The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (47 page)

"A straight line through the generations," I said.

"I'm not pretending that old decisions can be undone. But we move forward. It's—Clarification."

Perhaps Mr. Mirliton, supping at the French villa his Consolidation, Re-Formation, and Investment had acquired for him, would have been startled to hear his model used to salvage a marriage. I didn't suppose he would have been pleased to hear Clarification called in to order a set of deformed lives. But George's special genius lay in his Vision, in using whatever tool necessary to create a happy ending. My genius resided in choosing him. "Do you think Lisette understands this?" I said.

"How could she not? We are telling the story of her life."

"Partly," I said.

He made a brushing motion with his hands. "You two. It's the same story."

My eyes were still hot with tears, and I looked down, blinking and smiling a little at a deeply private joke: Lisette striding across the unexpectedly photogenic prairie. A single stationary camera would do fine with all that unshaded light. The subsequent shots would be easy, too—Lisette sitting up night after night, then seated on a lurching train carriage, then filing into a grimy factory, which would be easier to film than a department store.

"You should bring it up with her," I said, wiping tears and smile away.

"I already did."

"What did she say? She must have said yes. She has no choice."

"She said maybe," George said, and I stopped walking. "She says that this baby is the only thing she has. Aimée is already in the pictures and you have your sewing, but this is what she has and even if it's not what she wants, what would take its place?"

I had my
sewing?
What kind of girl equated sewing with a baby? Answer: Nell's girl.

"Then why are we having this conversation?"

"You don't believe her, do you?"

"Of course not," I said, flushing crossly. "But we can't force her to tell us what she wants."

"I don't think it's hard," George said. He put his hand on my arm, and his face took on the slightly too-focused expression Lisette wore when she was about to tell another whopper. "She sits there day after day, and you know she's not thinking about the baby."

"Or the baby's father," I said, but George was not about to be sidetracked.

"You know what she's thinking about? Indians. And showgirls. And sheiks. And match girls."

"That's quite a thought."

"She's got half a year's worth of pictures already worked out. Right this minute, she's making another one." He gave me a sharp smile that I recognized as another expression borrowed from Lisette. "Do you know the only part of picture-making where there are more girls than men? Writing photoplays. What you need is a good feel for a story and a good eye for the screen. A few connections would open the door for Lisette. You know she has the talent." I recognized Lisette's easy, persuasive sentences and near drawl. She might have seen fit to deliver this speech to George more than once, rehearsing to make sure he got the words right.

"George," I said softly, "I lost my job."

"I know that."

"I can't get her onto a set to meet people when I can't get past the gate myself. I wouldn't even begin to know how to do what you're talking about."

"Connections," he said. "Sometimes you don't know who you know."

Whom did I know? Mrs. Hoyt was unreachable, Franklin Coston probably didn't remember my name, and Harry Lorton was a faraway prince, accepting the adulation of thousands. "Rose," I said. George shrugged, which was how flappers said yes.

"Did Lisette think this up?" I said. "The Kansas girl helps the Kansas girl? The triumph of the country over the big city?" It would have been nice if I hadn't sounded bitter. "Did she mention the money you and I had been planning to use to buy a house? It might be enough to get her started, if we need to grease some palms. And we will. She's thought it through. This is a fine plan, if we don't mind giving away our future."

"I think we're taking hold of our future, Nell."

"We're taking what Lisette is giving."

"She never came to California aiming to stay with us."

"No, she never did."

He tried to take my arm, but I swung it away from him. He said, "I know you want to help her. You're her mother. This will help her more than anything."

"Swell."

"It will help us, too."

"Did Lisette write that line for you?"

"No," he said. "I wrote it by myself." When he started to say something else, the words broke apart on him, and he stared at the pavement to collect himself.

How much could I ask of the man? He was meeting me more than halfway. All I had to do was go back to Rose, hat in hand. All I had to do was call in every favor I had stockpiled. All I had to do was dismantle whatever remained of Madame Annelle. Something in the sandy dirt glittered before my blurred eyes. "A lot of people have to say yes. All the right doors need to open at the right times. Lisette has to put that baby into our arms." Surely George could see the ways she might undo our hopes. "Do you have any idea how farfetched this is?"

