Oh my God, Jack thought as he skimmed through the final pages. He tossed the manuscript on his desk just as Ginny came into the office, a pile of letters in her hand. She nodded in the direction of the manuscript. “How was it?”
“Frightful but it will sell big. Funny, in all those sex scenes in the garden, I kept wondering about love bites from the mosquitos. Is that a sign I’m getting old?”
Ginny grinned. “I doubt it. You know you have a lunch date?”
“I marked it down.” Jack stood up and stretched.
Ginny looked at him approvingly. “Do you realize that all the junior editors are twittering about you? They keep asking me if I’m sure you’re not involved with someone.”
“Tell them you and I are an item.”
“I wish. If I were twenty years younger, maybe.”
Jack’s smile turned to a frown. “Ginny, I just thought of something. How far ahead is the lead time of Contemporary Woman?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“I’m wondering if I can get a copy of the article Ethel Lambston did for them, the one on fashion? I know Toni usually won’t show anything before the magazine’s put to bed, but see what you can do, okay?”
“Sure.”
An hour later when Jack left for lunch, Ginny called to him. “The article comes out in next week’s issue. Toni said as a favor she’ll let you see it. She’s also going to send Xeroxes of Ethel’s notes.”
“That’s great of her.”
“She volunteered them,” Ginny said. “She told me the outtakes of Ethel’s articles usually make hotter reading than what the lawyers let them print in the magazine. Toni’s getting worried about Ethel, too. She says since you’re publishing Ethel’s fashion book, she doesn’t feel as though she’s breaking confidentiality.”
As Jack went down in the elevator on his way to his lunch date, he realized that he was very, very anxious to get a look at the outtakes in Ethel’s file that were too hot to print.
• • •
Neither Seamus nor Ruth went to work on Friday. They sat in the apartment staring at each other like people caught together in quicksand, sinking, unable to reverse the inevitable. At noon, Ruth made strong coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches. She insisted Seamus get up and dress. “Eat,” she told him, “and tell me again exactly what happened.”
As she listened, she could only imagine what it would do to the girls. Her hopes for them. The colleges she’d scrimped and sacrificed for. The dancing lessons and singing lessons, the clothes so carefully bought at sales. What good if their father was in prison?
Again Seamus blurted out the story. His round face glistening with perspiration, his hands thick and helpless in his lap, he recounted how he had begged Ethel to let him off the hook, how she’d toyed with him. “Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” she’d said. Then she’d searched down behind the cushions of the couch. “Let me see if I can find some of the money my nephew forgot to steal,” she told him, laughing, and, finding a hundred-dollar bill, she stuck it into his pocket with the remark that she hadn’t had much time to eat out this month.
“I punched her,” Seamus said tonelessly. “I never knew I was gonna do it. Her head lobbed to one side. She fell backwards. I didn’t know if I’d killed her. She got up and she was scared. I told her if she looked for another dime, I would kill her. She knew I meant it. She said, ‘All right, no more alimony.’”
Seamus gulped the rest of his coffee. They were sitting in the den. The day had started gray and cold, and now it was like early evening. Gray and cold. Just the way it had been last Thursday, at Ethel’s apartment. The next day the storm broke. The storm would break again. He was sure of it.
“And then you left?” Ruth prompted.
Seamus hesitated. “And then I left.”
There was a sense of something unfinished. Ruth looked around the room, at the heavy oak furniture she had despised for twenty years, at the faded machine-made Oriental that she had been forced to live with, and knew that Seamus had not told her the whole truth. She looked down at her hands. Too small. Square. Stubby fingers. All three girls had long, tapering fingers. Genes from whom? Seamus? Probably. Her family pictures showed small, square people. But they were strong. And Seamus was weak. A weak, frightened man who had turned desperate. How desperate? “You have not told me everything,” she said. “I want to know. I have to know. It’s the only way I can help you.”
His head burrowed in his hands, he told her the rest. “Oh, my God,” Ruth cried. “Oh, my God.”
• • •
At one o’clock Denny returned to Neeve’s Place carrying a cardboard tray containing two tuna-fish sandwiches and coffee. Again the receptionist waved him toward Neeve’s office. Neeve was deep in conversation with her assistant, that good-looking black gal. Denny did not give either of them time to dismiss him. He opened the bag, removed the sandwiches and said, “You gonna eat here?”
“Denny, you’re spoiling us. This is beginning to feel like room service,” Neeve told him.
Denny froze, realizing his mistake. He was getting too visible. But he wanted to hear any plans she might have.
As though in answer to his unspoken request, Neeve told Eugenia, “I’ll have to wait until late afternoon to go to Seventh Avenue on Monday. Mrs. Poth is coming in at one-thirty and wants me to help her select some gowns.”
“That’ll pay the rent for the next three months,” Eugenia said briskly.
Denny folded the napkins. Late afternoon on Monday. That was good to know. He glanced around the room. Small office. No window. Too bad. If there’d been a window in the outside wall he’d have a direct shot at her back. But Charley had told him it couldn’t look like a hit. His eyes swept over Neeve. Really good-looking. Really classy. With all the dogs out there, it was a real shame to have to waste this one. He muttered goodbye and departed, their thanks ringing in his ears. The receptionist paid him, adding the usual generous tip. But two bucks a delivery takes a long time before it adds up to twenty thousand, Denny thought as he opened the heavy glass door and stepped into the street.
• • •
While she was nibbling at the sandwich, Neeve dialed Toni Mendell at Contemporary Woman. When she heard Neeve’s request, Mendell exclaimed, “Ye gods, what is this all about? Jack Campbell’s secretary phoned asking for the same thing. I told her I’m worried about Ethel, too. I’ll be honest. I let Jack see a copy of Ethel’s notes because he’s her publisher. Those I can’t give you, but you can have the article.” She cut through Neeve’s attempt to thank her. “But for Pete’s sake don’t show it around. There’ll be enough people in the rag game unhappy as it is when they see it.”
An hour later, Neeve and Eugenia were poring over the copy of Ethel’s article. It was entitled “The Masters and the Masterful Phonies of Fashion,” and even for Ethel it was bitingly sarcastic. She began by naming the three most important fashions of the past fifty years: the New Look by Christian Dior in 1947, the Miniskirt by Mary Quant in the early sixties, and the Pacific Reef Look by Anthony della Salva in 1972.
About Dior, Ethel had written:
In 1947 fashion was in the doldrums, still hung over with the military fashions of the war. Skimpy material; boxy shoulders; brass buttons. Dior, a shy young designer, said that we want to forget all about the war. He dismissed short skirts as a fashion of restriction. Showing what a real genius he was, he had the guts to tell a disbelieving world that the gown of the future for daytime wear would extend to twelve and a half inches from the ground.
It wasn’t easy for him. A California klutz tripped over her long skirt getting off the bus and helped fan a national revolt against the New Look. But Dior stuck to his guns, or his scissors, and, season after season, introduced graceful, beautiful clothes—drapery below the décolletage, molded midriffs with unpressed pleats that merged onto slender skirts. And his long-ago prediction was proven in the latest miniskirt disaster. Maybe someday all designers will learn that mystique is an
important guideline to fashion.
By the early sixties the times were changing. We can’t blame it all on Vietnam or Vatican II, but the wave of change was in the air and an English designer, young and perky, swept onto the scene. She was Mary Quant, the little girl who didn’t want to grow up and never, never wanted to wear grown-up clothes. Enter the Miniskirt, the shift, colored stockings, high boots. Enter the premise that the young must never on any account look old. When Mary Quant was asked to explain the point of fashion, where it was leading, she brightly answered, “Sex.”
In 1972 it was all over for the Miniskirt. Women, tired of being confused by the hemline game, gave up the struggle and switched to menswear.
Enter Anthony della Salva and the Pacific Reef Look. Della Salva began life not in a palace on one of the seven hills of Rome, as his publicist would have you believe, but as Sal Esposito, in a farm on Williamsbridge Road in the Bronx. His sense of color may have been cultivated by helping his father arrange the fruits and vegetables on the truck from which they peddled their wares throughout the neighborhood. His mother, Angelina, not Countess Angelina, was famous for her cant-like greeting, “God bless youra momma. God bless youra papa. How about some nicea grapefruit?”
Sal was a mediocre student at Christopher Columbus High School (that’s in the Bronx, not Italy), a very mildly talented student at F.I.T. Just one of the crowd, but as fate would have it, eventually one of the blessed. He came up with the collection that put him over the top: the Pacific Reef Look, his one and only original idea.
But what an idea. Della Salva, in a single, magnificent stroke, put fashion back on the track. Anyone who attended that first fashion show in 1972 still remembers the impact of those graceful clothes that seemed to float from the models: the tunic with the drifting shoulder panel, the wool afternoon dresses cut so that they draped and shaped the body, the use of pleated sleeves in tones that shimmered and changed with the light. And his colors. He took the colors of the tropical Pacific ocean life, the coral trees and plants and underwater creatures, and borrowed the patterns nature gave them to create his own exotic designs, some brilliantly bold, some muted like the blues into silvers. The designer of the Pacific Reef Look deserves all the honors the fashion industry can bestow.
At that point, Neeve laughed reluctantly. “Sal will love what Ethel wrote about the Pacific Reef,” she said, “but I don’t know about the rest. He’s lied so much, he’s convinced himself he was born in Rome and his mother was a papal countess. On the other hand, from what he said the other night, he’s expecting something like it. Everyone’s hollering about how tough their parents had it these days. He’ll probably find out what ship his folks were on when they sailed to Ellis Island and have a replica made of it.”
Having covered the giant fashion looks as she saw them, Ethel proceeded in the article to name the society designers who couldn’t tell “a button from a buttonhole” and hired talented young people to plan and execute their lines; to expose the conspiracy among designers to take the easy way out and try to turn fashion upside down every few years, even when it meant dressing aging dowagers like cancan girls; to mock the cowlike followers who plunked down three or four thousand dollars for a suit with barely two yards of gabardine.
