The Pink Suit: A Novel (4 page)

M
r. Charles had the skills to make the toile, of course, but he was too valuable to lose. Women came every day from all over Europe to have suits made by him. The Ladies couldn't whip up a toile themselves, for obvious reasons. It had to be Kate, they explained. Kate was the only one the Wife had never met and would never see again. That was the way it was with back-room girls—they were invisible. So if Kate made the toile, and the Wife discovered that it wasn't a Chanel, the Ladies could make a great fuss and say that a mistake had been made and that the girl, Kate, had obviously forgotten to order the toile and would be fired. Then they could reschedule the appointment for the following week, by which time the Chanel would most certainly have arrived.

“Fired?”

“Don't get stuck on the details, Kate,” Miss Nona said.

“We'd never fire you,” Sophie said.

“Of course not.”

Everyone else had been sent home early. “No witnesses,” Mr. Charles said and laughed as he and the girls piled out the back-room door. And so, their reassurances were not entirely comforting. Sitting on the edge of the Ladies' silk settee, with the huge crystal chandelier creaking overhead, Kate felt abandoned. The Ladies, ancient and gilded, were perched at their Louis XIV desk—a fake, of course. The walls, ceiling, and floors were glass and perfume-bottle blue. It was a room designed for dreaming, not living. Behind the Ladies, walls of windows framed a Park Avenue skyline buffeted by rain.

“And when will they be here?” Kate asked.

“Soon,” Miss Sophie said.

“Too soon,” said Miss Nona.

The gilt, the azure, the women—it was like a Byzantine mosaic, Kate thought. “Byzantine” was Mr. Charles's latest design inspiration. “Delightfully complicated,” he explained to Kate. Now everything seemed Byzantine to her. “Couldn't we simply tell the Wife that the Chanel is in the mail?”

The Ladies chuckled.

“But it is coming soon, isn't it?” Kate said.

Miss Nona patted Kate's hand gently. “We have all the faith in the world in you.”

“But they'll wonder where everyone is. Mr. Charles. You. Schwinn.”

“Tell them that I took ill,” Miss Nona said. “Everyone rushed to the emergency room to be by my side.”

“She's at death's door,” said Sophie. “But resilient.”

“My recovery will be amazing. Everyone will be overjoyed.”

“And surprised!” Miss Sophie said.

It was almost too believable. Perfume could no longer hide the acid of Miss Nona's aging; twilight followed her wherever she went. The Wife would honestly think that Nona was dying—Kate sometimes did.

The directive was delivered, and so the Ladies stood. Time to go. The floor was always a little slick, especially when it was raining outside, because the delivery boys sometimes tracked in water. Miss Sophie took Miss Nona by the arm.

“Watch your step,” Kate said.

“You are a dear girl.”

“She is, isn't she? A remarkably dear girl.”

As the two old women shuffled across the blue floor, they seemed smaller, slower, more stooped, as if already a memory—and that made Kate's heart hurt. But they were absolutely Byzantine.

Kate knew she'd grown exceedingly fond of that word, but it seemed to apply to nearly all the goings-on these days. At the request of Maison Blanche, the Ladies were now “importing” Hubert de Givenchy's couture originals from Paris. It had become part of Kate's job to remove his label, stitch in one from Chez Ninon, have Maeve alter it to Cassini's specifications—put a bow on the back, or a dart here and there—and then ship the clothes on to the Wife. And then to do the same for the Nina Ricci shipments and the Dior—and all the rest.

There was such an alarming amount of French clothing being imported and altered by Chez Ninon that Kate began to wonder if her immortal soul was in peril. Father John told her not to worry. “ ‘Thou shalt not commit chicanery' is merely a suggested commandment,” he said, but made her say two Hail Marys just to be on the safe side. Now there was the matter of a faux Chanel. Kate wondered how many Hail Marys and Our Fathers it would take to absolve her of this particular bit of creative endeavor. She didn't even want to think about it.

