A suitcase? Grandma never went anywhere that I knew of. Or that anyone else in the family knew of. I mean anywhere. Ever.
It was a very old suitcase. The frame was made of wood, and the side and top and end panels were rattan. The handle was crumbly old leather. If it had been new, the suitcase would have looked at home in a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie. Which made me wonder a couple of things.
First, what was Grandma doing with it?
And second, where had she been hiding it all these years? Because let me tell you, I spent a lot of time in Grandma’s house. It’s not very big. And I’ve been through all of it, including the basement. At least, I thought I’d been through all of it. Only here was this suitcase that I’d never seen.
The suitcase had a name tag on it—not an old luggage tag, but one of Grandma’s Scotch-taped bequests. She had been really careful with this one, though. She had doubled up the tape, sticky side to sticky side, and made a loop, so the adhesive wouldn’t touch the bag. Which made it seem extremely important. I was very excited when I looked at the tag.
Only it said,
Suitcase for Uncle Joe.
Not for me. In just a few seconds I’d decided this was something special, and it must’ve been for me. Now it wasn’t. I was so disappointed.
I don’t know what made me turn the tag over. None of the other tags had writing on both sides. But I did. And the other side said,
Contents for Jane.
Which was how I found the dress.
3
I
need to be very careful about how I describe the dress. Because it is
completely
relevant. More than just relevant. Essential.
The bodice of the dress was made of two layers of this amazing sheer pearl-blue silk satin. If the dressmaker had used only one layer, the dress would have been indecent in 1928, and maybe even today. Because you could see right through a single layer of the silk. But with another layer added, the dress became translucent rather than transparent. You could
almost
see through it, but not quite. Which made it
incredibly
provocative.
The fabric was cut on a diagonal, what fashion design people call “on the bias,” which makes the fabric cling to the body much more intimately than if the weave was simply vertical and horizontal. The bodice was sleeveless, and the neckline plunged modestly in the front and so immodestly in the back that it would be daring even now. I can only imagine what a fuss it would have caused when first worn. The front of the bodice was sewn with an elaborate Art Deco pattern of dark blue glass beads so iridescent you’d think Tiffany made every single bead. I am talking about Mr. Louis Comfort Tiffany, not the store with the turquoise gift boxes.
The pearl-blue tulle skirt flirted with transparency, and it was also sewn with the amazing blue beads, but fewer of them, so they did not weigh down the skirt. The hemline looked as if it would fall just below the knee in front and to about midcalf in back.
I could not have written that description when I first saw the dress. I needed to get quite an education first. At the time, all I could think was
Wow.
Once I got past
wow,
I realized it was the kind of dress you’d picture the women in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels wearing. The young, pretty ones. The ones who make the men and boys gasp for breath. The careless, reckless, gorgeous, sexual ones. The
dangerous
ones.
There was something else in the suitcase, too. An old menu. From a restaurant called La Tour d’Argent. Which is French for The Tower of Silver. I know because I looked it up on the Internet. The name is in French because the restaurant is in France. In Paris, to be precise. In fact, it has been there for four hundred years. The fact that one restaurant has been in business in the same place for four hundred years is pretty amazing, but not nearly as amazing as the fact that, as far as I could tell,
my Grandma
had been there. Not to mention that she had apparently been there wearing this reckless, gorgeous, sexual, dangerous dress.
I asked my mom why she never told me Grandma went to Paris.
“As far as I know, she didn’t,” my mom said.
“Then where did she get the menu?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” she said.
“What about the suitcase? Where was that?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“But you grew up in this house,” I said. “How could you not know anything about it?”
“Because I don’t.”
“What about the dress? Did Grandpa give it to her?”
“I have no idea,” she said.
“Did Grandma ever go
anywhere?
