The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (8 page)

In town, Mrs. Cooper received me with tea and cake, and sugar for Lucille to suck on. Using a hand glass to note how her new dress fit at the waist, its fashionable military-style neckline framing her long neck, she twirled and laughed at herself. I hoped she had noticed the dark blue piping that traced the bodice. I had improvised to create it, unstitching the blue blocks from the quilt on Jack's and my bed and cutting them into strips. As I went along, I replaced the blocks with scrap dimity, trusting Jack not to notice how dull the quilt was becoming. Now the reverend's wife had smart-looking lines that ran up the bodice, making her look as tiny as a gnat. "Amn't I vain," she said, unable to put the mirror down.

"You wear the new sleeves well. They call for a delicate frame."

"I could be in New York, getting ready to call on Mrs. Astor."

Jack would have asked, Who's Mrs. Astor? A month earlier, I would have done the same. But now, watching the reverend's wife gaze at her reflection, new words ran into my mouth. "Mrs. Astor would wish for your small waist," I said.

"Mrs. Astor would wish for my dress. Who could imagine that in Mercer County I would be wearing the latest fashion?"

I hid my smile with my hand. "We are no more than three years behind the latest fashions."

"Three years behind the latest fashions in Wichita, perhaps. My sister tells me what the ladies in Philadelphia are wearing. Sometimes she sends pictures from magazines, which I consider unfair. It is quite enough to read her descriptions. I tell her regularly that it is vulgar to gloat."

"Do you have any of those pictures?" The sudden hunger made my voice coarse, and I blushed, but Mrs. Cooper's glance was understanding. When she left the parlor to fetch her sister's letter, her skirt rustled over the starched petticoat with a sound like wind through ripe wheat.

"I have to put these letters away when Mr. Cooper is in," she said when she returned. "He does not like to see me mooning over drawings. I tell him that I am not mooning; this is appreciation. He tells me that my appreciation could illuminate the night sky."

"Mr. Cooper is a wit," I said.

"He would tell you so. Here," she said, resting her finger on a drawing of a silk afternoon dress whose waist dropped into a point prettily trimmed out in lace. "If a person were inclined to moon, here is a dress worth mooning over."

"I could make that," I said, though the gathers at the back bothered me. Some trick must have been used to keep the silk from bunching.

"A waste of your talents," she said. "As soon as this dress entered the county—poof! It would vanish. This is a dress that calls for electric lights and motorcars."

"Not at all," I said. I had no right to speak so firmly to a reverend's wife, but she did not look reproving. "This is a dress that will bring electric lights with it. The world will hasten to catch up with such a dress. Why, people will thank you for wearing it."

"You are a salesman, Nell Plat."

"Electric lights. Dinner parties! Pâté." I had seen the word on the Topeka newspaper's rotogravure and hazarded the pronunciation. "Footmen. Parties with orchestras playing."

"I don't think even Mrs. Astor could fit an orchestra into her ballroom," said Mrs. Cooper, her laughter a chime.

"Part of an orchestra, then. Fiddles." I looked back at the drawing, memorizing the fold under the sleeve, the lace insert beneath the high collar. "Let me make this for you."

"Where would a minister's wife wear such a thing?"

"Won't you feel better just having it? Just seeing it in your wardrobe?" Though the drawing showed a row of ruffles at the hem, two rows would be nicer and would help the skirt hang properly in the back. "Lilac, I think. A fair color would suit you."

"I prefer blue," she said.

Blue was not a good choice for Mrs. Cooper. Though her cheeks were creamy, shadows smudged the cups beneath her deep-set eyes, a slight flaw that a blue dress would only emphasize. "Certainly," I said. I would look for a lilac trim, which would help.

I spent the ride home worrying about those gathers, and by the time I had helped Jack unhitch the horses, I had a solution. I kept it in the front of my mind through feeding and changing Lucille, through supper, through dishes and breaking the ice over the horses' water trough, the baby strapped to me and gnawing on a radish. My mother-in-law's quilt needed repair; the cotton batting had worked through a worn spot and now stuck out like a toe. She had to remind me about it twice. I had been thinking about two long darts down the back of a skirt, and how fabric might be doubled to give a flounce greater weight.

