The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  “I’m so sorry,” Gladys mumbled at the sound of a wailing infant down the hall. “It’s just—Teddy’s parents have gobs of money, he grew up in a mansion on Rittenhouse Square, but they feel he should make his own way. And we do too, of course!”

  Jeanne couldn’t help smiling at the girl’s earnestness. “I think it’s swell. So cosmopolitan. Now let’s see if you like what I’ve done.”

  She took the blue dress out of its garment bag. Gladys had given her an old ivory-colored skirt along with the suit, and Jeanne had shown the two garments to Peggy and asked her to come up with a design, describing Gladys’s figure. Once she had a drawing to work with, she had cut wide bands from the skirt to set into the yoke so that they tied in a bow above a keyhole neckline, which solved the problem of the too-tight bust. She’d also added a wide ivory band at the hem to lengthen the skirt and a single layer of tulle for a bit of fullness.

  Gladys gasped as Jeanne laid the garment reverently on the young couple’s worn davenport. “It’s gorgeous, but—gosh, Jeanne, this wouldn’t fit a flea! Look at me, I’m just as big as all get out!” She patted her hips, which swelled from a tiny waist like Peggy’s.

  “Don’t judge yet,” Jeanne said, hiding a smile. “Go try it on.”

  Moments later, a wolfish whistle could be heard from the back of the apartment. Gladys’s husband emerged from the kitchen, a wrench in his hands, his old shirt hardly befitting his family name. “You must be the fashion wizard Gladys talks so much about. I must say, you have a new fan. Listen, I’d better not shake your hand—I’ve got grease up to my elbows.”

  “Hello, Mr. Harris,” Jeanne said guardedly. She’d only glimpsed Theodore Harris once or twice in the office, since he worked in the executive suite upstairs—and always in starched shirts and ties. Today he looked more like the building’s super.

  “Call me Theodore. Please.”

  Slipping past him, Gladys entered the living room, skirt swirling around her shapely calves. Jeanne couldn’t resist clapping her hands in delight—the garment fit better than she could have hoped.

  “Where on earth did you get this idea?” Gladys asked, fingering the bow at her neckline.

  “Oh, I saw it in Photoplay. Rita Hayworth was wearing a dress just like it.” For some reason, Jeanne was reluctant to expose her sister’s secret talent. “I knew it would suit you.”

  “Say, Gladys speaks so well of you,” Theodore said. “She says you’re the smartest girl in the pool. You should meet my cousin Ralph—he lives nearby and he’s always up for a good time. I bet he’d love to take you to dinner.”

  “Oh,” Jeanne hedged. “I—I don’t like to take the trolley at night.”

  She hadn’t told anyone at work that she’d lost Charles in the war, since they were never officially engaged. When people asked if she had a fellow, she managed to shrug off the question, to suggest she was too busy to date or that the question was too intimate for her office relationships. This, she knew, had given her a reputation as a cold fish, which made Gladys’s friendliness all the more touching.

  Somehow, she’d let Gladys in. She had become fond of the girl, and that had turned out to be a risk. Jeanne hadn’t stopped to think that by granting Gladys this favor, which had cost her only three evenings at home, for which she had no other plans anyway, she would open the door to further intimacy. But of course, Gladys would want to return the favor.

  “Well, that’s easy,” Theodore said. “Ralph can drive you. He’s got a car.”

  “Oh, you’ll love him,” Gladys said. “He’s a real card!”

  “I—well—maybe,” Jeanne finally said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the young couple had walked her back to the trolley stop, the echoes of their goodbyes ringing in her head as she headed up the stairs. A date—had she truly just accepted a date? And would Ralph be like his cousin, broad and cheerful and booming and ebullient?

  Oh, Charles, Jeanne thought. In the early days following his death she had mourned the life they would have had together—the house in Woodbury near his parents, Charlie building his medical practice in the same office as his father. Evening strolls along Main Street and anniversary dinners at Dooley’s. Filling her days with the Women’s Club and long afternoons spent at the library, until the children came.

