“I am not going to be pushed into anything. And I feel you’re pushing me, Alfred.”
“I want what’s best for you.”
“You’re rushing me. And as far as Mr. Hatcher is concerned, he is looking out for his best interests, not mine.”
“It’s a cash offer, Gram. As is. He’d buy the building as is.”
“And as it is, today, I’m not selling.”
“Okay. Fine.” Alfred places his napkin next to his plate. He stands and moves to the door. Roman shakes his head in disbelief at my brother’s lack of manners.
“Honey!” Mom calls after him. He goes through the door. Mom goes after him.
Dad looks at me. “See what you started?”
“Me?”
I look to Roman, but he is gone. “Great. Now dinner is ruined. I hope you’re all happy.” I throw down my napkin. “Now that’s something to cry about.” I look to Jaclyn, who suddenly can’t muster a tear.
I go into the kitchen. Roman is carefully slicing the pork loin and placing it on a platter. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s actually worse in my family. When they’re not complaining, they’re plotting.” Roman puts down his carving knife, wipes his hands on a moppeen, and comes around the butcher-block table and puts his arms around me. “Let it go,” he says.
I pretend, for his sake, that I can. But I know, having seen the expression on his face and his abrupt exit to the kitchen, that my family just became a potential deal breaker in our relationship. Roman left Chicago because of this kind of infighting and competition in his own family, why should he put up with it from mine? Why would any man sign on for this kind of nonsense, even when it’s achingly familiar?
As complex as Roman is in the kitchen, when it comes to his private life, he is a minimalist. He doesn’t clutter his loft with unnecessary furniture, his kitchen with dust-collecting gadgets, or his heart with emotional fracases. He makes quick decisions and clean breaks. I’ve seen him do it. He is not a fan of drama for the sake of it, and the last thing he wants to do is argue. He wants his life outside work, which is competitive and volatile, to be the opposite: calm and peaceful. My family, even when I beg them, cannot deliver that. Sensing my feelings, he says, “Don’t worry.”
“Too late,” I tell him.
9. The Hudson River
LAST WEEK, GRAM LEFT for her annual two-week Lenten retreat with the women’s sodality of Our Lady of Pompeii. The ladies stay at a convent in the Berkshires during the ides of March, and find inner peace through participation in daily masses, group rosaries, hikes in the woods, and meals so loaded with starch that when Gram returns home she has to juice for a week to clear out the gluten. However, she considers the sacrifice well worth it because, while her body may take a health hit, her soul is cleansed. Mezzo. Mezzo.
I’m aiming to have my sketch of the shoe design for the competition at Bergdorf’s finished by the time Gram returns. I want to have a clear notion of what we’ll need to build the shoes before we go to Italy. While Gram has left the design of the shoe up to me, she promised to weigh in with any refinements or corrections before we turn it into a pair of real shoes and deliver them to Rhedd Lewis. I have become obsessed with the sketch of the dress, studying it so often, I see it when I sleep. I’ve come to appreciate the design, and the strange charm of it. The Rag & Bone gown has grown on me.
It’s helpful to have the house to myself. I’m one of those people who actually savors being alone. I like to get up in the middle of the night, turn on the lights, put on a pot of coffee, and get to work without fear of waking Gram. There is nothing more peaceful than New York City at three A.M. It’s the rest period before the madness begins at dawn.
I relish a big space with nobody in it but me. Virginia Woolf celebrated a room of one’s own, but I’ve learned that I require a house of my own. When I’m designing, I fill all available surfaces with offbeat objects that inspire me: a marble bocce ball that’s the exact shade of vanilla ice cream, a small watercolor of a cloud that has hues of lavender on a field of white, wheels of paint chips, boards of fabric swatches and skeins of silk trim. I like to create a circus of ideas, which I can walk through and live with, until something speaks to me. Slowly, I winnow out the claptrap until I’m left with just a few things that move me the most. This is how my mind works, several concepts at play at once, all advancing toward an unknown conclusion; disparate pieces becoming a new whole, in this case, a pair of shoes for a wedding gown that may, on the surface, appear to be in tatters, but is actually, after hours of study, a dress design that is forward thinking and new. My laptop is propped open, ready to record any ideas I have, and to provide available research when I need a goose in a particular direction.
The dining table is covered in fabric folded neatly in rectangles, a few old shoes I’ve saved from yard sales, a crocheted bride doll that belonged to my mother in the 1950s and a large collage that I’ve been making since we first met with Rhedd Lewis. I started the collage on an enormous sheet of butcher paper. I pasted images, photographs, scenes, and words from old magazines, then textured the whole by gluing on artful bits of lace, buttons, and loose crystals. Somewhere in this wild stew, which my subconscious directed, lies my design, or at least, the impulse that will guide me through the process of designing our shoe.
Using Rhedd’s sketch as a jumping-off point, my collage is a landscape of women, collected from couture photo shoots, advertisements, and newspaper stories, most of whom are in repose or turned away from the camera’s lens. I imagine the woman in the Rag & Bone sketch, who she might be and why she chose this particular design above all others to wear on her wedding day. My instincts say this dress isn’t for a first-time bride. It’s for a woman who has been down the road of true love more than once; she’s jaded and even a little ambivalent, hence the unfinished details and frayed chiffon. If the bride is not committed, her gown isn’t either.
Gram has taught me that, as custom cobblers, we have succeeded only when we have taken something a client needs and turned it into something she desires. I have to think like the bride who chooses to wear this gown and design shoes to complement her style.
We use line to accent and play up the individual customer’s physical attributes, we use balance to make the shoe comfortable and provide a seamless fit, form is mandated by personal taste and silhouette, shape is about taking current trends and making the shoe contemporary, color is about working with the dress design so both elements flow as one, pattern is used to accent the fabric of the gown, while texture is about the overall statement of the shoe. Is the leather or fabric appropriate for the time of year the bride is married, and do all the elements feed seamlessly into the overall presentation?
Gram says to keep it simple but not to be afraid of dramatic elements. These are the arenas an apprentice must master. All these notes must dance in the head of the artist as she creates; one element cannot take precedence over another, rather, the goal is a harmonious confluence of all of them. This harmony creates beauty.
I look at the shards of chiffon on the sketch. I prop it up against the candlesticks on the dining room table and walk to the kitchen and look at it from across the room. It reminds me of something. Something specific. And then I remember. I climb the stairs to Gram’s room.
Gram was married in 1948 in an eggshell silk-georgette gown with a scoop neck and sheer, short, puffed sleeves of organza with a wide band of fabric around the upper arm. The natural, fitted waist flowed out to a full circle skirt. There were accents aplenty: ornate handmade Italian cutwork lace was sewn on every seam. There was spider lace on the bodice, facing, and tips of the voluminous ruffles on the hem of the skirt. A photograph of Gram tossing the bouquet shows the gown from the back, where there are wings of tulle fashioned like a capelet, which must have trailed behind Gram like a mist when she walked. It was a typical postwar, pre-New Look ensemble, overtly feminine and deliberately overdone. The war was over and, evidently, one of the great prizes was the sea of femininity that awaited the soldiers as they returned home.