The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (32 page)

"I never saw you hit," I said unsteadily.

"And if you did, would you have stayed? Or taken us with you?"

Lisette put down her cigarette. Aimée stopped stirring. "Of course I would," I said.

The girls were still laughing when George arrived home, showily tucking a handkerchief into his vest pocket. "What's so funny?" he said.

Shoulders shaking, Lisette held up her hands mutely: it was all too much to explain. She dabbed at her eye and said, "Girl talk."

"Let a guy in," George said. "Fellows always want to know what girls talk about when we're not around."

"You think we talk about you, don't you?" Lisette said. "A boy can hope."

She recrossed her legs. "I thought you knew. Girls from coast to coast are talking about George."

"What are they saying?" he said, grinning toothily. Mary should not see this, I thought, although I did not move.

"You kissed the girls and made them cry. Bad Georgie."

"Naw," he said. "I would have remembered if anybody cried."

"That reminds me," Lisette said. "Jack told me to remember him to Nell."

A peculiar roaring rose in my ears. No one else in the room seemed to hear anything. Mary stretched out her finger to touch the slim line of perspiration that appeared on my neck. My stomach was violent. I hoped I would not have to run from the room.

"Who's Jack?" George said.

"Cousin," I said.

"Should I tell Jack that you remember him?" Lisette said.

What should I have said? I was drowning. To see Lisette's eyes just before the waters close overhead is a merciless fate. "Yes," I said. Lisette smiled. "Do you want some more coffee?" I said.

"You bet," she said.

"How about something with a little more nip?" George said.

"You better." She flipped her hair, and it slammed back into place.

When George returned with beers from the backyard shed, she shared more information from the home place. Jack, she said, had added a room when she and Aimée were too big to sleep in a cradle, and he encouraged them to spend time with their Mamaw. "Mamaw's the one taught me how to make gravy," Aimée said. "I could show you."

"Your mamaw? Why didn't your mother teach you to cook?" George said.

Lisette said, "Come suppertime, our mother wasn't around. Bad as Nell. Mamaw used to call us poor motherless waifs."

Polite George didn't press her, but in bed that night he asked me, "Did something happen to your mother? From the way Lisette talked, it seemed like there was an accident."

"I don't know," I said into the pillow.

"You must want to know. She's your mother, too."

"No one told me. I was gone, and no one told me."

"Aren't you going to ask?"

"I'm looking for an opportunity. You don't just up and ask somebody something like that."

I remained still until he must have thought I was asleep. He waited a long time before saying very softly, "Your own mother. She might need you." I did not turn or answer him. He did not say it again.

The next morning, after the sound of George's engine had faded around the corner, I hurried to the living room, my mouth spilling over with questions I had had all night to practice. Did Jack remarry after I went? Was Mama still airy, and did Pa still take a drink? Had my mother-in-law kept her flowered rug? The cousins, the houses, the people, the cows. Twenty years of banked curiosity was topping over the dam. Lisette and Aimée would need days to tell me everything.

But as soon as George was gone, Lisette lost her inclination to talk about Kansas. That morning and the next, she reread her tattered
Photoplays.
She mentioned a distributor named Nicholas Schenck who was going to start a new studio. He was already very big in New York.

"This will make less difference than you think," I said.

"I thought you wanted us to get started in pictures."

"I do."

"Knowledge is always useful. The right name at the right time can open doors."

"It's just—" Did Lisette imagine she was the only girl with a nickel to buy a magazine and read about Nicolas Schenck? If he announced an audition, a thousand girls would arrive.

And Lisette would be number one thousand and one. "You're right. It can't hurt to know things," I finished lamely.

"If we're going to work in the movies, we need new clothes." She tapped the picture before her: the bank of flowers, the running board, the glaring smile.

I looked over her shoulder. "I think you need to have a few movies under your belt before you can expect to wear fur."

"They say that if you want to be successful, you have to look successful. Success is made by what people see. George says you could make new clothes in no time. He says that you're a wizard at the sewing machine."

"When did George say that?"

"You don't need to hear every conversation in this house, Nell." Lisette yawned. "You could also make a new dress for Mary. She would like that."

