Chapter 3

For the next ten days, Sydney packed her clothes and personal belongings. She went through Andrew’s books and all the little things that she knew had meant a lot to him, sentimental objects and photographs, the albums of the trips they’d taken. She packed the souvenirs of their years together. Not necessarily objects of value, although a few were, but they were things that she treasured. She had stacks of boxes to take to the New York apartment, along with her clothes. She weeded through her closets and took out things to sell that she wouldn’t wear anymore, and set up several racks for her daughters to go through for themselves, of beautiful, expensive things she thought they’d like. She took a storage unit to put some special clothes away that she didn’t need but wasn’t ready to part with. It was a full-time job, and the housekeeper worked every day to help her. They both cried while they did it.

She was rolling a rack of things to sell out of her bedroom into the hall when Veronica showed up again unannounced, and looking mournful. She had brought her a sandwich and a Caesar salad in case she was hungry, but Sydney didn’t want to waste time eating. Veronica lingered, trying to chat, and Sydney finally told her she was too busy, so she left. There was something invasive about Veronica’s visits, though Sydney felt guilty for thinking that as she went back to work. The twins dropped by every day now to check on her progress and see if anything they considered valuable had disappeared. Kyra complained when she noticed that a small pink enamel Fabergé clock encrusted with pearls and tiny rubies was no longer on Sydney’s night table, and she asked her stepmother where it was.

“Your father gave it to me for my birthday when I turned forty,” Sydney replied, and Kyra shrugged. She could afford to buy a dozen new ones, but had always liked it.

“Dad said I could have it.” Kyra tried but convinced no one, and Sydney didn’t bother to respond. She had enough on her mind. She had postponed her job search until she got to New York. She had too much to do getting ready to move. And on her last night in the home she had loved and shared with Andrew, she was grateful to be alone. She just wanted to be there, with her memories. She had packed up his clothes along with her own, and sent them to storage. She wasn’t ready to dispose of them yet, and didn’t want to leave them for Kyra and Kellie to pick through, sell, or give to Geoff. Putting them in storage made it feel like she was taking Andrew with her, although more and more it was becoming a reality that he was gone. And she admitted it to no one but there were moments now when she was angry at him for what he had allowed to happen to her at his daughters’ hands. She was being stripped of everything, not only art and furniture, but the home that had been her refuge, her status as a married woman, her feeling of safety, and all the remnants and familiar landmarks of her life with him. All she had left was his name. The twins were claiming almost everything else.

The moving van came the morning she was supposed to leave the house, thirty days after Andrew’s death, to take what she was sending to storage, and the rest to the tiny apartment in New York. She stood in her bedroom for a long moment, and then walked quietly down the stairs with a lump in her throat the size of a fist and kissed the housekeeper goodbye. Sydney could no longer afford her, and Kellie had hired her. She needed the job so she was staying, but she said it broke her heart.

Sydney didn’t look back as she drove away in her station wagon. She couldn’t. She knew that if she did, she wouldn’t have been able to go any farther. She had to go forward. And she saw Kellie drive in through the gates as soon as she drove out to follow the moving truck to the city.

It was a hot day and stifling in the apartment without air-conditioning. The elevator was small and slow, so it took forever to unload the truck. Sabrina and Sophie showed up that afternoon as she was stacking boxes at the back of the second bedroom she was using as a closet, and Sophie helped set up racks for her clothes. She had brought all the things she thought she’d wear most in her new city life, or if she got a job. She had brought a few cocktail dresses and evening gowns in case she had a social life, but she couldn’t imagine it now. She’d had notes from friends, promising to call her, but no one had so far. Veronica had warned her that as an attractive single woman, she would be a threat to her married friends, which Sydney hadn’t believed at first, but maybe it was true. And rumors had spread quickly that she was moving out of the house. Whatever the reason, embarrassment, discretion, or cowardice, she had heard from no one in the weeks since the funeral. Only Veronica called and showed up, and it seemed she always had some piece of bad news to share. Sydney had started avoiding her calls. She just didn’t want to hear it anymore. She’d enough bad news of her own, without Veronica making her feel worse.

