The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  She had a date with Anthony that night, and she was glad for the extra time to get ready. He was taking her to the restaurant, where she would meet his father for the first time.

  She headed back into the city, her mind on what to wear. As she walked past the newsstands at Broad Street Station, she browsed the racks of magazines, perusing the glossy covers and headlines of Vogue, Charm, Madrigal, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mademoiselle, all of which she studied for trends. She glanced at Good Housekeeping, Women’s Own, and My Home. And then an image on a cover stopped her in her tracks.

  Around her, the tourists and con men bumped and jostled against panhandlers and preachers, the hustle and noise of noontime at its peak. A woman hissed, “Watch where you’re going!” and pushed past. But Jeanne could not tear her eyes from the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. Because there, in a small piece on the lower corner of the front page, wearing the smile she knew like the back of her own hand, was Peggy.

  The headline read: Peggy Parker, Fashion Designer, Builds Her Empire.

  The name was different but it was Peggy, so familiar and real it was as if she had just told a joke and was laughing at her own punch line. The newsprint blurred as Jeanne stared, her mouth going dry. Finally, she snatched it from the rack and carried it to the counter and asked the man to put it in a plain wrapper, as though passersby could guess what the image meant to her.

  She read the article under the awning of a bakery, gusts of rain blowing in on her. “Look at Fyfe’s own Designing Miss!” the caption read below another photo of Peggy. In this one, she was standing next to a plastic display mannequin in an empty dress department, her hand on its shoulder. The mannequin was wearing a dress with a wide, flaring skirt.

  Even now, Jeanne could see Peggy’s work in the design: the clever draping of the bust, the shirred waist panels. But it was her sister she was more interested in. She searched the photos for clues, but Peggy’s expression was empty. She was wearing lipstick in a shade of orange that was jarring against her pale skin, but maybe that was just a result of the printing process.

  “It’s Peggy’s year!” So says Helen Perkins, the director of women’s fashion at Fyfe’s, the beloved and venerable department store launched in Philadelphia in 1888.

  Why all the excitement surrounding this young, attractive debut designer? For one thing, she’s among the first to test the waters in America that Europeans have long dominated: the namesake label. Sure, the wealthiest customers have long been able to shop at Fyfe’s ultra-exclusive couture salon for designer fare, where an evening gown can cost as much as a family automobile and women are served coffee and tea by chicly dressed attendants as they thrill to the latest haute fashions.

  But Peggy Parker aims to change all that. “Fashion is for everyone,” she gushes, meeting this reporter at Cedar Tavern, a fixture for the in-the-know in Greenwich Village. Miss Parker sipped at a champagne cocktail and barely touched her sole almondine as she explained her take on the glamorous business.

  The article went on to tell the story of how Peggy had wanted to design fashions from an early age, sewing clothes for her dolls to match her own and begging for scraps from the ladies in the neighborhood. Jeanne felt her face grow hot as she read stories drawn from her childhood that Peggy had appropriated and made her own. Then came a quote that blurred her eyes with tears:

  “My mother died when I was young, and my father traveled a great deal for work. I had no siblings, only a series of housekeepers to keep me company. So I lived in a world of my own creation, of paper dolls and make-believe.”

  In a single sentence, Peggy had written Jeanne out of existence.

  And what of Miss Parker’s personal life? Though a rising star on the Manhattan social scene, the never-married 28-year-old claims to be far too busy for romance. Rumors of suitors abound, which Peggy declined to address, with an infectious laugh. After all, the wise entrepreneur knows that many a legend has been built on a foundation of intrigue. But a source who wished not to be named confided that Miss Parker has been seen on the arm of a certain handsome widower, a surgeon who is well known for his generosity to many worthy causes.

  Peggy had wiped them all away—Thomas, Tommie, Thelma, and even her. It was as though she’d willed her life to become a canvas as blank as the sketchbooks into which she had once poured her heart.

  Thelma

  Thelma too had seen the article—Mrs. Slater brought it over. She’d been visiting her daughter and had seen the magazine on the coffee table.

