The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (42 page)

"There was considerable debate on the issue. Mrs. Cates thought you had gone to Canada because you hated hot weather. And Mrs. Trimbull insisted that you had gone to France, where your skills would have been appreciated. She held quite stoutly to the belief that we had driven you away."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I wish I had left you with something better to debate."

"What would we have talked about, if not you? Biting flies? Burdock getting into the wheat? Your leaving was the best thing that ever happened to conversation in Grant Station."

"I'll bet there are people who wouldn't agree with that." Harry Lorton's assistant was taking his time about arriving with my sewing machine. I did not want Mrs. Barnett to go away, but I would have liked to have something to do with my hands, or at least a place to sit.

"Don't you remember those afternoons in Kansas? The Grant Station ladies called on one another."

"I've been gone a long time," I said. I had not lived in Grant Station, nor had I been a lady, and my calls had not been social. I couldn't tell whether Mrs. Barnett had forgotten those things or was overlooking them in the clear California air.

"We sat in one another's parlors and sweltered in the summer or shivered in the winter. The ceiling in Mrs. Trimbull's parlor pressed the heat onto us like a flatiron. Sitting in that room was a punishment. Punishment, with tea, twice a week."

"The lamp on the piano that she insisted on lighting," I said slowly, groping my way back to the memory. "Even at midafternoon, that lamp was lit." I hadn't thought of the lamp since the day I had been hoisted onto the train, but now it was as clear as Monday: a heavy, cut-glass base and an oddly squat chimney that seemed designed to encourage smoke and heat to cover the room.

"See? You do remember. It came from Charleston, South Carolina, you know."

"It couldn't have been easy to keep that delicate chimney in one piece overland to Kansas."

"Indeed it was not," Mrs. Barnett said. "Would you like me to tell you about the quilts it was wrapped in, and the crate, and how tenderly that crate was housed in the very center of the wagon?"

"No," I said, meeting her merry, naughty eyes. Harry Lorton might as well give in. The woman was irresistible.

"Mrs. Horne's English teapot. Mrs. Cates's crocheted curtain. Lizzie Spark's genuine red-mahogany sideboard."

"I don't remember a Lizzie Spark."

"Her husband managed the station for Union Pacific. It was no small amount of skill required in regulating train schedules. People thought he just read the newspaper all day, but his job was no easy task, let me tell you, missy." For an instant, she squinched her features and I remembered the tight conversations, every word guarded like a little sentry post. "You were a godsend. While you were in town, we could talk about your fashions. When you left, we could talk about your leaving. 'What do you suppose Nell is doing now?' Mrs. Cates would say. Mrs. Trimbull would say you were playing tennis, for its health benefits. None of us played but we had read about it. And Mrs. Horne would say pish, she is modeling couture."

"And Mrs. Cooper? What would she say?"

"Rose, Nell. After all this time."

It took me a moment to catch on to her meaning. Back in Kansas I never had known her first name. A preacher's wife didn't need a first name. "What would Rose say?" I said.

"I told them that you went to Hollywood."

"There was no Hollywood then. Not at first."

"There's always been a Hollywood."

She wasn't going to tell me, then. Perhaps the conversations about runaway Nell had taken place, perhaps not. Maybe Rose had sat under Mrs. Trimbull's low ceiling and opined that Nell had become a dancehall girl, or worse. My tone sharp, I said, "I did the same as I ever did. I made the acquaintance of women of means, and then I sewed for them. I did what I knew how to do. As you did."

Rose looked sad rather than angry, but before she could respond, we finally heard rushed, heavy footsteps at the door and the quick knock. Boys bustled in with a table, straight chair, sewing machine, dummy, lamp, and cardboard box holding fabric, thread, and, I saw when I glanced in, a length of flat lace. Mrs. Hoyt must have told Harry Lorton to include the lace, necessary for an invisible hem.

The boys needed only a few moments to set up and arrange the furnishings, and to whisk the corners of the room where dust had gathered; they even installed a blind for the window. When they clattered back out, the room had become a sewing room, as convincing as a stage set.

Rose snapped her fingers. "Voilà!"

"It's like a fairy tale."

"And there you are: Rumpelstiltskin."

