As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (11 page)

If the dresses Bec designed were for her a kind of freedom, a way to be herself, then Bec’s journey toward making them, like Vivie’s journey toward Leo, was circuitous and chancy. I use the word
choice
to distinguish Bec’s less conventional life from that of her sisters, but though I didn’t know it that summer of 1948, in reality Bec stumbled into that life of making dresses, landing upon it only after being loosed from the planned life, the far more typical one that during her long engagement to Milton Goldberg she’d assumed was her destiny.

He loved her, he said that last time they spoke. He still loved her, he always would, but he couldn’t marry her. He had just graduated from Amherst College. They’d been engaged the entire four years of his education there. During that time she’d waited for him, at home, taking in mending from around town and occasionally sewing a dress or skirt to order. By Milt’s senior year Bec had made an outfit for each member of her family. Though Milt was tall enough when he left—a commanding guard on Middletown High’s basketball team—he seemed even taller after college, as if his education had added inches to his frame. Late May of 1932 and they were standing outside Bec’s back door where he could kiss her without anyone seeing. That’s what they always did first thing when he came home. They’d stand out there, no matter the weather. But this time he started talking. His voice, she noticed right away, was deeper, more authoritative. What he planned to do next was to shoot for business school, he told her in that new voice. He explained that Middletown’s banks and businesses were faring better than in so many other places, that it was pure disaster most everywhere else. He shook his head. He wanted to help. He certainly wasn’t thinking this way when he’d first gone off, he noted. “If I only knew then what I know now,” he repeated as he turned toward her, and then away, never once taking her hand or bending to kiss her.

He was looking over her head, as if at the house next door, when he said that what he also didn’t know when he’d left those years ago was a girl named Audrey, someone he’d met at one of those many mixed socials between his college and the girls’ college next door, Smith. And in coming to know her—really it had been just that past semester—he’d come to know that he preferred being with someone who was like him.

“Like you?” Bec couldn’t imagine what he meant. She and Milt had grown up together, had had the same teachers, played on the same playgrounds as kids, knew each other’s friends and family. They may have only begun dating their senior year in high school, but in fact they’d known everything about each other for a long, long time. How were they not alike?

“Educated,” Milt answered. “I prefer the educated kind.”

If ever there was a time for sisters, Bec’s sudden breakup with Milton Goldberg was it. And how mightily Vivie and Ada had rushed, despite their ongoing tensions, to Bec’s aid. In an instant she’d gone from being the sister so admired, about to make what was clearly the most advantageous marriage of the three—Milt’s fine education had in fact set him apart—to the sister most wronged, jilted more severely after four long years of engagement than even Vivie.

“The snob,” Ada exclaimed. They were in the Syrkin kitchen, around the dining table, where all important conversations between the sisters had always taken place. Vivie was married to Leo by then, but until that moment—the as yet unrecognized start of a slow reconciliation—she still preferred to avoid Ada’s company.

“The stinking lowlife,” Vivie added, surprising the others with what was for her an uncommon insult. “I mean it. You don’t forget where you come from. He’s a fool, that Milton Goldberg is. A terrible fool.” She paused. “And besides,” she said, her face broadening with a mischievous smile, “the guy couldn’t eat a meal without spilling half of it on his pants.”

Bec looked at Vivie across the dining table, bewildered.

“That’s right,” Ada said, suddenly hopping in her seat. “And he couldn’t talk without so many ‘ums’ you’d, um, want, um, to finally, um, kill him!”

“And for all his schooling,” Vivie added, “the guy never showed up here except with his shirt untucked, his face unclean.”

“That’s just not so,” Bec said. But even she began to smile.

“The klutz,” Ada noted, slapping her hands on the tabletop. “Besides a basketball, what could that man hold on to without dropping it? Wait a minute; wasn’t he constantly dropping that basketball? Lucky for him it bounced back. You marry someone like that, you’d never have a full set of dishes. God knows, should he ever whisk you off your feet, he’d likely drop
you.
”

“And did he ever tell a truly
funny
joke?” Vivie asked, throwing up her arms.

Outside, a pair of cardinals landed on a nearby branch and the sisters, without thinking, paused at the sight. Dusk, late May, and they had the window open.

