The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (46 page)

"Have you watched her at meals?" he said.

"Eating a lot doesn't mean that she's eating nutritiously. I'm not convinced that she's healthy. Mary came into the house in the middle of the day and woke her. Lisette was fast asleep, sitting up."

"It's fine, Nell. That's what women do when they're expecting."

"I didn't."

"Not everyone is the same. Of course, she's getting closer to having that baby. She must be thinking about it."

George sounded a good deal more certain about Lisette's thinking than I was. "She's changed," I said.

"She's still the same girl. Still your daughter."

"A month ago, she was holding court to half the flappers in Los Angeles."

"Now she's got you and me to bring her coffee and graham crackers. Back in Kansas, that would have made her a queen."

"What does it make her in Los Angeles?"

"A queen." Oh, he should have been on the stage. And I, I was somewhere backstage, manipulating sets to keep him from seeing the outline of the future, a dark backdrop of broken buildings and burned, skeletal trees. Every time George showed an inclination toward Vision, I redirected his sight.

Aimée helped. The two or three times a week she was home, she coddled Lisette, painting her toenails and rubbing rose-scented lotion into her legs. She brought home new songs, including one racy number that I made her stop singing after two lines about honey and the stinger. "Mary isn't home," Aimée said when I put my hand over her mouth.

"Even Lisette's baby shouldn't hear that," I said.

"You know—the baby isn't here yet. It can't hear," she said carefully, trying not to hurt my feelings.

"They take things in."

"Did I?"

"I always thought so."

Aimée nodded with her usual perfect equanimity and went back to rubbing her sister's legs, this time singing about a rocking cradle and angels softly 'round. Lisette's eyes snapped open. "Ixnay."

"It's for the baby," Aimée said.

"That can wait," Lisette said, the same thing she'd told me when I offered to help her start a layette.

After a moment, Aimée, still rubbing, started to tell a story about her day on the set—a light had fallen and shattered, and the director swore, and Aimée herself was wearing a dress that wasn't very nice, and a girl next to her was convinced she'd seen Constance Talmadge. Like all of Aimée's stories, this one swirled and eddied without bothering to come to a conclusion. The artlessness of her talk nearly obscured the fact that she was on a motion-picture set every day now, and after she finished
Dust and Guns
she moved straight to a weepie called
Nobody's Daughter.
Even Lisette listened without feeling the need to add an opinion.

Aimée was not a star. She would have giggled at the thought, which was one reason that she was so charming, as Harry Lorton said. Still, star or not, she gave off light. Moving through the living room with a cup of coffee for her sister, she bent at a flattering angle before the picture window, the snowy curtains as bright behind her head as a halo. In the kitchen, she reached up for the packet of baking powder, the line of her arm mutely expressive, though what she expressed I could not have said. As my mother had done, Aimée lived in a world without echoes or shadows, as transparent as water, as dependable as California sunshine. The movies only turned up her wattage. These days, she brought light into any room she entered.

When Aimée was not home, therefore, the light went away. Mary grew fretful, I short-tempered. I brought Lisette sardines, being sure to use Mary's plate, then later found the food untouched, the living room stinking of fish. I sewed her a wrapper out of light chintz that would be crisp in the hot afternoons, but she left it at the end of her unmade bed. Mary drew her a picture of a house with a ringlet of smoke curling from its listing chimney that I discovered crumpled under the cushion where Lisette sometimes rested her head. "What do you
want?
" I said.

Lisette shrugged.

"That's no answer," I said, ensuring that she would shrug again. I said, "It's impossible in your condition not to think ahead. One way or another. I wish you would tell me what you're planning. I can help you, if you tell me what you need."

"If anyone could help, you could," Lisette said. "You can't."

"That's not telling me."

"I should have done something about this," she said, gazing at her belly without expression.

"Don't talk like that."

"You never felt this way, did you?"

As long as we were in the living room, one of us could do a little tidying. The area around the chesterfield was a sty. I straightened the magazines on the table beside the wing chair and picked up two plates from the floor. "No," I said.

