Memories of Envy

by Barb Hendee

  “What’s wrong with Mother?” Simone asked.

  “Daddy’s cut off her allowance. She can’t go out for tea. She can’t buy herself new handkerchiefs or stockings or lipstick. She can’t buy anything.”

  Simone didn’t quite understand. “Mother has money. She orders our clothes and our curtains and tells Cook what to get from the butcher.”

  Miranda looked her up and down as if she was a simpleton. “Daddy gets the bills for all that, and he pays them. Mother has to go to him if she wants a dime.”

  Simone was upset at the thought of her mother darning stockings. “Well . . . couldn’t you give her a pair of your stockings?”

  “Me?” Miranda asked in surprise. “If I help her, he’ll cut off my allowance.”

  But Mother was especially attentive and sweet to Daddy for the next week, and soon she was back in new stockings.

  By the time Simone was fifteen, the ritual of dinner had become grueling. When the family dined alone, Daddy would study all four of them carefully. The one who most pleased him gained not only his verbal approval and open pleasure, but also little rewards such as a night at the theater or the largest allowance or choice of the next night’s dinner. The one who least pleased him won his derision and open scorn, and he expected the others at the table to follow his lead. To Simone, it was a painful game.

  But even Mother played—every night.

  The problem was that by the age of twenty, Miranda still lived at home and showed no interest in marrying one of her many suitors. She knew exactly how to dress and wear her hair for Daddy. She knew how to lean forward with graceful but intense interest when he spoke.

  Kristina had recently turned eighteen, and she had grown into a different type of beauty, with smaller curves and curly black hair she wore pulled up in a bow. She also knew how to flatter Daddy and how to tease him in all the right ways. She most often won his pleasure.

  But even in her middle age, Victoria could still stop a man at twenty paces.

  Simone, on the other hand, couldn’t get a man to look up from a plate of roast beef. At fifteen, she was long legged, but as slender as a railroad tie, with little sign of developing breasts or hips. Her dresses tended to look bunchy and bulky on her slight frame, and her black hair wasn’t thick like Miranda’s or wavy like Kristina’s. Although she could sometimes think of ways to flatter her father, she could never outdo Kristina, and then always ended up looking young and foolish when she tried, thus winning his frown.

  She began to hate family dinners, and she ate less and less, making herself even thinner. The situation might have been bearable if her mother or sisters had ever defended her—even once—or offered a word of comfort afterward in privacy. They didn’t.

  They didn’t stand up for her, and they didn’t stand up for one another. They just went on and on trying to please Daddy, trying to win his game.

  Then one day, when the new school year began, Simone met Pug Vanguard, and life became a little easier. Pug’s real name was Georgiana, but her slightly upturned nose had resulted in a nickname. She was stocky, with unruly hair and thick glasses and rumpled clothes. She loved music and motion pictures and playing board games, and her smile reached all the way to her eyes.

  “I’m Pug,” she said the moment she sat down beside Simone. “God, I’d give both my thumbs for your hair.”

  And a friendship was born.

  Pug’s family lived in a small, cluttered house just off Broadway. They did not have servants.

  Mrs. Vanguard was short and chubby and sometimes wore mismatched shoes. She spent her spare time doing volunteer work for the poor. She was a terrible cook and a worse housekeeper, but she always seemed to produce gallons of hot chocolate from their disorganized kitchen.

  Mr. Vanguard adored his wife.

  He adored Pug.

  Simone had never seen anything like them, and she spent as much time in their home as possible.

  Often, seven o’clock would roll around, and Pug’s mother would realize she hadn’t given a single thought to dinner.

  “Oh,” she would say as if this development surprised her. “Let me see what I can find.”

  Then she would serve up something bizarre like baked beans on toast with a side dish of sliced apples. The family would eat and chat about their day, and no one cared how anyone else was dressed, and no one seemed to find the food lacking, certainly not Simone. She even began putting on a little weight.

  But finally, Daddy grew tired of her absences from the dinner table two or three times a week. Later, she suspected her mother and sisters were the ones who insisted upon her more frequent appearance, as she nearly always drew the short straw with Daddy.

  Then, to Simone’s horror, Pug was officially invited to the Stratford house for dinner.

  The evening followed a nightmare sequence Simone fully expected.

  Daddy stared at Pug’s face and unruly hair and faded wool sweater as if Simone had made some kind of mistake and accidentally brought home the wrong person.

  Pug looked around at the house with her mouth half open and almost balked when she saw the long dining room table, set with three forks to a plate and two candelabra centerpieces.

  Miranda and Kristina both smiled over the soup course and asked Pug politely pointed questions about her house or which afternoon her mother preferred to serve tea. They flicked their eyes repeatedly at Simone in glee as if to say, “Oh, you are going to pay for this.”

  By the time the cherry-glazed game hens came in, Simone could barely eat.

  Mother said about three words through the entire meal, but she didn’t seem displeased. She already had three daughters for competition, and Pug was certainly no threat to Daddy’s finite approval.

  At the appointed hour, Pug’s father stopped by to pick her up in his motorcar, and Simone walked her toward the front door when he knocked.

