First Papers (39 page)

“The shop’s yours, and only yours,” he insisted.

The shop remained Letty’s and only Letty’s. Apart from a token share bought for a hundred dollars by her parents and another bought by Garry’s, it was hers even in a legal sense, the lease signed in her own name, the books and credits and special checking account in her own name, without the usual countersignature or endorsement by her husband. Garry’s “no” had also been explosive each time she suggested that since she was using their money to launch herself, the new project really belonged to both of them, “for richer or poorer, profit or loss,” which made him laugh but did not change his no to yes.

And as the weeks and months passed, Letty found new pride for herself by feeling the mantle of his around her, and new reasons for a sense of well-being and achievement. When she came each month to the day that told her again they were not yet to have a baby, she no longer wept in desolation and sense of failure, accepting the fact and not dwelling upon it. All she knew was that she was happy again as she had been in the first year of their marriage and that Garry seemed happy with her.

One night early in February she thought, In a way he’s happier. It was a mild Sunday evening and they were both in the closed and locked store, finishing the largest task that had ever faced them, each weary but each stubbornly unwilling to quit before it was done. Garry had just heaved an empty crate atop half a dozen others at the rear exit of the shop and was mopping his grimy arms and face with a filthy rag that had been tucked into his belt. Out front in the gutter, where the street-cleaner would get them in the morning, were a dozen more, and he decided to add these newly emptied ones to their outdoor brothers.

“Do you remember,” he asked as he banged the door behind him at last, “when I promised to drop you a curtsy the first time I came in?”

“And then never once did!”

His hands were stained with varnish and oil, his shirt dark with dust and sweat, but at her reproving tone, he promptly sank in an elaborate maneuver that he took to be a curtsy and said, “Queen Anne, ma’am.”

“And me looking like the washerwoman. Oh, Gare.” She gave his shoulder a push while he was jackknifed at her feet, and he collapsed willingly on the littered floor, stretching out on the packing straw and shredded newspapers from the barrels and boxes they had been opening for hours.

“It feels good,” he said. “I’ll stay down here a while.”

“You must be half dead,” she said, “and starved too. But I’m so
glad.”
She looked around at what they had accomplished. “It would have taken me forever without you.”

She was as disheveled and grimy as he and as unconscious of her appearance, unworried about the hair coming loose from her high pompadour, about her skirts turned back and pinned up at her waist with a safety-pin like a slavey’s. The backbreaking part was done, and now she could manage quite easily and get the entire shipment on display in a couple of days, a week at most. The barrels and crates and cartons had been filled with an unrelated assortment of decorative objects that even Garry’s untutored eye recognized as beautiful or unusual or old or costly, or all of these at once. There were clocks and barometers and lamps, silver trays and bowls and candlesticks, crystal candelabra and wall sconces, andirons and firedogs and fireplace screens and fenders, several small tables and tiered stands and footstools, and then dozens upon dozens of those unknowns he always thought of as bric-a-brac, these ranging from fragile porcelains and china to indestructible bronze and marble.

Now, for all their dissimilarity, they were taking on a certain unity because, though they were a shipment on consignment, they were in a sense hers, in her control, set out in groups and clusters in her place, behind the two handsome screens she had installed across the width of the store to conceal from customers the mundane necessities she had begun with and still used in all her spare time: her scrapers and brushes and rubbers, her varnish removers and waxes and stains and polishes, the cracked old washbasin on the back wall, next to a gas plate where she made tea for the sandwich she brought from home each morning.

At her feet on the floor, Garry propped himself up on one elbow and looked about him. “Even I can tell it’s quite a collection,” he said.

“I could sell every single thing right off the floor, they’re so marvelous.” She leaned forward to pick a wisp of straw from a fluted vase and to blow dust from the face of a gilded wall clock, with an American eagle spreading brass wings across its top. “What luck that Cynthia thought of it.”