Lucille and I had gone straight from Mrs. Cooper's house to Mr. Cates's store, where we bent over the glistening fabric that Mr. Cates brought out from his locked back room. He also kept his liquor there, and, Nettie Harper loved to insist, opium, although none of us would recognize opium if he displayed it on a plate. "This cloth here—it belonged to the first Mrs. Cates. It was her dowry," Mr. Cates said. He had a quick eye for profit and had been known to stretch the truth about his wares, but on this occasion I believed him. The light blue silk slid under my hands like water, so densely woven that even lying folded on the shelf it gleamed. "As blue as the ocean," I said and he agreed, neither of us having seen an ocean. At home now I petted the silk, hidden beneath the grubby denim in the mending pile. Lucille reached out her little hand, too, though I did not let her touch.

She loved things that glittered—pins or mother-of-pearl buttons or the brass lamp base. My mother-in-law laughed and said she would make a good man miserable some day. Jack said the same thing and did not laugh. I didn't laugh either. Lucille was an unnerving mirror, allowing me to catch sight of myself in glimpses I had not asked for and did not desire. One afternoon she spied a crust of snow outside the window illuminated by a shaft of late sunlight; I watched her gaze at the blaze of cold light until the sun dropped a little, and the brightness was gone. For a held instant, Lucille didn't move, and I felt the child's disappointment like a pinprick. She turned to me, waiting for me to—what? Make the light return? Provide some new brilliance of my own? We gazed at each other, and then she opened her mouth, and the howling did not stop for hours.

She wanted things. I would have wished it otherwise. I walked and rocked her, showed her my mother-in-law's cut-glass bowl and hat pin, promised her that she would get her heart's desire. I lied to her, and when I felt guilty I lied more, assuring her that diamonds would come, ropes of rubies. Castles made of crystal, and shoes. Weeks of nothing but sunshine, followed by weeks more. Eventually my lies wore her down, or her own tantrums did, and she dropped into black, silent sleep. Her head slumped toward her shoulder, the dark curls pasted down by the same sweat that coated her plump legs. If I picked her up to carry her to the crib, her damp shadow remained on the rug or floor. Anyone, seeing her, would have thought of a tiny coffin—she was that still. "Don't," I whispered to her as I tucked the tiny quilt around her. "Don't believe me. Don't be taken in. You know what you know."

Poorly as we got along, she clung to me. I even had to take her to the outhouse with me—she didn't seem to mind the spiders—if I didn't want to hear the shrieks. Everybody said that she cried because she sensed the approach of her brother or sister, and I let everybody say that. I did not want them to notice the calculation in her baby grip, the assessing look on her face that sharpened as she adjusted her focus on the world around her. I wondered whether she had learned that look from me and tried to look at her more tenderly, until she bit me again.

By then Jack and my mother-in-law were accustomed to Lucille's and my nocturnal habits, and so they had no particular comment while I worked on Mrs. Cooper's beautiful silk gown. Lucille and I finished the dress in six nights, with me staying up all the last night to featherstitch the slippery hem. I rode with Jack into town, and my weariness lifted to see Mrs. Cooper twirl before me, catching the light like a dragonfly. With the lilac trim around the high neck, the shadows around her eyes hardly showed at all.

"Such an improper dress for a reverend's wife!" she said.

"There is not anything improper about it," I said. "It is very decent."

Her mouth twitching, she took my hand and rested it on the curve from waist to hip, which I was proud of. The gathers dropped in a lavish rush, like a waterfall, tracing the line of Mrs. Cooper's slim frame beneath the yards of shining cloth. "It is mostly decent," I said.

She laughed and twirled again, then asked, "Will you make me another?"

"Will you tell your friends?"

"Oh, Nell. They already know."

There was Mrs. Trimbull, the banker's wife, and Mrs. Cates. There was widowed Mrs. Horne, whose husband had left her with six girls, nine hundred-sixty acres, and seven outhouses in back of her wood-frame house, because she didn't want anyone to have to wait. Pumping the sewing machine pedal, I'd had plenty of time to think about these ladies. I had calculated and projected. "I can make children's clothes, too," I said to Mrs. Cooper. Lucille sat on the floor between us in a blue canvas sailor dress, playing so quietly that not a curl was disarranged. I'd hardly known it possible.

Mrs. Cooper bent to finger the dress's wide collar. "How old is she?"

"Six months."

"She's a pretty child." At that moment, Lucille truly was a pretty child, dimpling and kicking her round feet. The reverend's wife's house had a pleasing effect on both of us. When Mrs. Cooper squeezed Lucille's hand, my daughter gurgled.

