The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (28 page)

"Oh, la! I'm as famous as the mayor," I said, fast but not fast enough. George was already talking.

"So you came all the way to California to find your sister, and you stumbled into the red-hot center of Hollywood fashion," he said. "Nell and I have been talking about this very thing. Madame Annelle, in case you don't know, is the toast of the Southland."

"George," I said.

"Let me tell you: whatever she says, goes."

"Oh, now you are really joking," I said.

"'In the mornin', in the evenin','" the yellow-haired girl sang. Aimée. I waited for her to get to the next line: "Ain't we got fun." It was another song everyone was singing then. She had a good voice.

"She's the talk of every ice cream shop," George said.

"That's luck, hey?" said Lucille. Lisette. If my mouth hadn't seemed suddenly cast in concrete, I might have laughed. To create Madame Annelle had been a small thing, and necessary. Aimée, Lisette: they were grasping names, and vulgar. Names so patently false invited derision. Someone should have told the girls that. But who would take the girls aside and counsel them, if not their mother?

"He's teasing you." My caustic voice made Aimée stop singing. "I am a seamstress."

"Tut, tut," George said. "Madame Annelle is a
modiste.
" He made a flourishing gesture. "Everybody who comes to California gets one stroke of luck. Nell is yours."

"What was yours?" Lisette said.

His usual answer was "finding Nell." The subject came up from time to time. "I'm waiting," he said. "Luck doesn't always show itself right away."

"Maybe we're it," she said. Even when she did smile, the expression was nothing like her sister's. There was no sunshine in it.

"Are you sure you're Nell's sister?" George said.

"Can you see a resemblance?" She twirled, her black hair lifting from her face like a shingle.

"No," he said. "You don't look like her at all."

"People say I have your hands," Amelia—
Aimée
—said to me confidingly, holding up her little paw. People were right—her hand had my slight crook in the thumb, my spade-shaped tips, my hedge of hangnails. How clearly the citizens of Grant Station must have remembered! And how much they must have told the girls. The fear that ran through me then was so sharp I wondered if it were visible, like the famous photograph of lightning igniting a sailboat near Catalina. It was said that people on the shore could have read books from the illumination.

"This is my husband," I said shakily. There was no way to avoid the word. "My husband, George Curran."

"Making you Nell Curran now," said Lisette. "We wondered."

"Would you like to come inside?" he said. I held my breath and scowled. The girls crowded in.

George and I took the chesterfield, blond Aimée the armchair, and dark Lisette perched at the edge of a straight chair. Her chapped legs overwhelmed the small frame, and she held her elbows at an awkward angle. Around her mouth, sullen in repose, I could discern my firstborn. The eyes and face had changed, and the hair of course, ruthlessly bobbed now so that her pretty curls were sheared away, but the mouth retained its hot sulk. While I looked at her, my hands opened and closed. I was having enormous trouble thinking. My arms and legs shook; my whole body seemed to be rattling. My brain, I thought, was rattling.

"It took us three weeks to get here," Lisette said. "We stayed with family along the way. Mamaw recalled a cousin in Albuquerque. She needed two days to remember his name."

"Otis Parker Jones," Aimée added.

"I've never been to Albuquerque," I said.

"He was a nice man," Aimée said. "He had a phonograph."

"We have a phonograph," said Mary, still sitting in her chair at the dinner table. I watched her half sisters wheel to look at a child as fine-boned as an elf, wearing ringlets and a low-waisted dress whose smocking had taken me half a day and four colors of thread. Girls on the plains who were Mary's age already had squint lines. Her father said, "Come join us, punkin'," and I pulled her onto my lap. I had begun to think she was too old for me to keep so close, but just this moment it was a pleasure to hold her sweet, confident weight. I tried not to think that I was using my daughter as a shield against my daughters. There was no advantage to thinking certain thoughts. The strange girls glanced at Mary and looked away again, and I was both relieved and insulted. "Mary, honey, these are your aunties come to visit you."

"Mary," said Lisette. "After Daddy's cousin?"

"I don't remember any cousin," I said.

"There must be so many people you've forgotten," she said.

