The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  But it was unfair to view that time through the wistful lens of the present. Even then, darkness had touched their lives. Four years earlier, in 1937, Thelma’s husband had died in an accident, leaving her and her son, Thomas, with the house and an insurance policy that left little room for luxuries. Only two years later, Leo Brink was dead as well.

  In those days the two families had been acquainted only through business: Thelma’s husband, Henry, owned a small drayage company, and provided cartage for Brink Mills’ yard goods, driving them from the mill to shipping ports and New York City’s garment district. The sisters remembered Thomas Holliman from company picnics a decade earlier, when he was a ruthless plague upon the girls.

  But at twenty-one, handsome and tall with patriotic fervor in his eyes, Thomas proved irresistible. He and Peggy started dating in the late summer of 1941 and were married on Valentine’s Day 1942, weeks before he shipped out with the navy.

  All these years later Peggy was prone to dark moods, as though she were the only widow in the house. But between them they had buried two husbands and a sweetheart. Still, that wasn’t enough to elevate their misfortune above others’. Two doors down, Myra Lyall had lost both her sons and her husband had left her; when someone said hello to her in the street, half the time she didn’t respond at all.

  But the night after Jeanne finished Nancy’s dress they had a little party of their own. There was Thelma’s spice cake with buttermilk icing, and Frankie Laine on the radio. Jeanne and Peggy danced around the dining room, pretending they were at the ball, Jeanne leading because she was taller. Thelma acted annoyed and swatted at them, but Jeanne caught her humming in the kitchen. Peggy disappeared into her room for a few moments and emerged as Nancy, with couch cushions stuffed under her clothes and socks in her brassiere. She clomped through a waltz, while Jeanne made Tommie laugh by playing the rogue, pinching Peggy’s bottom and sloshing imaginary champagne.

  Hours later, after everyone had gone to bed, Jeanne lay under the mound of covers in her little bed, unable to sleep. Ice formed on the inside of the glass of the tiny attic window on nights as cold as this one, but Jeanne was warm under the quilts. She thought about the dress, about the compliments Nancy would receive and the business that might now come their way. In the end, she had charged Nancy nineteen dollars plus the cost of notions, a figure Thelma had come up with after studying the Fyfe’s ad from the week before. Nineteen dollars was only half the cost of the featured gown—“and Nancy got an original,” as Thelma pointed out.

  On Sunday, Jeanne got ready for church with a flutter of anticipation. She wouldn’t have to wait long. At St. Elizabeth’s, she followed Thelma into their customary pew with her head held high. It was impossible to focus on the Mass, on the interminable sermon, and during Communion she watched the processional while pretending to pray, judging each woman’s outfit as she walked by. Finally, the Mass was over, and she hurried to station herself strategically a few paces from the door, where Father Nowak was in the habit of greeting his parishioners.

  The line grew long. Thelma and Peggy were delayed by Tommie, who had undone the laces in her too-tight shoes. Jeanne chatted with Blanche Southwick, whose husband had been promoted to vice president at the bank where he worked, and who had most certainly been at the ball. Jeanne made idle conversation while she tried to figure out a way to bring up the dance, knowing that Blanche was far too polite to mention an event to which Jeanne had not been invited.

  Peggy caught up just as Marjorie Reid joined their little group, adjusting the cherries on her hat. She had been several years ahead of Jeanne at Mother of Mercy, a toothy girl who had been president of the student council—never one to mince words.

  “I saw Nancy Cosgrove last night,” she announced. “She said you’d hemmed her gown for her at the last minute, Jeanne. That was awfully nice of you.”

  Jeanne stammered a response as Peggy dug her gloved fingers into her arm. Thelma was out of earshot, whispering in Tommie’s ear, reminding her to curtsy for Father Nowak.

  “She said you were a godsend,” Marjorie continued. “What was it like, working on a Fath?”

  “A . . . Fath?”

  “Come now, Jeanne, you can tell us, now that the cat’s out of the bag,” Blanche interjected. “She told everyone that Lester bought her that dress in London.”

  “The skirt must have taken enough yardage to pitch a tent,” Marjorie said. “Nancy’s not exactly petite.”

