How Much is That Couple in the Window?
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Lori Herter
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1
After his usual early breakfast of coffee, dry wheat toast and marmalade, Jasper Derring walked into the windowed sun-room of his Chicago lakefront mansion. His wife of forty years, Beatrice, brought him the morning paper. He opened it and on page five found what he wanted to see—a full-page Christmas ad for Derring Brothers Department Store.
The huge ad dazzled with artistic flair. Large snowflakes danced against a black background. Darting between the white flakes, Santa and his reindeer all but jumped off the page. Santa’s sack on the sleigh was huge and on it was printed:
Derring Brothers’ gift to you: No toy trains. No artificial snow. No dancing elves or talking bears. Nor will Rudolph with his light-bulb nose clutter our store windows this year. Only Derring Brothers is daring enough to present fully live, breathing people for you to gaze at in a living tableau—real persons celebrating the holiday season just the way you do at home. People you’ve seen at work in our store, who have served you with the capable courtesy Derring Brothers is famous for. Come by our North Michigan Avenue windows during the week before Christmas and see for yourself. Wave hello! Our merry display people can see you and wave back!
Jasper was pleased with the ad his son, Charles, had commissioned. The living window display had been Charles’s idea. Jasper had thought it outlandish at first, but quickly saw possibilities in the promotional event that even Charles hadn’t imagined—and still had no notion of.
Charles had taken over Derring Brothers when an unexpected heart attack had forced Jasper into partial retirement six months ago. Used to being in charge all his life, Jasper found it difficult to let go and give control of the department store that he had founded with his brother over forty years ago to his younger son. But of all his grown, scattered, errant children, Charles was the most dependable. He had a natural aptitude for business, not to mention a highly creative mind. And, unlike his siblings, Charles had always loved the department store, ever since he was a towheaded, runny-nosed kid.
Jasper set aside the newspaper. The morning was too beautiful, with sunshine on the snow outside the windows and a cardinal by the bird feeder, to spend it reading about political scandals and crime reports or even the Dow Jones averages. Instead, he picked up his needlepoint project.
He’d taken up needlepoint, a lifelong hobby of his wife’s, when he was recuperating from his heart attack. His wife had suggested it because he’d been so fidgety and out of sorts being stuck at home. She’d told him that it always calmed her and focused her. Beatrice had shown him how to do the two basic stitches, the continental and the basket weave, and he’d begun on a small Christmas stocking. Once he’d gotten into it, he’d become hooked, much to his wife’s surprise. He’d started making gifts such as glasses cases and decorative pillows for family members, as Beatrice had often done over the years. Jasper tended to go overboard in the local needlepoint shop and bought everything that caught his eye. He currently had enough hand-painted canvases to stitch to keep him busy for the next three years.
Strangely, he found himself buying several canvases that commemorated wedding days, even though he didn’t know of anyone in the family getting married. He realized it had been an unconscious wish to see his children, all of whom were still stubbornly single and happy that way, married before he died. His doctor had given him a good prognosis, and Jasper seemed to have made a remarkable recovery, but the heart attack had made him realize he wouldn’t be around forever to oversee his huge, amassed fortune or to guide his children—not that they particularly wanted any guidance.
He picked up the canvas he’d been working on, an intricate design of flowers and stems twined with wedding bells. It was finished except for an empty space in the middle section, which Jasper hadn’t begun yet. There the names of the newly married couple were to be stitched, along with their wedding date. He ought to put the project aside for now and wait for someone to announce they were getting married. That’s what his wife often did with her projects; then she had them ready for shower gifts when a baby was born or a wedding was announced.
Instead, Jasper decided to think positively. Perhaps focusing on the project would make what he wanted to happen happen faster. He’d learned to do that in business and knew that halfhearted plans and goals never unfolded the way they ought to. So, Jasper decided to finish the project—or at least stitch in the names. He could leave the date for later. He threaded his needle with burgundy French cotton perle and began work on a capital C, the first letter of the first name of the prospective groom. Won’t Charles be surprised! Jasper thought with a mischievous little chuckle. He would be even more surprised if he saw the name of the bride Jasper was planning to stitch in beside Charles’s name.
Yawning, Jennifer Westgate opened up the morning edition of the Chicago Tribune she’d bought at the Elmhurst commuter train station. All at once, her sleepy eyes widened as a familiar name in huge print at the top of the page caught her by surprise.
She read the text on the Santa Claus sack and her mouth dropped open. So the rumors were true!
