THE DRESS SEEMED TO FLOAT down around her head, obscuring her vision in a soft blur of translucent white; then she felt Roberta pull it down over her shoulders, and she could see again: the familiar disorganization of Roberta’s workroom, the racks of clothing in various stages of alteration and repair, the dressmaker’s mannequin, the big worktable scattered with spare zippers, boxes of buttons, scissors and swatches. Outside, the skyline of upper Manhattan shimmered in the late spring haze.
“Now, if you had lived in those days,” Roberta said, “you’d have had a ladies’ maid to help you do this.”
Jennie shook her hair free, sliding her arms into the long, flaring sleeves. “And a downstairs maid and a cook and a butler, too, I suppose. If I’d lived then, I’d probably have been a maid myself.”
“Oh, no. Some rich, handsome man would have plucked you out of the crowd and married you.” Roberta tugged at the back of the dress, aligning the waist.
Jennie braced herself against the pull, self-consciously aware of the lacy collar soft against her throat, the ruffled cuffs circling her wrists. The dress felt light as air. It reached in one long startlingly white swath to the floor, seeming to draw toward it all the light in the room. She felt Roberta’s fingers begin working their way up the tiny buttons in back.
“It’s funny,” she said. “It makes me feel different.” She bent her head and lifted her hair to one side so that Roberta could reach the buttons at the nape of her neck. “I can almost feel how it must have been to be a woman then. Isn’t that strange?”
“Mmm-hmmn,” Roberta said, intent on the buttons. “You’ll have to wear your hair up with it. That was the fashion then.”
“I can’t believe what a good job you’ve done just from the sketches.”
“It was a labor of love,” Roberta said. “It’s not often I get a chance to work on something like this. Which reminds me—I showed the sketches to that friend of mine, Rosalie. You remember I told you about her, does costumes for John Cox downtown? She said it’s a dress from the eighteen-nineties. Said there’s a dress almost exactly like it in the Metropolitan Museum. In their costume collection.”
“The eighteen-nineties.” Jennie looked down at the long, enchanting lines of the dress, thinking of the artist who had made the sketches. Placing him definitely in the nineteenth century made them seem even more poignant and romantic. She wondered if they were preliminary sketches for a later painting, if somewhere in the world, in some museum, there was a painting based on sketches done in her own attic, by a man who had lived there more than three-quarters of a century ago. She had a sad intuition that there was no painting, anywhere—that he had never become successful. If he had, the real estate broker would surely have mentioned his name. It was possible that nothing else of his work had survived, that she possessed in the sketches the last remnants of work from a man who had never achieved the dream that, to judge from the studio, had meant very much to him.
Roberta turned her around and circled her waist with the belt. “You wear it tied in front like this, with the tails hanging down.” She tied the belt in a bow and stepped back. “Beautiful. It’s a perfect fit. Here, take a look at yourself in the mirror.”
Jennie hesitated. “No. No, I want to wait. I want to wait until I get home.”
Roberta smiled. “A special occasion, is that it?”
“I guess you could say that.” Jennie lifted the skirts in one hand, as she had seen similarly dressed women do in films and photos, and began walking down the length of the room, feeling the lush folds of lace flowing around her legs. The dress even seemed to make her walk differently—her shoulders back, her head held erect by the high collar, the hand holding the skirts up at one side—all giving her again that strange sensation of actually experiencing what it was to be a woman in the eighteen-nineties. She turned at the window, looking back toward Roberta, and her emotion seemed to give even the room a different quality, making everything seem somehow more real, more there, the way the huge movie screen deepened the colors and shadows of a room in a film, so that she felt almost like a character in a film herself. She was aware of the white light from the window falling through the white of the dress, setting her off from everything around her, surrounding her like an aura from head to foot.
Even Roberta seemed to have caught the spell. “You look enchanted,” she said. “Even a little uncanny. If I didn’t know you, coming in here and seeing you in that light, I’d think you were a ghost, a beautiful ghost come back to haunt somebody.”
“You don’t think it’s too . . . pretentious? For a garden party, I mean?”
