Designer Knockoff (37 page)
There was a large handsome wardrobe trunk in the design studio, navy leather banded in beige with bold brass fittings, which Dorrie was slowly filling with Marilyn’s new clothes. There were traveling suits, dresses, and slacks for a stay in the country. There was beautiful lingerie made in forbidden silk instead of rayon, but Dorrie knew better than to say anything.
“I didn’t really mind,” Dorrie said. “Not to be bragging, but I was a whiz with a needle and I was fast and careful. The trousseau was a treat to work on. And my, wasn’t Marilyn pretty? She looked like a movie star. But I have to say there were lots of headaches working with Miss Marilyn Hutton because she was so thin and required so many fittings. She kept losing weight before the wedding, but I guess that was just bride’s nerves. It seemed she was constantly on edge, and I wondered if she knew about Hugh’s trifling with Gloria.”
“You knew they were having a love affair?”
“It was certainly love on her side,” Dorrie agreed. “You would have to be blind not to see it. And I was not blind. The things I overheard in that room! Gloria refused to see reality; she was convinced that Hugh would throw Marilyn over for her, even though the wedding was six weeks away, and she could see me working on the bride’s trousseau.” Dorrie decided to open the box of Godiva chocolates. She offered one to Lacey, who politely declined. “This is delicious.”
“Did Marilyn do anything about the affair?”
“Not that I could see, although she certainly tried to keep Hugh busy with wedding plans, the engagement photo, the party, things like that. I was working on the wedding gown that day, and to make things more hectic, Belinda, Hugh’s little sister, always seemed to be underfoot.”
“But wasn’t Belinda in school?”
Dorrie thought for a while. “Maybe after the wedding. But she visited the factory quite a lot. She was going to be a junior bridesmaid and she was driving me nuts about what she was going to wear. She was always wanting something. Belinda was a pretty little thing, but what a pest.”
That day, May 11, Dorrie had cut the pattern for Marilyn’s wedding gown out of a bolt of white silk. Belinda was in the studio, wheedling for a white silk bow for her hair. Hugh told Dorrie she could certainly part with some scraps of silk, meaning that she had to do whatever the brat wanted. Gloria came running in late, buttoning her smock as she entered the studio. Hugh had given her an especially cruel task: to fit Marilyn’s wedding gown, a traditional white silk gown, on the dress form. But then Hugh stormed in with sketches in his hand and a sample of a very different material: a beautiful embroidered ivory silk.
“It wasn’t the silk I’d been cutting for Marilyn. This silk was so much richer than hers. Lacey, I’d never seen anything like it, not during the war, anyway.” This was a story that had clearly been replayed in Dorrie’s mind for years. The story that Lacey had waited for. “I don’t know where he got the sketches. Maybe from her purse. They were Gloria’s sketches, all right, but of another wedding gown, a real dreamy creation using acres of ivory silk. It was shameful, really, considering the war, but there were exemptions for silk for wedding gowns. Hugh insisted that the dress in the sketch be made for Marilyn. Gloria said it was her own wedding gown, and if he wanted to see it march down the aisle of the Episcopalian church he would have to see Gloria in it. Nobody else. They had a terrible fight. They carried on like I wasn’t there.”
Dorrie did what she always did: kept her head down and acted deaf, blind, and dumb. She was used to feeling invisible. Marilyn was supposed to arrive for a fitting soon, and Belinda was in and out of the studio. Gloria and Hugh were shouting like maniacs. Dorrie never understood why Gloria was convinced that Hugh would marry her. The lunch bell rang and Dorrie happily grabbed her sack lunch and her thermos of coffee for a quick half-hour retreat. But before she left she heard Gloria say, “You have to marry me, Hugh. There’ll be a huge scandal if you don’t, and I don’t care who knows about it.” Dorrie ran out but she had heard enough to tickle her imagination.
Dorrie deliberately delayed coming back from lunch to avoid an ongoing scene. When she returned everything was quiet, but the workroom looked like a hurricane had hit it. The trunk was gone and Marilyn’s clothes were stacked on wooden worktables. The pieces of white silk that had been pinned to the dressmaker’s dummy were on the floor, but the sash that Dorrie had cut out that morning was missing.
