The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (24 page)

"Sometimes it gets misplaced."

"You can't let that happen. We'll both be lost without it." He waited until I met his eyes and nodded uneasily. Not quite all of our talk about Mr. Mirliton's ladder was a joke to him. I hadn't realized that. It wasn't exactly a joke to me, either, but how could a serious person put faith in a ladder to success?

"You promise?" he said.

"I promise."

Not long after that, the United States entered the war. Men were shipped to France by the tens of thousands. Several of my clients were full of patriotic verve and requested that I attach tiny epaulettes to the shoulders of their coats—which I did, though they were hideous. Some weeks I brought home as much as forty dollars, and George called me his Helpmeet while I fussily arranged the bills in the cracker tin we kept in the kitchen. Next would come Consolidation. Mr. Mirliton's ladder had become one of the furnishings in our life, and every day I stood on the rung entitled Vision, straining to see a child. If I could just imagine it, Mr. Mirliton would have said, it would come. Mustering my will, I envisioned a whole baby, a healthy, roly-poly child—then watched, helpless, as it fell away from me, yet another thought I did not have the wherewithal to think.

On a heavy day in 1917, so hot that even the iron sewing machine seemed as if it would dimple if I pressed on it, I pushed back from my work to ease the ache in my neck. George and I had two thousand dollars now, an amount I carried in my mind like a rajah's jewel on a cushion. Every night George brought home another pamphlet; we could carpet Wilshire Boulevard with opportunities to change the face of the future by means of mowing machines, dog-walking devices, air coolers that promised to bring spring breezes even on the hottest day. Opportunities could be plucked as easily as low-hanging oranges—which trees, a dwarf variety, we could also invest in. All we had to do was choose. George enjoyed surveying the choices, and we squabbled happily about orange trees versus air coolers. He wanted to buy a house, a big one, and while I would have liked a workroom, I was afraid of the mortgage, a word I hadn't heard since Mercer County, where people weren't able to pay theirs. Sometimes now George paused at our rented house's front door, taking in the stacks of chiffon and charmeuse that spilled from the side table onto the chesterfield. Month by month, one seam allowance at a time, my work kept expanding. So far I had managed not to sew after nine o'clock, time rightfully devoted to my husband, but later nights were coming. Mrs. Hoyt had specific deadlines and would not take her place in a schedule as my clients did.

I was thinking about the neighborhood around the E. D. Goode home—those vast houses would have floor space enough for three workrooms—when nausea suddenly swept over me. I remained still for a moment, though the feeling was no pleasure and I should have been racing to the kitchen basin. My heart drummed, terrified and triumphant.

I waited a month to tell George. My body, I learned, had a profound memory, and when nausea racked my midsection, recollection stormed through my mind. Although every other wall in my marriage house had been covered with pictures of clothing and candelabras, pretty things, Jack had pasted a picture of a tractor over the bed. A joke. I remembered the single peony that bloomed one year. I remembered the dull black paint Jack's father had used for the wagon. I remembered the bowl my mother-in-law had given me to be sick in, so I wouldn't vomit off the porch. "Otherwise the chickens will be after it," she said. Cracked porcelain, with forget-me-nots.

I was sorry I could not share that memory with George. Right behind it streamed a hundred other memories I could not share—my terrible pregnant temper, the day Mama had appeared at the door with pudding for me, the way Jack had bellowed "Rock of Ages" to wake himself up on black mornings. Now that I was finally carrying a child, a miracle child, the old lies—not really lies, but stores of information kept back—shadowed everything I did. The night George came home shaking his head over his friend at work, who suspected the parentage of his third child, so blond after the first two swarthy ones, I shook my own head in sympathy and kept my eyes on my embroidery.

No one could match my knowledge about dissembling in marriage. My livelihood was made up of Los Angeles ladies who hid their expanding wardrobes from their husbands. From them I had become acquainted with the hiding places behind bureaus and in hat boxes, the receipts tucked into waistbands, the hushed payment plans. But I had always imagined that I would make a better marriage, this second time, than those silly women had done. My new marriage was built on respect. Now, bent and heaving over the basin, I considered whether my marriage was not in fact worse than those others. If George and I even had a marriage. Now less than ever could I tell him about Jack and less still about the baby torn from me. George had grown up on a farm. He knew all about babies harmed in delivery and about cows that never seemed to birth easily or right.