Sophie had arrived at the apartment in cutoff white denim shorts and a pink T-shirt from the brand she worked for, with sandals that laced up her slim legs. The clothes she designed were young and fresh. Sophie wore them a lot, they suited her and made her appear even younger than she was, with her mane of curly red hair. She looked like a teenager herself, totally different from her sister. Sabrina was wearing a black cotton dress of her own chic design with high-heeled sandals, and seemed like she was going to a fancy lunch somewhere, with her dark hair pulled severely back. And Sydney was wearing jeans and an old shirt of Andrew’s and feeling disoriented. This didn’t feel real. The tiny, ugly apartment couldn’t be hers. The girls were upset when they saw it, and Sabrina disappeared for a while to buy flowers, while Sophie helped her mother hang her clothes and did all she could to make the agonizing process easier for her. She still wished her mother would move in with her, although Sydney was determined not to impose on either of them.

It took them all day to get the apartment organized in order to fit everything into the limited space. By eight o’clock that night they finished. There was nothing left to do. They had done all they could, and most of what she’d brought had to stay in boxes. There was no place to put it. The flowers Sabrina had bought and arranged in vases made the place look more cheerful, but Sydney had the feeling that she was camping out. All she could think of was Kellie moving into her home. She was exhausted when she finally sat down on the couch and gazed at her daughters. There was nothing any of them could say to make the moment better. It had been a hard day. The harsh reality of her life now was staring them all in the face.

“Why don’t we go out to dinner?” Sabrina suggested. There were several restaurants in the neighborhood, but no one leapt at the idea. They were all feeling worn out and no one was hungry, but both girls wanted to bolster their mother’s spirits.

“I don’t think you can get me off this couch with a crowbar,” Sydney said, drained. “I’m so tired I don’t think I can walk or eat,” she said honestly. It had been a rugged day, leaving one home and trying to turn this place the size of a closet into another. She realized now that there were no window shades and she’d have to buy them, and the towels looked like they’d been stolen from a cheap motel. They were rough and small, gray from too many washings, and she wanted to buy new ones. Kellie had made a point of telling her to leave the linens at the house, and she had. She wasn’t going to fight over hand towels and washcloths, although she had brought three sets of her favorite sheets. They had so many, Kellie would never miss them. “I think I forgot to bring soap,” she said vaguely in a wan voice, and Sophie volunteered that she had brought toilet paper with her that morning.

The two girls left together, with Sydney still sitting on the couch, and they promised to come back the next day and take their mother out somewhere. The two young women agreed as they shared a cab downtown that their mother seemed battered, but it had been grueling for them too. What Sydney had brought with her had seemed like so little on the truck in Connecticut, but once it got to the apartment, everything seemed to have grown in the shrunken surroundings. It made them realize again how hard this was going to be on her and what a huge change.

She called them both the next day and told them she was too tired to get out of bed. It was raining and she wanted to stay home. They tried to talk her out of it but couldn’t, and finally agreed to leave her on her own. She insisted she’d be fine. She set out her photographs of Andrew and the girls on every surface where she could fit them, and she spent the rest of the day in bed, watching movies on the tiny ancient TV in her bedroom.

And on Monday, forcing herself, Sydney went down her list of employment agencies and called them all. She had four appointments for that week, and was determined not to lose momentum. She couldn’t look back now, or down, as though she were climbing a cliff and hanging on by her fingernails. She just had to keep going until she reached a place that felt safe to stop, and she hadn’t reached it yet. The abyss was still yawning below her, and she was afraid to fall.

All of her meetings at the agencies were discouraging, and by Friday she had heard the same thing over and over again. She had been out of the job market for too long, her experience was no longer relevant, she was too old and competing with people half her age for jobs. They suggested that she consider some other line of work in fashion, instead of design. Editorial assistant at a magazine perhaps, or working in a designer boutique or on the designer floor at a department store. No one took her seriously as a designer, and at four o’clock on Friday, she took Paul’s card out of her bag again, where she had left it after showing it to the girls, and called him. She wasn’t going to beg for a job, which she realized she was no longer suited to, but she was going to ask him if he had any suggestions for her. She had no idea where to turn next. The people she had worked with many years before all seemed to have disappeared. She couldn’t find any of them listed in information or on the Internet. She was touched when Paul took her call and came on the line immediately. His voice sounded pleasant and upbeat, and was a relief to hear.

“Hi, Sydney, what have you been up to?” He seemed like he really wanted to know, and she wasn’t sure if she should tell him the truth or lie. She was running out of steam. It had been a brutal week.

“Well, let’s see, since the plane crash I moved out of my house in Connecticut into an apartment the size of a phone booth,” she said. “I saw four employment agencies this week, and before I take a job as a waitress, I thought I’d give you a call and pick your brain to see if you have any bright ideas. It’s either that or work at Starbucks.” He could hear from the timbre of her voice that things were not going well despite her attempt to make a joke of it.

