Return to Christmas

by Anne Stuart

  “You guess what?”

  Madison mentally slapped herself. “I mean I’m not surprised they’re having a hard time. Everyone tries to pretend a war is so noble and honorable when it’s really blood and pain and horror.”

  Rosa made a face. “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do, and it’s a waste of time whining about it. Johnny doesn’t whine, but I’m thinking he had a harder time than most. Saw things he won’t ever talk about, leaves the room if anyone brings up the war. As for me, I just take him as he comes, and we get along like a house on fire. He’s a good man.” She bounced up again, a ball of energy. “Why don’t you try on some of these clothes, see what works, and then we can get out on the floor? I can always find other stuff if none of these are right.”

  Madison glanced toward the door, but Rosa reassured her. “Johnny’s at his morning meeting with Bette the Bi....” She slapped a hand over her mouth, stopping the words. “I mean, Miss Davis.”

  “I thought her name was Irene?” Madison was picking up the clothes, examining them slowly.

  “Yeah, it is. But she acts like Bette Davis when she’s on a tear, so that’s what I call her.”

  “Bette the Bitch?”

  Rosa flushed. “Don’t tell Johnny I said that, will you? He doesn’t like it when I swear. Says it’s not ladylike.”

  Madison couldn’t contain her chuckle. “Trust me, my language makes yours pale in comparison. And that woman reminds me more of Joan Crawford.”

  Rosa shrugged. “All I know is she doesn’t like people like me, and she likes Johnny a little too much.”

  “Does he like her back?” It hadn’t looked like it, and why the hell was she still asking about his love life, for God’s sake?

  “What do you think?”

  She was about to say primly that she had no idea, then wisely decided to STFU. She could imagine how Rosa might react to those actual words and hid her grin. Shrugging, she held up a pair of silky shorts with lace on them. There was half a dozen of them. “Don’t tell me these are underpants?” she said, in astonishment. Personally she was partial to bikinis and thongs.

  “Sure are. I’ve got bras and girdles too underneath all that stuff, though a lot of it will be way too big for you. Couldn’t get any stockings, I’m afraid—you’ll just have to take your eyebrow pencil and draw on seams down your legs to fake it like we did during the war.”

  Madison blinked, but Rosa had already bounded up, rifling through the clothes with a complete disregard for their historical significance. “Johnny said not to bother with outdoor stuff, so no hats or coats.” She pulled out a plain cotton dress with large purple flowers and a white collar. “This’d be a good work dress. I’ve got socks you can wear with your pumps.”

  It looked incredibly frumpy, but Rosa seemed quite pleased with it, so Madison accepted it with a sigh. “I don’t suppose they have any pants?”

  “I brought you six pairs.”

  “No, I mean...trousers. Slacks.” She almost shuddered at the old-fashioned words.

  “No, ma’am. Against Macy’s dress code, against most people’s dress code unless you’re a movie star, which I figure you’re not since I would have recognized you. Just keep your head down and no one will look at you. That’s a good thing about Johnny—he treats you like you’re one of the guys.”

  That was exactly what she’d always sought in her work environment, but for some reason she found it depressing. She shouldn’t give a crap how Johnny treated her—she’d spent more time obsessing over him than her trip to Crazy Town, and yet obsess she did. Rosa was already unbuttoning the purple monstrosity, unaware of her mixed emotions.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a staff shower or anything?” Madison asked, not holding out much hope.

  Rosa’s face creased in thought. “There must be showers somewhere in the building, but I don’t know where.”

  “Never mind, I’ll find it if I need it.” If she didn’t get the hell out of Oz. Rosa was already helping her out of her clothes, and she looked down at her industrial bra. Pretty, it wasn’t, and she sighed. She did her best to help, but the zipper was under her arm, of all the weird things, and there were hooks and eyes in the strangest places. When she finally shimmied out of the floral dress, she took a deep breath, looking down at herself. No, it was still her body, thank God, even in the bizarre clothes.

  Rosa was surveying her with an approving grin. “Sorry about the stout clothes. You’ve got a nice figure.”