I was George's wife, not a cow he might trade away. But the fear was in me, and every time I tried to imagine a nearly grown Amelia, past her hard birth and now the queen of the barn dance, my imagination stumbled until I saw a deeper vision: a girl with vague eyes and a crude cap dancing alone on the hay-strewn dirt. Let Mr. Mirliton build on that, I thought. I turned my mind to the child I carried, whom I did not imagine as a baby at all, but as a star shining in my womb. I felt illuminated, and if thinking of my baby as a star was as silly as thinking of myself as a cow, at least it was more pleasant.

I waited until an afternoon that the nausea gurgled away early. Soon would come the days of heroic stamina, when I would paint every room in the house, then black the stove after lunch. For now, drained and mildly exultant, I put away the billows of sprigged muslin I'd been struggling to subdue all day, fetched two of George's home brews from the backyard cellar, and waited in the living room for my Helpmeet.

Before I could tell him anything, he pulled me into his lap and softly worked locks of hair loose from my low bun. "Nell-bell, down she fell, came back up with a cockleshell. I heard about an opportunity. What is it you want more than anything else in the world?"

"If you don't know by now, Mr. Curran, I will not waste my breath in telling you."

"What does Los Angeles have that no other city can offer?"

"Vision," I said promptly.

"Almost. A view," he said. "People come here for the oranges, but they stay for the ocean."

"Are you offering to take me to the sea?"

He held up a pamphlet, and I could see the watercolor depiction—the long blue line of ocean, and a skinny finger of a pier extending from the beige shoreline. "Exciting new investment potential!" he said. "Investors must act soon! Lots are selling from beneath our feet!"

"It might be a fine idea," I said.

"True. We could combine it with an investment in air-cooling systems and manufacture the most pleasant air in America."

"We'll want healthful air. It's important for a child."

He let a fierce moment pass. I saw the doubt hover around his mouth and the frustration that his Vision had not let him name. Then his face cracked open. "George Junior?" he said, and I said, "Thaddeus," a name that always made him laugh.

For the rest of the evening, we tried out new names on each other—Eglantine, Marsippus, Bosco. George brought more beer up from the cellar and the naming grew more hilarious. Hippolitta. Rufus. He proposed Gerania, and I doubled over. He drew himself up in mock dignity, a posture we had by then named Thaddeus. "My mother was called Gerania."

"And you didn't tell me until now? Unfair. You knew I'd think twice about marrying into Gerania."

"What was your mother's name? You Kansans must have a few to write home about. Little Custer? Custerina?"

"My mother was named Zephyr," I said. "My father, too. Everybody in Kansas is named Zephyr. It's a windy state."

George picked up my hand and squeezed it. "Zephyr Curran. It's got zip."

"California Zephyr," I said. The beer was getting to me. "It's the wind that blows only good fortune."

"California Zephyr Curran," said my husband, a little crocked himself. "The wind that brought good fortune to us."

The next morning both my head and stomach were in uproar, the real-estate pamphlet left to collect dust somewhere under the chesterfield. I lay across the bed with a damp cloth over my forehead when George tiptoed out, pausing only to whisper, "You two rest, now." Just like that, a baby had entered the house.

I had told George at the right time. Although I couldn't have been more than three months along, within days my condition became apparent. In the bath, I glanced away from my navel protruding like a tiny thumb, and the bold line of dark hair like an arrow. The new signs made me shy. Many years had passed since I'd carried a child; it seemed greedy for my body to announce this one so soon.

At first, dressing for fittings with customers, I hid my figure in long, straight sweaters, but I soon stopped. Wealthy matrons liked seeing their employees appear in the family way, especially since that was a state that most of them were managing to avoid for themselves. Vast families, the children ringed like a litter of puppies around their proud parents, had become old-fashioned. Even Mrs. Butler, a battleship of a woman who deplored bobbed hair and cigarette-smoking girls, had embraced the ideal of the new, slim family. Unselfconsciously, she introduced me to her one child, Rupert, with spots on his face and a damp mouth hung slightly open. "This is my treasure," she said.

