Dresses for the ages

By: Christine Kreyling

Published On: September 09, 2010

The three dresses hung in the closet like wallflowers waiting for a dance. Suspended beside them, as if poised for partnering, was a man’s jacket. But the scent of mothballs told me that their dancing days were over.

The oldest gown was of crepe, faded from turquoise to dusky rose. The careful gatherings at bodice, waist, and elbows were stitched to drape the fabric on what was then the impossibly slim figure of my mother. Eyeing the narrow armholes I thought: I could never have fit my body into this one.

Next hung the still spiffy jacket of olive brown wool decked out with the brass of the U.S. Army Finance Corp.—all that was left of my father’s dress uniform. Tucked waist was mute evidence of his equally slender form: 147 lbs. stretched on a six-foot-one-inch frame, according to his induction notice.

I know of the dress’s original tint, that my mother topped it with a chocolate straw picture hat and my father wore the jacket, only from photographs of their wedding day on April 21, 1945. In the snapshots float grinning faces, full of the promise of the end of the war that had kept them apart for so long.

The other two garments were all-white relics my own rites of passage. The dress in which I made my first communion in 1956 displayed a bodice on which stamped flowers—pansies, maybe?—were meticulously outlined in silk thread. As I traced the pattern with my finger I envisioned some gnarled woman going blind over a sweatshop table, all to make me princess for a day.

Finally came my own wedding gown, peau de soie still shimmering, pearls still fixed to lace 39 years later. As one who’d matured to the strains of Hendrix and Joplin, I’d wanted something more hippie dippie. But as the only girl-child of a woman who’d had two weeks to prepare for a wartime wedding—forget silk and lace, or even a pro photographer—I’d responded to my mother’s unspoken, but clearly felt, need for the full treatment of tradition.

My mother was a keeper of traditions and of the things that marked them: the letters and telegrams my father sent her from overseas, her children’s report cards, the recipes for every dish she’d ever cooked. This habit was enabled by the fact that she and my father lived in the same house for over 50 years, until he died and dementia took her away.

Now the storage house my brother and I had once called home was designated for new occupants. And we were exploring the artifacts of familial past, deciding what to take and what to toss.

I determined that the cherry chest would be useful for lingerie and jewelry, he that the mahogany bed and dresser set was better than his own. We made equally rational decisions about stock pots and saucepans, silver and plate and filled carton after carton for Goodwill.

Then I looked in the closet. What to do with these one-day wonders that no one would ever wear again? Poised between Goodwill and U-Haul, I considered the already-bulging closets in my own house, the look on spouse’s face as he crammed my first communion dress into the packed truck.

U-Haul won, of course. These were ritual vestments, not utilitarian objects. The spare flesh and bones of those I loved that had once filled these clothes—and those of my own past selves—had left a spirit behind more real than images in a photograph. Now was no time to be practical.