The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (26 page)

So I was unprepared for the day that Mrs. Hoyt called me to her desk at the studio lot and met me there with a small man I had not seen before. Like many movie people, he had an immigrant's air, both commanding and uncomfortable, and as Mrs. Hoyt spoke to me, I understood that the man's English was not firmly moored. I was finding it hard to listen to her; the man—Mr. Laemmle's assistant—had a leer, and I had not been leered at in a long time. She had to say her piece to me twice before I comprehended it and then floated home on glittering air.

From my sewing pile, I picked up a dress I'd been working on—row after row of feathery pink fringe that would shimmer like a flock of birds—and put it on. Coming home just when I finished hooking it, George whistled and ran his hand down my back. "Careful," I said. "The bodice is still pinned."

"Who is it for?"

"Mrs. Owens Perry. Mrs. Los Angeles Automobile Association, Mrs. First Bank of Pasadena, and Mrs. Central Valley Golf Club."

"She's not going to like you wearing her dress," George said.

I shimmied. So did the fringe. The dress would properly suit a young woman, but Mrs. Owens Perry had been specific about her desires. She was hardly the only mutton among my clients these days who wished to be dressed as lamb. "She's not going to know. Let's go out. Just you and me."

"You are leading me astray."

"I'm doing my best. I would be obliged if you would give me a little help."

"And what will our daughter say, when she sees her mother dressed up in someone else's clothes?"

"Our daughter is next door, where Mrs. Finn is looking after her for the evening." Ignoring his dark look, I made a shooing motion. "Go, now. We don't have all night."

Just the day before, Mrs. Owens Perry had been telling me about the importance of keeping romance in a marriage—"Especially these days," she said, her voice dripping with dark meaning. We had been talking about fast girls whose skirts rose so high you could see their garters, if the girls were old-fashioned enough to wear garters. So I adjusted Mrs. Owens Perry's dress, using the straight pins along the seam to fit it snugly to my bony chest.

"Oh, you kid!" George said when he reappeared, face clean and hair combed. "You are too bright, baby, to keep in the house."

"Oooh. Squeeze me, daddy." I wiggled to feel my fringe skitter, and he rocked back, his thumbs locked in his belt loops. "You been drinking, Nell?"

"Not yet."

"Good," he said. "Give me a chance to catch up with you."

We changed streetcars twice to get to the Casbah, a nightclub whose name had been surfacing in gossip columns: Clara Bow had been seen there, her laughter "outshouting the band." Mrs. Owens Perry's dress twitched when I stepped onto the curb. I checked the line of straight pins at the seam to make sure the dress wouldn't get away from me, then hurried, flapper-style, to catch up with my fella.

Behind the bolted outer door and the leather-padded inner one that a Negro silently opened for us stood a purple velvet tent, big enough to fill the whole space. A jazz band glistened on the stage, and the gay crowd flung itself from one end of the tent to the other like the dancers at an old-fashioned racket, only more feverish. Brilliant girls and slick, sweaty men bumped into each other and screeched with laughter, dancing as if they were working something out from under their skin, and some frantic part of me rose to meet them. The waiter, who wore a fez, asked for my order, and I said, "Tea."

"What kind of tea?"

"Clear tea," I said. "From across the border. No milk, no sugar."

"You've come to the right place. That's the kind we've got."

The room's excitement boiled through me, so when my husband leaned across the table and said, "We are overdue for this," I grinned.

"Is it too late for us to become jazz babies?"

"Yes," he said. "We need to set our sights elsewhere."

"Where, for instance?" The band was playing "Gotta Getta Girl," and it was not easy to hear George over the clarinets' screech. At the teacup-sized table beside us, a flapper—a blur of fringe and beads and tapping feet—craned toward a burly businessman. I wondered if I looked like her. I hoped so.

"Calenga Beach."

"Never heard of it."

"You will."

The clarinet player had danced to the front of the tiny stage and now cocked his head back, holding a note so high it carried me to the ends of my nerves, and the crowd bunched around the stage to shout encouragement. The room was hot. My headband slipped, a few pins scraped my waist, and handsome George smiled at me. "It had better be close," I said. "Starting next week, Mary and I will be taking the streetcar to Hollywood every day." In fact, I would be going past Hollywood to Universal City, but we didn't need to split hairs.

