On the morning the first graduates of the job program were to receive their certificates, I loaded eleven pressed suits into the back of the old sedan of my father and drove across Birmingham to the training center on Third Avenue. I am Neil Brandvold, fifty two years old, a high school shop teacher, and I had never in my life felt less certain what I was carrying. Each suit hung in its plastic bag with a name tag safety pinned to the collar. My father Lamar had passed in June, in the same brown jacket he had worn since I was a boy.
The director of the center, a tall woman named Mrs. Odom, met me on the front steps with her hands pressed together as though in prayer. She had been waiting since seven. Behind the glass doors I could see men in the lobby, a dozen of them, in their work shirts and their best pants, sitting in rows of plastic chairs with folders on their knees. They were the graduates. Some were fifty. Some were barely twenty five. Every one of them had an interview scheduled before the end of the week, and I knew, from the tags in my hands, that every one of them had a suit.
Mrs. Odom led me into her small office and shut the door. She told me that my father had come to the center the first time eight years ago, a retired postal worker in a worn jacket, carrying a tape measure in his pocket. He had said only that he knew how to sew. For eight years he had come on the first Monday of each month, sat at the back, and watched which men looked at their shoes. Then he had gone home and measured their shoulders from memory. “He never missed a month,” she said. “Not once.”
A row of pressed suits carried into a training center gave one son the morning to bring his father back to the men he served in Birmingham.
I gave my terms to Mrs. Odom, standing at her desk with my hat in my hands. “My father asked that his name never be said, and I will honor that. But I will not let the suits stop. I will carry them on, every one, as long as the center will have me. I will learn to measure and cut from the patterns in his workroom. And today, if you will allow it, I would like to hand the suits to the men myself, and say only that they came from a friend.” Her eyes filled, and she nodded.
In the lobby, I lifted the first bag and read the tag aloud, “Desmond.” A thin young man in a faded shirt rose from his chair. When he took the suit from me, his hands shook, and he looked at the stitching on the lapel for a long time. “I never owned one,” he said, very low. “My whole life. I went to my last two interviews in a jacket borrowed from my uncle, and it was too big. They could see it.” He pressed the bag against his chest. “Please tell your friend that I will not forget.” I could not answer. I had never known that my father could do this for a stranger.
I was handing out the fourth bag when the front door banged open and a stocky man in a leather vest strode into the lobby. He was Gil Hardaway, who ran a pawn counter on Second Avenue and had been buying the donated clothes of the center from a janitor for months. He had heard about the suits. He snatched the ledger of the center from the front desk, in which Mrs. Odom had recorded sizes and addresses, and ran for the exit, thinking the list would lead him to more. He reached the glass doors and found them blocked. Eight graduates in their new suits stood shoulder to shoulder in the vestibule, Desmond among them, still wearing his tag on the collar. They did not raise a hand. Gil tried to turn, and found three more behind him, men who looked like the finest ushers in Alabama. Desmond held out his open palm. “Sir,” he said quietly, “I believe that belongs to the lady.” Gil Hardaway lowered the ledger into his hand.
Mrs. Odom took the ledger back and called the police, who arrived within minutes and led the pawnbroker out. In the lobby, the men burst into applause, and then, as one, they turned to me. I stood in the middle of the room with two suits still over my arm. Desmond stepped forward and shook my hand, and then the others, one by one, and each said the same thing, “Thank you to your friend.” I told them I would pass it on. When I got into the car afterward, I sat for a long time with my hands on the wheel, crying.
The money consequences were simple. My father had saved one million, one hundred thousand dollars out of the pension of a mail carrier and a paid off house, wearing the same two jackets for thirty years so that others could wear a suit. Gil Hardaway was charged with receiving stolen goods, and the clothes he had bought from the janitor were returned to the center. I closed the house of my father and moved his sewing machine, his chalk and his tape measure to the back room of the training center, where the Monday tailors now work.
In the name of my father, who passed in June, I started the Lamar Brandvold Fund, without a sign or a plaque, as he would have wished. The center only calls it the Friend Fund. It pays for suits, tailoring and interview coaching for men and women leaving hard places, in Jefferson, Shelby and Walker counties. In the first year we fitted one hundred and forty people, and ninety one of them were hired within sixty days. One was a former dock worker from Bessemer who wore his suit to every Sunday service for a year.
On a Monday morning in the fall, I stood at the cutting table in the back room of the training center with the tape measure of my father around my neck, learning to mark a sleeve. Desmond, now a clerk at the county courthouse, was there in his own pressed suit, holding the other end of the cloth. He had come to learn the trade on his day off. I looked at the chalk line on the wool, and at my own hands, and I thought that my father had never said a word about love, and had never needed to.