The Pink Suit: A Novel Read online

  “It’s like waving a flag,” Kate told Maggie. “Without the flag. It’s patriotic.”

  It was Kate’s way to honor Inwood, tucked away in the northern part of Manhattan and her adopted home. Irish, mostly. In Inwood, the President was a local boy made good. He took his first Holy Communion at St. Margaret of Cortona in Riverdale, right next door, and that made him one of their own.

  And even though Kate thought of the Wife as having a bit of a swayback from all that horseback riding—and she had that French last name—the First Lady was still a Lee from County Cork. Her mother was the granddaughter of Irish immigrants who came across during the potato famine in the 1840s. And Kate was from County Cork too—Cobh, specifically. “Cove,” in English. The village was the last place the Titanic laid anchor before beginning its voyage across the Atlantic, the last place the Lees saw before they left Ireland forever. And, although the Lees were actually from the country, according to her father, their people knew each other—although the Old Man was always a bit sketchy about the details. So Kate liked the Wife, no matter what anyone said. And Kate had to believe that, even with all those French mannerisms, she must long for the Island. Kate did.

  The day she left, her father was in the garden, going at the red roses with the kitchen knife and then his teeth. He was like a mad dog. The thorns left a thin trail of blood. Kate knew the boat would not wait. He knew that, too. Rose after rose—so much went unsaid. Finally, she picked up her suitcase and walked to the gate. “You can press them into a book for luck,” he shouted after her.

  Kate stopped and turned.

  That helpless grin. The fistful of ragged red roses. The Old Man had refused to take her to the docks. It wasn’t that far, just around the hill and then along the unfurling edge of the deep-water port—just a couple of miles or so. But he wouldn’t do it. Or couldn’t, Kate thought.

  He’d already lost Maggie and her husband to the promise of America—and now Kate. He had no more children to lose.

  The Old Man pressed the battered roses into her hands. Behind him, a thick fog hid the lush green all around them. There was some mercy in that.

  “Keep one,” Kate said. “We’ll match the dozen when I get back.”

  “When you get back,” he said, “we’ll plant a few more. Your mam would have liked that. You and me, digging around.” Then he turned and went inside. He had never left the Island in his life; he had no words for such a thing.

  Kate picked up her suitcase again. A rose petal fell at the gate. Then another. And another. She was late. She didn’t stop to pick them up.

  Petal by petal, Kate ran down the long, winding road, dragging her suitcase behind her. She ran along the water’s edge where lovers often lingered and then down the high street, past the pubs with their doors thrown open wide and the rusting cars careening this way and that, then onto the tangle of docks filled with suitcases and the sorrow of leaving, and, finally, onto the boat waiting in the harbor, a harbor whose motto was Statio bene fide carinis, “A safe place for ships,” and, aboard that boat, into the vast sea itself. Petal by petal, Kate left a trail, just like a young girl with bread who does not think of rabbits and foxes, but only of home.

  It was just six years ago when she left, but it felt like a lifetime.

  Kate was nearly finished with her tea when Mr. Charles finally emerged from his office. She’d rearranged her desk at least twice, moving the series of framed pictures of her nephew, Little Mike, from the left to the right and then back again, waiting for him to finish his call.

  “I thought I would grow old on that telephone,” Mr. Charles said. “Miss Sophie can certainly talk a blue streak.” He was wearing his best suit: dove-gray waistcoat, black pinstriped jacket, and the gray trousers with knife pleats. He was also holding a large envelope with a presidential seal. “And what do you think this is?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  But she could. Kate could imagine all manner of wonderful things in that envelope—from an emerald full-length ball gown completely covered with Austrian crystals to a pure-white silk cocktail dress with a black satin bow. When it came to the Wife and Maison Blanche (as everyone called the White House), the possibilities, and budget, were limitless.

