The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  Jeanne

  “Where’s Tommie?”

  Thelma came into the front room carrying a box, handing it off to the movers. “I sent her next door. Mrs. Slater said she’ll keep her busy until we’re ready to leave.”

  Jeanne nodded, pressing a hand to her forehead. It was pure chaos in Thelma’s small house. It was almost impossible to imagine, but tomorrow, she and Tommie would be living somewhere else. Thelma would be alone here for the first time in years. Everything was happening so fast. Sometimes Jeanne just wanted to make everything stop so she could take it all in one last time before it all changed.

  She went to the bedroom that she had been sharing with Tommie since Peggy left, where her suitcase was lying on the bed. Under her camisoles and stockings were two things that Thelma didn’t know Jeanne had packed. The first was the framed photograph of her and Peggy, taken in Atlantic City when they were seven and eight, their mother’s shadow falling across the sand while they squinted in the sun and laughed.

  The second item was a white handkerchief. Embroidered in pink thread, not nearly as skillfully as Jeanne’s handiwork, were the initials MAB, for Margaret Anne Brink.

  Peggy had stitched the handkerchief when she was thirteen, in the home economics class she despised, before stowing it at the bottom of her dresser drawer, where it lay forgotten until the day she left. Jeanne had saved it from the box of Peggy’s things that Thelma gave to St. Vincent de Paul.

  Jeanne closed the suitcase and set it on the floor. There were only a few more boxes from the kitchen and then Frank would be coming to drive them across the bridge and into the city. In less than an hour they would arrive at the sunny two-bedroom apartment on Spruce, with a maid’s room that would be Thelma’s when she stayed over.

  As Jeanne passed through the house, she paused at the door of the pantry that, for a while, had served as their dressing room. She put her fingertips to the nail hole where Peggy had hung the mirror for their customers to see themselves during their fittings. A lump caught in her throat.

  She’d sent at least a dozen letters to Peggy in New York City, using the return address she’d copied from a letter Peggy had sent Tommie. “Miss Thomasina Holliman, c/o Jeanne Brink” was how Peggy had addressed the envelope. No mention of Thelma at all, but when Thelma saw the letter in the stack of mail she’d snatched it away and never shown it to Tommie.

  And Peggy had never answered any of her letters. Thelma refused to discuss her departure, and the few times Jeanne had mentioned her name, Thelma had retreated tight-lipped and angry to the kitchen, banging pots and pans until she settled down. Jeanne knew that Thelma would never forgive Peggy for abandoning her grandchild without even a note. But she also believed in her heart that there was more to it, that Peggy must have suffered quietly for quite some time until she reached a breaking point that none of them had been able to predict.

  Looking back on the days leading up to her leaving, she knew that Peggy had been trying to tell them all along how badly she wanted to take the job in Philadelphia. They’d underestimated the power of Peggy’s hopes and wishes. If she had stayed in Brunskill, it must have seemed to Peggy that those dreams would have died forever . . . but couldn’t they have found a solution together? It was only a few years until Tommie would be old enough to stay by herself. Couldn’t Peggy have waited?

  The front door opened and Frank stood there with his hat in his hands. “Big day,” he observed with customary understatement, as Thelma came back into the room.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “We should get there before rush hour.”

  Jeanne followed her outside. At the curb she turned and took a long, last look at the house where she’d washed ashore for the past eight years.

  THE FIRST NIGHT on Spruce Street was full of the sounds of night in the city. The traffic never stopped, not even as the small hours of the morning ticked by. At four o’clock the trucks began their deliveries. Workers called to each other. A woman sounded like she was crying somewhere in the building.

  Jeanne lay alone in the wide bed that had come with the furnished apartment, staring at the bars of streetlight that snuck in between the draperies and splashed across the ceiling.

  Tommie’s room was at the other end of the apartment, a sweet little space with built-in bookcases and a dormer window, and Jeanne couldn’t stop worrying about her waking in the middle of the night and not knowing where she was, walking through the darkened rooms where stacks of boxes cast ominous shadows. She’d offered to let Tommie sleep with her, but Tommie was so delighted at the prospect of having her very own room that she refused.

