The Mink Coat

Fiction by Mark Jonathan Harris

In the winter of 1970, a few months after I moved to Montreal, my mother sent me her prized mink coat. It arrived, without warning, by insured mail in a plain brown box. The classic, mahogany mink was carefully wrapped in a cloth garment bag that bore the faint smell of my mother’s cedar closet. Along with the coat, a cryptic note: “Know I’m thinking about you. Mom.”

My mother and I had spoken only once since I’d moved to Canada to marry my college boyfriend. A day before his induction, Terry had fled in protest against dying uselessly in Vietnam in a war we both considered immoral. My father had fought in Guadalcanal during World War II and thought Terry a coward and a traitor. Better he should be in prison than living free in Canada. I deserved the same fate for marrying him. He forbade my mother to talk to me.

Although my mother generally deferred to my father, occasionally — though often surreptitiously — she defied him. I gave her our address and phone number in Montreal, hoping my willingness to stand up to my father would encourage her to do the same. One night shortly before Thanksgiving, she telephoned, a slurred call from what sounded like a restaurant or bar, as if a few drinks had given her the courage or recklessness to dial my number. Was it much colder there than Boston? she asked. Was I keeping warm?

I assured her I was fine.

And what about the Quebeckers? Was their French as bad as people said?

“It sounds a little like mine when I’ve had too much to drink.”

“You shouldn’t follow my example.”.

“It was a joke, Mom…”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Is he treating you all right?” she finally asked. It was difficult for her to even say Terry’s name.

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“I just want you to be happy, Brenda.”

I didn’t answer.

“Well, I should get back to your father.” She ended her brief rebellion.

The mink arrived a few weeks later.

I knew the coat held a privileged place in my mother’s wardrobe because she wore it only on those rare nights when my parents dressed in evening clothes, or when my father wanted to impress insurance clients. As a child, I loved to watch her as she carefully “put on her party face” for these engagements. When she took pains with her appearance, she appeared especially glamorous.

Photographs of her before her marriage show a slender woman, with pale blue eyes and a smile that could be either shy or coquettish. After three pregnancies — two of them miscarriages — her face and figure had coarsened some, but she could still turn heads when she entered a room. The coat helped. It wasn’t Blackglama — too expensive even for my father — but the finely tailored, knee-length mink provided a Lauren Bacall haughtiness missing from her life as suburban housewife and mother. In her pale blue evening gown that matched her eyes, diamond pendants dangling from her ears, and the fur draped casually over her shoulders, she seemed a different person from the mute, distracted woman I’d often find at the kitchen table, restlessly smoking and playing solitaire.

Each April, in a spring ritual as regular as Easter, she would send the mink back to the furrier to be cleaned, glazed and stored until she reclaimed it in time for the company’s annual New Year’s Eve party. The coat transformed her into a mysterious and inaccessible woman I barely recognized. Now she’d given me the most elegant possession in her life. The gift both touched and puzzled me.

I tried it on and looked at myself in the mirror. The mink flattened my hips as it had my mother’s. It made my frayed jeans look hip, stylish. The fur was luscious, velvety despite its years. Its warmth took the chill off our drafty Saint Laurent Boulevard apartment.

When Terry returned home that night from his job at the bookstore, I was wearing the mink.

He stepped back from my embrace as if the coat was toxic. “Where did you get that?”

“My mother sent it.”

“It figures. It’s obscene.”

“I thought you liked obscenity.” I opened the coat to reveal that I was wearing nothing underneath.

He put his hand in front of his face as if to block my nakedness. “Do you know how many animals they have to kill to make a coat like that? Sixty? Seventy? They spend all their lives crammed into these tiny, filthy cages. They go nuts, start cannibalizing each other.”

“I didn’t buy it. It’s a gift.”

“So what. It’s like the war. You support it, you have blood on your hands.”

“Not everything is Vietnam. Do I call you murderer because you wear leather boots?”

