An Enlarged Heart (11 page)

After a bit I had some errands to do across town, and I did them, and then I returned to the club in the terrible heat. The girls had had a wonderful time, swimming. By then my friend had left, and the girls were with a babysitter, a Russian woman who didn't speak English, so we bowed to each other in the lobby, and my daughter and I walked up York Avenue, in search of a taxi. There were none. It was so hot that you could see the city air in furred bands, rising from the buses. For a while it seemed that it would not be possible to get home at all: no buses came, and because it was 5 p.m., all the taxis, the way they do inexplicably, in New York, at the busiest times, had gone off duty. I found myself thinking, wildly, for a moment, that we could not get home because we were
stuck in time—
there was no way to get from the cool glade of that pool, and the waiter and the silver domes, and the toothpicks, to the next place we were meant to be, meeting her brother at a pizza place, in West Harlem, where we live. The force field of the past was strong, a whirlpool—it was inexplicable to me that I was the mother of the girl, in a damp sundress, and not the girl herself, forty years earlier, eating an identical sandwich under a silver dome, at a different club, with my cousin's grandmother, who wore stockings in the summer, before we would have to wait for thirty minutes to get into the pool.

We crossed the smoky street and I bought two bottles of water from a Mexican vendor, on the corner of Sixty-first. We drank them down. I tried to remind myself that my daughter and I would certainly reach home. That it was only three miles, if we needed to walk, when we got there we could order in, if we liked, and turn on the air conditioner in the bedroom, and take a cool shower. That this was infinitely better than the plight of other women and children around the globe, or even, I knew, in the city in which we lived, and I should stop feeling sorry for myself. It worked, a little, but not enough. I wanted, still, to be the girl in the Speedo tank suit who was told I had to wait thirty minutes before getting into the water.

The west side of the street was a little cooler. Up its artery swam a taxi whose light blinked on. My daughter ran toward it and flagged it down. It was full of priests. Smiling and nodding they got out, and the last one, a Russian Orthodox priest dressed in full black regalia in the heat, held the door open, and we sped uptown, to meet her brother at a restaurant that had sprung up two blocks from our house, an address from which only a few years ago, there had been not one restaurant in a radius of eight blocks, which is a continent in the city. It was called, inexplicably, the Bad Horse. The children liked it because the pizza was good, and it was cool, and I like it because they turn the music down if you can make yourself heard to ask.

The Bad Horse had not been there, three weeks ago. A young couple, my neighbor had told me, was trying to make a go of it. I tried to remember what had been there before, and hoped it had not been another restaurant, which would mean that even the neighborhood, waking itself from its slumber, had already developed its own impossibilities, its particular Bermuda Triangles where nothing could flourish but
FOR
RENT
signs.

Does a horse bark? The waiters didn't know. But the name made me think of another new restaurant, on the site of an old one. This one, the old one, was a restaurant I had been to a hundred times, over the years. I had begun coming to it in the butterflied chicken phase when we were feeling flush, and momentarily poised to enter another life, in which we could regularly afford the mediocre food and the good drink it afforded, under its once risqué murals of woodland nymphets. Later, I went to drink pear champagne at the bar, with a man I would marry, who, my father said, was the only man he ever knew who didn't look like a gangster in a double-breasted suit—he was too fey, too elegant—and when we moved from the bar we would sit at table thirty-eight, where we had decided to get married, catty-corner to the mirrors. Later, we took the children, and they ate pasta with butter and later, roast chicken. The restaurant was in the lobby of the apartment building where the poet Robert Lowell had died, in a taxi, outside the front door, returning to his second wife after a hiatus, so there was that, too. In a room across the lobby, which also belonged to the restaurant, the “Little Bar,” you could still smoke, and sit at small tables where your knees knocked into the knees of whoever you were with, which was the point, anyway. The last time I was there it was to meet a friend, a playwright, who was dying, and whose nurse took her to the door and then she made her way to the table where I was waiting, with a walker, and when she sat down said,
Thank God for drink.

A while ago, after the ballet, we would go and sit at the bar. The bartender's name was Victor, and he would put a stand of boiled eggs in front of me, because he knew I liked them, and we drank champagne. There was a man who almost always sat at the very end of the bar, whom my husband didn't like—he felt he had been criminal, about some deal, that I never quite understood—so we avoided his glance in the mirror, and he usually left before we did. Victor had a son at the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. Sometimes, but not often, we had a little something to eat; often even if we didn't order Victor would give us a something, anyway, a bit of smoked salmon, or a piece of cake. At that time I had a fur coat, that a friend had given me and I had had made over, with a blue silk lining, and I held it on my lap rather than check it. Sometimes in the winter I draped it over my shoulders. Victor always asked my husband what I would have. What he said was, “And for Mrs. Joe?”

