The Pink Suit: A Novel (18 page)

“It's all about balance,” Patrick said. “Too much fat, and it's greasy. Too lean, and it's tough. It must be both salty and savory. You need to learn to balance things. No high notes. Just the same thing over and over again.”

Kate wasn't sure if Patrick was talking about a butcher's life or the sausage, but she knew she'd never liked sausage all that much. After four hours of making it, she liked it even less.

By half past seven, they were exhausted. It took Kate a twenty-minute hot soak to get the scent of pork off her skin, and she still reeked of it. Very barnyard.

“It should wear off in a couple of hours,” he said, and found her an old blue flannel shirt of his to wear until she was “less piglike in aroma.” Patrick rolled the sleeves up twice, but the shirt still came to her knees.

While Kate had been in the bath, Patrick had showered downstairs in the shop with a hose. “I don't mind cold water,” he told her. He warmed a can of tomato soup for them both, poured it into coffee mugs, and served it with saltines. “I'd fry up a few chops, but after all that sausage, it takes a while for me to be hungry again.”

Kate understood. She couldn't even bear to hear the word
sausage
.

It was very cold in the apartment. “I've been in the States for twelve years, and I'm still not much for paying for heat,” Patrick said. He handed Kate his mother's sweater. “It was her favorite.” It was quite old. The wool was pilled, and it smelled like bleach, but it was better than many of Peg's clothes, which held the odd scent of violet perfume and dust. There was an entire closet full of them, hanging just the way his mother had left them.

“What are you saving these for?”

“I'm really not sure,” he said.

Patrick clearly missed her. So did Kate.

The tomato soup was not fit to eat. It was an off brand that Kate didn't know. It didn't taste like real tomatoes. Awful stuff. She finished it quickly and was still hungry—starving, really—but it would have been rude to ask if there was any other food in the house. And she couldn't just get up and root around. It wasn't her pantry. Even though Peg was gone, it would always be Peg's.

Patrick was exceedingly quiet, as was Kate. There are different kinds of silences. This one was filled with words that could not be said.

At least they had the television.

“Would you like a glass of water?” Patrick asked.

“Yes. Thank you.”

It felt as if they were strangers again.

Modesty was in short supply. Dressed in Patrick's shirt and his mother's sweater, watching television alone like that, made Kate uncomfortable, although
My Three Sons
was very nice. He'd turned it on straightaway. The widower had such sweet boys, all different ages, although they looked very Scottish, and with a name like Fred MacMurray, you had to wonder.

“Lovely hair, though.”

As soon as Kate said that, she took off Peg's sweater. She was starting to sound like her, yammering on and on. “Lovely hair”—Kate couldn't even believe that had come out of her mouth. Although it was true—MacMurray's hair had quite a roguish swoop to it—but still.

Patrick was lost in thought, not watching the telly, just sitting with the blue light tinting his face, and his tired blue eyes.

Kate wasn't sure exactly when she drifted off to sleep, but when she awoke, it seemed very late. The station was signing off for the night.

“This is WCBS-TV in New York City, transmitting by authority of the Federal…”

The screen went dark, and there was a high-pitched tone, like the squeal of an electronic pig. Kate turned off the set. She'd had quite enough of pigs for a lifetime. Still sleepy, it took her a moment to realize where she was.

“Patrick?”

The apartment was dark. It was not the same sort of darkness that Kate was used to. Her apartment was quieter and faced the river. His was right on the busy end of Broadway. Once the television was off, Kate could hear how loud the apartment really was. Up and down the street, pubs were letting out. Even on Sunday, some kept back-door hours for those who worked overnight and needed a quick pint with an egg cracked into it, a “liquid breakfast,” before dawn. At this hour, after midnight, most of the bleary eyed were drunk and weaving their way home—from sidewalk to street and back again. Some sang the old songs, some the new. Some shouted to each other. Some shouted to God. Not Kate's God, but a sullen God in a heaven that clearly had no time for fools. There were fire trucks and screaming patrol cars racing to one spot of trouble or another. There were telephone operators leaving their shifts or arriving. Wolf whistles, too. Patrick's apartment was on the second floor, right over the shop, so everything seemed closer and louder because it was.

