Sometimes you go to an estate sale and you just feel a connection with the previous occupants of the house. The sale I went to Friday was at the home of two 90-something spinster sisters, and that alone seemed to promise great things. The contents of their home - a fairly unassuming ranch house - spoke to a life filled with elegance. The sisters - or at least one of them - spoke French and read good books. They owned a considerable amount of sterling and wore good jewelry. They traveled, and they visited the stores I would have visited and brought home the souvenirs I would have bought.
They were excellent, perhaps extraordinary, seamstresses. They did not finish all of their projects, and no wonder, because they went to such pains to achieve perfection. They used tailor tacks (a stitch of thread to make a mark) instead of chalk, and they hand-basted seams before sewing them to make sure the garment fit.
They knew how to shop, and where to shop. In the box lots I brought home, mostly because I wanted some patterns inside, I found little paper bags from Macy's and Gimbels, filled with lovely notions - buttons, seam binding, a roll of Irish linen tape, a gorgeous length of sage-green polka dotted ribbon. The thought that Gimbels and Macy's once had notions counters was thrilling. And then it occurred to me that the sisters were shopping long before every city had a Macy's. To shop at Macy's, the sisters needed to travel from upstate New York, most likely to New York City. And while I sorted through the boxes, I made up a story about the sisters, Alice and Edna. They must have worked - maybe Edna was a schoolteacher, and Alice an executive secretary - and put money aside for shopping trips. They took the train into the city a few weekends a year, and they shopped at good stores. They came home with their purchases and stitched late into the night, and people would always notice how elegant they looked. And as much as this story pleased me, I wanted to know whether it was true, and so I went back to the sale the next day, knowing full well the real story might be a disappointment. I know the woman running the estate sale a little, and so I asked her about Alice and Edna, and boy, was I wrong.
Their lives were so much richer than I imagined. They didn't move to the little house until they were in their 80s, and they needed to be closer to family members. Up until then, they lived just outside of New York City. Alice spent her career working in the offices of the W.T. Grant Co., and Edna was the CEO of a trust on Wall Street. They were career women, in the mold of Katharine Hepburn in the movies. And judging from the patterns they bought, they must have looked fabulous.
I'll never know which sister cut an advertisement out of the newspaper and sketched a version of the jacket she wanted to make: "gray wool lined with red cotton." I'm guessing Alice, maybe during a dull report at a quarterly meeting at W.T. Grant.
Or which sister hurried to Macy's on her lunch hour, a snippet of green wool in her bag, to buy seam binding and buttons. Maybe that was Edna, taking a break from her responsibilities at work to dally at the notions counter, swatch in hand, musing over her choices.
