by Sofia Grant
A man came into the foyer. He was dressed in a black suit, his hands folded.
“I’m Peggy Holliman,” she said, using the name that Thomas had given her so very long ago.
“Mrs. Holliman. I am very sorry for your loss. Your husband is at peace in the casket that your mother-in-law chose for him.”
“I’d like to be alone with him for a while, please,” she said, and the hitch in her voice must have been convincing, because he led her down the hall without another word, to what remained of the man she hadn’t deserved and could not keep.
Tommie
A lady in a big dress that smelled like onions woke her up. The other lady, the one she’d sat next to, was gone. Nearly everyone was gone. The train had stopped moving, and the lights had come on inside their car.
Tommie sat up and looked out the window. They were on a platform underground. She wondered hopefully if they were in New York City yet.
The lady leaning over her spoke again. “Dziecko?”
Tommie didn’t know what she was saying, but she seemed to want something. She repeated the same words again, but Tommie couldn’t understand. She had a funny way of talking, as though she had a piece of licorice in her mouth, but she smiled too, and didn’t seem angry.
“I’m looking for my mother,” Tommie explained. Then she suddenly realized that she wasn’t holding Mummer any longer. She looked frantically around, on the seats, underneath them, up and down the empty train car—but the doll was gone.
She started to cry. She was hungry and Mummer was gone and she wasn’t sure how to find her mother and she was afraid she had made a bad, bad mistake. Maybe Aunt Jeanne was terribly angry with her—maybe she wouldn’t even come looking for her. Maybe she would never see Aunt Jeanne again, or Grandma.
“Ah, chodź ze mną,” the woman exclaimed, and took her firmly by the hand. Tommie didn’t resist. The woman kept talking and led her toward the train’s exit.
They walked out on the platform and up some stairs, and through halls and corridors and more steps, up and down until Tommie was thoroughly confused. They arrived at another, narrower platform crowded with people, and when a train came hurtling into view, everyone pushed forward, Tommie and the woman along with them.
They got on this new train, the woman pushing her ahead, but all of the seats were taken. Tommie held on to a pole, burying her face in the woman’s heavy skirts, comforted by her steadying hand on her shoulder as the train rocked and jolted and picked up speed, only to screech to a stop moments later. People got off, but others got on; Peggy counted one, two . . . seven stops until at last the woman took her hand again and led her off the train.
Now they were up above a busy, crowded street. The woman smiled and prodded Tommie toward the stairs, down to the sidewalk. The men hurrying by wore heavy coats and sturdy boots; the women wore scarves around their heads and carried shopping bags and babies. All of them spoke like this woman, fast and confusing. Delicious smells poured from the buildings, both familiar and strange, and Tommie’s stomach growled so loud that the woman laughed. She said something that didn’t sound mad at all, and Tommie found herself hoping that the woman might give her something to eat.
After they had walked a block or two, they came to a building with stone steps like Aunt Jeanne’s, except not as nice. There was a dog on the landing with a boy who was trying to get him to sit, which made Tommie smile. The dog looked friendly, but she didn’t dare ask to pet it.
They walked inside the building and took the stairs up, up, up until Tommie’s legs hurt and her breath was ragged, and then the woman took a key from her purse and said something to Tommie. She seemed to be expecting an answer to her question, but Tommie had no idea what she had asked. The woman tutted and opened the door, and they walked into a warm room with a table in the center and old chairs and lamps and pictures cut from magazines for decorations. On the table was a cloth as pretty as anything Aunt Jeanne’s company ever made, with big flowers in red and pink and yellow.
The old woman called out, and an old man and two young men came into the room, and looked at her with surprise.
The woman put her hands on Tommie’s shoulders and pushed her gently forward and said something, and then everyone was talking at once.
Peggy
Peggy sat for a long time in the room with the gleaming casket. At one point she stood and bent over it, resting her face on its polished, cool surface. Her hair had come free of its scarf and Peggy hadn’t bothered to fix it. Someone looked in on her at one point; Peggy didn’t bother to acknowledge them.
Moments might have passed, or hours. She kept expecting Thelma to walk in, and she had no plan for that, other than to drink in this time as fully as she could and make sense of it later. The walls were well insulated; no sound came into the viewing chamber. The electric candles in the sconces on the walls flickered endlessly, casting their ersatz shadows on the wallpaper.
Peggy’s heart broke for her dear boy, for the joy and daring in him. It was wrong that he’d been left in the soil of another continent for so long, but war had no sympathy for the order of things, war took what it would. But now Peggy understood that what was in the casket was also not Thomas: that the essence of him had left his body and traveled like milkweed silk on the wind, wherever his spirit needed to go. Maybe he’d been with her, through everything she’d endured since then. Maybe he’d been there for the birth of his daughter—and yes, yes, in this quiet and sacred space Peggy finally understood that Tommie was his daughter, in the only ways that mattered—in the stories they would tell her and the love they would wrap around her.
Maybe, just maybe, he’d already forgiven her.