  Jeanne tossed and turned, the old building creaking and cracking through the plumbing ducts. Tomorrow they would begin their new routine. She and Tommie would have breakfast together—Thelma had packed a cooler with bread and milk and eggs so they wouldn’t have to go to the store right away—and then Jeanne would walk Tommie to the Academy of Mount St. Agnes, where she was enrolled in the first grade. They had deliberately timed the move so Tommie would start a new school year right away, so she would focus on new friends and teachers instead of missing her old home and routines.

  From Mount St. Agnes it was a four-block walk to the trolley stop, then forty-five minutes to the mill—the reverse of the commute she’d made when she worked at Harris. The new showroom had just been completed, the floors buffed, the paint dry, the display racks installed and the furniture moved in. Later that week Jeanne and Frank would receive their first customers and take their first orders from the new location. The mill had been operational for a year now, and there were dozens of bolts of finished goods in the showroom and several thousand bolts at the warehouse, awaiting shipping.

  The wheels had turned at astonishing speed. In the last month, Charming’s first invoices had been sent out, and paychecks were beginning to trickle in. They’d already made the first payment on the loan they’d secured to start the business. And there would soon be more than enough money for the apartment, for Tommie’s school, for everything in their new life.

  Jeanne would take them all out to dinner at the Bellevue Stratford to celebrate, she decided. Tommie would love the crystal chandeliers, the white-gloved waiters. Thelma had promised to come and stay in the city apartment on weekends. She had a fondness for window shopping, and Jeanne would take her strolling along the shops.

  As Jeanne had searched for an apartment that would allow her to give Tommie all the advantages a life in the city offered, a hollowness had settled inside her. It was Peggy’s absence, the thought of her living in her own apartment in Manhattan that Jeanne had never seen, separated by miles that might have been continents. Jeanne had started and abandoned a dozen more letters, all of them attempts at an apology for failing Peggy, though she didn’t know what she had done that was too little or not enough or simply all wrong.

  How had it come to this? By now, Jeanne nearly thirty-one and Peggy twenty-nine, they were supposed to be busy with their children, their husbands, their homes. The childhood promise they’d made each other to always live on the same street, to raise all their children together—three girls for Jeanne, twin boys and twin girls for Peggy.

  Instead, they had one child between them, and Peggy had let her slip quicksilver through her fingers, a lost little soul living in a world without men, except for Uncle Frank. Now it had come to be Jeanne’s turn to keep her, and she would do the best she could.

  Six

  Brocatelle

  Italians have for centuries woven a fustian of cotton and silk, with linen threads in the weft making it extraordinarily strong. You might put brocatelle on a chair cushion—if you wanted that cushion to last for the rest of your life. It is not like a chiffon scarf or a satin glove that will last only a season before showing signs of wear: it is made to endure. Sewing with brocatelle requires skill and dedication; use a nap layout and only superfine pins, and be prepared to devote a great deal of time to matching seams.

  Do not undertake brocatelle until you a
re certain you are ready for it.

  Come ti vidi m’innamorai, e tu sorridi perche lo sai.

  When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew.

  —Arrigo Boito

  September 1950

  Jeanne

  She had taken the day off for Tommie’s first day of first grade, but when she arrived—fifteen minutes early, because she’d been so afraid of being late that she’d rushed Tommie through breakfast and the short walk to Mount St. Agnes—the nun waiting at the front door told her that parents were to say their goodbyes outside, and that any tears or reluctance on the part of the children should be ignored.

  “Otherwise, they’ll think they can get away with it every morning,” the nun explained grimly.

  Tommie was gripping Jeanne’s hand so tightly she was cutting off circulation to her fingers. She looked up at Jeanne with terror in her eyes.

  “It’s just—she’s new to the school,” Jeanne said.

  “Mrs. Holliman, all of the first-graders are new to the school.”