"In Boston? Sure. In Chicago, this would be a fairy tale. But in Los Angeles, this is how things happen every day. Every story in the newspaper looks exactly like this one."

"Lisette said that, didn't she?"

"It's not wrong."

We had come to the end of the pavement. George turned right automatically, the way we usually went, then looked back at me at the corner. "Are you coming?" he said, and then, "You look like you're listening to something."

"The sound of my life being knocked down," I said.

George laughed. "Where have you been, Nell-bell? The rest of us have been hearing that for weeks."

When we returned, Lisette looked up. "You could call the baby Annie. She could grow into Annelle. Mademoiselle Annelle," she said.

"What if it's not a girl?" I said.

"George," George said, saving Lisette the trouble.

In the mornings, George whistled as he put on his collar. Mary ran into the house from her bower, her mouth already pursed with kisses, her hair tumbling as prettily down her back as Mary Pickford's ever did. When Aimée was home, she turned to greet us from the stove, her apron starched, her generous smile at the ready. All we needed was the last intertitle, announcing
THE END
in an old-fashioned hand.

But we had not reached the last title card, no matter how dainty our mornings had become. In the evenings, George dawdled in the living room while I efficiently snapped linens and a blanket for myself over the chesterfield. Between the living room and our marriage bed stretched No Man's Land. A whole movie might be made of what had happened between George and Lisette in that space—the mirth, the quarrels, the sweet making up, until the final fight that sent Lisette back to Mary's bed and George to recover his helpmeet. Perhaps Lisette had rebuffed him. Perhaps he had been the one to push her away, though I doubted it. Because I could not bring myself to ask, I continued to sleep on the chesterfield, breathing in the dusty, slightly sour smell of the cushions. Night after night, George watched me tuck the sheet, his eyes slightly annoyed but mostly hopeful. George had always been good at hope.

Lisette watched, too. She studied me as I made up my narrow bed at night, overcooked George's eggs in the morning, and burned the oatmeal more often than not. She noted not only what clothes I wore, but also how I wore them. Sometimes she draped a sweater across her shoulders in the same way I was wearing mine. The action was not a tribute. She was trying me on, feeling what I felt.

A month before, I would have wondered what Lisette was storing away and how she intended to use that information. I would have been awkward under her gaze. Many would-be actresses, it was said, stumbled upon entering completely empty sets when they were given screen tests—they were that nervous under the camera's eye. But matters had changed, and now I presented myself to my daughter as if I were a bouquet, and she—she accepted my offering.

I did not tell her how Rose had frowned when I told her of Lisette's career ambitions. "Can she do anything else?" Rose had asked. Legions of girls read the same
Photoplay
articles Lisette had read, and they mailed Harry Lorton a new story idea every day. Lisette should not imagine she was the only girl who had ideas.

I told Lisette none of this. Certainly I did not tell her how I had clung to Rose's hand and begged until she gathered me into her arms, the girl consoling the girl. "Shhh, Nell. Hush, now. We'll find a way. Of course we will."

In the end, she remembered a director who owed Harry Lorton a favor. I could see from her face she didn't like him. "Bring me a specific story, not just a notion," she told me. "Act one, act two, act three. This man has the imagination of a brick. Bring me as much as you can."

"I can give you one right now with an Indian campfire," I said, and Rose looked at me carefully, then laughed.

"Think about what
you
would like to see, Nell," she said, opening the floodgates.

I started to do my hand-sewing beside Lisette on the chesterfield, where there was a lamp. I told her about my clients—sweet Mrs. Homes and imperious Mrs. Donlavey and vague Mrs. Wilmott, who never kept track of her own orders. "She forgets things," I said, inserting a bead in the hem I was making. Spaced one to the inch, the beads would make the light cloth pucker if they were not placed accurately. "I'll deliver a dress I measured her for not even two weeks earlier, and she'll look at it like she's never seen a dress before. 'Purple?' she says."