  “He says I’m too skinny.” For some reason, she was reluctant to call him by name, but she knew Rosa would figure it out.

  Rosa sighed. “Maybe you could do with a few pounds, but that’s easy enough to fix.”

  “Music to my ears,” she said. Apparently this dream world didn’t hold with the notion that you could never be too thin, too tanned or too rich. New York City in the middle of winter didn’t offer much in the way of tanning opportunities, and she’d always been too restless to lie for hours on a beach or beneath a sunlamp, and the small nest egg from her grandmother could hardly qualify as rich. After a lifetime of the Food Police, she was more than happy to eat carbs. You couldn’t really gain weight in a dream, could you?

  “You’d look really pretty if you gained some weight,” Rosa continued. “Men prefer a woman with a little meat on their bones.”

  Appealing to men had never been a major goal in her life, what with all the Philip Ronsons and other predatory males of her acquaintance. She was just as happy presenting as sexless, though there were limits to that. In fact, she liked most men, she had a certain affection for male body parts, and why was she shying away from thinking about cocks? Were the 1940s getting into her head?

  Cock, cock, cock. Dick. Penis. Rod. She tried to think of other words for it, just to ground herself, but at just that moment, while she was standing there in her slip and nothing more, Johnny walked in.

  He took one look, turned on his heel and walked out again, as Madison felt her body heat.

  “Oops,” Rosa said.

  “Maybe we’d better retire to the bathroom,” Madison suggested, unable to shake the bizarre thought that her litany of male genitalia had summoned his presence.

  Rosa nodded. “You’re right. At least now I know why you were asking about his girlfriends,” she said, looking pleased.

  “I wasn’t...” she started to deny it, then gave up. “Why?”

  “Because I saw the way he looked at you.”

  Madison jerked her head to stare at Rosa’s smug smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said uneasily.

  “That’s all right,” Rosa said cheerfully. “You will.”

  The dress was a dowdy horror, with anklets and high heels part of the signature look. Rosa even took her bizarrely long hair and twisted it into one of those pompadour things, shoving extra bobby pins into her scalp before stepping back and casting a critical eye. It was going to be really strange if she escaped back to her own life in these clothes.

  “You girls ready?” Johnny was demanding from outside the bathroom, and she ground her teeth.

  “We women are,” she said, and sailed through the door.

  He made no comment on her outfit—he probably didn’t notice. “Take Miss Fancy Pants to set up the new bedroom display we started. George and Aaron will help with the heavy lifting. If you get that done, come down and join me in window thirty-two.”

  “You got it, boss.” Rosa said.

  “And make certain you keep her away from Ratchett. He’s got busy hands, and God knows what she’d do to him if he tried his usual hanky-panky.”

  “It’d serve him right.” She turned to Madison. “Come on, Mollie—it won’t take long to show you the ropes. Time to earn our daily bread.”

  In another state of mind, she might even have enjoyed it all, Madison thought a few hours later, but she kept feeling like she was in a black-and-white movie. In fact, every time she glanced at her reflection, she was startled by her dark blond, highlight-fre
e hair, not to mention the garish purple dress instead of the chiaroscuro she expected. She couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that the world was as black and white as Miracle on 34th Street.

  The bedroom display was on an upper floor she’d never visited, and when they stepped off the service elevator, she looked around her in amazement. The entire floor consisted of mock rooms with shiny new furniture, bright linens, thick rugs, each display more bland and boring than the last. Rosa headed straight for one on the Thirty-Fourth street side, and Madison breathed a sigh of relief. This one was better than the others, charming and cozy. “This is ours,” she said.

  Madison looked around her. “Did...Johnny do the other rooms?”

  She hooted with laughter. “Are you kidding? He’s the best in the business. Most of these were done by the boys in decoration—they save the best stuff for Johnny.” She shrugged. “There are one or two of his on the other side of the aisle. He’s wasted here, of course. The man’s an artist—even went to school for it in Rhode Island. But he doesn’t listen to me.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as someone who listens to anybody.”

