by Sofia Grant
It was in this mood that she arrived at church. After dropping Tommie off in the church basement, they walked down the aisle in order of age, as always, and sat in the pew that Thelma had occupied since her marriage, fourth from the front on the left. Some Sundays she imagined Henry sitting next to her, but most of the time it was Thomas she thought about: on her lap as a new infant; squeezed between her and Henry when he was a boy of ten or eleven, and—finally—her favorite memory, when he was all grown up and she’d sat between her two men, beaming with pride at Thomas’s good looks and manners.
Today, she was so distracted that she barely paid attention to the Mass. Afterward, as they were filing out with the congregation, she didn’t see Father Nowak greeting parishioners until she was practically upon him. She preferred Father Zabek, but the older priest seemed to be slowly withdrawing from the daily life of the church, letting Father Nowak take on more and more of his duties. Father Nowak, in Thelma’s opinion, was not ready for the job. In fact, he looked barely old enough to shave.
“Ah, good morning, Mrs. Holliman, Mrs. Holliman, Miss Brink,” he said unctuously. Thelma resisted rolling her eyes—she sometimes thought he stayed up late at night with the parish directory, memorizing names. “Jeanne, I trust you enjoyed the fashion show yesterday. Mrs. Carson mentioned that she saw you there. A very good cause, indeed.”
“I—I’m sure you’re mistaken,” Jeanne stammered. “I was visiting a friend. In Roxborough.”
“Oh dear—” Father Nowak playfully tapped his forehead and laughed. “I must be confused. So many parishioners to keep track of.”
But Thelma realized that he wasn’t confused at all. That he was poking into Jeanne’s business, probing to see what he could unearth.
Thelma could not stand prying, particularly from a man—it seemed unnatural—and most especially from a man who wore the collar. She suspected Nowak was not, as others had suggested, merely a sycophant, aspiring to greater power in the parish. He was something worse and more dangerous: a compiler of clues, a hoarder of details, a merchant of secrets. Men like that were drawn to the priesthood, Thelma suspected, because of the inherent power linked in the position: literally God’s incarnation on earth, if one was a believer.
Jeanne had gone to see some friend from high school—or so she’d said. If she had reason to lie, well, it was certainly not the business of the contemptible Father Nowak.
“And Thelma,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “You’re looking well. We would still love to see you at the women’s club.”
Thelma held his gaze. “What a kind invitation,” she said coldly.
That, at least, seemed to set him back—there was no retort as they passed, and he didn’t react even to Peggy’s hip-swishing, perfumed presence. Perhaps he was one of those, the funny ones, if even her daughter-in-law could not capture his attention.
Peggy went around to the basement entrance to collect Tommie, and Jeanne and Thelma waited under the branches of a cherry tree, away from the rest of the parishioners chatting in the parking lot. “About what Father Nowak said,” Jeanne said anxiously. “About yesterday.”
“It’s your business,” Thelma said, suddenly weary of her own secrets. “You don’t owe me an explanation. And actually . . .”
It was on the tip of her tongue; There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, she could say, as though it had just occurred to her, as though the news she’d been carrying around hadn’t felt like a stone inside her.
But not here. Not yet.
A strange feeling stole over Thelma. Jeanne had taken a little time for herself, for an innocent outing to a fashion show—and Father Nowak couldn’t let even that go, a small recompense for a life mostly bereft of pleasure. Thelma had not wanted to make room in her heart for this thin, quiet, beautiful girl who carried the yoke of misfortune with her like a birthmark. She had been a burden that Thelma could not think of a way to refuse. But as Jeanne trudged on ahead, Thelma felt the walls inside her begin to crack.
Three
Tulle
You may have heard it called “illusion,” because tulle is used to trick the eye, to perform feats of deception no less impressive than Jasper Maskelyne’s sleight-of-hand. Clouds of it veil a bride in mystery; gathered lengths of it make a limp skirt seem full. There is a rumor that no less than sixty yards of it went into a Balenciaga evening gown worn by a Manhattan socialite who was likened by the press to a “gossamer faerie.”
But here is something you might never guess: tulle is strong. The weft thread is wrapped around the warp thread, practically knotting it in place. If you ever find that you are to be suspended from the top of the Empire State Building, tulle would make a better choice than cotton rope.
July 1949
Jeanne
An unexpected distraction arrived that afternoon, when they’d returned home after church. Peggy’s new boss, a sharp-nosed woman in her forties, arrived in a screech of tires and a cloud of Je Reviens, holding a stack of order books.
“I’m so very very sorry to disrupt your afternoon,” she said when Jeanne opened the door. “My manners are perfectly awful, I’m afraid, but now that I’ve been given an assistant I plan to work her to the bone!”
Peggy, who’d been in the kitchen trying to fix a tear in the suede covering the heel of a brown shoe with a homemade concoction of glue mixed with coffee grounds, came rushing to the door when she heard her boss’s voice. She practically pushed Jeanne out of the way, stepping in front of her. “Please come in,” she said, and Jeanne detected the frantic note in her voice.
Tommie, who’d been reading on her stomach behind the couch, rolled onto her knees and peered at Miss Cole. She loved adult visitors—brush salesman or neighbor, it made no difference; she seemed endlessly fascinated by people who were neither her teachers nor related to her.
“Oh, what an adorable little girl you are!” Miss Cole exclaimed, taking a step back, her expression implying the opposite.
“My niece,” Peggy said hastily, avoiding Jeanne’s gaze.
Jeanne quickly covered her surprise. Was it really any surprise that Peggy hadn’t told her boss that she had a child? She probably was afraid it would keep her from getting the job. But who knew what Tommie would make of the lie.