When he said it I felt that all was right with the world, the world I had made, or tried to make. I liked having the warm, light coat and the glass of champagne, or sometimes Sancerre, and the little plate of something to eat, and the man my husband didn't like at the end of the bar. I knew, I felt, how to be that person. That that person was someone invented out of another time, and if her constellate points had vanished it didn't concern me, then, nor that the wavery mirror in the leaf green powder room where I sometimes went to check my reflection showed me the girl in the Speedo suit, waiting to get into the water. About the time we decided we couldn't afford to go to the ballet every week during the season, nor could we afford other things, the restaurant closed. The owner, a Hungarian, had died, too, and it was sold.

To me at the time the restaurant closing seemed to be of a piece, another square filled in the ghost grid. When I spoke to my friend who lives in the country, I told him about it, and he said, “Well, another thing we won't ever do again.” The other night I was walking past Sixty-seventh Street with another old friend, with whom I had never been to the restaurant, although we had each been there many times, with other people. Let's look, I said. I had heard it had recently been reopened, in the same spot. You could no longer go into the restaurant through the lobby of the apartment building; this had been regularized. There was a door marked “The Leopard.” We went in, hesitant. Some of the murals had been kept, and the odd way you had to climb a small step to get to the back where the bar was. But the bar was on the other side of the restaurant, the wrong side, sleek, an expanse of shining wood. Victor wasn't there. The girl in the Speedo suit put her toe in the water, and withdrew it.

Mr. Ferri and the Furrier

W
hen I saw, in the newspaper, that Mr. Ferri had died I immediately thought of the furrier. It may have been the association of consonants or vowels—I almost wrote “consolation,” and “constellation” would be most accurate—of a hands-on caress, a kind of attention to detail and to the customer that barely exists anymore, like cigarette lighters, or loose powder, or the still click of a phone being lifted up, somewhere else in the house, when you are speaking on it, too softly, in another room. Mr. Ferri, who as far as I know was no relation to the great ballerina, Alessandra Ferri, though he shared some of the dancer's wit and grace, her deft movements, although his were often close to the ground, and he danced, always, as a partner rather than a soloist—a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth. Mr. Ferri was a tailor. His shop was four flights above Madison Avenue, in the East Sixties. On the street level was a fashionable restaurant, and across the street was and is a line of some of the most expensive jewelers in the world: in one, a bird of paradise made entirely of diamonds, the size of the flower; in another, a sapphire large as a robin's egg. But the door to Mr. Ferri's was sandwiched between the restaurant and a dress shop that catered to fairies of the woodland, the dresses all tulle and peau de soie; some of which, secretly, would make their way to Mr. Ferri's agency a half hour, or a decade, after they left the shop.

I had first heard of Mr. Ferri from my friend Sarah. We were on the beach in late August, talking idly of things we planned to do in the fall. Sarah needed a new rug. I had a jacket—I think it was a jacket—I needed altered, and Sarah directed me to Mr. Ferri. When Sarah and I were young we worked in the office of a magazine, and in those days—it was the early 1980s—she dressed out of bandbox. Her shoes matched her dress, and she had the sheeny beauty of the girls who advertised Breck shampoo. One afternoon many years after this—it was fall, and the red leaves of the turning maples were flush against the window of the house where we were sitting together, because it was raining—we made a list of those outfits. There was a white pleated wool skirt with a matching sweater appliquéd with a blue and red anchor; a pink sleeveless dress with what used to be called a jewel neckline and for all I know still is; a navy-blue linen shirtwaist with a rope belt. Over time these outfits were shed for loose blue jeans and men's shirts, never ironed. Instead of a Breck girl she now looks like a gelatin print of Georgia O'Keeffe. It did not occur to me that she would know of a tailor, then, on the Upper East Side. But she did know of Mr. Ferri, as I knew of a rug dealer, to whom she subsequently went, although I do not know if she bought a rug from him, because by that time she had also bought a house, and was then in that state in which it is difficult to buy just one thing.

I am trying now to remember my first visit to Mr. Ferri. I had a shopping bag over my arm, and I had stopped first at one of the jewelry stores across the street, the shop on the corner whose door and portico were made of bronze: I had once written a story about a pair of emerald earrings at that shop which had been stolen from a pirate ship, and since then my girls and I had made it a regular stop on our walks up and down the East Side, from their school, to visit their great-great-aunt, who was immobilized by a stroke in her apartment, which smelled of beeswax and Norell, next to the Guggenheim Museum, or to buy school shoes, at a place called Ricky's, where my mother had bought shoes for me as a child. The staff at the jewelry store, which was owned by a man who had started his career by selling Mexican wedding dresses in the East Village, was genial about letting them try on tiaras and necklaces that had belonged to queens and grand dames, and I had made a friend of a girl who worked there, who wore her cap of black hair in a helmet, like a Valkyrie. “What's in the bag?” she asked.