"What are aunties?" Mary said. Turned curiously to the strangers, her face was as unformed as water. Her aunts' faces, though, were full of expression.

"They're family. This is the first time they've been able to come out and visit us," I said.

"It's a surprise," George said.

"Did you come in a flivver?" Mary asked. She was fascinated by motorcars and wheedled George to take her out in our Ford as often as she could.

"Silly," Aimée said gently. I wondered if she had taken care of children at home or had some of her own. While the shiver passed over me, she said to Mary, "Movie stars take trains."

"Are you movie stars?"

"That's what we came here to become."

"Oh, boy," George said.

"Do you think this is a joke? It's not," Lisette said.

"I don't think you're joking," George said.

"Everybody says that getting to Hollywood is the hardest part," Aimée said.

"Getting to Hollywood is just the first part," I said. "The pictures are a business. There are skills involved. People take years learning them."

"We know how to work," Lisette said.

"Not like this." Looking at her blunt jaw and stubborn, wide-set eyes, I wondered how much time she had spent imagining herself on a screen in a bonnet and a dimity dress, raising her arms while her cowboy sweetheart galloped to rescue her.

"A lot of girls come to Hollywood," George said. "You read about them all the time. They think they're going to walk into the pictures, but they wind up behind the counter at the Rexall."

Lisette said, "We didn't come this far to stand behind a counter. Even Daddy said we have what it takes." When she looked at him she tilted her head so that she could drop her heavy eyelids to half-mast, her hair flapping away from her face in the manner that had been thought seductive five years ago. Theda Bara must still have been popular in Kansas.

"Well, that's fine. Maybe some girl from the sticks will make it big. Maybe you're it," George said, and Lisette folded her lips. It was just as well that she couldn't know the evenings George and I had spent imitating county-fair queens from Nebraska and Arkansas who streamed into Los Angeles and asked the way to Paramount, as if B. P. Schulberg would have their dressing rooms ready.

"We'll need screen tests, I know," Lisette said. "We have to meet people. Now things will be easy." The bland face she turned to me was more unsettling than the sulky one.

"You can introduce us to people!" Aimée said, catching her sister's drift.

"The only person I know is Mrs. Abigail Hoyt."

"Mrs. Abigail Hoyt," Aimée breathed. I couldn't tell whether she recognized the name or was simply learning her line. Mary slid off my lap and went to her auntie, who absently gathered her in.

"People know other people. I'll bet Mrs. Hoyt knows scads. Right off, it would be good for us to meet some cameramen—they're smart about lighting," Lisette said. "The right lighting can take an ordinary, pretty girl and make her look exotic."

"Gloria Swanson says the wrong lighting can make her look plain," Aimée said. "Think of it!"

"Lighting," Lisette said, counting off on her fingers. "Makeup. A producer who can match the right girl with the right material. I don't want to waste my time playing an ingénue."

"That seems best," I said. I supposed Lisette had gotten the word from
Photoplay,
which had also recently run an article about the importance of lighting. I'd seen the issue on a newsstand downtown.

"Directors, of course, and other actors," she said.

"You have quite an agenda," George said.

"That's why we came to you," Aimée said. "A person who's lived in a place for years knows people. Anybody from Grant Station could tell you that much."

"Anybody from Grant Station could tell you what everybody else in town had for breakfast ten years back," I said, then glanced at Mary. I didn't like to be so tart when she could hear. But she was playing with her auntie Aimée's small hands and not troubling herself about her waspish mama.

"People there know each other. They know what it means to be helpful," Lisette said to George. "People do favors for each other because they're neighbors and they want to help, or because they're neighbors and they want to keep things quiet."

I laughed shortly. "There's the voice of my home place."

Lisette shrugged. "Either way, favors get done."

"Maybe they get done in Kansas, where folks see each other every day. Los Angeles is a big city," said George. "This house is a long way from Hollywood. To tell you the truth, I can't remember the last time I saw anybody do a favor."

"That's because you didn't have a family member. We have a sister."

Every time the word rolled out of her mouth, I flinched. "A sister," I said. "Just that. I'm not D. W. Griffith."

