The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  Jeanne went home with the pattern and recut the pieces she’d already pinned. The raspberry dress flattered her perfectly, and that summer Jeanne worked through the fitting patterns for blouses, skirts, trousers, and coats. She was wearing the raspberry dress the night she met Charles; she made a second version in teal acetate when he asked her to a dance.

  That fall, when her father’s heart attack took them all by shock, sewing became Jeanne’s refuge and her solace. She made a mourning wardrobe for her mother, dark dresses that grew looser as her mother grew thinner. With their finances in a shambles—Uncle Frank was helping sort through the details, since her father had never given her mother access to the accounts—Jeanne learned to sew for economy. She made Peggy’s prom dress and the dress she wore under her graduation gown. She began to page secretly through the bridal section of the pattern catalogs, dreaming of her wedding even as the war stole headlines and her mother’s illness became impossible to ignore.

  With each new garment she learned a new technique, a shortcut, a tailoring trick. She could cut a skirt panel from memory, or gauge a sleeve adjustment by holding the fabric up to her arm. She matched the neckline from one pattern with the sleeve from another; she made adjustments on the fly, using up a bit of extra silk for a piped collar or narrowing a hem to save fabric. By that spring, when Uncle Frank shuttered the mill for good and Jeanne was finishing her secretarial courses and Peggy had gone to work at the art store, she could copy a dress from a magazine with just a measuring tape and chalk and scissors.

  All these years later, Jeanne rarely bought a pattern, but she still browsed the catalogs to see what was new. She lacked Peggy’s imagination—she couldn’t come up with a design on her own—and she drew her inspiration from the illustrations. She preferred Vogue for their designers and their intricate details, but always gave the Butterick and Simplicity books a cursory look. And there she’d found an ingenious pattern for yokes, fitted to the hip, that could be attached to an existing skirt to give the length and illusion of the abundant skirt that had become so popular.

  Jeanne had taken a chance and cut the sleeves from the jacket, leaving only fitted short ones. She opened out the seams and picked the hand-stitched lining and was left with enough yardage to cut a trim front and back from the more voluminous ones of the old style. Had she not lost weight last fall, it wouldn’t have been enough, but Jeanne had grown quite thin. She couldn’t help thinking how disappointed Charles would be; he’d always liked a bit of meat under his hands, and he’d loved to squeeze the soft flesh of her hips, her waist.

  Charles had been gone for five years. He’d died in Cisterna, watching helplessly at first light as seventeen German panzers bore down on his ranger division after a night of hard-won advances toward town. Some had suggested he’d been among the lucky ones, since hundreds of men were captured by the Germans that day and spent the rest of the war languishing in the camps.

  Thoughts like this could seize Jeanne’s mind and twist it into impossible knots of doubt and anguish. And there was no one she could turn to, because Peggy and Thelma had lost Thomas eighteen months earlier at Guadalcanal. At least Charles’s family had been able to bury their son in the family plot in Woodbury. Thomas’s remains lay on the other side of the world, in one of the makeshift cemeteries where they buried the endless tide of boys who were mown down by bullets or torn apart in blasts or felled by disease, starvation, or freezing.

  Jeanne forced her attention back to the skirt, using her seam ripper to pick the waistband from the plain gathered waist, then separating the panels. She would reconstruct them as a bias-cut flounce, attached at the thigh of the new yoke so that the hem—which she remembered hitting her mother below her knees—now swirled about the ankles. She would have to piece in triangular pieces of black wool from another old dress to achieve volume, but the gussets would disappear in the folds of the skirt. As for the jacket, she would narrow the waist and cut down the lapels to a demure inch.

  Hours later, as a final touch, Jeanne took a bit of the silk from which she’d sewn that traitor Nancy Cosgrove’s ball gown and stitched a gathered rosette, which she tacked to the breast pocket.