“Have you ever been a waitress before?” he asked, sounding startled.

“Actually, no.”

“Then why not stick with what you know? Let’s have lunch on Monday, and we’ll talk. Don’t sign up at Starbucks just yet.”

“I’ll try to resist the temptation,” she said and laughed, and felt better just talking to him. He’d had the same effect on her when their plane nearly crashed and he told her they’d be fine. She believed him.

“What else have you been up to? How are your daughters?”

“They’ve been terrific. They helped me move over the weekend.” He could only imagine how traumatic it must have been for her to leave her house, only weeks after losing her husband. He stayed off painful subjects while they chatted for a few minutes. He told her to meet him at his office, which was in an old warehouse they’d transformed in Hell’s Kitchen. They had facilities in New Jersey as well. He told her to come at noon and he’d show her around. There were several good restaurants in the neighborhood, and he’d take her to lunch after the tour. “See you then,” she said. “And, Paul, thank you for seeing me. I need some fresh ideas.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with this weekend,” he promised, and her spirits had improved slightly when she hung up. She had something to look forward to, and she was not going to tell her girls she’d called him. They had a visceral prejudice against the kind of clothes he made, and she wasn’t going to try and convince them otherwise. They were cheap copies of expensive clothes, but there was obviously a market for them. If nothing else, after their experience in Nova Scotia, she and Paul had become friends. And she needed some of those right now. Her old friends from Connecticut seemed to have disappeared the minute Andrew died. Veronica’s theory about married women not wanting divorced or widowed female friends around was proving to be accurate. She had disagreed with Veronica when she said it, but maybe she knew what she was talking about. There wasn’t a single part of Sydney’s life that hadn’t changed.

She spent a quiet weekend since both her daughters were in the Hamptons, and she took a long walk in Central Park and watched couples strolling and families picnicking together. She listened to a reggae band for a few minutes, and sat on a bench and observed the world drifting by, and then she went back to her apartment and tried to read a book, but her mind had been blank since Andrew died and she couldn’t concentrate, so she lay on her bed, which filled her entire bedroom, and fell asleep.

And on Monday morning, she headed for Hell’s Kitchen on the subway. She was wearing a white linen dress with big turquoise beads, flat sandals, and a chic straw bag, and her hair was pulled neatly back. She looked fresh and summery when she gave her name to a pretty young girl at the reception desk. Suddenly the whole world seemed half her age, and the people she saw coming and going around her all looked like kids. It was a relief to see Paul walking toward her a few minutes later with a smile on his face. He was delighted to see her. He gave her a hug in greeting and told her she looked terrific, and they went back to his office to talk before he showed her around.

“You know, I thought about you all weekend,” he said seriously, “trying to come up with some bright ideas for you to reinvent yourself, but I kept coming to the same conclusion. That’s crazy. You were a terrific designer when you retired. That doesn’t go away. You can’t throw away a talent like that, nor should you. It’s like teaching Picasso to be a busboy or an engineer. Why would you want to do that? You’re an artist, Sydney, a talented designer. You’ve been out of the business for a while, and you may not have the computer skills that kids do these days. But it wouldn’t take you long to get up to speed, and as long as you have a piece of paper and a pencil, who cares how you come up with designs, or what you draw them on? Look at you, you’re fabulous. You know just how to put it together. Why would you want to give that up? You took a break. Now you want to come back. Why not give it a shot?”

“Because no one will hire me,” she said honestly. “At least that’s what the employment agencies told me last week. I’ve been away from it for too long. My point of view has changed, the world has changed, I don’t have a commercial touch anymore, and everyone in the business is half my age. Look at my kids, they’re twenty-five and twenty-seven, and they’re at the top of their game. I’m over the hill,” she said, trying not to sound as discouraged as she felt.

“That’s bullshit. You have experience they don’t have, and perspective. You have an overview of fashion, which adds dimension. You know what’s already been done, what worked and what didn’t. A lot of these kids are still very one-dimensional. They haven’t seen enough yet. And too many of them rely on their computers and don’t really have talent. How many really do? You know it as well as I do. They can draw, but they can’t design. They don’t have enough to bring to it yet. They’ve seen last year, and two years ago. You’ve seen a hell of a lot more than that. It matters. And you have your own style, most of these kids don’t. They all look like bums sleeping under a bridge.” And she knew he wasn’t wrong about that. It was the current style.