  “It’s a love letter,” Mr. Charles said, and opened the envelope. Inside, there was a watercolor sketch, a clipping from Life magazine with four women modeling the same Chanel suit in different colors and variations, and a letter from a secretary on the embossed stationery of Maison Blanche. The entire room was suddenly filled with the scent of Chanel No. 5. The clipping from Life was about Chanel’s comeback. The French designer, who was now about Miss Nona’s age, had come out of retirement to create the “must have” suit for every proper country-club lady. And the Wife wanted one.

  As with nearly all of the First Lady’s custom orders, she’d sketched out her version of how the suit should look. She was quite a talented designer and painter, too. The watercolor was exceedingly cheerful. The Wife was holding one hand out as if a tray balanced on it had just been whisked away. The other hand was firmly on her waist. Maison Blanche was set in the background, but it loomed over everything. The Wife looked like a society girl soon to be trapped in a tornado of history. Her smile was mischievous; her eyes were wickedly playful. She was wearing a pink pillbox hat that sat back on her head—it didn’t hide her beautiful face, as hats sometimes can. A note on the drawing read, If it is another godforsaken pillbox, please make sure that it does not appear to have been stolen from an organ grinder’s monkey. It should be a non-hat hat.

  Kate knew that there was a new man at Bergdorf Goodman’s assigned to create hats for the Washington crowd. Mr. Charles said that Halston—one name only—was very meticulous. He’d come from Lilly Daché and had the same head size as the Wife and would try her hats on and look at them with two mirrors so that every angle was right and the fit was perfect. Kate couldn’t imagine how silly he looked in some of those hats, especially a summer straw he’d recently made with a large green polka-dot bow. But he got the job done, and that was all that mattered.

  While the sketch was playful, the Wife’s instructions for construction were quite precise. She was mad for fashion and had been designing her own clothes since she was a young girl. As a college senior, she’d won Vogue’s Prix de Paris contest with an essay that began with a sense of whimsy—If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space…She was all about the details.

  “Why is this a love letter?” Kate asked.

  “The President wants her to have this. He wants Chez Ninon to make it happen.”

  The back door suddenly opened. Schwinn saw the envelope immediately. “Is it Christmas?”

  “It is Christmas,” Mr. Charles said.

  It was always Christmas when an order came in from Maison Blanche.

  Schwinn was slight and freckle faced, with sun-washed blond hair that seemed to be styled by a series of cowlicks. He always wore the same clothes: a neatly pressed white cotton shirt, black trousers, and a black tie. He worked in the front, with the Ladies, but instead of wearing a suit jacket, he wore a windbreaker that made him appear as if he were just stopping by for a moment on his way somewhere else. Kate had never met anyone like him. He seemed to be about her age, about thirty years old, but he could have been older or younger. Unlike most men, he liked bicycles, not cars. He knew so much about them that some of the Ready-to-Wear girls thought he might have been part of the Schwinn bicycle family, perhaps a son. But Kate thought that Schwinn was just a nickname. She asked him about it once, and he said, “Schwinn is good enough for a bike, so it’s good enough for me.” Kate wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but that was just his way.

  Schwinn was a salesperson, but his formal title was “stylist,” which seemed to mean that he helped women accessorize clothes but he was also a designer himself. He had a nice business on the side, making hats for some of the clients. Kate thought that th
e Ladies probably knew but looked the other way. Everyone liked Schwinn, especially the clients. He was funny and enthusiastic about everything. And he was Catholic, which Kate liked, too.

  But there was also something about him that seemed deeply wounded. His eyes were gray with bits of green, and he never looked at you directly. He was secretive, too. In six years, Kate had only learned two things about his past—he’d been an art major, and he’d dropped out of college to serve in the Korean War. He’d told her that those were the only two things worth knowing.

  Schwinn picked up the drawing from the Wife and studied it carefully.

  “He wants her to have a new outfit,” Mr. Charles said. “That’s a first.”

  “Even the President can be a man in love. It’s probably a peace offering for the way the press savaged her during the election for wearing all those French clothes.”

