The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (31 page)

The more fool me, for believing pipe dreams. George and I had our nerve, mocking my daughters, those rough Kansas diamonds. They knew what it cost to believe in something.

When I was a girl, a poor family—the Jacksons—had lived in a slough. Swampy land, it took runoff from three different directions, and Potter Jackson spent as much time reinforcing his damp sod walls as trying to plough his sorry swale. The kitchen floor was always muddy. When the sinkhole opened and the house tipped in, no one was surprised, not even Potter. We all went out to see the place where a house had used to be. Potter had grabbed the table as it went, and its leg, whitened from standing in moisture for so long, came off in his hand. There was nothing to say. He wouldn't have paid for the land if he'd known, but his tardy understanding changed nothing. The fault had been there all along.

From one moment to the next, the disaster that cannot be forestalled. The tornado, the sinkhole. The child born, as I had read about in the
Examiner,
with its heart outside its body. The family desolate, homeless, childless, asking "Why why why?" until the word has no meaning. Too bad for them, to learn so late that the word never had meaning. I supposed it best that I not think of my daughters as sinkholes.

My last chance to claim them as daughters had come when I sat at the kitchen table with George. I had seen the moment, recognized it, and watched it pass. It had been a choice, and like every other choice I had made, it brought me to this point, where those two big girls held my fate in their hands. They held my fate, as I had once held theirs, and they owed me nothing.

As soon as the sun cleared the horizon, I bolted out of bed and waited in the kitchen. Maybe my daughters would profess to be amazed that I had learned to cook an egg. They must have been raised on stories about my bad cooking, such a reliable source of hilarity. Maybe they would choose to share those stories with me and with George. Maybe they would remember to call me their sister. Maybe Aimée would innocently slip. Maybe Lisette, not so innocently. By the time they got up, I had boiled every egg in the icebox.

Through that first breakfast, while squeals came at the appearance of orange juice and requisite jokes were made when I let the toast burn, my ears were full of thundering blood, my mouth dry as if it were full of sand. I could barely lift my eyes to look at the girls, though when I did, the view was innocent enough: George in his suspenders, the two girls stuffed into their wrappers, and Mary having to be reminded to drink down her milk, all of it. This was the beginning, I thought. After the girls asked directions to the shops and then drifted out of the kitchen so that I could wash their plates and cups, I commenced to worry about the next meal.

When they were out, I feared what would happen when they returned. When they sat beside me, their rose cologne wreathing the room, I feared what they might say.
Didn't you know that Nell .
.
.
My anxiety kept me from hearing the words I meant to listen for; I would look up and realize that a conversation had drifted a mile away from where I had noted it last. I felt like a deep-sea diver in his enormous suit, the cold weight squeezing me as I descended. Up on the surface, Lisette was in charge of the tube that allowed me to breathe. Often, I found that I could not.

To an outsider, our life in those days must have looked full of new pep. Lisette explained to me one morning while she stubbed out a series of cigarettes on her egg plate that she and Aimée were jazz babies. They hummed new tunes and walked around the living room with their wrappers above the knee, their rolled stockings below. Their makeup teetered in stacks around the bathroom sink, their magazines slithered in piles across the living room, and Lisette's Hollywood heels drove divots into the wood floor.

Mary followed them like a puppy. She stroked the cheap, shiny cotton of their shifts and said, "Look at how it shines, Mama!" Lisette would suffer her attentions for a moment before pushing her away, but Aimée would pull Mary into her lap and tickle her until the girl's giggles sailed out the windows. Mary was crushing Aimée's dress, but with its horrible cotton and droopy hem, a few wrinkles didn't matter.

At those moments, the terror that whistled through me calmed, and I remembered how Kansas had occasionally smelled glorious in the spring, when the wind ebbed and the budding air, sweet with new grass, rose around us. It had been enough to make even Pa tilt his head back and grin. On our arms and faces the sunlight spread like honey. "Feel that!" somebody would say. "That's new life, right there!" Then the wind would start again, driving everything before it.