  “It is Peggy, isn’t it?” she’d asked. Thelma had been frozen in shock, but as Mrs. Slater rattled on about fresh starts and God’s plan, she reclaimed her wits.

  “We’re really pleased for her, of course.” The words were bitter in her mouth. But she needed time to absorb this development, to reconcile it with her sense of betrayal and her anger, which had dimmed only slightly in the days since Peggy left.

  But Thelma hadn’t gotten where she was without the ability to take the long view, and she had a fine-tuned talent for choosing her moment. She smiled pleasantly and added, “But we were honoring her wish to keep mum about the new line. Peggy insisted on doing it her way, out of the shadow of her elder sister. It’s been hard for her, you know, with Jeanne having been such a beauty, so talented in school, and now such a success in business.”

  Mrs. Slater tutted. “No one deserves a fresh start more than that poor girl. And you too, of course, Thelma.”

  Mrs. Slater seemed sincere in her wishes. It was she upon whom Thelma had debuted the story that she and Jeanne had come up with to explain Peggy’s departure—and the fact that Tommie remained behind: nerves, she’d said, made worse by recurrent dreams of Thomas, dead in the war. The physicians had recommended rest, a less demanding routine.

  It was just that Thelma had never expected Peggy to succeed. She’d been certain that the job offer was merely Peggy’s desperate attempt to escape—her, Jeanne, the house, but most of all Tommie. Once she’d learned the truth about Tommie, Thelma had come to see Peggy’s mothering in a new and unflattering light. It was guilt, she was sure, that made her reject her only child. In Tommie’s face she must have seen a daily reminder of her infidelity, of the fact that she’d sent her husband to war—to his death—after squandering her virtue on another man.

  That night she stared at the magazine photograph of Peggy, memorizing every detail. The gossamer, spun-silk hair. The bright green dress. The rose gold earrings, which had once been hers, and which Thomas had given Peggy before leaving for the war.

  Inside Thelma new seeds of bitterness sprouted and began to grow. It wasn’t right that Peggy should thrive after what she’d done, and yet Manhattan seemed to have welcomed her with opened arms and celebrated her in its glittering center.

  But Thelma knew something that Peggy didn’t, not yet. No sin goes unpaid forever. The triumphs of youth eventually fade, and one is left to face the things one has done. The lucky have their children to comfort them, lovers to console them.

  But for most, aging brings clarity that is a cold comfort indeed.

  As the night grew late, Thelma tore the pages from the magazine and crumpled them, tossing them into the fireplace. Flames licked at their edges briefly before they went up in a blaze of orange, and Thelma bent close to feel the heat on her face.

  As she straightened, she felt a pain deep in her lower back, somewhere near her kidney. It was a new pain, dull rather than urgent; but Thelma knew that it was the price of her bitterness. She had declared vengeance, and she would have it—and then she would be made to pay.

  May 1951

  Jeanne

  “Tell me, please, precisely what Tommie has done to warrant this conversation,” Jeanne said tightly.

  She was seated in an uncomfortable hardback chair in Sister Eustace’s office. There were echoes of St. Katherine’s in the austere furnishings, the drafty tall ceilings; but Mount St. Agnes was also worlds away, just as Brunskill was worlds away from downtown Philadelphia, and
not just because Tommie’s fellow students often arrived in the company of nannies and servants. There were expectations of student and parent—or guardian, in her case—behavior here that Jeanne was still learning to navigate.

  “She refuses to focus in Sister John’s class.”

  “Her marks have fallen, then?”

  Sister Eustace’s mouth folded in on itself, a thin, disapproving line. “Her marks are superior. But if she applied herself, they could be exceptional. Instead, she does this.”

  Sister’s hands had been folded on an exercise book. Now she spun it around and opened it. On one page was dutifully copied a list of times tables, in Tommie’s familiar, lazy, slanting handwriting. On the other side was a drawing of a bird perched on a flowering branch. It was quite good, actually. Jeanne started to speak, but then Sister flipped a few pages forward to a drawing of a nun with a comically angry expression on her face, her open mouth featuring long, pointed teeth dripping with blood.

