by Unknown
“Model this?” she asked, not quite believing.
“If it isn’t too much trouble.”
“You’re the right size, Modom,” the saleslady intoned through her haughty nose. Then she tried to smile, because after all Meg was a customer, too, witness the bulging, sage-green paper sacks with the legend “Randolph’s” spelled out on them in paler green. It wasn’t much of a smile, but you had to be careful with lacquer.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Meg gave the little man a real smile. “I’d love to.”
She deposited on the ocher satin love seat, the paper sacks, her own coat, and her scuffed, tan leather purse. The saleslady helped her into the mink. Exactly the right size.
As it settled on her shoulders, Meg breathed, “Ohhh!” She had meant to be sophisticated about it. As if she had a mink for every day of the week; as if she only wore the old brown and white checkered wool for sales shopping at Randolph’s.
“You like it?” the man wondered.
“Ohhh!” Her voice sounded like a silly teenager but she didn’t care. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She swooped the fur about her and half-turned, mannikin style. “It is simply—simply supernal.”
The old man smiled. The salesperson smiled. She ought to, with the commission she’d make on this sale.
“I’ve got to see it,” Meg exclaimed. She half-danced to the pier mirror supported by gilt plaster cupids at the rear of the salon. When she beheld herself in the coat, she stopped breathing. She erased the young joyous excitement from her flushed face and posed in elegance, simple $10,000 mink elegance. She wished Stancia could see her. She wished Tash and Ron could see her. But she didn’t wish for the coat. There was a point where wishes were too far out.
The saleslady’s reflection came up behind her in the mirror. Smiling all over this time. She’d made the sale. Meggy slipped out of the coat and said, woman to woman, “It is gorgeous.”
The woman placed it reverently on another Louis XV chair. “You’d like your initials in it?” Her pencil pointed on her sales pad.
“But certainly,” Meg said, playing the game. “M.O.T.”
“Old English? Or Modern?”
“Old English, of course,” Meg said, just as hoity-toity. She went back to the love seat and retrieved her good old checkered.
The woman followed her. “May I have your name, please?”
This was carrying the game too far. “What for?” Meg asked. She wasn’t about to get on any special mink list; there was enough junk mail to dispose of. She’d had her moment.
“For delivery,” the woman suggested. And added, not quite so sure of herself, “You’d like us to deliver it, wouldn’t you?”
“Deliver what?” Meg shouldered her oversize handbag, tried to heft the sacks into a better carrying position.
“The coat.”
“That mink coat?” Meg gestured with her free elbow.
“Yes.”
Meg began to laugh. “I couldn’t afford a coat like that in a million years.”
“He bought it.” The saleslady spoke plainly. “He bought it, for you.”
Meg’s eyes slipped to the chair where he’d been sitting, but he wasn’t there anymore. She returned her gaze to the face of the woman. Speculation in it now.
“He asked me to have it delivered, to whatever address you gave.”
“Are you nuts?” Meg demanded flatly.
Sliding off her rarefied perch, the woman returned just as flatly, “No, I’m not nuts.” Then awe came into her mouth. “He paid cash. Eleven one thousand dollar bills. Cash!”
Meg shook her head. “It must be a gag,” she said slowly.
“I’d like to be on the receiving end of a gag like that.” The pencil poised again, “Your name and address?”
Meg gave her name and address.
• • •
She went down the escalator, outside, down the subway steps, train to Times Square, shuttle to Grand Central. There was time for a coke and to buy the children each a sack of gold-covered coins. She didn’t think about the mad, mad episode at all. It kept galloping through her head like a steeplechase, but she didn’t think about it.
She caught the fourish, well ahead of the commuter crowds; time to get home, gather the children from neighbor Betts (look after hers next week); get dinner, pack the children to bed, wait for Tash to come home from his upstate appointment.
It was a gag, of course. One of those TV things. Instead of the coat would be delivered a toupeed, not as young as he thought he was man, who’d burble, “So sorry, Mrs. Tashman, but you made a mistake. However, we are giving you absolutely free this frying pan and one dozen eggs.” She’d throw the eggs right in his toothy teeth. She decided she wouldn’t tell Tash about it. Not that she’d accepted or expected the coat, but being the butt of a practical joke was too humiliating. Anyway, by now the little old man’s keeper would have caught up with him and his play money.
The coat arrived on Monday. In the green van from Randolph’s with a driver who couldn’t care less, just sign here, Mrs. Tashman, and here’s your receipt. Not like when you sent sheets or underwear; they were dumped on the doorstep.
It was the same mink. The absolute same mink. Only the initials M.O.T. were now embroidered in the satin lining. She didn’t put it on. It was a firecracker ready to explode. She stroked it and looked at it and then stashed it at the deep, dark rear of her closet.
She didn’t mention it until the family was at dinner. Then she said, “The funniest thing happened to me when I was shopping in the city last week.”
“Like what?” Tash asked, dutiful husband, his mouth full of meat pie.
