The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (22 page)

Nearly thirty years old, I had been by any definition a spinster for five years. But I could pass for twenty-two, and an ambitious suitor would not be put off by a woman of a few years if she had means. An ambitious suitor would have means of his own, and plans and goals. Together, we could help each other. He would see how advantageous was Madame Annelle. An ambitious suitor would not need things explained.

That night, as I raced through all six replications of Mrs. Hoyt's disappointingly simple design, I was able to imagine myself and a suitor with a clarity that startled me; apparently a secret part of my mind had been planning its next step for quite some time. A warm, friendly-looking man, not so handsome that he would stray. Someone who appreciated quality when he found it. Someone ready to take advantage of opportunities and make a new life.

For only a moment, when the thread snarled and I had to rewind the bobbin, did I think of the children that a superior suitor might desire. Two, like a modern man, or twenty, like an old-fashioned patriarch. Children, his own seed, his pledge to the future. He would want them, that suitor. As I did myself.
Why not want?
I thought, savagely ripping at the thread. To want something was mere ambition, that fine trait. To want was to aspire. It was what we Angelenos did, I thought, snarling the thread so badly I had to throw the bobbin's worth away.

I turned to my clients. They were fond of discussing the future—their own, the city's, and mine. They were most interested in the last. The secret to my security and happiness, they told me with the assurance of shared belief, lay in prudent investment.

The topic brought out the orator in them. Such opportunity represented America at its finest! A woman with my skills could show all of America—truly, all the world—that refinement was not solely the product of Paris. Why, I could be an ambassador! Mrs. Donlavey made me put down my tape measure while she held forth, and I murmured, "Now, now," which could be heard as "
Non, non.
" She beamed, delighted to have such refinement in her employ. I saw no need to inform her that Madame Annelle would this afternoon drop off three identical dimity frocks at Universal Studio, each to be worn by an actress who would plead for rescue as angry ocean waters swirled around her delicate ankles. In the light of the morning, tumbling into a gilt-edged Pasadena parlor, the story's lack of refinement was plain.

By then Mrs. Donlavey was already on another tack, deploring the new department stores downtown—noisy, crowded establishments where anyone might come to shop. "The company's haste to serve the public has caused it to forget the quality of its clientele," Mrs. Donlavey fretted, echoing that morning's
Times.
Coarse girls elbowed to the counter as if they were at a saloon. While I continued to unstitch her waistband, letting out the skirt that had fit her a year before, Mrs. Donlavey recalled for me her wait at a millinery counter. She had found herself standing behind an uncouth girl who wore a shapeless cloth hat that fell over her head like a coal hod. Though the customer's hat was purple, the shop girl still waited on her before turning to Mrs. Donlavey. "A foolish choice," she said icily.

"But it was not a choice that Madame Annelle would make," said her husband, watching us from his armchair. To have a man in attendance was not unusual. Often my clients' husbands strolled into the rooms where their wives were being fitted, and if the wives noticed their husbands' gaze lingering on the
modiste
's quick hands and tidy ankles, no remark needed to be made. Madame Annelle was no shop girl trailing a string of beaus like cheap perfume. She was something different, a businesslady, a thrilling new category that suggested to my clients cigarettes and, perhaps, questionable undergarments. A
frisson
accompanied a businesslady into even the crispest drawing rooms, and I would not have been surprised to learn that my customers and their husbands looked upon each other with renewed ardor after one of my visits, though the thought was not one Madame Annelle cared to dwell upon.

So long as they restrained themselves to only mildly inappropriate comments and kept their hands to themselves, Madame Annelle herself had no objection to the gentlemen's presence. Not infrequently, speaking to the air, the husbands mentioned opportunities they had been farsighted enough to seize. Water rights, acreage. Those opportunities allowed them to have seamstresses come to their very homes. "She is a
modiste,
my dear," their wives would correct them.

