Lucy took a deep breath, as if she were bracing herself for the task ahead. John had gone sailing today, and it was just as well. He would have taken things out of closets and cupboards without deciding what to do with them.
“Casey, the guest room is in the back,” she said cheerfully, pulling out the silver-and-ivory-handled tea set from the sideboard. For as long as she’d been married to John, she had admired her mother-in-law’s silver, which had gone to Hazel and not John. Now it would go to their son, Michael, but would he even want such things in his bungalow in Sausalito? “Past the bathroom and linen closet,” she said when Casey appeared confused.
Casey went to the rear of the house, opening the wrong door first, then discovered the large spare room beside the laundry room. There must have been fifty or sixty hatboxes stacked up like towers—a landscape of striped paper, floral fabric, and squat leather cylinders. The windowed room with white cabbage rose curtains smelled of a dry, forgotten closet, and the scent of perfumed sachets lingered; someone had kept up with the mothballs. It would be impossible to take these back to Sabine’s. Casey opened the box nearest her and the one next to it, soon realizing that each box contained at least two hats. Some had more. They were sublime, but they were old hats nonetheless and for all intents and purposes unwearable. Not worth money, either.
She put on a pigeon-gray feathered hat shaped like a small oval plate. The feathers curved a little toward the face teasingly and were held up with two tortoiseshell combs and elastic. You’d wear your hair up, the hat cocked slightly over one eye. With a charcoal suit or maybe a pink one. Another was a luncheon hat with a bird’s nest cradling three blue eggs on a slender branch. The extravagance in design made Casey marvel. An ordinary woman could not pull this off. Surprisingly, the hat stayed put with only an elastic band worn beneath the nape of the neck. She checked the mirror near the door. How could she not smile? She dashed out to show Lucy.
“That was for a garden party in Wilton. Hazel had so much fun making that one. Those are real robin’s eggs,” Lucy said. Hazel’s hair was still brown then, she recalled. Her sister-in-law had worn a tailored sage-colored suit—something out of The Sound of Music with a nest on her head. Hazel was a wonder.
“One second,” Casey said. She ran back to the room and brought out a hat with a bisque-colored fan perched on top of a small brown pillbox. “You try.”
Lucy made a face. “No, no. You’re just like Hazel. She’d always make me do silly things.”
“Please,” Casey said.
Lucy’s pretty eyes lurked skeptically beneath the sober brow. She didn’t say anything. She was holding a pair of ice spoons in flannel bags.
Casey sensed acquiescence. “Oh, goody.” She deftly tucked the hat elastic over the back of Lucy’s head and moved the fan portion down closer to the forehead. “You look beautiful.” Casey smiled, because she took your breath away.
Lucy shook her head in denial, preparing to shed the thing herself, but she was admittedly curious.
“Go look.” Casey pointed to the Chippendale-style mirror in the foyer.
Lucy remained standing there, however, clutching the slotted spoons.
Casey removed the silver from her grasp and took her by the hand. “Come.”
Lucy cringed in the mirror reflexively. She felt self-conscious and ridiculous. “I don’t look good in these things.” When Hazel wore a hat, her neck had been as upright as a stalk of wheat.
“Nonsense. Look at yourself. It’s all right. It’s all right to look at yourself,” Casey said softly, only a little puzzled by the woman’s reluctance to admire herself. Excessive modesty being vanity’s sister, after all.
Casey studied Lucy for a moment, her hand covering her mouth in mild hesitation. “You look knowing,” she said.
Lucy glanced at the mirror and chuckled. The smile softened the straight line of her jaw. She raised her hands to remove the hat, but Casey wouldn’t have it. “Keep it on for five more minutes. Please.”
Casey headed to the attic, climbing the steps two at a time. She felt excited to see more.
When Lucy heard the attic door open, she shuffled quietly to the foyer mirror. Her image was so different. The hat hid the ash blond pageboy—the hairstyle she’d maintained since the seventies. Knowing. That was the right word. Lucy smiled shyly at herself and did not remove the hat until Casey came down much later.
Until evening, Casey went through each box in all three rooms until her hands were sooty and her hair covered in dust. Lucy drove her back to the city. A collapsible silk top hat rested in her lap for the ride back.