She told the story. Just as it happened. Ron couldn’t have cared less. A coat was a dull coat at six and three-fourths years, something you had to wear in winter. Stancia’s face shone with acceptance of all the magic in all the fairy tales. Tash queried, “You mean he gave you a mink coat, just like that?” He was a modern, intelligent young husband. Not one of those old-fashioned, suspicious, my-wife’s-got-a-secret-lover guys. “The broccoli, please, Stancy.”
“What’ll I do?” Meg wanted to know.
“Wear it,” Tash stated practically. “Everybody needs a mink. Eat your salad, Ron.”
The telephone rang. It was Betts, could Meg take her children Thursday instead of Friday? Meg could. She went upstairs, unstashed the coat, put it on. She returned to the dining room.
Ron noticed first. “Is that it?” Uninterested.
Stancia and Tash popped to attention.
“It wasn’t pretend?” Stancia asked.
Tash echoed his daughter. “You mean it really happened?”
“It did,” Meg assured them.
They all thought up reasons. Ron settled on Superman.
“But this was an old man.”
“Disguised.” Ron was shrewd.
Stancia dreamed. “You reminded him of his dear daughter who died young and who never had a mink coat.”
“Must have been a crook—getting rid of some dough he couldn’t be caught with. Counterfeit.” But Tash himself nixed that idea. “No. The store would have checked.” He tried again. “Income tax write-off. You know, a gift.”
Stancia was carried away. “He had only a week to live. Leukemia.” Nine-year-olds knew about everything. “He was all alone. He wanted to make one beautiful gesture before joining his loved ones.”
“Zrrp!” cried Ron. “Into the secret room. Put on wrinkles. Overcoat and hat. Zrrp to Randolph’s.”
But Meg and Tash worried it seriously. For at least a month. Tash had to have answers to problems.
Then the picture was in the paper. An old-time gangster, off to prison on income tax evasion. At first she thought it was her man. The same pulled-down hat, the same type overcoat. It wasn’t of course. Her man had a s
weet, secret smile not a tight-lipped glare.
But she told Tash, “It could be.” And when he looked so hopeful, “It really could be.” And, finally, her fingers crossed for what must be a lie, “It really is.” She relaxed in his relieved sigh. Tonight he would enjoy TV. She warned, “Don’t tell the children!”
“Don’t tell anybody,” he stressed.
The temperature dropped sharply that weekend.
Tash said, “You might as well get the good of it while you have it. Just in case Uncle Jabez decides to turn it into a pumpkin.”
She wore the coat to the school dinner, explained to friends, “A gift from my uncle.”
“The rich one,” Tash abetted. “Lives in Australia.”
She wore it to the PTA and the supermarket and the parties and the executive dinner and everywhere. Always with joy and tenderness. And a little feather of sadness.
Because she could never say, “Thank you,” to the little old man. Because he could never know what it meant to her. Unless. Unless he remembered her face at that first moment when he chose her to wear mink.
JOYCE HARRINGTON
___________________
1932–2011
By the time JOYCE HARRINGTON published the very first short story she ever wrote in 1972, she had already led several lives. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and raised in Southern California, Harrington pursued work as an actress, training at the Pasadena Playhouse alongside Harry Dean Stanton and Robert Duvall. Upon her 1961 marriage to photojournalist Philip Harrington, she raised two children and worked for a time with the American Society of Magazine Photographers. But when LOOK magazine, which supplied the bulk of the Harrington family’s income, closed in 1972, she turned her attention to writing. That first short story, “The Purple Shroud,” was not only published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, it won the Edgar Award for Best Short Story the following year.
From then on, Harrington proved to be one of EQMM’s most prolific contributors throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with her work also appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine on a regular basis. Harrington also wrote three novels: No One Knows My Name (1981), Family Reunion (1982), and Dreemz of the Night (1987). In parallel she worked in the advertising industry and was named vice president and director of public relations for Foote, Cone & Belding in 1986. When her health began to decline in the late 1990s, Harrington retired from writing, spending the last decade of her life as a devoted reader.
Retirement, along with greater fame as a short story writer, may be why Harrington’s fiction work hasn’t received the attention it deserves. She was primarily concerned with human behavior and the motives for sliding into nefarious deeds, with twists that disturbed in their quiet intensity. It’s no wonder “The Purple Shroud” fared so well upon publication: its depiction of a toxic marriage and how a subjugated woman finds her way out still resonates today.
THE PURPLE SHROUD
___________________
MRS. MOON threw the shuttle back and forth and pumped the treadles of the big four-harness loom as if her life depended on it. When they asked what she was weaving so furiously, she would laugh silently and say it was a shroud.
“No, really, what is it?”
“My house needs new draperies.” Mrs. Moon would smile and the shuttle would fly and the beater would thump the newly woven threads tightly into place. The muffled, steady sounds of her craft could be heard from early morning until very late at night, until the sounds became an accepted and expected background noise and were only noticed in their absence.
Then they would say, “I wonder what Mrs. Moon is doing now.”
• • •
That summer, as soon as they had arrived at the art colony and even before they had unpacked, Mrs. Moon requested that the largest loom in the weaving studio be installed in their cabin. Her request had been granted because she was a serious weaver, and because her husband, George, was one of the best painting instructors they’d ever had. He could coax the amateurs into stretching their imaginations and trying new ideas and techniques, and he would bully the scholarship students until, in a fury, they would sometimes produce works of surprising originality.