Since the elections, fittings with the First Lady had become a nightmare. The press stood outside the door to Chez Ninon all day long, nearly every day, hoping to catch the Wife coming or going. Fool's errand that was—since the campaign, she barely came in at all. But the press was unrelenting. In an effort to throw them off the scent, the Ladies bought a department-store mannequin that looked exactly like the Wife. Miss Sophie told everyone that it was a seamstress dummy and that their important client, who was so important that her name could not even be said aloud, wouldn't need to come in for fittings anymore.

No one believed her.

Now, months after the election, when the Wife felt that she absolutely needed to come in, which was very rare, the Secret Service would drive only as far as St. Patrick's, a few blocks away, where Her Elegance would put on her lace chapel cap and walk into the church and keep on walking to the sanctuary and then down into the catacombs. There, in the presence of the holy dead—specifically, all the archbishops of New York—she would take off her cap, put on a scarf and her sunglasses, and make a run for it with the Secret Service in tow.

New York is filled with tunnels, and under St. Patrick's there's one that ends up at the back door of Chez Ninon.

At least, that was the story Miss Sophie told the girls in the back room.

It sounded a bit like a fairy tale, but it wasn't Kate's place to speculate, and so she didn't. Kate was in charge of finishing—not questions. She was one of the “kippers,” just as her mother had been, back home in Cork, one of the back-room girls with a knack for Milanese buttonholes. However, if asked, Kate would say that she could understand why such a very important client and her bodyguards would be running through curtains of cobwebs in the abandoned service tunnels under the streets of Manhattan, past rats and the watchful eye of the holy dead, to shop at Chez Ninon. It is exceedingly difficult to find a good dressmaker. There was no wonder at all in Kate's mind why she and Mr. Charles were drawn to the word
Byzantine
.

Kate tacked the Wife's sketch onto the wall, next to Mr. Charles's cheeky cartoon of the designer Charles Frederick Worth outfitted as the Patron Saint of Chez Ninon. Worth, the creator of haute couture, had a tape measure in one hand, a bolt of silk in the other, and French francs raining down on him, piling at his feet. Kate didn't find it funny at all when Mr. Charles first showed it to her. “Shame it always comes down to money, isn't it?” she said.

“It's a shame when it doesn't.”

Kate now understood. Fifty-two dollars and twenty-five cents a week doesn't go very far, especially when you send half of it home.

She laid everything out the way her mother had taught her.
Mise en place
style—that was what her mam said they called it at John W. Dowden & Company Limited.
Mise en place,
as the chefs say—“every element within reach”:

Creating a toile took logic, math, and nerve. It was always thrilling.

Ninety minutes was all Kate had. First—muslin. The muslin for the toile had to be the exact weight and texture as the bouclé. But what weight would that be? Since the fabric hadn't arrived from Linton yet, it was difficult to know. The bouclé was handmade; its weight could vary greatly. The Wife would certainly suspect if Kate made the wrong choice.

She rummaged through the boxes of feelers from Linton, looking for a similar bouclé from another season. As big as a hand towel, a feeler was a sample sent out to clients to be squeezed, and twisted—it was the only way one could tell how a fabric would perform when worn. Everyone got them. Even Queen Elizabeth was sent boxes of feelers each season so she could twist and squeeze and then smooth them.

Kate's father worked at the woolen mill; it was his job to pack up the yearly shipment of cashmere feelers for the Queen's consideration. She was very concerned about wrinkling. He carefully wrapped the feelers in tissue paper sprayed with the powdery spicy scent of carnation—L'Heure Bleue by Guerlain, her favorite fragrance. No expense was spared in trying to garner the coveted title of “Royal Purveyor to Her Majesty The Queen.” Although the Royals never bought their selection, it was always gratis. It was their country, after all. They owned it. Everything was theirs.