  Sunday morning, she skipped church without an excuse, and Thelma, eyeing the still-uncut old clothes on the sewing table, didn’t ask for one. Peggy trailed Thelma out of the house, tugging Tommie behind her. Jeanne knew that they were trying to give her the time and space she needed to prepare for her new job. She was to earn thirty-eight dollars a week, money that would close the gap in their budget, but this had introduced a hierarchy into their home that was not there before. In the beginning she’d been the interloper, the odd one out, but in the years since then they’d become three women toiling equally, shoulder to shoulder like so many during the war.

  Jeanne sewed all day, barely looking up when the others returned from church dragging a now tear-stained and sniffling Tommie and a ham hock wrapped in butcher paper. She sewed while the soup simmered and took only a few minutes to eat with them, barely tasting the salty broth and Peggy’s biscuits. By midnight she had finished a second outfit, which she planned to wear on her second day of work, after which she would alternate the two until she could afford a third. The dress that Thelma had worn the day they went to the train station to see Thomas off to war now featured a four-panel skirt that reached almost to the ankle, its pieced-in yoke concealed by a flounced peplum and bodice made from an old dress that had never fit Peggy properly.

  Jeanne was in bed by eleven o’clock, exhausted. She knew that she would drop off quickly, that the strident tones of the alarm clock at six would interrupt a dead sleep. But she was not at peace. Since accepting the job, a nagging, anxious voice had taunted her: What makes you think, it demanded, that you can do this? You had your chance, and it’s over.

  It was this voice that had stolen Jeanne’s appetite and plagued her moments of solitude. But unlike the terrible long-ago spring after her mother died and Jeanne had to come like a pauper begging for a crust to live in Thelma’s attic, she had had enough. Some small spirit inside her refused to be snuffed out.

  She turned over in her bed, pulling her pillow over her head so that her breath warmed her face and neck under the covers. She could give in to her fate and spend the rest of her days languishing here, until she died a penniless spinster. Or she could get up tomorrow and get on the train that would take her into Center City, where her future was waiting.

  Jeanne had once been the envy of Mother of Mercy. She’d been pretty and popular and admired, but most of all she had been sure of herself and her place. If the pain of the intervening years had somehow loosed her from the gravity that moored her to earth and sent her floating aimlessly through her own misery, she was now ready to reclaim what she’d lost. She’d make them take notice once again. She’d show them all.

  Two

  Tweed

  They’ve been making tweed forever, you know—don’t be fooled by what they’ll ask for a yard of it at Holland & Sherry. A hundred years ago, Scottish women hunched over the spinning wheels, the carding combs, the looms, everything done by hand, and most of it stayed right there in the islands. And what do you suppose they were paid for their toil? But you see, that’s the way it’s always been: a man sees no value in a woman’s work until he can charge someone else double for it.

  It’s a pleasure to hand sew, though . . . the way the needle slips between the threads, like a hot knife through butter. And it’s got lot loads of ease. If you can’t match a Harris plaid seam, why, I suppose there’s no hope for you at all.

  February 1949

  Thelma

  The girl was up early, but Thelma was up earlier. She lay in the bed she’d once shared with her husband, and listened to Jeanne moving through her preparations for work. Two weeks into her new job in the city, she had perfected her routine, as brisk and tight as the girl herself. The slight creaking sound above the ceiling of Thelma’s room—that was the drawer in the old dresser in which she stored her
underclothes and hosiery. The scrape of metal was the hanger suspended from the length of pipe she’d hung from the wall in lieu of a closet. Muffled twin thumps were her shoes—shined and polished the night before, the narrow heels hitting the rug.

  Then, the sound of her feet descending the steep stairs, the squeak of the floorboards. For many years, Thelma only went up into the attic to add some piece of junk to the pile stored there since she and Henry moved in all those years ago. All of that had been discarded, of course, when Jeanne moved in. Good riddance.

  Jeanne performed her ablutions in the bathroom that separated the two bedrooms. She tried to be quiet—God knows she was a considerate one—but there are sounds that humans make that cannot be stifled. Thelma should know. She, at the advanced age of forty-seven, was a veritable catalog of the things that befell a body in maturity, or so she often thought in these early morning sleepless hours, when the sleep that had once come so easily eluded her and her gut churned and roiled. Her husband—she’d once known every detail of him: the creases in his neck, the snores that ended in abrupt gasping for breath (she has always believed he must have made a sound like this when the pallet fell from his truck and struck his head, killing him before he hit the street), the smell of him when he shifted in his sleep.