EVENTUALLY, WHEN NO one came, she left the mortuary and began walking the narrow stairs and sloping streets, rising above the commercial district into the stepped row houses that had housed a century’s worth of millworkers. She had planned to check into the hotel but instead she found herself back on Thelma’s street, exhausted, as night fell. She was ready to give up, ready to submit to Thelma’s fury, but she was also determined to be at the funeral tomorrow and if there was going to be a scene it might as well happen now, before the mourners gathered.
But no one was home; no lights were on in the house. After standing on the porch for a long time, Peggy finally took the spare key from under the mat and let herself inside.
She walked slowly through the house, turning on lamps, a flood of memories coming back to her, but everything was different. The old sofa had been replaced by a new bouclé couch, and there were other modern touches here and there. A new clock on the kitchen wall. A new electric kettle.
She didn’t dare go into Thelma’s room, but the room that had been hers was transformed: it was exactly as Peggy had first seen it, when Thomas brought her home so many years ago. The plaid blanket was made up neatly on the bed. On the shelf where she’d kept her perfume and her sketchbooks and pencils were Thomas’s trophies. Above them was a pennant for the University of Pennsylvania, where Thomas had once hoped to join the Quakers track team.
Peggy sat down on the bed, her hands resting on the soft, worn wool of the blanket. This bed had once been hers, but now she longed to envelop herself in the faint traces of Thomas that lingered.
She slipped off her shoes and pulled back the covers. It was just for a moment. She’d put it all back as it was before. She closed her eyes, and thought about the boy she’d loved.
A KNOCKING AT the front door woke her. It seemed like only moments had passed, but her mind was groggy and maybe she’d fallen asleep. Peggy bolted from the bed, mortified, tugging the covers into place so they wouldn’t know what she’d done.
But as she straightened the pillow it occurred to her that Thelma wouldn’t knock, not at her own house. She looked out the window into the night and saw a police car parked at the curb.
Her heart banged in her chest. Were they here for her? Had someone reported her breaking in? A panicked protest was on her lips as she hurried to the
door.
She opened the door and at first all she saw was the police officer, his shiny cap and smooth-shaven face and kind eyes.
And then she looked down and saw her daughter.
“Mama!” Tommie cried and threw her arms around Peggy. “I thought you’d be in New York. I was trying to get there.”
“This was the only address she could give us,” the policeman explained. “She said her grandmother lives here.”
Peggy fell to her knees and gathered Tommie into her arms and pressed her face into her hair and held her tight, unable to speak, her tears falling freely. And she wondered in the depths of her heart if Thomas had somehow had a hand in bringing her baby back to her.
Epilogue
August 1952
Jeanne
“You’re as nervous as a colt,” Anthony said, as Jeanne checked her hair in the mirror for the third time. “How about a drink?”
“I don’t think so, darling,” she said. “It’s silly, anyway. It’s just half a dozen people.”
“Half a dozen journalists, you mean. So you’re entitled to be a little bit excited.”
The buzzer sounded and Jeanne practically ran to answer it. The press conference wasn’t for another hour yet, and Frank was taking care of setting up the showroom for the photographers, but she wanted to be there to greet the reporters. Pauline Rehr was going to be there from the Times, and Anne Yardley from Women’s Wear Daily, and others whose bylines she’d known for years. Charming Mills was announcing its exclusive line for Perrodin today, the first of the European couture houses to feature American-made fabrics in a collection.
She threw open the door and was nearly knocked over by her niece. Peggy followed her daughter into the apartment, resplendent and shy in her pale pink suit and hat, a silvery feather curving down almost to her cheek.
Jeanne laughed. “Peggy! You look like a—a giant begonia!”
Anthony had come down the hall to greet Jeanne’s guests. “Hello, Miss Thomasina, how lovely you look today,” he said, bowing.
Tommie giggled like she always did. “You still talk funny,” she said, an ongoing joke between them, and barreled into the apartment. Jeanne had left her room unchanged since Tommie went to live with Peggy at Thelma’s house after Thelma’s death last fall, two months after Thomas’s funeral.
For now, Peggy had stepped into Thelma’s shoes and, with the help of an accountant they had hired, was learning to manage the books. Peggy Parker lived on, in the person of a fiery failed actress from California who had no design experience at all but who was brilliant at public appearances. But Peggy Holliman was content to live quietly on the money Thelma left her, working part-time and taking care of Tommie, learning the business that would someday be her daughter’s legacy.
“How are you, really, dear?” Peggy said, taking Jeanne’s hands as Anthony went off to sit on the floor of Tommie’s room and listen to her chatter.
“Good.” Jeanne drew a nervous breath. “I think. Anthony brought up marriage again.”
Peggy burst into laughter. “Most girls would be thrilled!”
“You turned down your last proposal,” Jeanne pointed out.
“Mmm. More like had it respectfully withdrawn. Can a girl get a drink, please?”
As they walked into the living room, Tommie’s shrieks of laughter echoing through the apartment, Jeanne let Peggy go ahead of her, so she could study her sister for a moment. Peggy was as lovely as ever, but there was a confidence about her that had never been there before. She talked about Tommie more than any other subject these days, and she’d actually called Jeanne in a panic last week to ask her how to get marshmallows out of the hair of one of Tommie’s friends.