“Free Ireland,” the Old Man would always say when he spoke of it, but Kate knew that was just pub talk. Her father knew nearly as much about the young Queen as Kate did about the Wife.

“You and I work in the shadow of greatness,” he once wrote her. “And that's both a blessing and a curse.”

Today, clearly, it was a curse.

Twist and smooth—sample after sample. Kate really had no idea what she was looking for, exactly. Just something that seemed similar. Most jackets would have a heavy toile made from twill muslin, but Chanel jackets were always as light as mohair.

At the bottom of the box, there was a bit of the ecru wool-and-mohair blend, the white-on-white tweed: Chanel's favorite. Pattern H1804, designed by Mr. Jamison, chief man at Linton himself.
Good a guess as any,
Kate thought.

Second—the pattern. Kate rolled brown paper out on the cutting table. How much she needed was a matter of math. Cassini's notes were taped to the back of the Wife's dress form:

Thirty-six inches of brown paper would be just enough to sketch the skirt on. The jacket—that was more difficult. Twenty-two inches long, or twenty? If the jacket was to hit exactly at the hip, the Wife's imbalance would have to be accounted for. Chez Ninon adjusted for that when she came in for fittings. Chanel, on the other hand, always figured it in. The Wife would instantly know the toile was a fake if this wasn't right. Kate closed her eyes and tried to imagine the last hem she'd done for Maison Blanche. An inch and a half lower on the right side—that seemed to be correct. The Wife's left shoulder would also be more forward than the other.

Kate visualized the line as she imagined it to be—not a hard edge, but an edge that was soft enough for “forgiveness,” as Mr. Charles always called that sort of cut.

She marked four points on the brown paper. Kate slipped her favorite drafting tool, the French curve, in place—the edge of it touching each point—and ran her pencil along it. As she traced the line, she imagined the story behind the suit, the details of how it really came to be. It helped Kate to know why something was being made. All clothes told a story. A wedding dress could tell the tale of a marriage of convenience or fairy-tale love by its color alone—off-white raised eyebrows.
Maybe,
Kate thought,
the story of this pink suit is one of forgiveness.

Chanel had certainly designed every element of it with an eye to that—every seam in the jacket could be adjusted for a comfortable fit. The Ladies said that when the Wife wore the pink suit, she would be forgiven for not wanting to spend her vacations at Camp David. And Schwinn had said that the Husband wanted the suit to be a real Chanel, so that he could be forgiven for putting his wife through the unbearable scrutiny that a president's wife had to face on a daily basis.
A gift of forgiveness is what it is,
Kate thought. It was a noble story. Inspiring, even.

You would think the First Lady would own a watch. Or that someone in that entourage would. The waiting was killing Kate, but she should have expected it. Even before Her Elegance was the Wife, she was late for all sorts of odd reasons. Once it was because she accidentally set the backseat of her little red convertible on fire with a cigarette and was trying to find someone on Park Avenue who had enough ice water to put it out. “Firemen are always so much of a bother,” she said.

She knew that from experience, according to Mr. Charles. “But she's such a lovely person.”

And he'd know. He not only spoke to her personally, but he also knew exactly how warm she needed the room to be before she stripped down to her knickers.

Kate looked at her watch again. The lace ball gown for Mrs. B still needed to be delivered that night. There could be no excuses. Mrs. B was a secret partner in Chez Ninon, but it wasn't much of a secret—her work always went to the front of the line. She'd recently lost weight—illness again—so there had been a slight gap in the neckline that was easily fixed by inserting an elastic stay. To get to her building during rush hour would take at least thirty minutes, which was thirty minutes more than Kate would have if all those security people and assistants and secretaries and all the rest of that entourage did not arrive soon.

Two hours and twenty-two minutes late, Kate thought. She's probably at St. Patrick's
now.
The ice in the champagne bucket had melted completely. The single crystal
coupe
looked forlorn. Kate sat in the showroom, fidgeting. Ankles crossed. One hand over the other? Hands in her pockets?