  Everyone was still trying to figure out who told Women’s Wear Daily, a small industry newspaper, that the Wife had spent $30,000 during the campaign on clothes in Paris. “Smart and charming,” they wrote about the future president and his wife, “and running for election on the Paris Couture Fashion ticket.”

  The average American salary was $5,600 a year, and so when the story broke, Mrs. Nixon began harping on the Wife’s un-American clothes. She went on at great length about how she only bought her clothes off the sales racks in moderately priced department stores.

  The Wife had planned to ignore it, but when the Associated Press ran the piece, suddenly everyone wanted to read Women’s Wear Daily, and the scandal grew. She was then forced to counter the speculations with an exclusive quote in the fashion section of the New York Times—“I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear”—which was followed by a statement from the campaign office stating that the Wife was “distressed by the implications of extravagance, of over-emphasis of fashion in relation to her life.” The situation spiraled out of control, and newspapers around the country began to run unflattering articles about the Wife’s “balloon hair,” and worse. Finally Women’s Wear Daily apologized to the family and dubbed the First Lady “Her Elegance.” After seeing what pain they’d caused, they vowed never to criticize her again. But the damage had been done to the Wife’s image. Even eight months after the election, the press still hovered like vultures, waiting for her to make the same mistake again.

  “This pink suit could be a very bad idea,” Mr. Charles said. “It’s clearly French. Maison Blanche wants us to pay Chanel for the right to make a line-by-line replica. If that gets out—”

  “It won’t matter all that much,” Schwinn said. “The suit is American if we make it. The reporters can’t touch her for that. If we make it, she’s not taking jobs away from anyone. She can wear French without the criticism—it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

  If Schwinn was correct, it was a very clever gift indeed.

  The rest of the back room arrived, squawking like geese. Then came Maeve, late as always. Maeve was the fitter. She was an Inwood girl, like Kate. Somewhere in her late fifties, she was unmarried. Irish, of course. Her hair was the color of iron. She was broad shouldered, nearly square.

  “Christmas?”

  “Christmas,” Mr. Charles said.

  She looked at the sketch Schwinn was holding. “That woman is a fine doodler,” she said. “But Chanel is not going to like this at all—it’s exceedingly pink.”

  Chapter Two

  “Pink is the navy blue of India.”

  —Diana Vreeland

  The suit was not actually pink, but raspberry. That was what Coco Chanel had named the color, and so the Wife had taken to calling it that too. Chez Ninon, however, referred to it as “pink.” Pink. Pink.

  That vexed Chanel. Everything about their request vexed Chanel, especially the Wife’s tinkering. Now they want it licensed as if it is original.

  It was late in the day when the telegram arrived in Paris at the offices of 31 rue Cambon. The designer was six floors up, in her private atelier, on her knees with her small gold scissors hanging around her neck on a black velvet ribbon. She was basting a length of wool crepe onto a malnourished model. Her assistant, who was dressed in far too much black cashmere for such a warm day in such a warm room, read the telegram from Chez Ninon to Chanel again. Chanel sighed. She shook her head but said nothing.

  “Raise your arms,” Chanel said to the model. “Good. Lower your arms. Good. And again?”

  The workroom walls were banks of mirrors so that Chanel could watch the way the black wool responded to movement and how it looked in the light. The model had been flapping her arms up and down for at least an hour, maybe more. Chanel was trying to get the armhole of the dress absolutely perfect.

  “And again?”

  The model was on the verge of tears.