  “You’re right, sister. The war took people different ways. I got a cousin who ended up getting in trouble, shot dead by the police. A lot of guys just pretend nothing happened, but Johnny can’t do that.”

  Madison opened her mouth to ask more inappropriate questions about her unexpected boss, but Rosa had sailed on, pulling things apart in the pleasant room. She didn’t have Johnny’s magic touch, but she was no slouch either when it came to setting up the room. She knew just what angle the English-style bed should be, which lamp should be on the polished walnut table, just how far to turn down the pristine white sheets. There was nothing particularly special about the room, nothing she could pinpoint to make it different from the others, but different it was. If she stripped off these ugly clothes and crawled naked between those sheets, she’d probably wake up in her own time.

  Stark naked in the middle of Macy’s. Nope, she wasn’t going there.

  They stopped long enough in the smoke-filled cafeteria for another cup of coffee and a cigarette break, and it took all of Madison’s self-control not to start a lecture when Rosa pulled out a pack. She needed to keep her head down, not say anything out of place—no one would believe her anyway. Did they even realize cigarettes were bad seventy years ago? Probably not—they would have been outlawed by now if they did.

  “Who’s the new girl?” A young man in shirtsleeves and a bow tie took the seat next to her, a sunny grin on his face.

  “Mollie, meet Archie,” Rosa said with a dismissive sniff. “She ain’t your type.”

  “Everyone’s my type, sugar,” he said grandly, and Madison had to stifle a snort of amusement. He was nineteen if he was a day, young enough to have missed the war, and he had the open sunny face of a child. “Where you working, sweetheart?”

  “With me and Johnny,” Rosa broke in.

  The expectant look vanished from the boy’s...man’s?...face. “Oh,” he said disconsolately. “You’re Johnny’s.”

  “I most certainly am not...” she began heatedly but once more Rosa broke in.

  “Yes, she is,” she said firmly. “And you can let everyone else know it too, especially Ratchett and his buddies.” Underneath the table Madison felt a warning hand on her knee.

  “Will do,” he said, saluting them both. He took one last look at her. “But you sure are pretty.” His sigh was gusty. “And that’s a swell dress. Nice to meet you, Mollie.”

  Madison waited until Rosa had led her back into the employees’ elevator, thankfully deserted. “Does Johnny have a habit of laying claim to the women who work with him? Because I can tell you right now he better keep his hands off me. Giving me a job doesn’t not mean that he gets to fu...” She stopped herself before the word could escape. “Doesn’t mean he gets to get...er...frisky.”

  “You should be so lucky,” Rosa said with a sigh. “We all should. It’s nothing like that. You gotta understand that there’s a pecking order here, and probably everywhere, though you don’t strike me as a girl who’s ever worked a day in her life.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got that look about you. You’re too innocent. You gotta watch out for people, Mollie, men in particular. Most of them are okay, but the bad ones can really mess with you. The floorwalkers are the worst, and Ratchett’s in charge of them, but the stock boys can be pretty handsy, and there’s even Eve in lingerie who likes the young models and they have to put up with it if they want a job. Not to mention Irene Davis. Belonging to Johnny doesn’t mean he has exclusive rights, it means that no one does. He looks after his own—the one time someone in Habo backed me into a corner and put his hand up my skirt, Johnny went down, took him down to the delivery docks and taught him a lesson. After the clerk’s broken arm healed, he never messed with another employee.”

  Madison blinked. “Johnny broke his arm?” Oh, Christ, the grump was not only gorgeous, he was a hero. She was doomed.

  Rosa shrugged. “He’s managed to scare everyone off, so I don’t have any more trouble, but Ratchett and the floorwalkers aren’t interested in a dago like me. You’d be a different matter. I think Johnny would win, but I don’t know if the threat of him is enough to scare them off in the first place.”

  Madison looked at the elevator panel, ready to slam the stop button to get a few answers, but this one didn’t run like the elevators she was used to. “Stop this thing,” she said.

  A moment later, the cage stopped, and Rosa turned to look at her. “What’s up?”

  “’Splain something to me, Lucy,” she said.

  “Lucy?” Rosa echoed, perplexed.

