The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard

Books by Erin McGraw

BODIES AT SEA

LIES OF THE SAINTS

THE BABY TREE

THE GOOD LIFE

THE SEAMSTRESS OF
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD

H
OUGHTON
M
IFFLIN
C
OMPANY
B
OSTON
· N
EW
Y
ORK
2008

Copyright © 2008 by Erin McGraw

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003.

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGraw, Erin, date.
The seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard :
a novel / Erin McGraw.
p. cm.
ISBN
-13: 978-0-618-38628-4
ISBN
-10: 0-618-38628-9

1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Self-actualization
(Psychology)—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles,
Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3563.C3674S43 2008
813'.54—dc22 2007045904

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Printed in the United States of America

MP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Shout, for the Lord hath given you the city.

—Joshua 6:16, quoted by Aimee Semple McPherson
when she first glimpsed Los Angeles

Ad astra per aspera.

"To the stars through difficulty."

—Kansas state motto

To the memory of my grandmother
(Elizabeth?) Bessie Lorena Cates (King?) McGraw
b. 1887
d. 1983

And were not one behind to know
Whe'r her feet had trod so fast
Or where her eye had lingered.

I couldn't cook, but I could sew. It would have been better the other way around. Luelle Morrisey had a face like a mud hen's backside, but everybody in Mercer County knew she could make a good meal, even at the end of winter, when nothing was left in the root cellar but tired apples. Folks talked about Luelle's knack for food, and at church socials her pies were bid up past three dollars. "A good cook is good value," said Or-dell Rightsbaugh, one of three ranchers courting her. By the time I was nine years old, I could sew a straight seam, and at fifteen I could make a hem stitch that no one could see, but nobody assigns value to what he can't see.

I didn't have the right mind for putting meals on the table. Staring into the crusty frying pan and waiting for onions to color, I got bored. Hot and itchy, I would stroll out to lean on the garden fence and look at the dim horizon as if it might have changed in the last ten minutes. The flat dirt, gray-brown, folded into the flat sky, gray-white, and behind me the onions burned. At night Pa poked his fork at my stew, lumps of flour floating next to the shingles of black onion. "If we auctioned you, you wouldn't bring in as much as a mule," he said.

"More than chickens, though," I said.

"How many chickens?"

"A dozen, easy. I am good value," I said.

"For somebody who already ate," he said.

Meals would have gone better if he'd just let Mama or one of my sisters cook, but he had ideas about things, and Tuesdays were my cooking days. He thought I'd learn. My family and the hands, the years we had hands, learned to avoid dinner on Tuesdays. Me, I was skinny as a whip and could get through the daylight hours on an apple.

No matter what Pa would admit, I had my value. I could weigh a spool of thread in my hand and tell if it was rotten at the center. I could stitch a buttonhole in brand-new denim, and I could mend a tear so that it blended right into the cloth around it, invisible even in church when the eye needed something to rest on.

There were other values: I was good with people, unlike my shy sisters. When Ernold Brown, who had already put two wives in the ground, twitched and snuffled his way up to Nussine Potter after church service, I saw that he was fixing to marry again. I hiked all the way to his place with a bunch of coneflowers he could bring to Nussine. He gave me a nickel, the first coin I didn't have to drop in the collection plate, and I had sense enough not to tell Pa about it.

I was smart about Pa, too, and I could judge when he had drunk one glass of whiskey too many and was itching to hit something. My doughy sisters never learned to clear out of his path, but I could tell a beating was coming the same way that a person can smell rain. "That's bad-looking leather," he'd say, looking at a patched harness. "Cheap. Everything about it looks cheap." Then he'd raise his head and say, "It's not one thing worth a tinker's damn on this place." Or in this county, or in this state. The fury would sweep over him like storm clouds. Folks knew him as a joke teller, but he wasn't always amiable, and his jokes could turn rough in a hurry.