  Suddenly Jeanne understood what was going on. Marjorie had always been a gossip in school, speculating on which girls might have allowed their boyfriends to go to second base, or tattling on the ones who smoked behind the band room. She would have been the perfect person to spread a rumor . . . particularly a rumor that one wanted spread.

  And what asset would good old Nancy Cosgrove, as insecure and socially clumsy as ever, most want the attendees of the Holly Ball to believe she possessed—especially because she had neither beauty, wit, nor social standing to fall back on?

  Money. Nancy would want everyone to think that she and Lester were rich—rich enough that he could bring back from his business trips a dress from one of the top couturiers in London. Of course everyone had heard of Jacques Fath, the French designer who had designed Rita Hayworth’s wedding dress. A gown from Fath was a prize that could be won, or even purchased, only after gaining entrance into the salons, an honor that itself typically required an introduction. Charles’s mother had owned a few gowns bought on her own European tour with her mother before her marriage, and Jeanne had been allowed a glimpse of them—the mothballed silk rustling gently under layers of tissue paper—in Mrs. Pearson’s closet during a visit to their home in Connecticut.

  Jeanne made all of these connections in the space of a few seconds—heartsick seconds during which she realized that Nancy had thrown her over, had won this round through sheer duplicity. But Peggy realized it even more quickly.

  “Oh, but it wasn’t just the hem,” she said smoothly, producing a serene smile. Only Jeanne—and perhaps Thelma—noticed the twin spots of color on her cheeks that signaled her fury.

  “Whatever do you mean?” Blanche said, her eyes narrowing as she leaned in closer, ever vigilant for a morsel of gossip.

  “Oh, I—I shouldn’t say,” Peggy said demurely, placing her fingertips delicately over her lips.

  Marjorie rounded on Jeanne. “Did you alter more than just the hem?”

  That was all it took, the match that sparked the tinder of Jeanne’s ire. She had once been a formidable presence, at least in the halls of Mother of Mercy, back in the days before any of them had known any real hardship. It had been years since Jeanne had summoned the poison from those hidden depths, a resource that all beautiful girls and women have, hoarded deep inside her like the bitter pit inside a peach, and she did Nancy one better.

  “Well . . .” she said hesitantly, as though she couldn’t decide whether to divulge the truth. Blanche leaned in too, and they all drew close, a coven of four, just a few yards away from the matrons offering their gloved hands to the pastor while they peered up piously from under their hats. “You see, she took it to be altered at Fyfe’s in Plainsfield.”

  This was credible, because though the flagship Fyfe’s department store was located just across the river in Philadelphia, it was actually easier to drive to the new store in Plainsfield, twenty miles away in the new Community Square mall. Center City society matrons would never make the trek, of course, but for a new generation of suburban housewives, flush with postwar success, the shopping mall beckoned with its wide avenues of parking and its imposing granite façade. The flagship’s couture salon may have served ambassadors, first ladies, movie stars—but the new branch boasted the splendid Crystal Salon, which featured tall mirrors in gilded frames and sumptuous carpets and chandeliers rumored to have cost tens of thousands of dollars, as well as clothes from the most celebrated houses in Europe. Jeanne had pored over pictures of the salon in the pages of the Inquirer, the beauti
ful mannequins wearing gowns fresh from Dior and Balenciaga and Perrodin and Balmain, the women who could afford them seated on tufted brocade chairs, sipping coffee from bone china.

  Blanche twitched her nose like a rabbit with a scent. “But why couldn’t they do the hem?”

  “Well.” Jeanne had warmed to the lie, and now it had taken possession of her. “You see, Lester purchased the size that Nancy managed to convince him she wears. When she tried it on at the salon, she couldn’t get the skirt up past her thighs. As for the bodice . . .” Jeanne shook her head sorrowfully. “There just wasn’t any way. She tried to force it, and the zipper tore clean away from the faille lining.”

  “Whatever did you do?” Marjorie gasped. Jeanne knew that the story she was spinning, embellished for maximum impact, would soon make its way through the gossip chain of Brunskill society.

  She shrugged. “The dress was ballerina length, thank heavens. I convinced Nancy that if we shortened it to slightly below the knee, I could use a bit of the hem”—here she paused to show that by a bit she meant a good eight inches—“to modify the bodice.”

  “But—I couldn’t even tell. It looked perfect.”

  Jeanne nodded conspiratorially. “It took me two days just to piece in the gussets. I had to remove the boning and reattach it by hand, since the faille is so delicate.” She accompanied these damning words with a covert gesture to indicate her rib cage and the bust darts of her suit, showing where the imaginary panels went and suggesting they’d been enormous. “Poor thing, I believe after the birth of her last, she’s really had the hardest time getting her figure back. And with Lester spending so much time on the road . . .”

  Jeanne gave the slightest emphasis to those last few words, just enough to communicate a bit of doubt, an unspoken suggestion that Lester’s travels might not all be strictly necessary to his business, after all. Never mind that Lester was perhaps even more unattractive than Nancy—he’d have to have been to allow himself to be snagged by someone so unremarkable, despite his family’s modest fortune—all it would take was a hint of a suggestion that his attentions were being lavished elsewhere.

  That the Fath might have been—just maybe—a guilt present.

  But Jeanne’s work wasn’t quite done. Revenge, no matter how sweet, wasn’t going to put food on the table.

  “Please don’t let on that I’ve told you anything,” Jeanne beseeched. “Nancy’s quite a private person. I only agreed to tailor her gown because we’ve been friends for so long. It’s not really . . .”

  She let the words hang in the air, as though battling with herself on how much to say.

  It worked, of course. “Not really what, Jeanne?” Blanche pressed close.

  Jeanne fluttered her eyelashes modestly. “It’s just that I prefer to work on my own designs. Mine and Peggy’s.” She nodded at the coat Peggy was wearing, one she’d begun several months ago when the first frost killed off the impatiens in Thelma’s flowerbeds. The coat was flared in the back so that it hung in generous folds below its straight yoke, and when Peggy moved it swirled graciously around her hips. No one needed to know that the coat had started out as a man’s balmacaan—quite a portly man, from the size of it—that Thelma had found in the St. Vincent de Paul shop. There’d been enough wool in the back alone to cut the sweeping gored panels.

  “What do you mean, your designs?” Marjorie asked.

  “Well, not mine exactly, of course. Peggy does the sketches. That one is based on a coat from the spring Balenciaga collection.”

  “They don’t show those,” Marjorie said, which was absolutely true. To gain entry into the salons, one had to have had an introduction from a long-standing client—and none of the women in the group qualified. Which was, of course, a fact that Nancy had gambled on when telling her outrageous lie: it was credible—just barely—that Lester might have made the connections to buy such a gift.

  “Oh no, of course not,” Jeanne said airily. “But Peggy is friends with the vendeuse at Fyfe’s in the city. They met at Camp Nyakway.”

  And with that final, brilliant stroke, Jeanne sealed their fate, the path that would wind through the years to come, leading them all down its treacherous, glittering twists and turns.

  Many years earlier, Peggy had been sent to summer camp in a last-ditch effort to civilize her after her junior year of high school, when the nuns at Mother of Mercy had warned Emma Brink that her younger daughter was becoming unmanageable.

  When Peggy returned at the end of the summer, tanned and sporting a new pin-curled hairstyle that she’d learned from the other girls, Jeanne had been hit with an unexpected wave of jealousy. She’d never had to share the spotlight, after all; she was accustomed to receiving the lion’s share of the praise and attention of her parents and teachers and other girls. Peggy’s transformation was surprisingly difficult to stomach, at first. But Jeanne had met Charles that summer on a fix-up date, and she buried her resentment by writing him long letters addressed to his family’s home in Connecticut, where he was living while studying for his medical board exams, and looking forward to his visits.

  Camp Nyakway was strictly for the daughters of affluent families, but Emma Brink was an alumna and somehow found the money to send her rebellious daughter. In her months at camp, Peggy had met girls from all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania and even New York—but none from Mother of Mercy. So she could say anything she wanted about the experience and there would be no one to contradict her.

  Jeanne knew she’d struck a direct hit when Blanche’s eyes lit up with excitement. “Wait a minute—you’re saying you copied a Fath for Nancy? And she told you not to tell anyone?”

  “Oh,” Jeanne said, feigning confusion. “It wasn’t like that—I don’t mean to make it sound like Nancy—I mean, I’m sure she was just—”

  “It’s all right,” Blanche said quickly. “I understand. You were trying to do something nice. But listen, Jeanne—I wonder if you might have time to stop by for coffee next week?”

  January 1949

  Peggy

  It was well past time to turn out the light and get some sleep, but Peggy didn’t set the square black Conté crayon down. She took a dainty sip of the bitter, cold coffee left over from the morning—yesterday morning, to be accurate, since it was nearly one-thirty—and made a bold, broad stroke down a fresh piece of newsprint. The piece of wood she’d rigged as an easel—taken from a cabinet face from a building being torn down around the corner—shifted on the bolster on which Peggy had propped it. Too bad they didn’t know any carpenters who might make her a real easel, Peggy thought grimly. Too bad they didn’t know any useful men at all.

  On her little mattress not three feet away, Tommie shifted and rolled, her rosette lips pursed. She was a restless sleeper, as she had been a restless baby—she’d come into the world uneasy, as though she knew already that she’d be denied a father, denied the perfect charmed life that Peggy had promised her many months earlier, when she’d first made her presence known on a prodigious wave of nausea, harbinger of the difficult pregnancy to come.

  No, nothing about Tommie was easy, and sharing a room with her—and yes, Peggy knew she was lucky to have a room at all, with her sister making up a bed each night in the freezing attic—was a daily torment.

  Another curving black stroke of the crayon, to meet the first. In those two lines were the suggestion of the back, the shoulders, the curve of the hip. Peggy glanced at the latest issue of Vogue, open to a spread titled “The New Blouse-and-Skirt Formula,” featuring full-circle skirts nipped in tight over balloon-sleeved blouses. The first wave of outrage over Dior’s new look seemed to have abated, silenced, perhaps, by the unstoppable tide of women hungry for a bit of glamour. Peggy could sympathize. The wartime fashions, made severe and scant by textile regulations dictated by the War Production Board—had looked all right on angular, thin women like her sister. But on curvy Peggy, they looked downright ridiculous.

  She sketched soft, feathery strokes to suggest a ful
l skirt like the one in the Vogue layout. Underneath the skirt, there would be structured layers of tulle to give it shape, but her drawing would only show the fanciful outline, like a bell, with satin pumps peeping from the bottom. Peggy could wear such a skirt—if she had anywhere to go. She had retained her small waist even after Tommie’s birth, and her bosom remained high and generous. She was still making do with her corset from two years ago, but if she could afford one of the new French-waisted ones, with the tabs that could be cinched tightly . . .

  After Thomas’s death, and Tommie’s birth, Peggy had drifted through time for a while. She remembered the sleepless nights, the endless bottles, the sour smell of spit-up and soiled diapers as though they were one long fevered dream. Boys she’d known seemed to die every day, or be taken prisoner, and she couldn’t seem to make herself care. The only time the war being fought on other continents felt real was when she saw some poor veteran soldier being pushed in a wheelchair, a blanket covering his missing limbs, and in his eyes saw something familiar—a blank resignation that resembled emptiness more than grief.

  But now! Now, for reasons she didn’t understand, Peggy was ready to live again. It was an amorphous urge, an undefined hunger for something she couldn’t name. She longed for something of her own, something beyond caring for Tommie and carrying on the homely tasks of life with her sister and mother-in-law. Sometimes, she saw a man in public—his worn brown shoe as he stepped up on the trolley; his callused hand holding a folded newspaper—and she felt a physical longing so strong she nearly doubled over with the force of it.

  Peggy, if she’d been allowed, if circumstances were different, would have greeted the New Look by wearing her skirt any damn length she pleased. She could have turned heads, could have been a provocateur herself, a trendsetter—if only. She squeezed the narrow chalk tightly between her fingers and concentrated, adding short light strokes to define the head, the arm, the wrist turned just so. The feminine form came naturally to her, the shadowy suggestion of the anatomy that would disappear under the rest of the drawing, yet without which it would never come alive.