The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (43 page)

"Yes, she would." Auntie Lisette would be lucky if she could get that dress around her arm. Now that I was removed from the Universal payroll, Lisette would have to make a choice: she could move out in pursuit of better opportunities, or she could help to support the household. We were not there to give her a bed to loll on all day. Unlike her sister, Lisette was deft enough with a needle. I could give her apprentice jobs. Madame Annelle and Daughter. I envisioned the new cards. Madame Annelle et Fille.
Couturiers?
I would have to look up the correct word. There was no correct word. Every time the tears crowded up, I forced them down again.

By the time we stepped off the trolley onto State Street, three blocks from home, evening was coming on. Mary's hand in mine was cold, and I took a moment to button her into her sweater. When we got home, I would heat lemonade, which she liked, and make her favorite egg mayonnaise. I rubbed her cheeks a little, to rub out the cold, and she held up her face for a kiss. Thank God, she wasn't a grownup yet.

Around us, in one house after another, lights were coming on. Smiling, Aimée said, "They're like sets. If we stood outside the windows and looked in, it would be as good as a moving picture."

"If we didn't get arrested," I said.

"We would show a policeman how beautiful it is. Then he'd join us at the window." Her face was as fresh as a peach, her smile purely delighted, her pearly laugh likewise.

"Where did you
come
from?" I said, unable to keep from smiling back.

"You," she said. I let her hold my hand and gave the other to Mary. We strolled through the oncoming evening, already cool, to our tidy, shingled house with its slender pink rosebush on the side where the car was parked.

No homey, yellowish lights opened up these rooms or spilled onto the bit of grass out front. Lisette was probably still burrowed wretchedly under the quilt, and I prepared myself for a trail of crumpled handkerchiefs and used water glasses as mute testimony to Lisette's suffering. Opening the front door and entering one step before Mary and Aimée, I think I was the only one to see the bulky figure in the center of the room spring apart into two bodies, although certainly even Mary could hear George's half-swallowed curse and the sound of him snapping his braces back onto his shoulders.

My hands were blocks. I nearly knocked over the lamp before I succeeded in turning it on, and I wrenched Mary around and jammed her face against my hip. Lisette and George had a moment to smooth their hair, a pointless effort given their flushed faces, slack mouths, and the "It" prowling the room almost audibly.

"This was bound to happen," Lisette said. Her voice was faint through the thundering pulse in my ears. She seemed far away, which I liked. On the shoulder of her wrapper, I could make out a dab of jelly. She had acquired it this morning, when she had laid her head on the kitchen table.

"Are you still sick?" I said.

"Nell," George said.

"Are you feeling better?" I said to my daughter.

"Please," she said, reproof like pain in her tone. I did not think I deserved reproof. With her overbright eyes and her chalky face, she might have been overcome with fever. She
was
overcome with fever, I corrected myself. Recently Paramount had released a new picture called
Fever.
Perhaps I should get her a cool cloth. Perhaps George could get it.

"It was just a kiss," George was saying. "I came home and didn't know where you were. Lisette was lonely and hungry. It's hard to be alone when you aren't feeling well. It was dark. She was almost in tears when I came in."

"She's not crying now."

"It was just one kiss, Nell. You walked in at the wrong moment. You never should have left her home sick alone," he said. I scarcely bothered to listen to the words as they rolled out of his mouth and could predict every one of them. This was Lisette we were talking about, with the throaty voice and skin heavy as velvet. A jazz baby. And, frankly, she had needed comfort.

"She needed a little comfort," he said. "She's alone in this city. Has that occurred to you? If she had needed to go to a druggist for headache powder, she wouldn't have known where to go."

While George talked, Lisette collapsed into the corner of the chesterfield. She arranged her features into an expression of fatigue and regret that was exactly as trustworthy as her other expressions. What I couldn't interpret was whether she knew that her skirt was riding up her milky knees, set slightly apart. "Sit up straight," I said wearily.

George stepped closer to the immobile Lisette. He said, "Would it hurt you to be cordial to her? Ever since your sisters got here, you've become someone new, Nell. Hard. If you want to know the truth, I haven't liked you very much."