  Thelma thought about getting up and fixing Jeanne some coffee, some toast. Lord knew the girl could use some meat on her bones. But Thelma had sensed from the start that Jeanne had no desire to replace her dead mother with a stand-in, that she would find her way best if she was left alone. Some girls were like that. Thelma herself had been, in fact. She’d shunned close girlfriends during her own school days, focusing instead on helping in her father’s store. Thomas arrived quickly after her marriage (Henry’s brief courtship seemed, in retrospect, almost insignificant when Thelma reviewed her life’s history) and occupied her completely. By the time Thomas went off to school, Thelma was consumed with trying to make ends meet.

  She helped in the classroom, volunteered at the convalescent home, scrubbed their little row house top to bottom, and grew vegetables to supplement Henry’s meager earnings. It bemused her that Peggy and Jeanne thought their current circumstances were dire: true, it was a struggle to pay the bills, but Jeanne often left food on her plate and Peggy thought Thelma didn’t know she held back some of her government checks for herself. It wasn’t their fault—they’d grown up coddled, wealthy enough for private school and pleasure trips. Perhaps because of this, Thelma had still not shared her secret, the one that might have saved Jeanne from this new career: How else was the girl to occupy her time? Hunched over the table for another seven years while her back grew humped and her fingers as arthritic as Thelma’s?

  Thelma had never sought out the attention of other women, but here she was living with two and raising a third, and none of them really knew her at all. Before Henry died, she had enjoyed doing his books. She was good with numbers and she found something like joy in preparing the invoices and depositing the checks and balancing the ledgers. Down in the basement, carefully packed in excelsior, were her adding machine, her stamps and inks, her leather-bound books and stationery and desk calendars and blotters. She hadn’t been able to part with any of it. The tools of a trade no one, not Henry or even Thomas, had ever acknowledged.

  The soft sound of Jeanne’s footsteps stopped outside her door. She lingered there for a moment, and Thelma wondered what she was doing. In between the bedrooms, was she listening at her sister’s door—or at Thelma’s?

  A secret-keeper by nature, Thelma couldn’t imagine what secrets the others might keep from her. Spoiled, tempestuous Peggy—unfit to be a wife, barely fit to be a mother, and made useless by being cast in the role of both. Jeanne, practically a spinster already, squandering a little more of her rare beauty with each passing day.

  And what did they see when they looked at Thelma? A widow, mother of a dead son, in mourning for over a decade now? A walking ghost, with only the gray road between the present and her own death, persevering only to help provide for her son’s wife and child?

  Thelma rolled her face to her shoulder and bit down the frustration that stemmed from too much introspection, leaving teeth marks in her own freckled skin. A moment later Jeanne’s soft footsteps shuffled away, down to the first floor, and then—there, the front door, opened and shut quickly because Jeanne was a meticulous and thoughtful girl and would be mindful of the house’s heat seeping out into the chilly dawn.

  The house was silent. The neighbors—a widow to one side, a childless couple to the other—would not be up for another hour at least. In the other bedroom, Tommie would soon wake, shift, demand attention. Thelma would go downstairs to warm her milk, then return and lead her from her bed. Her mother’s job, but there was no use prodding Peggy. Thelma would take care of them all. Thelma, wrapped in her secrets and her plans, would move among them undetected.

  March 1949

  Jeanne

  Jeanne’s morning walk to the trolley stop took around eleven minutes in fair weather or foul. She liked to arrive at precisely 7:01 for the 7:04 trolley, keeping her eye on her watch (her mother’s, which she had begun wearing the day after Emma Brink died).

