City of Girls (34 page)

“Yes,” I said. “You are an immigrant.”

“Immigrant or no, the only way people make money in retail in this city is by owning property, not by selling clothes. Ask the Saks family—they know. Ask the Gimbel family—they know. Although we
will
make money selling clothes, too, because our wedding gowns will be simply lovely, thanks to your considerable talents, and mine. So, yes, Vivian, in conclusion: I want
me
to buy a building. I want
you
to design wedding dresses, I want
us
to run a boutique, and I want
both of us
to live upstairs. That’s the plan. Let’s live together, and let’s work together. It’s not as though we’ve got anything else going on, right? Just say you’ll do it.”

I gave her proposal deep and serious consideration for about three seconds, and then said, “Sure. Let’s do it.”

If you’re wondering whether this decision
turned out to be a giant mistake, Angela, it didn’t. In fact, I can tell you right now how it all turned out: Marjorie and I made sublime wedding gowns together for decades; we earned enough money to support ourselves comfortably; we took care of each other like family; and I live in that same building to this day. (I know I’m old, but don’t worry—I can still climb those stairs.)

I never made
a better choice than to throw in my lot with Marjorie Lowtsky and to follow her into business.

Sometimes it’s just true that other people have better ideas for your life than you do.

All that said, it was not easy work.

As with costumes, wedding gowns are not sewn but
built
. They are intended to be monumental, and so it takes a monumental amount of effort to make one. My gowns were especially
time-consuming because I wasn’t starting with bolts of clean, fresh fabrics. It’s harder to make a new dress from an old dress (or from several old dresses, as in my case), because you must disassemble the old dress first, and then your options will be limited by how much material you are able to glean from it. Besides which, I was working with aging and fragile textiles—antique silks and satins,
and ancient spiderwebs of lace—which meant that I had to use an especially careful hand.

Marjorie would bring me sacks of old wedding and christening gowns that she scavenged from God knows where, and I would pick through them judiciously, to see what I could work with. Often the materials were yellowed with age or stained down the bodice. (Never give a bride a glass of red wine!) So my first
task would be to soak the garment in ice water and vinegar to clean it. If there was a stain that I couldn’t remove, I’d have to cut around it, and figure out how much I could salvage of the old fabric. Or maybe I would turn that piece inside out, or use it as a lining. I often felt like a diamond cutter—trying to keep as much of the value of the original material as I could while shaving away what
was flawed.

Then it was a question of how to create a dress that was unique. At some level, a wedding gown is just a
dress—
and like all dresses, it’s made of three simple ingredients: a bodice, a skirt, and sleeves. But over the years, with those three limited ingredients, I made thousands
of dresses that were not at all alike. I had to do this, because no bride wants to look like another bride.

So it was challenging work, yes—both physically and creatively. I had assistants over the years, and that helped a bit, but I never found anyone who could do what I could do. And since I couldn’t bear to create a L’Atelier dress that was anything less than impeccable, I put in the long hours myself to make sure that each gown was a piece of perfection. If a bride said—on the evening before her
wedding—that she wanted more pearls on her bodice, or less lace, then I would be the one up after midnight making those changes. It takes the patience of a monk to do this kind of detail work. You have to believe that what you are creating is sacred.

Fortunately, I happened to believe that.

Of course, the greatest challenge in building wedding dresses is learning how to handle the customers
themselves.

In offering my service to so many brides over the years, I became delicately attuned to the subtleties of family, money, and power—but mostly, I had to learn how to understand
fear
. I learned that girls who are about to get married are always afraid. They’re afraid that they don’t love their fiancés enough or that they love them too much. They’re afraid of the sex that is coming to
them or the sex that they are leaving behind. They’re afraid of the wedding day going awry. They’re afraid of being looked at by hundreds of eyes—and they’re afraid of
not
being looked at, in case their dress is all wrong or their maid of honor is more beautiful.

I recognize, Angela, that in the great scale of things, these are not monumental concerns. We had just come through a world war in
which millions died and millions more saw their lives destroyed; clearly the
anxiety of a nervous bride is not a cataclysmic matter, in comparison. But fears are fears, nonetheless, and they bring strain upon the troubled minds who bear them. I came to see it as my task to alleviate as much fear and strain as I could for these girls. More than anything, then, what I learned over the years at L’Atelier
was how to help frightened women—how to humble myself before their needs, and how to lend myself to their wishes.