As if Lisette had the least use for Mary. She ignored the girl whenever she could, introduced topics Mary could not follow, interrupted her. When Mary came streaming into the house from the backyard, her hands full of nosegays she had made from the geraniums and ivy that overran the yard, Lisette left hers on the arm of the chesterfield and plucked, with great finicky show, a petal from her skirt. She, who would wear toast crumbs all day.

"How kind of you to think about Mary," I said.

"She's not my lookout."

"She's just a little girl."

"I'm not her mother. That's the role you're supposed to play."

In anger—if what she was feeling could be called anger—Li-sette's face turned stony. At first I thought
ugly,
but she didn't look ugly. She looked monumental. Whoever created her had a lot to answer for.

"You have a harsh mouth," I said.

"That's what Pa said. He said I was just like you."

Helplessly, as I watched my daughter gaze out the window in a show of indifference, I saw young Nell, with her harsh mouth. I saw that hard girl's impatience and undistractable gaze. Lucille and Amelia had been distractions. They should never have been given to the girl that I had been.

Lisette looked ready to sit on the couch indefinitely, gazing into a garden that neither George nor I tended. She was like me but even better than me—cooler, more impenetrable, a glossy, modern thing. She would have an easier time than I of putting her past away, and unlike mine, hers would stay away.

"I can make you a basic wardrobe," I said. "What color do you like?"

"Let Madame Annelle decide. They say no one has a better eye."

I chose purple. Left to herself, she would have chosen worse.

I needed only two days. When my energy started to flag, I thought first of Lisette turning her head away when Mary came to give her a good-night kiss, and then of Aimée playing hide-and-go-seek all afternoon, finally entering the kitchen with disheveled hair and jubilant Mary on her shoulders. Remembering their braided laughter kept me up the second night edging the seam of Aimée's skirt with good velvet piping.

In the end, I presented Lisette and Aimée each with two dresses, a cloak, a skirt, and a bathing costume. "Now we're ready for the ocean," Aimée said, her face alight.

"Every starlet needs to be ready to be a bathing beauty," I said.

"I wouldn't have used such heavy cloth," said Lisette. "Can you shorten the skirt?"

"It will fit." I had hemmed the skirt so that it skimmed Li-sette's knee, a becoming line, no matter what she thought. Ladies all over Los Angeles paid high sums to have Madame Annelle decree the length of their skirts. "Pretend it was just sent over from the wardrobe department."

They tried on every item, and then they tried on each other's. Lucille was a good model, instinctively shifting her weight to show off the cloak's contrasting lining. My mother-in-law's voice flew back to me:
You're raising that girl to be a clothes horse.

"What's wrong?" Aimée said.

"Eyelash in your eye?" Lisette said.

They were parading around the living room in their high heels and their bathing costumes when George opened the door and stopped, his hand at his heart. "Oh, baby! I am the luckiest fella in America."

"Smooth-talkin' daddy," Lisette said, sitting down and crossing her legs. She had rolled her stockings to midcalf, and the spread of milky, dimpled flesh made me gasp, although I saw worse going downtown every day.

George said, "If you wear that on the set, you'll be starring in your own one-reeler tomorrow."

"I'll remember that," she said. She picked up a magazine as if she might decide to read an article. A cat, licking its paw.

"George is right," I said. "Now that you have some new clothes, it's time for you to go to Hollywood."

"Hooray!" said Aimée.

"Hollywood will still be there next week," Lisette said, scanning the magazine as if she might find something unexpected in it. "We don't want to rush."

George laughed. "Well then, you're unlike every other girl who steps off a train in Los Angeles."

Lisette took her time. She finished scanning the page before her, then looked up as if surprised to see us. "That's right. I'm unlike every other girl who steps off a train here."

"Oh, baby," he said again. There was nothing wrong with his words. It was his voice that was wrong, suddenly hoarse, and his eyes that had narrowed until they excluded everything but the girl on the chesterfield with the white, white legs.

I said, "Mary, do you want to go to Hollywood tomorrow with your aunties and see the movie stars?" I should have been ashamed of myself. I
was
ashamed of myself. But at least when George heard his daughter's name, he dropped his spotlight gaze from the languid girl he thought was his sister-in-law. Mary, pent up, twirled around the chair, then ran to each of us to bestow a kiss, quick as a butterfly.

Lisette watched her a moment in the room's sweet pleasure before saying, "You're too young and you don't know how to behave. You shouldn't leave the house."

Mary stopped dancing. Her lip quivered; otherwise she was still. I could see her thinking through Lisette's words and lazily mean tone, which Mary had never heard before. I knew she did not want me to touch her, though her eyes glistened and her cheeks were hot red. Since her aunties had arrived, she had told me daily that she was not a baby anymore. I said to Lisette, "For a gal with no children, you have a lot of opinions."

"I saw every baby in Grant Station grow up. Nothing is more troublesome than a spoiled child."

"Spoiled children volunteer opinions when they are not requested," I said. Had the others not been there, I would have slapped Lisette, daughter or not. A mother needed to teach her children respect. "And they presume that people should do things for them."

"This would be a good scene, Nell," Lisette said. "Somebody ought to make a movie about you."

George said, "You're okey-dokey, aren't you, Mary? Monkey girl?" She shook her head, and when he tried to gather her in his arms, she remained stiff. She was not about to tell him she was okey-dokey, no matter how much he wanted to make everything hunky-dory with Auntie Lisette of the flour-white thighs. I was furiously proud of my little girl.

"Mary and I are going to Hollywood tomorrow," I said. "Anybody else can come who cares to get dressed in the morning."

Aimée smiled and scooped Mary up to nuzzle her soft neck. After a moment, my little girl produced a watery smile and then a small, careful laugh. Its caution made my heart hurt, and I wished that Aimée had come to California by herself. I would have talked her out of her trinket of a name and taught her about refinement. Unlike Lisette—which was to say, unlike me—she would have made the work easy.

"I don't see the need for a rush," George was saying. "I thought you'd want some time to catch up. It's been so long."

"You're at work all day, when we talk about things," I said. "Kansas takes less catching up than you think."

"Sister Nell still thinks our idea of fun is a hay ride," Lisette said.

"What's a hay ride, Auntie Lisette?" said Mary stiffly.

"Yes, Auntie Lisette," George said. "What do the sheiks and shebas back in Topeka think is the bee's knees?"

"Don't know much, do you?" Lisette said.

"He knows everything he needs to know," I said.

"So tell me a story from the home place. Give it some heart," George said. I wondered how much beer he had drunk. Maybe he was thinking about Nell, his horse. A boy young and in love.

Lisette said, "Here's a story. Everybody was buzzing about it back home. A mother with two little daughters deserted them. Just up and left. No one saw it coming. People thought she was a good woman, but she walked out of the house before dawn and caught the train out of town without leaving a word. The first girl was old enough to walk, but the little one was a babe in arms, not even weaned."

"Their mother ran away?" George said. His smile had vanished, and he glanced with slight worry at Mary. I did the same, although I knew it would have been better to pretend nothing was wrong. There was no predicting what Lisette might say.
Nell, it was Nell
... The roaring in my ears was back.

"Can you imagine? Those little babies woke up, wailing to break your heart. And no mother there to hear them. They could have been left on a mountaintop. No one more to look after them than the animals."

"There must have been something wrong," George said. "Something wrong with that woman."

"Tiny babies," Lisette said. Her eyes widened with unshed tears. "What can babies that age do to run their mother off?"

"A woman who does that is sick," he said. "And criminal."

"Is it a crime, to up and leave?" she said. "Is it a crime, or just—just very, very sad?"

"It should be a crime, if it isn't," George said. Now his voice held tears, too. Me, I was dry as a stone. "But she couldn't have gotten far," he said. "Somebody must have caught up with her."

"She stole away before it was even light," Lisette said. "She had everything planned. Nobody saw her leave—in Grant Station! People there can tell you when other folks sneeze and when the handkerchief gets washed. This woman vanished like a cloud. No one knew where she went. It was like she'd never been there. Except that she left behind two babies, of course."