  All these years later, that life seemed like a childhood fantasy, as unreal as her long-ago wish to be like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden with her robin redbreast friend. Now, when she thought about Charles, it was with a twist of hopeless anger. Each year that he’d been gone had taken her further down a road she never intended to travel. How could you leave me to this? she implored his memory in her private hours, the lonely nights after she’d put the cover over her sewing machine and slipped under the freezing cold sheets. How could he have consigned her to a future whose best hope was a pension from her secretarial job, whose only connection to the future her niece?

  It hadn’t occurred to her to start again, as some girls did. Courtship, even with sweet, serious Charles, had been exhausting. To start again with a stranger—almost unthinkable.

  But now she was being offered a chance. This job, these rain-slicked streets and tall glittering buildings, the stone fountain and park benches in the square where on pleasant days she sat to eat her lunch. And now a date. Could this be a gift from Charles? Had her one great love, who could not come back to save her himself, sent her all of this instead?

  She could try, she supposed. She could dress up and make conversation and let a man buy her dinner. She could cast off the invisible cloak of spinsterhood, and demand something more for herself. Not the fever-dream of romantic delusion: she’d put Charles on a pedestal that he could never sustain; she’d inadvertently distanced him with her talk of marriage and home and children when they both should have been enjoying the youth that would end prematurely for their entire generation.

  She could kiss a man, if only to have something to talk about with the girls in the office pool. She could, perhaps, allow more to happen. She was nearly thirty years old, with a future as solid as a dandelion puff. The war’s enduring lesson was that everything can be taken from a person in the blink of an eye. What was she saving herself for? Where was she to find any pleasure in this life, if she didn’t seek it out for herself?

  The trolley came and she climbed aboard, nestling into the corner of her seat, avoiding the gazes of the other passengers. Thoughts and emotions battered about in her mind, invoking murky longings that refused to come into focus. It wasn’t infatuation she sought—one cloying taste, with Charles, had been enough—and it wasn’t the social ascent that lay ahead for Gladys, who would someday assume the powers and obligations of the Harris matriarch. But something—there was something that called to her in the throbbing pulse of the city, in the confounding clash of wealth and poverty, crime and civic duty, old world and new.

  When the trolley pulled to her stop in Brunskill, Jeanne got off and walked in the wrong direction, away from home, to the drugstore. She browsed the aisles as though she were searching for a box of clothespins, a cake of soap, when in fact she wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Passing the cosmetics counter, she paused in front of a cardboard display for pressed powder. It featured a laughing beauty, her blond hair gleaming, her lips retouched cherry red. “You’re a MODERN girl!” the ad copy read.

  Was Jeanne, in fact, a modern girl? Since the day the telegram arrived—from Mrs. Pearson, Charles’s mother, a full three days after his family was notified of his death—Jeanne had lived as an old maid. It had not occurred to her to demand or even desire more.

  “Miss?” The clerk, an acne-plagued young man in a poorly knotted tie, stepped uncertainly from behind his register. “Can I help you?”

  “Oh, no,” Jeanne said, turning away. “But thank you anyway.” She felt him watch her as she made her exit. Maybe he was admiring her, as teenage boys often admire women in the heady age between their sweethearts’ and mothers’—but more likely, Jeanne though
t, he’d noticed the change that had taken hold of her, as abrupt and consuming as if her heart had become a hungry furnace.

  THE NEXT FRIDAY, Ralph picked Jeanne up from work, because she couldn’t bear the mortification of him coming to Brunskill. He took her to Kelly’s, and his manners were as fine as his cousin’s. Though he shared Theodore’s sun-flecked brown hair and square chin, he was a stockier and all-around ungainlier man; but he made up for it with a self-effacing sense of humor that Jeanne took to immediately.

  It was Ralph who asked if she might like a second cocktail when their entrees came—veal cutlet for him, duck for her—but it was Jeanne who finished hers while unblinkingly holding his gaze.

  It was Ralph who ordered the cheesecake with strawberry crème, but it was Jeanne who offered him the last bit on the spoon she’d licked clean.