Even Mama, so dim she never seemed to recognize anything, said Pa and I were cut from the same pie. Like him, I was restless all the time, ants under my skin, and a day spent plowing would leave me fretful with wanting something I couldn't put a name to. The prairie's rough grass surrounded us like a belt that kept out soft fabrics, sweet-smelling pillows—anything that might ease a life. No wonder Pa drank. When I trudged out to the barn, my eyes cut over our paltry hundred-sixty acres of wheat the same way his did. Everyone around us was buying up acreage before land prices went up again—soon ours would be the smallest farm in the county. It didn't need to be so. Pa could have borrowed money to expand. For pity's sake, the bank was loaning money to the Pecks, who hadn't met a payment in five years. The manager would have loaned to us. But Pa looked out to the west toward what he didn't own, what nobody owned. He didn't want more of what he already had.

He was squinting at the fence line when I came up to him one afternoon. He had put his hat aside somewhere, and the back of his shirt bunched up out of his trousers. The man was careless, shedding things wherever he went—shoes and papers and tobacco. Mama spent her life picking up his litter. Myself, I would have let it lie.

"Feller dies and goes to the seat of judgment," he said, eyes trained on the blurred horizon. He didn't even look back to make sure it was me he was talking to. "Jesus says, 'You've got yourself a bad record. You've cheated, stolen, lied. You're going to have to go to hell.'

"Feller falls down at the feet of the Lord. He cries and begs for mercy. 'It's true that I didn't lead a good life, but I wasn't all evil. I cared for my mama and gave to the poor. I gave money to your church.'

"The Lord softens. All right,' he says. 'I'll take mercy on you. You can start again, homesteading in Kansas.'

"Feller stops crying, and looks up at the face of the Lord. 'Is that spot in hell still open?'"

"Dare you to tell it to the preacher," I said.

"Not everybody wants to hear the truth," he said.

"Preacher says only the Gospel is the truth."

"This is a different gospel," Pa said. "For those who have ears."

"Dare you to tell it to the visiting preacher. He's coming to dinner. Mama sent me out to fetch you."

"You're not cooking, are you?"

"It's Thursday," I said. My sister Mae's turn.

"Lucky for him."

"Mama wants you to wear your Sunday shirt."

"Bad as going to church," he said. "If I have to wear my Sunday shirt in my own house, maybe I
will
tell him my joke."

He didn't get a chance, though. Reverend Farley had jokes of his own: the one about the lamb and the peacock, the one about the squirrel who went to Bible camp, the one about the three ministers who went to heaven. After a while, we stopped forcing ourselves to laugh, since our laughter made no difference to the reverend. While Mae's good pot roast hardened in front of him, he planted an elbow on either side of the plate and said, "Man finds himself at the pearly gates. The Lord says, 'Son, it's your day of reckoning. You lived a bad life. You smoked, you drank, you didn't do right in business. There's only one place for you to go.'"

"We know this one," Pa said.

Reverend Farley didn't even pause. "The man says, 'Remember when I saved that widow? Remember when I ran into the burning house and snatched up the baby? Doesn't that count for something?'

"The Lord nods. 'You're right. Those things count for something. You can go to Wichita.'

"The man says, 'Remember that hundred dollars I stole?'"

Into the quiet around the table, Pa said, "We tell it different."

"I imagine so. Everybody loves this one in Texas."

Mama got up a smile and shook her head. "You're a regular theater."

"Do you come from Texas?" I said. Girls in Mercer County didn't talk at the table, and Pa's glance was sharp.

"I travel so much anymore, I'm not sure where I come from. I know where I'm going when the Lord tells me to hang up my spurs, though."

"You're not wearing spurs," Pa said.

"Where, Reverend?" said polite Mama.

"California. Heaven on earth."

"I don't imagine that's part of your circuit," said Pa.

"I was ailing for a time, and I went to Los Angeles to recover my health. I don't mind telling you, I'd go back, even if it meant falling sick again."

"What ailed you?" Pa said.

"Tell us about California," I said at the same time. I could see that my chatter was nettling Pa, but he wouldn't lay a hand on any of us before company.