Living here would mean a lifetime of closing times,
Kate thought, and shuddered. She couldn't imagine how Peg dealt with all this noise.

“Patrick?”

Her neck hurt from sleeping in the chair. Patrick had covered her with a blanket and tucked in the edges, and that had woken her up briefly. But he hadn't said he was going out. He hadn't said anything. He had just tucked the blanket around her and kissed her forehead.

“Patrick?”

He wasn't there. Kate wanted to go home and sleep in her own small, white bed. She wanted to be where she knew all the creaks in the floorboards and the voices of the neighbors coming home. But she couldn't just leave; that wouldn't seem right. Kate felt her way along the wall, looking for a switch, but no luck.

“Patrick?”

He wasn't sleeping in his room. She knocked twice.

“Patrick?”

Nor was he in the bathroom. Kate finally found the light switch by the front door and flipped it on.

“Patrick?”

Kate opened the apartment door and went out onto the landing. The stairs down to the shop were badly lit. A couple of lightbulbs were out. Kate thought for a moment that she heard Patrick's voice on the street; she held her breath and listened closely. It wasn't him.

Kate was a little dizzy from lack of food; she walked down the stairs carefully. She didn't want to fall. Unlike at home, there'd be no one to find her here if she did. The front door was locked but not bolted. Patrick was out. Somewhere. The door to the shop was also open.

“Patrick?”

She was whispering now. His white wool fedora was hung on the rack next to a neatly starched butcher's coat, ready for the next day. Someone opened the front door. There was a jingling of keys.

“Patrick?”

“Kate?”

He seemed surprised to see her. He was locking the front door behind him. He must have noticed that the door to the shop was open.

“You've come down for a midnight snack, have you?” he said, but his cheer seemed false. He'd changed his clothes. He was wearing a black sweater under his dark coat and dark pants. His silver hair was combed, although it seemed disheveled somehow. He'd had a drink or two. He smelled of stout.

“I've got burgers,” he said. “With onions for nightmares.”

He was holding a greasy white sack in his right hand. He said he'd run down to the pub and Mrs. Brown had thrown a couple of patties on the griddle. “I woke up hungry.” There was the overwhelming scent of seared beef and raw onion. Yellow mustard, too. But there was something else. Something he wasn't saying.

“It's so late for food,” she said.

“Consider it breakfast.” The hamburgers were wrapped in waxed paper and still warm. “They've very fine burgers, Kate.”

Kate felt that Patrick was hiding something. Another woman? It was difficult to tell. He seemed quite sad as he led her up the stairs and into his room. They ate the hamburgers on his bed, which was as small as her own. The white bedspread, the white sheets—it all felt very familiar.

When they were finished, Patrick turned his back and took off his shirt. She kissed him on his neck and then realized that she'd never told him about the pink suit, her suit—their suit now—and that the Wife planned to wear it to India. She knew he'd be as proud as she was, but before Kate could say anything, Patrick slipped out of her arms.

“Kate,” he said. “I was thinking about today. And you—”

Her heart nearly stopped.

“I'm sorry,” she said, and she was. Kate was sorry she wasn't Peg or an old-fashioned girl. She was very sorry she wasn't the kind of girl Patrick thought she was. But Peg's ring was still firm on her finger, it wouldn't budge.

“Nothing to be sorry about. I just got to thinking. This life I offer you isn't grand.”

“It's fine—”

“It's not the Chez.”

“It doesn't have to be,” she said. He kissed her so gently; Kate hoped that was true.

T
he problem with a pink pillbox hat is that everyone notices it. Especially if worn in December at four-thirty a.m. And if it had been worn to church the day before, as Kate had worn hers, a pink pillbox would be impossible to miss. In a small place like Inwood, one quick kiss outside the butcher shop is all it takes to get noticed.

