“Well, we don’t do what they do.”
“What you could do, and what all major designers do eventually, is lease your name and your designs. You get them mass-produced and you get a portion of the revenue stream. But even then, somebody has to believe there’s a market for you.”
“All the major wedding designers have used us from time to time. Vera Wang used to send girls down here regularly until she started manufacturing shoes with her own name on them.”
“That proves my point exactly. Traditional designers are getting the portion of the business you should be getting when they start their own affordable secondary lines. Val, if we’re going to get Angelini Shoes back in the black by finding a team of investors to make you more liquid, then you need a product that is stylish but can be mass-produced for maximum sales and profit.”
“I don’t even know if Gram would let me sell our designs. I mean, they’re my great-grandfather’s.”
“Then you’ll have to design something new. Something that reflects the Angelini brand, but is your own creation. Then you wouldn’t even need Gram’s permission. The hard truth is that nobody is interested in a shoe shop that can produce three thousand pairs a year. The profit margin is too small. But your classic wedding shoes can become the flagship items in a broader portfolio. You can continue to make one-of-a-kind shoes. As a matter of fact, you have to-that’s the Angelini hook. But you also need a product that can be mass-merchandised to pay off your existing debt, meet your balloon mortgage payments, and allow you to maintain a living and working space in one of Manhattan’s fastest gentrifying neighborhoods. This is a tall order, Val, but if Angelini Shoes is going to make it in the twenty-first century, there’s no other way.”
Bret leaves a file behind, full of research about luxury goods made by long-standing family businesses and how they work in the new century. There are spreadsheets filled with figures, and columns with comparisons, and graphs showing the growth of certain products in the last twenty years, as well as a chronicle of failed ventures. Family-owned businesses like Hermès, Vuitton, and Prada are cited. There is a section about buyouts of small enterprises by conglomerates (which seems to be the way of the world in fashion). I look around our shop, with its machinery from the turn of the last century, and our hand-drawn patterns on butcher paper, and wonder if it’s even possible to make the Angelini Shoe Company a viable name in the age of mass-produced, machine-made goods. And even if it is, am I the one to do it?
The November sky over the Hudson River is a menacing lilac with a low row of Jasper Johns-style charcoal clouds threatening rain. Occasionally, the pumpkin-colored sun peeks through to throw light on the choppy river, its whitecaps showing teeth like the edge of a serrated knife. I pull the belt on my wool coat tight, yank the brim of my baseball cap down, and tuck my long chenille scarf inside my collar.
“Here.” Roman gives me a cup of hot coffee from the deli as he sits down on the park bench, propping his vintage black leather Doc Martens on the railing in front of us. He wears faded jeans and a chocolate brown leather motorcycle jacket that looks to be at least twenty years old, and on him, it’s twenty years of sexy. Roman leans back on the bench as a runner with a chapped pink face jogs by. Roman puts his arm around me.
“It was nice of you to call,” I tell him.
“Between your shoes and my gnocchi, I only see you about half as often as I would like to.”
Roman came over when I told him I was taking a coffee break on the river. He could tell something was bothering me when I went over to the restaurant and helped him prep a supply of eggplant, and today, while we were talking on the phone, I finally told him about my father’s diagnosis. I hadn’t wanted to tell him because there’s nothing worse than bad news when a romance is in full bloom. One of us (him) would wind up being in charge of cheering up the other one (me). Who needs that?
Roman sips his coffee. “What kind of man is your father?”
I look across the river as though the answer lies somewhere on the shores of lower Tenafly. Finally, I say, “He’s Tuscan leather.”
Roman laughs. “What does that mean?”
“Tough hide, soft underside. Not glamorous. Durable. But very versatile. A lot like me. When he learns a lesson, he learns it the hard way.”
“Give me an example.” Roman pulls me closer, partly for warmth and partly because when we’re together, we can’t hold each other enough.
“Dad was an urban park ranger in Queens and he went to a convention in upstate New York in the summer of 1986. When he was there, he met a woman named Mary from Pottsville, Pennsylvania.”
“Seriously?”
“I know. Pottsville. My mother would have much preferred he fool around with a woman from fancy Franklin Lakes or ultraglam Tuxedo Park, but when you’re the wife, you don’t get to choose. Anyhow, my dad came home from the convention and everything seemed normal, except he suddenly grew a mustache and got contact lenses. I was only a kid but I kept looking at him and thinking, ‘That mustache looks like a mask. What’s Dad hiding?’”
“How did your mom find out?”
“She got an anonymous phone call one day while he was at work. When she hung up, she turned the color of iceberg lettuce, went into her bedroom, closed the door, and called Gram. But even as kids, we knew that my mother would never share bad news with us. So Tess, my older sister, wisely listened on the extension. When Mom hung up the phone, she put a plan in place. She very quietly packed us up and moved us right here to Perry Street with Gram and Grandpop. Of course, Mom never said she was leaving Dad. She simply invented a whole story about taking the summer to ‘rewire the Tudor,’ leaving Dad in Queens to ‘oversee the electricians.’”
“So everyone was pretending.”
“Exactly. Mom told Gram she needed time to think. But no one ever addressed with us kids what was actually going on, so we just lived in a total fog.”
“Did your father ever explain what was happening?”
“He came into the city every Sunday to have dinner with us, but Mom would disappear somehow, you know, make an excuse about running an errand or meeting a friend or something. Now I know she couldn’t bear to see him. I found out recently that she went to the movies every time Dad came to see us. She saw Flash-dance nine times that summer. It spawned her lifetime love of off-the-shoulder sweaters.”
“I really can’t wait to meet your mother,” he says wryly.
“Then, after a couple of months, Mom regrouped. She pulled a George Patton and began to strategize how to save our family. It turns out Dad is a security junkie. He’s all about safety. He checks every single window and door before he goes to bed. Mom was the adventuress. Dad was the responsible one. Mom knew that he would never give up the security of a wife for the unknowns of Mistress Mary in Pottsville.”
I take a sip of coffee before continuing. “She never mentioned the affair. Ever. She just removed herself from Dad’s world and let him experience life without her for a while. Believe me, if you knew my mom and suddenly she was gone, you’d miss the sheer force of her. She was deeply hurt, but she also knew that if she disappeared from his life, he would remember why he fell in love with her in the first place.”
“Did it work?”
“Absolutely. And I got to watch my parents fall in love for the second time. Trust me. There’s a reason parents are romantic figures before their children are born-it’s because the children can’t take it. I’d catch my mother on my father’s lap when I came home from school. Once I even caught them making out in the kitchen. My mother was so adorable and easygoing and present in the relationship that Dad couldn’t resist her. Suddenly, Mary from Pottsville was, well, Mary from Pottsville. She could never be Mike from Manhattan.”