"I think it's time for you to go to Hollywood a little less. In fact, I don't think you ever need to go there anymore." George reached into his jacket and extracted a pamphlet.
WELCOME TO THE NEW RIVIERA!
Beneath the headline sat a watercolor illustration of a turquoise bay rimmed by white houses with red tile roofs. Anyone could see that it was far from Hollywood's luncheonettes spilling onto the sidewalks and tangle of trolley tracks at every corner.
Continental living is waiting at your very doorstep!
announced the pamphlet.
Experience healthful ocean breezes and a view to rival the great resorts of Cannes and Nice, France!

"Swanky," I said.

"There have already been oil strikes in Torrance and Long Beach. I've been out there and seen them gushing; they'll be producing for years. These are strikes in people's backyards, Nell. Here at Calenga Beach, if you buy the house, you buy the oil rights. For a thousand-dollar investment, you might be a tycoon." His face blazed. "It's a chance worth taking. It's time."

"You're right. It is time. George—"

"It's everything we've been waiting for. We'll be sitting on our own fortune. House and investment, all in one."

Nervy with the argument hovering just behind our words, I stared at the illustration and thought of the Sunday afternoons George and Mary and I had taken the streetcar to the boardwalk. Mary loved the ocean. Pelting across the sand, she would spin herself dizzy, then plump down and stream sand through her fingers while the waves shattered and gulls screamed and armies of cats screamed back at them.

That ocean, the one I knew, looked nothing like George's pamphlet. At our ocean, unshaven men in canvas trousers fished for mackerel from the pier, and girls in bathing costumes paraded past us, smiling with all their teeth in case we were talent scouts. Mary, who loved pretty girls, always waved at them. When we came home, I rubbed her skirt and came up with a lapful of salt.

The pamphlet's illustration showed only the blue of a broad bay, but it took no effort to see the bright beach umbrellas, the starchy white of a steamship passing by, perhaps a cabana or two. From that, it was the merest bit of effort to see also the spacious houses that would soon be built. Bright white stucco walls, hillsides cascading in flowers. The landscape would burst with health and prosperity. Anyone who'd ever seen a movie could predict exactly how it would be.

"It's beautiful," I allowed, and tried to wipe my face of cunning. "It looks like a place movie people would go."

"It's too far from Hollywood. This is what I'm telling you."

"Vacation spots," I said. "Weekend retreats. We could go there to get away from the hustle-bustle."

"If you think we can buy a house as a weekend getaway, then you've been smoking the same thing as Pola Negri."

"I'm not smoking anything," I said unhappily. I could not see how much gin remained in George's teacup. There was very little in mine. The Casbah was getting hotter as more couples edged in, many of them making for the dance floor still carrying their wraps and handbags, boys tucking flasks into their big flannel pockets. People sitting near the dance floor dabbed at sweat flung from girls doing the Charleston as if their lives depended on it.

"Two bedrooms. Our own walls and windows. Why am I having to convince you about this?" George said.

"It isn't exactly a neighborhood. Mary might not have any playmates there." I don't know why I bothered. We glared at each other like two bulls.

"With these possibilities, it will be a neighborhood before the year is out. She'll have more playmates than she knows what to do with. The Douglas Fairbankses will come over from Universal City."

"They're with United Artists," I said stupidly. I might as well have waved a red cape. Before he could speak, I blundered on. "George, I have some news."

His head shot up, his mouth already soft, and I was flooded with remorse. He had long ago stopped asking about another child, but anyone could see his hope and Vision, just as anyone could plainly hear all the things he had kept himself, all these years, from saying. Before he could allow joy to build, I said harshly, "I've been promoted. I'm a costumer. Mrs. Hoyt called me in today."

His soft mouth became a line. "Haven't you been busy."

"This is good news."

"Did you think I would be happy?"

"It's Clarification of Vision," I said recklessly, and reached across the table for his hand, as yielding as an ingot. "George, sweetheart, you've earned this. You've put up with all the mess and the threads everywhere and the late nights. Now they're going to stop. Our home will be just a home now."

"Will it, Mrs. Curran? Madame Annelle?"