“Send it back! It’s disgusting.”

I flung the coat at him and retreated to the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. A crack in the frosted window made the bathroom the coldest room in our apartment. I shivered on the toilet seat until I could bear it no longer. When I emerged, Terry had hung the coat in the closet. “I’m sorry,” he apologized, handing me his flannel nightshirt. “I have a problem with anything to do with your parents.”

“At least my mother’s making an effort.”

“What? To bribe you to come home?”

I threw his nightshirt back at him and pulled a blanket from the bed to cover myself. “You think the worst of everyone. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s really cold here.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a fucking martyr. Turn up the heat!”

Whether it was rebellion against Terry or loyalty to my mother, I kept the coat, my badge of defiance. It was also the warmest garment I owned. I wore it, though, only when I went out alone. In a city whose language I never spoke fluently, and where I always felt out of place, the mink was a protective covering that helped me blend in with the fashionable Quebecois shop girls in their faux furs and midi skirts. I knew I should feel sorry for the dozens of hapless minks who’d died for my comfort, but I felt no collective guilt for their murder, no shame for wearing a coat I hadn’t bought myself. You can only protest so many things at once and fur coats were not at the top of my list.

***

The Paris Peace Accords of 1973 stopped the fighting in Vietnam and American troops began coming home. Six months later Terry and I officially dissolved our marriage. With the war and the draft ended, we no longer shared a cause strong enough to bridge our differences. Terry stayed in Canada to work with U.S. military deserters and I moved to Chicago. Northwestern offered a scholarship to graduate school in psychology and I eagerly grabbed it. It was a ticket back to the United States that bypassed Boston and a chance to explore why I’d made such a mistake in marrying Terry.

I packed my Friedan and Millett and de Beauvoir, my bell bottoms and tie dyes, and the mink, and left everything else behind. Like my mother, I’d stored and cleaned the coat at a furrier each April and reclaimed it in November. Although the fur was not quite as supple as it had once been, reglazed it still retained its luxuriant sheen, its aura of glamour. I felt bolder, freer somehow whenever I wore it.

Terry would have hated Chicago, railed at its hypocrisy and political corruption, but I fell in love with the city almost from the start. Unlike Montreal, divided by class and language and ideology, Chicago was a place where contradictions were more easily tolerated, where rich and progressive weren’t viewed as antithetical, where you could wear expensive Italian boots and still rail against capitalism. Here my mink evoked admiration, not scorn. I was wearing it when I first met Bryan.

It was a frigid January night; the wind stung my face and eyes as it whipped across the lake. I was trying to hail a cab in front of a North Shore apartment building after leaving a party of graduate students where I’d drunk too much and insulted too many earnest men who reminded me of Terry. The cold had emptied the streets and the few taxis that passed were all occupied.

Bryan emerged from the building, hatless and gloveless, in a black overcoat with a sable collar. He was in his late thirties, with the self-assurance of a man who enjoyed striding bare-headed into the wind.

He looked me over. “You waiting for someone?”

“A taxi.”

He shook his head at my grim prospects. “Fortunately, you’ve got a great coat to keep you warm.” He reached out and ran his hand lightly over my sleeve. “Did you know minks make love for six hours at a time?”

“Don’t they get bored?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Is that a boast or a dare?”

He looked at me again. “Where are you going?”

I told him.

“My car’s just down the block,” he said. “Let me drive you.”

On the way to the car we stopped for a drink at the James Hotel, and then another, and, in the end, took a room for the night. Though he wore no ring, I probably knew from the start that he was married. I didn’t care. I wanted to be desired again, not judged, to be swept away rather than measured. He made love to me in my mink and although he could not live up to his claims, he made me feel beautiful, alive.

In the morning he told me about his wife, who was in New York that weekend with their two young children, visiting her parents. He said he no longer loved her, but even if he had told me otherwise, I would have seen him again.