  Sister slapped down the open notebook and slid it across her desk.

  Jeanne sighed. Tommie, increasingly sullen and uncommunicative at home, had refused to talk about what she’d done to get in trouble. In fact, she rarely wanted to talk about anything at all, spending her afternoons by herself in her room or sitting at the kitchen table with her sketchpad. Jeanne had wondered if she should take Tommie to a doctor—a specialist of some sort—but a few discreet inquiries produced only a shockingly expensive psychoanalyst. It had been only a matter of months since she and Thelma had been struggling to find a way to pay the heating bill; wealth was still an untested tool, as unreliable as the weather, and it seemed irresponsible to spend it on something of such dubious merit.

  “I will speak to her about this. But you must admit, Tommie has talent, which if it were properly cultivated—” She pointed past Sister Eustace’s office doorway to the reception area, where a small Renoir sketch hung. It had been a gift from a wealthy alumna and was featured on every tour for prospective students. “Perhaps her work could hang here someday.”

  Sister hacked out a mirthless cough, showing her long yellow teeth, no doubt the ones that had inspired Tommie’s drawing. “I’m sure every parent wishes to find talent in her child, Miss Brink. But surely you recognize that suggestion is fantastical.”

  Jeanne bristled, but held her tongue. Was it her imagination, or did the old nun always put unnecessary emphasis on the word Miss, so as to underscore her unmarried status? And the unsubtle use of the word parent—which of course Jeanne was not? Still, Sister herself was the ultimate spinster, with her sham marriage to God. The church had lost its hold on Jeanne when she moved to the city, and Jeanne had stopped attending Mass, something else Sister probably held against her.

  “This has escalated beyond a problem that can be addressed with conversation. If Thomasina’s behavior does not improve, there will not be a place for her here at the Academy of Mount Saint Agnes.”

  Jeanne felt her fury rise, fury not just at Sister Eustace and her failure to understand what Tommie had been through, how much loss she had suffered—yes, perhaps she and Thelma and Peggy had not disciplined her adequately, perhaps they had allowed her to run free in a household of all women for too long, unfettered and unmolded—and how far she had traveled to come here. And her art! If only Jeanne could explain about Peggy, how at the same age she too had a head full of dreams and a pencil in her hand.

  Peggy had been pretty and brash, though, and people naturally excused her temperament, because her eyes were wide and blue, her blond hair fell naturally in perfect ringlets, her creamy soft skin was pink and chubby. Sister Eustace had obviously never been a beauty herself; but of course Jeanne could not appeal to her in that way. You ordinary girls, Jeanne longed to say. You had to work for everything, and now you want to hold it against those of us who didn’t.

  “I understand,” she said abruptly, standing and reaching for her handbag. “One more thing. I trust our donation to the Building Fund arrived?”

  Now it was Sister Eustace’s turn to look down uncomfortably at her desk. “Yes.”

  “It was for three hundred dollars, I believe.”

  “The check came from Charming Mills,” Sister Eustace said pointedly. “Our gratitude to the company will be expressed in the parish bulletin.”

  “The check,” Jeanne said tightly, leaning forward for emphasis, “was written by me. Charming Mills is my company. I am not married, as you know. Further donations will occur precisely the same way, at the pleasure of Charming Mills’s president. That person, it is my duty to remind you, is me.”

  Sister Eustace looked up at her defiantly then, her scowl filled with such hatred it nearly unsettled Jeanne. She hates me because of my power, Jeanne realized. She hates me because I dared to take it.

  Here in her drafty third-floor office in the brick building wedged into a not particularly fashionable block on Chestnut, Sister had risen as high as she could in the parish—and still she was despised by students, parents, and her fellow nuns; still her authority carried only as far as those she could bully. She’d made an error in thinking she could bully Jeanne. For a moment Jeanne almost felt sorry for her. Jeanne could manage the other parents’ censure by making large donations, ensuring Tommie’s gloves and veil were clean and pressed, and attending those events at which her presence—or absence—would be remarked upon. And she could, if necessary, manage Sister Eustace with a call to the diocese and the promise of a larger check, assuming Charming’s revenues continued as they were.

