Authors: Beth Gutcheon
A
s I came to understand much later, Avis Binney's social credentials were impeccable. Her father was a partner at the whitest of white shoe law firms and her mother came from one of the Dutch families of old New York; there is a tiny triangular park in lower Manhattan named for one of her direct ancestors and a street in the financial district named for another. At one time there had been in the family a famous estate north of the city, a favorite haunt of the painters of the Hudson River School, but the closest Avis had ever been to it was to visit its vistas in frames hanging at the New-York Historical Society. Perhaps it was that experience, of looking into pictures as if looking out a window from a life that wasn't hers but might have been, that made art so important to her.
You would have thought that, with her brains and breeding, she'd have been made for Miss Pratt's and it for her, but you would have been wrong. Miss Pratt's at mid-century wanted girls to be bubbly, cheerful, and easy to manage. Avis was hard to read, and shy even when she was a senior. To us new girls, her shyness registered as unearned hauteur, perhaps because she was tall and bony and frightened of making social errors; when she wasn't sure how to react, she often simply remained quiet. This made others suspect snobbery.
Avis was the only child of older parents. Her father, George Binney, had been nearly fifty when she was born; her mother was ten years younger but was still what was known in those days as an elderly primipara. Siblings for Avis were not contemplated. An older friend of mine described Alma Binney as a stern and humorless woman, fond of bridge and club life, who agreed with most of her social set that Franklin Roosevelt was a traitor to his class and family. Avis's parents were much involved with each other and with their various boards and pastimes. Avis was mostly raised by a thin-lipped Scottish nanny who stayed up all night pacing in panic when the moon was full because it reminded her of bombing raids on bright nights during the Blitz.
Throughout her childhood and youth Avis was far more at ease around adults than children; she understood better what they wanted, and how to please them, than she ever did with her classmates. She knew that among her mother's friends it was assumed that George Binney would predecease Alma, as husbands tended to do, and that Alma would enjoy a long and decorous widowhood for which she was calmly preparing. Instead, Alma suffered a massive stroke in her sleep when she was forty-nine, and as she herself would have put it, woke up dead. Avis was eight.
Alma had been dead not quite a full year before George married Belinda Ray, a magazine editor and self-described party girl who had come to New York from rural Ohio to attend Barnard College, fallen in love with city life, and stayed. She was as different from Alma as chalk from cheese, fun loving, irreverent, and beautiful. Having never been a mother, she functioned less as a parent to Avis than as an unusual but trustworthy pal. It made a great change in Avis's life, and after a period of confusion and standoffishness on Avis's part, which Belinda ignored, they became friends. Even in later years when Belinda had grown rather grand, she was known everywhere as a thoroughly nice woman.
In her own age group at Miss Pratt's, Avis was respected by most and loved by two or three. The younger girls, however, were less likely to see the point of her. New girls tended to prefer the seniors who were warm and affectionate, or mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Avis understood this and had long since made her peace with it, since her passions were not social. On a grand tour of Europe Avis had discovered Velázquez at the Prado in Madrid, and stood transfixed before first one and then another portrait of Philip IV with his long jaw, swollen lower lip, and sad droopy eyes. The pictures made him so present and human that it made Avis hungry for more; seeing them was like reading the beginning of a story you then couldn't discover the ending to. She wanted to know how it felt to wear those doublet things, to be never alone, to marry your own niece, to lose that beautiful prince, Carlos Baltazar. She hated it when children died. She had questions for Queen Mariana too, and for the lady-in-waiting, who looked so much like her roommate Cynthia, who was offering the tiny princess a plate of fruit in
Las Meninas
. Did they all really love the dwarves, or were they afraid of them? Avis was afraid of them. The rest of the group was ready to leave the museum and find some lunch when the tour leader did a head count and had to backtrack through half the galleries to find Avis and haul her off to where she was supposed to be.
