When I walked into her office, Mrs. Vreeland was eating her sparrowlike daily lunch: a small shot of Dewar’s White Label Scotch and a tiny, tiny finger sandwich sent over from Poll’s on Lexington Avenue. “Please be seated,” she said crisply to me. I could tell from the look in her eye that she had approved of my attempts.
Mrs. Vreeland took out a yellow legal pad and a sharpened pencil and hunched slightly over them. She was wearing a tiger’s tooth on a gold chain. “Now, what is your name, young chap?” she bellowed out, elongating her concave chest. The strength of her voice issuing from her small, thin body reminded me of my grandmother when she used to call me home to dinner. “André,” I replied.
She began to write in her large, grandiose longhand. Next to my name—I could read what she was writing upside down, her script was so enormous—she wrote, “The Helper.”
“Now,” she said, putting the pencil down, ‘”you will stay next to my side night and day. until the show is finished! Let’s go, kiddo. Let’s go out into the gallery. Get crackin’!”
I was astonished at the variety of accessories Mrs. Vreeland possessed—but not particularly surprised by the importance she ascribed to them. My grandmother had cultivated in me a love for the well-turned shoe, the hat that framed the face just so, the deftly chosen detail that made an outfit special. When I was growing up, it was part of our tradition to love fine tilings like the glazed-kidskin gloves and good leather shoes we re- served only for Sundays, along with the special underwear, and my grandmother’s lace-up corsets that looked to me. when they lay out airing on the chest, like they’d come straight from the Gay Nineties.
I have no idea how Mama amassed such a fine collection of mm gloves, but she did, carefully I budgeting and saving. While I’m certain she never gave a I moment’s thought to someone as remote as the duchess of Windsor, her habit of never leaving home without an extra pair of gloves stashed in her bag, in case the pair she was wearing got dirty, was a habit she shared with her.
On a trip I took to Paris not long before Mama died. I managed to buy up the last stock of unworn vintage Dior gloves from the fifties to bring home to her. It was in one of those pairs of couture gloves that I buried her; and of course, I tucked a fresh pair inside the coffin, in case the pair she was wearing should become soiled. I gave her a church fan bearing a color image of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Jr., a small tin of her favorite snuff, and a couple of extra handkerchiefs. I selected the hymn “No Tears in Heaven” as part of her going-home services, which were held on a cold March day that I will always carry in my memory. I was glad I buried her with the appropriate accessories, because I knew how proud she would be to enter Heaven with those Christian Dior gloves crushed down to just below her elbows.
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