”
“Not that I know of,” she said. Then she stopped and thought for a while. “I wonder.” She sat down and frowned, which is what she does when she is trying to remember something. Finally she said, “I was only eighteen. Almost nineteen. I was helping Grandma and Ginny Anderson cook chickens over at Sacred Heart. I asked Grandma where she thought I should go for my birthday. I just meant, What restaurant? Only she gave me this stare and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere. Not for the next six months.’ Then Ginny asked Grandma, ‘What’s wrong, you think it runs in the family?’ And then the two of them laughed until they cried. I asked Grandma what was so funny, but she never told me.”
“You think she went to Paris?”
My mom and I both looked at the dress, and the menu, and the suitcase. She didn’t have to say anything. I had the answer.
From what my mom said, Ginny Anderson seemed to know something about it. Maybe she even went with Grandma. Ginny was Susie Anderson’s grandma, and if I had heard this story years ago, I could have asked her. Only Ginny died two years before Grandma, and Susie and her family moved away after that, so all I had was the suitcase, the dress, and the menu. In other words, a mystery. Which I vowed I would solve.
As it turns out, vows are easy to make. But mysteries are not necessarily easy to solve.
In fact, for a long time, the only thing I had besides the suitcase, the dress, and the menu was the vow. For four whole years, in fact. I wish I could tell you that I immediately knew what to make of it. But I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t have a clue what to do. So I did something practical: I took the dress to Chicago. Which I should mention is only about a half-hour drive from Kirland. Twenty minutes if there’s no traffic, although there’s always traffic. So half an hour.
Here’s another thing you need to know about Kirland: A lot of people who live there
have never been to Chicago.
Like I said—Bumfuck.
I folded the dress very carefully, wrapped it in white tissue paper, and gently placed it in a big shopping bag, which I seat-belted into the front seat of my Tercel. I drove into downtown Chicago to find a dry cleaner. And no, it did not occur to me to take the dress to a dry cleaner in Kirland. If I have to explain why, you have not been paying attention.
I parked at the Chicago Place Mall on North Michigan Avenue and found the public phones. The mall is modern, but the phones still had phone books hanging from them. I looked in the Yellow Pages under
Dry Cleaners,
and wrote down a couple in the most expensive neighborhoods. Then I drove until I found one I liked the look of.
I guess I picked the right dry cleaner. When the ladies behind the counter saw Grandma’s dress, their eyes got big. They oohed and aahed, and they handled it very carefully, like they knew immediately it was something special. They did a very nice job cleaning it, too. When I picked it up, it was packed like it would survive a nuclear war.
They charged me fifty-two dollars. I almost fainted. But I didn’t. I paid, took the dress home, and put it—and the mystery—away in my closet. Where they both stayed.
For four years. Until my junior year at Purdue. Second semester. History of Fashion.
We were looking at slides. Which we saw a lot of. Which was when Grandma’s dress came up on the screen.
The picture wasn’t
like
Grandma’s dress. It
was
Grandma’s dress. Actually, the very first thing that occurred to me was that somebody must’ve stolen the dress from my closet back home in Kirland and taken a picture of it, although why anybody would do such a thing I couldn’t imagine. Then right away I decided that was silly. Which didn’t stop me from going back to my dorm room and calling Mom and having her check, and of course the dress was still hanging where it was supposed to be.
Before I called my mom, I went up to the professor at the end of class. Her name was Professor Singer. She was tall and thin and looked like she had almost been a model when she was younger. I say almost, because her eyes were a little too close together. But she was very nice when I told her I had a question about a dress. The one with the very sheer skirt. With the blue-black glass beads. Did she know anything about it?
She checked her notes. “It just says ‘Collection of Flapper Dresses, 1920s, Paris.’ ”
“Nothing else?” I asked.
“Nothing else.” I guess she could see that I was unusually interested. “Why?”
