City of Girls

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Years later, I found out that Jim Larsen had won the Distinguished Service Cross for extreme valor and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force. He eventually settled in New Mexico, married a wealthy woman, and served in the state senate. So much for my father saying he would never be a leader.

  Good for Jim.

  We both turned out fine in the end.

  See that, Angela? Wars are not necessarily bad for everyone.

  TWENTY-THREE

  After Jim left, I became the recipient of much sympathy from my family and neighbors. They all assumed I was heartbroken to have lost my fiancé. I hadn’t earned their sympathy, but of course I took it anyway. It was better than condemnation and suspicion. It was certainly better than trying to explain anything.

  My father was furious that Jim Larsen had abandoned both his hematite mine and his daughter (in that order of fury, without a doubt). My mother was mildly disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting married in April, after all, but she looked as though she would survive the blow. She had other things to do that weekend, she told me. April is a big time for horse shows in upstate New York.

  As for me, I felt as though I had just woken from a drugged slumber. Now my only desire was to find something interesting to do with myself. I gave the briefest consideration to asking my parents if I could return to college, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to get out of Clinton, though. I knew I couldn’t go back to New York City, having burned all my bridges, but I also knew that there were other cities to be considered. Philadelphia and Boston were rumored to be nice; maybe I could settle in one of those places.

  I had just enough sense to realize that if I wanted to move, I would need money, so I got my sewing machine out of its crate at last and set up shop as a seamstress in our guest bedroom. I let word spread that I was now available for custom tailoring and alterations. Soon I had plenty to do. Wedding season was coming again. People needed dresses, but that need brought problems—namely, fabric shortages. You couldn’t get good lace and silk anymore from France, and moreover it was considered unpatriotic to spend a good deal of money on such a wild luxury as a wedding gown. So I used the scavenging skills I’d honed at the Lily Playhouse to create works of beauty out of precious little.

  One of my friends from childhood—a bright girl named Madeleine—was getting married in late May. Her family had fallen on hard times since her father’s coronary the year before. She couldn’t have afforded a good dress in peacetime, much less now. So we scoured her family’s attic together, and I constructed Madeleine the most romantic concoction you ever saw—made from both of her grandmothers’ old wedding gowns, disassembled and put back together in a brand-new arrangement, with a long, antique lace train and everything. It was not an easy dress to make (the old silk was so fragile, I had to handle it like nitroglycerine), but it worked.

  Madeleine was so grateful, she named me as her maid of honor. For the occasion of her wedding, I sewed myself a snazzy little kelly green suit with a peplum jacket, using some raw silk I’d inherited from my grandmother and had stored under my bed years earlier. (Ever since I’d met Edna Parker Watson, I tried to wear suits whenever possible. Among other lessons, that woman had taught me that a suit will always make you look more chic and important than a dress. And not too much jewelry! “A majority of the time,” Edna said, “jewelry is an attempt to cover up a badly chosen or ill-fitting garment.” And yes, it is true—I still could not stop thinking about Edna.)

  Madeleine and I both looked splendid. She was a popular girl, and a lot of people came to her wedding. I got all kinds of customers after that. I also got to kiss one of Madeleine’s cousins at the reception—outside, against a honeysuckle-covered fence.

  I was beginning to feel a bit more like myself.

  Longing for a bit of frippery one afternoon, I put on a pair of sunglasses I’d purchased many months earlier in New York City, purely because Celia had swooned over them. The glasses were dark, with giant black frames, and they were studded with tiny seashells. They made me look like an enormous insect on a beach vacation, but I was mad for them.

  Finding these sunglasses made me miss Celia. I missed the glorious spectacle of her. I missed dressing up together, and putting on makeup together, and conquering New York together. I missed the sensation of walking into a nightclub with her, and setting every man in the place panting at our arrival. (Hell, Angela—maybe I still miss that sensation, seventy years later!) Dear God, I wondered, what had become of Celia? Had she landed on her feet somehow? I hoped so, but I feared the worst. I feared she was scraping and struggling, broke and abandoned.

  I came downstairs wearing my absurd glasses. My mother stopped in her tracks when she saw me. “For the love of mud, Vivian, what is that?”

  “That’s called fashion,” I told her. “These sorts of frames are very much in style just now in New York City.”

  “I’m not sure I’m glad I lived to see the day,” she said.

  I kept them on anyhow.

  How could I have explained that I wore them in honor of a fallen comrade, lost behind enemy lines?

  In June, I asked my father if I could stop working in his office. I was making as much money sewing as I could make pretending to file papers and answer phones, and it was more satisfying, too. Best yet, as I told my father, my customers were paying me in cash, so I didn’t have to report my earnings to the government. That sealed the deal; he let me go. My father would do anything to hornswoggle the government.

  For the first time in my life, I had some money saved.

  I didn’t know what to do with it, but I had it.

  Having money saved is not quite the same thing as having a plan, mind you—but it does start to make a girl feel as though a plan could someday be possible.

  The days got longer.

  In mid-July, I was sitting down to dinner with my parents when we heard a car pull into the driveway. My mother and father looked up, startled—the way they were always startled when something even slightly disturbed their routine.

