In order to manage his overflowing wardrobe, my father had a dry cleaner's carousel installed in the upper floors of our house in New Jersey. On opening what appeared to be an ordinary closet door in his dressing room, you saw the apparatus rising up through the ceiling and into the dim recesses of the attic, where it snaked around the rafters—a Narnia of bespoke English tailoring. Next to the closet door were the carousel's controls. One could either use the directional arrows to browse the wardrobe or input a three-digit number on the keypad, then press START. Below the control box was a numerical key—the wardrobe's Rosetta stone, which divided the clothes into nine categories: Dressing Gowns, Overcoats, Country Clothes, City Clothes, Odd Jackets, Odd Trousers, Formal Evening Wear, Formal Day Wear, and Odd Waistcoats. Under each of these were subcategories based on patterns, colors, and fabrics, corresponding to blocks of numbers on the carousel. (Odd Trousers, for example, were divided into Colorful, White, Linen, Gray Flannel, Tan, Checkered, Extra Heavy, and Corduroy.) At the bottom of the key was the notation "For Walk Thru Space, Dial 225"—a command that would cause the entire thousand-slot rack to spin around once. Before your eyes would pass a progression of the perfectly dressed man.
Every weekday morning, no matter where you were in the house, you could hear the great machine rumbling, a mechanical leviathan limbering its backbone, as my father dialed up his wardrobe for the office. On weekends, the closet seemed to be in constant motion, as Dad often dressed three or four times—corduroy Odd Trousers in the morning for family time; Country Clothes for an afternoon horse show; and Formal Evening Wear, perhaps worn with an Odd Waistcoat, for a fancy party. And finally Dressing Gowns, which my father wore over plain cotton Brooks Brothers pajamas.
I wrote about my father's closet, and the wardrobe it contained, in The New Yorker 10 years ago. My reason for returning to the subject is that I have been revisiting the closet recently. My father, who turned 90 in April, no longer lives in that house and has taken the clothes he wants with him to Aiken, South Carolina, where he moved in 2000. He still dresses beautifully, but, being confined to a wheelchair, he doesn't often change clothes three times a day anymore. The clothes that remained on the carousel in New Jersey, he says, he doesn't need anymore, and has urged me to take charge of their disposal before the house is sold.
The obvious thing would be to make his wardrobe my own. And the fact that I am, in the upper body at least, the same size as my father seems almost destiny. But while I have inherited and still wear some great suits of his, I don't need more than a few of them. Apart from the fact that the entire contents of his closet would take up all the space in my apartment, I don't really want to assume my father's style. I want to wear my own clothes, in my own style, such as it is. And my younger brother, Bruce, lives in Miami, where wearing one of our father's heavyweight woolen fabrics could be dangerous to your health.