Not infrequently, watching my rapid gestures, the gentleman would give the name of his investment. It was an easy task to carry the name home and look through the newspapers. Seemly endeavors were reported on by the
Times,
which would not allow to go unnoted a single civic, social, or charitable position held by the company's president. If the company was a flash in the pan, there might be a mocking article in the
Herald,
everyone's newspaper of choice for scandal. Between the two sources, I learned a great deal. "There are several paths to education, dear," teased Mrs. Homes, my only client blessed with a sense of humor.

Newspapers also informed me about the lectures offered every evening and weekend, all over the city. Nothing except my own hesitancy had kept me from attending informational Sunday-afternoon talks about a possible new railroad terminus or water rights from a lake far south of Los Angeles. There were always meetings about water, a great source of civic consternation. Everyone in Los Angeles had complaints—even in my nice rooming house, mud regularly ran through the pipes. Twice in the last six months, I'd turned the tap and confronted a sinkful of sludge. Water rights were discussed but not quite respectable; rumors clustered around Mr. Holt and his investors in the Imperial Valley, several of whom, Mrs. Donlavey noted, had seen the insides of prisons. "They are not the people we would care to associate with," she murmured, and I folded my lips into the expression of a woman who knew more than she chose to say. Then I went home and scoured the newspapers for announcements of state-approved investments, safe holdings, and futures, the words solid as bricks.

After a month of careful listening and research, I finally arrived at Glendale's municipal auditorium, wearing a suit with double-faced lapels that would not have been out of place at the Waldorf-Astoria. I had copied it from a drawing of fashionable ladies sitting in the tea room there. The lecture had to do with land claims and oil rights, investment opportunities that would attract gentlemen of means.

At the entrance to the auditorium, I was relieved to see other women in attendance—wives, their gloved hands resting lightly on the arms of their husbands. Perhaps over supper that night they would bend their heads together over a prospectus that guaranteed oil strikes. When I moved toward a seat at the back, the gentlemen politely left the seats on either side of me unoccupied.

I spent much of the next hour assessing the audience and therefore scarcely heard a word of the presentation, though I saw the chart used by the lecturer onstage and realized that my seven hundred dollars of savings would hardly buy me entrance to even the first level of investment. Some audience members slipped quietly out of the hall when they saw the chart, but I found the information bracing; I was always reassured by numbers. I resolved to take on more clients and to come back to the hall the following week, when a lecturer would speak about silver mines in Mexico.

These outings permitted me to see the interior of many fine buildings, some of which were decorated with arched blue ceilings and cherubs. I began to understand and employ the new language I was learning—"percentage down payment," for instance, and "capital improvement." Copying other audience members, I brought paper and pencils with me and began to take notes, doing sums as quickly as I could. Sometimes, after the presentations, gentlemen would ask about my calculations; many of them came out to the lectures week after week as I did. Like members of a large church congregation, we knew one another to nod at and make light conversation. There was no impropriety in comparing our sums, and many times the gentlemen offered to walk me to the streetcar. I allowed the ones with well-brushed jackets to buy me ice cream.

Those with manners found ways to ask questions without quite asking them. "It is unusual to see a single girl so set on self-improvement."

"What is life for, if not to improve ourselves?" I had to watch myself to keep the light French near-accent that I used with my clients out of my conversations with Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles, pleasant fellows with an interest in investment.

"But you are all alone? A businesslady?"

"Seamstressing has long been a ladies' profession." I watched Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles make quick calculations, as I was doing myself. "Why, we are in the Bible."

"Now you are joking with me."

"Queen Esther's robes swept the ground. Who but a seamstress made her fresh ones?"

"Ah. The ancient lineage of seamstresses. Will you continue to sew for queens?"

"I do hope so." We continued to stroll, and Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles did not take my arm. This was not courtship, and Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles would not return to my room. They were gentlemen and businessmen, accustomed to business transactions. And I? I was not by any lights a girl, nor any longer a young lady. I did not blame Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles, so perplexed in finding a word to describe me.