George Moon was, himself, only a competent painter. His work had never caught on, although he had a small loyal following in Detroit and occasionally sold a painting. His only concessions to the need for making a living and for buying paints and brushes was to teach some ten hours a week throughout the winter and to take this summer job at the art colony, which was also their vacation. Mrs. Moon taught craft therapy at a home for the aged.
After the loom had been set up in their cabin Mrs. Moon waited. Sometimes she went swimming in the lake, sometimes she drove into town and poked about in the antique shops, and sometimes she just sat in the wicker chair and looked at the loom.
They said, “What are you waiting for, Mrs. Moon? When are you going to begin?”
One day Mrs. Moon drove into town and came back with two boxes full of brightly colored yarns. Classes had been going on for about two weeks, and George was deeply engaged with his students. One of the things the students loved about George was the extra time he gave them. He was always ready to sit for hours on the porch of the big house, just outside the communal dining room, or under a tree, and talk about painting or about life as a painter or tell stories about painters he had known.
George looked like a painter. He was tall and thin, and with approaching middle age he was beginning to stoop a little. He had black snaky hair which he had always worn on the long side, and which was beginning to turn gray. His eyes were very dark, so dark you couldn’t see the pupils, and they regarded everything and everyone with a probing intensity that evoked uneasiness in some and caused young girls to fall in love with him.
Every year George Moon selected one young lady disciple to be his summer consort.
Mrs. Moon knew all about these summer alliances. Every year, when they returned to Detroit, George would confess to her with great humility and swear never to repeat his transgression.
“Never again, Arlene,” he would say. “I promise you, never again.”
Mrs. Moon would smile her forgiveness.
Mrs. Moon hummed as she sorted through the skeins of purple and deep scarlet, goldenrod yellow and rich royal blue. She hummed as she wound the glowing hanks into fat balls, and she thought about George and the look that had passed between him and the girl from Minneapolis at dinner the night before. George had not returned to their cabin until almost two in the morning. The girl from Minneapolis was short and plump, with a round face and a halo of fuzzy red-gold hair. She reminded Mrs. Moon of a Teddy bear; she reminded Mrs. Moon of herself twenty years before.
When Mrs. Moon was ready to begin, she carried the purple yarn to the weaving studio.
“I have to make a very long warp,” she said. “I’ll need to use the warping reel.”
She hummed as she measured out the seven feet and a little over, then sent the reel spinning.
“Is it wool?” asked the weaving instructor.
“No, it’s orlon,” said Mrs. Moon. “It won’t shrink, you know.”
Mrs. Moon loved the creak of the reel, and she loved feeling the warp threads grow fatter under her hands until at last each planned thread was in place and she could tie the bundle and braid up the end. When she held the plaited warp in her hands she imagined it to be the shorn tresses of some enormously powerful earth goddess whose potency was now transferred to her own person.
That evening after dinner, Mrs. Moon began to thread the loom. George had taken the rowboat and the girl from Minneapolis to the other end of the lake where there was a deserted cottage. Mrs. Moon knew he kept a sleeping bag there, and a cache of wine and peanuts. Mrs. Moon hummed as she carefully threaded the eye of each heddle with a single purple thread, and thought of black widow spiders and rattlesnakes coiled in the corners of the
dark cottage.
She worked contentedly until midnight and then went to bed. She was asleep and smiling when George stumbled in two hours later and fell into bed with his clothes on.
Mrs. Moon wove steadily through the summer days. She did not attend the weekly critique sessions for she had nothing to show and was not interested in the problems others were having with their work. She ignored the Saturday night parties where George and the girl from Minneapolis and the others danced and drank beer and slipped off to the beach or the boathouse.Sometimes, when she tired of the long hours at the loom, she would go for solitary walks in the woods and always brought back curious trophies of her rambling. The small cabin, already crowded with the loom and the iron double bedstead, began to fill up with giant toadstools, interesting bits of wood, arrangements of reeds and wild wheat.
One day she brought back two large black stones on which she painted faces. The eyes of the faces were closed and the mouths were faintly curved in archaic smiles. She placed one stone on each side of the fireplace.
George hated the stones. “Those damn stonefaces are watching me,” he said. “Get them out of here.”
“How can they be watching you? Their eyes are closed.”
Mrs. Moon left the stones beside the fireplace and George soon forgot to hate them. She called them Apollo I and Apollo II.
The weaving grew and Mrs. Moon thought it the best thing she had ever done. Scattered about the purple ground were signs and symbols which she saw against the deep blackness of her closed eyelids when she thought of passion and revenge, of love and wasted years and the child she had never had. She thought the barbaric colors spoke of these matters, and she was pleased.
“I hope you’ll finish it before the final critique,” the weaving teacher said when she came to the cabin to see it. “It’s very good.”
Word spread through the camp and many of the students came to the cabin to see the marvelous weaving. Mrs. Moon was proud to show it to them and received their compliments with quiet grace.