"So I see," I said.

"A single child can be brought up properly," she said, smiling at her spotty boy while I measured her bodice. "I don't care for children running all over the house, one leading to the next. It's so vulgar." She dropped her voice. "It suggests a lack of discipline."

"Madame will have to wear a corset," I said, pulling the tape measure taut. Mrs. Butler did not hold with the current loose fashion, and I was constructing for her a dress that had led the fashion world in 1906. "The waist is very unforgiving."

"Darling, go out to play now," Mrs. Butler said to her son. She waited until he was out of earshot before she said, "And then there is the birth itself. I do not mean to frighten you. Not every mother is the same. I was quite delicate."

"Perhaps if I bring you some magazines? The new styles can be exquisite on a figure of your depth," I said.

"It was two months before I could walk again," Mrs. Butler said.

I acted the scene out later for George, and he said two months' confinement was not enough punishment for naming a baby Rupert.

I could laugh as long as he was nearby, but the closer our baby's birth approached, the more loudly did Mrs. Butler's words echo. My powers of concentration were failing me. I could not quite evade thoughts of the baby birthed by force and the fever that followed, the pain that took months to ebb. As a result, George was surprised when, doubled over with the first cramp, I wept. He had not seen me cry before. "Babies are born every day," he said. "Don't cry, Nell-bell. You'll see. Everything will be fine."

For two days, I sweated and tossed on the bed, terrified that I would start to babble. I jammed the end of the sheet into my mouth and pulled it out only when George, his face drained of color, announced that he was going to the pharmacy, where there was a telephone, to call a doctor.

"No doctor," I croaked.

"This is too long. A doctor will help you."

"It is not help, what they do."

"You don't even know what you're saying."

"I'm saying no. No doctor in this room." I strived to sound fierce. George smiled at me and thumbed my toe, which hurt like every other part.

"This is no time for modesty, Nell." He left the room, though I moaned.

Only later did I hear the story: George rushing to the pharmacy and shouting like a hapless burlesque comedian, "My wife is having a baby!" and the pharmacist placing the phone call while his wife, her hair pinned in old-country braids over her head, scolded George. "You thought a first baby comes,
poof
? You have done nothing?"

By the time he returned with the doctor, a man whose long beard could not have been sanitary, I was holding Mary. She was a tidbit, not even as big as a self-respecting doll, and George blinked at the wrinkled umbilical cord snaking up her belly, wider than her finger. She could squall, though, and the sound filled the house. I could not stop stroking the sides of her perfect, perfectly round head. Hot from delivery and streaked with blood, Mary's skin was as fine as flower petals.

George traced her matted bit of hair and whistled. "Let's take her out. Show her the town," he said.

"Perhaps not just yet." I made my voice sound a little more wan than I felt, but not so very much.

"You might as well go. You've done everything else for yourself," said the doctor, lifting her from my arms. George's laugh was hearty and delighted, and although it hurt to do so, I laughed with him.

Her hands were as tiny as seashells, her flushed skin the precise color of the roses that lolled on the windowsill. Her laugh—she laughed often, even as a newborn—was a ripple of silk. She had George's wide eyes and dimples, and her curls were just the size to fit around a finger like a ring. I was her slave.

Feeling my heart grow huge, I remembered the reverend's wife's advice to wait one year to love a child. What stupendously silly advice. What impossible advice. If I could have given Mary a second's pleasure by lying down on the streetcar track when the Red Car was bearing down, I would have run outside with my pillow. Waking or sleeping, my thoughts moved toward my baby like water running downhill. I held her for hours, sought out reasons to touch that petal skin, and patrolled every room in the house for carelessly placed saucers that might fall, needles that might scratch—anything that might smirch my perfect child.

Everything about a new baby is a wonder. The wavering hand, its fingernails as fine as paper, the foot like a rosebud, the warm smell of milk and powder—a hundred times a day, I felt my heart brim over. From one moment to the next, the world is remade, made larger, because a meaning exists that was not there before.