It was a cold and snowbound December, just days after war was declared on Germany, Italy, and Japan. Men and boys had volunteered in waves. Everything—even the passing of time itself—was now electric. For Lila Blackwell, all the young men assumed a glow of almost unbearable poignancy, and even their smallest actions—drinking water from a glass, or smoking a cigarette—had become picturesque.
What Lila, who was seventeen years old, did not expect—what had seemed impossible even two weeks ago—was that this heightened state of being would obliterate the Christmas parties. The Halls had started it on Monday, sending around cards citing “the current circumstances,” and so began a flood of abdication, everyone now competing to express their austerity and commitment to the war effort. A monthlong Christmas mini-season of intoxicating joy, of day gatherings and night parties, fireplaces, cold walks home to bed, laughter dissolving into snow, had now been distilled down to one magical night: the Christ Church performance of the Messiah that Friday night. On Christmas Eve.
Lila did not cry when she was told that their own party would be canceled, though she did make a controversial request. For, in the midst of such upheaval in the world, Lila had engineered a hole in the elbow of her winter coat. The coat was blue boiled wool with large wooden toggles on the front, and all the girls had the same one: the mornings on Park Avenue were a parade of these blue coats. I’ve never heard of a hole in the elbow of a Crutchfield’s coat, her mother said. How do you explain it? Lila tried to look grave and perplexed, but in fact she would have endured any amount of shouting or deprivation to get a new one. Specifically, to get a coat that was not that same joyless shade of blue. The war had caused something in her to wake up.
Her father wanted peace in the house, so he gave Lila a small stack of bills along with clear instructions that under no circumstances could she buy her new coat from Crutchfield’s—the store where one bought school clothes, including all fully accredited blue coats. Everyone knew them at Crutchfield’s, and there could be no gossip about their purchases, her father said, as people were already frowning on all forms of excess, real and imagined, in the face of this naked foreign aggression.
The day before Christmas Eve, Lila took her sister, Hannah, in a taxi to a dress shop downtown that she had heard about from certain disreputable friends. It was called Amaranth. It was on the second floor above a steak house on University Place, not far from the wasteland of Washington Square Park.
The stairway was dirty and decrepit, which surprised Lila, although she did not share this impression with her sister. Entering the shop, though—one was buzzed in—was like entering a beautiful, vacant fairyland where the only sentient forms of life were flowers. Orchids covered the small handful of available surfaces. A lady sat behind a desk. No clothes were visible.
It’s the wrong place, Hannah whispered.
How may I help you? the lady at the desk said.
A winter coat, please, Lila said.
The lady at the desk spoke into an intercom, and soon a long rack emerged from a door, pushed from behind by a tiny woman in a uniform. The rack had nine coats on it. They were nine different colors, and none of them was blue. One of them was fur! Another was white. Lila had not known that winter coats could be white.
The tiny woman handed Hannah the coats, one at a time, and Hannah handed them to Lila. She tried on all of them, and as she looked at herself in the mirror wearing such different coats, every one was like visiting a new country. Each was better than the last—but what exactly was it that she wanted? Should it be beautiful? Sophisticated? Elegant? Each of these words captured something, but not enough. She wanted the coat to be … inevitable. In these difficult times, Lila thought, in the face of war, a new winter coat must be better than merely warm or lovely.
Hannah tried on the fur one herself, and they both laughed. The lady behind the desk looked over disapprovingly.
The white one, please, Hannah said to the tiny woman.
I can’t wear that, Lila said.
Be brave, Hannah said, and she shut her eyes theatrically.
Lila put it on, one sleeve and then the other, and then she buttoned it up. It had a collar that folded down. It was beautifully, even insightfully cut.
The tiny woman who handed them the coats made a small involuntary sound of appreciation. A sharp intake of breath.
Hannah opened her eyes.
You look like a poem, she said.
I love it, Lila said. She did not try on any more coats.
On the night of the Messiah, Lila told her mother that she would meet them at the church. Since the parties were all canceled, Lila said, she had to drop off Christmas presents en route. By design, she arrived at the church late, when her mother and father and Hannah were already in their usual pew. She would not give anyone the opportunity to object. She had kept the coat a secret from her mother, and Hannah was sworn to secrecy.
Lila felt the ripple as she walked down the aisle. And after it died down, she thought, the silence was deeper than before. Hannah said later that several people around them had said, Who was that? It was perfection, although her mother’s horror was clear from her permanent stare over the next two hours of wonderful music.
Outside it had begun to snow, and the crowd lingered outside for a long time after the performance, spilling out from the sidewalk onto Park Avenue: laughing, shouting, grasping at one another, stretching out the last moments of the old, known world.
Lila and Hannah stood under a street lamp with their arms entwined while boys in groups crashed into them, over and over again. One railed against the absent Christmas, another offered schnapps from a secret flask, some sang carols. More than one proposed marriage to Lila, and she smiled, to give them hope.
Inevitably, the sisters were separated, and as Lila drifted through the crowd, a boy came up to her and said Merry Christmas. He was alone, and quieter than the rest. His scarf was tied unconventionally. Lila did not recognize him.
I love your coat, the boy said. It reminds me of the mountains.
His name was Billy Quick, he said, and—though born in New York—his family had only recently returned to the States from Austria via Milan and Cairo. They kept being expelled from places, he said. Lila laughed; she did nothing that night but laugh, and as the snow continued to fall she found it easy to imagine that this collision of new energies might easily conjure any number of new things in the world, the least improbable of which might be a handsome stranger who seemed to know what her white coat truly meant. Then he said something that Lila would remember:
Would you introduce me to your sister?
7
Lila pushed open the screen door and then closed it behind her again, gently. In the hallway, a line of sweaters and raincoats hung from hooks. She looked from the shadows into the living room, and saw that she’d been right: Billy Quick sat on a couch, holding a candle in one hand and a large book in the other. Rapt, kneeling boys and girls surrounded him.