Dreamers of the Day (6 page)

“But all that hair!” Mildred rolled her eyes. Fingers busy behind Rosie’s ears, she dropped into a sort of baby talk. “Mommy’s hair has to go. Isn’t that right, Rosie? Awful, awful, awful.”

Shifting Rosie to the crook of her left arm, Mildred lifted an in-store telephone’s earpiece with her right hand. “Antoine’s!” she ordered into the speaker, eyes on mine, as though there were nothing wrong with what looked back at her. “They’ll say they don’t have time,” Mildred predicted. “Don’t worry. I’ve got Antoine twisted right around this,” she said, displaying a little finger tipped in blood-red enamel.

And it appeared that was the case. Before I could change my mind, Mildred had secured an immediate appointment for me. Still carrying Rosie, she escorted me up several escalators to the store’s hairdressing salon, where I was relieved of more of my clothing and swathed in a yellow rayon wrapper.

There was a brisk discussion with the slender and artistic Antoine. A bob, they decided. Just the thing.

“Oh, gracious,” I said. “I don’t think—”

Mildred pulled a silver flask from her pocket and handed it to me as though that were just another service she provided to her customers. “Canadian courage,” she whispered, urging me to take a sip. “I know an ‘importer,’” she said with a wink, and then offered to take Rosie out for a walk.

Recognizing the word, Rosie wiggled and whined rapturously. The two of them disappeared together. Antoine picked up his scissors.

Two hours later, the salon receptionist summoned Mildred in time to see me whirled in my chair to behold Antoine’s handiwork. Everyone in the shop applauded when I gasped. What had always been long and frizzy and disobedient was now short and shining and perfectly waved.

“Miss Shanklin,” Mildred declared, “you are the bee’s knees.”

“Well! I don’t know about that,” I murmured. But truly? From that moment on, I was Galatea to Mildred’s Pygmalion.

The weather had gotten worse while I was being shorn; with the store now nearly empty, its bored staff was entirely available to bring a dazzled and unresisting customer into the twentieth century. As we sailed down the escalator, Mildred called out assignments to her stylish young colleagues, detailing the elements of my wardrobe each should supply from the Better Coats Department, from Sports Wear, and Dresses, and Ladies’ Shoes. All of Halle’s took on a party atmosphere and I allowed myself to be borne along on the enthusiasm. It reminded me of rainy afternoons in childhood when Lillie would cry, “Come on, Agnes! Let’s play dress-up!” Only, this time,
I
would be the fairy princess.

Mildred led me to an elaborately mirrored private dressing room, lifted Rosie’s paw, and wagged it in the direction of a curtained screen. “Off you go, Mommy,” she said in a baby voice, as though Rosie herself were speaking. “You’re going to park that girdle for good!”

The new underthings laid out for me were dauntingly simple and unconstructed, but with my hair decisively cut, there was no turning back. While I changed, Mildred perched on a stool, chattering about her rapid rise at Halle’s from stock girl to sales and telling me all about her boyfriend, Les Hope, who was thinking of changing his name to the jazzier Bob. “He’s a terrific dancer,” Mildred said, and I didn’t have the heart to point out that “terrific” means very frightening, not good. “He gives lessons, but that’s just temporary, y’know. He’s going to be a star—just you wait and see! Here, now, try this on.”

She stuck a hand through the curtains; in it was a limp length of ivory charmeuse. “No, really, Mildred,” I started to protest. “I have no use for—”

“Just try it!”

The fabric slid over me like a waterfall, and I let Mildred adjust its drape before I looked in the three-way mirror. Then—my fingers went to my lips. What had been woefully inadequate in the era of the Gibson girl was now a slim, elongated, shimmering elegance. And the color made my complexion look fresh as cream.

Mildred clapped her hands like the delighted child she was. “I just knew you’d be a knockout in that dress! Do you have pearls? Oh, my gosh, you’d be positively stunning in pearls!”

Agnes, don’t be foolish. You don’t want that dress,
said Mumma.
It’s completely impractical. What you want is a good woolen skirt and a nice cotton blouse that can take bleach and stand up to hard use. Where on earth would someone like you wear a silk charmeuse—?

“I’ll take it,” I heard myself say.

