“Grazie,” Magda said, beaming. “You saved me from being a, how do you say it, bridezilla.”
“Did you get blood on the dress?” I asked, my voice quivering.
She shook her head and crossed herself with her good hand.
Magda’s mother folded the wedding gown into a box, lay the red sash on top, and closed the lid. The tiara and earrings were in a separate jewelry case. “Grazie,” she said. “Ciao.”
I left the wedding party to their canapés and corpses, and headed for the hotel, where the promise of an all-nighter lay ahead.
NIGEL WAS WAITING FOR me in the suite. The instruments of his trade (needles, large spools of thread, two Singer sewing machines circa 1950, magnifying glasses, dressmaker’s shears, thread nippers, pin cushions, and OTT-LITES) were assembled on the table.
“Show me the patient,” he said.
I lay the dress out on the couch. “It was only deconstructed. You see? The seam stitching was removed,” I said, “but no fabric was cut.”
Nigel gasped at the sight of it. Then he sat down and put his head between his legs.
“Nigel, there’s no time for tears. Give it to me straight. Can this dress be saved?”
Nigel lifted his head. Then he put on his magnifying glasses and examined the garment. “Can you give me a bit more light?”
I switched on another of the lights.
Finally Nigel spoke. “We can put it back together so that it looks like it did before. The average bloke will never be able to tell the difference. But it’s depreciated by at least ninety percent.”
“Oh, dear God, no,” I said, sinking into the sofa. “Do we have to tell anyone?” It’s not that I wanted to be dishonest and hide the truth; it’s just that I wanted to know if it was possible to get away with it in case I did want to hide the truth (which, of course, I did not).
Nigel shook his head. “It will be thoroughly inspected when it’s returned to the Hollywood Motion Picture Museum.”
“And they’ll definitely be able to tell?”
“Look at the fabric along the seam line,” Nigel said, showing me the inside of the bodice. “See this fine row of holes left from the original sewing machine needle as it passed through the silk? Each machine, combined with the needle used and particular seamstress, leaves its own signature. The stitch length, needle size, speed, and guidance of the material through the machine creates a unique fingerprint. We can try to stitch it back together in the holes made by the seamstresses at Paramount, but it won’t be a perfect match. Plus, there are new holes from where the dress was altered. And no one at Paramount could find the original thread, although I did bring some that’s pretty close from the early 1950s.”
“I am so fired,” I said. Then I remembered that I was fired. “You know what? I’ll take the blame. There’s no point in us both losing our jobs. But you may have to support me for the rest of my life.”
Nigel smiled. “For you, luv, anything.”
“Come, let’s get started on the repair.”
Carefully we dismantled the altered dress. It was then that we realized the enormous skirt was filled with horsehair stuffing and small lead weights to make it pouf and fall just the right way for the movie. Arrrgh, I thought, why does this have to be so difficult? Working with the 1950s Singers, we did our best to line up the seams as they had been previously and painstakingly sew the garment back together, stitch by stitch, coming as close to the original holes made in 1953 as we could. It was slow going, but there were two of us and we had all afternoon and night.
As we worked, I caught Nigel up on everything that had happened. How I had fallen hard for Denis King and then lost him to Sydney. Poor Denis, I thought. His life will be misery if he marries that icy heiress. I’ll bet she’d never lick strawberry jam off his private parts. I giggled at the memory.
As I told Nigel the story, it hit me. “You know,” I said, “I don’t have to roll over and take it. I could fight for him. I could. In fact I think I will.”
“Bravo,” Nigel cheered. “She may be prettier and younger and wealthier and better connected, but you’re somebody too.”
“Thank you, it’s true. I mesmerized a whole boatload of passengers with my chocolate corset and my fig-leaf bathing suit. I couldn’t have done that unless I had something to recommend me.”
Nigel regarded me with affection. “I still can’t believe you did that, you naughty girl.”
“Do you really think Sydney’s prettier than me?”
Nigel threw an empty spool of thread at me.
“Careful, you could poke my eye out with that. So was that a yes or a no?”
“It was a no, by all means no.”
“Thank you, it’s true,” I said.
Three Coins in the Fountain
NIGEL AND I ARRIVED at the Istituto Sunday morning with the Roman Holiday ball gown in hand. From the outside, the gown looked like perfection. But alas, that was not so. On close inspection, its defects were glaring.
“Signor Barbaro,” I said to the Istituto’s director, a gray-haired, impeccably dressed gentleman who smelled of musk the way European men often do, “Allow me to introduce my colleague, Nigel Calderwood, who is here to help you dress the mannequins.” I handed him the gown. “I believe this is what you’ve been waiting for?”
“Ah, signorina, grazie,” he said, kissing me on both cheeks and shaking Nigel’s hand. Then he launched into a rapid Italian soliloquy that I couldn’t understand, not that I could have if he’d spoken slower.
A tall, slender woman