For me, this education started as soon as we opened for business.

The first week of our boutique’s existence, a young woman wandered in, clutching our advertisement from
The New York Times.
(This was Marjorie’s sketch of two guests at a wedding admiring a willowy bride. One woman
says, “That gown is so poetical! Did she bring it home from Paris?” The second woman replies, “Why, almost! It comes from L’Atelier, and their gowns are the fairest!”)

I could see the girl was nervous. I got her a glass of water and showed her samples of the gowns I was currently working on. Very quickly, she gravitated toward a great big pile of meringue—a dress that resembled a puffy summer
cloud. In fact, it looked exactly like the wedding gown that the swan-thin model in our advertisement was wearing. The girl touched her dream dress and her face grew soft with longing. My heart sank. I knew this garment was not right for her. She was so small and roundish; she would look like a marshmallow in it.

“May I try it on?” she asked.

But I couldn’t allow her to do that. If she saw herself
in the mirror wearing that dress, she would recognize how farcical she looked, and she would leave my boutique and never come back. But it was worse than that. I didn’t so much mind losing the sale. What I minded was this: I knew that this girl’s feelings would be wounded by seeing herself in that dress—deeply wounded—and I wanted to spare her the pain.

“Sweetheart,” I said, as gently as I could,
“you’re a beautiful girl. And I think that particular gown will be a bitter disappointment for you.”

Her face fell. Then she squared her little shoulders and bravely said, “I know why. It’s because I’m too short, isn’t it? And because I’m too plump. I knew it. I’m going to look like a fool on my wedding day.”

There was something about this moment that went straight through the heart of me. There
is nothing like the vulnerability of an insecure girl in a bridal shop to make you feel the small but horrible pains of life. I instantly felt nothing but concern for this girl, and I didn’t want her to suffer for another moment.

Also—please remember that up until this time, Angela, I hadn’t worked with civilians. For years, I’d been sewing clothing for professional dancers and actresses. I wasn’t
accustomed to normal-looking, regular girls, with all their self-consciousness and perceived flaws. Many of the women whom I had been serving thus far had been passionately in love with their own figures (and for good reason) and were eager to be seen. I was accustomed to women who would shed their clothes and dance around in front of a mirror with joy—not to women who would flinch at their
own reflections.

I had forgotten that girls could be anything
but
vain.

What this girl taught me in my own boutique that day was that the wedding-gown business was going to be considerably different from show business. Because this little human being standing before my eyes was not some sumptuous showgirl; she was just a regular person who wanted to look sumptuous on her wedding day, and who
did not know how to get there.

But I knew how to get her there.

I knew she needed a dress that was snug and simple, so she wouldn’t vanish in it. I knew that her dress needed to be made of crepe-backed satin, so it would drape but not cling. Nor could it be a vivid white,
because of her somewhat ruddy complexion. No, her gown needed to be a softer, creamier color—which would make her skin look
smoother. I knew that she needed a simple crown of flowers, rather than a long veil that would—again—hide her from view. I knew that she needed three-quarter sleeves to show off her pretty wrists and hands. No gloves for this one! Also, I could tell just by looking at her in her street clothes where her natural waist was located (and it was
not
where her current dress was belted) and I knew that
her gown would need to fall from the natural waist, in order to give the illusion of an hourglass figure. And I could feel that she was so modest—so mercilessly self-conscious and self-critical—that she would not be able to bear it if the slightest hint of cleavage was revealed. But her ankles—those, we could show and so we would. I knew
exactly
how to dress her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, and
I quite literally tucked her under my wing. “Don’t you fret. We’re going to take good care of you. You will be a spectacularly beautiful bride, I promise it.”

And so she was.

Angela, I will tell you this: I came to love all the girls I ever served at L’Atelier. Every last one of them. This was one of the biggest surprises of my life—the upwelling of love and protectiveness that I felt toward
every girl I ever dressed for her wedding. Even when they were demanding and hysterical, I loved them. Even when they were not so beautiful, I saw them as beautiful.