"There you were, sixteen years old and a baby under your apron. You were like the cricket, happy the livelong day."

"I was very young. And then when I had Mary, I was old." Under the chesterfield, dust had matted into a dense layer that I could gather up like felt, studded with jagged cracker crumbs.

"Either way, you didn't let a baby stop you."

"I thought you'd take after me that way," I said.

"I'm not like you."

"Yes you are."

She sprawled across the chesterfield, her hiked skirt revealing one ponderous thigh, her skin mottled in the heat. A drop of sweat traced a lazy path beside her ear. "There's nothing like living in somebody else's house for a while," she said. "I see how different other people are. I don't arrange things the way you do. I don't have your way with people."

I started to ask what she meant, but she started in again. "I don't have—I don't—" She moistened her colorless lips. "I don't want to be a mother."

"I know that."

"If I could change this, even now, I would."

"I know that, too. It's not so unusual, you know." I rested my hand on the cushion behind her. "You're not a monster." I said the words briskly, to make sure I could say them at all. The moment before Lisette returned my gaze was long.

"Son of a gun," she said. "I am like you."

In her face, scoured clean by despair, I could make out my forehead, Jack's jaw. Pa's surprisingly delicate ears, Mama's fair complexion, Jack's mother's twist at the mouth. I could also see a perfect stranger. It was easy to go back and forth, family to stranger to family, in the same way that I could see true anguish in her trembling mouth or a fine cinematic portrayal of grief. Both visions were right.

"Mothers know these things," I said. "You want something to eat?"

She paused a moment, and her stiff hands relaxed. "I could go for a sandwich," she said.

I knew better than to imagine myself absolved. We had merely worn the skirmish out, and now Lisette was hungry. While I was cutting bread, I went ahead and made a sandwich for George, too. Lisette wasn't going to be the only hungry one around here.

I let George, falsely casual, bring the subject up on a Sunday afternoon when he invited me out for a stroll. I hoped he did not think his airy manners were fooling me; his face was full of excitement and impatient desire, like the boys at the Redondo Beach pier, itchily lined up to board the Lightning Racer. "It feels good to get out," he said. "We need to do this more."

"Next time we should bring Lisette with us. If she doesn't move off that chesterfield, she's going to grow roots."

"It's nice to be out just with you for a change, Nell-bell," he said.

Sandy dirt spread from people's yards, and our steps made an amiable crunch. I said, "According to Mrs. Hoyt, if every girl on the lot walked three miles a day, the costuming shop would never have to let out another waist."

"Girls do not come to Hollywood to walk. Girls come to Hollywood to ride in gold carriages."

"Not Lisette," I said. "She wants a Packard."

"A gold one," George said. "With an automatic starter and white seats. When I told her she was making up a fairy tale, she pulled out a picture of Clara Bow balanced on the running board of a gold Single-Eight."

"Lisette had better find a magic lamp if she thinks she's going to get Clara Bow's car," I said, a little breathless despite our easy pace. Perhaps Lisette was not the only one who needed to get out more.

"That will be her next story. She's making it up, right now:
The Genie of a Thousand Wishes.
She has a lot of wishes."

"Like her mother," I said fast, before George could.

"Mind you," George said, gazing at a house across the street and pretending to be artless, "there's the thing she's carrying around. I wouldn't call it a desire. It's growing every day."

"I've noticed."

"What do you suppose she has in mind?"

"I have no idea," I said. This was not the time to tell him about the hopeless fury that flashed across her face when she looked at the moon of her belly, though it would be useful to tell him someday. "I'm waiting for her to ask me for advice," I said. Every bit as artless as George, and every bit as transparent.

"What will you say?"

"There is a Catholic orphanage that is supposed to be very nice." Rose had told me about it the night I packed Mary's and my things. She brought over a bottle of real champagne that Harry had smuggled from Paris, and we drank every drop. My memory of the night was inconsistent, but I recalled leaning out the window into a net of vines and letting my arms dangle there. When I asked Rose whether we were flaming youth, she had laughed and laughed, although I hadn't meant to make a joke. That night I felt young, though I did not in the morning.