We continued meeting, in my apartment, at night in his law office, and over heady weekends in New York, San Francisco, once even Paris, where his international law firm sent him. When we were together I wore my coat as often as the weather warranted, flaunting it, as he flaunted me, his decade-younger mistress, elegant or vulgar depending on your taste. In my mink and the French lingerie he bought me, I felt alluring, not tawdry, a woman of the world, with secrets, mysteries. Weeks when he was occupied with work or family, I worried that he was using me, that there was no future in our relationship, but I loved his extravagance, his romantic recklessness, so different from my father, his ease and sophistication in the world, so different from Terry. I saw in him what I wanted and ignored the rest.

***

At the beginning of April 1976, my father called from Boston. It was the first time we’d had spoken in years, but his peremptory tone hadn’t changed. “Your mother’s ill. You need to come home.”

For my father to call, it had to be grave. The diagnosis was esophageal cancer. The doctors were treating it aggressively, but they’d caught it late. I didn’t ask the prognosis.

Although my mother and I now spoke a few times a month on the phone, I hadn’t seen her since I left Boston. President Carter pardoned the draft dodgers the day after his inauguration, but my father still hadn’t forgiven me. “They broke the law and betrayed the country, “ he told my mother. “As far as I’m concerned, they can all rot in hell.”

I flew, unannounced, to Boston and took a taxi to our house in Newton. The key to the front door was still hidden on the ledge, and I let myself in the house. Mother was alone in the backyard, lying in a lawn chair, covered with a blanket even in the warm spring air. She was thinner than I’d ever seen her, thinner than the pictures of her in her youth. Her pinched face was capped by a black turban to hide the wasteland chemotherapy had made of her hair. When she reached to embrace me, her papery arms were as gaunt as the branches of the still-bare trees.

“Your father tried to get me to quit smoking for years,” she said. “I guess I should have listened.” It was one of her small mutinies against him.

I told her she could beat the cancer.

But she already knew the truth. “You can see it in the doctors’ faces. I’m a lost cause.”

“I don’t believe that, Mom.”

“You sound like your father. You two are more alike than you think.”

“You can fight this. You can’t give up.” I tried to sound more confident than I felt.

“At least it’s brought you home again. I’m happy for that.” She looked me over with her restless eyes, the only familiar feature in her wan face. “It hasn’t been easy for you, has it?”

“I’m doing fine.”

“That man you’re seeing, how’s that going?”

“Fine,” I said again.

“He’s married, isn’t he?”

Somehow she’d managed to detect that even on the phone.

“I suppose he’s promising to leave his wife.”

“As a matter of fact…” I started to explain.

She cut me off. “You know they never do.”

“You learn that from soap operas?”

“We all make our own mistakes. I’d hate to see you keep repeating them.”

I wanted to lash back — Bryan wasn’t at all like Terry — but she shivered and pulled the blanket up around her shoulders. Stricken by her fraility, I knelt and took her hand. Its coldness chilled me. I thought of the mink and how it could have warmed her. “When I was in Montreal, why did you send me your coat?” I asked.

“Do you still have it?”

“Of course. ”
She looked pleased. “I hope you’re storing it during the summers.”

“Just like you did. But I still don’t understand why you gave it to me. You had more reasons and places to wear it.”

She paused before she answered. “I wanted you to have a good winter coat and I wasn’t sure you could afford one.”

“It was more than a winter coat. It was the nicest thing you owned.”

“It was a wedding present. If you’d had a proper wedding, I would’ve bought the bridal gown. I wanted to give you something that would mean as much.”

It struck me again what it must have cost her to give away my father’s most expensive gift to the daughter he’d disavowed. My own rebellion had cost much less. I’d discarded Terry, but she still lived with my father. I squeezed her hand and kissed her chilled cheek. “Has he forgiven you for sending it to me?” I asked.

“I never told him.”

