Free Unto the Sons by Gay Talese Page B

parents’ store, and she had been given the coat by her lover, a balding entrepreneur who had a few shops on the boardwalk and a jealous wife whose doubts about his fidelity prompted her to hire a private detective.
    One night the detective, accompanied by a photographer, followed the husband by car across the bridge and up the coast to Atlantic City. There, in a hotel lobby, he was seen meeting his lady friend wearing the leopard coat, and then walking arm in arm with her toward one of the elevators. But before the detective and the photographer could catch the couple in a compromising position, the concierge had called their room from the house phone and warned the couple—and immediately the blond woman fled down a back staircase, leaving her coat in the hotel room closet.
    Later, and more casually, the man left the room carrying the coat concealed in a hotel laundry bag; and, after strolling through the lobby with affectations of nonchalance, he locked the coat in the trunk of his car and drove home. The news of this incident soon circulated throughout Ocean City, and in my parents’ store I overheard numerous versions from the town gossips who were friendly with my mother—who, to be sure, always pretended to be hearing about the incident for the first time.
    There was a touch of the thespian in my mother, and it served her admirably when the man himself arrived at the counter carrying the leopard-skin coat, still in the hotel laundry bag, and asked her to place it in the vault. This she did, without raising an eyebrow; and there the coat hung through the rest of the winter and the entire following year, and throughthe subsequent changing seasons of my adolescence in Ocean City—an isolated coat, exiled in the vault, spotted with scandal.
    The car door opened, and my mother in her beaver coat got into the front seat with my little sister ahead of her.
    “We were outside all this time looking for you,” my mother began, seeming more concerned than irritated. “Why didn’t you wait for us along the side of the church?”
    “I was too cold,” I replied.
    She said nothing as we all waited for my father to finish wiping the windshield with the classified-advertising section of the Sunday edition of the Atlantic City Press , a paper he sometimes purchased after Mass at the newsstand across from the church. The dim sunlight that had shone through the glass was now subdued by clouds, and a sudden strong breeze blew dust and sand across the hood of the car, causing my father to close his eyes and hold on to his hat. He tucked the newspaper tightly under his arm, opened the door, and glanced toward me in the backseat, as if assessing my mood.
    “We could drive to Philadelphia and have a good dinner, if we had the gas,” he said, alluding to the wartime fuel shortage. “But instead we’ll go tonight to Atlantic City.”
    “They have homework to do,” my mother said promptly.
    “They have all afternoon to do their homework,” my father said. “We’ll go early enough, and be back before ten.” Smiling at me in the rearview mirror, he seemed to understand my desire to escape, however briefly, the narrow boundaries of this island.
    My mother unbuttoned my sister’s snowsuit as my father started up the Buick. We began the ten-minute ride to our apartment above the store in the midtown business district. I gazed at my family in the front seat—my father in a tweed overcoat and brown fedora, my mother with her fur coat and black leather curve-brimmed hat, and my sister in a pink snowsuit trimmed with pieces of white rabbit fur that had been left over from one of my father’s alteration jobs.
    He wasted nothing. The fur scraps left on his cutting table after he had shortened one customer’s coat would later reappear to decorate the pocket flaps or the collar or the hem of another customer’s cloth coat he had been paid to remodel. The creative skill he had once exhibited as a designer and cutter of men’s