Ignoring his stiffened posture, I said, "The nuns look after education, and the children come out knowing French and deportment. It isn't unusual for the girls to marry well."

"Marriage! Jumping the gun a little, aren't you?"

"The child would have opportunities." This talk had made sense when Rose told me about it. In the flush of champagne and the warm, flower-scented evening, the words had not sounded crude. "We wouldn't have to worry."

"I would, though," he said softly. "I would worry every day. Nell, how could we do such a thing?"

Now that it had arrived, the moment did not feel terrible. Compared to other conversations George and I had had, this was no more dramatic than a Sunday ride in the car. Sometimes, those Sundays, I had wished that George were not quite so careful a driver, holding to cautious speeds and taking the corners with aching slowness. At this moment, of course, he didn't seem so cautious.

"I've been trying to imagine it," he said. "How hard it would be. To go through every day knowing that your child was growing up without you—I don't think I could do it." He pretended to examine a shrub's slim leaf. I pretended to peer at a gauzy cloud.

I said, "It isn't the worst thing in the world. Everybody's life goes along, whether we're there to watch or not. We're not that important."

He smiled sadly, an expression I had not meant to incite. "I missed Mary so much while you two were gone. Every morning felt like a wound. I wondered what she was saying. How her alphabet was coming. I got a taste of how terrible it must have been for you, all those years by yourself."

"You get used to it," I said, and then, "You do what you have to do, George. Especially if you're working for a goal."

"That's it exactly." He smacked his fist against his palm. "You made your choices because you had to. I wouldn't want you to have to make the same ones again."

"I'm not the one making choices."

This was hugely untrue, but George was in possession of a Vision and didn't even pause. He said, "We never meant for Mary to be an only child. I worry about her becoming selfish. She would do better with a brother or sister to look after." He said, "It could be a boon for the whole family." He said, "It could heal the rift between us."

We began to walk again, and I listened to our shoes knock against the pavement. His still bore the shine from his Sunday-night polish, an example of the tidy habits I had always appreciated in him. He said, "This is how we did things, when I was a boy. If there wasn't room for a baby in one house, another house took it in. What with all the babies passed around, the whole county was connected." When I didn't speak, he added, "I think that was true where you grew up, too."

"Did Lisette tell you that?"

"I've been thinking about how you came up, and what you did, and I've tried to imagine myself in your shoes."

"I'm not sure you can do that."

"It's not hard, once you get past the shock." He mounted another joyless smile. "You look around and see no opportunity, no option. You have a Vision, but nothing you see in your daily life supports it. I did that myself."

"Yes, you did," I said.

"You planned to send for the girls. I know you did. But things take much longer than you expect. Money is hard—for every penny you can hoard, another two need to be spent. Years pass, and you realize that to send for the girls will cause them more harm than good, no matter how it tears your heart. I
know
you, Nell. I know how you are. The more I thought about it, the more I came to understand." Eyes fixed straight ahead, he walked as if we had a destination. I did the same.

"It wasn't easy," he said. "At first, all I could imagine was two babies left out on a Kansas snowbank, crying for their mother. I knew it wasn't really like that, but once a picture is in your head, it's hard to get it out."

"Yes," I said.

"You knew that people back on the home place would look after them until you could do it yourself. But then you found yourself working all day and living in a rooming house. Where would little girls go? Who would watch them all day? It took so long to get on your feet. By the time you did, the girls were grown."

"Thank you," I said. The sun's reflection on the white pavement was blinding. "Thank you. You are exactly right."

"The story looks pretty bad from the outside. But if you're the girl who's going through it, these are the choices that make sense." Tactful now, George did not wait for me to answer him. "Raising Lisette's baby would even things out," he said. "You can take over for her when she needs you, just like folks did for you."