I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 22
“Sorry,” I replied, standing to leave. “I don’t work for anyone who puts his feet up on the desk.”
Perhaps I was a codger. I vehemently mourned the death of good manners, devotion to quality, joy in hard work, obligation to others—and I mourned the deaths of those who’d embodied these qualities that appeared to be on the verge of extinction. Of course, one of these spirits was Mother, who’d read as many as she could of the seven thousand books housed in her little shop in order to recommend with true authority and lost her will to live when she ceased to be needed. But there were many more. Too many.
Jeanne, my beloved fitter who’d died of cancer, worked up until the very end. A mighty mouse, she missed Bergdorf immensely when she had to take a leave for her chemotherapy treatments. Work was her life. During our daily phone chats, she listened intently to everything happening at the store: who was in, who wasn’t. I was very careful in my words. I didn’t want her to think anyone had replaced her, which of course no one had. No one ever has. They are still expert artisans in their trade, but their work has changed as well. They are rushed and pressured from above.
Frieda was another one. Her standards were more exacting than those of anyone I’d ever met. She would push the silver tray around to serve dinner only if there were no more than four people. If we had more than four guests, then she insisted we employ Prince to serve while she stood back with her hands clasped over her starched uniform (which, incidentally, she didn’t do herself but sent to the laundress). Waiting for approval, she didn’t budge until someone said, “Frieda, that roulade of beef was very good,” or “Nobody makes profiteroles like you, Frieda.” Then she would beam and march through the dining room’s swinging door to offer yet another helping.
She was some bird, but she stuck with me through thick and thin for more than thirty years. Although she wasn’t happy when the household split up, Frieda, an unlikely romantic, was so pleased when Jim entered the picture. She had her own relationship with a married man a step above her, or so she thought. She would hurry through the dishes and run to meet him or go to his summerhouse on the weekends—where I suspected she cooked and cleaned for him, too.
When I noticed she wasn’t herself and was finding it difficult to walk, I thought maybe she was drinking. Then one morning I saw in her room that she had placed a chair next to her bed to pull herself up in the morning.
Not long after, she came to me to announce she was leaving. She was going to her apartment in Astoria for good. (She had that walk-up apartment, her security, all the years she was with me.) I was upset, but I understood. We kissed and hugged. I said I would see her soon. But I never saw her again. They found her in the apartment less than three weeks later—on the floor. She had saved me the incident, but not the pain.
Worse than any joint pain or wrinkly neck is waking up one day and realizing that nearly everyone you’ve learned to love over a lifetime is gone. It’s a ubiquitous and familiar tragedy that becomes particularly unjust when it happens to you.
Despite the authority with which I ran my business and got people dressed, I was vulnerable. I was never an independent soul and felt at the mercy of all this loss. I missed my phone calls with Mother and the funny little notes from her that had punctuated my entire life. I considered my humor a poor substitute for hers. Neither the store nor the neighborhood was as gracious without Corinne.
Without Jim my weekends and vacations were torturously long. I wasn’t comfortable doing things alone and so found myself spending much of them cleaning already clean floors and organizing my already organized closets. Looking into the fifty-plus years’ worth of clothing I had accumulated since arriving in New York, it struck me that no one had ever helped me get dressed. What was going to happen with the demise of Betty? I had an idea to label the clothes I wanted to wear when I went and how to put them together. This way all that my children had to do was go to the closet, throw me into the clothes—sans shoes—and then into the inferno.
I thought I had learned to be alone. But this was true loneliness, and I had a lot more learning left to do.
CHAPTER
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Ten
Things that grow speak to me. When I open my office door, orchids—tall, florid, pink and lavender trophies gifted to me from clients and designers who are amazed at how I keep them flowering season after season—greet my morning arrival.
Despite their loveliness, they were not to be outdone by the view that is their backdrop. The Callery pear trees have grown so large that they obscure nearly all the other treasures framed in the window by my desk: the Plaza, the Pulitzer Fountain, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park. They’ve dropped their showy white spring blossoms and now fill the entire window with summer green.
Settling in for the workday, I put out the water and change into my walking shoes. Long ago the store took my feet. They are my nemeses, that I liken to a headache. Then I beat it right back out the door. At eight-thirty in the morning, it would be at least a half hour before the sprightliest salespersons amble in. I like this hour; sometimes I see shipments of new clothes when the truck that delivers them arrives. Usually, though, I find new pieces that have been returned or previously hidden. There’s a whole game here that I like to call H&H, for “hide and hold.” A few weeks after any sale, out come clothes I have never seen. Never. And I am always looking. It’s the oldest retail trick in the book.
This kind of behavior makes my work harder, but I don’t shrink from a challenge. There is nothing new under the sun, yet finding the new is my task. Luckily, God gave me a third eye that allows me to see things that others do not. At least when it comes to clothes, which I have always loved and worn well with little effort. So when I do my walk, which I do every morning, I see a lot. I pretend that everything is new in what has become a game, a routine, a distraction.
