whole look … shoes and bags and hats … teach people how to dress, not just the fancy ones like the women who go to Axelle's, but the others too, the ones with money who don't know how to put it all together.” The women she had dressed at Axelle's were surely the best dressed in New York, but most of them also went to Paris for their clothes, like Lady Mendl, and Doris Duke, and Wallis Simpson. “You could start small, and then add to it as you go along. You could even sell my coats!” He laughed, and she looked up at him thoughtfully, sipping her champagne. She liked the idea, and then she glanced up at him with a serious question.
“Could we afford it?” She knew he did well, but she had no idea how much capital he had. It was something they never discussed. They had more than enough for the life they led, but his parents were still living on Houston Street, and she knew that he supported them, and all his father's brothers. He looked at her gently then, and sat down next to her.
“Maybe it's time we had a serious talk about all this.”
She blushed as she shook her head. She didn't really want to know. But if she were to open a store of her own, perhaps she had to. “Simon, I don't want to pry. Your business is your own.”
“No, my love. It's yours now too, and it does very well. Extremely well.” He told her what he had made the previous year and she stared at him in amazement.
“Are you serious?”
“Well,” he apologized, not understanding the look of shock in her eyes, “we could have done better if I'd ordered all the cashmeres I wanted in England. I don't know why I held back, next season I won't,” he explained as she laughed openly at him.
“Are you crazy? I don't think the Bank of England handled that much money last year. Simon, that's incredible! But I thought … I mean, your parents …” This time he laughed at her. “My mother wouldn't leave Houston Street if you took her out of there at gunpoint. She loves it.” All of Simon's attempts to move them to a more luxurious apartment uptown had been unsucessful. His mother liked her friends, the shops where she did her marketing, and the neighborhood itself. She had moved to the Lower East Side when she had come to New York a generation before, and she was going to die there. “I think my father would get a kick out of moving uptown. But my mother won't let him.” The woman still wore housedresses, and took pride in only having one “good” coat. But she could have bought every coat at Axelle's if she wanted.
“What are you doing with all that? Investing it?” She thought with a tremor of her late husband and his ventures on the stock market, but Simon was a great deal shrewder than Clayton. He had an instinctive sense for what worked, and in his case, what worked made a great deal of money.
“I've invested some of it, mostly in bonds, and I've put a lot of back in the business. I also bought two textile mills last year. I think if we start making our own goods, we'll do better than we do with some of our imports, besides which, I can control the quality better that way. Both of the mills are in Georgia, and labor is dirt cheap. It's going to take a few years, but I think it's going to make a big difference in our profits.” She couldn't even begin to imagine it, the profits he had just mentioned to her were staggering already. He had built the business up from nothing in twenty years. At forty, he had already made a vast fortune. “So, my love, if you want to open your own store, get on with it. You're not going to take food out of anyone's mouth,” he thought about it quietly for a minute as Zoya tried to absorb what she'd heard in the past half hour, “in fact, I think it might be a damn good investment.”
“Simon,” she set down her glass and looked at him earnestly, “will you help me?”
“You don't need my help, sweetheart, except maybe to sign the checks.” He leaned over and kissed her. “You know more about this business than anyone I know, you have an innate sense of