  “Jesus!” Pug whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve tried,” Simone answered miserably. “A couple of times. I just didn’t . . . I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? I’m the one who’s sorry.” Pug grabbed her hand. “See you at school tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  Pug’s father did not come inside the house.

  Slowly, Simone walked back into the dining room. Daddy was still there, standing beside the table. She steeled herself for whatever was to come.

  But he only shook his head. “I would have thought even you could do better than that.”

  He walked away.

  Hating herself for it, Simone realized she was embarrassed by Pug. If she had only brought home some lovely girl who lived in a manor house on Bannock Street, Daddy would be showering Simone with love by now or offering to take her to the theater—while aiming his disapproval at one of her sisters or Mother.

  But the next day, she tried to forget her embarrassment. After all, Pug was her best friend.

  Three years slipped by, and life only grew worse. Simone tried and tried to please her father. The thing was . . . in addition to wishing for an end to the suffering of his cutting words, she longed more and more to be the “winner” at their evening meals.

  She liked having money for herself. She liked taking Pug to the movies or out for ice cream. Money meant freedom, but the only path to gaining money was by winning Daddy’s love, and she lived with three other women who were far better at the game.

  Then in 1931, a miracle happened, and Miranda finally announced her engagement to a bank manager named Walter Smudge.

  What a ridiculous name.

  His institution had survived the onset of the Depression, and it even appeared to be doing well. He was the oldest son of a wealthy Denver family, and Daddy approved the match. Walter was balding at the age of twenty-nine. He had a bland face and a thickening waistline.

  But Simone didn’t care who he was. Had decorum allowed, she would have kissed him. Daddy, Mother, Miranda, and Kristina all became obsessed with
the impending wedding: cakes, dresses, flowers, guests, invitations, and so forth. The list went on. They nearly forgot about Simone.

  She was in heaven.

  She and Pug had just graduated from high school, and it seemed they had an entire summer to themselves.

  Now that they were both eighteen, several new doors were open to them, and one night in July, they went to a musical performance at the Bluebird Theater on Colfax Avenue. Simone knew this establishment would not have gone over well with her parents, as the Bluebird was hardly a place Daddy would consider “the theater.”

  But she loved anything new.

  Torch songs and blues music weren’t exactly new to America, but Simone had never heard such sounds before. Settled at a table, she let herself get lost in the gravelly voices and sorrow of the singers.

  “This is wonderful,” she whispered to Pug.

  The sultry woman on the stage finished her song and sauntered off to a table. Then the music grew raucous as five young women burst from the sides of the stage, kicking their feet backward and moving their arms in harmony.

  “Oh, flappers,” Pug said, smiling. “This kind of dance was all the rage in New York a few years back. Mama showed me some photos.”

  Simone stared at the women, wordless.

  Their dance did not seem physically difficult. It just involved rapid, fluid movement, and yet they commanded every eye in the room. They were all slender, with boyish figures like Simone’s. They wore sleeveless, straight-cut dresses with low waists, and long knotted beads around their necks.

  Their hair caught Simone’s attention the most. Whether blond or brunette, their hair was cut into razor-straight bobs at chin length, and it swung with life as the girls danced and moved. Their lips were red, and a few strokes of black accented the outer corners of their eyes.

  Simone breathed in sharply. “Do you think Daddy would like me if I looked like them?”

  Pug glanced over in surprise. “What? Why do you care?” She paused. “Simone, you do realize your father’s kind of perverse, don’t you? I’d worry less about him liking you and more about how to get out of that house as soon as possible.”

  But Simone couldn’t stop watching the girls onstage, studying everything about them. When their number was over, and they walked to join members of the audience, they moved with an entirely different kind of grace than what Mother had always taught. Rather than moving like graceful ladies, they moved more like graceful cats, sure and fluid.

  Simone watched them, forgetting everyone else who took the stage that night.

  The next day, she took a cab to the shops on Sixteenth Street, and she pawned a small emerald left to her by her grandmother. She bought three dresses cut just like the ones worn by the flappers, knowing her mother would probably faint at the sight of them. She bought long strings of dark beads. She bought little flat shoes. She bought lipstick and eyeliner. Then she gathered her courage and went into a barber’s shop and started explaining what she wanted, but he interrupted.

  “I know what you want, honey. Don’t worry. I’ve done lots of these.”

  Her hair reached all the way to her bottom.

  “You sure?” he asked, picking up the scissors.

  “I’m sure.”

  When he was done, she hurried back home and slipped up to her bedroom before anyone saw her. She put on one of the dresses—a rich shade of blue—and the shoes and a single string of knotted beads. She put on just a bit of the lipstick and the black liner at the outer corners of her eyes. Her head felt so light now.

  She swung her head, feeling her new bob move back and forth . . . and then she looked into the full-length mirror.

  A completely different girl stood staring back at her.

  She was beautiful.

  The dress showed off her small figure and exposed her pale arms. The haircut completely altered the shape of her face, making her features softer and more delicate. The lipstick gave her a bit of mystery.

  The dinner bell rang.

  She walked down the stairs and into the dining room on her long legs, the light dress making her feel free and confident.

  Mother, Miranda, and Kristina all gasped at the same time.

