While My Pretty One Sleeps (18 page)

Linings. He'd figured it out before he was old enough to shave. The one constant. Whether you sold a jacket, a full-length, a fingertip, a stole or a cape, it had to be lined.

That simple realization together with a grudging loan from his father had been the beginning of Steuber Enterprises. The kids he'd hired fresh from FIT or Rhode Island School of Design had imagination and flair. His linings with their exciting patterns had caught on.

But linings didn't make you a byword in a business that hungered for recognition. That was when he started looking for kids who knew how to design suits. He made it his ambition to be the new Chanel.

Once again he'd succeeded. His suits were in the best stores. But he was one of a dozen, two dozen, all competing for the same upscale customer. Not enough money there.

Steuber reached for a cigarette. His gold lighter with his initials blazoned in rubies was on his desk. For an instant after he lit the cigarette, he held the lighter, turning it over and over in his hand. All the Feds had to do was add up how much the contents of this room and this lighter had cost and they'd keep digging till they had enough to indict him on income-tax evasion.

It was the damn unions that kept you from making a real profit, he told himself. Everyone knew that. Every time Steuber saw the ILGWU commercial he wanted to throw something at the television set. All they wanted was more money. Stop all the importing. Hire us.

It was only three years ago that he'd started doing what the rest of them did, set up off-the-books places for immigrants without green cards. Why not? The Mexicans were good seamstresses.

And then he'd found where the real money lay. He'd been all set to close out the sweatshops when Neeve Kearny blew the
whistle on him. Then that crazy Ethel Lambston had started snooping around. He could still see that bitch bursting in here last week, last Wednesday evening. May was still outside. Otherwise right then . . .

He'd thrown her out, literally taken her shoulders and shoved her across the showroom to the main door, pushed her so she stumbled against the elevator. Even that hadn't fazed her. As he slammed the door, she'd shouted, “In case you haven't found out yet, they're going to get you on income tax as well as sweatshops. And that's just for starters. I know how you've been lining your pockets.”

He'd known then that he couldn't let her keep digging into his affairs. She had to be stopped.

The phone rang, a soft purring sound. Annoyed, Gordon picked it up. “What is it, May?”

His secretary sounded apologetic. “I knew you wouldn't want to be disturbed, sir, but the agents from the United States Attorney's office insist on seeing you.”

“Send them in.” Steuber smoothed the jacket of his light-beige Italian silk suit, flicked a handkerchief over a smudge on his square-cut diamond cufflinks and settled himself in his desk chair.

As the three agents came in, professional and businesslike in their attitude, he remembered for the tenth time in the last hour that all this had begun because Neeve Kearny had blown the whistle on his illegal factories.

•   •   •

At eleven o'clock on Friday morning, Jack Campbell returned
from a staff meeting and again attacked the manuscript he had meant to read the night before. This time he forced himself to concentrate on the spicy adventures of a prominent thirty-three-year-old psychiatrist who falls in love with her client, an over-the-hill film idol. They go off to St. Martin's together on a clandestine vacation. The film idol because of his long and lusty experience with women breaks down the barriers the psychiatrist has built around her femininity. In turn, after three weeks of unending coupling under starry skies, she rebuilds his confidence in himself. He goes back to Los Angeles to accept the role as grandfather in a new situation comedy. She returns to her practice knowing that someday she'll meet a man suitable for a life with her. The book ends as she admits her new client, a handsome thirty-eight-year-old stockbroker who tells her, “I'm too rich, too scared, too lost.”

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.