In spirit, the kimono reflects its maker’s predicament. My mother’s entire relationship to fashion was one of passionate ambivalence. Her mother had pushed her into vocational home economics in both high school and college, and she later envied my father, a teacher of literature, his exalted access to higher things. She never wore the French and Italian designs that she showed her students in pictures during those years when she had an academic job. She liked to drive to the Neiman Marcus store in Bal Harbour, but she rarely, if ever, bought anything. She said that she could not afford Chanel and Dior, but I suspect that the truth was more complex. The coats and hats and dresses she most admired represented for her, I think, a world beyond her compass. In the sixties, when she and my father were beginning their first divorce, she led a group of fashion students on a European tour, and later she took a few trips overseas and to New York, but these places remained faraway lands. In the seventies, after remarrying my father, she got her Ph.D. from the College of Home Economics at Florida State University — her dissertation was titled “Exploratory Study of Quality Control Problems and Procedures in the Manufacture of Junior and Misses Fashion Apparel in Dade County, Florida”—but she never felt that this achievement was appreciated by her family or her colleagues. It would be only a short time before she’d turn her back on teaching. In the late eighties and the nineties, her Peace Goods years, she began exploring popular alternative philosophies, most of which were formed, it seemed to me, from blends of astrology, Jungian psychology, Native American mythology, and various recovered-memory and past-life regression theories and therapies — the ad hoc religions of the New Age. These philosophies essentially gave my mother permission to imagine the world as a place of her own making. She never, I sometimes think, stopped being a child.
The world depicted on the kimono is the world inhabited by that child, a world full of storybook animals waiting to accompany the heroine on her journey to forever. To see her wearing it, however — and I recall that I did, one day at her house in North Carolina, though I wonder, sometimes, whether I only imagined this — was to experience its power. My mother was tall and sedentary, and in her later years she ate poorly. Drinking and smoking had broken her down. Her face looked worn and, as my father had always said, tired. That day in Black Mountain, she put on the robe, drew it close around her, and stooped beneath the low ceiling in her living room, the room partly taken up with the worktable she’d carted north from her shop in Miami.
The kimono fell on my mother to a place between her hips and knees. The butterfly’s antennae rose in the air behind her head, and drew attention to her hair, which looked brushed to appear as if it had not been brushed at all, then hurriedly sprayed in place. She had on glasses; their frames were big and buglike; combined with the antennae and the wings, the effect was almost comical. Because I knew that I had no choice other than to approve, I told her that the kimono was amazing, and she asked me if I truly thought so, and I said, “Yes, yes, absolutely.”
I imagine her turning, showing me the back, like a lover displaying a dress that delivers a frank promise of sex. And it occurs to me that the butterfly was a parasite — that its wings were too small to lift and carry both her and all the things attached to the robe, the sachets and the man in the moon and the feathers and jewels hanging from ribbons and strings. When I see her this way, in memory, with the indigo and blue sashes dangling beneath her arms, and the cat like a badge over her heart, and her antennae sticking up behind her head, I become grateful to her father, who, however he may have failed her when she was a little girl, protected her and insured her a home in the last years of her life.
In the seventies, my mother made a suit for my father. We were living in Coconut Grove at the time, in a house that had formerly been inhabited by a CIA agent. The suit was handmade in the traditional manner, with recurrent fittings leading to the drawing and redrawing of patterns, and the painstaking construction of a paper-and-muslin facsimile. In proper tailoring, enormous labor is expended before the valuable fabric — in this case, a dark-brown wool herringbone from a Scottish mill — is ever cut. The tailor observes the posture, mannerisms, and physical idiosyncrasies of the man who will wear the finished garment. Subtle information about social standing, power, and ambition is communicated through the wearer’s bearing, and through choices in material and style: pinstripes or plaids; notched lapels or peaked; side vents or center; and so on. The tailor indeed takes the measure of the man, who begins to feel the pride that comes with wearing clothes cut and sewn specifically for his body, clothes intended to carry him into the world as a confident and vital participant in society.
The suit my mother made for my father was impeccable. He told me that he wore it until he wore it out. My mother’s skill as a tailor is evident in all the clothes she ever made. Yet when it comes to the apparel she championed as wearable works of art — and tried without success to market as her Peace Goods line — there remains the problem of power. The power of my mother’s robe is the power that was strongest in her at the end of her life. This was her power to force away the people she loved. There is beauty in the robe, as there was beauty in my mother, who, when young, was lively and playful and striking to look at, and who even in her worst sickness never lost her ability to laugh. But it is likely, for a person newly confronted with her kimono, that the naked innocence it reveals will defy empathy. When this happens, the conversation among the maker, the wearer, and the viewer of clothes, the conversation open to all of us, simply through living in a world where people get dressed, will be interrupted.
That my mother knew so thoroughly her craft and the traditions of fashion, and that she went on to make, in her final decade, such declamatory yet incomprehensible clothes, such odd things to wear, gives — in light of her scornful retreat from people and the public world — a supreme, unexpected dignity to her creations. I realize now, as I did not before she died, that, however violent or delusional she may have been when I was growing up, she was, after all, working. She was smoking and drinking herself into her grave, yet she was managing, in her classrooms at the college, and in her shop near the river, and in her house at the bottom of the road, to carry on and endure. “Death? Or life?” the kimono seems to ask. Because the appliqued symbols that form these questions are so appropriate to the idea of ceremony and pageantry, and yet so childlike and puzzling, the viewer looks away from the garment and considers the wearer. But my mother in her robe is nowhere to be found. Her inner life has been transferred to the surface of the kimono.
My mother lived her life inviting death. When her cancer was diagnosed, and she was summarily ordered by her doctors to quit smoking, she did so in a matter of days, and seemed afterward rarely to think of smoking, or to regret that she ever had. Smoking had got her to the one place where the major competing strains in her consciousness of herself — as a visionary child and as a brokenhearted woman — came together, and made her whole, and left her to die in peace.
Years after her death, my worry over her persists. Worry may be what I am trying to overcome when I talk to my dead mother, as I did that evening in the stairwell at the New York Public Library. I was brooding over some problem that had existed between us, and sharing with her, out loud (though not too loudly), my thoughts. On the first-floor landing, I briefly imagined her floating near the ceiling. Stitched onto her silk kimono were provisions and companions for her winged journey into eternity. “Mom!” I said, and, as I called out to her, I did not glance over my shoulder, and I did not, in that passing instant, dare to see, at a modest height above the ground — my mother, not there.