by Sofia Grant
Jeanne realized with a sickening sensation that it was indeed her birthday—her twenty-ninth. She stood helplessly, her mouth hanging open like a fish laid out on ice, as the pieces fell into place. Thelma in the kitchen all morning, the scents of allspice and cinnamon wafting from the oven, pretending to be cross and shooing Jeanne from the room. Peggy insisting that Jeanne take Tommie to Florence Park, at the bottom of two steep sets of steps half a mile away, because the playground at the public school down the street where they usually played was too marshy with melting snow. They’d been plotting a celebration!
Jeanne, only last night, had been feeling sorry for herself as she put the finishing touches on the dress. She felt her face warm with embarrassment. “Thelma, I . . .”
“Hush now.” One last pinch, this one hard. “Go see to Queen Elizabeth in there.”
Jeanne hid a smile behind her hand. Thelma could occasionally make a joke, a sly one. They’d read about the luxury ocean liner named for the queen, marveling at the glittering excess, the parties and formal dinners—and most of all the trunks and trunks of beautiful clothes the passengers brought along. But it wasn’t the gowns Thelma was comparing Nancy to; it was the enormous ship herself.
There wasn’t room for Jeanne to join the others in the brand-new “dressing room”—but what a transformation Peggy had effected! The walls were covered in pale shirred fabric, and a closer examination revealed it was Jeanne’s very own muslin, gathered under hem tape and stapled top and bottom. Thelma’s oval mirror had been plucked from her dresser and hung from the wall by a satin ribbon Jeanne recognized from the band of one of Peggy’s hats, and the floor was covered by the rug from Thelma’s bedside. The hooks that held bags of onions and potatoes were now adorned by glass knobs that looked suspiciously like the ones from Thelma’s bureau. Nancy had slipped off her day dress and hung it on the wall, and now she was turning this way and that in the green silk gown, examining herself in the mirror and frowning.
The waist was stretched taut, as Jeanne had known it would be, and Nancy was tugging at the sleeves. They were done in the New Look style she’d requested, small tapered caps that hugged her doughy shoulders. Jeanne had made the armholes more generous than the tight cut featured in the Parisian gowns, but even so, the fabric cut into Nancy’s flesh. She looked a bit like a washerwoman, her underarms jiggling as she moved.
“You’ve made these too tight,” she complained, jamming a stubby finger under one of the curved caps.
“I’ve got an idea,” Peggy said, before Jeanne could respond. There wasn’t a seamstress in the world who could make a cap sleeve that would flatter Thelma’s arms. Peggy and Jeanne, used to the labor of keeping house and carrying Tommie around, had the opposite problem—their biceps bulged with muscles.
Thelma crowded behind Jeanne, the four women squeezing into the little room like fraternity boys into a phone booth. Ignoring Nancy’s ire, Jeanne was touched by her sister’s ingenuity. There hadn’t been money for a new pair of gloves or stockings, but the gift she’d given Jeanne was better than anything money could buy.
“What a gorgeous shade,” Thelma said diplomatically. “Almost like jade, wouldn’t you say?”
“What was your idea?” Nancy huffed to Peggy.
“Just give me a minute . . .”
While Peggy raced upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Tommie, there was a small commotion from the coat closet, and Jeanne suddenly realized where her sister had stashed Tommie. She exchanged an exasperated look with Thelma.
There was often an unspoken cooperation between Jeanne and her sister’s mother-in-law. For her part, Jeanne’s efforts were born of the desperate wish to make herself valuable in the household that had taken her in. She was well aware that her presence was a burden, that Thelma had offered her shelter more out of deference to social conventions than any genuine enthusiasm for Jeanne’s company. As for Thelma . . . Jeanne liked to think that they had found they were kindred spirits: both practical women, clever in the way of women whose resources were few and needs were great. And without many options for passing their leisure time, both loved to read, and Jeanne suspected both of them might have been labeled bookish if their more obvious assets hadn’t drawn greater attention. Yes, Thelma had been a beauty once, and her face—even now unlined and smooth—still commanded notice.
