The Dress Read Online Free Page B

Look’ as ‘a total glorification of the female form’ which given those times, could have been either an insult or a compliment...’
    The text wasn’t really flowing so Lily turned to her bookmarked page and pulled up the Vogue clipping she had saved earlier for some inspiration.
    There was a beautiful picture of a woman in a divine, full-skirted evening gown. She had one of those archetypical haughty, high-cheek-boned faces so familiar from the old Avedon shots which Lily had scattered about the flat. The headline read: Exquisite Irish Beauty and the face looked a lot like the model Barbara Mullen who had been around at the time. However, when Lily scrolled down and checked the caption, she got a surprise as she read: Mrs Joy Fitzpatrick wearing what has become known among the discerning couture clientele of New York as ‘The Dress’ .
    Gripped by the coincidence of the name she scrolled down further and magnified another, smaller society picture. This caption read: Joy is the wife of dashing Irish-born steel magnate, Frank Fitzpatrick.
    Lily sat looking at the screen for a moment, at Frank Fitzpatrick’s name, then at his face. He bore a striking resemblance to Grandad Joe.

3
    New York, 1950
    It was New Year’s Eve, ten years after he had first arrived in America. Frank Fitzpatrick’s journey from the wilds of Bangor to the sophistication of New York society had been short, but hard won.
    The beaten boy had left with the Conlons’ money at first light as he had planned, taking a pair of his host’s dress shoes from the front hall, tying them by the laces around his neck in order to spare them. Then young Francis walked and hitched his way across Ireland, all the way to Dublin. The six-day journey took him ten, because he worked for food along the way so he could save the cash he had stolen. He stacked turf for a widow in Pontoon, in exchange for a loaf of bread and a bottle of tea, that he made last two days. He whitewashed stones at the front of a rich-man’s house in Strokestown and they gave him a hot meal of salty bacon and potatoes, which he ate with his hands from a china plate, in their shed. If the weather was dry, he slept in a ditch at the side of the road. When it looked like rain, he would go off route and seek out an old shed or a house that had been long since abandoned by famine or emigration.
    When he arrived in the city, Frank went to the first menswear shop he passed and bought a shirt and tie. On O’Connell Bridge he asked a fellow street traveller where he could find the nearest public baths and the man, weathered, as if he had not bathed himself in some time, put his hand out for money, as he told him, ‘Tara Street.’ Francis reached into his pocket and handed the man a penny. As he did, he felt a thrill, realizing that he had been in Dublin for less than a day and yet as such already felt he was in a position to give away his cash. Looking at the worn face of the street drunk at his feet, the young boy knew that he had finally escaped the brutality of his childhood and was about to begin his new life. No matter how hard the coming days would be, no matter if he was hungry, or had to work until his hands bled, the worst years of his life, all fifteen of them, were behind him now.
    There were only half a dozen men, at most, in the public bath, and an official in a white coat looking down on them from the balcony above. One or two of his fellow bathers nodded a greeting, but he ignored them. He sank his head under the soapy, steaming water and stayed submerged, until his lungs hurt, then flung himself back up in an exploding breath, into his new, clean future.
    His father’s violence, his mother’s death, leaving his baby brother behind, stealing from the Conlons, they were troubles too heavy for the young boy to bear. So Francis washed off his feelings and his conscience. He left his past, bobbing in a trail of soap scum on the