The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  Once—Thomas had been away at war for nearly two months at the time, and Peggy was still in the first trimester of her pregnancy—she had snuck off to the library, a place she knew no one would expect to find her. She’d found a book titled Anatomical Drawings of Albrecht Dürer and spent a long afternoon studying how the great artist had prepared a sketch. Hands divided with crossed lines to indicate proper proportion, limbs moving along a curved axis—even drawings of skeletons and skulls to illustrate the structure under the skin. Peggy had been fascinated to discover that there were tricks and secrets to what she’d always assumed was the domain of pure genius.

  She got that day’s Philadelphia Inquirer off the heavy wooden roller and spread it out on the long table next to the book, ignoring the scowl of the librarian. Here—in the Wanamaker’s advertisement featuring “smart hostess frocks”—she saw how the artist had fancifully altered the mannequin’s proportions. Peggy held up her pencil with her thumb marking the hip bone, checked it against the Dürer illustration. Off by a factor of nearly one and a half. Languid fingers too narrow to hold a telephone—ankles so delicate they’d snap during a brisk walk. Waists and necks impossibly narrow and sharp, planed cheekbones you could practically cut a tomato with.

  It was no secret that the sketches in the ads didn’t reflect reality. But as Peggy traced the drawing with the eraser end of the pencil, beginning to learn the proportions in her muscles’ own memory, she reflected that maybe they represented something better: possibility, which was in such short supply now that the grim reports were coming back from the front—

  Peggy sneezed, drawing a sharp glance from the matronly librarian. But did the librarian have a husband who was serving in the South Pacific? A husband whose letter, received only yesterday, compared Peggy’s breasts to “cantilopes” (okay, so Thomas wasn’t a speller)—who promised that when he returned he was going to take her to Atlantic City, where they wouldn’t leave their motel room for three entire days? A husband who was not yet aware of the incredible fact that he would soon be a father?

  No, Peggy thought angrily, she undoubtedly did not. The librarian was too old and pruney and mean to have a husband or beau.

  Peggy redoubled her efforts.

  Now, nearly seven years later, she’d improved considerably. She’d done little drawing during the early sleepless nights with Tommie, the bouts of colic and croup and fever. But later, as Tommie grew into a willful toddler and exhausted herself with temper tantrums until she collapsed, Peggy learned to steal every peaceful moment for herself. She asked only for chalk and paper for her birthdays, and when her daughter finally slept through the night, Peggy waited until Thelma and Jeanne went to bed and drew to her heart’s content.

  A tap, a swish, and the door swung silently open. The figure who slipped inside, past Tommie’s little bed, was her sister.

  “What are you working on?” Jeanne whispered, pulling her robe tightly around her knees. Peggy’s room was warmer than the attic, but not by much, especially at night when they turned the furnace way down to save oil.

  Peggy tilted the sketch up. She’d finished detailing the skirt, and outlined a scalloped capelet over the shoulders. Jeanne picked up the paper and examined the Wanamaker’s ad from which Peggy had been working. “That collar looks like it could stand up by itself,” she said doubtfully. “I don’t know if Brunskill is ready for that.”

  “You said you wanted to give Blanche something new,” Peggy said. “Europe is doing everything crisp. You could do broadcloth . . .” The defensiveness that rose up in her was inexhaustible. If only Jeanne would spare a kind word now and then—Peggy often imagined that she could go for days on a bit of praise. But their mother had been gone for years, and with her, the indulgence Peggy never knew she would miss so much.

  “Maybe . . .” Jeanne set the page down and sat on the edge of Peggy’s bed, the same one that Thomas had slept in during his childhood. This had been Thomas’s room, a fact that had given Peggy comfort in her early months here, before his spirit seemed to fade almost entirely away. “I just think that Blanche . . . she’s going to her husband’s sales dinner. Not a cotillion in Versailles.”

  Peggy heard the petulance in her own voice but couldn’t stop it. “Her husband is getting an award. She said so. She needs to look special.”

  Those had been Blanche’s exact words, in fact. Peggy had busied herself with Tommie, on the floor with the wooden blocks that had also once belonged to Thomas, while Jeanne sat primly on the sofa and took notes. “I need something special,” Blanche had said, “something that says ‘regional manager material.’”

  As if a dress alone could turn Blanche, a sow’s ear of a girl with enormous thighs and a sloping chin, into a silk purse. But Peggy felt a duty to try. She felt strangely moved by the naïve hopes of Jeanne’s clients, their bright-eyed longing for la mode. Peggy knew that no woman shaped like a proper mannequin was likely to walk through their door and ask for a dress, but she didn’t mind. Their work—because even though Jeanne did all the cutting and sewing and fitting, Peggy considered it her work as well, as she did the sketches and maintained the “dressing room” and swept up the snippets and threads each evening—was to give the women of Brunskill and Roxborough an escape from their babies and children and husbands and household budgets. They were ordinary women with ordinary problems, trying to buy a little glamour at a cut rate, and Peggy was proud to provide it.

  She knew it was different for Jeanne, who had gone to school with most of these girls. Peggy, two classes beneath them, had envied and worshipped them but never really known them. She’d been a willful, solitary girl given to spending most of her time alone or in the mother superior’s office awaiting the latest in a never-ending stream of rebukes. Having never attained Jeanne’s level of status, Peggy had never suffered the ignominy of a fall from grace.

  “Bring the skirt in,” Jeanne said, rubbing her eyes. “We’ll do it in crêpe. Put some stiffening in at the hip if you must, but remember that Blanche probably doesn’t want to draw the eye there. Her hips are not her best feature.”

  Peggy didn’t want to bring the skirt in. She wanted it just the way she’d drawn it, outlandishly full and coquettishly flounced. But she bit back a retort; her sister looked exhausted. She’d been losing weight again; the robe’s sash circled twice around her shrunken waist.

  “Why are you still up?” Peggy asked instead, afraid to voice her fear. Their mother had grown very thin before her final illness. Peggy couldn’t imagine losing Jeanne too: she needed her sister to be steady, to be her rock.

  Jeanne smoothed the robe over her knees, ducked her chin, sighed. Finally she looked up and met Peggy’s gaze with her own. “It’s just . . . I can’t sew fast enough, honey. I’ve got girls waiting. Aggie Hart called just this afternoon, wanting a coat, she was so happy with the dress I made for her. But it takes as long as it takes. And . . . and they won’t pay. It’s Brunskill and they will only pay Brunskill prices.”

  So it was money, again. Peggy stayed out of the household finances, but she’d seen Thelma and Jeanne with their heads together, going through the accounts. Thelma’s medicine and Tommie’s shoes, heating oil and groceries and detergent—Peggy knew they were struggling to get by. But there was her widow’s pension and the money from Jeanne’s part-time office job in addition to the sewing; how could it still not be enough?

  “I can help,” she said quickly, shamefully. Her main task, they all agreed, was to raise Tommie; but she knew that Thelma and Jeanne would also agree she wasn’t well suited for the job. Tommie was in kindergarten now for several hours a day, but the peace of the school day passed so quickly, sandwiched between the chaotic mornings and evenings. Tommie was a demanding child, and Peggy secretly wondered which of her many failures caused her daughter’s poor behavior. Surely there were other mothers who would welcome Tommie’s boundless energy, her scabbed elbows and knees, the tangles in her flax-fine hair and the faintly spoiled smell about her. Mothers with
experience, matter-of-fact women who’d take Tommie in hand and have her sorted out in no time, who’d braid her hair tightly and teach her to say “yes, ma’am” and take a hairbrush to her bottom when she talked back.

  Peggy herself would have done well with a quiet, shy girl, one whose energies were restrained, who still napped and said please without being prompted. Or a boy. She would have known what to do with a boy—raise him to be athletic and strong and decisive. But what to do with a headstrong girl?

  “I can help, you know,” Peggy repeated, rubbing the black grime off her fingertips with a worn handkerchief she’d saved for the purpose. She would take up hems, cut out patterns, sew on buttons—simple tasks that she couldn’t mess up. “I could chalk and pin and cut—I can baste and hem.”

  Jeanne barely acknowledged the offer. Those were the least difficult tasks and they both knew that Peggy couldn’t set in a sleeve or fit a bodice or sew an invisible zipper. And Thelma—with her painful joints—was no help either.

  “I’m going to have to take a job in the city,” Jeanne said quietly.

  Peggy stared at her sister. “City?”

  “In Philly. I talked to Benny Frazier. There are openings in the typing pool at Harris Carton. I can start next week. I will start next week.”

  “But—” Benny Frazier had been in love with Jeanne since they were Little Saints together at St. Augustus. He’d married a Main Line girl after college and took a job at the same company where his father-in-law worked. What must have it cost Jeanne to ask such a favor?

  “Who will finish Blanche’s dress?” Peggy asked instead.

  “I will,” Jeanne said. “I’ll work extra this week. I need to tailor my brown suit too, and maybe I can do something with Mother’s old tweed. I’ll need clothes for work.”

  Peggy picked up the crayon again, squeezed it hard enough to break. The little sticks were brittle, and she only had one spare. She set it down again. Who would she sketch for now? And who would help her with Tommie? And the little dressing room . . . would it go back to storing potatoes and onions, the rag bag hung from a nail, Thelma’s coffee can rattling with coins?

  For the last few months, as Jeanne’s fingers flew over yards of wool and silk and cotton and the sewing machine whirred late into the evening, as Thelma stepped around the kitchen table covered with fabric and patterns, carrying the mail and the laundry and the hard round loaves from the bakery, and Peggy made a game of hunting for snipped threads and dropped pins with Tommie, she had allowed herself to hope. That the future might hold something for them—something finer than the life that had settled on them during the war.

  But Jeanne was leaving. Jeanne—not technically a widow, still young, or at least young enough, and prettier than girls a decade younger—would find her chance, in the crowded streets and skyscrapers of the city. For Jeanne, now, there would be cocktails at smart clubs, lunches with other career girls. Banter with sophisticated men and women in the office, glances exchanged with strangers as she rushed for her train.

  She would go on dates. There would be a wedding, perhaps, eventually—a proper one, with a gown and a veil and a mountain of gifts, not the rushed ceremony at City Hall that Peggy and Thomas had. What would be left for Peggy but raising Tommie under her mother-in-law’s observant eye, watching her waistline thicken every year, discovering her first gray hair alone, with no one to comfort her?

  “What a wonderful idea,” she said, crumpling the half-finished drawing in her trembling fist.

  Jeanne rose and slipped out of the room before either of them could cry.

  Jeanne

  Their poverty was a constant thread, though each of them suffered it differently. Peggy resented the meager meals most of all. She’d always had a sweet tooth, and when her government check came, she always bought a pint of ice cream on the way back from the bank before handing the cash over to Thelma. The rest of the time there was cabbage and meatloaf, stews and gristly chops, Malt-O-Meal and spaghetti and canned fruit. As for Thelma, she hunched over the black ledgers left over from when she’d done her husband’s books, entering every penny of their household expenses, adding the sums over and over as though if she only tried hard enough, she might get a different result.

  For Jeanne, the worst privation was having to make do with mended and redone clothes. All three women loved fashion, but for the others it was like a spectator sport: they read and reread the remaindered fashion magazines Thelma got from her friend who worked in the drugstore until they were dog-eared and crumbling. They admired the beautiful clothes they saw in the department store windows, and devoured the newspaper photographs of movie stars in sumptuous gowns. For Jeanne, on the other hand, going out in public in a patched or worn garment engendered an almost physical pain. She had always taken pride in her appearance, and she could hardly bear to wear the things she’d owned for years, some of which she’d mended and tailored so often that they were virtually disintegrating.

  Now she was faced with the prospect of walking into the midtown headquarters of Harris Carton in two days’ time, under the gaze of all of those smart city girls and her new supervisor—she was to report to the assistant to Theodore Harris, the boss’s own son and heir to the family business and hence a thorn in the side of her old friend Benny—and she could not bear to do it in one of her old dresses. There was humiliation enough in her age and bare ring finger.

  Jeanne had finished Blanche’s dress last night, and this morning had sent her home happy. Blanche had asked for another and Jeanne had put her off. So far, no one but Thelma and Peggy knew about the job, and that was how Jeanne meant things to stay until she was sure she could measure up. She’d learned typing and dictation before the war, when she thought she would work until her wedding to Charles—but then her mother had begun her steep decline and everything else was put aside. Since Emma Brink’s death, Jeanne had done only a few hours of filing and simple correspondence each week for small local businesses. She wasn’t certain, despite her assurances to Benny, that she’d be able to pull off the dictation and typing, and she wanted to spare herself any further humiliation.

  She turned her mother’s old tweed skirt over in her hands. It was at least a decade out of date, an A-line style that would never do, but tweed was back in style and Butterick had just published a pattern that had given her an idea.

  Jeanne no longer worked from patterns. After discovering a passion for sewing the first time her mother opened the case of the Singer Featherweight, she had sewn perhaps a hundred garments, hungrily tackling each new technique with the passion of a master. She started with a Simplicity pattern for a blouse that was only slightly more advanced than the simple white middy she’d sewn, along with all of her classmates, for home ec, then moved through A-line and gored skirts, a tab-waisted pair of trousers, a shawl-collared jacket.

  Her first designer pattern was a Joseph Sussman for Advance, and Jeanne discovered halfway through cutting it out that shortcuts had been taken—gathers rather than a proper bust dart, for instance, and a faced neckline that would never lie flat and really should have been lined. Jeanne had begged her mother to buy the four yards of raspberry crêpe for the dress, and planned to wear it to deliver her salutatory address—and she felt personally affronted by the pattern’s shortcomings.

  Jeanne studied the pattern envelope and saw how she’d been taken in. The illustrator’s fanciful brushstrokes hid the underlying flaws; she should have noted that the back of the envelope bore the legend SEW EASY. She went back to the catalog counter at the fabric store and spent an hour poring over the catalogs. Simplicity, McCall’s, and Advance all had designs advertised as “easy” or “quick” or both, for lazy, novice, or time-pressed seamstresses. But even Vogue’s elegant catalog included designs that lacked fine tailoring, while others featured clever feats of fabric manipulation that it would almost take an engineer to plan and execute. A twisted keyhole top, for instance, was constructed of pattern pieces shaped like hourglasses; the end result coul
d not be divined from its parts.

  She was studying a draped and bustled gown from the Vogue Couturier line when the woman next to her glanced over. “All those tucks,” she tutted reprovingly. “And then what if you want to ease in a little extra?”

  “I haven’t done tucks yet,” Jeanne admitted.

  “Well, then you have no business with that one. You’ll cause yourself no end of grief.” She peered over her spectacles at Jeanne. “Such a lovely girl. Have you done a fitting pattern yet?”

  “No—but I have my mother’s dressmaker’s dummy,” Jeanne said, embarrassed. Her mother barely knew how to use it herself; sewing had not been part of her privileged upbringing. “I’ve adjusted it to my measurements.”

  “Oh, no no no,” the woman said. “You’re not ready for that yet. Here, let me help you.”

  Jeanne never did learn her name—but her benefactor spent nearly an hour patiently explaining how the fitting pattern would teach Jeanne to adjust her flat pattern cutting, to lengthen and shorten, ease for fullness or take in excess. “You won’t be ready to drape on the dummy until you’ve mastered all of this,” she said, using her thumb and index finger to mark off two-thirds of the Vogue catalog.

  Years later, when Jeanne worked in the silent attic, allowing her mind to wander wherever it liked, she sometimes wondered about the woman. Had she no daughters of her own? Or were they too impatient with their mother’s instruction? Jeanne had listened eagerly, soaking in the details that her basic home economics course hadn’t covered, her fingers practically twitching with their eagerness to get started. She showed the woman the dress pattern she’d been working on, and together they found another—a McCall’s evening gown with a pieced bodice and full-length side zipper—which she said would fit far better.