"You have a new position in Universal City, just north of Hollywood," Lisette mused. I didn't believe that I had mentioned those facts. "Right on the lot. It will be easy to introduce your sisters to people. My goodness! Even fancy Hollywood people understand an introduction."

"It would not be easy at all." When I attempted to laugh, the sound I made was rusty. "This town! The rumors are like gnats. Yes, I've been offered a place. But I'm not going to start working downtown at a studio. How could I, with little Mary at home?" George's face was as blank as chalk. Perhaps he wasn't listening. "Even if I had taken the position, I would have worked in a little room with a sewing machine, not on the set where the people are."

"You haven't started," Lisette said.

"No."

"It would be normal for you to tour the lot on the first day. Two younger sisters would not make things very different. Otherwise, we will have to stay here at the house. I guess we could tell stories about Kansas to Mary and George. I'll bet there's a lot about Grant Station you haven't told them."

"George will be at work!" Shot with panic, my voice cracked like a dish. "He won't be here to listen to your stories. And what about Mary?" I pointed at my child, boldly reclining against her Auntie Aimée's cheap dress. "I can't just leave her at home."

"We'll take her with us!" said Aimée, dipping her head to kiss Mary's hair. Mary giggled and tilted up her face for a proper kiss. She had never met anyone she should not trust.

"That's not possible," I said.

George said, "Why not?" His face looked purely curious; he could have been a scientist with a stopwatch and a pencil.

"We have already decided, dear," I said.

"I didn't think you had decided anything," he said. "As a matter of fact, that's what you explained to me just this evening."

I glanced at the girls. They were wearing the expressions of men clustered around a radio, listening to a prizefight.

"Universal City is too far," I said unsteadily. "Mary is too young to be taken all over the city."

"You've taken her to Pasadena often enough. Let her see the city she lives in. Take all three girls on a tour. Give them a thrill." His voice caught in the back of his throat, and he did not look at me. He also did not look at his daughter. He looked at, then away from, Lisette.

"Well," I said. "George. You surprise me. You've never been interested in the studio before."

"Maybe I'll be discovered. Maybe I'll get cast as a mother!" Aimée said. She nuzzled Mary's ringlets and laughed. George laughed, too, roughly. With its dazzling smile, Aimée's countenance did not quite suggest motherhood.

Lisette said, "Audiences like to see fresh faces. When you think about the people walking around a set, just looking for new ideas and new talent—why, anything could happen. A director could see a new girl and ask where she's from. He could commission a new story all about her."

"Let me guess. You're thinking that audiences will rush to see a picture about the girl from Kansas who changed her name?" I said. Somebody needed to talk sense to the girl.

Lisette's smile was catlike. "How about the girl from Kansas who came to the big city to find her sister? Audiences love stories of devotion. The sister could be saved from a life of corruption. Someone needs to tell the truth about her plain beginnings."

Mary was playing pat-a-cake with Aimée, and I was grateful that she was no longer on my lap to feel me shaking. Tiny, painful rockets were exploding in my joints, like fireworks. A stupid comparison. Like bullets, fired by my steady-eyed daughter.

I said, "You've already cast yourself in your own fantasy. The ingénue goes to the office and just happens to meet a producer. Next thing you know, she's a star. But things don't happen that way."

"How do they happen?" Lisette said.

"You go through channels. You work and get to know the right people."

Stupid, stupid, stupid: naturally, Lisette said, "We know you."

"You're setting yourself up for disappointment." A gentle billow blew in from the kitchen, air still round and slick with pork fat. The girls had said nothing about the piles of food on the table. Maybe they thought it normal to cook forty pounds of meat at a time. Maybe they thought everybody in Los Angeles cooked pigs, in order to feed their many acquaintances who worked in the pictures.

"We didn't come this far because we're quitters," Lisette said. "Just like you. People used to talk about how you didn't let anything get in your way. They won't be surprised a bit that you wound up in Hollywood. Would you like me to tell you what they say about you?"

"Fine," I said. "We'll go to Universal City tomorrow. I just don't want you to be disappointed."