  “Dinner hour,” my father said, managing to form those two words into a grim lecture about the inevitable collapse of civilization.

  I answered the door. It was Aunt Peg. She was red-faced and sweaty in the summer heat, she was wearing the most deranged getup (an oversized men’s plaid Oxford shirt, a pair of baggy dungaree culottes, and an old straw farm hat with a turkey feather in its brim), and I don’t think I’ve ever been more surprised or more happy to see anyone in my life. I was so surprised and happy, in fact, that I actually forgot at first to be ashamed of myself in her presence. I threw my arms around her in flagrant joy.

  “Kiddo!” she said with a grin. “You’re looking choice!”

  My parents had a less enthusiastic response to Peg’s arrival, but they adjusted themselves as best they could to this unexpected circumstance. Our maid dutifully set another place. My father offered Peg a cocktail, but to my surprise she said she would rather have iced tea, if it wasn’t too much trouble.

  Peg plunked herself down at our dining-room table, mopped at her damp forehead with one of our fine Irish linen napkins, looked around at the lot of us, and smiled. “So! How’s everyone faring up here in the hinterlands?”

  “I didn’t know you had a car,” my father said by means of a reply.

  “I don’t. It belongs to a choreographer I know. He’s gone off to the Vineyard in his boyfriend’s Cadillac, so he let me borrow this one. It’s a Chrysler. It’s not so bad, for an old clunker. I’m sure he’d let you take it for a spin, if you’d like.”

  “How’d you get the gas rations?” my father asked the sister whom he had not seen in over two years. (You might wonder why this was his preferred line of questioning, in lieu of a more standard salutation, but Dad had his motives. Gas rationing had just been mandated in New York State a few months earlier, and my father was in fits about it: He didn’t work as hard as he did in order to live in a totalitarian government! What would come next?
Telling a man what time of night he might go to sleep? I prayed that the subject of gas rations would quickly change.)

  “I cobbled together some stamps with a bit of bribery here and a bit of black-market elbow grease there. It’s not so hard in the city to get gas stamps. People don’t need their cars as much as they do out here.” Then Peg turned to my mother and asked warmly, “Louise, how are you?”

  “I’m well, Peg,” said my mother, who was looking at her sister-in-law with an expression I would not call suspicious as much as cautious. (I couldn’t blame her. It didn’t make sense for Peg to be in Clinton. It wasn’t Christmas, and nobody had died.) “And how are you?”

  “Disreputable as always. But it’s nice to escape the general mayhem of the city and come up here. I should do this more often. I’m sorry I didn’t let you folks know I was coming. It was a sudden decision. Your horses are well, Louise?”

  “Well enough. There haven’t been as many shows since the war started, of course. They haven’t liked this heat, either. But they’re well.”

  “What brings you here, anyhow?” my father asked.

  My father didn’t hate his sister, but he did hold her in rather violent contempt. He thought she’d done nothing but revel about recklessly with her life (not unlike the way Walter perceived me, now that I think of it), and I suppose he had a point. Still, you’d think he could have ginned up a slightly more hospitable welcome.

  “Well, Douglas, I’ll tell you. I’ve come to ask Vivian if she’ll return to New York City with me.”

  At the sound of these words, a dusty old doorway in the center of my heart blew open, and a thousand white doves flew out. I didn’t even dare to speak. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, the invitation would evaporate.

  “Why?” my father asked.

  “I need her. I’ve been commissioned by the military to put on a series of lunchtime shows for workers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Some propaganda, some song-and-dance numbers, some romantic dramas and such. To keep up morale. That sort of thing. I don’t have enough help anymore to run the playhouse and also handle the Navy commission. I could really use Vivian.”

  “But what does Vivian know about romantic dramas and such?” my mother asked.

  “More than you might think,” said Peg.

  Thankfully, Peg didn’t look at me when she said this. I could feel my neck turning red all the same.

  “But she’s only just settled back here,” said my mother. “And she got so homesick last year in New York. The city didn’t suit her.”

  “You were homesick?” Now Peg was looking me straight in the eye, with the faintest trace of a smile. “That’s what happened, was it?”

  My blush spread farther up my neck. But again, I didn’t dare speak.

  “Look,” said Peg, “it doesn’t have to be forever. Vivian could come back to Clinton if she gets homesick again. But I’m in a spot of trouble. It’s awful hard to find workers these days. The men are all gone. Even my showgirls have gone to work in factories. Everyone can pay better than I can. I just need hands on deck. Hands I can trust.”

  She said it. She said the word “trust.”

  “It’s hard for me to find workers, too,” said my father.

  “What, is Vivian working for you?” Peg asked.

  “No, but she did work for me for some time, and I might need her at some point. I think she could learn a great deal from working for me again.”

  “Oh, does Vivian have a particular bent for the mining industry?”

  “It just seems to me that you’ve driven a long distance to find a menial laborer. It seems to me you could’ve filled the position in the city. But then I’ve never understood why you always resist everything that might make your life easier.”

  “Vivian’s not menial labor,” Peg said. “She’s a sensational costumer.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Years of exhaustive research in the field of theater, Douglas.”

