A Dress to Die For Read online

  “Yes.” Mom shook his hand.

  Bernard, who had dealt with hundreds of people of all stripes, seemed unable to stop looking at Mom. Laura shifted in her seat, but no one else seemed to notice.

  “The show looked beautiful.” Laura wondered if she should have stuck in a “fabulous” or an “amazing” but decided against it. He was not a fabulous/amazing kind of guy. Or more succinctly, if he said “fabulous” or “amazing” in his life, he’d mean it, and the rest of the art world would know it.

  “Thank you, Miss Carnegie. I hope to curate a show of your work one day.”

  Laura stifled a nervous giggle because her mind fired a hundred deliciously gratifying scenarios whereby that would occur, all of which were about as likely as her receiving an Oscar. “We missed you last night,” Laura said.

  “I wasn’t feeling well enough to go. Once the setup was complete, my work was done anyway. Of course, after what happened, I wish I hadn’t stayed home. I’m managing a lot of angry people.” His accent was untraceable. It was definitely there, but Laura could never place it, and Nestor was always cagey about its origin.

  “I can imagine,” Mom said. “That dress was the draw for the whole show.”

  Bernard smirked. Laura could see the implication that the rest of the show wasn’t worthwhile, but she knew Mom well enough to know that wasn’t what she’d meant.

  “You know,” Mom said, “I knew it was fake the minute I saw the button. And then when I pulled it open—”

  “I was curious about that,” Bernard said. “The monarchy of Brunico saw it as an offense for anyone to touch what touched the princess’s skin, so no one outside the court ever fit her clothing properly on her, and no one was ever allowed to sew interior constructions.” He pursed his lips. He was trying to corner Mom. Laura wanted to unleash a verbal smack-down. Her mother wasn’t his to corner.

  But Mom didn’t appear threatened or daunted. She didn’t blush or shy away from confrontation, and in that moment, Laura loved her mother with a prideful passion.

  “The interior was brought to me on a form,” Mom said. “I draped the shell on it, and I will tell you now, the sewing on the garment I saw in that show was not couture. The shell I sewed and the beads I attached were done to the highest standards, interior construction notwithstanding. Anyone who knows anything could see something isn’t right here.”

  They were having a standoff. Laura was glad she’d come. “I’m wondering if there was a switch at some point. How did the delivery happen?”

  “I already went over this with the police,” Bernard said.

  Laura noticed him looking at her mother a little longer than normal, as if he wanted to memorize her face before it went away forever, and though it made Laura highly uncomfortable, Mom either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  He took a binder out of a drawer and put it on the coffee table. “It came on an unmarked truck, in a box, on the form.” He opened to a page featuring the princess of Brunico at her husband’s inaugural ball. Her face was cut off at the middle of her toothy smile, which seemed odd. But still, she was vibrant and beautiful, with long dark curls falling over her shoulders. It must have been late in the party, because her smile was too easy for the first hours of photographers and formality, and her body was twisted as though she were on her way to another dance or a long-coveted fresh drink. She was a girl at the best party of her life, wearing a forty-thousand-dollar saffron-orange gown.

  “See the cuff button?” Mom pointed. “Flush to the fabric. It came in two pieces. You sew the first part on and then snap the dome on top. Did it with my own hands. And that button last night? Drooping.”

  “Is it not possible that over the course of years, the thread loosened and the button drooped?”

  Mom held up her chin. She was sticking to her story.

  Bernard, however, was sticking to his. “The dress was kept in a closet, a very crowded closet, in the Iroquois building for the past twenty years. It is possible that it was worn in that time by someone who was not the Princess. It is possible the button fell off in that time, and it is possible it was sewn back on improperly. It is also possible there was a deterioration of the thread in that time that could have caused the button to droop. As you can imagine, the dress was not kept in an archival setting. We had no control over it beforehand, except a visual check at the Iroquois apartment, but I assure you, we took sweat samples from under the arms. The Royal Society of Sciences in Brunico reported that the DNA was a match.”

