Chương 4
“You followed the record,” Mara said. “Even when it made the label untidy.”
“My father approved that correction.”
“Your father approved a dead woman.”
The kettle whistled.
Mara poured water over two tea bags. She drank hers without milk. Elise let hers cool untouched.
“Tell me what happened in 1978,” Elise said.
Mara’s eyes moved to the sewing machines.
“No,” she said.
Elise had expected anger, grief, perhaps a rehearsed history. The refusal unsettled her.
“You broke into a gallery to expose it.”
“I broke glass to stop a sale. That doesn’t mean I’m going to perform forty-eight years of my life for you before breakfast.”
“Then what do you expect me to do?”
“Read.”
Mara pushed herself up and went to the bedroom. She returned with a flat cardboard box tied in cotton tape. The box had once held men’s shirts. The name of a department store no longer in business was printed across the lid.
Inside were eight items.
A black-and-white photograph showed a younger Mara at a worktable, head bent over emerald fabric. Only part of the garment appeared in the frame. A pay envelope from Voss Custom Garments contained no money but bore her name and a date in October 1978. There were two pencil sketches of a coat collar covered in small silver flowers, a grocery receipt with measurements written on the back, three pages torn from a production notebook, and a swatch of green wool.
Elise touched nothing.
“Where are the rest of the records?”
“Gone, mostly. Basement flood in 1999. My husband dried what he could on the fire escape. We lost the sofa and kept the grocery receipt. Life is not respectful about value.”
“These prove you worked on the coat.”
“They prove I was near it.”
“You said your name was hidden in the hem.”
“I put it there.”
“Why?”
“Because Julian told me he would credit me, then the press release arrived with his name alone.”
“And you thought a hidden strip would protect you?”
“No. I thought it would annoy him after I was dead.”
The answer held no triumph. Mara rubbed her thumb over a pale indentation on the table.
“Julian found out,” she continued. “Not immediately. Years later, perhaps. I don’t know. The strip was still there when the coat came back to the house for restoration in 2004. Adrian found it then.”
“How do you know?”
“He visited me.”
Elise sat down across from her.
Mara’s mouth tightened, not dramatically, only enough to show that the next words cost more.
“He came to this apartment with a bottle of wine and a folder. Your mother was alive then. You were a child.”
“I was five.”
“You had chicken pox.”
“How could you know that?”
“He complained he’d been sleeping in the guest room because you kept climbing into your parents’ bed.”
The detail was so ordinary that Elise believed it before she wanted to.
“What was in the folder?”
“A release. He said the coat was going into a retrospective and the old strip would confuse people. He offered me twenty thousand dollars to sign a statement that I had worked as a seamstress under Julian’s direction and had no design claim.”
“Did you sign?”
“No.”
“Did he threaten you?”
“He explained consequences. Men like your father prefer explanations. They sound cleaner.”
“What consequences?”
“My husband’s tailoring shop supplied alterations to three Voss stores. Adrian said the house was consolidating vendors. He never said the contracts depended on my signature. They disappeared anyway.”
Elise looked toward the cardigan on the chair.
“Your husband knew?”
“He knew enough to hate your father. Not enough to hate me for refusing the money.”
“Why didn’t you go public?”
“With what? A photograph of me sewing fabric? A hidden label nobody would let me inspect? A story about a dead designer and his powerful son? Your father had lawyers. I had rent.”
“You had the sketches.”
“I had children.”
Elise glanced around the apartment, though there were no family photographs in sight.
“A son,” Mara said. “Daniel. He was twenty-six then and applying to the fire department. He asked me not to turn our name into a lawsuit. He said it once. That was enough.”
“What changed now?”
“Daniel died in March.”
The box fan clicked as it turned.
Elise lowered her eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
Mara said it without inviting comfort.
She lifted the swatch from the box and held it between two fingers. The wool looked almost black in the kitchen light. When she turned it, green rose from the surface.
“The house announced the sale three weeks after his funeral,” she said. “I saw the coat in the newspaper. I decided I was tired of protecting people who were already gone.”
“And Celia?”
“Your aunt found me first.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
Mara retied the cotton tape around the box. She did not offer it to Elise.
“You may photograph these tomorrow,” she said. “With a witness and a proper list. Tonight you would make mistakes.”
“You trust me enough to show me.”
“I trust you enough to see what you do next.”
The distinction followed Elise home.
At eight the next morning, the House of Voss issued a statement.
It described the gallery incident as an unfortunate act by an individual with a long-standing personal grievance. It confirmed that a fabric inscription had been discovered inside the coat but warned against conclusions before expert examination. It praised Adrian Voss for cooperating with insurers and authorities and promised a full review led by independent specialists.
Elise’s name did not appear.
At eight seventeen, she received an email suspending her access to the archive pending an internal investigation into the unauthorized cutting of a historic garment.
At eight twenty-four, Adrian called.
She let it ring twice before answering.
“Come to the house,” he said.
“Which house?”
May you like
“Don’t be childish.”
The family townhouse on East Seventy-Third Street was where Elise had grown up and where Adrian still lived alone. He called it the house even though he owned buildings in three countries and an actual fashion company known by the same word.
