29. The Decision #2
"My father is dead. He would have liked you."
Edward’s face does what Edward’s face does when something matters, which is almost nothing visibly, but the matter is in his face. He nods.
"I am sorry he is not here. He raised the woman who is going to be my daughter-in-law in two days. He did the work."
That sentence is the one. The one I will remember on my deathbed. Marina’s ribbon will be in the dress, and Edward’s sentence will be in the day, and Papà will be in both of them whether the world knows or not.
Edward picks up the coffee he had set down on the courtyard wall. He nods once more, the kind of nod that is its own form of leaving.
"See you at one o’clock on Saturday, Alessandra."
"See you at one."
He goes inside. The courtyard is very quiet. The cypresses are dark against the sky that is starting to turn. On the wall where he had set his coffee, I sit. I do not move for a long time.
Matteo formalizes his role on day thirteen. He brings me his small notebook in the courtyard at dusk. He has been keeping it on the fort construction; now he has been keeping it on the wedding. "What is my role?"
"What kind of role?"
"The one who checks that everything is in order before it begins."
"That is a good role."
"Yes," he says. "I designed it."
No argument.
I will marry Maxwell Grant on Saturday at one in the afternoon at the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence in front of fifty people who flew in for it. The reception will follow at the family villa.
Not nervous. Not strategic. Excited. I am thirty-three years old and I am excited.
Alex, The Fitting
Day four. The toile is the first dress, white muslin, no silk, no construction beyond the line. It is the architectural drawing in cloth. Renata pins it on me in the workroom and says nothing for an hour. Lorenzo Jr. sits at the cutting table with his back to us, drawing.
"Stand still," Renata says, in the voice she uses when she is not asking.
Standing still. The muslin is being shaped to me a quarter-inch at a time.
Renata’s hands have been doing this for forty-six years.
She is not adjusting the dress to my body; she is locating where my body actually is, which is information she will use to make the silk version fit not as it would on a mannequin but as it does on a woman who walks the way I walk, who sits the way I sit, who breathes the way I breathe.
Lorenzo Jr. turns once. He looks. He turns back.
"More room in the chest. She breathes large when she is trying not to."
Renata adjusts the chest. He is right. I do.
Day eight. The first silk version. Ivory, the cut close, the construction beginning to show what it will be. The dress is on me for two hours while three women work. Margot at the back, hands folded, watching Renata.
Renata at my left hip with chalk. The senior seamstress from the atelier, Anna, at my right shoulder. Alessia at the hem on the floor. The light comes through the workroom window and the silk reads gold. Nobody is talking.
Renata’s hand, briefly, on my shoulder. Then back to the chalk.
The atelier is sixty years old. Renata’s hands have been on the shoulders of three generations of brides in this room.
Her hand is a transmission. I know what it means without her saying.
The dress is correct, my body is correct, the room is correct.
Day twelve. The crisis. Alessia finds it at four in the afternoon, an inch and a half of hem on the left side that does not fall as the right side falls.
The fabric remembers a fold from before the cutting.
Renata is called. She looks at it for thirty seconds.
"Re-cut." Alessia begins to apologize. Renata says, "Re-cut," and walks out.
Six women work until midnight. The hem falls correctly by morning.
During the crisis fitting the kitchen is where I am, with Giulia, trying to eat soup. She is reading me the seating chart. Max is in the library reading a contract for a Vaudrey transfer. Edward and Marina are walking in the garden in the dark.
Day thirteen. The final fitting. Two days before. The dress is on the form by the window. Lorenzo Jr. is in the corner with his sketchbook closed.
It is not a bridal dress as the word usually means it.
It is a dress. Floor-length, ivory silk that reads gold in the late afternoon light, the construction so quiet you would not see it unless you knew what to look for.
The bodice is cut close. The skirt moves the way fabric moves when it has been understood by the woman who made it.
There is no veil. There is no embellishment.
There is the line of it and the weight of it and the silence of it.
Renata helps me into it. The cream ribbon Marina brought is somewhere in the construction; I do not know where because Renata has put it where it belongs and that is enough.
Mamma’s hand is somewhere in the construction; I do not know where, either.
The Belgian lace is somewhere in the construction.
The dress holds all of it the way a piece of music holds notes.
You do not see them; they are the music.
Alex, Gorgeous
I stand in front of the mirror.
Giulia is behind me. Renata is to the side with her chalk, looking for the one thing that needs adjusting and not finding it. Margot at the door, hands folded. The room is quiet.
"Alex," Giulia says.
The mirror does not move. The woman in the mirror is thirty-three years old and has waited a long time for this dress. And is wearing one that her brother and her mother and her future mother-in-law and a dead Belgian lacemaker have all touched.
I have been a sister and a daughter and a manager and a steward of a house, and tomorrow I will also be a wife. The first time in my life I have stood in front of a mirror and seen the bride.
Giulia steps closer. She is laughing and crying at the same time, which she does perhaps once a decade and last did at Lorenzo Jr.’s twenty-fifth birthday.
"You are gorgeous," she says. "You insufferable woman, you are gorgeous."
"Stop."
"No."
We laugh. Then both of us are crying. Both of us in the mirror, my sister with her hand on my arm, both of us laughing too loud for the workroom, which has been a quiet place for sixty years.
Renata says nothing. She turns the chalk in her fingers and does not adjust anything.
We do not get out of the dress immediately. Renata helps me out and then Giulia and I sit on the workroom floor together with our backs against the cutting table. Anna brings espresso without being asked. We drink it.
The dress is on the form across the room from us. Giulia leans her head on my shoulder. We sit there for a long time. Nobody asks us to leave. Renata works at the cutting table behind us. The light gets longer.
Mamma should be here. The thought arrives without warning and I let it. She would have stood where Giulia is sitting and said something exact and shorter. She would have looked at Lorenzo Jr. once and then back at the dress.
She is not here. The dress is here, with her hand somewhere inside it, in places only Lorenzo Jr. and Renata know. The brother who designed it is here. The sister is here. That is what she left.
"Lorenzo," I say eventually. "What do you think?"
He looks up from the corner, where he has been silent for the entire afternoon. He looks at the dress. He looks at me.
"Yes."
That is everything he says. He does not say which parts of the dress he made and which parts of the dress my mother began. He does not say what the cream ribbon is doing under the bodice or where the Belgian lace is. He does not need to. The dress holds it all.
Eventually we stand up. Anna takes the empty espresso cups. The women of the atelier are still working. The villa is full of the sound of fifty people preparing for a wedding two days from now. Outside the cypress trees are dark against the late sky.
The form across the room. The dress on the form looks as the dress looked on me. Renata has done that on purpose: the form is now my dimensions exactly, so the dress can be moved tonight without losing its line.
The dress is recognizable. The woman in the mirror is recognizable. They are the same person.
Tomorrow she gets to be seen.