  It was Ralph who suggested a post-dinner walk in the square . . . but it was Jeanne who paused in front of the lion statue with her face upturned in the gilded lamplight. Ralph kissed her, tenderly at first, then less so half an hour later in the elevator of his building, to which they had taken a heady cab ride with her hand under his shirt.

  Peggy

  Tommie was the sort of child who could amuse herself for hours, given the right combination of books and pencils and scraps of paper. It did not look as though she was going to be a very good student, but Peggy had expected that; she had done poorly at school herself.

  More puzzling was Tommie’s indifference to her appearance, to the dresses her aunt sewed for her and the bows and ribbons Peggy tried to put in her hair. Tommie’s socks were generally bunched at her ankles; she preferred pants and wondered why she couldn’t wear them to school when the boys were allowed to; she wanted to play baseball, not softball.

  In one way she resembled Jeanne more than Peggy: she loved to read. Every week one of them took her to the library, where she checked out all the books she was allowed—six—and conversed with the librarian about what she should choose next. She liked nonfiction, even the books she was too young to understand: children’s biographies about U.S. presidents and famous explorers, foreign cities and scientific discoveries, astronomy and the discovery of gold in California. Anything, really, as long as the illustrations were nice.

  That was the one way Tommie undeniably took after Peggy: her greatest passion was art. Not fashion illustration and figure drawing, the things Peggy most enjoyed, but puzzling little tableaus of everyday items and ordinary scenes. One day Tommie might draw a dead beetle she found on its back on the sidewalk; another day she would try to capture the water standing in a glass. She drew the carcass of a chicken after dinner; the basket full of laundry. And she was good, even exceptional, for her age—or would be, anyway, if she drew things anyone wanted to look at.

  Today, an unexpectedly balmy spring day, Tommie trailed Peggy on a trip to the Community Square mall in Plainsfield. Touted as one of the first and finest suburban shopping centers in the nation when it had been built nearly a decade ago, it was anchored by the magnificent three-story limestone Fyfe’s department store. From the start, Peggy preferred this Fyfe’s to the stuffy granite columns and arches of the flagship store in downtown Philadelphia, its echoing, fussy marble atrium. She loved the modernity of the new branch’s art-deco flourishes, the stately, imposing entrance. They were not here to buy anything, and Peggy had only enough money in her pocket for a shared milkshake on the Silver Terrace. But spending a few hours window shopping was better than idling the day away at home, waiting for Jeanne to return from work while Thelma grew irritated at having Tommie underfoot.

  On the bus ride, Tommie kept her nose in a book about trains. She was wearing overalls that barely fit, hand-me-downs from a family several doors down, and Peggy had let her get away with them because she didn’t feel like fighting today. It was warm out and Tommie’s neck was sweaty, her hair matted, her dense, chubby torso straining against the canvas. Peggy wondered if her daughter would develop curves like her own someday, the genetic gift from their father’s side, glimpsed in photographs of aunts long since dead and buried. It seemed unlikely that she would thin out like her willowy aunt.

  Once they disembarked from the bus, Peggy tugged impatiently at the overalls’ strap, willing Tommie to walk faster. They approached the enormous windows along the side of the department store, whose displays were changed every two weeks to feature the newest merchandise. Peggy loved to browse, even if she couldn’t afford so much as a pair of stockings.

  Today the windows had been done up in a bridal theme to showcase the new gowns. The floor was draped in yards of satin and strewn with silk rose petals, and mannequins peeped shyly under their veils while faceless plastic flower girls held their skirts. Wedding dresses had been among the few garments excluded from the War Production Board’s General Limitation Order restricting fabric usage, along with burial clothes and baby layettes, but these gowns were still a far cry from the more austere wartime fashions. Each skirt featured dozens of yards of tulle or organza, with nipped waists and highly ornamented bodices. Peggy’s favorite was rendered in Alençon lace, with dainty scalloped sleeves and dozens of tiny silk-covered buttons. The veil was attached to a crown of silk flowers . . . Peggy touched her hair, imagining her platinum curls mounded under such a veil, and nearly jumped when Tommie poked her in the side.