Thelma gave Jeanne a slight nod and went off to fetch Tommie, who’d probably been stowed among the galoshes and mops with nothing but a few saltine crackers to keep her busy, and Jeanne racked her brain for ways to hold up her end of the bargain—to distract Nancy.
“So tell me more about the ball,” she said.
Nancy gave Jeanne a suspicious look. The Holly Ball was a fairly minor event in the Philadelphia social season, but to attend any ball in the city was a heady accomplishment for a Roxborough matron. Jeanne herself had attended, once, with Charles. With his sterling manners and good looks, he’d been invited several times already, a handy date for girls making their debut. And he danced well—his mother had seen to that.
Nancy, on the other hand, had had to work her way up—laboriously, Jeanne suspected—to an invitation, serving on the committees no one wanted and looking for opportunities to gain a footing in Philadelphia society. “Well, it’s still held at the National Guard Armory, of course,” she began. “The Mo Bishop Band will be playing, and—”
Jeanne was saved from having to hear more of what she would be missing by her sister, who’d come back with one of her old sketchbooks in hand. She held up the book to reveal a quick drawing of Nancy’s dress rendered in a few bold, assured strokes—but with a new sleeve, a rather straightforward elbow-length style with a little notch at the bottom, eased into a more generous armhole. The new sleeves were just shy of matronly, but they would hide the flabby extra flesh that had given Nancy pause.
“It’s very chic,” Peggy gushed. “I saw this style in Women’s Wear Daily. It’s barely made it to New York from Paris, but it will be everywhere this spring, I imagine.”
Peggy didn’t look at Jeanne—she knew better. She was a gifted liar, and had been since childhood, and Jeanne had learned to be constantly vigilant. Often Peggy would give up in a gale of laughter when Jeanne gave her a pointed glare—and they couldn’t chance that now.
“Hmmm,” Nancy hedged. “I didn’t know you were an artist, Peggy.” She said it in the same tone that she might have said I didn’t know you were a laundress, but Peggy’s sketch really was quite good. Once, she’d hoped to go to art school, but after their father died during her last year of high school, she settled for working at an art supply shop. She’d draw anything, but she especially loved to copy illustrations from the department store advertisements in the papers and the magazines they read at the library, modifying the stylish outfits to suit her own taste; and she could suggest the turn of an ankle or the drape of a coat with just a few strokes of a pencil. It was a hobby that had taken a backseat since Tommie’s arrival, but now Jeanne saw that it might come in quite handy.
“Oh, yes,” Jeanne improvised. “Peggy’s done tons of original designs. In fact, I’m wearing one.”
She turned this way and that, hands on hips, to show off the dress she was wearing. In truth Jeanne had copied it from one she’d seen at Fyfe’s on a trip to see the holiday decorations earlier in the month. The wool had exhausted her savings, but Jeanne was making Peggy and Thelma each a new dress for their Christmas presents, and she’d wanted something new to wear to church too. She’d even made Tommie a little matching dress, just for fun, but Tommie’d been sick on it and Jeanne couldn’t get the smell out of the wool.
The dress was ice blue and it had a clever faux twist at the neckline, made by stitching down a band of wool with a thin rayon interfacing that allowed the wool to be ruched without adding much bulk. It hadn’t been Jeanne’s idea, but it had been simple enough to copy.
Nancy considered Jeanne’s dress only for a moment before she returned her attention to the one she was wea
ring. Her fingertips idly caressed her bare shoulder. “Well, can you do it?”
Jeanne thought of the scraps, carefully folded in her basket. She’d coveted a bit of the green silk to use on a project of her own—but there wasn’t enough to make much more than a dickey or perhaps to line the pockets of her old car coat. Making new sleeves for Nancy would be a stretch, but if she cut them on the bias, and pieced a gusset in the underside . . .
“I suppose,” Jeanne said coolly.
“But she’ll have to charge you twice her usual rate,” Thelma cut in, “as it will mean putting off another client. And there won’t be time for a fitting, of course, since the ball is tomorrow night.”
Nancy glanced between Thelma and Jeanne, nonplussed by the older woman’s intervention. “Well, then, I’ll come first thing in the morning.”