  Seventy-eight years old and still working, Chanel seemed relevant and ancient at the same time. She was dressed as she often was—in a hat and suit. The hat was black and Spanish, inspired by the cowboys of Seville. Its crown looked like a layer of a cake. The suit she was wearing, which she wore nearly every day, had lost its buttons and was held together with safety pins. It was thinning under the arms, but she loved it. Made from her own signature fabric—number H1804, from Linton Tweeds—it was an ecru wool-and-mohair blend. It appeared as if it were dyed two slightly different shades of the same color, but it was not. It was like a magic trick. The yarns took the color differently, and so the mohair seemed to be a darker shade of white than the virgin wool, giving the suit a white-on-white checkered look. It was that sort of subtlety that Chanel adored. She was wearing pearls, as always. There were so many ropes wrapped around her neck, they seemed to elongate it, making her look a bit like an ostrich.

  The dress was driving Chanel mad. “And once more,” she said to the model. The girl raised her trembling arms over her head again. The room was overheated. Chanel’s assistant looked appropriately bored as he stared at himself in the banks of mirrors. He wore a gold pince-nez, which set off the sharp angles of his face but served no practical use. No matter how warm he was, he would have to stand there, sweating, waiting for Mademoiselle’s response—no matter how long it took. The man held the telegram with two fingers, away from his body, as if the paper were dripping wet.

  The fitter, who was also dressed completely in black, handed Chanel pin after pin. He too was sweating and pale. Chanel didn’t seem to notice anyone’s discomfort. She was always cold, so the heat of the room suited her. The enormous length of black wool overwhelmed the model, blended with her black hair, and served as an alarming counterpoint to her shocking green eyes. Chanel draped the heavy wool around the girl’s frail body and over her head, creating a monklike cowl. The wool intensified the heat of the room, but no one offered the pale model a glass of water or a moment to collect herself. The cowl would not sit properly, and the armholes still would just not lie flat. Chanel’s hands shook slightly as she reset the pins again.

  “Once more. Arms straight up. Hold.”

  The dress was meant to be that year’s Little Black Dress—the “LBD,” as Chanel called it, as everyone had called it since 1926, when Chanel declared that black should not be for clerics, maids, and nuns alone. But after dozens of fittings over the course of four days, the dress was still far from complete.

  Chanel was intent on fixing the armhole, no matter how long it took. With the gold scissors hanging around her neck, she snipped away at the basting she had just laid in.

  “The telegram. Once more,” she said to her assistant. The man read in a neutral voice: URGENT NEED OF LICENSE FOR MAISON BLANCHE STOP EXACT LINE BY LINE REPLICA OF LIFE MAGAZINE SUIT STOP PINK STOP SEND TOILE STOP NEED PINK FABRIC AND FINDINGS STOP MUST BE PINK STOP HOW MUCH STOP.

  To which Chanel said, “Stop.”

  She was usually quite flattered when her work was copied. Chanel reveled in the irony when suits she’d designed for champagne lunches at La Grenouille were mass-produced for office girls who ate from bro
wn bags in badly lit rooms. However, because of politics, always politics, this “Chanel” was to be American made, a licensed “line-by-line” using Chanel’s own fabric and trim. In pink. It was to be pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Not raspberry, as the color was actually named.

  “These people are annoying,” she told her assistant. The man, in his ironic pince-nez, nodded.

  Chanel had never worked with the Ladies before, but she certainly knew them. She was still angry that Chez Ninon told everyone that their copies of her clothes were better than the Chanel originals. They were total fakes, never authorized, but they made this claim to all of her best customers. “Their clients in New York receive four fittings and Chez Ninon thinks that makes them superior. We only need one; we do it properly the first time.”

  This suit was not just a personal favorite of Chanel’s, but groundbreaking. The Life photo spread honored it as a “crisply tailored figure-fitting shape.” And yet, it was forgiving. You could be fat as a fig and still look wonderful. The double pockets on each side drew the eye in and made the jacket look fitted, although it was not. It was modern and timeless.

  One can always design fashion, but to design beauty is another thing entirely. Chanel had closed her shops in 1939 and had been in retirement for years; the rumors of her collusion with the Nazis were difficult for her public to understand. But now, with this suit, Chanel had returned. She was forgiven. She was relevant again. Revered. With this suit, she could not be denied her place in history.