  Sister Eustace had no such choice. She’d already played all of her best cards, and they were a pitiful lot.

  With a mixture of pity and scorn, Jeanne nodded goodbye. But at the door, she couldn’t resist adding, “Who knows? Perhaps Tommie’s art will pay for her own children’s tuition one day, long after you’re gone.”

  July 1951

  Peggy

  “Peggy, darling . . . you’re a thousand miles away.”

  Peggy smiled reflexively and focused on the man seated next to her. He’d purchased a table at the ball, a fund-raiser for the new New York City Ballet—one of the best tables, right in front of the stage where the orchestra would play—and during the seemingly endless speeches, he’d been making little circles on her knee with his fingers. No one at the table knew; none of them would guess that Daniel Griffin, handsome surgeon tragically widowed when his wife suffered a terrible riding accident, would indulge in such illicit activities.

  She gave him a smile and patted his hand on her knee, and was saved from having to reply when the event’s chairman began his introduction and the spotlight followed Daniel up onto the stage. There he had to wait until the long list of accolades was over to make his own remarks, all while Peggy kept her face carefully composed.

  She had to tell him. Not tonight—tonight was for him, the crest of a wave of success he deserved to ride, a triumph over the dark days following his wife’s death. But soon. Before the next time Claudia, his daughter, visited from Vassar. Before the web Peggy found herself in drew itself so tightly around her that she could never escape.

  Daniel spoke briefly about his involvement in the arts and thanked the organizers for putting on a splendid event, earning applause at every pause. Peggy could feel the envious glances directed her way.

  “Fortune has smiled on me in recent months.” Daniel’s voice was one of his best features, Peggy decided as she listened, its rumbling timbre that she loved to feel against her skin when he held her after their lovemaking. It wasn’t just the women in the room who were drawn to Daniel, but the men as well; he had the rare gift of making other men feel greater in stature in his presence. He was generous in that regard, as in most. “As some of you know, I have been fortunate enough to have won the heart of a beautiful woman. I cannot imagine what she sees in me, because she captures the affections of everyone who meets her. Peggy Parker . . .”

  He held out his hand, inviting her to join him at the podium—and Peggy understood the gravit
y of her miscalculation. He wasn’t waiting for Claudia’s visit—wasn’t even waiting for the six-month mark. Why hadn’t she listened to Helen, who’d warned her that no man who’s been married can return for long to the bachelor life?

  An excited murmur filled the room. Next to her, the wife of the chief administrator at the hospital put her hand to her mouth in delight. “Oh, Peggy! Get up there!”

  She had no choice. She laid her napkin on her chair and smiled, smiled, smiled for all she was worth, and then she was moving toward the stage, only vaguely aware of her painfully high satin heels. She was walking up the stairs, she was accepting his hand, his kiss on her cheek—careful not to muss her makeup, always so considerate that way—and she was turning, looking out into the sea of faces, the thunderous applause.

  “As you know,” Daniel began, then had to wait until the applause died down. “As you know, Peggy is a success in her own right. Her line of women’s dresses is doing smashingly well here in New York.”

  Tri-state, Peggy mentally corrected him. Fyfe’s had grown to eleven stores in three states, something she was quite sure she had told him. And it wasn’t just dresses, of course.

  “So I’m hoping she might be able to carve out room in her busy life for this hopeful suitor,” Daniel said, reaching into his pocket for a small velvet box.

  Don’t kneel, Peggy frantically prayed. Please, for the love of God, don’t kneel . . . because suddenly she remembered Thomas, that freezing February night outside the courthouse, the thin platinum band with the diamond chips that he’d spent every cent of his savings to buy. The way he’d knelt right there on the icy pavement, grinning up at her with nothing but guileless love in his eyes.