Jennifer rolled her eyes uneasily toward the train window she sat next to. Picturesque suburban houses with snow on their roofs sped by, but her mind was on the full-page ad. For weeks now, she’d heard coffee-break gossip about the new publicity idea. She couldn’t believe they would really put store employees on display in the windows. If they wanted real people instead of mannequins, why didn’t they hire professional models?
As a Derring Brothers employee, Jennifer might be chosen. The thought made her feel slightly ill. She wasn’t a shy person, but she wasn’t an exhibitionist, either. And if she was chosen, what would Peter think? She kept telling herself she shouldn’t worry about it. The store had hundreds of employees. Why would they pick her?
Still, she had an odd feeling that she’d wind up involved. Just last week, Mr. James, a makeup expert she’d often seen doing make-overs in the cosmetics department, had mysteriously shown up in Housewares, where she worked. For some reason, he’d made a beeline for her and struck up a disjointed conversation about automatic drip coffeemakers. All the while, he seemed to be studying her, apparently analyzing her features and skin. Soon he shifted the conversation and suggested that some mauve eye shadow would bring out the color of her green eyes. She’d told him straight out that she didn’t like wearing makeup. She felt makeup was a facade and she wanted people to accept her as she was, not artificially enhanced. Mr. James looked perplexed, then amused, and walked off with a Cheshire-cat smile.
But that wasn’t the only incident that had made her suspicious. About a month before that, Jasper Derring himself had also made a silent study of her. It had happened on a Wednesday, on one of Jasper’s infrequent visits to the department store since his heart attack. The short, eccentric, sixtyish millionaire, wearing his customary tweed hat with a feather on one side, was walking through Housewares—why, she didn’t know. He stopped when he saw Jennifer and seemed to single her out, his brown black eyes sparkling from beneath his bushy gray eyebrows. He stared at her for a long moment with a peculiar focused energy in his gaze. She’d smiled hesitantly in response, not knowing what he was thinking or what his purpose was. He’d nodded to her, absently commented that it was a nice day—even though it was snowing outside—and rather mysteriously gone on his way.
What such special notice from the store’s grand old man meant, Jennifer had had no idea. In the past, he’d occasionally stopped to talk to her briefly, and other than feeling honored, she’d never thought anything of those encounters. But this time, she’d gotten the feeling that he had secrets to keep. Later she heard rumors about a living holiday window display using store employees, and she began to wonder.
But then again, maybe she was just being paranoid. She hoped so. Having her head examined by a psychiatrist sounded far more appealing to her than standing in a window all day and having every person who walked down North Michigan Avenue turn and stare at her.
Jennifer was twenty-six and had worked as a saleswoman for Derring Brothers for five years. Recently, she’d been proud to be promoted to assistant manager of Housewares. She loved the store and liked most of the people working there. Jasper Derring had a well-deserved reputation for instilling comradery and loyalty in his employees, and he returned their loyalty with a fair salary, good benefits and opportunity for promotion. If she was going to stay in retail sales, she wouldn’t work anywhere else.
However, things had changed in the past several months. Jasper Derring, though still part owner of the store, was no longer its president. After his heart attack last July, he’d turned the store over to his son, Charles Derring, who immediately became the new president. He’d also given Charles half ownership.
Since that turn of events, Derring Brothers had taken on a different atmosphere. The store’s former stately quality was disappearing. Everything from the antique glass showcases to the gold-painted molding on the ceiling was being “updated,” the word used in advisory memos from the new president to the employees. The store was quickly losing its familiar classic style and taking on a slick modern veneer. Along with this, the TV and newspaper ad campaigns had become “high profile”—gaudy was the word Jennifer would have used—rather than the quality ads they used to have. She supposed the window display idea was also a part of the store’s new image, and that this new image was all Charles’s doing.
Jasper might be eccentric, but he had both feet on the ground. He also had class, the type of class that comes not from money, but from character. Jasper was a man who had been married to the same woman for decades, who raised hothouse orchids on his Kenilworth estate and had some of his flowers made into corsages or boutonnieres for his employees when their birthdays came. He believed in old-fashioned values like courtesy, integrity and giving the customer good value for his or her dollar. He believed in hard work, because he had come up the hard way himself, going from selling yard goods with his brother off the back of a truck to owning his own multimillion-dollar retail corporation. Expensive clothes, flashy cars, fancy parties and playboy ways were never his style.
His son, Charles, however, was a whole other story.
“I’ll bet you any money it was Charles’s idea,” Jennifer said to Trudy Hargrove later that morning. She’d arrived at work early as usual. “He has that screwball side to him. Like when he programmed my register with those crazy messages.”
