The Temple
BY KATHY PERUTZ
Moishe Schneider emigrated from Poland to New York in the 19th century. He was a tailor by trade, a sign of God's amusement, who had given him a name that served equally as profession. "Schneider" in German means tailor, and Moishe came from the part of Poland that belonged to the Austrian Empire.
Settled with an uncle in Brooklyn, Moishe soon found his heart's delight in Trudi, whose breasts were generous and her bottom large. Almost immediately they had children and knew they were blessed. Moishe's tailoring shop was doing well, and when the little boys were 3 and 1 1/2 Moishe decided to expand. He prayed to the Almighty for assistance and the Lord answered him, saying: "Go, my son, open a clothing store. Call it Gott and Schneider and I shall protect you."
Moishe did as the Lord told him, and was successful.
Soon he became adventurous and thought of opening another shop, in Queens. Again the Lord blessed him. The second Gott and Schneider became as successful as the first, perhaps more.
Then the little tailor turned his eyes to the Bronx, and again the Almighty said it was good, and he opened another Gott and Schneider, and was rewarded.
At last Moishe dared to dream of Manhattan. God heard his prayers and said, "Again I bless you, my son, for you have been successful and carried my name through the boroughs. You will open your store in Manhattan, but this time you will call it Lord & Taylor."
***
I call it the Temple. I am addicted to it, I go there with the regularity of the faithful, sometimes in pursuit of a particular item but more often just to drift through the aisles, to touch this blouse or that dress, to hold a pair of pants up against me, checking for length, or to enter the dressing room, my arms laden with garments and try them on one after the other as if trying out for parts in a play or film, mugging at myself in the mirror, imagining other settings, new scenarios: a garden party in the Bois, as photographed by Annie Leibowitz for Vogue - Mais avec plaisir, M. l'Ambassadeur - a chic new bar in a part of Brooklyn I've never seen, the years flying off me like the pages of a calendar in an old black and white movie. I am a vamp, I am Heidi. I morph through different roles, my reflected self as audience, until a previously unnoticed bulge of flesh strains against the skin of the material and the dream fades, the mirrors return me to my age and imperfections. Sometimes I take the clothes anyway, knowing I'll return them later, but wanting one more trip on the merry-go-round when I model it at home for Michael or more likely just for myself.
I keep my rituals, though I have no faith. When the flyers beckon me with promises of 40% off, 60% off, when this is the clearance sale of the season, of the year, I answer the call of the muezzin and go back. "This shaking keeps me steady," Roethke wrote; since I was old enough to be responsible for myself, I've used masks, disguises, impersonations of any kind. Bleaching my hair, layering my lashes, lining my eyes. My mother was a lady, who dressed à la mode in haute couture ever since her days in Prague at Rosenbaum, the chief couturier in the early 1930's. I wore her hand-me-downs and the kids in Maspeth, Queens where I went to Junior High mocked me endlessly for that. Wearing the finely pleated black cotton piqué blouse I had inherited, I heard around me the taunts of, "Whazza matta? Your mudda dead?" Children in those days did not wear black except in mourning.
That was a tough school, J.H.S. 73, also knows as William Cowper Junior High, in a tough neighborhood where girls fought on the concrete of the handball court during recess, sometimes rendering each other unconscious. The cops were called in every day. I put on makeup in the Girls Room as soon as I got off the bus in the morning. After that, I rarely took it off again for the rest of my life. And in revolt against the good taste and elegance of my mother's clothes, I wore tops that were too tight, skirts too short, sometimes classic garments but often with a last minute touch of sluttiness, buttons left unbuttoned, zips not zipped. Mother was a lady but daughter was a. . . Call it playgirl, though that wasn't me at all. Who I appeared to be and who I thought I was were very different people.
In the dressing room on the fifth floor of the Temple, I look in the mirror and don't like what I see. My age is showing, it's not the image I want to the world to see. Only when I find that image, the one that assures me I am me but younger and better-looking, only then will I be content. ( Yeats: "I'm looking for the face I had before the world was made.") If the garment is on sale, I am very happy. If the garment is going for a ridiculously low price - a Calvin Klein jacket, for example, reduced from nearly $200 to not much above $40 - I am beside myself with joy. First time it happened I phoned a girlfriend to say, "I've just won the Nobel Prize for shopping at the Temple!" and she laughed and understood.
I once ghosted a book for a well-known actress called I'd Love To, But What'll I Wear? The title and her name, as she pointed out, were what would sell the book, though people would return it if the pages were blank inside. But a book on fashion with my name on the cover would never sell, she said flatly, so this was the perfect solution: her name and title, my text. It worked and we split the royalties 50-50. In the book we told women what to wear for any occasion - an audience with the Pope or watching your kid's Little League game in the local field. We had fun, we stuck to a conservative line in our advice; she and I spent a weekend together in the Manhattan apartment of Oscar de la Renta, a friend of hers, with a private maid who brought us petits fours on a silver tray, and occasional breaks for a game of Backgammon, at which she was a reigning queen. Saturday and Sunday - and then I was on my own.
