Joe needed a suit. He has a couple of sports coats and dress slacks that have been suitable thus far in his almost 18 years on this planet. But he had to be in a wedding so it was time for the real thing. And although he and his mom were perfectly capable of doing this on their own, I volunteered to meet them at the men's store that I use.
My father used to take me with him sometimes when he went shopping for suits. We would go downtown to the old M.M. Cohn. We would take the ancient elevator, which my memory insists was run by a human operator, up to the men's department. Buck always asked to be waited on by the same guy. The man's name has long since escaped me. But I remember distinctly remember his being an older gentleman with a tailor's tape measure around his shoulders.
Buck always bought suits manufactured by either Hickey-Freeman or Hart, Shaffner and Marx. Whichever was the better deal at the time, of course. He would ask the ancient salesman to show what he had "in a navy," for example. The salesman would return with two or three draped over his arm. And then I would watch the two of them engage in the ritual of Men and Suits.
Buck would put on a suitcoat. He would step in the three-way mirror and look one way or the other. The salesman would occasionally brush at the shoulder. Pull at the back. Buck would button and unbutton. Turn and look over his shoulder. Price would be discussed discreetly and out of my earshot.
Eventually Buck would announce that he had made his decision with a terse, "Hell, let's mark this one up." The salesman would invariably compliment him on his decision.
"That's a nice suit of clothes," he would always tell my father after Buck decided what he wanted. Just like he probably told anybody that ever bought a stitch of clothing from him at Cohn's.
After the sale had been consummated, I would sit on the floor and watch the salesman take up a sleeve with the stickpins in his mouth. He produced the stubby square chalk from his pocket and put a mark on the back in the event the jacket needed to be let out some. Or taken up. I forget which. How much break on the shoe Buck required was discussed with something approaching gravity.
I learned from my father that you wear a dress shirt and your good shoes when you got fitted for a suit of clothes. You did this because "you're not buying off the rack," as he put it when I expressed the notion that this seemed to be a lot of trouble. You have to show some shirt sleeve. The cuff has to break across the shoe just so.
That's just the way it is.
My father died before I got my first real suit. One could safely navigate Hendrix College in those days with just a jacket and tie. So I never much thought about it. But Mother insisted that I needed a suit before I went off to law school. And it needed to be "banker gray" for reasons known only to her.
I remember Mom patting the sleeve of the suit jacket as the salesman "marked it up." At M.M. Cohn's--of course--but at the mall over on University which no longer exists. And Buck's old store downtown is being turned into lofts, or in litigation, or both. I can't keep it straight.
"Banker gray, Paulie," my mother said, on that day long ago and far away. "You look nice in banker gray."
Joe called me over to the mirror after the saleslady--not an elderly man in the musty department store from my childhood--was through "marking him up."
"What do you think?" he asked.
I looked over Joe's shoulder from behind. In the mirror, his mother's face attached as it is to Tarzan's body looked back at me from three planes. I fiddled with the pinned-up cuff as I pulled the sleeve of his shirt out a bit.
I mean, you don't come into this world knowing that you need to shoot some cuff. That's just how it is. I brushed his shoulder with my hand.
"You look great, Buddy," I said. "That's a nice suit of clothes."
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Arthur Paul Bowen is a writer and lawyer living in Little Rock.
Editorial on 12/25/2017