“Because . . .” For a moment I wasn’t sure if I should tell her. Like it was my big secret. The thing that made me feel special, different from everybody else in that big lecture hall, even if I hadn’t earned the right to feel special, since the dress was really my Grandma’s, after all, and I only got it because she died. But even if I hadn’t earned it, just having the dress in my closet back at home made me feel like I had some little spark of magic that was all mine. And I was afraid the magic might go away if I told.
Then I thought,
If you can’t tell your History of Fashion professor about this dress, who can you tell?
So I told her Grandma had a dress exactly like that, which she left to me.
“It’s a very unusual dress,” she said. “For there to be two identical dresses would be . . . unusual.”
“It is unusual,” I said.
“Where are you from?”
“Kirland,” I said. I almost said
Bumfuck,
but I didn’t think I should call it that to a professor, so I didn’t.
“That would be . . .
very
unusual,” she said.
“I
know,
” I said.
“You’re sure it’s exactly the same?”
“Absolutely.” I was.
“Hmmm,” she said. Then she thought a little. I was afraid her eyes would cross. But they didn’t. “What do you know about its provenance?” she asked.
Provenance
is a fancy art word that means where something came from and where it’s been.
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Well,” she said. “Well.” And I thought that was that. But then she said, “We can’t lose an opportunity like this, can we?”
I didn’t know what opportunity, but I shook my head no anyway.
“You’re required to write a paper for my class,” she said. “The dress can be your paper!”
“But I don’t know anything about it. And”—I tried to say this part very diplomatically, and I even pointed at her notes to back me up—“neither do you.”
“But you can
research,
” she said. “I’ll help you. Oh, this is going to be fun!”
Up to that moment it never occurred to me that you could research a dress. I knew you could research the building of the Sears Tower, or the history of space exploration, or even—yuck—the savings and loan industry in northern Indiana. I knew you could, because at one sorry time or another in my so-called education, I’d actually had to research those things. But I didn’t know you could research a dress. Much less an old dress. Much less an old dress you knew nothing about.
Only now I did know something. Two things, in fact. First, it was really from the 1920s. And second, it—or they—had been made in Paris.
“Paris?” I asked.
“Paris,” Professor Singer said.
“Paris,
France?
” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. I guess if you are a professor of Fashion History, then of course it’s Paris, France.
Not only did my Grandma apparently go to Paris and dine at some fabulous famous four-hundred-year-old restaurant, she also apparently got her reckless, gorgeous, dangerous dress in Paris. All of which made me wonder where else my Grandma might have been, and what else she’d done, that I knew nothing about.
“There are really ways to research a dress?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
And do you know, there are. It was quite a lot of work. I had to read articles, and even a couple of books, about specific French designers. Like Madeleine Vionnet. Today she is pretty much only a perfume. But in the 1920s she was a very influential Parisian designer. She was the one who pioneered cutting fabrics on the bias. So at first I thought maybe Grandma’s dress was a Vionnet. Except for the split-level hemline. And the fabric choices. So I came up with a theory. That somebody who worked for Vionnet then went to work for another designer named Louiseboulanger, and borrowed elements from both, then added some of her own.
I was sure the person who designed this dress was a woman.
Anyway, that was my theory. And I was pretty well able to pinpoint 1928 as the year it was made. Probably late 1928. Because hemlines dropped in 1929, along with the stock market, although I don’t think the two things were necessarily related.
Professor Singer was right about it being fun. Plus I learned an enormous amount, although
not
how Grandma came to own such a dress.
I put everything I’d learned into my paper. Which took a really long time. It ended up being thirty pages long, and it had ninety-seven footnotes. I am not a big fan of footnotes. If I could have written this paper with even one footnote less, I would have. But I couldn’t. It all belonged.
I will not quote much from the paper. It would take up too much space, and a lot of it is pretty technical, about fabrics and stitches and beads and such. And I have already told you most of my conclusions. But one part of the paper was my favorite, and apparently it was Professor Singer’s favorite part too, because she wrote
Yes!
and
Wonderful!
in big letters in the margin. It was the final paragraph: