The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (29 page)

"You have our best interests at heart," Lisette said. "That's what folks back home always said. 'She loved those girls. That's why she left.' To tell you the truth, that never made much sense to me."

"True, though," I said. "Believe it." I was sorry the words were so tight. My firstborn and I stared at each other, her face mulish and mine, I supposed, equally so, returning her affection in exact measure. At that moment, I remembered the mornings I had hated her, the peerless product of that tiny house with its black walls, those clenched people, that wind set on scouring every object to featureless, huddled existence. The old shame sang in me as I remembered the mornings I had wished Lucille gone, vanished, never created or thought of. She, just a baby. Though she had never seemed like a baby.

"This is a nice house," Aimée said, aiming her bee-stung smile at the bedroom door.

"It's a small house," I said. "The three of us fill it right up."

"We might move to a big, new house!" said Mary. "We might move to the ocean!" Her voice rang in the air like a bell.

Lisette said, "We could help you. An extra pair of hands is helpful at a time like that." She paused, then drawled, "Next best thing to a barn-raisin'."

"By that time, you'll be starring in motion pictures," George said. "You won't even remember your older sister, the country mouse."

"An actress has to remember things," Lisette said. "If I'm called on to play a girl who's been wronged, I think about the girls back home carrying babies who didn't have fathers. Or I remember what a woman's face looked like when she watched her house burn right down to the ground."

"You make Kansas sound like a disastrous place," George said.

"Sister Nell must not have told you very much," she said. Again the bold glance from under the lowered eyelids, not more than a flicker.

Aimée said, "Lisette and I slept in Mamaw's room until Lisette turned thirteen, when Mamaw let us go out to the lean-to. Before that, we used to spend every summer sleeping outside. As soon as it started to get hot, we'd pull out quilts and sleep on the grass. Sometimes we were caught in the rain, but it was always fun. Good for the complexion, too."

Mary started to crawl her hands up the side of my skirt. "Mama?" she said. "Can I sleep outside?"

"Hush, sweetheart. It isn't safe." I wondered if my daughters were surprised to hear me call Mary "sweetheart," as people in Los Angeles did. I had startled to hear them call their grandmother "Mamaw," that country name. I wouldn't have let them use it.

"I don't know why you say that. People love to think that California is a center of crime and white slavery, but that's simply not true," Lisette said. "Any Angeleno can tell you that this is an upstanding community, and its values are those of the stoutest Americans." She caught me looking and shrugged. "There was an editorial in the
Times
"

"I'd guessed." Anyone who had ever seen a movie could imagine these rough girls with their short dresses arriving—when? this morning? a week ago?—at Arcade Station, veering away from the colored porters and keeping their eyes on patrol for movie stars. They would know better than to strike up conversations with strangers, because they didn't want to reveal themselves as rubes. Perhaps somebody else just off the train was already taking them for extras at Warner Brothers. So Lisette—Lucille, my daughter—would have put together her confidence and strode to the newsstand, buying the local paper and scanning the front-page stories about oil strikes and the electricity shortage until somebody passing by jostled her elbow. "Pardon me," she would have said. "I was engrossed." Then she would have looked at the stranger—eye to eye, she was that tall. Who was to say the stranger wasn't looking for a fresh face? She would have smiled, without any notion of how a smile could distort. Looking at her expression, I helplessly felt my heart open.

"Mama, I could sleep next to the house. It wouldn't be far. I could put my bed right under your window."

"The nights here are pleasant," said Aimée. "Not like Kansas, where it could be so sticky. I'll bet it was those nights that drove you away."

"Was it?" Lisette said, her voice so arch it seemed to curve back on itself. "I always wondered."

"All right," I said to Mary. "You can stay outside tonight, and your aunties will have your bed."

While Mary clapped and scampered, I gave her an old quilt and pillow to make up a little bed in the backyard, reminding her to avoid the ice plant, which stained everything. I hoped she did not hear the quiver in my voice. George disappeared while I pulled down Mary's narrow Murphy bed across the back of the living room and straightened the sheets and coverlet. From the porch, the girls hauled a battered black suitcase and an ancient carpetbag whose scraps of remaining brocade looked like bits of moss surfacing from a fog. The luggage filled most of the floor space around the bed, and I had to thread past Lisette to get out. Both of us drew back. "Tight quarters," I said.

"Aimée wants to reduce. Maybe this will help."

"Nobody used to want to reduce. Now everybody does," I said.

"Aimée needs help with things," Lisette said.

A fresh wave of unease broke over me; my teeth were practically chattering. "I'll leave you now to arrange your things," I said, and fled before she could respond.

Outside, George had helped Mary into her nightgown and was sitting Indian-style on the ground beside her, playing cat's cradle with some purple yarn Mary must have filched from my basket. She held up her cradle, a soft nest of tangles and dropped loops, when she saw me.

"Get under the quilt." I stroked her neck under the soft curls. "You'll catch a chill."

"It smells pretty out here. I want to sleep outside every night." Before I could ask what she and her father had been talking about, she said, "What's a complexion?"

"It's your face, baby. You don't need to worry. Grown-up ladies think about it."

"Are my aunties grown-up ladies?"

"What do you think?" George asked.

"They don't look like movie stars."

"You're just used to seeing Mary Pickford on the screen at the movie house," I said. "You might be surprised if she came into our living room."

"Maybe your aunties will bring Mary Pickford home with them. Then we'll all see." George pulled the quilt up more firmly around Mary's neck. He hadn't looked at me since I came outside.

Mary stretched her arms toward the pepper tree's pencil-shaped leaves rustling over her head like fringe. The knots of its roots must have been poking her spine, but a child never notices those things. "Why did my aunties come here?" she said.

"They are following their dream," George said.

"It looks like we're a part of it. I don't mind telling you, I'm surprised."

"What's the best dream you ever had?" I said to Mary.

"I had a dress. It was velvet, and it changed color. I cried when I woke up. I wish I could make it come back."

"I can make you a velvet dress," I said.

She wriggled fretfully. "It changed
color.
And when I wore it, I could fly."

"It's like your aunties' dream, after all," George said.

"I don't know about the flying," I said.

"Are you kidding? Their feet never touch the ground. They share that dream with half the people in California." The open window beside their bed was not ten feet away from us, and his voice would carry easily inside. I knew they were listening, and I hoped they appreciated that George was telling them the truth. Too many people had dreamed about Hollywood already. Hollywood was overbooked, jammed beyond capacity with people's dreams. Girls in Ohio or Kansas who dreamed of Hollywood were stepping on a lifeboat whose gunwales were already going under. If Lisette and Aimée had asked me, I would have told them to find another dream, one less crowded. And they should have asked me, the expert in the family. I'd been dreaming their whole lives.

"What will happen tomorrow?" Mary said, her eyelids already lowering. I watched her with dismay. Soon there would be nothing to stop George and me from having a conversation.

"We'll go downtown, to a movie studio," I said. "Won't that be fun?"

"Can I wear my good dress?"

"The streetcar is covered with cinders. You'd be filthy."

"What if I get discovered?" she said drowsily.

"You don't need to be discovered. Madame Annelle already makes all your clothes. There is no further glory to be reached," George said. Puzzled, Mary curled up tighter under the quilt. Her father and I kissed her good night, then took the back door into the kitchen, which was a horrifying sight. Blood and juice from the pig were spattered all around the cutting board and across the floor, and heaps of raw meat tottered in the sink. I waited for George to say something about an abattoir. Instead, we sat wordlessly at the table. His features had the steady, preoccupied look he wore when he was staring into a misfiring engine. The door into the living room was closed, so the girls could hear us only if they pressed their ears against the wall. I wouldn't put it past Lucille. Lisette.

"What are you thinking?" I said to George.

"I'm trying to understand what it means to have a wife who will be going to her job tomorrow morning. What does that make me? A househusband?"

"You made this happen, George. I was already going to say no to Mrs. Hoyt. You heard me say so. And then you changed the rules."

"What else were we going to do? They have to go somewhere, your sisters. They came asking for help."

"More or less."

"More," he said, and fell to studying the gruesome linoleum under our feet. "Let's see. I heard about the small farm. I heard about your mother's bad memory," he said.

"Not bad, exactly. She remembered things, but they were strange. You could never tell what she would come up with."

"I heard quite a bit about wind and rain. You're a regular almanac. But sisters? Not a word. They don't seem easy to forget, Nell."

I looked around the kitchen. At some point during the pig butchering, I had wiped off the top of the kitchen table, but the effort had been halfhearted, and the table probably would require lye. Between George and me stood the ghosts of Aimée and Lisette, whoever they were, almost solid. "They just never came up. Are you going to tell me that I know every single breath you ever took?" Good Lord, this was no way to talk to my husband, whom I loved.

He said, "How is a person supposed to guess which questions he should ask? Any unsolved murders behind you, Nell? Any embezzlements or suspicious fires?"

I said, "I don't know if you ever finished grade school. I don't know the name of the town closest to the farm where you grew up."

"Waynesburg. Where I also finished grade school."

"You've never suggested taking Mary to meet her grandparents. You never told me how you got from Waynesburg to California."

"It's not the same thing," he said tightly. But it was, of course. Meeting on the level playing field of California, our eyes fixed unswervingly on the future, we had rarely bothered to share stories from our pasts. We had not seen the need, when what lay before us glittered and beckoned. I could ask George now about any unsolved murders or fires that scarred his boyhood. But it wasn't George's past that had knocked on our door. And it wasn't George who might have a secret from me. One look at his face, flushed with high emotion but still as open as a boy's, made the idea laughable.

"Do you want to begin now?" I said, struggling to keep my voice low. "Is it time for us to tell each other our life stories?"

"Obviously, it's past time."

"Fine. Tell me a story, George. Tell me about the first time you fell in love," I said.

"How about parents? How about brothers and sisters?"

"That's not what I'm after," I said. "I'm ready for a love story. There must have been a girl before me." Later I would be horrified at my recklessness, but now I was angry, and curious.

George put on an angry smile of his own. "I should have told you this years ago. The first horse I ever rode was named Nell. Just like you. I liked riding her into town. She was a pretty thing. I only used spurs sometimes."

"Preparing you for your future," I said.

"She belonged to a neighbor. Orland Murray. Nobody liked Orland. He was tight and wouldn't help when folks were in trouble. 'I look after my own,' he always said. But my mother was the one to bring camphor cloths when his help got sick."

"Don't get sidetracked. This is your love story," I said.

"I know what I'm telling you," he said. "Orland let me ride Nell when I was little, not more than ten. I spent all kinds of time in his stable, grooming her as high as I could reach. He came in to watch me and said, 'You keep working like that, and you'll buy yourself a horse.'

"I went roaring home and told my folks that Orland was going to sell me his horse. When they started laughing, I stomped back out of the house and slept next to the barn."

"A lot of that going on lately," I said.

"From then on, I was over at Orland's place every chance I got. He loaned me a stepstool to help with grooming. I curried her for hours, brought her carrots. She started to look good. The first time he let me ride her to town, I was so proud you'd think I'd just been elected president. 'That isn't Orland Murray's old nag, is it?' people kept asking, and I was like to bust. Sitting on that horse, I had plans. We were going to go to Indianapolis. We were going to go out west."

"Like to bust," I murmured.

"I'm giving you what you wanted, Nell. While I was out planting or haying with my pa, I'd distract myself by figuring how much of the horse I had already paid for, with grooming and exercise. I calculated what I thought Orland would agree was a fair price. By the time I was sixteen, I figured, she'd be mine."

"Sixteen? How old was this horse?"

"Boys don't ask sensible questions when they're young and in love." He pulled over the saltshaker and rubbed it between his hands, its glass making a friendly clink against his wedding ring.

"One day I went over at my usual time and Nell wasn't in her stall. Orland never rode her. Nobody over there did. I tore into his house and asked his wife where Nell was. 'Sold,' she said. She didn't look up from her dishpan. She knew you don't do a boy that way. You don't fool him. You don't tell him one thing when you've been thinking about another all along."