  “Sorry. An old joke. First off, what the hell is Habo?”

  “Oh, yeah, you haven’t worked in retail before, have you? Habo is Men’s Haberdashery.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Rosa was getting use to her odd questions and only gave her a momentary quirk of her thin, penciled eyebrow. “Menswear. I guess you don’t have a man in your life, do you, sugar?”

  “Not right now,” Madison said grimly. In fact, she’d been happily celibate for months, with just her faithful battery-powered rabbit taking care of business. Did women use vibrators back in the day where she unexpectedly found herself? Did Macy’s sell them?

  “Once you get married and start a family, you’ll know all about things like that,” Rosa said comfortingly. “In a way, working at Macy’s is a better preparation for marriage than going to college, and it’s not such a waste of time. This way you don’t spend four years learning something that you’ll never use again.”

  Take a deep breath, she reminded herself. These were different times. “Okay,” she said, mentally grinding her teeth. “What in God’s name are floorwalkers? Ratchett and the Floorwalkers sound like an emo-punk band.”

  Okay, clearly saying “in God’s name” wasn’t approved either, given Rosa’s reaction. “What’s an emo-punk band? Sounds like a piece of hardware.”

  If she made it through the day she was going to count herself lucky, Madison thought. “Yup, that’s what it is. What’s a floorwalker?”

  “Oh, come on, I know you’re sheltered but that’s ridiculous. Everyone knows what a floorwalker is.”

  “A vampire?” she offered.

  Rosa laughed. “You’re not that far off the mark, honey. They’re the men who roam each floor and keep an eye on things.”

  “Like a security guard?”

  Rosa shook her head. “No, the floorwalker’s job is to cozy up to customers, annoy the saleswomen—and men, for that matter—and represent Mr. Macy. They’re easy to spot—they have the best suits. They get them for free as part of their uniform. Basically, they’re spies and bullies in Cary Grant clothing.”

  At least she didn’t have to ask who Cary Grant was. “Okay,” she said. “And this Ratchett’s in charge of them?”

  “He is. He’s untouchable—he and Johnny avoid each o
ther, and Ratchett is smart enough not to cross him. Macy’s knows what an asset they have in Johnny, and they’re not about to lose him. He works cheap, he’s way overqualified, and he’s brilliant at what he does. They don’t even mind that he...” She stopped talking, looking suddenly self-conscious. “That is, they’re ignoring that he’s...” She stopped again.

  “They ignore the fact that he’s living in the store?” Madison supplied.

  Rosa looked relieved. “You figured that already, did you? Yeah. A bunch of people know, but they don’t say anything, because if they did, they’d have to fire him. The night guards are told to keep away from him, which they mostly do, and the employment office turns a blind eye to everything else. Ratchett knows, and it drives him looney.”

  “Okay.” It wasn’t that things were making sense, but at least she was beginning to understand some of the more arcane aspects of this world she’d stumbled into. Of course they had predatory males back them, and even fewer options for their victims. Which made her feel even more guilty—there were at least legal consequences in the here and now—er—the then and now, though each time she’d simply left the job without saying a word, leaving her replacement to deal with things.

  “Any more questions?” Rosa said cheerfully.

  “Not right now. I’m sure more will come up.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  The elevator descended again, moving lower and lower, and she held her breath. She needed to get back to the first floor, with the customers and the doors that worked, and they’d been descending long enough that the chances were good that escape was near.

  The heavy doors opened onto one of the utilitarian corridors, but the buzz of voices beyond the partitions was enough to tell her it had to be near one of the busiest areas. “Follow me,” Rosa said, heading away from the noise. “It’s like a treasure hunt to get to the right window.”

  Madison cast a longing glance at the double doors that led out to the showroom floor. Maybe...

  “Come on,” Rosa said, and Madison turned away, reluctantly, following her into the rabbit warren of dark passageways. There’d be time enough to get out of there. There was no harm in taking one more look at the gorgeous, bad-tempered man of her dreams. Because he was most certainly straight out of her dreams. She just hadn’t figured out if he was a nightmare.