Jeanne could see that it had been the right move, from the rising color in Nancy’s cheeks. It was just as it had been when they were at school together: girls like Nancy valued things by how much others wanted them, and creating a false sense of scarcity had excited that impulse in her.
A devilish idea occurred to Jeanne, born of the years she and Nancy had spent in their overlapping social spheres.
“Oh, I’m afraid that won’t work,” she said sorrowfully. “I’m to visit Sister Anthony this evening, you see, and the poor dear looks forward to my visits so much. She doesn’t receive many visitors.”
Behind Nancy, Jeanne could see Peggy trying to keep a straight face. She bent down and pretended to be busy wiping something from Tommie’s chin.
Sister Anthony O’Connell had been simply the most dreadful teacher at Mother of Mercy. She’d always seemed to have eyes in the back of her head, and had a near-obsessive distrust of humor. A giggle in Sister Anthony’s English class could lead to an inquisition, with her looming over a student demanding to know what exactly was amusing about the day’s lesson. Also, she couldn’t speak without spittle flying from her thin, cracked lips, and rare was the girl who’d avoided being spattered during a reproof.
Sister Anthony had seemed ancient even then, and shortly after Jeanne and Peggy graduated she’d moved on to the order’s retirement home. Jeanne had heard she had dementia now; there was a rumor that she yelled like a longshoreman at her nurses. Jeanne had certainly never been to visit her, not once.
“Well,” Nancy said, drawing a breath. “I suppose . . . I mean, I could go, to visit her . . . that would be the kind thing to do, wouldn’t it? And you could—you could—” She gestured at the sketch she was holding.
Thelma coughed and took the sketch from her hands.
“And yes, the . . . extra charges will be fine,” Nancy added.
Moments later, she was gone. The three women peeked out at her behind the drapes, giggling at her wide derriere when she bent to get in the car. Even Tommie joined in the laughter, delighted by a rare moment when none of the women in her life were in the clutches of despair.
THAT EVENING, AFTER she got Tommie to bed, Peggy came up to the attic, carrying her sketchbook. She reclined on Jeanne’s pillow, her back against the iron headboard of the bed Jeanne had brought from their mother’s house, her sketchbook propped up on her knees.
“I bet Nancy’s bazooms hang down to her belly button,” Peggy said. “You should sew a couple of saucers into the bodice to hold them up.”
“You’re terrible.” Jeanne sighed, carefully lifting the presser foot as she eased in the new sleeve. In truth, she liked it when her sister came upstairs; it reminded her of their childhood, when they’d shared a room until they were teenagers. Even when Jeanne started high school and was given the guest room for her own, Peggy snuck in many nights and crawled in with her, keeping her awake with her whispering and giggling.
For several moments the only noises in the drafty room were the scratch of Peggy’s charcoal pencil on paper and the hum of the sewing machine’s motor as Jeanne made her slow and careful way around the armhole. The machine was her most precious possession, a Singer Featherweight with a special red and gold embossed badge on its narrow throat. It had been her mother’s, a gift from her father when the pair made an anniversary trip to Chicago for the World’s Fair in 1934.
Emma Brink was a daughter of the Philadelphia Burnhams. She’d grown up with money, beautiful clothes, servants, an elegant home in Merion—and given it all up to marry Leo Brink, a poor son of Irish immigrants who promised her the moon.
Leo had done well for himself, working tirelessly in the mills until he was able to start his own company. Brink Mills had been a modest success; Leo had been able to move his family from the tenements above the river up to Roxborough and send his daughters to Mother of Mercy with the other mill owners’ children.
Ever mindful of the promise he’d made his wife, Leo Brink spoiled the three females in his house. It was as though he never stopped trying to make up for the loss of her family, who never reconciled with their only daughter and refused to acknowledge their granddaughters, because they were being raised Catholic. There were closets full of beautiful clothes, fine linens for the table, Irish crystal Leo had shipped all the way from Dungannon. The one indulgence he put off year after year was to take Emma on a long-delayed wedding trip, because he never wanted to leave the mill. Finally, he hired his brother to be his right-hand man, and he was able to fulfill his promise.