“I just stood there with my hands on my hips, looking at the disaster, wondering where to start. Hugh came back, looking flustered. I didn’t say a thing. He told me that Gloria had a tantrum and was sent home to cool off. He trusted me to be discreet. Gloria usually got to take the afternoon off after fighting with Hugh. But the workroom had never been such a mess before. He told me the missing trunk was damaged and a replacement would be coming. Marilyn came in and told me she had a frightful headache and we would have to fit the dress the next day.
“Sure enough, a new trunk arrived in a day or two, and we filled it up with Marilyn’s trousseau. She even had nylon stockings and alligator pumps. I wore ankle socks and saddle shoes.”
“What do you think happened to the trunk?” Lacey said before taking a sip of her now lukewarm tea. She had gotten so wrapped up in the story that she’d forgotten about it.
“At first I thought Gloria must have damaged it in their fight, like maybe she took a pair of shears to it and gouged the leather or something. Later I realized that wasn’t like Gloria. She would just as soon go after Hugh with the scissors as that beautiful trunk.”
Good for her,
Lacey thought.
Scissors can be a girl’s best
friend.
Lacey thought.
Scissors can be a girl’s best
friend.
“What did you think when she didn’t come back?”
“I didn’t worry at first. She had spent several nights away before, and she never told me where she spent them—as if I didn’t have a pretty good idea. But when she’d been missing for four or five days, that’s when I really began to worry. Gloria never came back.”
“Did you report her missing to the police?” Lacey asked.
“No. Hugh said he did, but I think he was lying.”
The next week Hugh asked Dorrie if Gloria had made a version of her secret wedding dress design, the one with the embroidered silk. He knew her habits pretty well by then. Gloria liked to present him with the finished version so he could see the entire effect. She didn’t trust his imagination to fill in the details. “I was scared to death. I knew she’d pinched two bolts of that beautiful ivory silk embroidered with a pale-green-and-gold-leaf border pattern. Of course, it was black-market silk. There were five bolts and Gloria took two, bold as brass. And now here’s Hugh Bentley himself saying real nice things to me, like all of a sudden I was a person and not the invisible little monkey in the room. He was saying I was really valuable to his work because I knew my place and I was smart and a first-rate seamstress. And it would be a real help if I could find that wedding gown of Gloria’s.”
Hugh generally didn’t mind when Gloria took the materials. It was understood that she was working on some new design. But what Hugh didn’t know was that Gloria had designs she did not share with him.
Gloria used to keep her secret projects in a locker. Dorrie said she really didn’t know anything about the wedding gown, but she told him about the locker. He broke the lock off the door and there it was, hanging up with the green-and-gold embroidered train looped over a separate hanger. The hem wasn’t in and the sleeves were not quite finished, but anyone could tell it had star quality. Every stitch was perfect.
Dorrie stood up and indicated to Lacey that she should move to the dining table, where a large box rested. The box was covered in blue watered silk, emblazoned with the Bentley logo in gold script. Lacey recognized it as the type used decades ago by expensive department stores. The type of box that Mimi had liked to store things in.
Dorrie used her walker to slowly inch to the table. She lifted the lid to reveal news clippings and photographs, and beneath them, what looked to be a large piece of material protected by layers of tissue paper. Dorrie unwrapped the material and spread it out carefully on the table. Lacey gasped when she saw it.
No one could have guessed it was sixty years old. It was still lovely. Ivory silk, with the embroidered pattern of pale green and gold leaves. Lacey’s fingers longed to touch it. Dorrie picked up a newspaper clipping about Hugh and Marilyn’s wedding with a photo of the bride wearing the dress. The clipping had yellowed, but the wedding couple were Hollywood handsome.
“He told me to fit it to Marilyn, you see. We had to fill in the bust a little, and make the neckline higher, but it was a beauty. Marilyn was gracious about it, but I could tell she didn’t want Gloria’s dress. As you can see, the picture doesn’t do justice to the material.”
Lacey examined the old clipping. “Did Hugh put this dress in his collection?”