  Fortunately, Miranda’s fiancé, Walter Smudge, was dining with them that evening, and his mouth fell open.

  Daddy noted the state of Walter’s mouth.

  Then he looked back at Simone.

  “Simone?” he asked, as if in doubt.

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  For once, he was momentarily speechless. Then he said, “You bought a new dress.”

  Obviously.

  “Yes, I thought I’d try something different.” She tilted her head. “Do you like it?”

  He didn’t need to answer.

  Mother, Miranda, and Kristina didn’t even look angry, as she expected. They looked . . . frightened. Mother didn’t say a word about Simone’s sleeveless dress or her clear lack of adequate undergarments.

  Simone sat on Daddy’s left that night, listening and nodding and smiling.

  The next day, he tripled her allowance.

  She had power in the house now, and she wasn’t going to lose it.

  But to her surprise, her mother and sisters weren’t the ones who didn’t care for her transformation.

  Pug didn’t like it all.

  “What are you doing?” Pug asked one night in August. “I’ve never seen you spend so much time in front of the mirror.”

  But Simone couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. She liked what she saw there far too much. She liked the way Daddy looked at her. She liked the fear and worry on Kristina’s once-smug face.

  In early September, Pug left Denver to attend a small women’s college on the East Coast. She’d badly wanted to go west to Seattle, to the point of showing Simone numerous photos of that city. But choices were limited for women, and her parents didn’t have a great deal of money, so she’d settled on a private college in Pennsylvania, to which she’d received a scholarship. Even amidst a tearful good-bye with promises to write every day, Simone couldn’t help feeling they were both a little relieved at the parting. In just two months, she and Pug had grown apart.

  Miranda got married as quickly as possible and went to Italy with Walter for their honeymoon.

  Simone learned how to move, how to walk in her light dresses in a way that could make Daddy’s colleagues drop their coffee cups.

  Soon Mother was drawing the short straw every night—or sometimes Kristina.

  As a reward, Daddy let Simone go out to local nightclubs or theater clubs almost every Saturday night, as long as she was home by a respectable hour (eleven at the latest), and she always remained in a group. She had a new set of girlfriends from her own neighborhood that he’d approved. They weren’t like Pug. No one could ever be like Pug. But they were fun, and they liked to dance.

  Simone made sure they were never loud or drunk or silly, though. Drinking was illegal, and silliness was a sin in her father’s eyes, and she wanted no damaging reports getting back to him. She liked being allowed out in the nightclubs too much.

  She was admired and adored there.

  Two years slipped by. She turned twenty in June of 1933. The night after her birthday, she first saw Pierce McCarthy, and everything changed again.

  Simone and two of her girlfriends were walking toward a cab on Colfax when she passed the mouth of an alley and saw a tall young man dumping garbage from the back of a restaurant into a row of trash cans.

  He looked up and saw her.

  She froze at the sight of him.

  He wore a white T-shirt and an apron, like some kind of cook or dishwasher, but he was tan, with chiseled features, and his hair was cut in a stylish fashion: short in the back with a thick shock of bangs hanging forward over one eye.

  They just stared at each other a long moment, and then Simone forced herself to toss her head and walk away. Daddy would kill her if he heard she’d been talking to a dishwasher. But that night in bed, she kep
t thinking about the young man’s face.

  The following Saturday night, she was in the Bluebird Theater again, when three men came through the door, laughing and joking with one another. They all wore tailored suits and polished shoes.

  Simone’s heart nearly stopped.

  The one in the lead was the dishwasher from the alley. He stopped at the sight of her and flashed a smile.

  He walked over.

  Her mind raced for something witty to say, anything, but the sight of him towering over the table left her speechless.

  “You recognize me,” he said, putting a cigarette in his mouth and offering one to her.

  She shrugged. “You look different.”

  “I’ll say.” He sat down, so sure of himself. “Pierce McCarthy,” he said as if his name should mean something. “You’re Simone. Dr. Stratford’s daughter.”

  He knew who she was?

  “What were you doing in that alley?” she asked abruptly.

  “Working,” he answered. “I’m in my final year of law school at Harvard, but I come home in the summers, and my father thinks I should learn the value of honest labor. So I always get a job somewhere on Colfax or Broadway.”

  Simone put her hand under her chin and leaned forward. This was getting more interesting by the second.

  “Oh,” she said. “Where do you want to practice when you graduate?”

  “New York.”

  She tried to keep her expression still.

  He was going to be a lawyer. He was going to New York.

  Simone spent the next few weeks hanging on his every word and studying him the way she’d studied Daddy, taking careful notes of what he liked best and doing everything she could to make him fall in love with her.

  It wasn’t hard.

  Daddy quietly checked out Pierce’s family and must have been pleased by what he found.

  “Invite him over for dinner,” he told Simone.

  That dinner was one of the best nights of her life. To make the deal even sweeter, Miranda and Walter were visiting that evening. Walter was bald and bland and thickening rapidly.

  Miranda stared at Pierce with open envy. Even Mother looked slightly green. But after the initial shock of Simone bringing home a good-looking Harvard lawyer, Kristina kept her eyes downcast on her plate, demure and shy.