City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “That’s sweet.”

  “I suppose so. I do love him. I only wish that I could send a stand-in that day, to do the job for me.”

  “You hate being the center of attention,” I said. “Your father always told me that about you.”

  “I despise it. I don’t even want to wear white. It seems ridiculous, at my age. But Winston wants to see me in a white gown.”

  “Most grooms do. There’s something about a white gown—setting aside the obnoxious question of virginity—that signals to a man that this day is not like any other day. It shows him that he’s been chosen. It means a lot to men, I have learned over the years, to see their brides walking toward them in white. Helps to quiet their insecurities. And you’d be surprised how insecure the men can be.”

  “That’s interesting,” you said.

  “Well, I’ve seen a lot of it.”

  At this point, you relaxed enough to start taking in your surroundings. You drifted over to one of my sample racks, which was filled with billows of crinolines and satin and lace. You started sorting through the gowns with an expression of martyrdom.

  “Angela,” I said, “I can tell you right now that you won’t like any of those dresses. In fact, you’ll despise them.”

  You dropped your arms in defeat. “Is that right?”

  “Look, I don’t have anything here right now that would suit you. I wouldn’t even let you wear one of these gowns—not you, the girl who was fixing her own bicycle by the time she was ten. I’m an old-fashioned seamstress in one regard only, my dear: I believe a dress should flatter not only a woman’s figure, but also her intelligence. Nothing in the showroom is intelligent enough for you. But I have an idea. Come sit down with me in my workroom. Let’s have a cup of tea, if you’ve got a moment?”

  I had never before taken a bride into my workroom, which was at the back of the shop, and full of mess and chaos. I preferred to keep my customers in the pretty, magical space that Marjorie and I had created at the front of the building—with the cream-colored walls and the dainty French furniture, and the dappled sunlight streaming in from the street windows. I liked to keep my brides in the illusion of femininity, you see—which is where most brides like to abide. But I could see that you were not somebody who wanted to abide in illusion. I thought you might be more comfortable where the actual work was done. And there was a book I wanted to show you, which I knew was back there.

  So we went back into my workshop, and I fixed us each a cup of tea. Then I brought you the book—a collection of antique wedding photos that Marjorie had given me for Christmas. I opened to a picture of a French bride from 1916. She was wearing a simple cylindrical gown that came to just above her ankles, and was completely unornamented.

  “I’m thinking of something like this for you. Nothing like a traditional Western wedding gown. No flounce, no whim-whams. You could be comfortable in this, and move about with ease. The top of the dress almost looks like a kimono—the way the bodice is just two simple pieces of fabric that cross over the bust? It was the style in the teens for a while, especially in France, to imitate Japanese clothing in wedding design. I’ve always thought this shape was beautiful—not much more complicated than a bathrobe, really. So elegant. It’s too simple for most people, but I admire it. I think it would suit you. Do you see how the waist is high, and then there’s that wide satin band with the bow on the side? Something like an obi?”

  “An obi?” You were legitimately interested now.

  “A Japanese ceremonial sash. In fact, what I would do is make you a version of this dress in a creamy white—to satisfy the traditionalists in the room—but then, on your waist, I’d give you an actual Japanese obi. I would suggest a sash of red and gold—something bold and vivid, to signal the unconventional path that your life has taken. Let’s stay as far away from the ‘something borrowed, something blue’ cliché, shall we? I could show you how to tie the obi in two different ways. Traditionally, Japanese women use different knots, whether they are married or unmarried. We could start you off with the unmarried knot. Then perhaps Winston could untie the sash during the ceremony, and then you could retie it, with the knot of a married woman. Maybe that could constitute the entire ceremony, in fact. Up to you, of course.”

  “That’s very interesting,” you said. “I like this idea. I like it a lot. Thank you, Vivian.”

  “My only hesitation is that it may be upsetting for your father, to see the Japanese elements in the design. Given his history in the war, and all that. But I’m not sure. What do you think?”

  “No, I don’t think it would bother him. If anything, he might appreciate the reference. Almost as if I am wearing something that represents a bit of his history.”

  “I could see him thinking that,” I said. “One way or another, I’ll talk to him about it so it doesn’t catch him by surprise.”

  But now you seemed distracted, and your face became sharp and tight. “Vivian, may I ask you something?” you said.

  “Of course.”

  “How is it that you know my father, anyway?”

  God help me, Angela, I do not know what my face revealed in that moment. If I were to guess, though, I would imagine that I looked some combination of guilty, afraid, sad, and panicked.

  “You can understand my confusion,” you went on, seeing my discomfort, “given that my father doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t talk to a soul. He says that you’re his dear friend, but that doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t have any friends. Even his old friends from the neighborhood don’t socialize with him. And you’re not even from the neighborhood. But you know so much about me. You know that I was fixing bicycles when I was ten. Why would you know that?”

  You sat there, waiting for me to answer. I felt completely outgunned. You were a trained psychologist, Angela. You were a professional dissembler. You’d been around all sorts of madness and lies in your work. The feeling I got was that you had all the time in the world to wait me out—and that you would instantly know if I was deceiving you.