Jeanne had no illusions that Peggy would ever be the sort of mother Thelma had wanted for her grandchild. But before she died, Thelma had given them both her blessing. “I thought I knew what was right for all of us,” she’d said, shortly before she slipped into a coma two days before her death. “I made so many mistakes.”
Peggy and Jeanne had both protested in the hushed voices they’d taken to using in her bedroom. Out in the living room, the day nurse was doing homework with Tommie.
“No,” Thelma had said. “Don’t. It’s all right. I just want to . . .” She paused for a moment as a wave of pain passed over her face. “I just want you girls to promise me that you won’t doubt yourselves. Just take what you deserve from life.”
It was the last time she’d been entirely coherent, and Jeanne knew that Peggy cherished the moment as much as she did, though they never spoke of it again.
Peggy had mixed them each a gin and soda. She handed Jeanne her drink and raised her own for a toast.
“To Charming?” she suggested with a smile.
“To us,” Jeanne replied, and they touched their glasses, the clink of crystal one of the loveliest sounds in the world, after the laughter of a child and the whisper of a lover and the hum of the treadle as the needle works its magic in the cloth.
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SOFIA GRANT has the heart of a homemaker, the curiosity of a cat, and the keen eye of a scout. She works from an urban aerie in Oakland, California.
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About the Book
Story Behind the Book
I REMEMBER the first time my mother told me to watch my sister while she ran into the store, leaving us in the backseat of the station wagon with our scornfully indifferent older brother. It is my first memory of taking up the mantle of “women’s work,” and I was more than ready, at seven, for the job.
Mom emerged from the fabric store with a card of buttons, and it’s these I remember even more than the dress they were intended for. The buttons were butterscotch yellow, smaller than dimes, smooth and slightly domed—and embedded in the plastic was the suggestion of a shimmering star, like a precious sapphire. You wanted to both admire and eat those buttons, they were that gorgeous.
They were to go down the back of the bodice of the dress, and I remember my mother’s hands—firm, impatient—on my shoulders as she lifted the pinned and basted garment over my head to check their placement. Her mouth was full of pins, so she tugged at me insistently to make me stand up straight. I would wear that dress until the cotton thinned and faded, the rickrack edging so hopelessly curled no iron could ever flatten it again, but that day, it was new and still smelled of sizing sizzled under the soleplate.
My mother was not one to share her inner life, and so sewing became a kind of language between us. I intuited that proof of her love for us could be found in the hours she spent hunched over her Singer. She made a shirt for my father early in their marriage, which—over fifty years later, after their divorce and her long illness and death and his remarriage—he still owns. She made a throw pillow (brown bouclé, appliquéd with an eagle) for my brother that graced his tiny basement bedroom, defiantly at odds with its shelves full of Star Trek books, his Dungeons and Dragons figurines. For my sister and me there were matching navy cotton ottoman sundresses with wide sailor collars; we wore them to a summer festival and the sun burned our shoulders.
I remember the things I sewed too, and in the remembering is the narrative of our relationship. Sewing was our language, and woven through the strict lessons (how many seams did I rip out until she was satisfied?) was the heady knowledge that Mom was conferring on me the tools of femininity. I was, if not yet a woman, at least an acolyte on the path to becoming one. Sewing, with apologies to my daughter and her peers, seemed firmly the realm of women and girls, and I was as eager to master it as I was to shave my legs or curl my hair into a Farrah Fawcett flip.
A
s the years ticked by, I sewed for economy. This will be incomprehensible to a generation reared on Forever 21 and H&M, but in the 1970s and early 80s it was still cheaper to sew a garment than to buy ready-made. I was broke, so I made my prom and high school graduation dresses; I made Bermuda shorts and sundresses during my preppy college days. The Izod alligator gave way to the Ralph Lauren pony, and I had a dorm-room cottage industry of embroidering faux logos onto polo shirts and sweaters. No one could tell the difference between my version and the real thing.
I graduated and got a job—a real job, far better than anything my mother could have hoped for. I met a man; I sewed black-tie gowns, bridesmaid gowns, my wedding gown. I sewed maternity clothes and baby clothes and doll clothes, curtains and slipcovers, baby quilts and school raffle quilts. The children grew, they left for school, their father and I divorced, and I was too sad to make much of anything for a while. I gave away my fabric stash, my patterns, my half-finished projects: let someone else take up the needle, for I needed to gird myself for my own second act.
But just as you’ll never get a blood stain out of cotton once you wash it in hot water, I never was able to quash forever the urge to pick up the spool and the thimble and a patch of cloth and go to work. Handwork calms; it’s better, sometimes, than speaking to a therapist. At forty-nine I was back to the basics, an overcast stitch and tiny knots bitten off with my teeth, finding solace in English paper piecing hundreds of tiny hexagons into . . . well, nothing. They’re still in a box somewhere, misplaced in my latest move, waiting to be made into a pillow or a throw.