She was referring to her birthday earlier in the year when her new computer cash register suddenly flashed “Happy Birthday, Jennifer!” at her while she was ringing up a sale. The following week, it flashed “I’ve got an itch at the back of my terminal—can you scratch it for me?” She didn’t know how to get rid of the message and had to wait until it mysteriously disappeared before she could continue using the register. She knew Charles had done it, because he was the only one in the department at that time who had access to the cash registers and the computer knowledge to program them.
“It’s just like him to come up with a publicity stunt like this,” she told Trudy.
“I don’t doubt it,” Trudy agreed as she studied the newspaper ad. A competent woman in her late forties with a smart haircut that made her prematurely gray hair enviable, Trudy was the manager of the Housewares department and Jennifer’s boss. “Charles was an incorrigible cutup when he worked with us. Being president doesn’t seem to have changed him, as far as I can tell.”
At the beginning of the year, Charles had served as the temporary manager of Housewares for four months. Their original manager had quit and Charles had taken his place until Trudy was made manager. Charles had been filling in when vacancies turned up in the store’s various departments for the past three years. He’d readily told everyone with his characteristic enthusiasm—and perhaps to impress his father—that it was his intention to learn every facet of the department-store business from the ground up, clearly anticipating that he would one day take over the store.
That day had arrived sooner than most employees had expected, due to Jasper’s sudden heart attack. Charles was only thirty-one when he became president, and many of the older employees quietly remarked to one another that he hadn’t “settled” yet. Was Jasper wise, permanently turning the store over to his rambunctious son so soon?
“So,” Trudy said, lifting a carefully penciled eyebrow as she glanced at Jennifer, “the question is, which employees will be chosen for the window?”
“Heard any new rumors about that?” Jennifer asked. “I keep having that awful feeling it’ll be me.” She had told Trudy about Jasper Derring and then Mr. James studying her for no discernible reason.
“I did hear from Grace in Cosmetics that they’ve hired Mr. James to show up every morning the week before Christmas.”
“Well,” Jennifer said with false hope, “that ought to rule me out—I told him I hate makeup.”
Trudy smiled. “If we could all look so good without it! You’d be as lovely as you always are in a window under the lights.”
“Thanks, but it hasn’t exactly been my aim in life to be a mannequin on display for everyone to gawk at.” Jennifer took her name badge out of her handbag and pinned it to the lapel of her navy wool suit jacket. “The newspaper ad even encourages people to come and wave at the models in the window. I can’t imagine anything more embarrassing. It would be like living in a cage at the zoo! And it’s such a weird idea. How could Jasper Derring approve of this stunt?”
“It is quite a publicity stunt, all right,” Trudy agreed. “A bit of Charles’s derring-do.” It was a joke among the employees, often repeated.
“A piece of Derring doo-doo, if you ask me,” Jennifer said.
“Shh!” Trudy whispered with a throaty chuckle. “You know better than to say that out loud around here!”
“Derring doo-doo, Derring doo-doo,” Jennifer repeated defiantly.
“Memo for Jennifer Westgate.”
She found herself interrupted by a young man named Rick, who had been hired as a messenger for the executive offices. He was smiling at what he’d caught her saying.
“For me?” she said, too wary of the envelope in his hand to be embarrassed. She had that feeling again of being on the threshold of something awful.
“You got the wrong name tag on today?” Rick asked.
“No.”
“Then this is for you, from the prez himself.” He handed it to her and walked off. -
Trudy came to her side. “From Charles? Well, open it! What’s it say?”
“I hope it says I’m fired,” Jennifer told her with gallows humor as she tore the envelope open. She skimmed the brief, typewritten memo.
Dear Jennifer,
You have been selected to be the female model for our holiday window display the week before Christmas. That week only, your work hours will be from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. A generous bonus will follow. I think we should have lunch today and discuss it.
Best, Charles Derring
“Oh, God, it’s happened.” Thunderstruck and slightly sick to her stomach, Jennifer turned the memo over to Trudy.
“For heaven’s sake! You have been chosen,” Trudy said with excitement. “Don’t look so distressed. It’ll be fun! And you’ll get a bonus, too!”
“I wonder if he did this on purpose,” Jennifer said, not caring about the bonus.
“Who? Charles?”