I start today’s rounds in the stockroom, as is my habit. I don’t like to take from the floor and mess up what the stock clerks have worked hard to put back in good order. In the back room, however, nobody returns anything properly. After greeting Lester at the desk (I say hello to everyone), I proceed to the floor-to-ceiling rolling racks of clothes, where I find colors all mixed up and sizes in no particular order. The awful sight, which for me is as grating as nails on a chalkboard, compels me to take on the role of stock lady for a few minutes as I put garments back in their place. A black leather schoolgirl skirt jumps out at me, but not in a good way. Certain pieces I play with, and certain ones I don’t. This one was a don’t. Moving through the racks only reveals more of the same from the floor. Still, I roll each one back and forth, because thoroughness is part of the game. Three-quarters through I notice something bright and unfamiliar: a darling bougainvillea-print ruched sheath dress. The flowers have caught my eye.
“Have these been counted in?” I ask Lester, holding up one of the suits.
“Brand-new merchandise, Betty.”
I look through the sizes and say a small prayer. The dress was designed by a Frenchman as unforgiving as his culture, which means I need a 48 to fit over my client’s ample hips—and the store does not buy many in that size, no matter how many customers wear larger sizes. But I’ve gotten there first and so find the one and only 48. I promptly sign it out with Lester. (I feel a bit like a bandit when this occurs.)
My mission this morning is to see if there are any last-minute treasures to add to what I’ve already pulled for a new young lawyer client with troublesome hips—and there’s still the matter of a T-shirt to go with my long-standing client’s palazzo pants. I’ve discovered over the last few weeks that there are absolutely no T-shirts in this store.
I make an executive decision to skip the fourth floor, aka la-la land. Whenever I do go there, I riffle through the evening and couture collections and usually leave. I don’t believe in special orders. By the time the gown—which is not in stock for purchase but is ordered according t
o the customer’s size, color, and other specifications—arrives, the client says, “Is this really what I ordered?” After such a long time, the customer loses interest or has purchased a dress somewhere else. Plus, I’m not a big glitter fan, and these days the dresses positively drip in it. A beautiful gown should be like a painting not a disco ball.
By the time I arrive at five, I feel as if I’m thrift-shopping, the way the store crams all the merchandise together. But I never discount the lower-priced lines. I think nothing of pairing pants and a sweater from the fifth floor with a thousand-dollar jacket from the second. I simply go where my eye takes me. However, I often need to hide the price tag from my clients so they don’t prejudge the garment. People who can afford expensive clothes naturally prefer them.
While making my way through the maze of garments, plucking and pulling every now and again, I bump into Vivian.
“Hi and good morning. Is it almost Friday yet?”
“Hi, Betty.”
Vivian, who sees to it that the floor is in order and restocked with proper sizes, is the only one who comes close to the thirty-eight years I’ve been working at the store. During her thirty-five years, she has been through everything and everyone. She has raised children and grandchildren—and she’s still here. After exchanging a few “It isn’t like it used to be” work complaints, Vivian and I part ways.
It’s quiet. Deep into July it will be quiet all day.
That doesn’t bother me. Even on dull days such as this one, when everybody is in the Hamptons or upstate, I can find something that needs accomplishing. The store is my playhouse. Every time I show up to the office, I reinvent the game. If I were simply holding up a dress and saying, “Do you like it?” I would be a drudge. But I relish work and hardly ever take a sick day. By 7:00 A.M. I have risen, dressed, and made my bed as if someone were coming to do an inspection. I make lunch to bring to work and for my cleaning woman—a proper plate of cold veal, a salad, and fruit or whatever I have available—because otherwise she will not eat. At home everything is dusted, wiped, and organized within an inch of its life before I’m out of the apartment by 8:30 A.M. (My friends kid me that there is no day of rest. On the weekends I turn into a human scouring pad, rearrange what has already been arranged, iron as therapy, and wax a floor on my hands and knees. Although it is becoming a bit difficult to rise again from the last position, I do not give up. I wonder if all the glamorous persons passing through my office would be surprised.)
On the sixth floor, I hit the security code for the stockroom as quickly as I dial my son’s phone number. I know all the security codes for all the store’s back rooms by heart. Whenever people comment on how much they love the store’s windows, I always say, “I’m sure they’re beautiful, but I don’t know, because I don’t look at them.” I live internally—in the back rooms. I’m not a mannequin dresser; I dress real people.
“Good morning, Mozelle,” I say to the tall stock clerk standing and talking to another woman.
“Hi, Betty.”
“Are you on vacation?”
“I’m at the men’s store.”
“That is a vacation.”
I don’t find anything to go with the pants, but I do find a specific striped top in a large that another client of mine coveted and I was unable to find, either on the floor or in the computer, a week earlier. It’s hanging on the side along with many other garments on hold.
“How long has this been on hold?” I ask Mozelle.
She looks at the pink memo slip attached to the hanger and replies, “Fifteen days.”
Disgraceful.
“Oh, come on. How is anyone supposed to do business here?”
As I walk back out, my crankiness is abated by the hush of the empty store, a privilege of access that in all my years here has never lost its thrill. The clothes placed on the correct racks and shelves, the floors freshly swept, and the neatly folded shopping bags waiting like elegant writing paper; it is everything I imagined as a little girl wondering what Marshall Field’s was like when nobody was around.