A week later, Father John came to the shop to speak to Patrick in person.

“A few of the parish ladies are not fans of Kate and are raving about ‘moral grounds.' They'll object if you try to announce banns and marry in church. They don't know Kate like we do.”

As soon as the priest left, Patrick closed the shop and arrived unannounced at the back door of Chez Ninon.
DELIVERIES ONLY
, the sign read.

“We can talk later,” Kate said.

“We can't.”

It was the middle of the afternoon. There was no privacy at all. There was barely enough space to stand in. Tarnished tinsel hung from the fluorescent lights overhead. Perry Como crooned on the radio. Christmas was less than a month away, and nearly every mannequin had been pulled out of storage. The clients all needed something: smoking jackets and velvet dresses for family dinners, or formal gowns and full dress tails for New Year's Eve. All the back-room girls, even the mice of Ready-to-Wear, were pitching in.

“Did you hear what I said, Kate?”

They were standing in a sea of headless mannequins. Whispering.
“Let it snow,”
Perry sang. Outside the long banks of windows, Manhattan braced itself for sleet. Patrick was pale. Kate felt awful about that but was relieved that he'd taken a moment and put on a coat and tie and nicked his face with a quick shave and a splash of cologne. He was presentable. Unexpected and unwelcome—but presentable. “We need to apply for a license right away. We can marry at the courthouse. It'll stop the talk.”

Although the mannequins were headless and deaf, the back-room girls were not. The hum of the sewing machines, the chatter of gossip: it slowly wound down around them until all Kate could hear was Maeve's raspy breathing; her cold had gone from bad to worse, and there was no hiding the sound of it, not even over Perry's insistent refrain.
“Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow.”
Patrick stood so close to Kate that he could kiss her, but he didn't. “This kind of talk is bad for business,” he said.

She was holding an evening gown that she'd been repairing for the Wife. The Ladies had made it, even though they knew that Mrs. Newhouse, the magazine publisher's wife, had her own version of it. She'd bought hers during the runway show at Lanvin. It was the same show that the Ladies had stolen the design from for the First Lady. The gowns were nearly identical. Same color. Same beadwork. Same fabric. If the two women ever found out, it would be a disaster.

Kate held the dress like a barrier between Patrick's world and hers. It was quite heavy: floor length, with an ivory satin skirt. The bodice and shawl were completely beaded in a pattern of red roses over ruby silk. The beadwork was always unraveling. It was unraveling at that very moment, too. Small ruby beads slowly spilled onto Patrick's polished shoes.

“Kate,” he said, “these women are objecting to us on moral grounds. It's not good. Do you understand?”

She did.

The beadwork would not stop unraveling, no matter how many times Kate fixed it. The threads kept snapping, and so the Wife left a trail of iridescent beads behind her everywhere she went. The problem was too much for Provy to fix. It was too much for anyone. It was a design flaw. The silk thread required for such fine fabric would never hold up under repeated wear.

And now Patrick was demanding a wedding.

It was an impossible situation on both fronts.

“I'm working,” Kate said.

Perry was still singing.
“When we finally kiss goodnight
—”

The blue of Patrick's eyes no longer seemed blue but a thin, dull gray.

“Do you understand what I'm saying, Kate? A lot of my business is the parish.”

“Let it snow,”
Perry sang. Someone turned the radio off. The workroom went quiet.

The gown felt so heavy in Kate's arms.

The rain of red beads continued on.

“This is the Wife's,” Kate said.

She held the gown out to Patrick, as if the silk's memory of Her were sacred. “It was designed originally for an embassy dinner with Prime Minister Nehru. He wears very severe jackets, but always with a red rose boutonniere. To honor him, the Ladies decided that I should bead the entire silk bodice in red roses—even though we could get in trouble, because that's the same exact way the original was made.”