"I don't want to know."

"You need to hear this," he said.

"I don't need to hear it now."
We
didn't need to hear it: me or my daughters. The three of them were as still as wild animals, their ears practically quivering. Had Mary learned this rigid, attentive posture from her aunties, or had she had it from birth? Nell's girls know how to listen. All of them half wild.

"There's no secret here. Lisette was crying when I came in. Do you care about that?"

"No."

He shook his head. "I'm starting to think that I married the wrong sister."

Lisette smirked, which was more than I could bear. She, wearing her feline grin, was the one who made me speak. "Are you telling me that the next time I come home from work—not that I have work anymore—I might find you kissing my daughter again?"

George's face went blank. "What are you talking about?"

My voice kept sounding wrong, but I couldn't fix that. "George Curran, meet Lucille and Amelia Plat. Daughters of Nellie Plat, born in Mercer County, Kansas, 1900 and 1901."

"I wouldn't have expected you to remember the years," Lisette said.

"Mothers remember," I said. George looked affronted, as was his right. Every one of us had the right, except Lisette, who licked her lips and leaned away from me.

"Well now, that's an issue, isn't it?" she said. "Mothers do a lot of things. They guard their children with their very lives. They attack anything that threatens their babies. A cat knows how to tend to its babies. In plenty of ways, Nell, you're no more my mother than—" She jerked her head at Mary, as if she'd forgotten my baby's name. As extra bits of meanness went, it was exquisite.

"I'm your mother, all right. Who else would have you?" I wasn't even ashamed of myself. Quite the opposite.

George sank onto the chesterfield where Lisette was sitting. George's eyes moved from Lisette's broad mouth to her nose, her hair, the set of her jaw. He twittered, "'Oh no, George, I'll never lie to you again. No more surprises. No more family.'"

"I thought you would leave if I told you."

"I probably would have. You don't think that I'll leave anymore?"

"I wanted you to know who you were kissing."

"She doesn't kiss like you, Nell."

"George," I said. Mary was standing right there.

"I thought you'd want to know," he said. "That's a piece of information that I had and you didn't. There aren't many of those." His elbows propped on his knees, he sat utterly still. On the worn spot in front of his feet, splinters had worked up from the pine floor. "What else?"

"Nothing else."

"No other children? There must have been a husband."

"There was."

"She's older than you thought," Lisette said. "She was seventeen when she came to Los Angeles."

Still staring at the floor, George nodded. "Was there ever anything you said that was true?"

"Nearly everything." Even if my daughters were not arrayed between us, listening to every word, how could I say,
I have loved you,
or
We have a life,
or
Vision, Clarification, Plan
? If George didn't remember those things, my saying the words would not bring them back to him.

"Nearly. That covers a lot."

"There is truth between us." My face flamed. No one outside of an actress could say such a thing without sounding ridiculous.

George shook his head. "You know what's between us? Lies. Built on more lies."

"Stop. Think."

"I've thought enough. I've done lots of thinking." He raised his head, and his eyes were running with tears. I hadn't had a clue that he was crying. That seemed terrible. "It's already dark outside. You and Mary can stay here tonight. You can sleep here on the chesterfield."

"I lost my job today," I said. "Mrs. Hoyt told me not to come back because I was trying to arrange a screen test for the girls. The thing they wanted—that we wanted for them. George! I have my last pay envelope in my handbag."

"Why are you telling me this?"

If his face had been angry, I would have had a chance. Heat might have reforged what was broken between us, as much as it was. But even with his tears he looked calm, his light frown no more than puzzled. In his steady features, wide-spaced eyes, and snub nose, a face I knew as well as I knew Mary's, I saw only perplexity, such as any man would bring in hearing a strange woman suddenly tell him the contents of her handbag.

"Do I have to leave, too?" said Lisette. I could not bear to look at her, or at George, so I looked at the black window, which reflected the backs of their heads. They were inclined toward each other, lovers' sweet posture.