When Avis returned to school, the History of Art teacher, one of the best and meanest teachers at Miss Pratt's, watched her commitment to this new passion first with skepticism, then with an amused pleasure in trying to find its false bottom or trick latches, and finally with admiration. Her classes had inspired scores of girls to major in art history in college and then to while away a year or two in internships at the Met in New York or the MFA in Boston before marriage, but a girl with an actual vocation came along far more rarely. By her senior year, when we first knew her and Avis had taken all the art history courses the school offered, the teacher did something she would normally have considered far above her pay grade; she designed an individual tutorial for Avis on Spanish painters from Pacheco to Sorolla. So Avis got out of taking Domestic Arts or something else she didn't care about to fill out her schedule.
Nothing, however, could provide her a bolt-hole from the school's famous social traditions, which had once, in its days as a finishing school, been its most important aspect. Equipping young ladies to converse graciously with companions they had no interest in was still seen as a key aspect of a Miss Pratt's education. Accordingly, each new girl was assigned a senior girl as her “date” for Saturday nights, a different senior for fall, winter, and spring terms, and yet others for special occasions. These arrangements occasionally led to real friendships, but most often they were regarded with anxious horror by the new girls. The older girls minded the whole business less, as the “dates” mirrored the roles of girls in the outside world, with the seniors playing the boys. The seniors sat with their own friends or roommates while the dates sat glumly by, attempting to fit in. But some seniors, and Avis was one, never got over the discomfort of these forced intimacies. I imagine she may have reacted with inner dismay to the news that her assigned companion for the annual winter Ice Cream Concert was popular, self-assured iconoclastic Dinah Kittredge. Avis's only contact with Dinah up to then had been her duty as library proctor to ask Dinah and her friends to stop erupting in laughter during study hall.
The Ice Cream Concert was always a classical performance of some kind, followed by ice cream, so the girls would look forward to the event even if they were sporty or lowbrow philistines who knew nothing of classical music, and many of us were. All that the new girls knew for sure was that we must wear velvet skirts and Capezio flats to this concert, as the clothing list that came with our acceptance letters had specified. By the time Dinah and I arrived at Avis's door I knew my velvet skirt was wrong. It looked homemade, with a broad embroidered tape of vaguely Slavic design for a waistband. No one else had a homemade skirt or a contrasting waistband, and all too clearly my mother had had trouble setting the zipper, as the velvet was sewn into a pucker at the base of it. Avis of course noticed this at once, but I sensed that she felt not satirical but sorry about me and my skirt, and I wished she could keep me and protect me, but my date was a girl on the next floor up; instructed on how to find the right room, I left Avis alone with Dinah.
Dinah hated it. She was an alpha girl and she especially didn't like being paired with those who, though senior to her, were not class leaders, or beloved, or notorious. Avis also had an unfortunate haircut that winter, a severe bob that made her neck even longer and her nose more prominent. They had fallen silent by the time my date and I caught up with them on the porch and we all sallied forth into the dark evening.
My date was a jock named Lonnie whose long lank blond hair made her look like an Afghan hound. The four of us crunched grimly along in the new snow, the crisp winter night air sharp with woodsmoke in our nostrils. The grand houses that lined the village street loomed dark on all sides of us with yellow lamplight glowing from their window eyes as we joined the chattering flood of girls heading from all parts of the campus toward the cloakroom door at the side of the dining hall.
Avis's roommate had been saving places for Avis and Dinah at the table in the corner where she was sitting with her tiny date, a very young freshman with tight curls and thick glasses magnifying mournful eyes. Through the soup course and then the mystery meat, the four of them made laborious conversation about chemistry, which the roommate loved and Avis didn't and neither of the new girls had taken yet. At my table we were trying to talk about Baroque music.
No dessert was served at dinner, since there would be ice cream later. There were rumors about how wonderful the ice cream would be. Monotony and deprivation make a fine petri dish for rumors about almost anything. These rumors were wrong; the ice cream, served in slabs, was that grim supermarket stuff that came in stripes, one chocolate, one vanilla, and one strawberry. I remember that forty years on, and I don't even care about sweets. But the music! They didn't stint there. They had the Juilliard String Quartet and the program started with a Brahms that was transporting.
In retrospect some believed it was a piece of snobbish malevolence that the headmistress, who had certainly told us not to rattle our programs or unwrap cough drops once the music began, did not also point out that you don't clap between movements of a classical piece. Of course there would be girls who did not know that in advance. Of course there would be girls who started clapping when the bows were rested. Would be and were, and one of them was Dinah.
