The Dew Breaker

THE BRIDAL SEAMSTRESS

Beatrice Saint Fort was lying down for one of her midday siestas when a journalism intern arrived at her new house in Far Rockaway, Queens, to interview her for a short feature on her last day as a bridal seamstress. The intern, a striking Haitian American girl with waist-length, amber-hued dreadlocks and a gold loop in her right nostril, had to knock several times before Beatrice finally made it to the front door in a green flannel nightgown and matching rabbit-shaped slippers. Beatrice held the door half open, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, while barring the entrance with her wispy frame. A petite, wasp-waisted woman, Beatrice had shoulders that curved, and she bent forward as though she’d spent too much time searching for things on the ground.

“My name is Aline Cajuste,” the intern said. “I called yesterday and you told me to come at two?”

“Oh,” Beatrice said, running her long, veined fingers over the rainbow cap that covered her bullet-shaped head.

“May I come in?” Aline asked.

“Sure,” Beatrice said. In spite of her size she had a loud, commanding voice, like someone who was accustomed to giving orders. “Have a seat while I get myself ready.”

A half hour later, a more youthful-looking and made-up Beatrice emerged, wearing a purple tunic dress and a curly bronze wig pinned to her scalp. Putting aside a profile of the actress Gabrielle Fonteneau that she was reading from her own newspaper (“A model of the kind of uplifting articles you should attempt,” her editor in chief, Marjorie Voltaire, had said), Aline looked up from the plastic-covered couch near the window where she’d sat since Beatrice had disappeared and politely asked, “May we begin?”

“Sure,” Beatrice said, “but first let me make you some coffee.”

Before Aline could refuse the coffee, Beatrice vanished behind the louvered door separating the living room from the rest of the house, giving Aline another chance to look around and jot down a few notes.

The living room was bare enough to make setting up the piece an easy task. Aside from some taped boxes piled in a corner, there were only the couch and a glass coffee table. On the wall was a picture of Jesus, neither white nor black, but somewhere in between, and beneath it a headless dressmaker’s model covered with a beaded lace gown.

“Can I help?” Aline called from the living room.

“Don’t move,” Beatrice called back. “I won’t be long!”

By Aline’s watch, it took Beatrice another twenty minutes to make the coffee. When Beatrice finally resurfaced, Aline promised herself she wouldn’t let the woman out of her sight again until they’d completed the interview.

“Okay.” Beatrice sat down on the couch, watching Aline. “Tell me, is this the best coffee you’ve ever had?”

Indeed it was. Aline had an expensive espresso machine at home that she’d not yet gotten to produce anything nearly as delicious as Beatrice’s coffee. The espresso machine was a college graduation gift from her thirty-years-older girlfriend; she’d shipped it to Aline all the way from Miami, where she’d gotten a new chaired position in the psychology department at Florida International. On a late-night call, during finals week, she’d asked Aline what she wanted most after graduation, and still exhausted from back-to-back all-nighters, Aline had mumbled that she wanted (1) to stop drinking watered-down coffee, (2) to eat no more frozen dinners, and (3) to do something with her life.

She’d sent Aline the espresso maker and a three-hundred-dollar gift certificate for a five-star restaurant meal. “The rest,” she’d written on her newly monogrammed stationery card, “you have to figure out yourself.”

Beatrice’s coffee was beginning to relax Aline. Ignoring her editor’s advice (“Don’t get too cozy with the natives,” she’d told Aline soon after she’d offered her the internship), Aline was tasting spirits in the coffee, but couldn’t identify which. Beatrice had brewed the coffee in a way that overpowered whatever she’d added to it, but still left its effects intact.

The tips of Aline’s fingers and toes were tingling, and Beatrice was starting to seem like someone she knew or should have known better, like her college professor girlfriend, who was always looking for new conquests, in both life and career.

“You want to know my secret?” Beatrice asked.

It took Aline a minute to figure out that Beatrice was still talking about the coffee.

“You want to know why it tastes so good?”

“I’m interested,” Aline said.

“The secret is time,” Beatrice said, picking up the cup she’d poured for herself. “I always take my time, whether it’s getting dressed, making coffee, or sewing those wedding gowns.”