  That was lovely. Laura enjoyed the fallacy that people like Princess Philomena of Brunico didn’t sweat. “Okay.” Laura stood up from her chair. “We’re sorry to have bothered you.”

  “It’s no bother,” Bernard said as he walked them to the door. “I’ll be leaving town once this is settled. I hope I see you again before then.” His smile was sincere, and he touched Mom’s shoulder, as if he had earned the intimacy.

  “I’m sure we’ll be around,” Laura said.

  **

  Mom’s neck got a few inches longer and her chin a centimeter higher once they were half a block away from Bernard’s place and safely on Madison Avenue.

  “Did you meet him before?” Laura asked.

  “Not that I remember.”

  “He seemed awfully familiar with you. Like he knew you.”

  Mom waved Laura’s concern away. “This is not finished. The entourage stayed at the Iroquois. Something’s going on.”

  “Mom, it’s totally finished. We have to get that dress back into the exhibit ASAP. Like, faster. It looks bad for Jeremy.”

  “Give me a break. There’s ‘how things look,’ and there’s Jeremy. Maybe I’d be concerned if I thought he was worried, too.”

  “Don’t change the subject. The dress is going back up. I have no idea why you’re so attached to the thing anyway. How many hundreds of dresses did you make? This one got under your skin, and I don’t know why.”

  Mom kept walking.

  Laura got in front of her, walking backward. “Why?”

  “Nothing.” Mom tried to dodge left.

  Laura lunged right, getting in the way. “Tell me.”

  “Laura Priscilla!”

  “We’ll walk to Rockefeller Center, and you can tell me beside the Christmas angels. Or we can ice skate.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “So am I.”

  **

  The train rumbled over the bridge. In the short space of time between tunnels, the phone got enough signal for her to text Jeremy.

  —Going back with Mom, sorry—

  —She okay?—

  —Crazy, I think—

  —You don’t come from nowhere—

  “What are you smiling about?” Mom asked as they went back into the tunnel and the signal died.

  “Jeremy texts in whole words. I like that.”

  “He’s very good to you.”

  “He’s a jerk,” Laura said, but she was still smiling.

  There had been a rare November snowfall the night Mom had met Jeremy, Laura’s lover, instead of Jeremy, Laura’s boss. No wind blew the flakes from their downward spiral as they landed on his black lashes and hovered there for a second before melting. He had a short beard then, which attracted its own white down, and he was adorable in every way, with his arm around her and an easy smile, as if the only place he wanted to be was walking with her on a block in Brooklyn.

  He’d insisted on buying flowers, though they’d make Mom more uncomfortable than anything. Or not. It wasn’t as if Laura had ever brought anyone to meet her mother. And certainly not someone so huge, so much a presence and a history as Jeremy St. James. She’d spent half the morning in the bathroom, wondering if she should look better, smell better, or take more time or less trying to appear as though she and Jeremy were in the same league.

  But to Mom, she was beautiful, right? All of her implications and downright accusations that Laura was being used for some nefarious purpose pointed to the fact that there wa
s a disconnect in the relationship that Mom could see without ever having met him. And it irked Laura, because she had assumed the disconnect had to do with surface things, where Mom should be concerned with the more important things.

  Despite all her mother’s smirks, rolled eyes, and pursed lips when Laura had spoken about Jeremy, Mom smiled warmly when they got to the restaurant and told him that she’d heard “so many good things” about him. They had plenty in common, having both gotten fingers caught in sewing machines and hands burned on steamers. They both knew how to fix a Merrow machine and turn a coverstitch without stretching the fabric. They had stories and anecdotes and laughed about the same old garmento jokes. Laura felt comfortable enough to go to the ladies’ room when the check came.

  Things had changed when she returned to the table. Not terribly, nothing that would make a normally sensitive person uncomfortable, and it wasn’t because Jeremy had already taken care of the check by surreptitiously giving the server his card when they’d arrived. Nor was it the huge volume of dinner Laura had left behind as an offering to her nerves. The change was simply the absence of the chatter and laughter, as if she’d taken it to the bathroom with her and left it there on the sink after she washed her hands.