  She liked to sit in the fourth seat, next to the window. Arriving in Center City at the Ninth and Walnut stop, it was another four blocks to the Harris Carton offices on Sansom. At her desk at last, she took pleasure in finding the plastic typewriter cover precisely as she’d left it the night before, her coffee cup rinsed and dried, pencils and pen lined up on the blotter.

  The work was not difficult. The memos and letters that came her way to type were simple. Jeanne typed as she sewed, with precision and determination, and she was rarely called on an error. By the end of the first week, the girls at nearby desks had taken to asking her how to spell words or to check their punctuation. This, however, was the limit of their contact. Jeanne was not invited to lunches; no one gossiped with her in the ladies’ room over the stall doors.

  Standoffishness had been one of her stock tools, back at Mother of Mercy, so Jeanne understood it keenly. She was almost glad of it. The well of her social graces had gone dry during the years of her exile, and she had no desire to curry the favor of the office queen bees or mock the ungainly ones. There was a hunger blooming inside her, but it was not for girlish confidences and petty feminine victories.

  After the first day, Jeanne realized she had worried about her clothes for nothing: no one guessed the shabby provenance of her wardrobe. Other girls wore dated and unflattering and clearly homemade things; Jeanne’s skill with the needle ensured that her suits fit and flattered her perfectly, and she let the others believe that she shopped for her fabric in the showrooms on Fourth Street. That lone insecurity vanquished, it was from an indifferent remove that Jeanne received her coworkers’ envious glances.

  At the end of the day Jeanne prepared to leave in reverse order, brushing off the typewriter’s keys with the bristles of her correcting wheel and dusting her desk with a rag she kept in the drawer. Then she hurried out with barely a nod to her coworkers. Maybe they thought she had a fiancé. Maybe they saw right through her. It was hard to say.

  But on a damp Tuesday several weeks into her new job, as she settled into her chair, she heard her name.

  “Jeanne?”

  There was Gladys, hurrying toward her between the desks, tugging anxiously on her faux pearls. Gladys was a transplant, a newlywed from the Midwest who’d married a soldier with whom she’d begun a wartime correspondence, a shy girl whose broad pale cheeks were forever bursting with pink. Her soldier was Theodore Harris himself, Benny’s rival and son of the company’s owner, and her employment here was sure to end just as soon as she managed to get pregnant. This sort of gossip was impossible not to know, even for someone like Jeanne.

  “Oh, hi, Gladys . . .”

  “You always look so elegant,” the girl blurted. “And I need—I need some advice.” She tugged at the hem of her skirt self-consciously. “I’m having l
unch at my mother-in-law’s club next Friday and I just don’t—and I heard the girls saying that you can sew? That you make all your clothes and they’re just so, and I don’t have, I mean I can’t buy anything new, and I’m a disaster with a needle and I just wondered. If you had time . . . I could. Well.” She grinned a wobbly grin. “I could pay you back with a pie. That I can handle.”

  Jeanne hesitated, her mind already on the ride home, the bliss of sliding, at last, into her seat. The smell of damp wool and pipe tobacco and the leather of the seat, mixed with aftershave and perfume and exhaust from the traffic.

  But there was something about this girl, with her hapless wholesomeness, her slightly protruding teeth, her guileless smile. Another girl would have made an advantage of her marriage to the boss’s son, but in Gladys it backfired; she had an air of perpetual embarrassment, rendering her easy fodder for the sharp beaks. Jeanne sensed, perhaps, an opportunity to repent for her own long-ago cruelty.

  “Well, sure,” Jeanne said, smiling, casting back in her memory for something the girl had worn that had potential. “The blue crêpe—are you very fond of it the way it is?”

  Gladys grimaced. “Ugh, no. Mama made that for Pearl—my older sister—but she had a baby last year and she hasn’t got her figure back, which is why I got it, but it never has fit right.”

  Jeanne nodded; that explained the gappy neckline, the straining darts. “Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you bring it in tomorrow and let me take a look?”

  A WEEK LATER Jeanne was standing at the door of an apartment just off Bainbridge along the northern edge of South Philly, a part of town she’d never visited before, where families of seemingly all nationalities crowded into tenements and apartment buildings together.