As she reached into her bag, pulled out a tape recorder, and put it on the edge of the coffee table between them, Aline thought that if Beatrice took as much time with her work as she did getting dressed and making coffee, her brides would be baptizing their children by the time their gowns were done. However, she simply asked, “Do you mind if I record?”

“First,” Beatrice began as though she were the one conducting the interview, “remind me again what this is for.”

“As I mentioned yesterday,” Aline said, “I write for the Haitian American Weekly. You made a wedding dress for our editor in chief, Marjorie Voltaire. Do you remember Marjorie?”

Beatrice raised both her hands to her chin, her penciled eyebrows creased in full concentration as though she were trying to channel Marjorie Voltaire into the room.

“Well, Marjorie was so sad to learn you’re retiring that she asked me to write this story.”

What Marjorie had actually said was, “I hear that the woman who made my wedding dress is giving up the trade. Go talk to her. Maybe we can get a short piece out of it.”

“I don’t remember that girl,” Beatrice said with a sigh of resignation, as though she’d given remembering her best shot and failed, “but I’ve made a lot of dresses for a lot of girls. In any case, it would have been better for you to write this when I was still working. I could have gotten a few more clients and would have stopped sooner.”

Seeing this as an opportunity to officially begin the interview, Aline leaned over and pressed a button on the tape recorder.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

“Old,” Beatrice said.

“Forties?” Aline ventured, even though Beatrice looked much older, late fifties at least.

Beatrice threw her head back and let out an earsplitting laugh, contorting her face in such a way that her skin, had it been cloth, would have taken hours to iron out.

“So you would have liked to retire sooner?” Aline continued.

“Everything happens when it’s meant to happen,” Beatrice said. “That’s what I tell my girls when they think they’re either too early or too late in getting married. By the way, are you married?”

“No,” Aline said.

“Don’t worry,” Beatrice said, taking another sip of her coffee. “I’m not going to sit here and tell you what a great institution it is.”

“Please tell me why you’ve chosen to retire now, after all this time,” Aline said. ”You’ve been making wedding dresses for many years, is that so?”

“I’ve been making these dresses since Haiti.” Beatrice arched her neck and pushed her head toward Aline’s. “In all that time, I’ve sewn every stitch myself. Never had anyone helping me. Never could stand having anyone in my house for too long. Now it’s become too hard. I’m tired.”

Beatrice stated this last part flatly, as though it were simply a fact, not a plea for sympathy or pity, which Aline couldn’t help but admire.

“Describe for me the process of making a wedding dress,” Aline said.

“Well.” Beatrice cleared her throat after a series of dry coughs, as sudden and as consistent as a smoker’s cough or a lint cough. “My girls-when I say my girls, I mean the girls I make the dresses for-they come here carrying photographs of tall, skinny girls in dresses that cost thousands of dollars. They bring those to me and say, ‘Mother’-I make them all call me Mother, it’s more respectful that way- they say, ‘Mother, this is the dress I must have for my wedding.’ It’s part of my job to tell them, without making them cry, that they’re too short, too wide, or too pregnant for a dress like that, even if I lose money. I don’t do this for money. When any of my girls puts on one of my dresses, everyone at that wedding is going to be looking at it. When they’re singing ‘Here comes the bride,’ they’re really singing ‘Here comes the dress.’ And the way I see it, I am that dress. It’s like everyone’s looking at me.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, Aline thought. What could she ask next that would get a similarly lengthy response?

“Have you ever been married?”

“You never ask a woman my age a question like that,” Beatrice replied.

“The readers might want to know if you’ve ever made a wedding dress for yourself,” Aline said by way of an apology. “Besides, you asked me-”

“It’s okay to ask younger women,” Beatrice interrupted, “but with a woman like me, you keep that type of question to yourself. I’ve never wanted to be asked that question. That’s why all the girls call me Mother.”

Aline wrote on her reporter’s pad, “Never married.”

Soon, one side of Aline’s cassette was near full. As she turned the tape over, Beatrice suddenly suggested that they take a walk down her block so Aline could see it.

“I don’t need to do that right now,” Aline tried to protest.

But Beatrice was already standing up and walking to her door.

It was a sunny, yet breezy afternoon. There were birds and squirrels skipping on the branches of the tall green ash in front of Beatrice’s house. Aside from the child-care center at the end of the block, all the houses looked the same, with red-brick facades, gabled roofs, bow windows on the first floors and sash ones on the top. There were steps leading up from the street to the doorways and a patch of land up front that some fenced in and made into a garden and others cemented into an open driveway.

As she and Aline strolled up and down the block, Beatrice pointed out the residences of her neighbors, identifying them mostly by their owners’ professions and nationalities. On the left was the home of the Italian baker and his policewoman wife. Across the street was the house of the elderly Guyanaian dentist and his daughter the bank manager. Further down the block was the Dominican social worker, then the Jamaican schoolteacher, and finally the Haitian prison guard.

Beatrice had another coughing spell in front of the prison guard’s house, and when it stopped, her face was somber, her eyes moist.

“Where does he work?” Aline asked, imagining a long commute for Beatrice’s sole Haitian neighbor, from some distant correctional facility in upstate New York.

“I knew him in Haiti,” Beatrice replied. She raised her fingers toward the Roman shades on the front window, accusingly, it seemed to Aline, but then refused to say anything else. Was he an old friend, Aline wondered, a new enemy, a past love?

“Do the two of you talk?” Aline asked. “Are you friends?”

“Friends?” Beatrice made a loud sucking noise with her tongue and teeth. Before walking away, she waved her hands dismissively at the house, as if wanting to make it disappear.

When they returned to Beatrice’s front steps, a few more ash leaves had fallen there. Beatrice reminded herself out loud that she needed to have the higher branches of the green ash trimmed. For she often sat on her stairs in the early evening, she said, completing some details of her work.

Beatrice disappeared into her kitchen as soon as they walked into her house. Aline looked around the living room again, this time for some sign of the mysterious jailer, a photograph, a love or hate letter, some framed memento that she’d missed.

Beatrice returned with the rest of the coffee, still warm from earlier.

“Did you study to do what you’re doing now?” she asked Aline, setting down new clean cups.

“Not really,” Aline said. “I studied French.” Then not sure that Beatrice understood or approved of her college major, she elaborated, “Books, words written by French people over many centuries.”

These last few words seemed to clarify nothing, just as they never did for Aline’s parents, who ran their church’s day-care center in Somerville, Massachusetts, so Aline became quiet. She didn’t want to tell Beatrice that she’d simply taken the newspaper internship because it was the first paid job she was offered after she’d been dumped by her girlfriend, needing important-sounding work to report to both her ex-should they ever speak again-and her folks.

“When you were studying this, what was it, French, did you learn anything useful?” Beatrice asked offhandedly.

Aline’s common sense and her recollection of Marjorie Voltaire’s caveats told her that she was losing control of the interview. However, it had been such a long time since anyone had spoken to her with such interest that she frankly welcomed it.

She was finding it hard now to remember anything from any of the hundreds of books she’d read in school. What instantly came to mind, aside from her former professor, was a film of a depth-perception experiment she’d seen in a Psych 101 class, in which an infant cried when he was made to crawl over a glass surface with an image of a deep gorge below. Much had been made of the fact that the infant had displayed fear of falling into the gorge, despite not knowing what a gorge was or what it meant to fall. Aline had thought the experiment cruel and had been unable to watch most of the class film, though she’d never been able to forget what little she’d seen.

It was after she babbled the story of the gorge experiment to Beatrice and got no response that she noticed the sewing kit on Beatrice’s lap, a cedar box divided into several sections, each filled with thimbles, bodkins, pin-cushions, and chatelaines that looked as though they were from another era. Beatrice was searching for something in the box and let out a sigh of relief when she found it. It was a gold thimble with her name carved in microscopic letters on the base and a wreath of tiny wildflowers on the rim.

Beatrice moved the thimble closer to Aline’s nose ring, then took turns capping each of her ten fingers with it.

“What are you going to do after you retire?” Aline asked, trying to complete the interview.

“Move, again.” Beatrice pressed the thimble between her palms, rolling it up and down as if to warm it.

“Why?” Aline asked.

Beatrice put the thimble back in the box, then set the whole kit down on the ground. She covered her eyes with both hands, then gradually removed her fingers as though to slowly take in the world again.

“We called them choukèt lawoze,” Beatrice said, the couch’s plastic cover squeaking beneath her. “They’d break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they’d also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they’d take you away. He was one of them, the guard.”

Beatrice removed her open-toed sandals and raised her feet so Aline could see the soles of her feet. They were thin and sheer like an albino baby’s skin.

“He asked me to go dancing with him one night,” Beatrice said, putting her feet back in her sandals. “I had a boyfriend, so I said no. That’s why he arrested me. He tied me to some type of rack in the prison and whipped the bottom of my feet until they bled. Then he made me walk home, barefoot. On tar roads. In the hot sun. At high noon. This man, wherever I rent or buy a house in this city, I find him, living on my street.”

Beatrice got up and collected the empty coffee cups, piling them on the tray. Aline reached over to help her, but Beatrice gently pushed her hands away.

It was the inevitable question, maybe insulting, but Aline felt she had to ask it. “Are you sure it’s the same person?”

Beatrice removed her bronze wig, revealing a line of cotton-white cornrows, curved toward the back of her neck. She raised her hand to her head and scratched her scalp as though to quell a flame there.

“You never look at anyone the way you do someone like this.” Beatrice’s exasperation was spewing out with the spittle at the side of her mouth. “No one will ever have that much of your attention. No matter how much he’d changed, I would know him anywhere.”

“I think she’s a bit nutty,” Aline said to a gruff and hurried Marjorie Voltaire on her cell phone. She was sitting in her car outside the prison guard’s house with her notepad and tape recorder on her lap.

“I’m in a meeting with my photographers, have a pissed-off advertiser on the other line, and the printer’s late with this week’s edition,” Marjorie Voltaire snapped. “Aren’t we all a little nutty? I know you’re very proud of the fact that you took Psych 101, but I didn’t send you there to judge her state of mind. Come back and write what I sent you to write: Bridal Seamstress Retires. Simple.”

From the front seat of her car, Aline could see the Roman shades on the guard’s front window and the green ash shedding more leaves on Beatrice’s porch in one glimpse. The green ash, the only one on the block, was still shaking ever so slightly in the afternoon breeze, letting loose a few more leaves. Beatrice was sitting on the steps in front of her house, watching the street, but mostly watching the leaves drop. It was an odd yet beautiful sight, the leaves seemingly suspended in the air, then falling ever so slowly as if cushioned by air bubbles. It was an image worth closing another type of article with, Aline thought, but in many ways it was so ordinary. It was fall, after all.

Aline was thinking of immediately heading back to the office to type up the story she’d been assigned: BRIDAL SEAMSTRESS RETIRES. SIMPLE. Mercilessly edited by Marjorie Voltaire, it would probably be reduced to a brief anyway, a five-inch announcement. But as she reached over to start her car, she took one final look at the prison guard’s house, wondering if there might be something there, a bigger story, one that could earn Marjorie Voltaire’s respect. Then something made her pull her hand away from the keys in the ignition. It was the house’s mailbox, a small, black, metal box, attached to the brick facade beneath the residence numbers. The mailbox was stuffed, nearly overflowing, as though no one had touched it for a while.

Aline got out of her car and crossed the street, then slowly climbed the steps to the front door. There was a small window, high in the door, but it was covered with what seemed like a piece of construction paper the same linseed color as the door. Flipping through the mailbox’s contents with her fingertips, she quickly searched for address labels, a name. She found mostly advertisements: flyers for mechanic shops, neighborhood dry cleaners, restaurants, and supermarket sales; catalogs for women’s clothing addressed to “Resident” or “Occupant.”

Aline walked down the front steps and stepped back from the house to have another look. The front window was too high for her to peek inside. Besides, it was well covered, with what on closer examination seemed like dark plastic, underneath the Roman shades.

There was a sliding window on the side of the house. It too had a curtain on it, but the window was lower than the others and the curtain was thin and there was a gap between the window frame and the drapery, which would allow her a look inside.

She moved swiftly, but casually, trying as much as possible not to call any attention to herself. If any of the neighbors saw her, she wanted to appear as though she was visiting and not trespassing.

