The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (33 page)

"People could have gone to the nearby towns." George leaned forward, his face quick. "They could have gone out in the fields, looking. If they'd gone soon enough, they would have found her."

"And then what would they have done, George?" I said. I meant to sound coaxing. God knows what he heard.

"Bring her back and horsewhip her," he said.

"You wouldn't want to wait and hear what she has to say? She has a side here, too."

"No, she doesn't. A mother who leaves her children doesn't have a side. Even in the pictures, mothers don't walk off and leave their babies. No mother would do that. No natural one."

"If we're taking Hollywood for our example of how to live, we're in trouble," I said, a line that should have made him smile.

"Did they ever catch her?" he said, and Lisette shook her head.

"The little girls grew up without a mother," she said. "They didn't learn the things a mother would have taught them. They cooked and kept house like ranch hands. They came to town in overalls. They sawed off their hair once a year. People said they cut it so they wouldn't have to wash it."

"People didn't have to be ugly," I said. "They could see what was happening. They could have helped."

"The girls were living with family. We knew plenty of families whose mothers had passed on. They found a way to get on with things. Of course," she said, "this was worse."

"I'm surprised that you can bring yourself to tell the story."

Her face was a picture of mildness. "If you can't tell these things to family, who can you tell them to?"

"The newspapers," George said. "It might not be too late to find her."

"No one complained. A lot of time passed."

"If she just
saw
those babies she walked out on. If someone just showed her their picture, then maybe she'd do the right thing."

"And what is that?" I said.

"Jump off a bridge." Maybe he realized his voice was savage. Or maybe he realized he was staring plainly at Lisette's powdered face. He dropped his eyes, then glanced at me and at Aimée, nodding as if we had all just agreed to something. "Nell never told me this story."

"Nell never heard it," I said.

"I was just saying, when you came in," Lisette said.

"But you were laughing," George said.

"That was something else," Lisette said, smooth as water. Really, she was astounding. "An old story about the cat in the well. Everybody loves that one."

"That's funny?"

"If you know how to tell it right, it is," Lisette said.

"Back in Kansas, the cat's a real knee-slapper," I said. "When the cat first fell in, somebody probably felt bad, but stories change from one mouth to the next. Like this mother who ran off. Who knows what she endured? Leaving her children must have felt like ripping her own heart out." My voice broke, adding credibility. Adding more was my uncontrollably trembling mouth. "There were no options in Kansas. No opportunities. Maybe she ran off to start a new life that could give those girls things. Maybe she meant to send for them."

"She never did," Lisette said.

"Maybe she encountered setbacks! Maybe she was killed by an Indian! You didn't ask! You don't know!"

"Calm down, Nell," George said.

"You said that mother should be horsewhipped. Was that calm? There are sides to every story, and you won't even think about this one!"

Lisette raised a finger and tucked her hair behind her ear. Aimée hummed. Their averted gazes told me that I sounded like a lunatic.

"You're right," George said after a long hesitation. "There are sides to every story. What do you suppose is the father's side here? He didn't leave, did he?"

"No," Lisette said. I waited hungrily, but she said no more. It was not her job to feed my hunger.

"I'll bet he had an interesting observation or two." George put on a judicious expression that might have been genuine. "Your stories never have fellows in them."

"They do, though." Lisette ducked her chin and smiled in a way that would have made dimples, if she had had dimples. "Wait until I tell you the one about Morris Lundstrom and his sheep."

"Oh, how he loved that sheep," Aimée murmured. Mary giggled and I shook my head at Aimée.

"That's not a fellow, that's a clown. Tell me about a real man. A father. A mayor. Tell me about—I know, tell me about a beau." His face was much too foolishly bland, his hands slack in his lap, heavily posed. George should never attempt to act in front of professionals.

"What makes you think I would know anything about that?" Lisette said.

"Just a guess I've made." His voice was rough at the edge. We looked like a sweet scene, family ringed around the kitchen table. But George had to keep dampening his lips, and Lisette's face blazed from behind its powder. "All right, then. Tell me about Kansas. Tell me about the country."

"It's not all country. Topeka's a real city. They have electric lights."

"A girl could run away to Topeka," George said. "Some do. There are stores there. Shop girls."

"Like Nell used to be," he said.