“It’s perfect for a garden party. Are you going to get a parasol? A dress like that, you should have a parasol.”
“Do you think I could get one?”
“Ought to somewhere. In New York you can get anything. You should have a cameo, too. They always wore a cameo right at the base of the throat.”
Jennie crossed the room again, feeling the light receding at her back, the full lacy sleeves rustling against her sides, the frothy skirts sweeping along the floor. She couldn’t get over how the dress made her feel. She was reluctant to take it off, to lose the feeling it gave her, but it was getting on toward noon. She undid the belt and turned, so that Roberta could get at the buttons. “I suppose you’d better help me out of it. I have a lunch date at twelve-thirty.”
“You’ll be surprised when you see yourself in the mirror,” Roberta said, unfastening the buttons. “With the sleeves and collar finished, it looks a lot different from when you were here for the first fitting. You’ll have to give me a picture of you in it.”
“I’ll send you one the first chance I get,” Jennie said.
She changed back into her street clothes and wrote out a check while Roberta cushioned the dress in soft tissue and folded it into a large cardboard box. Roberta accompanied her to the door and unfastened the chain-lock.
“Your husband seen the sketches? He knows what it looks like?”
“He’s seen the sketches. I don’t know if he can imagine how it will look.”
“He’ll love this dress. Take my word for it.”
“Thank you, Roberta.” Jennie suddenly snapped her fingers and went back into the workroom.
“What is it?” Roberta said.
“My sketches,” Jennie said, retrieving them from the cluttered worktable. “I want to keep those. I think they’re very special.”
• • •
She had lunch with Beverly at Prospero’s, on East 52nd Street. She was early and was seated at a corner table from which she could see through the slatted divider to the bar and the cloakroom near the door. Beverly breezed in at a quarter to one, wearing a chic tweed suit and a scarlet blouse. She pressed a chilled cheek to Jennie’s and sat down, pulling off her gloves.
“Boy, it may be spring out there, but that wind feels like football weather. How are you, kid? You look good. The country must be agreeing with you. Did you order drinks?”
“Bloody Marys. That’s still your drink, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. Perfect for the weather, too. How was the new garden party dress? Finished?”
“It’s in a box in the cloakroom. Wait till you see it—it’s beautiful.”
The drinks arrived, two Bloody Marys in large goblet glasses. Beverly stirred, tapped the swizzle stick dry against the rim, and raised the glass in a toast. “To your new life in the country.”
“So how are you really? No more down-in-the-dumps? No more headaches? This past year you could have taken the prize for grumpiness, kid.”
“I know. I was a real pain, wasn’t I?”
“Understandable, given the circumstances. And—speaking of the circumstances—how’s Michael?”
“Michael’s fine.”
Beverly eyed her sympathetically. “It’s working out, huh?”
“I think so. I think it’s just what we needed.” She was a little sorry now that she had made this lunch date. Beverly had been her best friend ever since they had shared an apartment five years ago, but you could always count on her to pursue an unpleasant subject. She remembered Roberta’s remark about Michael liking the dress and wondered if that was why she had had it made. She remembered a girl in college who had spent a small fortune on clothes trying to attract a boy she was wildly infatuated with. She didn’t like to think she was like that. But there was a grain of truth there. It was a natural reaction, she supposed: to try to make yourself more attractive to your husband when you’ve discovered he’s been unfaithful.
The maître d’ took their orders, collected the menus and departed. Beverly opened a new pack of Trues and lit one with a slim gas lighter.
“I meant to ask you. Did you ever find out who the woman was? What kind of thing it was?”
“I don’t want to know. It’s over now, and I don’t want to think about it.”
“Men,” Beverly said. “Such schmucks.”
“How are you and Don getting along?”
“We see each other once a week or so. We have a good time together—the man knows his place. Why?”
“I have a vested interest. After all, he’s Michael’s friend, and I introduced you. When are you getting married?”
“Kid, I may never get married.”
“You always say that, but I never believe you.”