Marjorie and I had gone into this business primarily to make money. My secondary motive had been to practice my craft, which had always brought me fulfillment. A tertiary reason had been that I really didn’t know what else to do
with my life. But I never could have anticipated the greatest benefit this business would bestow: the powerful
rush of warmth and tenderness that I felt
every single time
another nervous bride-to-be crossed my threshold and entrusted me with her precious life.

In other words—L’Atelier gave me
love
.

I could not help it, you see.

They were all young, they were all so afraid, and they were all
so dear.

TWENTY-SEVEN

The great irony, of course, is that neither Marjorie nor I was married.

Over the years that we ran L’Atelier, we were up to our eyeballs in wedding gowns, helping thousands of girls prepare for their nuptials—but nobody ever married us, and we never married anybody. There’s that old expression:
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride
. But we weren’t even bridesmaids!! If anything, Marjorie
and I were bride tenders.

We were both too weird, was the problem. That’s how we diagnosed ourselves, anyhow: too weird to wed. (Perhaps that would be the slogan of our next business, we often joked.)

Marjorie’s weirdness was not hard to see. She was just such a kook. It wasn’t only the way she dressed (although her sartorial choices were indeed patently strange); it was also the interests that
she had. She was always taking lessons in things like Eastern penmanship and
breathing
up at the Buddhist temple on Ninety-fourth Street. Or she was learning how to make her own yogurt—and causing our entire building to
smell like yogurt in the process. She appreciated avant-garde art, and listened to challenging (to my ear, anyway) music from the Andes. She signed up to be hypnotized by graduate
students in psychology, and underwent analysis. She read the Tarot and the I Ching, and she threw runes. She went to a Chinese healer who worked on her feet, which she never stopped talking about to people, no matter how many times I begged her to stop talking to people about her
feet
. She was always on some kind of fad diet—not to lose weight necessarily, but to become healthier or more transcendent.
She spent one summer, as I recall, eating nothing but tinned peaches, which she had read were good for respiration. Then it was on to bean-sprout and wheat-germ sandwiches.

Nobody wants to marry an odd girl who eats bean-sprout and wheat-germ sandwiches.

And I was odd, too. I may as well admit it.

For instance: I had my own bizarre way of dressing. I’d grown so accustomed to wearing trousers
during the war that now I wore them all the time. I liked being able to ride my bicycle about town with liberty, but it was more than that—I
liked
wearing clothing that looked like menswear. I thought (and still think) that there is no better way for a woman to look smart and chic than to wear a man’s suit. Good woolens were still difficult to come by in the immediate postwar period, but I discovered
that if I bought quality used suits—I’m talking about Savile Row designs from the 1920s and 1930s—I could trim them down for myself and put together outfits that made me look, I liked to imagine, like Greta Garbo.

It was not in style after the war, I should say, for a woman to dress like this. Sure, back in the 1940s a woman could wear a mannish suit. It was considered patriotic, almost. But
once the hostilities had ended, femininity came back with a vengeance. Around 1947, the fashion world
was taken hostage by Christian Dior and his decadent “New Look” dresses—with the nipped waists, and the voluminous skirts, and the upwardly striving breasts, and the soft shoulder line. The New Look was meant to prove to the world that wartime shortages were over, and now we could squander all
the silk and netting we wanted, just to be pretty and feminine and flouncy. It could take up to twenty-five yards of fabric just to make one New Look dress. Try getting out of a taxicab in
that
.

I hated it. I didn’t have the kind of va-va-voom figure for that sort of dress, for one thing. My long legs, lanky torso, and small breasts were always better suited to slacks and blouses. Also, there
was the matter of practicality. I couldn’t work in a billowing dress like that. I spent much of my workday on the floor—kneeling over patterns, and crawling around the women whom I was outfitting. I needed pants and flats in order to be free.

So I rejected the fashion trends of the moment and did my own thing—just as Edna Parker Watson had taught me. This made me a bit of an oddball for the times.
Not as odd as Marjorie, of course, but still rather unusual. I did find, however, that my uniform of trousers and a jacket worked well, in terms of serving my female customers. My short hair was also psychologically advantageous. By defeminizing my look, I telegraphed to the young brides (and their mothers) that I was not any sort of threat or rival. This was important because I was an attractive
woman, and for the purposes of my profession it was best not to be
too
attractive. Even in the privacy of the dressing room, one must never outshine the bride. Those girls didn’t want to see a sexy woman standing behind them while they chose the most important dress of their lives; they wanted to see a quiet and respectful tailor, all dressed in black, standing at their service. So I became that
quiet and respectful tailor—gladly.