  She and Jeremy were walking to the train station when she finally asked him if anything had happened when she’d stepped out.

  He answered as though he’d been waiting for her to ask. “I know where you get it now, and the more I think of it…” He stopped midstride and bowed his head.

  “Jeremy, what?”

  When he looked up, he was obviously trying to hold in his amusement. “I mean, it was so you, even the expression on her face when she said it. She said, out of the clear blue…” He let out a laugh. “This is... I mean, it’s funny, even. She said, ‘I know you’re using my daughter for her mind.’ And the funny thing was, she was mad about it, no, not mad, but like it was wrong, even though… wait, no. I’m not saying she’s got it right but...” He had to lean against a parking meter he was laughing so hard, and it was so rare and beautiful to see him lose control that she had laughed, too.

  Laura smiled at the memory of it when she and Mom got to the front stoop. Ruby’s light was on, and she wondered if she could recruit her sister in double-teaming Mom into getting into more detail about the dress. Having come all the way back to Brooklyn for the sole purpose of finding out about the Brunico saffron gown, Laura had no intention of going to bed without a full and complete accounting.

  A manila envelope was leaning against the front door. Mom picked it up, opened it, and pulled out three letter-sized envelopes.

  “What is it?” Laura asked, seeing her name on one.

  Mom stuffed them back inside the larger one. “Nothing.”

  Laura snatched the manila envelope and turned her back to Mom. The three white envelopes were labeled: Laura, Ruby, Jocelyn. “What is this, Mom?”

  “I wanted to look at them first.”

  Ruby came out of her garden apartment in yoga pants and a tank. “What’s going on?” Behind her came Elaine, wearing head-to-toe Lululemon, which fit as though it had been made for her. Elaine was the first after Thomasina and had rebound written all over her yogi-tight ass. Despite that, she acted as if Ruby was her own personal permanent girlfriend. Laura felt sorry for her.

  “We got these envelopes,” Laura said. “And now she’s having a breakdown.”

  Ruby put her hands on her hips. “Mom? What’s going on?”

  In the streetlights, with some undecipherable concern weighing her mother’s eyes, Laura thought for the first time that her mother looked old.

  Mom deflated. “I knew it as soon as I saw it.” She looked across the street and sighed. “It’s your father’s handwriting.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mom poured three glasses of wine from a box on the counter. Having left Elaine in the downstairs apartment, Ruby crouched on the chair by the door, feet up on the seat, arms wrapped around her knees. The yoga habit had made her even slimmer and suppler than she’d been. Mom gave Ruby a glass, which she dangled between her knees. Laura took the last.

  Jimmy, their next-door neighbor and landlord, wasn’t much of a wine drinker. A nice-looking retired cop, he had plenty of time on his hands and much of it was spent hanging around Mom. When he’d chased reporters away from their door with a crowbar three months ago, Laura had assumed he was either drunk or crazy. Turned out he was neither.

  “I think you should burn the things,” Jimmy said as if reading Laura’s mind.

  “Well good thing your ex-wife never showed up,” Mom said. “I’d have to watch for a stake and a woodpile in the back.”

  “Can we get this over with?” Ruby said. “Laura and I are going out with Stu.”

  “No, I’m not,” Laura said. “I have to go back to work.”

  “It’s nine o’clock already,” Ruby said.

  “So? I have two jobs, you know.”

  “Quit one and have a life.”

  “Why? So I can learn to sit with my ankles behind my ears and wear cotton spandex all day?”

  Jimmy interrupted them. “This is what you were talking about?” he asked Mom. “These two? Like this?”

  “Since they could speak.” Mom picked up her envelope from the pile. “I’ll go first.” She ripped it open, unfolded a single sheet of paper, and read aloud:

  Dear Jocelyn,

  It’s been a long time since we’ve spoken. I hope you are well.

  “Twenty years later,” Laura interjected.

  “You,” Jimmy said, pointing. “Put a lid on it.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Seriously,” Ruby said.