“Snob,” Ada argued more seriously, turning from the window. “Who marries a girl just because she goes to Smith College? Who does this?
Who?
” She paused, thinking, and then she raised her right hand, jabbing her index finger pugnaciously forward. “Episcopalians!” she said, spitting the word out, sure of it. The birds flew off. “That’s who.”

“Ada, you know that’s not so,” Bec said, but gently, letting the way Ada boiled a whole people down to one bad thing stand essentially unchallenged. For a minute Ada rattled on, about snobby Episcopalians then idiotic Congregationalists then uppity Catholics then, more specifically, uppity and rotten Irish Catholics then uppity and rotten Italian Catholics. For some reason her mind then looped to the Negroes, who, for no reason in particular, were worst of all.

Bec didn’t even try to follow her thinking.

“He did write me the dullest letters,” Bec finally said, interrupting Ada.

“You see?” both sisters cried in unison.

“And he did sometimes snort like a pig when he laughed.” This news out, Bec began to chuckle, at least momentarily, and her sisters joined in.

“Life goes on, sweetheart,” Vivie told her in all seriousness once they’d calmed down. “You have to trust me on that.”

The cardinals returned.

“And you’re still young,” Ada added. “Look, take it from me, what’s the rush anyway?”

That summer while at Woodmont, Bec was simply marking time, feeling wounded and low. Even during the weeks of her sisters’ visits—Ada and Mort in late June, and Vivie and Leo in early July—Bec slept late. She took long walks alone. She wandered the length of Beach Avenue, coming at last to a grassy park at the east end of the street where a Japanese maple tree’s quirky and grand burgundy foliage called out to her, soothed her for the time she took to stare at it. Except for that tree she was angry at everything, even sunshine, even billowing white clouds.

Midsummer, Bec went with her parents into New Haven for the day. For her birthday, Risel wouldn’t accept anything less than her favorite pizza pie at Pepe’s. After the meal, Bec had linked arms with her mother and was strolling down nearby George Street when Risel spotted a woman posting a sign in a dress shop window.
Seamstress wanted.
Apply within.
“Look!” Risel told Bec.

Bec was as startled as her mother. That someone was hiring was indeed a miracle. But Risel meant something else.

“Me?” Bec shook her head.

“You,” Risel said, and then she threw her shoulders back and posed for Bec, right there on George Street’s sidewalk. In fact Bec had designed and made the dress Risel was wearing, a navy-and-white-polka-dotted cotton. A birthday gift. For a couple of lonely weeks, something to do. Her mother had a thick waist, a narrow bottom, and a large bosom, and still the dress fit her like a glove. Bec, taking that in, wasn’t sure how she’d done it.

“What is it?” Maks then asked. He’d been trailing behind the women, indulging in a cigar.

Risel pointed at the sign in the store window. Across the glass the name
McMannus
was printed in large black letters.

“A pipe dream,” Bec said. “Come on.”

Pipe dream or not, the next morning Maks returned to the McMannus shop, Risel’s dress folded in a paper bag that he carried as carefully as he’d once held the dress’s maker when she was but a child, the baby of the family. Hours earlier, while Maks and Risel walked to the ocean for their dunk, they had agreed: if it would get Bec that job, Maks was to show the McMannus people Risel’s dress as an example of Bec’s work. Risel loved the dress, and had worn it just that once to Pepe’s, but she could part with it for a day or so, she said.

Upon Maks’s arrival he was told that Mr. McMannus was out, home with a backache. The woman he spoke to, Pearl Delaney, served as Mr. McMannus’s assistant seamstress. “I’m temporarily in charge,” she told Maks, her voice firm, her Irish accent strong. Her face was craggy, worn, just like the shale of Woodmont, just like his own face, Maks noted, but oddly her hair had barely aged, was still a crow’s black. Of the occasion for the hiring, Pearl explained the recent retirement of the shop’s only other seamstress. “Eighty and sewing blind,” she said.

Maks explained about Bec, “the family seamstress,” he called her proudly, and then he pulled the dress from the paper bag, sorry as he did that he hadn’t packaged it in something more special. He watched as Pearl Delaney grabbed what she didn’t know was Risel’s gift then turned the dress inside out only to tug at it as if determined to see it rip. For the next several minutes she examined each seam. “Dear God,” she said once, shaking her head. When she finished she flung the dress, like a mere rag, over her right shoulder. Seeing it treated so, Maks was glad that Risel hadn’t made this trip with him and that he’d kept it a secret from Bec.