I wanted to ask why she’d married such an unforgiving man, but like my mother, I found it easier to avoid the question. Besides, I told myself, she needed to think about the future, not the past. I’d come home to bolster her spirits not darken them with regrets. So I did what I often do when I feel emotions building that I can’t control: I cooked. Chopping, peeling, measuring helped to focus my attention elsewhere. My mother sat at the kitchen table watching me, as I’d watched her when I was a child, offering occasional instructions for dishes she could no longer eat. Despite her loss of appetite — or maybe because of it — I filled the refrigerator with familiar soups and casseroles, as if her old Good Housekeeping recipes might restore a time when we were closer and make up for the lost years between us.

My father and I shared no activity that could repair the rift between us. I didn’t even know if his summons home had been his idea or my mother’s. “Why did you wait so long to tell me she had cancer?” I asked the first time we were alone.

“This has been hard enough for her. She needs all her strength to fight this.”

“You thought I’d make her worse?”

“Six years. It’s been six years since you ran off. Where have you been all that

time?”

“Exactly where you wanted me. In exile.”

“You know how much grief you’ve caused your mother…” He swallowed whatever words were rising in his throat. “We’re going to get through this. We will. All of us.”

I didn’t argue or contest his view of the past or future. Denial was the default coping mechanism of our family and we quickly lapsed into our familiar silences. After three days I could bear them no longer. Pleading obligations at school, I booked a flight back to Chicago, promising to return within a few weeks.

My father was as relieved as I that I was leaving. The divide between us made it even harder to accept the imminent loss of the one person who bound us together.

***

Shuttling between Chicago and Boston, I stopped working on my thesis. I could no longer focus on the reasons middle-class girls became delinquents. I told Bryan I needed to know where we stood.

He was understanding, supportive — he had lost his own father two years before — but he appealed for more time. He was a good lawyer and his arguments always sounded reasonable. It was the wrong moment for either of us to make such a big change. He was in the middle of a political battle for control of his law firm, and because of the tension with his wife, his son was acting out at school. I should focus on my mother and my dissertation, while he would work to resolve his office and family problems. Then we could be together.

I wanted to believe him, so I agreed to wait a little longer. Between my trips to Boston, and the stress of his work and family, we didn’t see each other as often as before. And when we did I was no longer the uninhibited mistress who met him in his office late at night, without underwear, or unzipped his pants again as he drove me home in his Corvette.

One night, after we hadn’t seen each other for almost two weeks, he agreed to come to dinner at my apartment before returning home — a rare occurrence now. Needing a distraction, and wanting to please him, I spent the afternoon in the kitchen, trying Julia Child recipes I had never cooked before. He arrived over an hour late, ruining all my careful preparation. The spinach soufflé had fallen and I feared the poulet au diable was overcooked.

He put his arms around me as he apologized and slipped his hands underneath my blouse.

I pulled away, wanting to get to the table.

“We can heat the food up later,” he said.

The ease with which he dismissed my hours of work irritated me. “No, everything’s past done.”

He wasn’t interested in the food and pulled me back. “What happened to that sexy girl in mink I met three years ago?”

“She’s been standing at the stove all day cooking for you.” I tried to extricate myself from his grasp.

“You know the two most overrated things about marriage?” He grinned. “The other is home cooking.”

I hit him in the chest with my fist. And then slugged him harder before he pushed me away. “You should go. Now.”

He glared at me with an expression I’d never seen before — a fury that must have mirrored my own, or maybe it was just recognition of a truth we’d both been refusing to accept. “You want more than I can give right now,” he said.

Terry had said much the same when I told him I was leaving. The pain was just as sharp. Would I have relented if he called the next day, or the day after, or even the week after that and pleaded for another chance? Perhaps. But the call never came.