“No. It was intended to be one-of-a-kind, and he made sure that it stayed that way. And it was the war, after all. A lot of women didn’t want something so extravagant. It didn’t seem patriotic, and lots of girls got married in a pretty dress or a suit and a wide-brimmed picture hat. Everyone was trying to do their part for the war effort. Well, nearly everyone.”
Lacey turned her attention from the material and looked up at Dorrie. “I took it,” Dorrie said, answering Lacey’s unasked question. “After the dress was finished, Hugh locked up the remaining bolts of the silk. He said he didn’t want anyone else using it, and he never wanted to see it again. Can you imagine that? Why, it would be a sin for all of that beautiful fabric to be lost forever. So I took what was left from the wedding dress.” Dorrie sat down at the table and sifted through the various items in the box. “It didn’t really occur to me that something terrible had happened until Mimi Smith showed up. But when she did I knew Gloria must be dead. I knew that it must have happened on the eleventh, the day the trunk disappeared.”
“What did Mimi say about your idea?”
Dorrie looked down at her hands, rubbing them as if they were cold. “That’s a terrible thing. I didn’t tell her.”
chapter 25
“You didn’t tell her?” Lacey had to sit down. Tears overflowed Dorrie’s eyes, and Lacey forced herself to be quiet while the old woman continued. One day a couple of weeks after Gloria vanished, Mimi Smith popped her head through the door of the workroom. She had tried to find her friend Gloria, “Morning Glory,” she called her, but no one seemed to know where she’d gone. Gloria Adams hadn’t gone home to Virginia, as Hugh Bentley had suggested. And it didn’t really hit the factory girls until the papers reported that Gloria had disappeared.
“I mean, who would care about a factory girl, even if she had pretensions to be a designer, even if she’d had a dalliance with the boss? Only your aunt Mimi, and she somehow came up with a reporter. But I didn’t say anything about the big scene with Hugh and Gloria, or the mess afterward, or the trunk. I had a job, a pretty good job, and I needed to keep it. I knew it wouldn’t take much for me to disappear too.”
Mimi told Dorrie and the reporter that she was afraid Gloria Adams had uncovered some unsavory information about the black market. Bentley denied any knowledge of black-market activities. Nevertheless, investigators from the Office of Price Administration poked their noses into every part of his operation.
There were many theories around the factory about what happened to Gloria Adams. The black marketeers had gotten her, or some Nazi spy. The Bentley factory girls were scared to death: They all started walking home in twos and threes. Still, according to Dorrie, some of the girls thought that Gloria was sent away to have a baby. It seemed reasonable, especially after all the gossip about her and Hugh Bentley. Some people thought that maybe she had married a GI on leave. But Gloria never returned to the rooming house to pick up her clothes and effects. Finally Dorrie boxed them up and sent what she could to Gloria’s family in Virginia.
“I always felt bad about not telling Mimi. I haven’t done many good things in my life. Don’t get me wrong; I haven’t done that many terrible things either. But not speaking out about Gloria was the worst. It’s too late, but I’ve been waiting to free myself of it.” She sighed deeply and pulled a tissue from the box to wipe her eyes behind the huge lenses. “Mimi was smart. I thought she and that reporter would find out the truth without my getting involved. I wasn’t smart. I wasn’t brave.”
“What do you really think happened to Gloria that day?” Lacey’s head was spinning.
“Gloria left Hugh Bentley’s factory in the trunk. That’s what I think. And I kept thinking about that missing sash. Maybe they tied her up with it. I’ve kept those thoughts for more than fifty years. I kept hoping Hugh would die so I could tell someone. But he’s like the devil.”
“I guess if she left in the trunk, she wouldn’t be there now,” Lacey mused as she picked up her cup and rinsed it in the sink before returning to the table.
“No chance of it,” Dorrie agreed. “They’re too smart. They probably dumped her in the sea. Or the East River. Isn’t that where mobsters are supposed to dump people?”
“What about Marilyn, Hugh’s wife?”
“She was always decent to me. She had her own worries. She always suffered from those crippling headaches. She was a little rich girl, but I think she was sweet. Can you believe she still sends me a Christmas card every year?”
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