The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (25 page)

I had never had such thoughts before, and normally I would have been embarrassed at my grandness. Meaning! Wasn't I la-di-dah.

I had not completely slipped my tether and knew better than to share my thoughts with anyone but Mary. As a result, we talked quite a lot. Finally! I told her, in the sink or at my breast. Finally I had age enough to love a baby. Finally I did not have the hungry, angry sense that her breaths were snatched from my lungs. Rocking Mary and looking back to my young self, I saw—it had to be said—a madwoman. That furious girl had rarely sat and looked at her children. Instead, she had paced resentfully with an infant slung over her shoulder, crossing the length of the soddie in three raging steps, then three steps back again. No wonder Lucille had howled. A spasm of shame seized me. Partly in appeasement, I flew to Mary's side at every opportunity, until George laughed and told me to give the child a moment's peace. Ha! He was hovering beside her cradle, too.

The baby in the house made us young again; even on the sleepless nights when Mary would not be comforted and my legs and arms ached, I felt myself blossoming. The old frantic need to make progress, to
hurry, hurry,
had vanished, blown away by our California Zephyr. The mornings were joy because Mary was in them, the nighttimes, too. "Look!" I would say to George, pointing at her wrist. Pink as a little apple, it was irresistible. I picked her wrist up and kissed it over and over while Mary chuckled. George, meanwhile, was speaking reasonably to her foot. "You have so many toes. You wouldn't miss just one." Then he nibbled at them until Mary crowed. I could not remember ever hearing Lucille laugh. Six months before, the thought would have been intolerable, but now the world was changed.

Through Mary, I would make up for everything I had done wrong. Enchanted by her throaty sighs, I spent hours gazing into her dark blue eyes. "Have you ever seen such a color?" I asked George. I didn't care that I sounded stupid with admiration.

"Never. She invented it."

"They might change, you know. Babies' eyes do that."

"They'll only get more beautiful. That's all she knows how to do. She can be beautiful and she can be beautifuller."

"You, Mr. Curran, are going to spoil that child."

"You, Mrs. Curran, are a league or two ahead of me." He ducked his head and gobbled at her round belly until she kicked with glee.

I'd never seen a man so captivated. In the mornings he could scarcely force himself out the door, and at night he brought home ribbons, buttons, seashells that he scrubbed at the pump in the backyard before he let Mary see their soft pink throats. At night, the two of us sat beside Mary's cradle and watched her as if she were a moving picture. "Furs," he told her. "Buicks. Ponies."

"Silk," I added. I already had a piece in reserve, blue-gray, a color that would bring out her eyes and that no other baby would have.

George took my hand. "I thought I understood everything about where we were going. I didn't understand the first thing."

"How could we know?" I said.

"We will do this again," George murmured. "Again and again and again. We'll have so many babies we can't count them all. We'll haul happiness into the world by the trainload."

"Two trainloads," I said recklessly.

I thought I sounded charming and carefree, but he must have heard something in my voice. He said, "Don't worry. The second one always comes faster."

My hand trembled as I pulled it away from his. We had only recently resumed relations, both of us giggling at my round breasts that seemed like toys I'd borrowed from some other woman. But I was aware of a new spirit in George, partly confidence and partly determination. I didn't ask him because I knew that he would say he had Vision. I didn't want to hear him say it.

I had Vision of my own, and Mary was smack at the center of it. As she grew, first sitting up, then experimenting with crawling, I made the world to her measure. From scraps of soft wool, I created flowers, a bundle of folds held by a single stitch, just the size for her baby hand. By the time she was six months old, so pretty that strangers crossed the street to greet her, I had made her enough clothes to dress every little girl on the block. An obliging model, the only way she resembled Lucille, Mary held still and gurgled while I pinned a sailor suit on her or made a tiny felt hat. She was wearing it the first day we took the streetcar to Pasadena. At the home first of Mrs. Butler, then Mrs. Chambers, I held up my child as evidence that I could make clothing for their children, a service I had decided to add.

"She's a little angel!" cried Mrs. Chambers, smothering Mary against her hull of a bosom. "What is the French for
angel
?"

"
Ange.
" I had looked it up.