My mother died a few weeks later. She took her last breaths while I was still in the air circling over Logan airport. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had been at her bedside. I had flown back to Boston several times during those last months, but we never spoke more openly than the first day I’d returned, either about my mistakes or hers. On one of my final visits to the hospital, she mentioned a suitcase that she was leaving for me in her closet. “Promise you won’t open it until I die,” she said. She struggled to sit up to make her point. “After you’ve gone through it, burn everything!” I promised to honor her request. Whatever secrets the suitcase contained, neither of us had the courage to face them while she was still alive.

Her funeral was a bleak, dry-eyed affair. A modest number of people came to pay their respects — neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues of my father. It was all decorous and proper. “As your mother would have wanted it,” my father said, as usual attributing his own desires to her.

I found it hard to measure the depth of his grief. Maybe all these last months he had been preparing himself, or maybe my parents had lived such separate lives for so many years that her actual loss made little difference. Guadalcanal had taught him to cut his losses and move on. He was as incapable of talking about my mother’s death as he was the war. Two days after the funeral he went back to his office to work. His absence gave me a chance to open her last gift.

I found the worn, canvas suitcase hidden behind a stack of shoe boxes in her cedar closet. Inside was a carefully preserved scrapbook of my mother’s life, neatly sorted stacks of letters, cards and yellowed newspaper clippings, all tied together by different colored ribbons. According to the newspaper accounts she’d saved — their wedding photo, a picture of my father in military uniform, an article about my mother’s fund-raising activities for the local library, a story about a golf tournament my father won — my parents were a prosperous, civic-minded, American couple. The greeting cards confirmed the public record — a proper sentiment for every occasion — birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, including all the hand-made cards I was forced to make at school. She’d dutifully saved them all, as if throwing them away might have exposed their fraudulence.

The letters told a different story. My mother’s youthful beauty had attracted many men. She had been admired, desired, pursued. “I dreamed of you last night, your eyes as blue as the sky…” “I can’t stop thinking about you and the fleeting touch of your lips on mine. Why did you run away?” “If you gave me a chance, I’d make you the happiest woman in the world.” “Your braking my heart,” another wrote in touching misspelled prose. “Why are you so mean to me?” Although she’d flirted with many, she seemed to have denied her favors to all.

Somehow meeting my father had changed all that, but why she’d fallen in love with him was impossible to tell from the letters in the suitcase. They had met while he was in basic training, shortly before he shipped out to the Pacific. The only letters from him she’d saved were ones he wrote during the war. Many had portions blacked out by the military censor. Others were constrained by my father’s reticence. “I think of you so much, but I never seem to be able to put my thoughts on paper.” “So much has happened and it is still forbidden to tell all that it makes letter writing very difficult.” Even in his stiff prose, though, my father’s feelings were clear. “I think of you constantly. You are what keeps me going through all this mess.” “I have seen all I want to see here. All I want is to see you again.” That was as much passion as my father allowed himself to express. But perhaps his reticence was a perfect fit for her own remoteness. “Your heart

is as cold as ice,” one of her early admirers had written to her.

Whatever my parents had sensed in each other in their first meetings seemed to have been reinforced by their correspondence during the war. Soon after my father returned from the army they married — the censored letters and Hallmark greeting cards the only record of their attachment.

At the very bottom of the suitcase was a large pack of letters she had written to her older sister Bea, who lived in San Francisco with another woman. My father didn’t approve of my lesbian aunt, so she and my mother didn’t see each other often. I didn’t know my aunt well because she died when I was ten, but she was evidently the one person my mother could confide in. My mother must have found the letters after Bea’s death and kept them to document the full story of her life.

The letters were hard to read — the handwriting often illegible, the ink blurred with time and maybe tears. “Long, empty days. Stan working late again. Brenda busy

with her friends and me alone as usual…” The discontent and entrapment she felt were often more implied than stated, as if she were reluctant to admit her feelings even to herself. “Drank too much sherry and burned the dinner tonight. Stan late at work anyway. Brenda content with macaroni.”