Piece by piece over the next two hours, a wardrobe was assembled. Like a butterfly in reverse, I drew on one cocoon after another. With every change of outfit, a new and different Agnes appeared in the mirror, and Mumma hated them all.

Tailored frocks with boyish collars and turned-back cuffs, belted low.
(You look like a stick in those things.)
Simple straight skirts in good Scottish wool, to be worn under the most beautiful costume tunics in crepe de Chine and printed silks.
(They’ll be ruined the first time you wash them.)
Round-necked voile blouses with hand-drawn embroidery work.
(You’ll snag the openings, Agnes, you know how careless you are.)
Shoes next, three pairs.
(Two are enough, surely. One for church and one for everyday. Why would anyone need three pairs of shoes?)
A long loose overcoat in jade green wool, with a deep shawl collar—stunningly expensive, but the loveliest thing I’d ever worn.

I brought you up to think of others,
Mumma said with a defeated sigh.
The moment I’m gone, you sink into selfish profligacy
.

I will give an equal amount to charity, I promised silently.

“I’ll take it,” I said aloud.

With the dressing room filled and me beginning to wonder where on earth I’d hang all these clothes once I got them home, the jubilant Mildred crooked a varnished finger and led me out to a cosmetics counter. While my purchases were being bagged and boxed, my lips were to be rouged and my eyes smudged with kohl.

“Oh, Mildred, really, I couldn’t!” Balking at long last, I gestured toward my forehead and confided my reluctance. “It will draw attention to—”

“What?” she asked.

“My eye,” I whispered.

“What about it?”

“Well, it—it crosses.”

“Which one?”

“The right. It crosses. When I’m tired.”

She shrugged. “So? Take naps.” She stared hard and finally admitted, “I suppose it does turn in, but it’s not that bad. Makes you look…like you’re really paying attention. Anyway, you’ve got lovely lips. We’ll play them up.”

Mildred and the Elizabeth Arden lady consulted on colors and application, and when they were finished, Mildred produced a bell-shaped cloche hat made from the same green wool as my beautiful new coat. She settled it onto my head and tugged it down until it dipped rakishly over my right eye. “In case you get tired,” she said, winking. “What do you think?”

I walked to the nearest full-length mirror and saw someone chic and modern, youthful if not young. In a daze, I stood there reassessing everything I had ever thought about myself. “Mildred,” I whispered finally, “you are a miracle worker.”

“Don’t you dare cry!” she warned. “You’ll ruin your makeup.”

We embraced then as though we were old friends, and I waved to half a dozen other girls beaming happily at the magic they had accomplished. I didn’t even ask how much the bill had totaled. It doesn’t matter, I told myself. I am not a penny-pinching schoolteacher anymore. I am a lady of means.

Not if you keep up this kind of spending,
Mumma warned.

Paying no attention, I sailed out of the store followed by three boys laden with the boxes and bags they would carry to my car. The doorman, who barely noticed when I entered Halle’s five hours earlier, looked at me now with frank and cheeky admiration as I departed.

I tipped the boys a dime apiece when the car was loaded, and gave a nickel to the valet who held my car door open. Rosie hopped in, and for a time I sat still, gazing at the green-gloved hands resting on the steering wheel. I felt as transformed as the society I lived in.

The spell was not broken, but only slightly cracked when a trickle of melted snow slipped down a newly bared neck that had never before gone out in such weather without a sensible crocheted scarf. Even inside the car and out of the winter wind, my silk-stockinged legs felt exposed and cold beneath the knee-length skirt.

You’ll catch pneumonia,
Mumma said.

Maybe so,
I could hear Mildred say,
but she’ll die happy.

What about Egypt?
you ask.
What has any of this to do with Egypt?

Well, I’m getting to that, but you have to know all about Mildred to understand why I went to the séance. You see, Mildred and Mumma began to argue on my way home, and they never seemed to stop. Every time my mother rebuked me for that spending spree or anything else, for that matter, Mildred’s voice would come to my defense.

What would she be like if you’d let her make the most of herself instead of the least?
Mildred demanded, bold as brass.
You always acted like her life was over before it got started.

But a silk charmeuse dress! A waste of money if ever there was one. It’ll sit in the closet forever.