The two of us pulled charmeuse and satin from the box—Mrs. Hoyt must have helped select fabric, too—while I tried to remember who Rumpelstiltskin was. My brain was stuffed with stories. "Which of these do you like?" I said. "The ivory would be good with your skin."

"Is there any blue?" she said, and I toppled back into memory, hearing her sweetly pout for a blue dress in the days when we still wore corsets under our dresses and bonnets when we went outside.

"Not for this dress. It wants to be simple." The satin I held, a creamy beige that shone gold where the light caught it, might have been the most beautiful cloth I had ever seen. Rose sighed.

"I'll tell Harry that it requires a white fox coat."

"You will look like a Hollywood star." Not at all true. Hollywood stars wore fringe and daring hems. This dress would make her look like a goddess.

"That will please him," she said absently. She held her peace while I took her measurements and remained still while I draped first the satin, then the charmeuse, down her chest, trying to make Rose look tiny and enticing, not merely bony.

"Will this be difficult?" she said.

"Yes. If I don't cut it exactly right, the whole cloth will be ruined. And there's no point in making a sample first, because another fabric won't hang the same way."

"It's a shame to see such effort go into a dress that I'll wear once. I'll wear it once, and Harry will get his picture in the
Examiner.
That's what he will like."

"There's nothing wrong with giving him what he'd like."

"Myself, I would like to have a pretty dress to wear in the daytime. Would you make one for me?"

How blunt she had become. California had coarsened her. "I work for the studio now." I plucked a pin from the cushion and put it in my mouth.

"It doesn't need to be a miracle of engineering, like this one." She gestured at the sketch on which I was jotting measurements. "It would mean a lot to me to have a new dress by you. I'll tell people it's by Madame Annelle, but I'll secretly know it's by Mercer County Nell. I'll be the only person in Los Angeles to know about Mercer County Nell and her magical sewing machine."

"Not quite," I mumbled.

"Maybe I can get Harry to make a movie about you," she said. "The girl from the sticks whose greatness is recognized once she gets away from her home place. The girls in Nebraska and Rhode Island will go over and over again."

"The girls in Nebraska and Rhode Island are already here," I said.

"And they're sitting in movie houses. Harry would be wise to give them what they want." Absently, she raised and lowered her arm, looking at the fall of the shining fabric. "Even with the pins in, it's gorgeous. I don't know how you do it." The look she turned on me was full of warm affection, as if we had never been separated more than a day, and my heart rose to meet it.

"My daughters are here," I burst out. "In Los Angeles."

"Did you send for them?"

"No."

She let a thoughtful moment pass before she said, "Lucille and Amelia. I haven't seen them since they were babies."

"They've given themselves new names. They are flappers." I meant to smile wryly, but to my dismay, I felt my eyes fill. What had I expected them to become, if not flappers? Nothing. I had expected nothing. I had not had the capacity to entertain expectations; every time my mind had been shadowed by memories of crops or fence lines, I had forced myself to think about seam allowances. Only when Mary came into the world did I learn about expectations: carriages, princes, glass slippers.

"They want to be in pictures," I blurted. "They are calling themselves my sisters." Then I said, "They want to be in pictures" again, as if that were an explanation.

"Oh dear," Rose said.

"They think I can make them a career," I said, stabbing a pin at an unresisting edge of the satin, where holes wouldn't matter. "They think they only need to have someone start cranking the camera, and they'll become stars."

"It's the one story every girl believes."

"I didn't," I said. "Did you?"

"We didn't want to be stars. We wanted something else. Still do. I, for instance, want you to make me a dress." Her face held no cunning at all; it was as direct as the rose she was named for. Lisette and Aimée had approached the wrong Kansas girl to make their future.

I said, "I'll make you a dress. Will you get Mr. Lorton to arrange a screen test for Lisette?"

"Wouldn't you like a test for yourself?"

"No," I said sharply. The idea was horrifying. I knew that because I imagined it from time to time. George did, too, I was certain. Everyone in California imagined the screen test, and then the house with a swimming pool surrounded by a high wall. "Thank you, no. I was made to stay behind the bright lights. But Lisette is ready to dazzle."

"I'll tell Harry," she said.

I raised my eyebrows and put my finger beside my mouth, a look that was winsome and mischievous on Colleen Moore. "Tell him to wear sunglasses when he watches."

