It was a lovely hat, cobalt blue with silk flowers and berries cascading around the brim, piled higher on one side of the crown than the other. It wasn’t one of those frothy confections meant to appear suspended over the head by magic, one of those ridiculous dollops of cream that required a morning’s worth of framing and supporting the hair that it sat upon. It was an everyday hat. A walking hat. The kind of hat where a woman could twist her hair as usual and then just place it on top, a pin here, a pin there, nothing more. The flowers weren’t simply cut out from the fabric, but labored over, each one a tiny piece of craftsmanship Mary examined in the shop before pushing her money across the counter. The shop was called Matilda’s, and she’d passed it dozens of times before the day she finally went inside. Nothing in the window had ever cried out to her until that hat, so she went in. She was extending her fingers to feel the brim when at the very same moment she remembered that her hands smelled of onions, and the shop’s mistress asked if she could be of any assistance. Mary wasn’t used to shops being so quiet, the mistress being so solicitous. She could feel the woman’s eyes on her from the moment she put her hand on the door’s handle. That first day, Mary said, “I’m in a terrible rush. I’ll have to return another time.” She let a few days go by, and then she scrubbed her hands well, rubbed her fingertips with lemon, and tried again. This time she picked the hat from its peg and held it to the light.
“It’s new,” the shop’s mistress said. “It was made in Paris.”
Mary asked how much and kept her face very still for the answer. It was an astonishing number, but she had it. She had the whole price of that hat in an envelope hidden in the frame of her bed at the Bowen residence. She was going to do it. As she walked away from the store she knew she was going to do it. Why not? She had no one to answer to but herself, and what was money for if not to be spent on a beautiful hat? On her next visit, Mary told the woman that if she discovered the craftsmanship to be less than it appeared, she would take the hat straight back and demand her money returned. The woman suggested a plain gray toque with a narrow brim and showed Mary the neat stitching as if to tell her that gray and plain might be more appropriate to a head like Mary’s than a cobalt jewel that would draw every glance. Mary ran her thumb along one of the silk petals and bought it on the spot.
When she returned to her room at the Bowen residence, she studied it in the box for the better part of an hour, those flowers, each one centered with a small piece of glass that drew the light, the blue of the petals slightly paler than the rest of the hat, the blue of the berries slightly darker. It was a beautiful thing and she loved it. It lived in its box on top of her dresser for two whole weeks before she put it on her head and wore it outside. She paired it with the chestnut dress coat she’d purchased secondhand, and she worried for it when she stepped into the weather and found the day not as fair as it had seemed from her room. She didn’t want it to get wet, or be stolen from her head by a thief. Or worse, it occurred to her as she remembered the week before, when a gentleman’s handkerchief was carried away in the wind. Mary had joined the chase for a few steps, until she predicted where it was headed, and when he caught up with it, he found it had landed on the belly of a horse that had died in the street and been left there to rot and draw flies. Mary had laughed when, out of habit, the gentleman reached for his hanky, to cover his face, but of course it was the hanky he’d been chasing in the first place.
She wore it. She stood in the small private room Mrs. Bowen had assigned to her as cook and slid one pin behind her left ear, and one behind her right. She felt its beauty like a living thing as she crossed the street, as she gathered her skirt and stepped as well as she could over the horse shit that had been pushed to the curb and left in a heap at the corner of Sixtieth Street. She felt it like a light shining over her as she made her way east to the streetcar on Third Avenue, still shining as she transferred to the IRT at Forty-Second Street. Mrs. Bowen was to have a dinner party that evening and wanted something unusual to serve to her guests — lobster, perhaps, or sweetbreads. No fowl, she instructed. No oysters. No pork. Nothing her guests might be served by their own cooks, in their own homes. Milton’s on Second Avenue had a good selection most days, and high turnover, but Mrs. Bowen didn’t trust them, and sent Mary instead all the way down to Washington Market, where she instructed Mary to witness with her own eyes the fish being pulled off the ice. It meant a morning’s journey and more work, just so Mrs. Bowen’s guests would go home and say to one another, That Lillian Bowen, she’d never serve anything as plain as a roast.
As she descended the staircase to the IRT on Forty-Second Street, she looked down for her next step with her eyes instead of bending her neck and risking the hat. She’d been on the IRT fewer than a dozen times since it had opened with great fanfare, and still found it jarring to see a train shoot out of the darkness so far underground, knowing as she stepped aboard that it would plow into the darkness on the other side. But the hat made her brave. On the train, she fixed her gaze on the doors as the rest of the world pushed in around her.
Because Mrs. Bowen had left the choice of dinner to her, she had to look at everything the market offered: twenty-five butcher stalls, all the vegetables, all the fruit, the cheese, the nine fish stalls, the smoked meat, the tripe. She sampled the coffee cake, the coffee, the dark bread, the light, the butter from Connecticut, the cheese from Virginia. She bought a nickel slice of Westphalian ham and ate it as she walked. She raised a hand to protect her hat against the flying feathers of the poultrymen, from the rough knuckle-cracking work of the butchers and the bits that flew in the air, the cartilage and marrow that made a slick circle around their stalls and forced women to walk on tiptoe until they were safely past.
She kept the hat on her head well enough, adjusting it now and again when it started to tip, and she made her way all the way back to Park and Sixtieth loaded down with packages. The other Irish at market had their hair covered in scarves. The European women from other parts wore tight braids coiled at the back of the neck, or old hats of their husbands’ pulled down over their ears. Heads had turned seeing Mary coming in that hat. Seas had parted. When she bargained and told them exactly how she wanted her packages wrapped, they knew she was a domestic, and yet that hat.
As Mary turned the last corner before the Bowen home, she caught sight of her reflection in a neighbor’s bay window and decided she was as pretty that day as she’d ever been. The coat hugged her figure — slim, back then — and her hair was shiny and clean. Her eyes were bright from the chill in the air, and her cheeks rosy from the effort of hauling her purchases. She was thirty-seven years old.
She turned onto Park to walk the half block uptown and who did she encounter in front of the residence but Mrs. Bowen herself. And what was Mrs. Bowen wearing on top of her curls? The identical twin to Mary’s beloved hat.
“Mary,” she said, her eyes fixed on Mary’s head. “I expected you ages ago.”
“I’m very sorry, madam,” Mary replied, even though Mrs. Bowen had no reason to expect her any sooner. She made a point not to look at Mrs. Bowen’s head, even though Mrs. Bowen had yet to take her eyes from Mary’s.