It was a tiny moment. She wasn't the only one. But Dinah was proud, as most are when young and ignorant, and thin-skinned about offenses to her dignity. She stilled her hands the instant she realized Avis hadn't moved, but not before a hot shock of humiliation had flashed through her system. She had wanted to show that she was alive to this new beauty, or simply to demonstrate the sophistication of her taste. We all did. Avis didn't correct her or in any way contribute to her embarrassment. But Dinah never forgave her for seeing.
I
'm making it sound as if Dinah was my best friend. She wasn't at all. My best friend was a girl named Meg Colbert who came from the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont. Meg and I bonded over the fetal pig we dissected together in sophomore biology class. She was very shy and homesick (though remarkably cold-blooded about the pig), and later told me she had cried every single day she was at school our first year. There was a soul mate for me. It was Dinah who told me that the town Meg came from was Colbert, Vermont. It was the kind of thing Dinah knew.
Meg and I roomed together junior and senior years and were thoroughly happy together. I went home with her for spring vacation both years. She lived on a farm, threadbare but so beautiful you could practically eat the views. Her father kept dairy cattle, and her mother taught piano and played the organ at church. Meg kept chickens. And there were horses. We went cantering in those gorgeous spring-green pastures, through those endless woods, every day it wasn't raining. Heaven.
Meg is dead now. She married a boy she'd grown up with, stayed in the Northeast Kingdom, and died in childbirth. She was home alone when her labor started, and a snowstorm had knocked down the power lines and blocked the roads. The town's one ambulance was already out and stuck somewhere. Then a falling branch ripped Meg's phone line off the side of her house, and by the time someone got there to check on her, it was too late. They found her on the floor of the kitchen in a sea of blood, cradling the dead telephone. Her daughter lived, but she's an odd one, and never comes to the city.
S
uch an interesting question, whether mean people know they are mean. Thinking of Dinah always makes me wonder about that.
Did you know that the origin of the word
gossip
in English is “god-sibling”? It's the talk between people who are godparents to the same child, people who have a legitimate loving interest in the person they talk about. It's talk that weaves a net of support and connection beneath the people you want to protect. I am godmother to Dinah's son Nicholas. My gossip, Nick's godfather, is Stewie Brumder, a great pal of Dinah's then husband Richard Wainwright. I haven't seen Stewie since Dinah's divorce. Really, I'm not sure I've seen him since the christening. Interesting how things change: the people you thought would be friends forever disappear, and others become more and more important to you over time.
Mrs. Oba and I tend to close the shop at lunchtime, and eat our lunch together in the upstairs workroom, surrounded by the ladykins of our best customers. I don't worry about losing business by closing; most of ours is by appointment. The workroom has a huge cutting table, though we make almost nothing from scratch anymore. Where there used to be floor-to-ceiling fabric bolts, now we have our racks of ready-to-wear in sizes from two to twenty. We don't keep much on the floor downstairs, just enough to let passersby know it's a dress shop. My ladies will come in and say, “I need something for the PEN Gala,” and we get to work.
We know everything about them. We know which ones are allergic to wool, so all their winter skirts and trousers have to be lined. Avis has scars on her chest from skin cancers, so we never show her décolletage. Mrs. Crittenden is unusually proud of her arms, which to my taste speak too eloquently of the gym, so we try to put her into romantic shirts with flowing sleeves, but she's not having it.
We know what balls they go to, who's getting married and with what color scheme, who's had a mastectomy or a tummy tuck. They know much less about us. Most of them think Mrs. Oba speaks only Japanese. That's fine with her; she's there to tailor, not to sell. Selling is my job.
I met Dinah's parents and sisters several times when they came to school and took us out to lunch. Unlike me, Dinah adored her parents. Her father taught English at the private day school inside the Canaan Woods compound. Dinah and her sisters attended the school for free as faculty children, and some other outsiders were bused in from surrounding towns, but most of the students came from inside the gates. I learned from Dinah not to call the houses “mansions.” If you're a tourist or a servant, it's a mansion. If you or your friends live there, it's a big house. Mrs. Kittredge sold real estate, mostly big houses inside Canaan Woods. Dinah was proud that her father was everyone's favorite teacher at the school, and even prouder that her mother worked and made more money than Mr. Kittredge.