"Sure," said Lisette smoothly. I could all but see her tucking that piece of information into her corset. "Everyone says that Mother could sell anything to anybody." In the confused pause that followed, she slowly amended, "Little Mother."

"You were a shoppie as far back as Kansas?" George said to me.

I shook my head, and Lisette cut in, "She had her own business. She made all kinds of money."

"Oh, I was a Vanderbilt," I said unsteadily.

"People still talk about your money. Every year kids dig holes around town, looking for it."

How easy it was to imagine the mop-headed urchins, caps askew, setting out with their spades and trowels. How charmingly dauntless they would appear until they tried to pry a blade into hardpan, when their grins would fade and their pluck give way to the sullen disappointment that was their birthright. Perhaps the urchins could get their hands on some TNT, not that explosives would find them any money.

"Well, Nell? Where did your money go? I'm ready to move to easy street," George said.

"Yes, Nell. Where did it go?" said Lisette.

"I was making dresses for gals in Nothing Much, Kansas. Just how much cash do you think they had?"

"They had a little. Women there still wear the dresses you sold them."

"They should stop."

"What else are they going to wear?" Lisette said. "Nobody else ever made them French seams."

"Good grief!" George said. "French seams. Does every girl in your family have thread running in her veins?"

"Nell was the only one, believe you me," Lisette said. "Nobody in Mercer County could make those kinds of clothes. She put points on a collar. Nobody else did that. Nobody else saw options the way Nell did."

The room thrummed with everything Lisette was on the brink of saying, and I, my heart galloping anyway, wondered if it was possible that women in Grant Station were still wearing those fussy dresses, designed by a child, a counted-out eight stitches to the inch. I had never meant the clothes to last so long.

"That's Nell," George said. "She sees things."

"And here she is, come to California, where everybody sees things," I said roughly. "A new movie every minute."

"Lucky for us," Lisette purred.

"For instance, there's a picture being made right now about opium girls," I said. I didn't know this as a certainty, but the odds were in my favor. "Maybe you can get a screen test for that."

"And people seeing me will think I'm a hophead?"

"People seeing you will think you're a star. You can trust people to know when you're playing a role."

"That's true," George said. "People like a girl who knows how to show herself."

"And that's why you like Nell?" Lisette said.

"A fellow's got to keep his options open," he said. I winked at Mary, pretending not to hear her father's bad pretense at casualness. I no longer feared that she might detect the unspoken messages in the room; there were too many of them, shouting so loudly that no one could hear anything anymore.

"OK," said Lisette. She spoke up smartly. "Let's go to Hollywood and get some options. Let's see what we can see."

It was as close to Vision as we were going to get. I closed my eyes and took it.

Dressed in a dark green wrapper and a red turban that made her look like a Chinese sage, Mrs. Abigail Hoyt did not appear angry when I introduced her to my sisters at Universal City's entrance—a flimsy guard post on an unshaded stretch of street. I had often met Mrs. Hoyt here before but never had been taken beyond the gate. Under other circumstances, I would have been excited.

"Can they run a sewing machine?" Mrs. Hoyt said, jabbing a new cigarette into her amber holder. "Of course," Lisette said.

Mrs. Hoyt assessed Lisette's purple dress with its slimming front seams, then Aimée's sunflower yellow hair, and finally Mary, her stockings tidy underneath the sharp pleats of her navy-blue skirt. "Perhaps I should assume that talent runs in Madame Annelle's family," Mrs. Hoyt said.

"Who?" Lisette said, then, "Oh! Back home we just called her Nell."

"What did they call you?" Mrs. Hoyt said.

"Get-out-here-I-need-some-help." Lisette smiled. "On bad days, they called me something less polite."

"You should do fine here." After showing the bored guard my name on his clipboard, Mrs. Hoyt led us a few steps down the sidewalk onto what looked like an ordinary city street—unadorned pavement backed by dull bungalows, the hasty look of a street that had been made the day before. The only interest came when a boy in a brown cap made his way past us down the macadam, his arms heaped with costumes. Tossed over his shoulder like a shawl trailed two yards of pink tassel fringe. Mary giggled, but Lisette stared hungrily, seeing nothing funny about a boy with pink fringe. Now that she was in Hollywood, she could remember what she had come to California for. Even George's charms could not compete with the mammoth dream of Hollywood. I felt one corner of my mouth tick up. Lisette had simply needed to get out of the house.