“So what are you telling me? I did give it a shot, going to see the agencies.” Listening to him, she almost believed him, but it wasn’t happening. In fashion now, youth was king. And the one thing she couldn’t do was erase her age.

“I’m telling you, give me a shot. Give us a chance. Come to work for me. If you talked to your daughters about me, I’m sure they tried to scare you off. They’re at the top of their field. They work in an elitist world, even the line for teenagers your younger daughter works for. Their prices are still above ours. But the truth is that isn’t always what sells. Designers like your kids hate people like me, because we borrow, heavily, I admit it, but we bring fashion to everyone. We make looking great accessible to the masses, at prices they can afford. And if you want to try it, you can work in some original designs and do some signature pieces for us. I’d really like to give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll have learned something from it. I think we need each other, and if you want to use your name here, you can. I have no objection to it. I’d love it. We can give you your own label for what you design. Sydney Smith for Lady Louise. That was my grandmother’s name, by the way. She was a seamstress and a cool old dame. I named the company after her. She came here from Poland and taught me everything I know about life and clothes. What do you think?”

Sydney could just hear Sabrina shrieking in horror if she heard their conversation, but so much of what he said made sense, and he was right. Designers like Sabrina were enormous snobs about fashion, and created for an elite few. There was plenty of room in the market for a different kind of customer. It sounded challenging to Sydney, and like fun.

“I’ll give you a tour,” Paul said. “I want to show you our design studio.” She followed him out of his office and up a flight of stairs. The building had an industrial look to it, which appealed to her. It was all very different from the lofty atmosphere she’d worked in before. This was fresh and young.

He led her into an enormous room where twenty designers were working at tables, sketching, working on computers, and correcting designs, with color swatches and bits of fabric hanging over their desks. Some of them had photographs on their screens of clothes she recognized, and she knew what that meant. They were copying more expensive designs, but Paul didn’t deny it, and he assured her that they modified them enough to keep them from being exact copies. Most clothing designs couldn’t be protected or copyrighted, but he still had his designers change a pocket or a sleeve length or a skirt to keep them from being identical to the designs that “inspired” them. They gave them a new twist the original designer may not have thought of, dared, or been allowed to do.

She walked from table to table quietly, and was shocked at the youthful age of the designers. They were dressed like orphans and street people, there were as many girls as boys, and they all looked intent on their work. It was an impressive operation, and on the floor above them were the patternmakers, working diligently, adjusting the designs to make sure they worked. It was exciting being back in the familiar milieu, on a much larger scale. Paul had more of everything. There were so many of them it looked like a school, and in a way it was. They were all learning something new, and she had new techniques to learn too. She toured the building with him, and they wound up back in the lobby, and then he walked her down the street to an Italian restaurant with a garden for lunch. The day was just cool enough to sit outside. He ordered a Bloody Mary, and they ordered lunch, and she talked about what they’d seen. She asked him a lot of questions, and his answers seemed straightforward and sounded right to her. She was touched that he was willing to give her a chance. She had a feeling that no one else would, and certainly not a firm like the one Sabrina worked for, or others like it. She’d been gone for too long. But not for Paul.

“I’ll do it,” she said, halfway through lunch, and he glanced at her in surprise.

“Do you mean what I think you mean…what I hope you mean?” he asked, and she nodded and broke into a smile.

“If you want me, yes, I do,” she confirmed.

“I can’t pay you what you made before, when you stopped working. But in the long run, you’ll make more here. A lot more if you take the kind of strong role I hope you will. Sydney, we have a home for you for the long haul, if you want it. You could have a major impact here.” He made her feel competent, relevant, and important, and not like a has-been. He gave her hope that she could work her way out of the financial mess she was in.

“I do want it,” she said seriously, and suddenly nearly dying in a plane crash with him had become the best thing that had happened to her in a long time, and recently for sure.

“When can you start?” he asked, beaming at her, and she laughed.

“Tomorrow?”

“Sydney, you’re on!” He got up and walked around the table to hug her, and it reminded her of Nova Scotia again, when he had told her that everything would be okay, and she believed him. And now he was making that promise come true. She clung to him for a moment and thanked him, and he ordered champagne when he sat down again. “My grandmother would approve,” he said, smiling at her, and she laughed. Things were starting to look up. She had a job. The only thing she couldn’t do was tell her girls where she was working. In the five weeks since Andrew’s death, she had nearly drowned, and now, thanks to Paul, she was swimming to the surface again, and she knew she would survive.