Context is everything. I began to really understand Dinah when I went to stay with her. The June we graduated, about nine of us were invited to a deb party at the Canaan Woods Casino. I was the only one invited to stay at Dinah's house.
Mother had offered to make me a dress for the dance, but Grandmother Loviah could be heard rolling her eyes even on the phone. She sent me to Mrs. Bachman, her saleswoman at Saks. (Her saleswoman! Who knew you could have your own? The beginning of my real education.) We chose a very pretty floor-length A-line gown with cap sleeves in lemon-yellow taffeta, and I wore it to everything that season. Jackie Kennedy was in the White House, and the dress was pure homage. It was brilliantly made; I still keep it in a cloth bag in the workroom. When we made more clothes from scratch than we do now, I used it to show my workers how the seams are finished, and how beautifully the sleeves are set. I know now that yellow is not my color, but I didn't then; when I wore that dress I felt beautiful. My first experience with clothes as emotional armor instead of the badge of the misfit.
Grandmother Loviah clearly viewed that dress as an investment. She thought if I had a good dress and a string of real pearls, I'd catch a husband. A husband of our class, dear. In her day, very few girls went to college. They were “finished,” they “came out,” they got married. Clergymen blessed the debutantes every June, just as they blessed the foxhounds in the fall.
Well, the dress
was
a good investment; it was the beginning of my métier. But I can hear Granny spinning like a dervish in her grave up in Trinity Church Cemetery, that a grandchild of hers would keep a shop.
Dinah's house existed on a different planet from where I grew up. Dinah's father was lanky and handsome, a very tweed-jacket-and-corduroy-pants kind of man. Her mother was a wonderful cookâin fact the whole family cooks well. They cooked together. My first night there, Dinah's little sister Treena asked me how much stock she needed for two cups of risottoâas if I knew what risotto was. She thought all grown-ups knew. Mrs. Kittredge, whose hair had been white since her twenties, had deep blue eyes and a wide smile. She dressed in stockings and pumps and a series of suits that looked much better than they were because she cut the cheap buttons off and sewed on very good ones she bought at a special shop in the city. The buttons were always black, so she could wear everything with one or two pairs of really good black shoes. You can't fake quality in shoes, but I used the button trick for years.
When Dinah took me up to see the grammar school she had gone to, I began to understand precisely how her childhood had shaped Dinah's stance in the world. The school was on top of the ridge behind the lake, a sprawling campus with a half-timbered main building that had been added to many times to make room for the best of everything. There was a new gym, a new preschool, and a new science lab. There were two vast playing fields, and a spectacular view of the wooded compound below. Canaan Woods was shaped like a bowl, with the lake at the bottom like a silver mirror, and slate roofs gleaming among the trees. The houses were mostly hidden by leafy woods except for those beautiful blue-gray slants of slate. Many had six or eight bedrooms, many had tennis courts or swimming pools, little glimmering splinters of aqua or green glimpsed through the leaves far below us. All got you access to the Canaan Woods Hunt Club (foxhunting), the Rod and Game Club (the other kind of hunting), the Yacht Club (this was a joke, it was mostly a boathouse down by the lake where members kept their little sailing dinghies and canoes), and the Casino, where you could eat lunch or dinner, play cards, dance on Friday nights, lounge around the swimming pool in summer, or stump in on frozen feet for hot chocolate beside the fire after an afternoon of skating in winter.
Dinah was full of stories of childhood friends and happy times at school. And yet when we stood together looking down at the roofs and the lake, the Casino sprawling beside the water and far beyond, the stone bell tower of the Episcopal church and the thick stone piers of the big iron gates, she said, “It's a little like living in a zoo.” Clearly what she liked was being welcome here, passing for a native, but really belonging outside, with the layer of irony that gave all her observations about who the people in the big houses were, and how they were shaped by what they took for granted, and who she was, and which was better.