“I’ll bet he picked me to get back at me. He always blamed me that day he split the seat of his pants, remember? When I accidentally on purpose spilled the glass pebbles on the floor?” When they’d worked together early in the year, she’d spilled the slippery pebbles used in flower vases near his cash register, to pay him back for programming the surprise messages on her register. When he was squatting to pick them up, the back center seam of his pants had split. “He wants to humiliate me in return. Well, I won’t do it!”
“Jenny,” Trudy said in a motherly tone, “calm down. They’ve probably done a lot of marketing research for this window display idea. You weren’t chosen for some petty reason, I’m quite certain. Take it as a compliment. And it wouldn’t be smart to refuse to do it. You don’t want to be marked as uncooperative, not willing to give your all, if you intend to get more promotions in the future.”
Jennifer chewed her fingernail and glanced at her watch. It was one minute till opening time. Soon, holiday shoppers would be pouring in. “I suppose you’re right,” Jennifer conceded. “But you know how Charles always liked to needle me.”
“He still does, whenever he passes by.” There was a hint of amazement in Trudy’s voice. “And you needle him right back—with gusto, I’ve noticed. You two bicker so much, a casual observer might think you were married.”
“No way! He prefers glittery blondes anyway.” A new thought came to her. “Who else will be in the window display besides me? Are they picking male employees, too? Will there be teams, maybe alternating two hours on and two off?”
“Connie in PR said she heard they were choosing only one woman and one man.”
Jennifer was appalled. “What! I’m going to be the only woman on display for seven days? How can they expect anyone to stay in a window for twelve hours straight? What am I supposed to be doing all that time—a juggling act? And who’s going to be the man?”
Trudy shrugged. “Don’t know. It was only a rumor. Maybe Connie had it wrong.”
“I can just imagine what Peter will think of all this,” Jennifer fretted.
“Peter? You’re going to be famous for a week, get a nice bonus, and you’re worrying about your absentminded professor? It might light a fire under him. How long have you been dating him?”
“Three months.”
“And he’s barely kissed you.”
Jennifer wished she hadn’t lamented about her love life to Trudy so much. “He’s an English professor. Academic people conduct their lives with a certain reserve.”
“Disdain is more like it,” Trudy murmured under her breath.
“I just know he’ll take a dim view of his girlfriend appearing in a store window. It’ll be an embarrassment for him.” Jennifer slammed her fists on the glass countertop in exasperation, shaking the bun warmers on display. “Oooh!” she exclaimed. “Why me? Why did they pick me? I’m not glamorous or anything. I’m not what you’d call sexy, not with my plain old brown hair and flat chest. Why would they stick me in a store window?”
“Peter?” Jennifer said when a male voice answered the University of Illinois number she’d dialed. Peter taught at the Chicago campus on the west side of the city.
“Jennifer?”
“Yes, it’s me. Sorry to bother you. I’m on coffee break, so I won’t talk long. I just wondered if you would have dinner with me tonight. I’ve got something I need to talk over with you.”
“Mmm.” Peter seemed to be checking his calendar. “It happens I’m free. All right. Shall I pick you up at six? Or are you working late tonight?”
“No, but I may be…soon.”
“Are you all right? You sound upset.”
“I am, a little. I’m…afraid you will be, too.”
“Really?” he said, a touch of concern in his deep, authoritative voice. “I can arrange to meet you for lunch, if that will help.”
“Thanks, but I can’t. I’m having lunch with the president.”
“Charles Derring?”
“Yes. I was summoned by a memo this morning. Look, I can’t talk now. See you at six, okay?”
Jennifer hung up after he said goodbye and walked away from the pay phone. She was in the third-floor employees’ lounge. Sighing, she got a cup of coffee and headed toward a table where others on break were sitting. Her coworkers were talking about their children and grandchildren, always a favorite topic.
Jennifer barely heard them. All she could think about was that Peter would disapprove of what she was being asked to do. Peter didn’t even think she should be working in a department store. She had two years of college to her credit, and Peter was always telling her she ought to go back and get her degree and then get a “meaningful” job. She often argued with him, saying there was a great deal of potential for her at Derring Brothers, but he never seemed impressed.
Now that she was being asked to be a mannequin in the window, Peter would have new ammunition. How could she argue?
She could think of only one hope. Maybe at lunch she could talk it over with Charles and ask him to choose someone else. To a small degree, they were friends, despite the practical jokes they’d played on each other during the four months they’d worked together. And even though he thought she was straitlaced and razzed her about taking life too seriously, she felt that he did like her. Charles might be wild and wacky—and rich and powerful, too, she reminded herself—but he had a heart. Sometimes. It was worth a try anyway.