Mrs. Aldrich had arranged the shipment on consignment, the first Letty had ever had. It came from the estate of a millionaire banker named Will Harrett, of Fifth Avenue and Oyster Bay, whose widow was a lifelong friend of Cynthia Aldrich. “It wouldn’t take a cent of added capital,” she explained to Letty, “and your commission would be thirty-three per cent, and on some things fifty. You would be doing Olive Harrett a kindness, too, my dear; she simply has to give up that enormous place out there, and she does have the loveliest things.”

Her timing was perfection itself, for Letty had been taking inventory, her first attempt at that “store-wide inventory” that she had so often read about, and Mrs. Aldrich’s talk of “the loveliest things” made her glance around her Christmas-depleted shop.

“It does look awfully empty, doesn’t it?” she said. “I never will get used to that.”

Last fall when success had still seemed a mirage, Letty had been constantly astonished that so small a store could swallow up all the pieces she had collected and restored throughout the summer and early fall. Each departure of a chair or table or chest left a gaping space that hurt her newborn proprietary pride, and now, even with new things due to arrive daily, she longed for those small odds and ends to “fill up the holes” and restore the fullness and variety she wanted.

“I’d love to go out to Oyster Bay,” she said tentatively to Cynthia Aldrich. “Could I?”

“Of course, Letty. To make your own selection?”

“It’s just that—”

“No explanation’s necessary, child. When shall we go?”

“It’s just that I’ve noticed that if I am really crazy about something, it always seems to sell. But if I can’t quite make up my mind about it, customers can’t make up their minds either.”

Cynthia Aldrich patted her shoulder, nodding approval, and later that week enjoyed the long day at Oyster Bay as much as Letty did. She relished the role she had adopted for herself, and enjoyed Letty’s gratitude immensely. Last October, on Opening Day, she had appeared at the shop with another of her close friends, who soon turned into Letty’s “second best customer,” and each day or two thereafter Mrs. Aldrich would show up with yet another. These friends in turn brought in their friends, or sent them in, and in some ways they were all alike. None of them fussed over cost. None showed surprise even at a price that Letty once would have called “scandalous.”

Very soon Letty saw “social importance” turn visibly into commercial importance, and she never knew when she herself began unknowingly to put a private label upon each woman who came through the door. As with the price tags hidden away inside a drawer, or glued to the underside of a table-leaf, these private labels were unobtrusive and concealed, so artfully concealed that she remained half unaware of their existence on the retentive undersurface of her mind. She would have denied that she was impressed by one customer more than another, but she regarded this ticketing of the women she dealt with as “just business” and never questioned it.

Nor did it seem strange when Mrs. Aldrich invited her and Garry to dinner. The Aldriches lived in a wide stone house facing Gramercy Park, and Letty had been there once by herself for tea, afterward giving Garry a lyrical description of the beauty within it, its paintings and rare books as well as its fine furniture and carpets, its dignity as well as its elegance.

The dinner was planned for the young; the Aldriches’ married daughters, Constance and Lucinda, both in their twenties, asked their friends too, so that seven young couples were at the table. Later, a five-piece orchestra played for them to dance to; the evening was a delight.

Neither Letty nor Garry had ever dined in such surroundings before, nor did they often go to parties where evening dress was taken for granted, where four wines were served at the table, where a butler and a footman in livery served champagne or liqueurs or whiskey afterward into the night. It all was new and exciting and carefree; Lucinda Aldrich was married to a man named Hank Stiles, who sold stocks on Wall Street and who kept coming back to Letty after dancing with any other girl, to ask for the next. Constance’s husband was an assistant professor of history at Yale, Ronald Yates, whom everybody called “Proff,” and both Proff and Connie were diverting and companionable from the start.

It was three in the morning when the Aldrich door closed on Letty and Garry and two other couples, and it was clear that this evening would lead to other evenings. At the curb several hansom cabs were waiting patiently, drawn there by the fight streaming from the windows, their owners knowing that if a ball was in progress, customers would be sure and payment generous.

