The Japanese Lover(36)

In November the whole weight of winter fell on Boston. Alma had spent the first seven years of her life in Warsaw but did not remember its climate; nothing had prepared her for what she had to endure over the following months. Lashed by hail, blizzards, and snow, the city lost all color; the light faded, and everything became gray and white. Life went on indoors, with people shivering as close as possible to the radiators. However many clothes Alma put on, the cold chapped her skin and got into her bones whenever she set foot outside. Her hands and feet swelled with chilblains; her coughs and colds seemed never ending. She had to summon all her willpower to get out of bed in the morning, wrap herself up like an Inuit, and face the freezing weather to cross from one college building to the next, hugging the walls so that the wind would not bowl her over, dragging her feet across the ice. The streets became impassable; most mornings the cars were covered with a mountain of snow that their owners had to attack with picks and shovels; everybody went around buried in wool and furs; and the children, pets, and birds all disappeared.

But then, just when Alma had finally accepted defeat and had admitted to Nathaniel that she was ready to call her aunt and uncle and beg them to rescue her from this freezer, she met Vera Neumann. Vera was an artist and businesswoman who had made her art accessible to ordinary people in the form of scarves, sheets, tablecloths, tableware, clothing—anything that could be painted or printed on. She had registered her brand name in 1942, and within a few years had created a market. Alma vaguely recalled that her aunt Lillian competed with her friends to be the first each season to show off Vera’s new designs for scarves and dresses, but she knew nothing about the artist herself. She went to her talk on impulse, to escape the cold between two classes, and found herself at the back of a packed room whose walls were lined with painted fabrics. All the colors that had fled the Boston winter were captured there—bold, whimsical, fantastic.

The audience greeted the speaker with a standing ovation that reminded Alma yet again of how ignorant she was. She had no idea that the woman who designed her aunt Lillian’s scarves was a celebrity. Vera Neumann was not an imposing figure—she was barely five feet tall, and very shy, hiding behind a pair of enormous glasses with dark frames that covered half her face—but as soon as she opened her mouth no one could doubt she was a giant. Alma could barely see her up on the platform, but she felt her stomach flutter when the artist spoke and knew with complete certainty that this was a decisive moment for her. In an hour and a quarter this eccentric, tiny woman roused her audience with stories from her tireless journeying to source her various collections: India, China, Guatemala, Iceland, Italy, and seemingly everywhere else on the planet. A feminist, she spoke of her philosophy, of the techniques she employed, of selling and marketing her products, of the obstacles she had encountered along the way.

That same night, Alma called Nathaniel to announce her future in great gusts of enthusiasm: she was going to follow in Vera’s footsteps.

“Whose footsteps?”

“The woman who designed your parents’ sheets and tablecloths, Nat. I’ve no intention of going on with classes that are of no use to me. I’ve decided to study design and painting at the university. I’m going to attend Vera’s workshops and then travel the world the way she has.”

A few months later, Nathaniel completed his law studies and returned to California. In spite of pressure from her aunt Lillian, Alma refused to go back to California with him. She endured four winters in Boston without complaining ever again about the climate, spending her whole time drawing and painting. Not having Ichimei’s facility for sketching or Vera’s boldness with color, she set herself to supplement talent with good taste. She already had a clear idea of the direction she wanted to take. Her designs would be more refined than Vera’s, because she did not intend to satisfy popular taste and create a brand, but to create for pleasure. The possibility of earning a living never occurred to her. She wasn’t interested in scarves for ten dollars, or sheets and napkins sold wholesale; she would only design and print certain items of clothing, all of them in top-quality silk, and would add her signature to each one. Her work would be so exclusive and expensive that her aunt Lillian’s friends would kill to have it. During those four years she overcame the paralysis that this imposing city had produced in her; she learned to get around, to drink cocktails without completely losing her head, and to make friends. She came to feel like such a Bostonian that whenever she vacationed in California it seemed to her as if she were in a backward country on some other continent. She also won admirers on the dance floor, where the frantic practicing she had done with Ichimei in her childhood served her well. She had her first unceremonious sexual encounter, behind some bushes at a picnic, which served to satisfy her curiosity as well as her complex at still being a virgin over the age of twenty. Later on she had two or three similarly unremarkable experiences with different young men, which confirmed her decision to wait for Ichimei.





THE RESURRECTION


Two weeks before she graduated, Alma called Nathaniel in San Francisco to organize the details of the Belascos’ trip to Boston. She was the first woman in the family to obtain a university degree, and the fact that it was in the relatively obscure disciplines of design and art history did not detract from its merit. Even Martha and Sarah were planning to attend the ceremony, partly because they were counting on going on to New York on a shopping spree, but her uncle Isaac would be absent, as his cardiologist had forbidden him to fly. Isaac was ready to disobey him, as Alma was more deeply rooted in his affections than his own daughters, but Lillian would not hear of it. In her conversation with Nathaniel, Alma commented in passing that for several days she’d had the impression she was being spied on. She said she was sure it wasn’t important, that it was merely her hyperactive imagination because she was nervous about her finals, but Nathaniel insisted on hearing the details. A couple of anonymous phone calls when somebody—a masculine voice with a foreign accent—asked if she was there and then hung up; the awkward feeling that she was being watched and followed; a man had been making inquiries about her among her friends, and from the description they gave, it seemed he was the same person she had seen several times in recent days in class, in corridors, in the street. With his suspicious legal mind, Nathaniel advised her to write to the college security office as a precaution: if anything happened, there would be evidence of her concern. He also told her not to go out alone at night. Alma paid him no attention.