  “Ha. The field of theater.”

  “I’d like to go,” I said, finding my voice at last.

  “Why?” my father asked me. “Why would you want to go back to that city, where people live on top of each other, and you can’t even see the daylight?”

  “Says the man who has spent the better part of his life in a mine,” retorted Peg.

  Honestly, they were like a couple of children. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they started kicking each other under the table.

  But now they were all looking at me, waiting for my answer. Why did I want to go to New York? How could I explain it? How could I explain what this proposal felt like, compared to the marriage proposal Jim Larsen had recently offered me? It was merely the difference between cough syrup and champagne.

  “I would like to go to New York City again,” I announced, “because I wish to expand the prospects of my life.”

  I delivered this line with a certain amount of authority, I felt, and it got everyone’s attention. (I must confess that I’d heard the phrase “I wish to expand the prospects of my life” on a radio soap opera recently, and it had stayed with me. But no matter. In this situation, it worked. Also it was true.)

  “If you go,” said my mother, “we won’t be supporting you. We can’t keep giving you an allowance. Not at your age.”

  “I don’t need an allowance. I’ll earn my own way.”

  Even the word “allowance” embarrassed me. I never wanted to hear it again.

  “You’ll have to find employment,” my father said.

  Peg stared at her brother in astonishment. “It’s incredible, Douglas, how you never listen to me. Only moments ago—at this very table—I told you that I had a job for Vivian.”

  “She’ll need proper employment,” said my father.

  “She’ll have proper employment. She’ll be working for the United States Navy, just like her brother. The Navy’s given me enough of a budget to hire another person. She’ll be a government employee.”

  Now it was I who wanted to kick Peg under the table. For my father, there was scarcely a worse combination of two words in the English language than “government employee.” It would have been better if Peg had said I’d be working as a “money thief.”

  “You can’t keep going back and forth between here and New York City eternally, you know,” said my mother.

  “I won’t,” I promised. And boy, did I mean it.

  “I don’t want my daughter spending a lifetime working in the theater,” said my father.

  Peg rolled her eyes. “Yes, that would be appalling.”

  “I don’t like New York,” he said. “It’s a city full of second-place winners.”

  “Yes, famously,” shot back Peg. “Nobody who has ever been successful at anything has ever lived in Manhattan.”

  My father must not have cared that much about his argument, though, because he didn’t dig in.

  In all honesty, I think my parents were willing to consider allowing me to leave because they were weary of me. In their eyes, I shouldn’t have been inhabiting their home anyway—and it was their home. I should have been out of the house a long time ago—ideally through the portal of college, followed by a finalizing shunt into matrimony. I didn’t come from a culture where children are welcome to remain in the family household after childhood. (My parents hadn’t even wanted me around that much during childhood, for that matter, if you consider the amount of time I’d spent at boarding school and summer camps.)

  My father just had to razz Aunt Peg a little more before he could finally agree to it.

  “I’m unconvinced that New York would be a good influence on Vivian,” he said. “I would hate to see a daughter of mine becoming a Democrat.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Peg, with a fat smile of satisfaction. “I’ve been into the matter. Turns out, they don’t allow registered Democrats into the Anarchist Party.”

  That line actually made my mother laugh—to her credit.

  “I’m going,” I p
ronounced. “I’m nearly twenty-two years old. There’s nothing here for me in Clinton. From this point forward, where I live should be my decision.”

  “That’s laying it on a bit thick, Vivian,” said my mother. “You won’t be twenty-two until October, and you’ve never paid for a thing in your life. You don’t have the faintest notion of how anything in the world functions.”

  Still, I could tell she was pleased by the tone of resolve in my voice. My mother, after all, was a woman who had spent her life on horseback, hurling herself at ditches and fences. Perhaps she was of the opinion that when faced with the challenges and obstacles of life, a woman should leap.

  “If you take on this commitment,” said my father, “at the very least, we expect you to see it through. One cannot afford in life to do less than one promises.”

  My heart quickened.

  That last, limp lecture was his way of saying yes.

  Peg and I left for New York City the following morning.

  It took us forever to get there, as she insisted on driving her borrowed car at a patriotic, gas-preserving thirty-five miles an hour. I didn’t care how long it took, though. The sensation of being pulled back toward a place I loved—a place that I had not imagined would ever welcome me again—was such a delightful one that I didn’t mind stretching it out. For me, the ride was as thrilling as a Coney Island roller coaster. I was more keyed up than I’d felt in over a year. Keyed up, yes, but also nervous.

  What would I find, back in New York?

  Who would I find?

  “You’ve made a hefty choice,” said Peg, as soon as we got on the road. “Good for you, kiddo.”

  “Do you really need me back in the city, Peg?” It was a question I had not dared to pose in the presence of my parents.

  She shrugged. “I can find a use for you.” But then she smiled. “No, Vivian—it’s quite true. I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this Navy Yard commission. I might have come for you sooner, but I wanted to give you more time to cool your heels. In my experience, it’s always important to take a break between catastrophes. You took a bad knock in the city last year. I figured you’d need some time to recover.”