"I will work from a room at the studio. And I'll get to spend time designing clothes, not just bringing home piecework like—"

"—a seamstress," George said tonelessly. He had already signaled one waiter. Now he signaled another. "And this will mean that you get a raise?"

"Yes. I'll be paid by the studio, not by Mrs. Hoyt."

"You will have a career."

"This is not bad news, George." I had meant for the words to be gentle, but I lost control of them as they shot out of my mouth, and his face grew tighter still, his cheeks skinned back to the bone. He stood up and hoisted his teacup, and two waiters veered toward us with pitchers in hand.

"And what will I tell Mary?" he said. "'I'm sorry, sweetheart—your mama can't help you get dressed. She is in Hollywood, working on her career. She is the seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard.'"

"Don't be ridiculous. Of course I'll be home for her."

"How do you plan to do that? Employees are expected to be in the office. I don't imagine Douglas Fairbanks is going to understand when you arrive at ten o'clock in the morning because you had trouble getting Mary to eat her breakfast cereal."

My teacup was empty. That surprised me. "He
isn't
at Universal. And Mrs. Hoyt knows Mary. She has watched Mary grow up. She gave Mary a parasol, in case you don't remember. She will not expect me in the studio until nine o'clock. I can bring Mary with me and help her read while I work, or Mrs. Finn can look after her. This position—it's a compliment. Mrs. Hoyt is making special arrangements so she can have me designing costumes." My eyes were as hot as cinders, and I was shaking so hard that my pink fringe blurred. "No one has ever heard of such a thing. She told me that."

"And you're flattered."

"You should be, too."

"No one has ever done this."

"No."

"A mother who's a businesslady! I'll remind Mary of that when she asks where her mama is. I guess I'll be the one to look after her. Or do you expect our daughter to keep herself occupied in the house? Perhaps have dinner on the table when you get home, worn out from your long day at work?"

"She's nearly ready to start school." Tears were crowding the edge of my voice. I was humiliated that I had not given more weight to these practical issues when I had stood, dazzled, in Mrs. Hoyt's office. A good mother, even a reasonable one, would have seen what George was seeing. Instead, I had seen the sketchbook Mrs. Hoyt held out to me and heard talk about a new full-length Western. Velvet might simulate buckskin but was costly. "You'll need to think about budget now," Mrs. Hoyt had said. "That will be new to you."

I picked up George's brochure again. "How much do they want?"

"Two thousand dollars for a plot and oil rights."

"And then to build?"

"A thousand dollars for five rooms."

"It would wipe us out, and we'd still have a mortgage."

"For God's sake, Nell, we're not giving the money away. We would have our own house."

"And no margin. What would happen if the Ford gave out? Or we needed a doctor? We're used to having cash on hand."

"And you don't think I can provide it?"

"I know what we're used to."

Just then a girl in a green spangled cloche crashed onto George's lap, where she lay giggling. "I'm spifflicated."

"That ain't news," he said. "You want to be my sugar daddy?"

"Yes. But my berries are spoken for."

She kissed him on the forehead and bounced back onto the dance floor. I said, "Berries?"

"For all the time you spend with Hollywood people, you don't know much. Voot. Jack. Scratch. That stuff you're so goddamn proud of bringing home."

"I haven't noticed you refusing to deposit it."

Onstage the trumpet blatted; the band was terrible. A floor lamp in the corner toppled when a fellow lost his balance and kicked out its leg. George and I sipped from our teacups, full again—when had that happened?—and did not look at each other. Under our table, George's knee knocked mine. I said, "If I try to dance in this dress, it will come apart." Pins had already started to drop.

He said, "Who said anything about dancing? It's time to go home."

"The party is just beginning."

"I've had as much of a party as I can stand."

We didn't speak again until we met Mrs. Finn on her doorstep and thanked her for looking after Mary. In our bedroom, where earlier I had imagined George taking out my straight pins with his teeth, we undressed with our backs to each other, then fell silently onto the bed. By grasping the edges, we could avoid touching.

Both of us were hung over in the morning, but I found the strength to tell Mary that we would go to the ocean that weekend. Her cheer blasted across my parched brain, obliterating every other thought.