Kate took Patrick's callused hand and ran his finger along a single rose. The beads unraveled and stuck to his skin. The rose disappeared. All that remained was the outline, the series of tiny holes in the fabric where Kate's needle had once moved deftly.

“It's too fragile,” she said. “It's just too fragile.”

Kate bit her bottom lip hard. It was a trick Miss Sophie had taught her to keep from crying. The Ladies didn't like it when back-room girls cried. “Even if you try to fix it, it can never really be fixed. Nothing can be done.”

Kate wasn't talking about the dress. Patrick rubbed his fingers, and the beads fell onto the floor. He watched as they rolled off his shoes and under a mannequin. He looked so helpless, standing there with his bad shave and crooked tie. There were so many things that could have been said at the moment, but neither of them said a word. Patrick gently took the dress out of her arms. He laid it on her table carefully. The silent mannequins were a forest around them. The back-room girls forgotten, Patrick held Kate in his arms until their racing hearts slowed a bit.

“I love you,” she said, and was surprised how fiercely she meant it.

“I know,” he whispered.

The radio went back on. The workroom began to hum again. Kate, embarrassed, looked at the tinsel hanging off the lights above their heads. It looked more like brass than silver. “I need to get back.”

“Of course.”

Patrick hesitated as if he hoped she'd change her mind, hoped she'd grab her coat and run through the snowy streets with him, all the way to the courthouse, because that was what her heart wanted—but she couldn't. It was nearly Christmas. There was still too much work to be done.

As soon as the door closed behind Patrick, Kate missed him.

At six o'clock, Miss Sophie caught her by the arm. Kate thought that the Ladies had heard about Patrick's visit and weren't pleased, but it wasn't that at all.

“Maison Blanche called,” she said. “Provy used all the material that you'd sent. For the pink suit. Cigarette burns. Reweaving. They need another yard to fix it for the India trip. Two would be best.”

Every last inch of the remaining pink bouclé was in Kate's suit. There was no fabric left. Miss Sophie put her arm around Kate and whispered, “I know some of the girls take bits with them.”

Kate was too embarrassed to speak.

That night, in Kate's small apartment, amid the chaos of fabric piled everywhere—the bolts and swatches and rolls—she sat with her pink suit on her lap. In the kitchen, Maggie's copies of the Wife's clothes still remained stacked in chronological order. The boxes were gathering a thick layer of dust. Those clothes were beautiful and could be remade to fit Kate. But they were not the suit. The suit was a Chanel. And it was hers.

Kate desperately wanted to keep it.

She wore her white cotton gloves. Her seam ripper was too rough for such delicate material, and so she'd sharpened the thin Jowika fish knife that her father had given her.
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
was stamped on its blade. It was amazingly sharp and always provided a clean cut. The Old Man made her fillet everything they caught for dinner with it. “It will keep you humble,” he said.

The irony did not escape her now.

It was snowing outside. Patrick would be at the pub for dinner in a couple of hours. If Kate hurried, she could catch him there. She didn't want to go to sleep without seeing him again. Didn't think she could sleep at all, if things were left the way they were between them at Chez Ninon. But that meant she had to work quickly, and very carefully. Since the silk was quilted to the bouclé in hundreds of perfect stitches that were exactly one inch apart, to remove even one improperly could cause a run, and the yardage would be ruined, unusable.

At best, Kate knew that she could only provide Provy with a little over a yard of fabric. And it would have to come from the skirt. The jacket was not cut from a single piece of bouclé but from several pieces that had been sewn together, and so none of that could be saved. It would completely unravel if she undid the stitching.

The skirt would have to do.

The hem was the place to start. St. Jude's scapular, with its inscription,
Whosoever dies clothed in this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire,
was removed first. Kate put it around her neck. She wanted to pray for forgiveness but couldn't. She didn't even know where to start. She'd gone too far. She'd broken too many rules.