Conversations with Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles were not easy. Almost all of my time now was spent with other girls or with the ladies who employed me; I had nearly forgotten how to hold a conversation that did not concern itself with the depraved state of today's youth. I tried to be an informed citizen, learning about cultural affairs and faraway countries. I knew all about, for instance, the Americans' dominance at the Olympic Games in Sweden. But when Mr. Bowles asked whether I thought the new swimming stroke used by the Hawaiian with the difficult name would catch on, I could only smile. I vowed to start memorizing the articles; in the meantime, I told Mr. Bowles that I had been too busy to read, sewing costumes for the pictures.

I could not have hoped for a better prompt to conversation. First Mr. Bowles and later, on another afternoon, Mr. Hanratty, turned, a bright expression softening his face. "Have you met any actresses?" they asked.

"Not yet." Seeing the brightness fade, I speedily added, "Soon I hope to move my work to the studio. Many of the girls there are so slim that their waistbands could serve as a gentleman's collar." Many of the girls were not so slim, but there was no point in being scrupulous when Mr. Hanratty or Bowles took my arm.

"I enjoy the pictures," he said.

"They can be a delightful entertainment."

"We might attend the pictures together," he said.

This was precisely what I had hoped to hear, and yet when Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles tucked my hand into his pocket, I could not stop my voice from growing a shade too cool, my smile too private and rare. I had not quite forgotten Jack Plat, my name linked to his in a Kansas registry. Would anyone think to check such a thing? I worried, and as I worried my smile toward Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles dimmed, a great foolishness. I was in no position to give up opportunities, no matter that Mr. Hanratty's high voice grated or that Mr. Bowles's hands were damp. I might have smooth arms and a waist as pliable as a willow, but a girl's complexion would never come back to me.

George Curran did not slide his arm around my waist the first time he walked me to the streetcar, or the second, but he communicated that he would like to do so, and I did not discourage his communication. He was skilled at making clear his desires, allowing his eye to linger on a well-kept motorcar, a wool overcoat—an extravagant garment in sunny Los Angeles—or the E. D. Goode home.

I showed it to him after we sat through ninety minutes of great tedium while a little man with a tremor in his voice talked about electricity. Hydroelectricity from the rivers trickling into the Los Angeles basin was sold through the Department of Water and Power, but the little man seemed to be suggesting that small amounts of power generated in a manner that he alone understood could be channeled for private use. I gave up trying to make sense. Instead of listening, I pondered electricity, and the delightful surge I felt in sitting next to George Curran. I had not felt the surge in many years; I had forgotten how it could wipe out every thought except the man's hair, the man's hand, his knee inside his trouser leg, several proper inches from my own.

He had come to California from Indiana two years before. He was moving up smartly with Standard Oil, which had first hired him to install oil rigs, but who now called him out for machinery maintenance and repair. He was like me, I thought, finding ways to make himself indispensable. He wore a brown single-breasted suit with a double shirt collar, an excellent bowler, and a wide smile, even when the lecturer lost his place and repeated point five of his plan, whatever it was. "May I escort you back to the streetcar?" George said after the lecture ground to an end. "I would like to salvage something pleasant from this afternoon."

"My goodness. After you have heard so many informative facts about electric power."

"Can you repeat a single fact our speaker told us?"

"Electric power is ... good."

"I see nothing escapes you."

I offered him my arm, more than I had offered to Mr. Hanratty or Mr. Bowles. As we strolled, my breath light in my lungs, he scrutinized the homes we passed. "That one, for instance. Consider its potential for improvement if its owners were only to install a modest hydroelectric dam in the backyard."

"Electricity is tomorrow's power today," I said. The speaker had assured us of this several times.

"Do you suppose he knows that regulated power programs already exist? It seems a shame to weaken his enthusiasm."

"It is enthusiasm that cannot bear very much weakening."

"Perhaps if he himself simply put his finger into an outlet."