"They would have had to invent the word for you, if they didn't already have it," Mrs. Chambers said to my daughter. Watching her nuzzle Mary's neck, I quietly planned to make a cape to go with Mrs. Chambers's walking suit.

Even Mrs. Hoyt was captivated when Mary flashed her joyful, gummy grin. "She's pretty enough for the pictures already. Shall I arrange a screen test?"

"No girl of mine is going to be tied to railroad tracks."

"Most of the time they stop the train before the girl is actually run over," Mrs. Hoyt said. This was her idea of a joke, the sort of thing she growled out around her cigarette when she was tired of earnest girls from Sioux Falls. Still, I couldn't keep myself from snatching Mary back. Some things were not to be joked about.

I couldn't complain to George, who was already stiff on the subject of my employer. He had expected me to stop working for Mrs. Hoyt by now. "You are a mother," he said. "That's your job."

"I am a mother who wants her child to have opportunities." I pushed away the overskirt I'd been beading and hoped I would remember the pattern when I picked it back up. "There is no harm in my contributing to the household."

"All you need to do is raise our children. I'll take care of their opportunities." His face was tight; this was no time to ask him whether he had found another child in the garden, under a geranium leaf. Still, he did not forbid me to work. That command would come, I supposed, as soon as Mary scratched herself with a pin or toppled onto her plump bottom while my eyes were fixed on a clipped hem. I knew better than George where the dangers lay.

I became only a little bit sneaky. If George asked me plainly what I was sewing, I told him. The work was hardly secret. He could not be unaware of the piles of dollar bills that I tucked in the cracker tin every week, and that he brought to the bank. But if I put the stacks of finished dresses in the cupboard and stored the big spools of lace and feather trim in the pantry before he came home, he was willing to forget them and turn the conversation to speculation, fueled by vile-tasting illegal gin, first about his coworkers and then about investments, always ending in admiration of our daughter.

Everyone who met her, clients or neighbors, praised her captivating smile, her eyes that had become the rich, complicated blue of an evening sky. "George had better get a shotgun," our neighbor said. "Boys will be beating a path to your door. Are you going to put her in pictures?"

People asked all the time. No one meant to be rude, I knew. But my girl was made for better things than the pictures, even if I wasn't entirely sure what those things were. Not the hot shine of cameras, anyway. Not these hasty costumes that I turned out a half-dozen at a time, their seams unfinished and their hems no more than tacked. Mary had never worn a garment that wasn't sewn for a princess.

"Goodness," I made myself say to the well-meaning people. "I guess we'd better wait until she can walk."

Which she did before she turned a year old, toddling toward her father and me and any set of adult knees she could throw her arms around. Having scarcely heard a cross word in her life, she greeted the world with joyful, confident affection. She even smiled in her sleep. George and I told each other that we would have to teach her discipline and manners, but how does a mother discipline a child who has confidently taken the hand of a strange woman on the sidewalk? "You must be careful," I said mildly, while Mary grinned up at her new friend, who asked whether we were going to put Mary in pictures.

As soon as she was four years old, I started her on her letters, noisily applauding her when she could point at
R
and giving her a slice of apple when she managed to print a wobbly
A.
She needed only two weeks before she could print her name, and George shouted when she showed him. Then he gave her a triumphal ride on his shoulders across the living room, and when she demanded another, he gave her that, too.

I could not remember my mother teaching me book work; probably I had learned my letters at the long desk in the school-house. Perhaps that was the same place Lucille and Amelia had gone to learn, sent by their father or grandmother or their new mother. Now that Mary was here, these thoughts did not make me flinch so, and while I watched my girl struggle with her pencil, I thought lightly about Kansas; many country places, I read, had built proper buildings with windows. It was hard to think of such a structure in Mercer County, where my school had been a windowless room heated with still-hot dinner buckets. When Mama forgot mine, I walked back home for dinner across two farms and the town road. I strove to distract Mama in the mornings so I could make that walk and sometimes catch grasshoppers. The single school desk we worked on was so scarred that it looked as though a horse had run across it, and our stubby pencils often ripped through the paper into the wood's divots. Clever Lucille would have spied the clear spaces on the table to work on. I hoped she would have showed her sister, too.