“It was wonderful, wasn’t it?” Letty asked Garry happily, as the cabman spread a thick lap robe over their knees. She leaned against him, feeling herself newly valuable because she had been his introduction to the Aldrich house, even though it was he and the lab and his job that had brought the Aldriches into her life to start with. Garry agreed that it was a fine party; all evening he had worn that look which announced that he liked every moment of the evening, at dinner, over liqueurs, while he was dancing. Because he so openly showed what he felt, people responded and liked him in return.

All their new friends did that, Letty had frequently reflected since that night, at all the places they had been asked to since, and she was always aware of it, soothed and reassured by it. Garry was changing into a more social being; he didn’t get started on the gloomy news from Europe while he was at a party, just as he no longer carried on about it at home the way he used to do. He was changing, and maturing, and that was wonderful too.

“Hey, what are you thinking about?” Garry said, and for a moment she thought they were still in the hansom cab, still in their new evening clothes, he handsome above his white tie and she still too conscious of how deeply décolleté her cerise gown actually was. Then he stretched and groaned and got to his feet from the littered floor of the shop and she came back to the present, to her pinned-up skirts and straggling hair.

“Oh,” she answered, “about Mrs. Aldrich and this shipment and the first time she had us for dinner, and Lucinda and Hank’s party and the Grintzers’ theater-supper.”

“Let’s hurry and finish up now,” he said. “It’s nearly nine, and we’re both giving out.”

Outside on the street they stopped for a last look at the outer face of the shop, and Letty said, “It’s prettiest at night.” Even to a casual passer-by the shop proclaimed itself different, an individual among shops, unwilling to be like a thousand other small shops in the city. Letty had never changed her decision to keep the big window uncluttered, and there was in it now only one oblong dinner table of flame mahogany, its rounded tapering legs ending in the claw-and-ball feet characteristic of Chippendale. The window itself was framed by a pair of draperies of the same red damask Letty had used at home, and these, gave an unexpected and personal warmth to the shining window. Instead of the usual store lighting, she had installed a crystal chandelier, hanging over the table on a long linked metal chain, lighted, not by candles, but by tiny frosted bulbs shaped like candles and imported from Belgium. It remained alight every evening of the week until midnight, when a watchman for the neighborhood turned an outside switch on the back door. Separated from them by the smooth expanse of glass, it blazed with a hundred twinkling brilliances, casting reflections into the depth of the old mahogany below it, sending radiance out to the guide lines of red damask at its left and right.

“I love it most of all at night,” Letty said.

Garry pulled her hand through his arm and led her toward Fifth Avenue, past the grand shuttered solemnity of the Tiffany store on the corner. Had
that
begun as a small shop, he wondered, with the sparkle and dazzle of quick success? Or had it been a tedious halting growth, as most successes were? Even yet, it was hard to credit the reality of “Mrs. Garrett Paige, Antiques,” but any doubt was evanescent. Long before Christmas it was clear that Letty would have to employ people to help her, but thus far she had hired only a handyman, Josh Flick, who could not get a regular job because he limped rockily and “looked peculiar.” For a dollar a day, Josh kept the shop clean, the furniture dusted or waxed; he polished the great brass plate on the front door with its six-inch doorknob, washed the plate-glass window after every rain or snow, and packed and crated each item so skillfully that nothing was ever scratched or injured by the trucking wagon hired for deliveries.

Letty agreed long ago that she needed a salesman or saleswoman to take over when she was away from the store on her endless searching through her ever-widening “sources,” which now included regular antique dealers as well as her old dealers in junk. But she had hired nobody, and apart from some temporary help for the holiday season, she had rarely even interviewed anyone who seemed “right.”

“It has to be somebody who’s really lived with lovely things,” she explained to Garry once, when he urged her to widen her idea of “right.” “So she would feel in her bones
why
my things are lovely, and not just memorize what I said about them.” The process of interviewing was an ordeal that made her feel as if she were the suppliant, she the one being measured or on trial, and she was invariably glad when the moment came to say, “Thank you for coming in, and I’ll decide in a day or two.”

The day or two was another of Cynthia’s contributions. “So you can check up on references. You’re not to risk being cooped up with
anything
that answers your Help Wanted ad.”