Reverend Farley put on a sharp smile that didn't look right on a preacher. "If California is not the promised land, it's the closest we'll see in this life. To walk in an orange grove is to be in Eden. The air smells sweet and tangy at the same time, and the leaves shine, and the oranges all but push themselves into your hands. Have you ever eaten an orange?"

Pa said, "We see a few luxuries. We're not poor."

"Your mouth tingles, but the fruit is sweet and so quenching you imagine you'll never be thirsty again. The flowers are tiny, but they put out a powerful scent. And then you get to the end of the grove, and the next thing you see is the ocean crashing onto sand."

"Salty soil kills most plants," Pa said. "Guess your orange trees are different."

Reverend Farley made a brushing motion. "Maybe not exactly at the end of the grove. But close."

"What does it look like?" I said.

The reverend stopped talking, which amazed us all. He looked around the kitchen, eyes skidding over the freshly blacked cookstove and the magazine pictures Mama had put up on the walls, over the hard dirt floor and the pie safe with a weeping willow punched into its tin door. He picked up a white enamel pot lid with a blue rim and said, "Hold this close to your eyes." When I held it up, he said, "Closer," until the edge of the lid was practically in my eye. "What do you see?" he said.

"The blue is wobbly, and then there's white over it. That's all."

"That's close," he said. "Except it's beautiful."

"I like the land, myself," Mama said. "I like seeing where I stand. Would you care for some pie?"

I kept staring at the lid. What I saw, the blur of blue into white, wasn't beautiful, but I could imagine it turning beautiful. I probably looked like a pure fool, staring at a pot lid as if it were a magazine picture, but the minister had given me something that I didn't understand. There was nothing of Kansas in that blue line.

After Mae's dried-apple pie, Reverend Farley put down his fork and announced, "Now that was cause for thanksgiving," the first churchy thing he'd said since giving the blessing. I put on a pleasant expression, planning to think about oceans while he talked about salvation. Pa looked sour. But Reverend Farley kept unsettling us; he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a harmonica. The first song he played was "Amazing Grace," which we none of us sang well, and after that he started on a tune I'd never heard. Sweet and slow, it had a clean ache, and I studied the tablecloth so that no one would be able to see my wet eyes. Mama joined in, her low voice true.

Oh, Shenandoah
I long to hear you.
Look away
You rolling river.

She sang only when she felt moved; sometimes years would pass. But when she opened her mouth, we all hushed. Suddenly the air was rich, and so it became poor when she stopped.

"That's no church song," Pa said while the last note was still hovering.

"It can be," Reverend Farley said.

"How?" Pa said.

"It's about having to go away. It's not what you want to do, but it's what you have to do."

I said, "Why does somebody have to go away?"

"Me, I heard a Call," Reverend Farley said.

"What about somebody who's not a reverend?" I said.

"Nell," Mama said.

"What does a Call sound like?" I said, heedless as a chick. It wasn't Mama who would hurt me. She could barely lift her hand to beat biscuits.

Reverend Farley said, "Two Episcopalian ministers arrive at the same church, with the congregation there waiting. It's a big church, folks are well dressed, there are fine carriages outside. The first one says to the people in the church, 'I heard a Call. I don't know what the other fellow's doing here.'

"'I heard a Call, too,' says the second preacher.

"'What did yours say?'

"'Lo, I will make you a leader of nations.' What did yours say?'

"'No one ever lost money on hog futures.'"

"'Preach on!' cried the congregation."

Pa snorted. Myself, I had never seen an Episcopalian. I said, "I don't think anybody gets called to Kansas for money. Nobody's got any."

Reverend Farley said to Pa, "She's the spit of you, isn't she?"

"Her bad luck," Pa said.

Reverend Farley stayed in town for a week, but we didn't go to hear him preach past the first day, when everyone went. I didn't want to see any more of the man. He had left me feeling rumpled, and even if I wasn't fool enough to repeat the experiment with the pot lid, I couldn't forget the glimpse he had given me of a view that was light and rested on a color I'd never seen in nature.