“Why should I get married? I have a career, I enjoy my work, I have a good time. And the marriages I see around me hardly make the institution look attractive.”
Jennie winced.
“Sorry, kid. I didn’t mean you. But how many marriages do you know that are any good? I like my life just the way it is.”
Jennie had heard all this before. Beverly wasn’t the only friend she had in the city who seemed to mistrust the idea of marriage. And it wasn’t only marriage; they seemed to shy away from a serious relationship of any kind, as if they had lost faith in any workable commitment to the opposite sex. She couldn’t understand it. She couldn’t imagine being involved on a casual basis, relating from an emotional distance, perennial strangers.
“You’ll get married some day,” she said.
Beverly smiled. “You’re a romantic, kid. You’re a throwback to an earlier age.”
The waiter brought their orders, and while they ate, Beverly brought her up on all the gossip. Jocelyn, the third girl in the apartment they had shared five years before, had just separated from her husband but was doing well in the ad agency she worked for; Gary, a guy Beverly had dated for a while before Don, had come out of the closet and was living with his lover on the Upper West Side; Beverly’s magazine was planning a spinoff devoted to the inside world of show business, and she had a chance at the top slot. Jennie listened, content to let Beverly fill the silence with that verbal energy she had always been somewhat in awe of. With her ambition and her model’s looks, Beverly was the quintessential New York woman, the kind Jennie had finally decided she wasn’t. She didn’t have that driving ambition; she wasn’t good at the kind of politics it took to get ahead. She had begun to realize that after only a year in the city, and at the time she had been so unhappy she had considered leaving. Then, of course, she had met Michael.
After lunch, Beverly walked her to Second Avenue, where she hailed a cab to take her to Grand Central.
“When do I get to see you in your new dress?” Beverly said, holding the door open for her.
“I’ll wear it when you and Don come up. Can you make it next Sunday? That’s a week from tomorrow.”
“It’s a date. That ought to prove how much I care about you, kid, if I give up a weekend at Fire Island to spend it up in farm country.”
“You have a house in Fair Harbor again?”
“For the whole summer. You get tired of hayfields and cows, come spend a few weekends at the beach.”
“Okay,” Jennie said, “I will.”
The train home took only a little more than an hour; by four o’clock she was in her upstairs bedroom, sitting at her dressing table, fixing her hair into an upsweep atop her head. The drapes at all the windows except one were closed against the sun. The light falling through that one window created a warm afternoon feeling in the room. From downstairs came an occasional outburst of sound from the living room, where Michael was watching a ball game on TV. She ducked her head to place a barrette in her hair, looking up through her lashes at her reflection. A faint flutter of anticipation danced in her stomach, an excitement heightened by her impatience. In the mirror she could see the dress laid out long and beautiful on the bed. She tucked the last hairpin into place, gave herself a quick examination in the mirror, and went to slip it on. Fastening the tiny buttons up the back was awkward and difficult, but only when she had fumbled each one into its loop did she step to the full-length mirror by the door.
She was entranced: she hardly recognized herself. The high lacy collar lifted her chin and made her neck seem longer. The sleeves ballooned slightly outward to just below the elbow, then tucked into long slim cuffs that ended in ruffles about the base of the hands. A wide, ruffle-edged band of lace ran up the center of the bodice from waist to neck; all that white seemed to turn her hair from its natural dark blonde to a kind of burnished gold. Light fell through the window at her feet so that she seemed to rise up out of it, a slim, almost luminescent figure in the dimness of the room, reminding her of all those romantic Impressionist paintings—Degas’s dancers like white flowers in the shadowy light of the studio, or Monet’s Cliff Walk: two women in just such dresses as this, standing under a parasol in a breeze on a bluff overlooking the sea.
The sight of herself so changed brought a confused rush of feelings welling up in her: happiness, excitement, eagerness, a yearning ache she hadn’t felt so strongly since she was a girl. Somehow just wearing the dress unlocked all those emotions inside her. She had never looked more beautiful and romantic in her life. Eagerly, she picked up her skirts and went out and down the hall toward the stairs.