"Have you done anything you don't want to tell me about?"

"Plenty."

"Stay," he said. "I need new stories."

"Providence provideth," Mrs. Butler used to mutter when I presented her bill. Though I had never much bothered myself with Providence, the words swam back to me when Mary and I boarded the streetcar to Pasadena, where Rose lived.

Providentially, Rose was home when we arrived, and more providentially still, a cottage stood behind her house, the two buildings separated by a stripe of lawn. "You must stay," Rose said, clasping my hand, "for as long as you like. Nell! Here we are, brought back together after our adventures. What could be better than this?"

I could think of a number of preferable circumstances, but gratitude kept me from voicing them. Rose did not ask one question about George, or about my daughters, or about Mrs. Hoyt. At midafternoon, when Mary and I had finished putting away our few things and I gave her permission to go out and play, she opened the door to find nestled among the ferns and daisies a picnic hamper big enough to sit in. The hamper was stuffed: sandwiches and cakes, and flasks of coffee, lemonade, and milk. Propped up by the flasks stood a bud vase with a yellow rose. "This," I told my daughter, "is generosity. This is what it looks like." Later, I would teach her the word
charity.

I set up a table beside the window with the best light and got to work beading a tunic in an Egyptian motif. Originally, I had planned to cover the tunic in long, rapid crewel stitches, but now I had time for elaborate handwork. At last I could return to Madame Annelle's signature quality, which had made her name so formidable. I reminded myself of this fact a number of times.

I hadn't done close sewing for months; when a costumer worked on a dress that needed dazzle, she used presewn rows of sequins on satin tape that could be tacked onto a skirt in five minutes. My hands had become awkward threading a single glistening bead onto a needle, knotting it in place, then reaching for the next bead. Twice I upset the small dish holding the beads and had to chase them all over Rose's polished wood floor. At Universal City, a boy would have been sent over to bring me more beads. At Universal City, I would not have had to do such work, Madame Annelle being required for more important tasks. Before I went to Universal City, I never thought of handwork as demeaning.

After half an hour, I put down the tunic. Two inches. A yard and a half remained. I studied the expanse of unornamented wool, then called Mary and made her sit beside me while I showed her how to stitch an open seam, although she looked pointedly bored, an expression she had learned from her Auntie Lisette.

"This is easy," I said. "Look at how nicely that opens. It's pretty."

"Nobody can see it," she said.

"You'll know it's there. Secrets are fun."

"That's not a very good secret," she said, pondering the straight seam line, the generous allowance. Oh, that kid. It was a lousy secret. "I'm tired of living here," she said. "I want to go home."

I had seen her long walks around Rose's yard and heard the long silences. "I know, sweetheart," I said.

"I miss my aunties."

A wise mother would have threaded another needle for her child and redirected the conversation, but by now anyone could see I was not wise. "How about your daddy?" I said.

Her gaze flew to me, her eyes suddenly bright, but then her expression crumbled. A child so young should not become expert at reading adult faces. And a child so young should not have learned to turn her head to hide her tears. "We'll see him as soon as we can, Mary," I said, trying very hard not to lie to her. "Do you want to go for a walk around the neighborhood? We can look at the pretty houses." She shook her head and knuckled away her tears, just like a big girl. When she slipped out to the yard, I didn't try to stop her.

It was George who had created this, I thought, watching from the window as Mary methodically demolished a geranium. He had pushed away his own daughter. A monstrous act. For the near half-hour I stood at the window, I reminded myself of George's culpability, but once the shadows started to lengthen and I called Mary back in, it was guilt that rinsed through me like acid.

In the days that followed, I first put away the beading, then the sewing altogether—without clients, what was the point? I left the cottage for a daily newspaper, milk, and eggs that I bought two at a time, husbanding the few dollars I'd carried from South Gate. Mary was strictly ordered to stay in the garden, and even at that, I looked out the window every three minutes to make sure she was safe.

Safe! Don't make me laugh. Safe was a husband. Safe was a salary. Safe was a sterling reputation, with no strange rumors clinging like rags.