But I'd learned all I needed to know about fashion from my mother. As a child, I perched on the stool in her dressing room while she made herself for a night out with my father. She sat at her vanity in bra and panties (both silk), cleaning her neck with a ball of cotton soaked in eau de cologne, mowing lanes of cleanliness and then holding out the cotton to show me, with shared wonder, how black it was. She wore red lipstick with a touch of coral, a redhead's lipstick, and she powdered her nose. No other makeup. Much later, when my curtained lashes made people think they were fake (they were not, just the results of layering powder and mascara), she would add a touch of brown mascara to the tips of her lashes. Her hair was marcelled by Augustine at Rockefeller Center, a swish French-speaking German who twirled the irons as he brought them up from the flames with the verve of a drum majorette, held them a moment and then blew on them. When they'd cooled enough, he picked up a small section of hair and slowly ironed it out into fat ringlets which later he would brush together to form wonderful upsweeps and chignons. Her hair was never cut, and she never washed it herself. It was thick as a mane (Leo was her astrological sign) and she always wore it up, fastened with hairpins made of horn and tortoise.
Her face ready, she stood up and opened the vast closet. "What should I wear?" she'd ask, and always answered with fervor, "the glitter-flitter!" - a black crêpe dress with large black spangles at the hip. She looked like a fairy queen, her skin white against the black, her nails coral, hair gleaming and the warm smell of Femme filling the dressing room.
It doesn't matter how you feel, it's how you look - clothes were her passion, and they made up for a lot of things, as they do for many of us. I remember the black leather suit I brought from Switzerland to London when I was living there, with its straight skirt that would ride up my thighs when I sat down. That was power! My first love, a yellow lace dress at Lilliputian Bazaar, the children's department of Best & Co, had satin ribbons threaded through the bodice and I was in love the moment I saw it. It was the most expensive dress I'd ever seen - $40. if I remember right - unattainably expensive, but I couldn't keep my mind off it in the weeks before my birthday. And then it was there. A miracle. I don't remember when or even if I wore it, just that it was mine.
There were others of course - the green wool dress with bolero jacket I wore the night I play-wrestled with the man who would be my first love, the cocktail dress that plunged to the waist in back, into which the son of the world's richest man once poured ice cubes at a London party and then asked me to run away with him (I didn't); and all the smaller garments, lucky underpants I'd wear with someone I hoped would take them off, the black and white garter belt with green bows that Michael bought me in Zurich on our honeymoon 50 years ago, the pastel chiffon scarf from Anna, a close friend who was in my life only a short time before she died of cancer.
And then there are the devastating memories of when your clothes turned traitor on you, exposing you in your ignorance or incompetence. The time when I flew in a private Rockefeller plane to a college friend's wedding, wearing no stockings at all (a sin at the time) and a dress so insubstantial. . . but no, I just can't reveal that, I refuse to remember. Becoming aware that you're wrongly dressed is as painful to look back on as a cruelty unwittingly committed and afterwards hidden away in a locked trunk of memory.
Our appearance and how we think we look to others is basic to who we are (or who we take ourselves for.) Years ago I wrote a book called Beyond the Looking Glass: America's Beauty Culture and tried to discover when and where our preoccupation with appearance ends. At the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, the warden told me, "We get the least intelligent and least good-looking girls. Everything's slanted against arresting women, starting with the cop, so a girl with anything at all to offer - brains, looks, charm - probably won't end up here." Most of the women were incarcerated for prostitution and/or drugs. This was some years ago, when women were just beginning their upward climb on the crime ladder, with Patty Hearst and later Kathy Boudin becoming radicalized and going into major crimes (kidnapping, murder, bombing), thereby upping the ante on brains and looks. Nevertheless, in the Greenwich Avenue jail I watched the women strut an imagined runway modeling "Fabulous Fashions from the House of D," which they had designed and run up themselves on a sewing machine. They pouted, they shrugged, hand up, hip out. I learned that many of them steamed the wax off wax paper to straighten or smooth their hair. Also they used the gravy from their meals to make a fairly workable mascara. Yet these were the same women who "cruised the bull" - i.e. tried soliciting cops so they would be returned to the jail, to their friends inside and a sense of familiarity.
At Manhattan State, the huge psychiatric hospital on Ward's Island in the East River, its windows barred like a dungeon's, I asked the chief psychiatrist if patients here still continued to care about fashion and makeup. He nodded. "In fact," he said, "that's something we use as a measure to assess a patient's degree of mental health. If he or she stops grooming, doesn't comb their hair and so on, well, that's a strong indication that they've let go."
If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
- W.B. Yeats