At the fair, Leo wrote letters to his teenage daughters about the brand-new Museum of Science and Industry and the artillery that was rumored to have cost over one million dollars. But Emma was captivated by the Singer sewing machine being debuted in the Electrical Building. Perhaps remembering the early years of their marriage, when she’d sewn her husband’s shirts and her daughters’ layettes on a secondhand treadle, she declared it a miracle that would transform the American household.
They returned home, and the machine remained in its case. Leo went back to work, harder than ever, because the textile industry had started to shift and he saw the writing on the wall; hard times were coming. Emma, who had pneumonia as a child and had always struggled from her scarred lungs, grew weaker and spent more and more of her time sitting up in her bed, waiting for her girls to come home and tell her about their days.
Jeanne missed a pin and drove the needle down on top of it, snapping the needle in two. “Oh, rats,” she exclaimed, giving the full skirt an exasperated tug. “I’ll never finish this in time.”
“Leave the pins in,” Peggy suggested. “When she goes to the toilet in the middle of the ball, maybe she’ll sit on one.”
“You’re awful,” Jeanne murmured, gently removing the bunched fabric so she could access the throat plate and dig out the snapped needle.
“Maybe,” Peggy agreed. “She has it coming, though. The way she swans around! She’s probably spent the last ten years dreaming about putting you in your place.”
Jeanne leaned back in the chair, rolling her shoulders, taking a break from the painstaking work. She looked around the room, at the exposed rafters, the coarse floorboards covered with a flea-market rug, the length of pipe along the wall that served as a wardrobe. Besides the bed, she’d taken her childhood dresser from her mother’s home, as well as a few treasures that now sat on top of an embroidered Irish linen runner on the dresser top: her parents’ wedding picture, her mother’s comb and brush, a vase that Charles had given her for her twentieth birthday. The only other ornamentation in the room was the dressmaker’s mannequin and her sewing cabinet.
How Nancy Cosgrove would smirk if she could see this room. But Jeanne would never forget looking out over the audience in the high school auditorium her senior year and seeing Nancy, stolid and unremarkable even then, in the front row. Jeanne, who’d been salutatorian and also voted both loveliest and most graceful, had given Nancy a smug nod before receiving her awards, then forgotten all about her in the ensuing standing ovation.
Jeanne had been beloved by all, and Nancy hadn’t, and no reversal of fortunes would ever take that away.
Jeanne worked her fingers into her neck, trying to massage away the numbness from sitting too long bent over her work. “I suppose she can put me in my place all she wants, as long as she pays. What are you working on?”
Peggy held up the sketchbook: she’d drawn a fanciful hat, dripping with feathers and roses, on a faceless mannequin. The drawing was quite good, the detail of the veil rendered in a few lines, the roses lush and shaded. Peggy had loved to draw clothes and fashion since she’d received her first set of paper dolls and promptly made them a whole new construction paper wardrobe, but now that she had a child of her own, she limited herself to the sketchbooks she kept under her bed.
“And where are you going to get ostrich feathers?” Jeanne teased. “From a visiting sultan?”
“It’s just for fun,” Peggy mumbled, and closed the cover of the sketchbook. Too late, Jeanne realized that she’d hurt her sister’s feelings.
Even though Peggy was the one who’d married and had a child, who’d buried a husband and made a life with her mother-in-law, providing Jeanne a home by Thelma’s good graces, Jeanne sometimes forgot that her younger sister had grown up.
“Your drawing is really good,” Jeanne amended quietly.
“I’m off to bed,” Peggy said, getting up and smoothing the covers where she’d lain. “I’ll be up early with Tommie. Go back to burning the midnight oil.”
PEGGY HAD BEEN right: the modified sleeves balanced out the dress, drawing the eye up from Nancy’s thick midsection and showing off her collarbones. “Her best feature,” Thelma had observed wryly, making the others laugh.
The project had brought the three of them together in a way that had been rare in their little house. At the outset of the war, no one would have imagined the life they now had: three women and a baby, living on a service pension and Jeanne’s earnings from her part-time jobs. Nothing had gone as it was supposed to. Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Jeanne and her beau planned to marry, Peggy was caught up in a whirlwind romance, and Thelma looked forward to grandchildren and time to spend in her garden.