Going to the deb party with Dinah gave me courage. Her dress was midnight blue satin and had a Paris label; they'd bought it at a consignment shop on Upper Madison. “It had been worn once, if that,” Mrs. Kittredge said, shaking her head. “In Europe, you know, you buy the very best you can afford and then you wear it over and over again. I went all the way through college with one very good wool skirt and three cashmere sweaters.”
D
espite my grandmother's best efforts, and despite a great deal of fun I had that season, I did not find a husband. As things have worked out, I think we can conclude that I wasn't looking. Apparently the vision of domestic bliss provided by my parents carried more weight with me than all the romantic stories we'd read and cultural promptings we lived with.
My father's latest flash in the pan had flared and gone out that spring. I don't remember what it wasâa new kind of car wash, I think. All my classmates were going to college in the fall. I had gotten into the college I wanted to attend but hadn't been offered enough scholarship money. Grandmother Loviah was unmoved. She had other grandchildren to worry about. She would pay for me to go to the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School, if I wanted to be a secretary. I did not. Mrs. Wanamaker made a call on my behalf to her couturiere, the famous Philomena, and on July first, I started work in her atelier on Seventh Avenue. The famous Philomena was not an easy person to work for, but to me, it was like throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch.
W
e've been unusually busy in the shop this week, for obvious reasons. Mrs. S, a client we haven't seen in four years, bought an $8,000 ball gown yesterday. While we were fitting her, she said, as if it had just occurred to her, “Oh Loviah, aren't you a friend of Dinah Wainwright's?” (She pronounced it Lov-I-ah.)
I hummed something. Pins in the mouth are so useful.
Eventually Mrs. S said, “I don't know her very
well.
I've read her for years, of course.”
I took out my pins and said, “I think Bradley is going to love you in this dress. It's elegant, and it shows off your beautiful little waist.”
“Bradley likes elegant,” she said doubtfully. This is a woman whose idea of glamour is her breasts falling out of her blouse. She tried again.
“I think Dinah might be interested in our apartment. It's finished, finally. Alexa Hampton did it. I'd be glad to have her come and have a look.”
“She doesn't really do that kind of writing much anymore.”
“I know, but she does sometimes.”
“But perhaps this wouldn't be the time.”
“No. Of course. I just meant. Later on, you could mention it to her. Or I could give her a ring in a month or two, if you had her number.”
“Yes. Do you want to come in for a final fitting on Thursday, or shall we just send this along to your apartment when Mrs. Oba is finished? Why don't we send it, won't that be most convenient for you?”
When she had gone, Mrs. Oba asked, “Would the English word be
strumpet
?” She does amuse me.
At least we got her out of the shop before Avis arrived.
W
hen we were young, I saw Avis Binney as one of those impossible sophisticates, girls raised in New York who all knew each other from Chapin or Brearley or Spence, who'd been to Barclay's Dancing Classes together, who went to Gstaad or Hobe Sound for Christmas. Of course, I know her far better now.
Her stepmother, Belinda, was a beauty into very old age, and a lot of fun. We made her a dinner suit for her ninetieth birthday party, in emerald taffeta with an Elizabethan collar that framed her face. Even when she was dying, Belinda had her hair and nails done every week; she said the worse you felt, the more important it was to look your best. The week before she died her saleswoman at Bergdorf's sent up a pair of sensationally expensive black snakeskin stiletto heels on approval, and she bought them. Such a hopeful thing to do, and the shoes
did
show off her beautiful legs. Avis buried her in them.
In looks, regrettably, Avis took after her father, whom I never met. When we were in school she resembled nothing so much as a young emu, which made her name unfortunate to those who'd had any Latin. Now in late middle age, she has such poise that she's achieved a distinction, if not a beauty.
A cadre from the press corps that had trailed her there was camped outside my shop when Avis and I came downstairs after her fitting. (I'd learned my lesson by then and taken her up to the workroom.) We could see them through the showroom windows. She turned to me with a look of panic. In the past I have had my own reasons for wanting to be able to enter or leave my workrooms without being seen, so many years ago my friend bought me a small flat in the apartment block that abuts the building the shop is in. We broke through the walls to allow me to reach my apartment through a door at the back of the workroom. I led Avis back upstairs, into my flat, and down to the lobby, where she could exit onto a side street once the doorman hailed her a taxi.