Then Ethel turned her guns on Gordon Steuber:
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 alerted the public to the horrendous working conditions of garment workers. Thanks to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the ILGWU, the fashion industry has become a field where talented people can make decent incomes. But some manufacturers have found a way to increase their profits at the expense of the helpless. The new sweatshops are in the South Bronx and Long Island City. Illegal immigrants, many of them hardly more than children, work for pitiful wages because they don’t have green cards and are afraid to protest. The king of these cheating manufacturers is Gordon Steuber. Much, much more about Steuber in a future article, but just remember, folks. Every time you put one of his suits on your back, give a thought to the kid who sewed it. She probably can’t afford a decent meal.
The article concluded with a paean of praise for Neeve Kearny of Neeve’s Place, who started the investigation of Gordon Steuber and who banned his clothes from her shop.
Neeve skimmed the rest of the text about her, then put down the papers. “She’s drawn a bead on every major designer in the field! Maybe she scared herself and decided to get away until the heat dies down. I’m beginning to wonder.”
“Can’t Steuber sue her and the magazine?” Eugenia asked.
“Truth is the best defense. They obviously have all the proof they need. What really kills me is that despite all this, Ethel bought one of his suits last time she was here—the one we slipped up on returning.”
The phone rang. A moment later the receptionist buzzed on the intercom. “Mr. Campbell for you, Neeve.”
Eugenia’s eyes raised. “You should see the look on your face.” She gathered the remains of the sandwiches with the paper wrappings and the coffee containers and swept them into the wastebasket.
Neeve waited until the door closed before she picked up the phone. She tried to make her voice casual when she said, “Neeve Kearny.” Dismayed, she realized she sounded breathless.
Jack came right to the point. “Neeve, can you have dinner with me tonight?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “I was planning to tell you that I have some of Ethel Lambston’s notes and maybe we could go over them together, but the real fact is I want to see you.”
Neeve was embarrassed to realize how her heart was pounding. They agreed to meet at the Carlyle at seven o’clock.
The rest of the afternoon became unexpectedly busy. At four, Neeve went out on the showroom floor and began to take customers. They were all new faces. One young girl who couldn’t have been more than nineteen bought a fourteen-hundred-dollar evening gown and a nine-hundred-dollar cocktail dress. She was very insistent that Neeve help her choose. “You know,” she confided, “one of my girlfriends works at Contemporary Woman and she saw an article that’s coming out next week. It says you have more fashion in your little finger than most of the designers on Seventh Avenue and that you never steer people wrong. When I told my mother she sent me over here.”
Two other new customers had the same story. Someone knew someone who had told them about the article. At six-thirty, Neeve gratefully put a “CLOSED” sign on the door. “I’m beginning to think we’d better stop knocking poor Ethel,” she said. “She’s probably hyped business more than if I’d taken ads on every page of W.”
• • •
After work Doug Brown stopped at the local superette on his way to Ethel’s apartment. It was six-thirty when, as he was turning the key in the lock, he heard the persistent ringing of the phone.
At first he decided to ignore it as he had done all week. But when it relentlessly continued to peal, he debated. It was one thing that Ethel didn’t like anyone to answer her phone. But after a week, wouldn’t it seem logical that she might be trying to reach him?
He placed the grocery bag in the kitchen. The harsh ringing continued. Finally he picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
The voice at the other end was slurred and guttural. “I have to talk to Ethel Lambston.”
“She isn’t here. I’m her nephew. Do you want to leave a message?”
“You bet I do. Tell Ethel her ex owes a lot of money to the wrong people and can’t pay it while he’s paying her. If she don’t let Seamus off the hook, they’re going to teach her a lesson. Tell her she might have a hard time typing with broken fingers.”
There was a click and the line went dead.
Doug dropped the receiver onto the cradle and sank onto the couch. He could feel the perspiration on his forehead, in his armpits. He folded his hands to keep them from trembling.
What should he do? Was the call a real threat or a trick? He couldn’t ignore it. He didn’t want to call the police. They might start asking questions.
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Neeve Kearny.
She was the one who was worried about Ethel. He’d tell her about the call. He’d be the scared, concerned relative asking for advice. That way, no matter whether it was a trick or for real, he’d have covered himself.
• • •
Eugenia was locking the cases with the fine costume jewelry when the phone rang in the shop. She picked up the receiver. “It’s for you, Neeve. Someone sounds terribly upset.”
Myles! Another heart attack? Neeve rushed to the phone. “Yes.”
But it was Douglas Brown, Ethel Lambston’s nephew. There was none of the usual sarcastic insolence in his voice. “Miss Kearny, have you any idea where I can try to reach my aunt? I just got back to her place and the phone was ringing. Some guy told me to warn her that Seamus, that’s her ex-husband, owes a lot of money and can’t pay it while he’s paying her. If she doesn’t let Seamus off the hook they’re going to teach her a lesson. She might have a hard time typing with broken fingers, the guy said.”
Douglas Brown sounded almost tearful. “Miss Kearny, we have to warn Ethel.”
When Doug hung up, he knew he had made the right decision. At the advice of the ex–Police Commissioner’s daughter, he would now phone the police and report the threat. In the eyes of the cops, he’d be viewed as a friend of the Kearny family.