was something I wanted to put away from me, especially a mink that was lying scrunched in a shopping bag, its one badger arm testing the air. There was no help for it. “Jimmy,” she yelled, and pressed a button. A door to the left was opened by a very tall man, about ten or fifteen years younger than I was, whom I will call Jimmy. He was wearing a pin-striped suit, and his black hair was cut short, and parted on the side. He had the handsome face of a television sports announcer, and I took the coat out of the bag and on his instruction, put it on. I look back now that this was a time of my life when I was constantly trying things on, in workrooms and dressing rooms, and asking people what they thought, which is not something I do often now, for complex and perplexing reasons—why I was doing that and why I ceased to do it. Jimmy looked like a man on television who is trying to make the best of what he knows is going to be a sad, losing game. “Aha!” he said, rubbing his hands. And then, “Aha!” again, as if in the interval he had come to some kind of conclusion. A discussion ensued. I asked if it was possible to alter the coat. I think the expression I used was “Is it worth it.” When I entered the room, a spacious atelier with three standing mirrors, and coats grouped on hangers on trees, as well as along the wall, Jimmy had just finished helping two clients, a mother and her two daughters. They were buying a coat each. They were so harsh with each other, that it was impossible not to think of Cinderella’s stepmother and evil sisters. When one tried on a coat that didn’t suit her—the color was wrong, or the style—the others were beside themselves with glee, pointing out the flaws, and how it would be impossible, actually, for Sylvia to wear anything like that, that it seemed impossible that they had found coats that they did like, although they had appa
rently, as each one walked out with a box under her arm, after a consultation about whether it would be possible to ship the coats to Boca Raton, and therefore evade paying taxes. I did not think that the expression “is it worth it” had occurred to Sylvia and her mother and sister, and I felt embarrassed. What was I doing there?
I realized in that moment that I wanted a fur coat. It had not occurred to me to want one before. I looked at Jimmy with a kind of pleading. The fur was old, he told me. The quality was good, but it could tear if they tried to cut it up. I should try some coats on—what style was I thinking of? For the next few minutes I tried on furs. In all of them, I looked ridiculous. My children were right. I looked like a woman being eaten by an animal. Or Ninotchka. Jimmy and I were as one on this. Fifteen minutes later, I had tried on ten coats. A short man who looked like a wrestler, called Greg, who would a year or two later sell me, as a sample, a leftover fox hat from the previous season, for what used to be called a song, was taking up the discarded coats and tenderly hanging them up again, but still there was a mounting pile of fur on the leather sofa. “My mink” was on the table. The last coat I tried on was a short car coat, with a cable belt. Behind my image in the mirror a man appeared. He was small, and wore a golf shirt, pressed trousers, a snakeskin belt, and white tennis shoes. His hair was white. He had a small cleft chin and molded cheekbones, and he looked like a small elderly version of Robert Mitchum in The Sundowners. He came up behind me, shook his head, and lifted the jacket off my shoulders. He said, under his breath, “No, no, no,” and then, aloud, “What is going on here?”
Jimmy explained that this was his father. I had brought in an old fur, and wanted a new coat. I protested. He explained I wanted a new coat made of my old coat. The older man walked over to the table and looked at my mink, and then at me. He disappeared, and came back a moment later, with a coat over his arm. He held the coat open for me to step into, then stepped back. “There. Here is your coat.”
The coat was cut small in the shoulders, and tapered out from a fitted bodice to a slight bell that stopped at the knees. The sleeves were narrow. The coat had a spread collar that could be worn up or down, against the cold. A line of three buttons stopped just above the waist. It reminded me of a coat I had loved as a child, what my mother called a party coat, which had been passed down to me by a cousin. It was made of pale blue tweed, and it had dark blue velvet collar. This was that coat, grown up. Was it possible to buy this coat? I asked. It was. Jimmy looked it up. It cost four times, almost exactly, more than I had ever paid for a car. I shook my head. I explained that this wasn’t possible. I had four children, all of whom had to be fed, and who attended school. There was no place in my life for this coat. The older man, who by now I had learned was Jerry, the Jerry of Jerry Sorbara, Jimmy’s father, went back over to the table and picked up “my mink.” He turned it around in his hands as if it were a living animal, and I thought again of Mr. Ferri, and my friend I had watched buy a horse. The horse had stood still in the barn, his black coat coal in the sun and shadow, smelling of salt and sweat. The mink smelled faintly, I knew, of Cabouchard. Then he put it down. He looked at Greg. “Get me the pattern for the Audrey,” he said.
“What?” said Jimmy.
Greg left the room and returned with an accordion fan made out of onion skin paper. When I was a child my mother sewed some of her own clothes from Butterick and Vogue patterns, for herself, and for my sister and me. She had an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. The machine had been given to her by her parents, my grandparents, for her sixteenth birthday, and part of the story was that the machine was “top of the line.” My grandfather had decided to buy his daughter a machine, but it wasn’t going to be “any old machine.” Another part of the story was that they made payments each month for a year, of sixteen dollars each: the real point of the the story was that when my mother was growing up, her parents didn’t have enough money to buy the “top of the line machine” “upfront.” That this was the same as buying on credit didn’t occur to me.
My mother always told this story with a kind of pleasure, her parents loved her enough to buy her the sewing machine, to buy the machine was a sacrifice, they had to “put money aside,” and inside the story was a complicated kernel, inside an apricot pit: it was a virtue to be poor, to not have enough, to know “what’s what.” And then the machine itself, given to a girl one generation away from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, who liked to sew. When my daughter told me this story again, the other night, as it had been told to me by her grandmother, once again, recently, she said, expostulating, “Why did they buy it if they couldn’t afford it? Why did they tell her that?”