The other thing that was odd about me was how much I had come to love my independence. There was never a time in America when
marriage was more of a fetish than in the 1950s, but I found that I simply wasn’t interested. This made me quite the aberration—almost even a deviant. But the trials of the war years had turned me into someone both resourceful and confident,
and opening up a business with Marjorie had filled me with a sense of self-determination—so maybe I just didn’t believe anymore that I
needed
a man for very many purposes. (For one purpose only, really, if I am being honest.)

I had discovered that I rather liked living alone in my charming apartment above the bridal boutique. I liked my little place, with its two happy skylights, with its infinitesimally
small bedroom (overlooking a magnolia tree in the alleyway behind me), and with its cherry-red kitchenette that I had painted myself. Once I’d laid claim to my own space, I quickly became accustomed to my own weird habits—like ashing my cigarettes into the flower box outside the kitchen window, or getting up in the middle of the night to turn on all the lights so I could read a mystery
novel, or eating cold spaghetti for breakfast. I liked to pad about my home softly in my house slippers—never once touching shoes to the carpet. I liked to keep my fruit not randomly cast about in a bowl, but lined up neatly on my gleaming kitchen counter in a satisfying row. If you had told me that a man was going to move into my pretty little apartment, it would have felt like a home invasion.

Moreover, I had started to think that perhaps marriage wasn’t such a great bargain for women, after all. When I looked around at all the women I knew who’d been married for more than five or ten years, I didn’t see anybody whose lives I envied. Once the romance had faded, these women all seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands. (They either served their men happily or with resentment—but
they all
served
.)

Their husbands didn’t look ecstatically happy about the arrangement, either, I must say.

I would not have traded places with any of them.

All right, all right—to be fair, also nobody
asked
me to marry him.

Not since Jim Larsen, anyhow.

I do think I narrowly escaped a marriage proposal in 1957 from a senior financier at Brown Brothers Harriman, which was a private Wall Street
bank, cloaked in hushed discretion and thunderous wealth. It was a temple of money, and Roger Alderman was one of its high priests. He owned a seaplane, if you can imagine it. (What possible use does a person have for a seaplane? Was he a
spy
? Did he have to drop provisions to his troops on an
island
? It was ludicrous.) I will say of him that he had the most divine suits, and there has always
been something about a good-looking man in a freshly pressed and well-fitted suit that makes me feel a bit faint with desire.

His suits made me feel so faint, in fact, that I convinced myself to romance this man for over a year—despite the fact that, whenever I gazed into my heart for signs of love toward Roger Alderman, I could find no trace of love’s existence. Then one day he started talking
about what kind of house we might like to inhabit in New Rochelle, should we someday decide to get out of this god-awful city. That’s when I woke up. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong with New Rochelle, mind you—except that I know for a fact that I could not live in New Rochelle for even a single day without wanting to break my own neck with my own two hands.)

Soon after this, I gently excused
myself from our arrangement.

But I enjoyed the sex that I had with Roger while it lasted. It wasn’t the world’s most electrifying or creative lovemaking, but it did the trick. It took me “over the top,” as Celia and I used to say. It has always astonished me, Angela, how easily I can convince my body to become free and
unstuck
during sex—even with the most unappealing man. Roger was not unappealing
in terms of handsomeness, of course. He
was quite becoming, actually (and although I wish sometimes that I were not
quite
so susceptible to handsomeness, there’s no way around it: I just am). But he did not stir my heart. Yet still, my body was grateful for its encounters with him. Indeed, I had found over the years that I could always rise to a grand finale in bed—not only with Roger Alderman,
but with just about anybody. No matter how indifferent my mind and heart might have been toward a man, my body could always respond with enthusiasm and delight.

And after we were done? I always wanted the man to go home.

Perhaps I should back up here a bit and explain that I had recommenced my sexual activities after the war ended—and with considerable enthusiasm, too. Despite the picture I
may be painting of myself in the 1950s as a cross-dressing, short-haired, solitary-dwelling spinster, let me make one thing clear: just because I didn’t want to get married doesn’t mean I didn’t want to have sex.