Two more applicants, sewing samples in hand, entered the shop. Pearl Delaney told them to stand in line, and then she told Maks, “You’ll have to wait for a reply from Mr. McMannus.”

“You’re going to keep the dress then?” he answered, confused.

A week later, the phone rang at the Woodmont cottage. “Shall I come get it?” Maks asked once he realized the woman he was speaking to was Pearl Delaney. He only hoped that no one else was on the party line, listening.

“On the contrary. We’re interested. Mr. McMannus is right here, standing beside me. He asks me to tell you to have your daughter come in to talk to us.” She told him they should come in the next Monday, at nine sharp. “Lateness will be your first mistake,” she said.

It took some convincing to get Bec off to New Haven that next Monday. Bec had cried each evening since Maks broke the news of her pending job interview.

“You don’t want me,” she told her parents. Their reassurances only made her weep more. “Milt didn’t want me and now you don’t,” she countered stubbornly.

In the end, though, she let her father take her to New Haven. And after she’d met Tyler McMannus, after she’d heard him say to her father, “Your daughter has a pleasant way with fabric,” she’d nodded and told Maks that she’d give it a try, at least for a week.

Pearl Delaney, who’d been silent, said, “A week?” Then she laughed.

“A week it’ll be,” Tyler said, turning to Bec. Smiling, he handed her Risel’s dress.

“I’ll take that,” Maks said with noticeable relief.

A week wasn’t much time, but from the start Bec took to the smell of the place: the sweetness of unworn clothes, a pureness that didn’t exist in any closet. The look of the place, too, intrigued her with its simplicity: the racks of pressed clothes along the walls, the set of cushioned chairs lining the shop’s back wall. And the work itself satisfied a need to do something, anything, beyond stewing about Milt. Mr. McMannus, as Bec called him then, could throw any project at her—a man’s suit, a woman’s gown—and from the start Bec could tailor it well enough, and sometimes, it seemed to her, almost to perfection. All those years of taking in mending while she stayed home, waiting for Milt, were at least coming to something, she figured during the long days of that first week. Or so it seemed until she was told otherwise by Pearl Delaney, who, she soon discovered, had been working at the shop before it even was a shop. Pearl had been hired by Tyler’s father, a tailor, when she was only fifteen. She’d come to America from County Cork with her two sisters the year before. She was desperate for work when Tyler’s father took her in. Tyler had been only a baby then.

“No,” Pearl told Bec more than once those first days. “Your work isn’t adequate.” Her stitches weren’t even, she’d remark sharply, and then she’d insist Bec rip apart hand-sewn seams and try again.

Tyler wasn’t with them in the back room when Pearl spoke to her this way, but when he was there his comments weren’t like hers. “Good job,” he’d say, simply enough. Or, as on their first meeting, “You have a pleasant way with fabric.” But Tyler spent most of his time on the sales floor, pushing as hard as he could the shop’s inventory of men’s suits and women’s dresses. If she had a pleasant way with fabric, then he had a pleasant way with people, Bec grasped soon enough. The actual tailoring he left largely up to Pearl, and now to Bec, too. But Bec was second in line, someone, according to Pearl Delaney, who had yet to prove her worth, and by ordering so much of Bec’s work to be redone, Pearl made sure Bec knew it.

So there were things about this new life she was instantly drawn to—the smell of the shop, Tyler’s infrequent but sincere admiration for her skill—and things she could readily do without, especially Pearl Delaney, all five feet of her. But Tyler seemed to adore Pearl, would bend low to kiss her cheek each evening before she left the shop and wish her good night, and Bec understood that no amount of willing Pearl Delaney away was going to do the trick. She was a fixture there, much like the clothes racks and the chairs lining the back wall. And there was a history between Pearl and Tyler that Bec could only imagine. Something about Tyler’s good night kiss made the hardness in the woman soften, and after a day full of complaints Pearl would invariably leave work with a girl’s shy smile and often a giggle.