  “Can I have my drawing pad, Mama?”

  “Oh.” Peggy shook her head, embarrassed that she’d allowed herself to get caught up in such a silly fantasy. “Well, all right. Here, let me put your book away.”

  She took the sketchpad and pencil box from her purse—she was in the habit of carrying both—and on impulse tore out a page before handing them to Tommie. She sat down on the bench facing the window and patted the warm wooden boards next to her for Tommie. Propping the book on her lap to lay the sheet of paper on, she took one of Tommie’s pencils, and the two of them sketched side by side.

  She drew the gown she’d admired, making small changes as she went. Her drawings were getting quite good now; she’d learned to define the spine with a single stroke, to suggest a background with a few shaded blocks for buildings, or feathery curves for clouds and trees.

  Occasionally, when she was drawing in public, someone would stop to admire her sketch, and ask if she was a professional artist. Once or twice when she was alone, Peggy had said yes, just to see what would happen. It was both thrilling and disappointing that the answer was . . . nothing. Some lies, it seemed, went unpunished.

  Unless . . .

  Unless they weren’t lies at all.

  Peggy stared at the plate glass windows thoughtfully, her finished sketch flapping lazily in the breeze. She was wasting the afternoon, and if she waited too long to buy their milkshake, Tommie would get restless and cranky. But the tantalizing notion that had flickered into her mind refused to go away.

  Well, she’d never gotten anything in this life for nothing, had she? Senior class secretary (despite her poor marks), a good part in the spring musical that year, even handsome, gregarious Thomas—she’d had to seize upon each of these goals herself, had to make an opportunity that ordinarily would have gone to someone else—someone richer, more important, more experienced, better educated.

  Peggy had always played her best advantage back then—the fact that she had nothing to lose. And what did she have to lose now?

  She made a show of admiring Tommie’s drawing—three dogs frolicked next to a lake, though there was neither dog nor lake anywhere in sight—and suggested they move along. “Mama has to make one stop, and then we’ll get a treat,” she promised, relieved when Tommie showed no interest in what that stop might be.

  They walked into the department store, past the cosmetics counters and displays of gloves, to the elevator. Up to the top floor, where they passed the bridal and couture salons and the entrance to the grand Ruby Room, where lunch was being served, all the way to the customer service counter. She whispered to Tommie to take a seat in the waiting area and read
her book quietly, and approached the desk, where a woman in tortoiseshell glasses resting on a pocked red nose was filling out a long form. She looked up and smiled. “May I help you?”

  Peggy felt her resolve slipping, and tilted her chin up higher, as though to stanch the leaking of her confidence. “I have a portfolio of illustrations. I’d like to show them to someone in the advertising department.”

  The woman’s eyebrows lifted fractionally. “Oh, I don’t think . . . they don’t do the ads here,” she said. “That would be in New York, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, of course,” Peggy said, feeling a blush creep across her face. Had she been so stupid to think they had a team of illustrators somewhere in the back, drinking cold coffee and sketching at long tables? Most likely they worked in ateliers and studios, like the great artists of Europe—as inaccessible to Peggy as easels and live models for figure drawing and redolent tubes of oil paints, all the trappings of true art.

  But she was here, wasn’t she? And if all it cost her was some embarrassment—well, who was this pinch-faced girl, with no wedding band of her own and some unfortunate skin condition, to judge her?

  “The employment office, then,” she said coolly.

  “Well, you’re in luck there,” the woman said. “Mr. Friedman’s one o’clock interview canceled. Would you like me to see if you can take her place?”

  “What sort of interview was it?”

  “For runner in the Crystal Salon. The position reports to Miss Perkins.”

  The woman recited this information deferentially, and Peggy didn’t feel like asking who Miss Perkins was or what a “runner” did. Of course she knew what the Crystal Salon was, though she’d only ever been as far as the entrance to the couture collection, close enough to glimpse the brocaded chairs and tall mirrors and chandeliers. It took far more money than she’d ever had to get any closer than that.