An argument, biting its tail. The patterns my mother used, in the sewing room under the eaves in the house I grew up in. The house was shaded by tulip trees that shed their long yellowing petals into the ivy beds. The patterns were made of onion skin paper, the color of those flowers. In the summer I found the carapaces of beetles, stiff, amber. The onion skin paper, I knew, was not made of real onion skin. My mother pinned the cloth to the ghostly pattern with straight pins and then cut the cloth. She also knew how to cut out paper dolls, and showed me.
Greg lay the paper pattern carefully on the hardwood floor. Mr. Sorbara pulled a tape measure from his sleeve. As Greg read out the measurements he ran the tape lightly along my arms, across my back and shoulders, and from my neck to the back of my knee. He asked me to hold the tape when he measured the circumference of my hips. The sleeves would be lengthened, he said, one quarter of an inch. “Like this,” he said, and held his forefinger and thumb together, and laid them, as Mr. Ferri had, on my wrist. Perched on the table on the side of the room, Jimmy’s face contorted. “Pop,” he said.
Mr. Sobrara looked at me. “First we will send out your mink, and we will bring it back to life. Then you will come back in two weeks, and we will try on the coat we will make for you.”
“Dad,” said Jimmy.
Mr. Sorbara ignored him. I said, “I think we have to talk about what this is going to cost.” I was a person who has been treated with kindness who had offered in return the carcass of a cat.
He asked me what I could spend. I told him.
Jimmy asked his father if he could speak to him, privately. They left the room. From behind the closed door I could hear Jimmy’s raised voice, and an answering, softer murmur. Mr. Sorbara came back into the room by himself. He smiled. He said, “We will see you in two weeks.”
In the end, it was almost two months before my coat was finished. In the interim I made three trips to the showroom. Each time I looked for the door between the kimchi stands, half expecting it to have disappeared, and rode up to the eleventh floor in the Janus elevator. The same woman sat behind the glass partition, and each time I was ushered in by Jimmy, who rolled his eyes when he saw me, and buzzed for his father, who then soundlessly appeared. Once he was wearing carpet slippers. The first time he was apologetic; they had thought the coat would be ready. I was given to understand that my mink, which was now called “the coat,” was a special case. The second time the coat, basted together, was taken in at the shoulders. “Stand up straight, my darling,” said Mr. Sorbara. He put a finger to my third vertebrae and pressed. “Here.” When I raised my chin I heard my spine crack.
The day I went to pick up my coat there was a thin layer of ice on the ground. Steam rose from the vents outside the kimchi shop. In the showroom there was frost on the window. Greg brought the coat out in a garment bag. Did I want to try it on? I did. The fur gleamed. The coat stopped short of the knee, and closed with three horn buttons. Inside, on the lining I had dropped off one afternoon, bought from the same shop where the year before I had found my Japanese merchants, my initials, the initials I had then, were embroidered in lilac thread. The lining was watered silk, pale blue and lavender, printed in marbleized swirls that reminded me of handmade endpapers I had first seen on a trip to Florence, on wooden rac
ks, when I did not have enough money to buy even a single sheet. The print was called “Florentine.”
For once, Jimmy was in the room. He was rolling his eyes. “Do you have any idea … ?” he said to me.
Mr. Sorbara and I looked at my reflection in the pier glass. We saw a woman with her dark hair pulled up and back, in jeans and flat shoes, wearing a narrow dark mink coat that just grazed her knees. He put the collar up. “Very pretty,” he said. In the mirror I gave him an inquiring look. He shrugged, then said, “You are a young woman. This coat looks very nice on you. This is your first fur coat, but it will not be your last.”
In the mirror, Jimmy raised his eyes, appealing to heaven. Then he said, “Be careful of the lining. Fur we can fix, but if you tear that, we’ll have to redo the whole thing.”
The fur tore. They fixed it. I am careful when I take off the coat and put it on my lap, when I wear it to the movies, to fold it fur side out. I have not bought another fur coat. I did buy the black fox hat, one September, from Greg, when I picked up my coat from storage. I did not go to see Mr. Ferri for a number of years, and then I read that he had died. The last dress I brought to be tailored was a silk taffeta orange-and-blue plaid evening gown, which I had inherited. Mr. Ferri was ill. Someone else hovered over me, with pins in his mouth, but the project was not a success. It may have been the dress, or my idea of what I wanted the dress to be, or me, and nothing to do with Mr. Ferri’s absence, his touch on my wrist, at all. But the years in which I went to see Mr. Ferri, and had brought my friend B——’s coat to the furrier, had been a time in which I was happy to make over what came my way, to make do with what was given to me, often almost by accident, the world opening its arms: jackets, dresses, houses, love. They could be fixed with scissors, glue, cherry twist, pins. In those days I mixed flour and water paste, and the children made collages out of what they found in the woods, and made elevators from cardboard boxes. I bought linings that without my knowing it reminded me of other stories, and I wore them close to the skin. It was a time when I knew what was what. I knew that the thing to do was to avoid large places after dark. When the children had bad dreams at night I put out my hand and asked them to give them to me. I thought that if I believed in what I could dream up the goblin-rat would fall dead. I did not believe that the world was a place where anything could happen. I thought then that it was possible to alter anything.
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