Kate carefully picked at the stitches with her father's blade and thought about the Island. Some still believed in Brehon's law, the laws of honor there. The regulations of proper behavior were quite clear. Of course, it's easy to be clear when your world is very simple: The sun rises. You fish. You work. You fish again. The sun sets.

The more she thought about home, the more Kate realized that the pink suit was not hers to have. It had nothing to do with her life. It wasn't a part of her. If it had come from the Island, the wool would have been dyed in variations of wild pink thyme and the deep rose of St. Dabeoc's heath and that particular geranium pink-magenta of the bloody cranesbill. And while the bouclé was spun and woven and blocked, the secrets and dreams and fears and laughter and cups of tea and sweet-cream cakes and blue jokes and awful puns and razzing and anger and songs and prayers and tears and love—yes, love—of those who were born on the Island would have brought it to life.

It would be of the Great Island and of Cobh, the port of County Cork. It would not be of Cumbria or New York. But home.

This is merely an unraveling of another person's life, not mine,
Kate thought. And the work went much quicker for it.

After a couple of weeks, Patrick stopped asking Kate to marry him, but Peg's ring remained firmly on her finger. It was not because it was stuck there: she'd had it stretched so it fit properly now. Kate wore the ring because she could not imagine a day passing when she would not hear Patrick's voice. Every day, on the way in to Chez Ninon, she would stop by the apartment to make porridge for them both. He liked his with bitter fruit—unsweetened mashed strawberries were his very favorite. He made a very nice pot of tea, which was a skill that Kate had never quite mastered. She brought over her mother's Belleek teapot for them to use. And he brought out Peg's bone china cups.

Breakfast together was about the past and the present. The future was never mentioned. Patrick pushed the kitchen table to the front window. While they ate, he'd prod Kate into a running commentary on the fashion sense of the telephone operators as they went in and out of the building across the street.

“Thumbs up?”

“Her lipstick's too red—it betrays her intentions.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“It depends on what her intentions are, doesn't it?”

It was certainly more entertaining than television.

Patrick had taken to packing Kate a lunch of banana-and-butter sandwiches on white batch bread, which he made himself. There was also a thermos filled with raspberry squash,
rasa,
as it was called, or orange juice when it wasn't too dear. For teatime, he sometimes included his own version of Marietta biscuits, which were dead plain digestives, just as they were on the Island, but lovely all the same.

They had both learned to cook, somewhat. Kate could assemble a breakfast with the best of them, and Patrick was gifted with Peg's ability to bake. That pleased them both. Baking helped Patrick forget how badly business had fallen off since all the talk began. “It's really quite therapeutic to bang around some dough,” he told Kate. If it made him happy, it made her happy, too.

They were determined not to let the gossip get to them. Late suppers were still taken at the pub, always with a proper pot of tea during the week and a halfie on the weekends. Mrs. Brown served them kindly every night and tossed anyone out who gave them a second look. Sometimes they would come in for sessions night. Patrick would bring his guitar, and Kate would sing a chorus or two. If Mrs. Brown wasn't there, they came in anyway, because it felt like home, like Cork, and they weren't willing to give that up, no matter who made a snide remark about them or told a pointed joke or two.

They carved out a bit of happiness for themselves, but it was still difficult to know that Patrick spent his days standing behind the shop counter, in his starched butcher's coat with his white wool fedora angled just so, just looking out the window. Waiting. Only the telephone operators came in now, which wasn't quite enough to keep the place going. After a time, Patrick started talking about selling the beloved Rose and her Oldsmobility. But Kate hoped that was just talk.

After—there was that word again—after everything, they couldn't return to the Good Shepherd, despite Father John's reassurances that people would forget, especially if they married. It just didn't feel like their church anymore.

On Christmas morning, they took the A train into the city, to St. Patrick's. It was all gold and glory there, not like at the Good Shepherd, where God had a pulse and a heart, and it was Ireland's, not some high-and-mighty version of it. After the mass was finished, a plaster Jesus was laid in the crèche. His arms were outstretched toward them, but Patrick and Kate turned away.