  Jeanne seethed. The nun could be forgiven for not knowing she was Miss Brink—that she was Tommie’s aunt, not her mother—but couldn’t she see how frightened Tommie was? But maybe she was right. Maybe this was how every child behaved, in every school in every city in the country. In this, as in a thousand other details of child rearing, Jeanne was ignorant.

  She crouched down and straightened the ribbed waistband of Tommie’s navy blue cardigan. Her braid was already threatening to come out of its matching ribbon, and there was a smudge—syrup, from their rushed breakfast—on the collar of her blouse. Tommie wrapped her arms around Jeanne’s neck and squeezed tightly.

  Suddenly Jeanne was certain she’d made a mistake. What did she know of raising a child? How could she possibly care for Tommie, when her heart was full with all the things that could go wrong?

  “Are you going to be here after school?” Tommie whispered. “To pick me up?”

  “Oh yes, darling, of course I am!” Gently, Jeanne pried her arms away and forced a smile. “You’ll have so many things to tell me about your day.”

  “No, I won’t,” Tommie said gravely. “None of the girls will like me.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.” Jeanne knew that if she didn’t leave now, she would cry, which would be awful for the poor girl. “That’s nonsense. Now, up the stairs you go, we mustn’t keep Sister waiting.”

  Tommie gave a barely perceptible nod, then trudged away without looking back.

  “It’s so sweet, isn’t it?” a woman’s voice said.

  Jeanne turned to see a woman with a stroller and a toddler in her arms.

  “Your first?” the woman continued. When Jeanne nodded dumbly, she smiled. “I could tell! But I promise it gets easier. Five minutes from now she’ll be playing with all the other children, and she won’t want to come home later.”

  “Thank you,” Jeanne said. The woman was already turning away, the toddler squirming in her arms.

  Should Jeanne go after her? Should she introduce herself, find out her daughter’s name, perhaps plant the seed for future get-togethers for Tommie and the other girl? By the time Jeanne made up her mind, the woman was halfway down the block, and the opportunity was lost.

  The day stretched out with nothing to do. Thelma was overseeing the installation of new display racks for the sample books; Frank was interviewing candidates for second-shift manager in the office. Jeanne’s presence was completely unnecessary. But she didn’t relish the thought of going back to the apartment, with its bare walls and boxes waiting to be unpacked.

  Jeanne decided to walk along South Street, with its many clothing stores, haberdasheries, and tailors. Frank was drawing up lists of potential customers, including accounts that Brink Mills had served as well as new ones, and in a matter of weeks Jeanne would be joining him on sales calls to some of these stores. Maybe she’d stop in somewhere to drink coffee and read the newspaper from front to back, an indulgence she’d had no time for lately.

  The shops were opening up for the day, merchants sweeping the sidewalks out front, delivery boys wheeling garment racks and unloading trucks, seamstresses strolling in twos and threes. Jeanne heard conversations in Yiddish and Italian and English; she passed pushcarts and produce trucks and fishmongers transporting their wares on beds of ice. Jeanne felt her spirits lift in time to the pulse of the city.

  When she reached Fourth Street, she decided to walk a little farther. She would never tire of looking in the fabric shops at the bolts lined up in the windows, especially knowing that soon, some of those bolts would come from her very own company. The sun was rising higher in the sky, and her legs felt pleasantly invigorated from the walk. Her stomach growled, but Jeanne wasn’t quite ready for this simple pleasure to end. Perhaps she’d buy a yard of lace or a packet of buttons, or some ribbon for Tommie. Maybe, if she drummed up the nerve, she’d approach a merchant or two and tell them about the gabardine, serge, and doeskin that would comprise Charming Mills’ new season.

  She was standing in front of a trim shop, examining a sample board in the window, when she heard her name called.

  “Jeanne? Jeanne Brink?”

  She turned, searching for the source of the deep, amused voice, when a hand touched her shoulder. She turned and found herself face-to-face with Anthony Salvatici. He was wearing a stained white apron over a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair had been cut shorter, but otherwise he looked very much as he had the last time she’d seen him, standing at the curb outside the house.

  “What are you doing over in this part of town?” he asked.