  “You can tell me the truth, Vivian,” you said.

  The look on your face was not hostile, but your focus was fearsome.

  But how could I tell you the truth? It wasn’t my place to tell you anything, or to violate your father’s privacy, or to possibly upset you right before your wedding. And how could I possibly explain Frank and me? Would you have believed me, anyway, if I’d told you the truth—namely, that I had spent several nights a week with your father for the past six years, and that all we did was walk and talk?

  “He was a friend of my brother’s,” I finally said. “Frank and Walter served together during the war. They went to Officer Candidate School together. They both ended up on the USS Franklin. My brother was killed in the same attack that injured your father.”

  Everything that I said was true, Angela—except for the part about your father and my brother being friends. (They had known each other, yes. But they were not friends.) As I spoke, I could feel tears standing in my eyes. Not tears about Walter. Not even tears about Frank. Just tears about this situation—about sitting alone with the daughter of the man I loved, and liking her so much, and not being able to explain anything. Tears—as with so many other times in my life—about the intractable dilemmas in which we can find ourselves.

  Your face softened. “Oh, Vivian, I’m sorry.”

  There were so many more questions you could have asked at that point, but you didn’t. You could see that the subject of my brother had upset me. I believe you were too compassionate to keep me cornered. Anyway, you’d been given an answer, and it was plausible enough. I could see that you suspected there was more to the story, but in your kindness, you chose to believe what I had told you—or at least not to chase any further information.

  Mercifully, you dropped the subject, and we went back to planning your wedding dress.

  What a beautiful dress it was, too.

  I would spend the next two weeks working on it. I searched the city m
yself for the most stunning antique obi I could find (wide, red, long, and embroidered with golden phoenixes). It was criminally expensive, but there was nothing else in New York like it. (I didn’t charge your father for it—don’t worry!)

  I made the gown itself out of a creamy, clingy, charmeuse satin. I fashioned a fitted slip beneath it with a built-in brassiere that would subtly make you feel more held together. I wouldn’t let my assistants, or even Marjorie, so much as lay a finger on that gown. I sewed every stitch and seam on my own, bent over my work in something like prayerful silence.

  And as much as I know that you hated ornamentation, I could not help myself. At the spot where the two bands of fabric crossed your heart, I sewed one little pearl, taken from a necklace that had once belonged to my grandmother.

  A small gift, Angela—from my family to yours.

  THIRTY-THREE

  It was December of 1977 when I got your letter saying that your father had died.

  I’d sensed already that something was terribly wrong. I hadn’t heard from Frank in almost two weeks, which was highly unusual. In fact, in the twelve years of our relationship, it had never happened before. I was growing concerned—very concerned—but didn’t know what to do about it. I had never called Frank at home, and since he had retired from the police force, I couldn’t phone him at the precinct. He didn’t have any friends that I knew of, so there was nobody I could contact, to ask if he was all right. I couldn’t exactly go knocking on his door in Brooklyn.

  And then came your note, addressed to me, care of L’Atelier.

  I’ve saved it, all these years.

  Dear Vivian:

  It is with a heavy heart that I write to tell you that my father passed away ten days ago. It was a sudden death. He was out walking one night around our neighborhood, as he was wont to do, and he collapsed on the sidewalk. It would appear that he had a heart attack, although we did not ask for an autopsy. This has been a great shock to me and to my mother, as I’m sure you can imagine. My father had his frailties, to be sure, but they were never of a physical nature. He had such stamina! I thought he would live forever. We held a small service for him at the same church where he was christened, and he has been buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, next to his parents. Vivian, I apologize. It was only after the funeral that I realized I should have contacted you immediately. I know that you and my father were dear friends. Surely, he would have wanted you to be alerted. Please forgive this tardy note. I’m sorry to be the bearer of such bad news and I’m sorry that I didn’t get word to you sooner. If there is anything that I, or my family, can ever do for you, please let me know.

  Sincerely, Angela Grecco

  You had kept your maiden name.

  Don’t ask me why, but I noticed that right away—before I had even fully registered that he was gone.

  Good for you, Angela, I thought. Always keep your own name!

  Then the news hit me that Frank was gone, and I did just what you might imagine I would do: I dropped to the floor and I wept.

  Nobody wants to hear about anybody else’s grief (there’s a level at which everyone’s grief is exactly the same, anyhow), so I won’t go into details about my sadness. I will say only that the following few years were a very hard time for me—the hardest and loneliest I ever experienced.

  Your father had been a peculiar man in life, Angela, and he was peculiar in death, too. He remained so vivid. He came to me in dreams, and he came to me in smells and sounds and sensations of New York itself. He came to me in the scent of summer rain on hot macadam, or in the sweet perfume of wintertime sugared nuts sold by street vendors. He came to me in the sour, milky odor of Manhattan’s ginkgo trees in springtime bloom. He came to me in the bubbling coo of nesting pigeons, and in the screaming of police sirens. He was everywhere to be found across the city. Yet his absence weighted my heart with deep silence.