As she raised her body to the window, she took one last look at the street to make sure no one was looking. A group of teenagers strolled by, crowding the sidewalk. They seemed to be on their way home from school, talking and laughing loudly, not paying attention to her.

She waited for them to pass the house, their voices blending with sounds of cars going by; then she stood on the tips of her toes, tilted her head, craned her neck, and looked inside. From where she was standing, she had an angled view of what appeared to be the dining room. The living room, she figured, based on the layout of Beatrice’s house, was the room you walked into when you entered the house. There was a wooden staircase leading upstairs, but the dining room itself was empty. The walls were gleaming white, as though they’d just been painted, and the parquet floors looked shiny, but sticky, as if they’d recently been varnished and hadn’t dried properly. It didn’t appear as though anyone was living there.

The sound of a car pulling into the driveway next door forced Aline to move away from the window. She walked back to the front of the house until she could see Beatrice once more, sitting out on her front steps, sewing.

“Are you looking for someone?” The next-door neighbor was standing in his driveway, leaning against his car and twirling a set of keys, watching Aline. He must be the Jamaican schoolteacher, Aline guessed. The lilt in his voice as he said, “Are you a friend of Dolly’s?” confirmed this.

Aline answered, “Dolly?”

“Are you a friend of Dolly’s?” he repeated, grinning, as though he would have very much liked her to be.

“Isn’t there a man living here?” Aline asked. “A corrections officer?”

“No one’s lived here since Dolly Rodriguez,” the man said, bouncing his keys from hand to hand. “And that was over a year ago. I know she’s trying to sell, but it’s hard to do that from Bogotá. She just has to get her butt here and stay a while, if she ever wants to be rid of this place.”

“Thank you,” Aline said. “I didn’t know.”

“No sweat,” the man replied. He kept waving as she walked away from him. Perhaps he knew she was lying, for only when she made it to Beatrice’s front steps did he walk into his own house.

Beatrice had unbraided her cornrows so that her hair, now high and thick, looked like an angry cloud, a swollen halo floating a few inches above her. Aline sat down on the last step, where Beatrice’s slippered feet lay, and watched silently as she meticulously stitched the hem of a taffeta wedding slip, possibly her last.

Beatrice said nothing, as if trying not to break her own concentration. When she was done with the hem, her face relaxed and in this late-afternoon light, she seemed as airless as the green ash leaves that had gathered in small heaps around her.

“You’re back,” she said, gathering the slip on her lap so that, resting there, it looked like a large animal covered in gauze.

“The house is empty,” Aline said.

Beatrice didn’t seem shocked, as Aline had expected, or even embarrassed, as Aline had been, facing Dolly Rodriguez’s next-door neighbor.

“Of course it’s empty,” Beatrice said, raising her hands in the air as if to emphasize that it couldn’t have been any other way. “That’s where he hides out these days, in empty houses. Otherwise he’d be in jail, paying for his crimes.”

Beatrice moved the taffeta slip from her lap and gently placed it on the floor, at her side. She was not looking at Aline but was staring at the street, waiting for a few cars to go by before speaking again.

“I think the reason he finds me all the time is because I send notes out to my girls,” Beatrice said, keeping her eyes on the street. “I let all my girls know when I move, in case they want to bring other girls to me. That’s how he always finds me. It must be. But now I’m not going to send these notes out anymore. I’m not going to make any more dresses. The next time I move, he won’t find out where I am.”

Growing up poor but sheltered in Somerville, Massachusetts, Aline had never imagined that people like Beatrice existed, men and women whose tremendous agonies filled every blank space in their lives. Maybe there were hundreds, even thousands, of people like this, men and women chasing fragments of themselves long lost to others. Maybe Aline herself was one of them.

These were the people Aline wanted to try to write about now, no matter what Marjorie Voltaire said. And if Marjorie didn’t like it, then she would quit and go work somewhere else. She might even return to Somerville and, at last, let her parents learn who she was. Or she might escape to Florida for a while, to avoid eating that five-star-restaurant meal by herself.

But for now, she would simply sit with Beatrice and wait for some time to pass, so that she might see how the green ash leaves looked slowly falling from the tall tree in the very ordinary golden light of dusk.