Rose obligingly laughed before clattering back out to the blazing street and leaving me with a puddle of fabric, an impossible dress, and the sense that someone had opened a door in a dark room. Not "someone." Rose Cooper, of all people, had flung open the heavy door. Rose, another piece of my past I had meant to be unrecoverable.

By re-pinning the cloth a dozen times, ignoring the lunch that Mr. Lorton sent over, and relying on a few extra tucks to correct the skirt panel, by five o'clock, I had a dress nearly finished, though it lacked a hem and I had to send for Rose, who arrived with Harry Lorton and, to my discomfiture, Mrs. Hoyt. "I can't get the length right without a model," I said, blushing. Surprisingly unembarrassed, Rose went behind a screen to disrobe, then stood before Harry Lorton and Mrs. Hoyt and me, the fabric spilling like liquid over her clearly unclad hips.

"See?" Harry Lorton said to Mrs. Hoyt. "I told you."

"You could not possibly put an actress in this dress. Look at the poor girl. She's afraid to move."

"There are still some pins," Rose said.

"Once tomorrow's photos hit the newspapers, every girl in Los Angeles will want to wear this dress," he said.

"God help us."

"You should be proud of your work."

"No work of mine," she said. I was on my knees beside Rose, pinning the hem to reveal the fine arch of her foot. The dress made everything about the wearer's body look desirable. I could feel Mrs. Hoyt's gaze on me, making my hands as clumsy as if they were mittened. She waited until I had finished pinning, until Rose had taken off the dress and left on Harry's arm, until I had hemmed the entire garment and handed it to Harry Lorton's boy. She waited until the boy's footsteps had died away, and then she said, "Collect your pay envelope at the gate on your way out. You will not be coming back."

"When Mr. Lorton asked me to make the dress, I had no choice."

"Neither do I. Perhaps he will hire you as his onsite seamstress and talent agent."

"I never spoke a word to him about talent."

"Oh, madame. Word travels."

"People talk all the time. It doesn't have to mean anything."

"
Vous blaguez?
" She let a moment pass, then said, "Look it up. Look up
modiste,
too, before you have more calling cards made. It means 'milliner.' I promised myself that I would tell you."

As she turned away, her hard face held genuine sorrow, which was more than I felt. My heart was abruptly vacant, as if a cool wind were sweeping through my veins. "Where will you tell Mr. Lorton I have gone?" I said.

"I will tell him that you bid a fair
adieu.
"

The cool nonfeeling kept my posture straight as I went to the seamstress shop. Mary proudly showed me a pageful of
S
s; the girls there had made a pet of her and were marching her toward
Z.
In the same spirit, they rewound Aimée's bobbins and re-stitched her botched seams. I was sorry to have made daughters who needed looking after, a thought I held as I gathered them and told them to watch their handbags.

"I hope that Lisette is feeling better," Aimée said. "It's not like Lisette to take sick."

"Probably nothing more than a cold."

"It's not like her to get a cold, either. Mamaw said she was a dray horse."

"Horses get sick, too, I suppose." I spoke without paying attention, holding Mary's hand after we left the gate and slipping my pay envelope into my handbag. We hurried the two blocks to the streetcar stop where a trolley obligingly waited for us. Aimée said, "Door-to-door service!" and Mary laughed. The familiar stops ticked by, heading downtown to Sixth Street and the complicated change at Gramercy, then past the Mexican encampment around Lincoln Park, where Mary wrinkled her nose at the sharp smells—the spices the Mexicans used, and something burning. A man in a derby pulled the cord at State Street, where I sometimes stopped to visit the good cobbler who always had a sweet for Mary. My throat thickened. Would I have reason to come this way again? I looked at the grimy storefront windows, which had probably been unwashed for ten years, and I saw how much litter had piled at the side of the street, glued together with wet tobacco and horse dung. My eyes cleared. I could come back downtown anytime I wanted to. I was fired, not dead.

My old clientele still waited for me. Even though I had not taken on new jobs, I had answered notes from a number of my ladies, being sure to enclose my card every time. The ladies' appetite for distinctive, first-quality clothing had not diminished; I could pick up work tomorrow. Mary nudged me and pointed at a bill posted on a warehouse, advertising
The Rustler,
a Universal picture Mrs. Hoyt and I had worked on. None of the customers I was returning to would countenance the low bodice. "Auntie Lisette would like that," Mary said.