Gesturing at the boy, Mrs. Hoyt said, "There's some of what you'll be doing. I'll take you to the costume shop."

"What kind of picture will we be working on?" Lisette kept the boy in sight until he turned a corner. Aimée had not said a word, though her blinding smile was as good as anyone's conversation.

"A Western."

"With that fringe, I thought about a nightclub."

"It isn't necessary for you to think."

The West was wide in Hollywood, and Universal's Westerns had been doing good enough box office for the studio to make three of them a month. The assistant to the property manager had to drive all the way out to Bakersfield to get enough cowboy hats. I had sewn dozens of dancehall skirts, and in a moment of frustration, I had told Mrs. Hoyt I never wanted to see a ruffle again. "Ruffles aren't the worst," she said, showing me a blister on her finger. "Chaps are."

"I might could help design the costumes," Lisette said now. "If you want authenticity. I grew up with cowboys."

"Just do what Madame Annelle tells you."

"Naturally," Lisette said. "It's an honor. It's just—Nell hasn't been back there in a long time."

"On the set," Mrs. Hoyt said, "her name is Madame Annelle."

The pleasure that shot through me was intense enough to be embarrassing, and I studied my shoes while Lisette had the good sense to stop talking. "Coming through!" called a boy behind us. He was carrying a saddle.

"Get a horse," yelled a girl smoking on a corner.

"Thank you for letting us be here," Aimée said. Her voice was a small bell, her eyes bright behind their ring of kohl. Mrs. Hoyt paused and rested her hand on Aimée's arm.

"On your lunch break, you can take a walk. Maybe somebody will be making an outdoor scene you can watch." I had not known Mrs. Hoyt's voice could be so gentle and could not stop myself from sending her a smile of my own, although she was looking at my girls, not me.

We started walking again, slower now. Mary stayed politely beside me, holding my hand, as proper as a princess. My pride in her was like a trumpet flourish—her tidy ringlets, her clean gloves. No one could guess, looking at her mild face, that she had burst into the kitchen that morning screaming, "Hollywood! Hollywood!" and jumping like a monkey until her father had to swat her backside. Lisette had raised an eyebrow and I found myself saying, "Mary!" more sharply than I might have. She had been a model girl since, ignoring my several attempts to wink at her.

She was, in fact, far more restrained than her aunties, who gawked like hayseeds at—what? At nothing much. Though Universal City's main street was paved at the gate, most of its stumps of side roads and lanes were nothing but packed, whitish dirt, worn down by the shoes that polished it every day. White ground, dirt-colored buildings. How dull it all was! I squeezed Mary's hand, but she was more patient than I. It was Lisette who craned to see another boy, coming toward us with a typewriter.

The farther into the city we went, the more the street bustled. Boys in knickers and white shirts made their way from building to building, carrying hats, candles, saddlebags, lamps, spittoons, jodhpurs, armchairs, empty bottles, full bottles, armloads of preserved flowers. Two boys navigated the street wielding a sofa, followed by three more with a long deal table. A list fell out of the hip pocket of a boy who passed us with a rubber plant; Lisette bent to pick it up, but the boy snatched it back before she could look at it. "Studio property," he said. I thought she would be miffed, but she looked thrilled.

We weren't near any actual picture-making; we didn't see hoop skirts or horses or swinging saloon doors, and we certainly didn't see men with megaphones or girls in spangles. Mrs. Hoyt was taking us through Universal City's business district, hardly more interesting than what we might pass downtown on Spring Street. And yet the place felt strange, like a city street in a dream. Though this was a business district, there were no businesses. No vendors, no buskers or beggars, no window displays. Few windows. The gimcrack frame and stucco buildings, already shabby, presented a plain front to the street, and most of the windows we passed displayed the blank back of a window shade. The building fronts had no sign to indicate what went on inside, although some had cardboard tags tacked by the door: 121 on one, S. D
ESIGN
—M
R
. F
ILDEW
on the next. Universal City seethed with secrets, and the boys scuttling in and out of buildings were the bearers of more secrets. When a boy with a headful of blond curls blasted across the street from one unadorned door to another carrying the leg of a mannequin and a seat cushion, Aimée raised her arm as if she might stop him. "They're just trying things out," Mrs. Hoyt said to Aimée, a remark that answered nothing.