It was a disreputable-looking large plastic bag, with the kind of hard plastic handles that click together if you line them up properly, which is hard to do, and it was printed in red and blue letters with the name of a local drugstore chain. In the hushed space of the shop it was outré, a nanny goat in the Tuileries. I pulled out the contents to show her.

The first thing was the jacket I had been thinking about on the beach. It was a heavy wool houndstooth hacking jacket. The teeth were brown, moss green, and gold, and the top of the collar was lined with wool flannel like cat fur. I was then under the impression that the jacket had belonged to my immobilized aunt. She had given it to me two decades ago. Since then I had replaced the buttons. When I held it up we could both see that the pale lining was torn to shreds. The other item in the bag was a pair of dark brown velvet trousers. The velvet was made of silk, and it had been rubbed almost away in some places. Those places, on the knees, looked mottled. I had bought the trousers almost twenty years ago. They had a high, fitted waistband and bell-bottoms. I had been happy in them. I had worn them with a white poet's blouse and flat shoes, and in the winter, when I went out, with a black velvet hooded parka with a drawstring waist. The worst of the wear was on the seat, which had split, which I had tried to fix, but had torn again. The Valkyrie looked at the jacket and the trousers. She reached out a hand and felt the velvet. “Well,” she said, “waste not, want not.”

The last thing in the bag was wrapped in white tissue paper. I drew it out and unwrapped it. I had not meant to show it to her out of a kind of shyness; the jacket and trousers had come a little close to airing dilapidation, or even dirty laundry. But maybe because of that, I wanted to create a frisson of surprise to detract from my feeling of haplessness. Inside were the two yards of silk I was bringing to Mr. Ferri, to replace the jacket's shredded lining. I had called to make an appointment. The man who answered the telephone had repeated the number when he answered. He sounded if he had a mouthful of pins. I thought, unbidden, of the tailor of Gloucester, with his fine silver whiskers, a story which I had read aloud to my children countless times, and which had always terrified me. A tailor sends his cat, Simpkin, out to buy a twist of cherry-colored wool. The mayor is getting married the next morning, and the sumptuous waistcoat he has ordered is unfinished. We know, though Potter does not tell us, that the tailor is disorganized, untidy, prone to fits and starts. Before the cat leaves (we understand, too, that the tailor can talk to the cat, and that he is the only helper the tailor can afford) the cat imprisons his enemies, a family of mice, under a set of teacups. The mice scrabble under the teacups. The tailor discovers the captives, releases them, and angers the cat, who hides the twist. The tailor falls ill, in despair, realizes he cannot finish the waistcoat, but grateful mice creep out at night and embroider the waistcoat so magnificently that the enfeebled tailor is overwhelmed when he arrives at the shop the next morning, wringing his hands. The shop is empty. One button is left undone. A note next to the buttonhole, written in tiny script, reads “No more twist.” The cat, cajoled, recovers his good humor, and supplies the bit of cherry thread. It is based on a true story. The ratting of teacups, filled with fur and tails, the malignant cat, the sheer improbability of it coming right.

“Nelson Ferri, YUkon 8–5850” said the voice, full of pins and needles. I came to. The mouse headed out for the territories. My grandmother's telephone number was CHelsea-3. My great-aunt's was ATwater-9, another aunt's, TRafalgar-7. These numbers, all of them abandoned, made a ticker tape in my mind. I could not remember my first New York telephone number. The exchange at the magazine where Sarah and I had worked, to which she wore her matching shoes and bag, was ALgonquin-4. These numbers, all of them abandoned, were colored places on a folded map. On the telephone, speaking to the voice of the man holding pins in his mouth, I explained I needed the lining of a jacket replaced, that he had been recommended by my friend. Length? Size? “Two yards,” he said.

In the jewelry store I unwrapped the fabric. I had bought it the week before, in the pouring rain, in the garment district, in a shop I had visited obsessively years before. It was during a time in my life when the amount of time that I devoted to thinking about upholstery fabric was in inverse proportion to everything else I wasn't thinking about: chief among these was how a person like me, untrained in domestic arts or stick-to-itiveness, could be responsible for a baby, who would quickly grow up into a child. I slipcovered one hand-me-down sofa in ill-advised pale duck linen, with striped piping. By the second year I had dyed it with tea, to hide the stains. But by the time I found myself propelled to Mr. Ferri I had long given up on slipcovers and upholstery—draping the multiplying chairs and sofas with old tablecloths and shawls, as one child, by hook or crook, had followed another, and many of my sentences, then, were prefaced by the words “there's just no point in … ” I had not looked at the fabric since I bought it—the shop had wrapped it, like a present, in carefully folded tissue paper. It slid across the glass counter, like a half-vanished dream.