  “Who is this guy?” Laura asked Ruby. “Where was he when we ate ramen noodles twice a day?”

  Looking up at Jimmy, Ruby asked with faux-sincerity. “Where were you?”

  “Enough!” Mom shouted. “This little vaudeville routine was old in tenth grade. This is exactly the wagon circling the two of you do when you want to avoid something, and I’m not having it today. I stopped waiting for these to come, and here they are, so shut the hell up before I do burn them right here.” Mom cleared her throat and started reading again:

  I know this must come as unexpected after so long. Twenty years. There have been many things I’ve wanted to say over that time. It hasn’t been easy. I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done raising the girls. I know it must have been hard for you. There were so many circumstances leading up to this moment, I don’t even have an explanation for any of it.

  I see you’re living in Brooklyn now. I hope you like it there. I remember that used to be quite a dicey area, but I guess if the girls are with you, it can’t be too bad. Well, have to go. Best of luck. — Joseph.

  “What the hell was that?” Ruby asked.

  “Someone got hit by the vanilla truck,” Laura said.

  Dad suddenly seemed less scary, less newsy. More an old man trying to reach out with nothing in his hand.

  Ruby slammed back the rest of her wine and said, “Me next.”

  As her sister opened the envelope, Laura compared hers. The one Laura held was thicker, like the acceptance letter against two rejections. She felt a little twinge in her throat, like a plastic straw twisting, buckling, and closing, the ends sticking out at sharp angles and closing off passage for her spit. She tried to swallow, but found she’d forgotten how.

  Ruby read her letter aloud, which Laura could see from the back—half a page, handwritten.

  Dear Ruby:

  I hope this letter finds you well. I have learned you design clothing, and I think that’s wonderful. You were always very talented. I just painted my room, and I thought, my oldest daughter would know exactly what color to use...

  Laura didn’t hear the rest. It was more of the same. She knew hers wouldn’t be like that. Hers was going to be long. And she was going to have to read it in front of everyone. A hand came from her throat and clutched her heart. Her ribs grew too fat fo
r her rib cage, expanding with every breath, squeezing her lungs. Pain radiated from her chest, shoving her bent-up throat tubes into the back of her mouth. The room closed in on her. Black tendrils crept in from the edges of her vision, closing off the light into a tiny pin shaft through which she saw Ruby’s mouth as she read.

  Very Best—Dad.

  Suddenly, it was dark. The air smacked her cheeks with cold. She was on the back patio. She didn’t even know how she’d gotten there.

  “Breathe.” Jimmy’s voice.

  She took air in through her mouth, clutching the iron rails, hitched over, and was convinced she was going to puke if only her stomach would comply.

  Mom rubbed her back. “What happened?”

  “Panic attack,” Jimmy said. “She close with him?”

  “He left before I could walk,” she said, turning around, the moment receding, the sensation in her chest fading from pain to plain tightness.

  “No, he didn’t,” Ruby said. “Who told you that? He left when we were six and seven.”

  “No, I’d remember him.”

  “Sweetie.” Mom put her hands on Laura’s shoulders. “You made that up. You were very close with him. You took it so hard when he left… you just wiped it all out.”

  “No. Really. Mom, stop it.”

  “Yeah,” Ruby said. “You picked up this little incontinence problem when you realized he wasn’t coming back. Like, every day after lunch, I had to follow you and drag you into the bathroom. I had to beat up anyone who called you Crapcrotch or Pisspants. Almost got us kicked out of Dalton.”

  Jimmy chuckled. “You shit yourself? Oh, God! That’s rich, kiddo. You’re just rich.”

  Laura ran inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. She snapped up her envelope. She remembered the bout of incontinence, but it couldn’t have been because of Dad. He’d been long gone by that time. Just a non-memory. She ripped open the envelope.

  Her hands shook as she unfolded the two pages. She hoped it was all weather and paint colors and the shapes of the clouds in autumn. Maybe he started with the youngest first and just tired himself out after the two-page ode to boring.