“The telephone melted—remember that part?” I asked him.
“THE CASH REGISTER MELTED—REMEMBER THAT?” he asked me.
“Maybe they rebuilt the place—after the fire,” I said. “Maybe there was another store—maybe there’s a chain of stores.”
He didn’t say anything; we both knew it was unlikely that the public’s interest in the color red would support a chain of stores like Jerrold’s.
“How’d you know the store was here?” I asked Owen.
“I SAW AN ADVERTISEMENT IN THE SUNDAY BOSTON HERALD,” he said. “I WAS LOOKING FOR THE FUNNIES AND I RECOGNIZED THE HANDWRITING—IT WAS THE SAME STYLE AS THE LABEL.”
Leave it to Owen to recognize the handwriting; he had probably studied the label in my mother’s red dress for so many years that he could have written “Jerrold’s” in the exact same style himself!
“WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?” Owen asked me. “WHY DON’T WE GO INSIDE AND ASK THEM IF THEY EVER HAD A FIRE?”
Inside the place, we were confronted by a spareness as eccentric as the glaring color of every article of clothing in sight; if Jerrold’s could be said to have a theme, it appeared to be—stated, and overstated—that there was only one of everything: one bra, one nightgown, one half-slip, one little cocktail dress, one long evening dress, one long skirt, one short skirt, the one blouse on the one mannequin we had seen in the window, and one counter of four-sided glass that contained a single pair of red leather gloves, a pair of red high heels, a garnet necklace (with a matching pair of earrings), and one very thin belt (also red, and probably alligator or lizard). The walls were white, the hoods of the indirect lights were black, and the one man behind the one counter was about the age my mother would have been if she’d been alive.
The man regarded Owen and me disdainfully: he saw two teenage boys, not dressed for Newbury Street, possibly (if so, pathetically) shopping for a mother or for a girlfriend; I doubt that we could have afforded even the cheapest version of the color red available in Jerrold’s.
“DID YOU EVER HAVE A FIRE?” Owen asked the man.
Now the man looked less sure about us; he thought we were too young to be selling insurance, but Owen’s question—not to mention Owen’s voice—had disarmed him.
“It would have been a fire in the forties,” I said.
“OR THE EARLY FIFTIES,” said Owen Meany.
“Perhaps you haven’t been here—at this location—for that long?” I asked the man.
“ARE YOU JERROLD?” Owen asked the man; like a miniature policeman, Owen Meany pushed the wrinkled label from my mother’s dress across the glass-topped counter.
“That’s our label,” the man said, fingering the evidence cautiously. “We’ve been here since before the war—but I don’t think we’ve ever had a fire. What sorta fire do you mean?” he asked Owen—because, naturally, Owen appeared to be in charge.
“ARE YOU JERROLD?” Owen repeated.
“That’s my father—Giordano,” the man said. “He was Giovanni Giordano, but they fucked around with his name when he got off the boat.”
This was an immigration story, and not the story Owen and I were interested in, so I asked the man, politely: “Is your father alive?”
“Hey, Poppa!” the man shouted. “You alive?”
A white door, fitted so flush to the white wall that Owen and I had not noticed it was there, opened. An old man with a tailor’s measuring tape around his neck, and a tailor’s many pins adorning the lapels of his vest, came into the storeroom.
“Of course I’m alive!” he said. “You waitin’ for some miracle? You in a hurry for your inheritance?” He had a mostly-Boston, somewhat-Italian accent.
“Poppa, these young men want to talk to ‘Jerrold’ about some fire,” the son said; he spoke laconically and with a more virulent Boston accent than his father’s.
“What fire?” Mr. Giordano asked us.
“We were told that your store burned down—sometime in the forties, or the fifties,” I said.
“This is big news to me!” said Mr. Giordano.
“My mother must have made a mistake,” I explained. I showed the old label to Mr. Giordano. “She bought a dress in your store—sometime in the forties, or the fifties.” I didn’t know what else to say. “It was a red dress,” I added.
“No kiddin’,” said the son.
I said: “I wish I had a picture of her—perhaps I could come back, with a photograph. You might remember something about her if I showed you a picture,” I said.