The silk was printed with figures. The colors were red and gray and slate blue and moss green—I see now the colors on my telephone map, the same sepia palette—as if the fabric had overlaid or colored in that paint-by-numbers graph of the city. The figures were between four and six inches high: they were Japanese people, in nineteenth-century dress, fingering abaci, mending shoes, surveying their own collections of silk. The signal note was quiet industry. There were no conversations: each figure was intent on its own business. The men wore blue or red pantaloons, and pigtails. Their hats were tied underneath their chins with ribbons
.
When I was a child my grandparents came back from a trip and gave me a book of lavishly illustrated Japanese folktales, by Lafcadio Hearn. There was a story about a talking fish, and another about the fountain of youth, which held no interest for me, and one in which a dragon shed ruby tears. It was called “The Boy Who Drew Cats,” and it was the title story which frightened: a boy loves to draw cats; he is the youngest child of a large family, and instead of doing his chores, he draws cats leaping, sleeping, eating, dreaming. In despair, his parents take him to the village monastery in hopes that he might become a priest. But still, he draws cats. The abbot, too, despairs of him, and sends him off, advising him to avoid large places at night, and favor small ones. He wanders, despondent, and then sees a large temple, where a light is burning. The temple is deserted. He does not know it, but a huge goblin-rat has scared the priests away, and the warriors who have been sent to capture the goblin have all vanished. All that remains in the temple are some large screens, covered with white rice paper. Unable to resist, he takes out his pen and draws cats on the rice paper walls: the most beautiful cats he has ever drawn, and then, recalling the priest's advice, he climbs into a tiny cupboard, and falls asleep. He is woken in the night by the sound of a terrible battle: hissing and sharp cries, but when he wakes in the morning the temple is quiet and full of light. In the center of the room is the gigantic goblin-rat, dead, and the cats he has drawn on the screen have blood on their mouths. Twist, twist.

I recognized the pantaloons from the illustration in the story: they were the costume worn by the priest in the temple, who sends the little boy who drew cats to slay the goblin. “Goodness,” said the Valkyrie, about the silk lining, and ran her hand over the silent faces. A customer had come in; one who was more likely than I ever would be to buy a pair of drop rosette earrings, which I had tried on a few weeks earlier, and admired. I was late. I folded up the fabric and put it in the plastic bag with the trousers and the jacket, and went out the door and across the street, to find Mr. Ferri.

Later, when I brought my daughter there, with a jade silk dress over her arm that needed to be altered, she said, “Are you
sure
?” We disregarded the tiny elevator, which I knew was at the end of the hall, and instead climbed the three flights of listing steps, which were covered in cracked linoleum. But the first time I went I wasn't sure. The distance from the jewelry shop and the Valkyrie, and even the flower stand and the fashionable restaurant, called, I think, Fred's or Jacques, was too abrupt. The shabby hall and the zigzag staircase were a split seam. That Mr. Ferri's business was to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, and that the look of the place where that happened didn't matter, hovering as it did between the seen and the unseen, in proximity to possibility, I didn't know yet, or understand. At the pasteboard door I rang the bell. When no one answered I turned the knob. The door opened to a rectangular room divided, at one end, by a counter, and behind the counter were some cutting tables, covered with rolls of fabric and measuring tapes. At the other end was what looked like a dressing room, with a curtain across it on a wooden pole. The gray carpet was so littered with pins it glittered. The room was dominated by a tall open three-sided mirror. In front of it was a low wooden stool. Two men with black hair shiny with brilliantine, in their late twenties or early thirties, were working behind the counter. A small elderly gray man, his shirt stuck here and there with pins, his eyes magnified behind his glasses, was Mr. Ferri. I had made an appointment, and he greeted me by name. “You have the jacket with you?” he asked.

I nodded. I took the jacket out of the bag. I had not repacked the lining fabric as neatly as I'd hoped. A foot or two came out with it, a fan of faces, so I piled it on the counter as well, with the jacket, which Mr. Ferri immediately took up in his hands. “Johnny, can I have a hanger, please?”

A hanger appeared. It was an old heavy wooden hanger with a worn peeling label, black with gold letters, which read
THE
NEW
YORKER
HOTEL
. Mr. Ferri hung the jacket on the hanger, on a hook. Then he began to touch the fabric and turn it over in his hands, looking at the sleeves and then the shoulders. He touched the buttons, and then turned back the lapels. Once I had seen a man look over a horse he was thinking of buying, and Mr. Ferri and the way he appraised the jacket reminded me of that day, the sun and shadow and smell of hay. It was hot in the room. I was wearing a black cardigan sweater and I took it off. Mr. Ferri gave me a long look, considering. “Could you turn around, please.” I did. Again, I thought of my friend and the horse. He took the jacket off the hanger and handed it to me. “Could you put it on, please.”