  “Oh, I—well, actually, I live here now. With my niece. We have an apartment on Spruce.” Immediately, Jeanne wanted to take back her words—did she sound snobbish? Would he be put off that her niece lived with her?

  And then she was overcome with mortification for even having those thoughts. It was miraculous that he even remembered her.

  “How’s your sister’s dress business coming?”

  “My—oh—fine,” she stammered. She had not seen or spoken to Peggy in eleven months and two days, a painful number she tallied alone, ever aware of trying to divert Tommie’s attention from her mother’s absence. “She moved to New York City.”

  “Yeah, Mrs. H says that’s where you have to be, in that business. Although, I don’t know, seems like we have plenty of fabric stores right here.”

  “I’m, um. I’m working for a fabric mill, actually. It was my father’s.”

  “No kidding?” He whistled. “I asked Mrs. H about you, but she said you quit the company. I was sorry to hear about your mother. Is she . . .”

  “She’s passed away,” Jeanne said, and suddenly the lump in her throat was as real as if it truly had been recent. Why she should react like this now, she wasn’t sure—but there was something about the kindness in his voice that dissolved every shred of her composure. “And—and you,” she said desperately, “how is school?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I graduated. It only took me eleven years, but I’m the first Salvatici to get a college degree.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful. What did you study?”

  Anthony laughed. “English literature. Nearly killed my pop. But I’m making it up to him now.” He pointed at his apron.

  “You’re helping in the restaurant.”

  Anthony raised an eyebrow, studying her. “You could say that. Pop retired, and me and my brother are expanding into wholesale. Tell you what, how about I give you a personal tour?”

  Peggy

  The man with the clipboard and the Kelly green tie came into the little anteroom for the third time. “Still doing okay, doll?” he asked with a familiarity that set Peggy’s teeth on edge.

  His name was Mr. Crouse and he had been hired to orchestrate today’s event, so Peggy could not evade him. “Mmm,” she murmured, giving a slight smile, trying to appear more confident than she felt—under the table her hands were clenched tightly, and
she’d taken one of the little pills her new doctor had given her to calm her nerves.

  “We’re just getting the girls settled down now,” Mr. Crouse said. He consulted his watch. “You’ll be on in five.”

  Peggy closed her eyes after he left the room. She could hear them out there, all the women who’d been invited for this exclusive preview of the Fall 1950 Peggy Parker collection, the ones whose purchases put them in the top ten percent of Fyfe’s ready-to-wear clientele. The chain hadn’t tracked these customers as carefully as the Crystal Salon tracked theirs, but that was going to change. Sales of the store’s first exclusive line by an American designer would be examined with an eagle eye. Her future hung in the balance, and it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that it could be decided in the next two hours.

  Peggy couldn’t fail now. She had no home to return to.

  She drew a deep breath and stood, smoothing down her skirt and adjusting her collar. The dress she had selected for today was not the one that would be featured in the advertisements; that one was the star of the line, a dress and jacket ensemble with scallops on the collar, the peplum, and all the way down the placket. But Peggy had made the decision to wear one of the least expensive pieces, a sailor-collar day dress in navy and white sailcloth, trimmed with blue braid and a rope belt. At eleven dollars and ninety-eight cents, the dress could be had for less than a tenth of the price of dresses Peggy had sold only a year ago—a price that was in reach of every woman in the room.

  Peggy had put on a crinoline, which she rarely wore due to the scratchiness of the netting, to make the skirt flare out dramatically. Her front-lacing French corset had been a special welcome gift by Miss Perkins herself, who was now the head women’s fashion buyer for the whole chain. The corset lifted her bosom and whittled her waist and forced her shoulders back, which added up to a measure of discomfort that, as Miss Perkins liked to say, was a small price to pay for the envy of others.

  Peggy took her compact from her bag and checked her lipstick. “Orange Absolu” was not Max Factor’s best-selling shade—but Peggy knew that in a sea of women wearing red, she would stand out. Even her hair had been a daring choice: she’d had it dyed reddish-blond and cut her bangs nearly as short as Bettie Page’s.