  I went on about my life.

  So much of my day-to-day routine looked exactly the same, even after he had gone. I lived in the same place, I did the same job. I spent time with the same friends and family. Frank had never been part of my daily routine, so why would anything change? My friends knew that I had lost someone important to me—but they hadn’t known him. Nobody knew how much I had loved him (how would I have explained him?), so I wasn’t warranted the public grieving rights of a widow. I didn’t see myself as a widow, in any case. That was your mother’s position, not mine. How could I be a widow when I had never been a wife? There had never been a correct word for what Frank and I were to each other, so the absence I felt after his death was both private and unnamed.

  Mostly, it was this: I would wake up late at night, and lie in my bed, waiting for the phone to ring so that I could hear him say, “Are you awake? Do you want to go for a walk?”

  New York City itself seemed smaller, after Frank died. All those distant neighborhoods that we had explored together on foot were no longer open to me. They weren’t places a woman could go alone—not even a woman as independent as myself. And in the geography of my imagination, a great many “neighborhoods” of intimacy were now also shuttered. There were certain subjects that I had only ever been able to talk about with Frank. There were places within me that he alone could reach with his listening—and I would never be able to reach those places on my own.

  Even so, I want you to know that I’ve done just fine in my life without Frank. I grew out of my sorrow—the way people usually do, eventually. I found my way back to joyful things again. I’ve always been a lucky person, Angela—not least of all because my natural temperament is not one of gloom and despair. In that regard, I have always been a bit like my Aunt Peg—not prone to depression, thank God. And I’ve had wonderful people in my life in the decades after Frank died. Exciting lovers, new friends, my chosen family. I’ve never wanted for company. But I have also never stopped missing your father.

  Other people have always been perfectly nice and kind, don’t get me wrong, but nobody was him. Nobody could ever be like that bottomless well of a man—that walking confessional booth who could absorb whatever you told him without judgment or alarm.

  Nobody else could be that beautiful dark soul, who always seemed to straddle the worlds of life and death.

  Nobody but Frank was Frank.

  So you have waited a long time for your answer, Angela, about what I was to your father—or what he was to me.

  I’ve tried to answer your question as honestly and thoroughly as I could. I was about to apologize for going on so long. But if you are truly your father’s daughter (and I believe that you are), then I know that you’re a good listener. You’re the sort of person who would want the whole story. Also, it is important for me that you know everything about me—the good and the bad, the loyal and the perverse—so that you can decide for yourself what to think of me.

  But I need to make it clear once again, Angela: your father and I never embraced, we never kissed, we never had sex. He was the only man I ever really loved, though, with all my heart. And he loved me, too. We didn’t speak of it, because we didn’t need to speak of it. We both knew it.

  That said, I do want to tell you that over the years, your father finally reached a point of ease with me where he could rest the back of his hand on my palm without flinching in pain. We could sit together in his car, in the quiet comfort of that touch, for many minutes at a time.

  I never saw more sunrises in my life than I did with him.

  If by doing that—by holding his hand all those times, as the sun came up—I took something away from your mother, or from you, I beg your forgiveness.

  But I don’t think I did.

  So here we are, Angela.

  I am sorry to hear about your mother’s death. You have my condolences. I am glad to hear that she lived a long life. I hope she had a good life, and a peaceful death. I hope that your heart is strong within your grieving.

  I also want to say that I’m so glad you were able to track me down. Thank God I’m still living at t
he L’Atelier building! That’s the good thing about never changing your name or your address, I suppose. People always know where to find you.

  Although I should tell you that L’Atelier is not a bridal boutique anymore, but a coffee and juice shop that Nathan Lowtsky runs. The building itself belongs to me, though. Marjorie left it to me after her death thirteen years ago, knowing that I would do a better job than Nathan at managing the property. So she put things entirely in my hands and I’ve taken good care of the place. I was the one who helped Nathan to get his little business up and running, too. He needed all the help he could get, believe me. Nathan, dear as he is, will never set the world on fire. But I do love him. He has always called me his “other mother.” I’m happy to have his affection and care. In fact, I am probably as embarrassingly healthy as I am for my ripe old age because he tends to me. And I tend to him, as well. We are good to each other.

  So this is why I am still here—still in the same place I’ve lived since 1950.

  Thank you for coming to look for me, Angela.

  Thank you for asking me for the truth.

  I have told you all of it.

  I will sign off now, but there’s one more thing I want to say.

  Long ago, Edna Parker Watson told me that I would never be an interesting person. She may have been right about that. That’s not mine to judge, or to know. But she also said that I was the worst sort of female—namely, the type of woman who cannot be a friend to another woman, because she will always be “playing with toys that are not her own.” In this regard, Edna was wrong. Over the years, I’ve been a good friend to a great many women.

  I used to say that there were only two things I was ever good at: sewing and sex. But I have been selling myself short all this while, because the fact is that I am also very good at being a friend.

  I’m telling you all this, Angela, because I am offering my friendship to you, if you would ever care to have it.