Also, I was still quite pretty. (I’ve always looked terrific with short hair, Angela. I didn’t come here to lie to you.)

The truth is, I emerged from the war with a hunger for sex that
was deeper than ever. I was tired of deprivation, you see. Those three coarse years of hard work in the Navy Yard (and, by extension, three dry years of celibacy) had left my body not only tired, but dissatisfied. There was a sense I had after the war that this is not what my body was
for.
I was not built only to labor, and then to sleep, and then to labor again the next day—with no pleasure or
excitement. There had to be more to life than toil and travail.

So my appetites returned, right along with the global peace. Moreover, I found that as I matured, my appetites had grown more specific, more curious, and more confident. I wanted to
explore
. I was fascinated
by the differences in men’s lust—by the curious ways that they each expressed themselves in bed. I never tired of the profound
intimacy of finding out who is bashful in the sexual act and who is not. (Hint: It’s never what you expect.) I was touched by the surprising noises that men made in their moments of abandon. I was curious about the endless variation in their fantasies. I was thrilled by the ways a man could rush me in one moment, all guns blazing, only to be overcome in the next moment by tenderness and uncertainty.

But I also had different rules of conduct now. Or, rather, I had one rule: I refused to engage in sexual activity with a married man. I am certain, Angela, that I do not need to tell you why. (But in case I do need to tell you, here’s why: because after the catastrophe with Edna Parker Watson, I refused to ever again harm another woman as a result of my sexual activity.)

I would not even engage
in sexual congress with a man who claimed to be going through a divorce—because who really knows? I’ve met a lot of men who always seemed to be going through a divorce, but who never quite managed to complete one. I once went on a dinner date with a man who confessed to me during the dessert course that he was married, but claimed that it didn’t count, because he was on his fourth wife—and can
you honestly even call that
married
?

I could see his point, to a certain extent. But still: no
.

If you’re wondering where I found my men, Angela, I shall inform you that never in human history has it been difficult for a woman to find a man who will have sex with her, if that woman is
easy
.

So, generally speaking, I found my men everywhere. But if you want the specifics: I most often found
them at the bar at the Grosvenor Hotel, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. I had always appreciated the Grosvenor. It was old and staid and unassuming—elegant, but not off-puttingly elegant. The barroom had a few tables
with white tablecloths set near the window. I liked to go there in the late afternoons, after my long days of sewing, and sit at one of those window-side tables, reading
a novel and enjoying a martini.

Nine times out of ten, all I did was read and sip my drink and relax. But every so often, a male guest at the bar would send over a drink. And then something might or might not transpire between us—depending on how things went.

I usually knew fairly quickly if this gentleman was somebody with whom I wished to engage. Once I knew, I liked to move things right along.
I’ve never been one to game a man, or pretend to be coy. Also, if I’m being honest, I often found the conversations tiring. The postwar period in America was a terrible time, Angela, when it came to the problem of men talking boastfully about themselves. American men had not only won the war; they had won the
world,
and they were feeling pretty damn proud of themselves about it. And they liked
to talk about it. I became quite good at cutting short all the chitchat by being sexually direct. (“I find you attractive. Shall we go someplace where we can be alone together?”) Also, I liked to witness the man’s surprise and joy at being propositioned so blatantly by a good-looking woman. They would light up every time. I have always loved that moment. It is as though you have brought Christmas
to an orphanage.

The bartender at the Grosvenor was named Bobby, and he was so gracious to me. Whenever he saw me leaving the bar with one of his hotel guests—heading to the elevators with a man I’d met only an hour earlier—Bobby would ever so discreetly bow his head over his newspaper, not noticing a thing. Behind his spiffy uniform and professional demeanor, you see, Bobby was quite the bohemian
himself. He lived in the Village, and went away to the Catskills for two weeks every summer to paint watercolors and wander about in the nude at an art retreat for “naturists.” Needless to say, Bobby was not the sort to cast judgments. And if a man ever gave me unwelcome attention, Bobby
would intervene and ask the gentleman to please leave the lady alone. I adored Bobby, and I probably would
have had an affair with him at some point over the years, but I needed him as my sentry more than I needed him as my lover.