Finally, she could no longer ignore or deny her suspicions of my father’s infidelity. In a letter written when I was in third grade, she reported to my aunt irrefutable evidence of a long-running affair my father was conducting with an office secretary. Several phone calls must have followed, for in the next letter, she wrote: “Took your advice and spoke to Stan. He’s agreed to end it, swears he will never see her again. Can I believe him?”

Three days later, she wrote again: “Today he brought home a mink coat as an apology. As if that makes up for all his lies. I can’t bear to put it on. Wonder if it was really meant for me.”

Then another scribbled note, dated two days later. “This morning I made my decision. Better to keep the family together. Am I making a terrible mistake?”

There was no record of my aunt’s reply. Maybe my aunt didn’t support her decision, or maybe in deciding to remain in the marriage, my mother felt she had abrogated her right to complain, for her letters to my aunt ended shortly afterwards. Still she saved them for me, wanting me to know the truth at last. The letters, like her

wedding present of the coat, were her final revolt against my father.

When I finished going through the suitcase, I burned all its contents in the fireplace, as she had wished, turning all her pain to ashes.

All the next day I tried to think what I could say to my father. Wasn’t that the reason she’d saved the letters all these years? So I could speak in her place, say what she’d been unable to. Or were the letters just meant for me, a cautionary tale about marriage and men, delivered too late? Or was it her way of forgiving me for my own mistakes?

The morning I was to leave, my father offered to drive me to the airport. It was the chance I’d been waiting for, yet in the car I still didn’t know what to say.

“What now?” he broke the palpable tension between us. I wasn’t sure if he was asking himself or me.

“I read her letters to Bea,” I blurted out. “She wanted me to know how badly you

hurt her. She saved those letters so I would know.” I was trembling as I said it.

He kept his eyes fixed on the road. “I loved your mother,” he said quietly.

“Then why did you see other women?” I lashed out. “There were other women, weren’t there?”

His silence confirmed it. “You don’t understand…” he started, then fell silent again.

“What? What don’t I understand?” Yet even as I asked, I think I knew. We all make choices that fit our needs, I no more than my parents.

“Despite what you may think, we had a good life together,” he finally said.

“You…you had a good life, but she deserved more.”

He lifted one hand from the steering wheel as if to ward off the accusation, but then dabbed at his eyes instead.

At the airport, he got out of the car. “Will you come back?” he asked as he handed

me my bag. The catch in his voice caught me by surprise. Sorrow deepened the lines in his face, eroding its stoniness.

My mother had been willing to accept his contrition and confine her regrets and injuries to a suitcase in her closet, but forgiveness was as difficult for me as it was for my father. “I don’t know” was all that I could say.

***

I didn’t reclaim my mother’s coat from the furrier until the middle of November. A few days later, on a crisp fall day, I put it on to join six other fur-clad women in front of a window display of mink coats at Marshall Field’s, two blocks from Bryan’s law offices in the Loop.

At a given signal, we shed our coats and picked up huge, hand-lettered signs to

cover our nakedness. “I’d rather go naked than wear fur,” one poster proclaimed. Another asked: “Would You Wear Your Dog?” Mine read: “Stop the Pain!”

A crowd of bystanders gathered, a few to cheer our sentiments, others to try to glimpse the nudity behind our placards. Newspaper photographers clicked away. Television cameras rolled.

Despite the sun, you could feel the start of winter in the air, a perfect time to give our coats away to the homeless. Terry no doubt would have felt vindicated to see that I finally recognized the immorality of the coat. Even Bryan might have appreciated the

flamboyance of the gesture. But it wasn’t the poor minks I was thinking of liberating as I posed for the cameras in the chill autumn air. I only wish my mother could have been there to cheer me.

Mark Jonathan Harris began his writing career in Chicago as a reporter for the legendary City News Bureau. He moved from covering crime to making documentaries and has won three Academy Awards for his work. His latest film, FOSTER, aired on HBO in May. He has also written five award-winning children’s novels and several short stories. He teaches filmmaking in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where he is a Distinguished Professor.