March 5, 2012

I can’t recreate the argument that ensued when Mom found out that Dad had spent my college clothes money on a silk suit and that wasn’t even the worst part. I mean, the suit was bad enough, but the shoes were what she kept coming back to, time and again. You have to hand it to him, really; the suit was gorgeous but the shoes were extraordinary. I don’t mean they were bizarre or a funny color. Their extraordinary-ness lay in the very fact that he had bought them. They were just so unnecessary and so obviously a purchase the only reason for the existence of which was gratification. You didn’t need these shoes just to walk around in. It was the first inkling I got of what luxury might mean from a negative perspective.

Here’s what I have come to understand about the shoes and the suit. The suit was its own explanation; for the years that Dad kept it, it looked wonderful on him. When he wore it, he became another person, physically. You would want to stop and watch him walk by, that suit looked that good.  Dad was a stickler about tailoring. He had the jacket collar lowered a good half an inch so that the right amount of shirt collar would show and the jacket would never ride up so that the shirt collar might disappear as if down his back. He had the sleeves shortened so that 3/8 of an inch of French cuff would show, just enough to give you a glimpse of his cuff links. His shirts, by the way, had no pockets. A shirt with a breast pocket was a day-time shirt, one you wore to work; a man dressed for the evening had no need to put anything in a shirt pocket. When he wore that suit, Dad never carried a wallet; he had a money clip so nothing would break the line from shoulder to the point where the trouser leg touched the top of the shoe.

The shoe. Those shoes were what were called “Italian” slip-ons. They were absolutely seamless from toe to heel and the cut away over the arch revealed just a hint of the stocking. Such shoes, in a soft black leather, were very popular in the late 1950s; some cool boys wore them with Levi’s and white socks. But a soft black leather was not what Dad was after, and he would never wear white socks with anything but his work shoes, the ones with the steel toes. So this is where conjecture enters the game. I think Dad’s vanity forced him (allowed him?) to make a virtue out of necessity. My father had very small feet. I’d say, almost dainty. I couldn’t get into his shoes and I just have your average size nines. I think Dad knew that this suit was going to attract a lot of  attention  and he needed something to prevent his little feet from disappearing into the floor and throwing the whole presentation out of whack. It was a Fred Astaire problem, in reverse. The slightly tapered trouser legs helped, just like the lowered jacket collar kept the starched white shirt collar visible against Dad’s tanned neck; they didn’t help enough. Dad needed you to see his feet so the proportions would work and there were only two ways to do that. One was to buy a pair of shoes at least a size too big and hope no one would notice, as if you were a short guy with lifts in your shoes or big heels. The other was to wear a pair of shoes that in and of themselves would justify the suit, a pair of shoes not dependent on the feet in them, shoes that drew your mind from the foot to the marvelous thing the foot was making possible. Dad went for option number two.

Option number two. The Italian slip on. Lined in doeskin, uppers made of deerskin, but—and get this, because this is what made the shoes—the deerskin uppers were covered by a layer of shantung silk that just missed matching exactly the color of the shantung silk suit. Of course, that was Dad’s decision; the silk exterior of the shoe signaled its affinity with the suit but the slightly dark grey-shading-toward-black pearl reminded you that this moment was not just about the suit but about the man who wore it, the man who could think to buy such shoes the same day he bought such a suit.

I think you can tell from this account that I’m not angry about this. I can’t even say, “Anymore,” because I don’t think I was mad at him then. I might have been hurt, but that was just as likely to have been the consequence of having my mother tell me over and over what a betrayal that suit and those shoes represented. I have to say I don’t think I felt it that way. My memory was that I was so excited about going to college that nothing bothered me. Besides, by that time I had come to realize how many slips there were likely to be ‘twixt the cup and the lip for my father. It was awkward, I admit, negotiating a much abbreviated shopping trip with my mother for what we could scrounge together. And I am certain that it was she who was truly betrayed. Whatever her failings, my mother was excited for me. Well, actually, Mom was a thorough-going narcissist and so my going off to college was really about her. Dad’s betrayal, it seems, was a crime against her sense of herself. Besides, she had saved that money on her own. She had a lot invested, accidentally or not, in that suit and that pair of silk shoes.

So there I was, three years later, on the patio at the Shreve’s Landing Club, not much more sophisticated than I had been that summer I left, wearing pretty much the same sort of college boy beiges and plaids that Mom and I had bought on credit at Penney’s, not at Selber’s, where Mr. Aaron’s son outclassed me in every way. I wanted to be classy; I had, the luck of the draw, enough of Dad’s sense of style to make me presentable to folks. And like him, I could get along with almost anyone, tell stories, dance. I wasn’t even a virgin, thanks to a high-school classmate, one of two Mormon girls I went steady with at the same time (another story, I’m afraid), but I wouldn’t say I was experienced. In fact, let’s say I was inexperienced, as became evident soon enough when one of the women from the bar strolled onto the patio, caught my eye, and walked over. Standing there, she said,

“Hi. I’m Louise. Orlando sent me.”