(This article was originally written in the late '80's.)
When I was a child, I used to see him there, sitting in a non-descript corner, hunched over his machine. Acknowledging my father's watchful presence more than my brown-eyed curiosity, he would look up and nod as I would observe him cut the thread between his teeth.
Worn Singers--maybe six of them--and an old Pfaff, were stuffed into that back room like desks in a schoolhouse. Instead of books, cones of sewing thread, boxes of buttons, rolls of braid, filled the shelves. And, like mollified students, they all sat there, the numbers of Eastern Europe engraved into their faces, their clothing belonging to a different time.
Trousers and vests hung on skinny men like jackets tossed on barbed wire fence posts. Faded flowered silks (for there were no polyesters in those years) threatened to cover trundling women as though they were skins on bulging sausages. They were old then--grey, stoop-shouldered, an dreamless--sewn into the linings of their world. The years eventually took most of them, but the old tailor remained loyal.
I suppose he was only twenty, in those groping times when the world was righting itself from the War. I think it must have been that I was so young, that he appeared so old. When he died, he was sixty-six; my memories are from many years ago.
His first name had been anglicized and he had a last name infiltrated with Polish phoneticisms--an infinite number of "z's." Medium build, medium height, his pride kept his spine as straight as a measuring stick all his life. But from the close work of the stitching, a roundness had grown into his shoulders, softening that very formal European discipline into an almost friendly stoop.
His eyes were quick to note a mistake, observant to follow a line. I cannot recall their color, for there was no contrast to the shading of his face. Everything was grey. The hair, straight and combed to one side, covered his baldness. Occasionally, when he lost himself in his art, a strand or two would slip down over his brows, creating a casualness that might have made him a part of this world. He had a sharp Aryan nose, and a large brown mole on his cheek that rose up in a rounded dome like a used pencil eraser. He always wore a too-wide tie and a too-tight coat; he always wore a hat--straw in the summer, felt in the winter.
He worked for my father for over forty years. He did just about everything, because he was trained in the days when "everything" was what one did; when loyalty to the superior mattered; when quality was more than a quick stitch of a union label. He had apprenticed as a boy, I imagine, in pre-War Poland. Afterward, he came here, bringing with him a needle and thread, a pair of shears, and his accent. Nothing more.
In the early years, he did the master tailoring. Hitch it up here; let it out there. Dart. Pleat. No gusset. Watch the inseam. This one is a
portly--don't confuse him with a
stout. Sleeve lengths to match. Careful when you cut, now--those lapels are getting narrower. Single-breasted for him; double-breasted takes too much cloth and he's too broad across the chest. Not too much padding in the shoulder. Slimmer leg, please...
Eventually, the tailoring business became more of an eccentricity than a practicality. As the shop became a factory, and the company grew to a corporation, the old tailor, in order to continue to survive, should have changed, also. But he never grew or learned any more than his youth had taught him. His pessimism over a lost world invaded his dulled being. Now, they used the word "manufacturer" instead of "tailor." It was longer, maybe. Fancier. But to him, its real meaning was death.
He tried to leave once, when industrial replaced hand, when one suit became one hundred, when the single name "
piecework" replaced the completeness of the whole garment. He had in mind to buy his own shop--a small corner, downtown. At last, out from under my father's shadow, he would be his own man. Butler becoming boss. His shop would be in the tradition of his world--suiting fabrics, shirt weights. A small press in back with a good steam iron ought to do it. Of course, a really good machine or two. Maybe, if it went well, a helper. But most of all, he, the old tailor, would celebrate his trade and his skill. Tape measure around the neck--like a priest before the altar--he would dress the mannequin to approximate size. Clip the threads. Check the button holes. Brush the shoulders. Amen.
He had purchased the shop with his savings. Received my father's best wishes. Was ready to own the life for which he had been trained. But he had a wife--and at the proper moment, her greed coerced her into gambling.
If, for a few months, there actually had been a color to the old tailor's eyes, it was never seen again. Only grimness and waiting and manufacturing remained.
He needed a job and my father needed a good man to run the shop. "Shop" didn't mean the whole building, but those rooms confined to the cutting, sewing, and pressing of the garments. My father never did find that "good man." But the old tailor was there. And, he did his best, I suppose. Mostly pacing between this girl and that, watching how they sewed, wondering what to complain about next.
The flowered dresses were replaced with low-cut blouses and too-tight pants. The seven machines reproduced themselves into twenty and thirty. The presses became the pressing room. Electric cutting knives whirred, two and three at a time. The women had become girls, and the Europeans had been replaced with Spanish, Indian, and Oriental blood.
It wasn't pride anymore. It was survival and endurance.
Kibbitz with the girls. Punch in--punch out. A day's work. Most of all, disdain for modernity. Disgust with the distance between a man and his work; a love affair the old tailor testily missed. It didn't matter how good the garment was. To him, it wasn't right--it wasn't done with tenderness, or respect for the beauty of the fit. The caring, the sighing, the becoming-at-one-with, were not there, any more.
The tailor made a poor foreman. My father knew it. The tailor, I imagine, knew it, but didn't care. I believe for him, it was a simple transfer of professions: From creating, to observing others create. The world had passed him by.
Almost too late, my father grew tired of the bigness of his work. He sold the factory, and returned to the smaller shop. A staff of nothing: Except that he still needed the old tailor. Only a few days a week. Alterations. Hand stitching. A custom measurement now and then. It was here that I saw the old gentleman gradually fail, fall apart, and finally die.
The manufacturing of suits had become the making of uniforms--for hotels, restaurants, and specialty groups. He would still take the bus each day to and from his torture, where he would be surrounded by brightly colored cocktail dresses and Mexican waitress skirts, hot-pants, and chambermaid garb. Once again, rounded over his machine that was lit cautiously with a small refrigerator bulb, he would sit and baste. Snapping the thread between his teeth as he used to do, forty years ago. He knew the feel of a good wool gab. He could line up the buttons on a jacket by sight. He ripped and re-sewed with the steadiness of the years.
I always thought he liked the ripping best, somehow. When it wasn't his own work, it was a delight to correct. To remind the others of what real tailoring and genuine workmanship were about.
The months passed. He muttered a lot. At first to himself. Then to the cloth. Finally, to the audience of the presses.
His end was those hot steaming machines. Mentally, he had grown quite slow, old memories stitching over the cloth of reality. My father would have retired him, but the tailor's wife still gambled away their money. There was no other means for him to survive, but to work. All that was available now that his skills were fading, were the presses.
He was as good at them as any other aspect of the trade. He was content to come in, fold his coat carefully on the chair, and place his hat neatly on their top. He would smoke a cigarette and go to the back, where amidst conversations with himself, he would smooth a pant or two, using all his strength to pull down those big mangles and buck presses.
He worked until his last day. Dignified, formal, polite. As gracious to the imagined voices he heard as to the workers behind the cutting tables. As critical of the twentieth century, as anyone I've known. Vacant and shyly droll, always the Old World, in a tattered and worn sort of way. His clothes never changed from those early, ill-fitted years, despite the thousands of hours he spent caressing the seams of others.
I felt sad when he died, not so much for him as for me. Clearly, he was just too tired. I wondered if, had I tried, I could have known him better. I wondered if, had I succeeded, there would have been any greater depth to him than what I had observed. The old tailor, like a worn suit of clothes, may well have been a disguise for someone very different underneath.
Other countries have poverty, also. There will always be the haves and the have-nots. Life in the big city. Nothing will ever change that. It's part of the human condition. To exonerate American decline in the quality of education on the basis of poverty, doesn't wash.