"Hush, love," I said mildly.

"You do love her, don't you?" Mrs. Cooper said.

"When she lets me."

"You're brave," Mrs. Cooper said.

"I don't know about that."

"My mother said that a baby has to be a year old before you can allow yourself to start loving. In the first year, so many sicknesses can come. You cannot afford to be destroyed." She peered at me. "Your mother didn't tell you?"

"I've never heard such a thing," I said. Then, meaning to soften the words, "My mother doesn't say much."

She tucked a curl behind Lucille's ear and wagged a finger for the baby to grasp. "You, missy, are a lucky girl. Your mother loves you."

I looked at my dusty shoes. Maybe people ordinarily talked like this in Baltimore or Philadelphia. To my relief, Mrs. Cooper straightened up and reached again for the mirror. She said, "I can't go to see Mrs. Astor without a hat."

"Mr. Cates can order ribbon," I said.

In the wagon, I pressed Lucille against me. "This isn't love," I told her fiercely, my heart actually hurting. My complicated, difficult child. Who but a mother could possibly love her? I kissed her soft neck, which was grubby from the long day and smelled like dirt. I kissed it again. Lucille stared at the horse's rump and made an idle, ugly noise. "This isn't love," I told her again, the words breaking apart in my mouth. "We still have six months left." The new baby sagged in my womb. Lucille pulled away from me and tried to pinch my breast. For the rest of the ride home, to steady my shaking hands, I thought about money.

I had given my mother-in-law three dollars from the first dress, then three more from the second. The money gave me new rights, and I started sewing town dresses as soon as I had stacked the breakfast dishes. A dress for Mrs. Trimbull to wear to Topeka. Sailor suits for Mrs. Cates's twin boys. A whole wardrobe, a bonanza, for the housekeeper Mrs. Horne had shipped out from Killarney to scrub what my mother-in-law called Outhouse Row. Money that I had never suspected in Grant Station materialized along with treasured pictures, crumbling at the edges, from a three-year-old
Harper's Bazaar,
the Sears catalogue, even an ancient
Godey's Lady's Book
—"But with bigger sleeves," "Can you attach a train?" "I think this high neck would suit me."

I learned to steer wistful women past waists too delicate for their thickening bodies, showing them instead how prettily a skirt might hang from a substantial frame. I taught them to take pleasure in a thoughtful sleeve length. One night, Jack sat up beside me, watching for nearly thirty minutes while I stitched a tight bodice, twice stopping to rip out stitches that were too big or had tilted off the marked seam. "Leave it. Little as those stitches are, nobody's going to see," he said.

"They have to be right, or the cloth won't stand up the way it's supposed to." My new clients turned those bodices inside out once they got home and examined every inch. If they found a wandering stitch, they would bring it back to me, as was their right.

"Mighty finicky work, for a dress that will just come out on Sundays."

"Gives a gal a reason to look forward to Sundays," I said, and caught his tired expression. "It's
pretty,
Jack. Women want one pretty thing, like your mother and her rug. Pretty is reason enough. And I'm helping to pull us ahead." By then I had given his mother twenty dollars of my earnings and kept thirty-eight. If she guessed at my private fund, she hadn't given me a clue.

"Don't know that Grant Station can afford you doing this."

"I'd say Grant Station is affording me just fine. Us."

"Zeke Closter says you're ruining his life. When he needed a new harness, he went to the coffee jar where they keep household money. Fifty cents in there. 'Where's the paper money?' he asked Minnie. 'In Nell Plat's purse,' she said."

"A first-rate wool dress, with a tippet. It's an old-fashioned style, but it suits her."

"A harness costs fifteen dollars."

"I can't be responsible for whatever all Minnie Closter might be spending on. I made her a wool dress. Five dollars, less the cloth. If Minnie's spending more, then Zeke had ought to ask her about that." My voice was calm, and my stitches so tiny I could feel them better than see them. Focusing on the nearly invisible seam kept me from meeting Jack's eyes, his look balanced between sadness and anger. Minnie had not seen fit to tell Zeke about the other clothes she had ordered along with the wool dress: two blouses, three serge skirts, plus a set of handkerchiefs. Fifteen dollars for all of that was a bargain, as she told me when she pressed the bills into my hand. A professional now, I smiled in response.