Not necessarily…Why, it’s perfect for a cruise! It’s the very sort of dress ladies wear when they eat at the captain’s table on a cruise.

And what would you know about such things?

More than you would! I have lots of customers who go on cruises. Anyway, Agnes should get out more, see more things,
said Mildred.
Say! A change of scenery would be just the thing! She might meet someone on a cruise.

Meet someone? Why, the very idea!

And why shouldn’t she?

She’s nearly forty!

She doesn’t look it, not when she’s all dolled up.

It went on like that for a week. Nothing seemed to quiet the dispute I heard inside me. And it was in that state of mental instability that I found the courage to do something else completely out of character. I visited a medium.

I know, I know. You’re absolutely right. The séances popular in the twenties were shameful, silly affairs, designed to fool the gullible and take advantage of grieving families. I grant you that, but then again, here I am, telling you this story! So you just never know, now, do you? And remember, please, all the other invisible forces that had so recently become a part of our lives in those days. Madame Curie’s radiation, and Signore Marconi’s radio, and Dr. Freud’s unconscious. Even before I died, it seemed possible that there might be some scientific basis for communication with the unseen soul. There might be a sort of telephone of the spirit, or maybe radio waves, which were there to be heard if only one were tuned to the right frequency. Why not try to assuage our hunger for one more moment with the shockingly, suddenly absent? Why not yield to the desire to contact the dead, to ask one last question, to receive one last message?

And I did so long to hear my sister Lillian’s voice again! Maybe she could settle the differences between Mumma and Mildred.

All of which is why I am not embarrassed to tell you now that my decision to go to Egypt was set in motion by the eerie male voice I heard in the darkened room of a glassily bejeweled woman who called herself Madame Sophie. “Years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did,” the disembodied gentleman predicted. “Throw off the bowlines! Sail away from the safe harbor, madam! A sea voyage is what you need!”

“That is the spirit of Mr. Mark Twain,” Madame Sophie whispered, leaning over the fringed paisley shawl that covered a small round table. “He was a skeptic in life, but he visits me frequently.”

Well, I don’t know about that, I thought, but I listened anyway because, like Mildred’s, this voice too insisted that I travel, that I see the world from a different perspective. And a coincidence like that seemed the sort of thing to which one had to pay attention.

“Mr. Twain,” I said, feeling more than a little foolish, “while I am a great admirer of your work…Well, sir, since the influenza, I—I dream of drowning, and sailing would be—”

“—just the thing!” he exclaimed. “Like getting back up onto a horse after you’ve been thrown.”

Then it happened. Clear as a bell, I heard Lillie’s dear remembered voice.
The best time for Cairo is March,
she said.
And then go on to Jerusalem, as I did…

You can wear the silk charmeuse,
Mildred added.

“What about Rosie?” I asked, my hand running down her back as she snuggled in my lap. “I have a small dog—”

“That will be no problem at all!” the putative Mr. Twain assured me warmly. “Take her with you, dear lady. All the best ocean liners are delighted to accommodate the pets of valued guests such as yourself.”

Of course, it didn’t take a great deal in the way of deductive reasoning to work out that Madame Sophie was the
inamorata
of a gentleman who ran the Thomas Cook Travel Agency, located one door down the corridor from her second-floor salon, but I simply didn’t care. Within the hour, I had booked passage on a steamship to Egypt. And then? I drove directly from Cook’s to Halle’s to consult Mildred about a wardrobe for warm weather, and bought a beautiful set of matched luggage to contain it.

As you can imagine, Mumma argued nonstop, the whole day long.
It’s nerves,
she said as I steered the electric off Carnegie and angled up the hill toward Cedar Glen.
You’ve no regular work, nothing to take you outside yourself. You have a great deal to be grateful for, right here at home, young lady.

I’ve been good all my life, I told myself and Mumma. I’ve been oh, so good for oh, so long! Just once, I’d like to trade good for happy.

I suppose now you’ll tell me you can buy happiness.

Not happiness, but maybe a little fun.

But Egypt, of all places! You’ll get a disease. You’ll be kidnapped by white slavers!

Lillie and Douglas did just fine there. Maybe I’ll be a missionary. Why, I could teach at the mission school in Jebail.