Mary, who had been shielding her paper, turned to show me what she had written:
Mamm.

"You are the most precious thing in the world," I told her. "You also want to add one more
a.
"

"I know," she said, leaving me wondering which part of my statement she was agreeing with.

As she grew older, I taught her to sew, giving her fat needles and crewel yarn, encouraging her heavy, wandering stitches. She had little interest in the work, and I had to keep changing the color of her yarn to keep her at it. I wondered whether the other girls carried on any of my skill; in a sharp flash of curiosity that surprised me, I wondered whether Lucille had picked up my old business in Grant Station. She was old enough now. I envisioned her riding into town with packages of finished dresses for Mrs. Trimbull's daughters. Perhaps even the Grant Station ladies were wearing dropped waists now. Maybe Amelia was able to help, sewing the straight side seams, tacking the armholes. Pleasure shot through me at this idea, silly as it was. I had no right to such thoughts. I had less than no right. But every choice I had made, from sewing for Mrs. Trimbull to taking the 1535 out of town, had brought me to Mary. I leaned over to help her direct her needle, using the opportunity to brush my cheek against her flossy hair.

I was too superstitious to claim these happy days as my reward, but joy was around me everywhere, flashing like light on water. George was promoted to foreman over a dozen oil rigs that extended from Signal Hill to Long Beach. He blasted through the front door every night, racing to see his daughter and then sweep me in his arms like a bridegroom, his mouth full of stories about the day. For Mary he saved stories about animals, which she loved. He told me about the conversations he'd overheard, and the movie stars he sometimes saw downtown. More than once, he brought home stock tips he'd picked up from coworkers or clients or the shoeshine boy; investment was everyone's reigning passion. With the war now a memory and the stock market vaulting, high spirits frothed over Los Angeles as if a huge bottle of bootleg champagne were drenching us all. The dullest, meekest people had stock portfolios. My most drearily respectable clients learned to dance the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Life was shining.

The news was full of movie people, many of whom I had measured for fitted skirts or hip-hung pantaloons. My Los Angeles ladies wanted to hear all about the Hollywood people, if only for the satisfaction of disapproval. Mrs. Chambers nearly squealed when I told her that Inez Chanson's cornsilk hair, so important a part of the publicity surrounding
Girls of Montenegro,
was, frankly, dyed. "I'll bet she started life with hair the color of that dirt, right out there," Mrs. Chambers said, pointing at her lawn lined with olive trees. "Is her waist actually twenty-three inches?"

"If a person were to pull the measuring tape very, very hard," I said. Mrs. Chambers's laugh made her sound like a bird.

"Wouldn't it hurt her?" said Mary, playing in the corner, and Mrs. Chambers laughed again, a shade harder.

She and I were sipping coffee when her daughter arrived home in a jalopy with "A-budda-rum-bum" scrawled across the side in white paint. Her beau jumped out of the driver's seat, then came around to help the girl, whose bead necklace was so long it looped around her fat knee, made fatter by the stocking rolled there. "Oh, baby!" yelped the boy.

"Give me a cig," she said.

"Flaming youth," said her mother. "He failed out of Yale, but his father is in production at Paramount. She thinks she's in love." Looking at Mary sitting tidily on the sofa with her cup of cambric tea, she added, "You won't ever ask for a cig."

"She's pretty," Mary observed. "She looks like a movie star."

"You would make her very happy if you told her so," Mrs. Chambers said.

"The lady is asking you not to tell her," I added.

I did not tell George about these conversations, though I did not try to hush Mary when she spoke up. George was as movie-struck as anybody, even if he was unhappy about his wife's employment, which we referred to as "piecework." Many, many pieces. I dropped hints before Mrs. Hoyt, indicating that anyone who could turn out fifteen dresses
with bustles
in a week deserved to be promoted to costumer. Once she allowed to being surprised that a celebrated
modiste
might care about her title in a one-reeler called
Mother Against Daughter.
Remembering the long days of gray and navy suits, I closed my mouth. Whatever I was called, by now my piecework was bringing home a reliable forty-five dollars a week. Sometimes I imagined sending Mary to finishing school, sometimes buying her a pony.