"Purple?" Lisette said.

"Violet," I said. "If a color is good enough for Constance Bennett, it ought to be good enough for Gertrude Wilmott. It's no pleasure holding up a completed dress and convincing a woman that she not only ordered it but owes me thirty dollars."

"Rich."

"You saw that dress. It took me fifteen hours."

"You didn't have to pleat it."

"What? And give up Madame Annelle's signature silhouette?" No one else, not even Rose, permitted me to make light of Madame Annelle. But Lisette had been making fun of her before I did; as with most of our conversations, she had decreed the terms. I merely had to accept them.

Mostly she didn't care to talk back, which made little difference; I could fill in her part. I myself had not been much of a conversationalist when I was pregnant, which I told her. "Your father liked to work outside when I was carrying you. If he came in the house, he planned to eat or sleep. As for your granddad, he just stayed in the barn. So it was me and your grandmother, Jack's mother, and she was a fierce woman in those days. Maybe she was easier with you. The day that her own cat that she'd had since it was a kitten sneaked into the house, she took the thing out and drowned it. I stayed out of her way. No telling what she'd drown next.

"She wasn't happy with Jack's choosing me, but who did she think he was going to bring home, the queen of England? She knew the pickings in Mercer County. Jack should have counted himself lucky."

Sometimes we talked about larger issues—Mr. Coolidge, for instance, as if either of us knew a thing about him or his scandals—but quickly enough, the conversation fell back to Kansas, which underlay our every word and step. It was a relief to acknowledge that. The old memories, so bitter when I buried them, had become sweet with the years. Lisette's face, which looked as if she had sipped vinegar, was not enough to keep me now from dipping again and again into that sweetness.

"The first time I went to a barn dance I was nine years old. Carth Knoller scooped me up for a polka. I was pressed against his armpit and about passed out, but when he asked me again, I said yes. It would be a good scene in a picture, a dance."

Lisette nodded.

"I'm serious," I said, and I took her second nod as encouragement.

"We see the girl back home in Kansas, at the barn dance. Everybody looking on, watching and not watching, the way they did." I paused, but Lisette had nothing to add. "His old face right up against hers. Nobody needs to overplay it; let us see her smooth face next to his wrinkles. Maybe a grizzle beard. The picture will say it. In a later scene, she'll be in a nightclub, with a different old man. He may have patent-leather shoes, but he's fifty if he's a day. It will be right there. How girls get ruined. And how ruin is the best thing that can happen to them. It's the kind of story that would make people think. People don't think enough. If you spent as much time as I do talking to ladies around this city, you'd agree. They love to talk about flappers and stars. They love to disapprove. But I'd like to see one of them facing a month's hunger or rent. Ha! I'd like to see what they would do behind a shop counter."

"I can't do a nightclub scene," said Lisette, stopping my headlong words like a wall.

"Why not?"

"I've never been to a nightclub."

"You've never been abducted by an Indian chief, either."

"No one in the audience has been to an Indian camp. They don't know whether the braves use torches or lamps or have strung up electrical lighting in their teepees. Nobody can tell me I got it wrong. Nightclubs, though, people know about."

"Tables," I said. "Spindly chairs. Teacups."

"What's the floor like? Do they have spotlights? Are there telephones? How big is the band?" She spread her hand over her belly. "I'm not about to go see for myself."

"The girls back in Mercer County won't know the difference," I said.

"The girls in Mercer County know more than you think. You knew quite a bit yourself."

"But not the things I wanted to know."

"My point exactly."

Three yards of white chiffon floated over my knees. Simply to finish the hem would take another two hours, and I hadn't even begun the gathered bodice. "I have no time."

"That's a shame," Lisette said.

I made another three stitches and she waited me out, as we both knew she would. "A film like that would be important," I said. "It would speak to those girls, the ones like you, like me." Lisette had the grace to ignore the wobble in my voice. I said, "It would be a hit. I know it and you know it."