Brooks Brothers Shirts.

• Author: Bathanti, Joseph
• Position: Poem

Ten hours a day, my mother hunched downtown in Brooks Brothers tailor shop--fretting cuffs and belt loops, pleats, vents, button-holes, lapels into ruthless wool suits, unthinkably expensive, for men who spent their days unsoiled, whose soft hands never raised a callous. After she punched out, caught the streetcar, and high-heeled home two glassy downhill blocks from the Callowhill stop, she often breezed in with packages: icy broadcloth shirts she'd monogrammed with my initials, swathed in smoky silvery tissue. The deep navy boxes piped in gold, the gold band that bound them, and in their centers the Brooks Brothers coat of arms: a golden ewe lowered on a sling into a sacrificial grail. The Agnus Dei . My mother dressed me like a prince. "Apparel oft proclaims the man," I'd one day read in Hamlet . Those luscious shirts: the forbidden glory of plenty (of too much, really). Every day with neckties and blazers, oxblood penny loafers, the Princeton wave that swooped across my yearning brow, I wore them to school: yellow, blue, pink, charcoal and burgundy pin-stripe, tattersall, blinding ecclesiastical white. I wore them to church. I adored those shirts, my immaculate patrician destiny. My mother washed them by hand, hung to dry in the winter sun, spritzed with water from an Iron City pony, then shelved them in plastic bags overnight in the freezer. She loved them as much as I did. My...