In the evenings, when I heard George's Ford rattling down the street toward home, I jumped to my feet. I ran out to greet him, raced back to the house, then scurried between kitchen and living room until he told me for Pete's sake to get off my dogs. So much energy screeched through me that I could have flipped from a trapeze. Nor was I the only one pulsing with new blood: the second my husband entered the room, I could see the eagerness that lit his face. "Where are my dolls?" he would pretend to bellow, scooping up Mary and looking for Lisette or Aimée to give a chaste, brotherly peck.

Sweet George, good-hearted George, infuriating George. Now that he had gotten past his shock at the girls' existence, he was delighted to find himself ringed with layers of family he hadn't suspected. And he didn't need to tell me that he had no objection to coming home, every night, to a house where jazz babies lolled on his chesterfield with their cigarettes and their magazines. They brightened when they saw him, too.

They had stopped talking about Hollywood, which redoubled my intent to get them there. I knew what it took to distract girls from the idea of lights and cameras; they needed to see other fellows, in snappier shoes. The Monday after the girls arrived, I went to the Rexall and contacted Mrs. Hoyt by telephone, the first time I had used one. I told her that my sisters had arrived, good seamstresses, useful. I employed the word
emergency,
which did not seem wrong. Her voice taut over the crackling line, Mrs. Hoyt reminded me that movies had timetables. Just when did I plan to begin? Panic made my voice sound strange as I promised Mrs. Hoyt we would arrive at the studio soon.

My steps dragged as I walked home from the drugstore where I had made the call. In the living room, Lisette and Aimée were beached on the chesterfield, their usual spot. Did they think Hollywood would find them there?

I picked up a copy of
Photoplay
from the floor and loudly read that Clara Bow was challenging Mary Pickford as America's sweetheart. "It will never happen," said Lisette. Beside her sat two used cups and a napkin, and at her feet more magazines, dog-eared. She might have already read them on the train, but as Aimée said, you could find more in an article if you read it twice. From the end of her foot dangled a slipper. She hadn't put on street shoes all day.

"Why not?" I said. "She works hard. She's made three pictures this year already. America loves a girl with pep."

"What Clara Bow has is more than pep. And America loves it, all right. But nobody's going to call her a sweetheart."

"But you love Clara Bow!" Aimée said, looking at her sister uncertainly.

For a sizable girl, Lisette had an uncanny ability to look like a cat. She yawned, then purred. "I had the impression that a gal like Clara Bow would not be welcome in a nice family with a young girl. Was I wrong?"

"No," I said, and then, "Take your feet off the chesterfield, please," and then, "I have some news for you."

"Swell," she said.

Clearly, she would prefer that I leave her to memorize the
Photoplay.
I sat down. Mary bounced onto my lap, still clutching her pencil and the paper on which she was practicing her letters. So far, she had a pageful of
M
s. Tucking her to me, I said to Lisette and Aimée, "I made arrangements with the studio. We'll be going in soon."

"Will we be meeting a director?" said Lisette.

"You'll be in the sewing shop. There is only so much I can do."

"We really don't have time to waste."

"I know that," I said. I listened to the scratch of Mary's pencil; she was getting silly now, making loopy, nonsense squiggles. I put my hand over Mary's and redirected the pencil to its line. "
M
," I whispered.

Lisette turned the page of her magazine. "You're Mrs. Abigail Hoyt's right-hand gal. Every single day you visit sets with famous men who can make a girl's career"—she snapped her fingers—"like that."

"I don't—"

"Or maybe you don't want us near the famous men. Maybe you don't want us telling stories. There are plenty of people who would be interested." She reached for her handbag and fished out a battered cigarette.

Mary said, "I like stories."

"Do you want a story, child?" Lisette said.

"Mary," I said. "Manners."

Lisette cocked her head and studied Mary, as people often did. Her prettiness was unaffected, a rare thing in a city where half the people on the street seemed to be auditioning for an invisible cameraman. "She wouldn't last a minute on the plains," Lisette said.

"Why not?" said Mary. This was fresh. I frowned at her.

"Little girls there know how to do things. They can milk cows and tend whole gardens."

"We could make a garden," Mary said to me.

"A Kansas girl would have done it already. By herself," said Lisette. "Kansas girls don't need their mamas for every little thing."

Mary pondered the row of
M
s staggering before her. I said, "Mary can sew better than any girl her age. And read. She knows how to conduct herself in the world."

"Mae's littlest daughter was raising a calf when we left," Lisette said. "Sturdy thing. Bluebonnet."

"Was that the calf's name or the girl's?" I said.

"Did you learn to be nasty when you came to California?" she said.

"Nope. I learned it on the home place, where you learned to be nasty to six-year-old girls," I said. This was no way to talk to my daughter, but I had another daughter to protect. Later, when Mary was safely asleep, I would contemplate the harm I had allowed to come to Lucille.

"Your little girl seems to have survived my assault all right," Lisette said. Not bothering to listen to the adult talk, Mary was drawing an elaborate, round flower. I was pleased by her unclouded face, even though she had the right to cry, and I was half inclined to remind her of that.

"You're in California now," I said to Lisette. "Folks don't talk to each other like field hands."

"How do they talk? Give me the scoop, Nell. The home folks want to know every jot and tittle."

"Did you tell people in Grant Station where you were going?" Sweet God, there could have been a sendoff at the train station. Balloons. A band. A banner bidding farewell to Lisette and Aimée, the flowers of Mercer County, and hello, Nell, gone but not forgotten.

"What do you think?" Lisette said.

The sheer number of questions crowding into my mouth made it impossible to ask any of them. Calves, children: How many? How old? And Mae herself, and Viola? And Pa and Mama? And Jack, about whom I could not even form a single question?

"Who's Mae?" Mary asked.

"She's family, like you," Lisette said. "I'm surprised your mother hasn't told you about her."

Mary twisted on my lap. "Mama? Is she little?"

"I guess you'd better ask your Auntie Lisette."

"Her clothes aren't as nice as yours," Lisette said appraisingly, taking in Mary's sailor collar. God help me, I felt a sting of pride. "But she's a good hand with horses."

"She could drive the tractor before she was nine!" Aimée said. "People dropped by to watch."

"I've never seen a tractor," Mary said fretfully.

"Little thing perched up there. Folks said she looked like a flea on a bull," Lisette said. "Cute."

"That little girl has never ridden a streetcar or an elevator," I said to Mary. "She hasn't been to the ocean, like you have. Everybody learns different things."

"I could teach her how to ride an elevator," Mary said. "It isn't hard."

"I don't expect she'll be coming out here," I said.

"They'd stop her at the state line because of her clothes," Aimée said, laughing. "The last time we saw her, she was wearing overalls."

"You could make her new clothes, Nell," Lisette said.

"Her and everybody else who takes a notion to come to California." I meant to sound light, though I know I did not.

"We made our own dresses," Lisette said. "Not that we weren't offered other ones along the way."

Mary turned a questioning face to me, and I shook my head. No, I would not explain. She sighed and kicked the leg of my chair, but didn't complain. My good girl, she knew that adults had their own talk.

Still, when Aimée shuddered and said, "Mr. Prescott!" I said, "Little pitchers" and put the pencil back in Mary's hand. Naturally, she let it fall again. She could tell when talk was getting interesting.

"Mr. Ryan," Lisette said.

"Mrs. Ryan," they chorused.

"That boy," Aimée said. "The one"—she glanced at me and paused a minute to arrange her words—"that asked you to show him something he'd never seen."

"He would only allow that his name was Ford, but I bet it was Buford. His brother was named Cletus."

Mary giggled at that. "Cletus," I whispered to make her giggle again.

Aimée said, "Lisette kept telling him to come closer, come closer. He walked clear across a field before she pulled out some string and showed him a cat's cradle. Good thing she was quick to duck. He swung at her so hard he fell right down."

"Gave you time to get away," Lisette said, and Aimée nodded placidly. "I got away, too," Lisette said. "Pa trained me right."

"Your pa?" I said. "Jack? He raised a hand to you?"

Lisette took the time to inhale and release a soft mouthful of smoke. "O, the scandal," she finally said. "O, the disgrace of it all. What do you think, that Mamaw took to her bed after you left and we never raised our heads in town again? Where do you think we grew up, Nell?"