My father was exactly the same way—a real retailer. He didn’t just work at Mandel Brothers but saw the old Chicago department store as an extension of himself. So did my parents’ friends who called the house to ask, “Can Harry bring the toaster to the repair department?” And he did gladly. He didn’t mind being pulled back to his work for whatever the reason. He knew every nook and cranny of that store just as I do this one.
I take a gloriously empty elevator down to the third floor and pass a young woman in thick black glasses returning from the morning sales meeting as evidenced by a half-eaten bagel on a paper plate.
“Is that Jil Sander?” she asks, pointing to my green suit, which for the last twenty years comes out of my closet every spring for a pressing, then is pressed again and returned to the closet in the fall. I paired it with a tie-dye print shirt in black and lime green that I won after selling so many of them last season.
“No, it’s O.L.D.,” I say, and keep walking.
I have to wear clothes—and I do love them—but I’ve seen everything. Unlike my father, whose diabetes didn’t allow him to indulge his sweet tooth to the fullest so he dipped his finger into the maraschino cherry filling whenever he visited the chocolate department of Mandel Brothers, I am satiated with clothes.
I bump into the buyer for Armani, which has been appearing newer to me recently. I think we’re going back to that tailored look, because we have nowhere else to go. At this point everyone is walking around looking like they’re going to the beach. My only problem is that no one can make Mr. Armani young again.
“We aren’t sizing correctly,” I say, stopping the buyer. “There are some size-forty-eight people in the world.”
“We do have them.”
“Very few.”
He jots down my comments with the seriousness of a physician taking notes on a case. We’ll see if it comes to anything. In the meantime I grab an aqua blazer as a last-minute idea for my lawyer.
On my way to my office, I pass Kenneth in front of a new display. A real old-fashioned buyer in a young man’s body, he is hands-on as he does the floor, repositioning the clothes and talking to the salespersons. I admire him immensely. Everyone else is too busy on the computer to take a look at what’s going on in the real store. After we exchange greetings, I glimpse the display in front of him. One mannequin wears a drab black dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top with a gray A-line skirt, a thin black leather belt, and the most monstrous pair of black platform prison-matron shoes.
“Heil Hitler!”
Being eighty-six years old gives me license to say almost anything I like.
The second mannequin has the Lady Gestapo outfit with a pencil skirt in leather, a black dress shirt, a motorcycle jacket, and those same terrible shoes.
“I remember World War II,” I say. “There’s so much leather, they must have killed every cow in Germany and Poland!”
Kenneth laughs. “Oh, Betty.”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Betty’ me.”
I turn the corner and run smack into André, the head carpenter overseeing the latest round of renovations. Stores are constantly renovating, because they, too, need to convince customers that there’s something new to be found.
“Hello, my dear,” I say, delighted. “Thank you so much for fixing my door.”
“Anything for you, Betty.”
André launches into the subject of his eldest daughter; he worries about her finding someone. I tell him that every pot has a cover, adding that, “I’m going to the Berkshires soon, and I’ll bring back that jam you like.”
Sometimes my A.M. rounds feel like early morning therapy sessions, but I love it. Only a few days earlier, I encountered an engineer who wasn’t his usual jovial self. Why? As it turned out, he’s getting a divorce. With his three little children away, he was going t
o therapy to deal with it. I held the elevator door open, and we talked until I got a smile out of him. “You aren’t going to lose your children,” I said.
In my banter with André, the engineer, the fitters in the workrooms at the top of the store, I’m reminded again of my father, who roamed throughout his store, including the hosiery department. He made an elderly lady selling stockings feel like a glamour girl!
Work keeps me firmly rooted in the present. It’s important to have someplace you need to be in the morning. Plus, there’s nothing like a “much-needed” dress that doesn’t arrive on schedule to the apartment of a very important client not habituated to waiting that keeps an eighty-six-year-old woman on her toes.
Yet I recognize how my job also ties me to the past. I cannot let go of the old routines no matter how outdated or outmoded they may be. For example, I would never in a million years dream of going out in public barefaced. I have to put on lipstick and mascara even to travel half a block for a loaf of bread. How do I know I won’t meet Prince Charming on the way?
The customs ingrained in me from my earliest recollections are permanent, for good or for bad. Although I live alone, I don’t eat standing over the sink. Buying, chopping, and cooking food, on the very same Roper with six burners that I’ve used ever since first walking into this apartment sixty years ago, gives me fulfillment. Unlike in my mother’s dotage, when her larder contained only champagne, coffee cake, coffee, and peanut butter, you can walk into my apartment at any time and find plenty to eat for breakfast, lunch, cocktail hour, and dinner. Just as in the “old days,” my tray is set for every meal with a cloth doily and a napkin, china, silverware—the whole nine yards. I’ve always felt that if I fall into any other habit, everything will take a downward spin. I am, as they say, overly toilet trained.
It’s the same with my clothing. As soon as I get home, I undress, brush my clothes, put them on the proper hangers, and give them an airing before they return to the closet—which, containing a lifetime of garments, is a Narnian portal to times and places that no longer exist.