“Come on, Tommie, let’s go feed the ducks,” Jeanne said before Tommie could react.
“I’ve got some stale bread,” Thelma said, rushing to get the heels from the bread box and put them in a paper bag. She exchanged an opaque look with Jeanne as she handed them over. “I think I’ll join you.”
In moments, the three of them were out the door. Peggy and her boss, their heads together over the paperwork and the last of the coffee, barely looked up.
“Don’t be angry with her,” Thelma said once they reached the park and Tommie was busy tearing off bits of bread and throwing them in the pond, where half a dozen ducks circled and quacked.
“I’m not.” Jeanne tried to decide if that was true. The lie, that Tommie was her child, wasn’t so outlandish. It might as well be true, given the amount of time the two of them had spent out alone together. Jeanne had no wedding ring, but not every widow wore one.
Once or twice, when Tommie was younger, Jeanne had even allowed herself to pretend. “You’ll ruin your appetite,” she’d say loudly when Tommie paused to peer into a bakery window, or “She gets them from her father,” when a stranger complimented her long, thick eyelashes. These moments felt, strangely, more like thefts than lies. Jeanne would never understand fate’s handiwork, why some were given so little and others so much, but she still felt guilty when she allowed herself to imagine having what Peggy did.
Since she was a little girl, she’d dreamed of having children of her own. It wasn’t until Charles’s death that she accepted that it truly might not happen for her—and it took several more years for her to mourn the loss of that dream.
Lately, though, something had happened to change things. Or rather . . . something had not ha
ppened. Jeanne hadn’t given her missed cycle much thought at first—since she’d lost weight, she missed months as often as not—but as each day ticked by, she had started to wonder. It had only been the one time—and Ralph had pulled out, as he had promised, only it had seemed to happen faster than he’d expected and she wasn’t quite sure if he’d been all the way out when . . . it happened. It had all been so awkward, Ralph apologizing and unable to look at her as he pulled up his pants, Jeanne dressing hastily in an agony of embarrassment.
The thought nagging at the back of her mind was simply unthinkable, but with each passing day it encroached further. It all seemed to circle back: there was one child in their household, and three grown women to watch her—and still Tommie was passed among them, her presence one more obligation, one more endless source of chores.
For years now, Peggy had put herself first—her needs, her whims—while the rest of the household worked overtime trying to accommodate her and her child. The unfairness of it weighed more and more heavily on Jeanne the longer she thought about it.
“If I tell you something, do you promise not to tell Peggy?” she blurted.
A strange look passed over Thelma’s face, but she quickly recovered herself. “Of course.”
“I wasn’t with a friend yesterday. I mean, I was—but we were at the Junior League fashion show in the city. Remember Gladys? The girl from work, the one I made that blue dress for? Well, her mother-in-law asked me to make an outfit for the show, and it was a huge hit, and now she wants me to do more. And not in secret, either, like I did for Nancy and Blanche and the rest of them. And if I started sewing for her, I’d have to quit Harris—”
“But I thought you liked your job,” Thelma said.
“Well, yes, I do, but—”
“And you wouldn’t make as much sewing as you do there, right?”
The flame inside Jeanne flickered and she felt her face flush. “I—not at first, anyway. I mean, we didn’t talk about what she would pay me, and maybe it would be more than I charged the others. Definitely it would be more,” she amended, with more certainty than she felt. How to explain this wasn’t about the money—when everything was about the money?
How had she thought she could make this work—without Peggy’s help, with the mountain of bills under which they were all suffocating?
“It’s just that it would be for me,” she said. “I mean—working for myself, not—not—”
Not for the subtly cruel and competitive Miss Bream, whose reaction to a perfect draft, one in which she could not find a single typo or misspelling, was to grunt and roll her eyes and load Jeanne up with more work. And not for her boss, a man who took three-hour lunches and was famous in the office for his flatulence and for his habit of waiting until a girl went into the supply room to follow her, pretending to drop his pen on the floor so he could look up her skirt.
“I just want to be something other than one more girl in the typing pool,” she finally said. “They’re all the same—they just work for a couple of years and then they get married. And I . . . and that’s not going to happen to me.”
Thelma was watching her carefully. “What is it you want?” she asked, finally. “For you, for your life. I don’t flatter myself that you want to live with me forever and take care of me in my old age.”
What did she want? The old rage filled Jeanne, and then immediately drained away. It was so long ago now. She had wanted Charles not to be dead. She had wanted to be married, with three perfect children, in a perfect home. She had wanted her parents to live long enough to meet their grandchildren.
She would never have any of those things. For a while, the path left to her had seemed to be to merely wait to die, whether it took a year or a decade or half a century. But there was something . . . when she picked up her paycheck at the accounting department every other week. When she handed the stack of bills over to Thelma. When Mrs. Harris had looked at her appraisingly, as though she had something of value to offer. There was a seed of something inside Jeanne that had somehow sprouted into a hunger, perhaps even a need.
“I want to matter,” she said. “To do something important. I thought, back when we first started, with Nancy, I thought maybe Peggy and I could do something together. With her designing and me sewing—maybe even open a little shop. But now she’s got this new promotion, and—and I did something.”
Jeanne’s urge to confess was suddenly strong—but how to explain? “I took one of Peggy’s designs, for the jumpsuit I made for Mrs. Harris. I took it out of her sketchbook without asking. I didn’t ask her first and she doesn’t know. I . . . I pretended I designed it myself.”
I lied, she wanted to say, I cheated, because Peggy gets everything and she doesn’t ever appreciate it. But even in her thoughts, the explanation sounded pitiful, even contemptible.
“Ah,” Thelma said. “Well, your sister knows how to land on her feet. I wouldn’t worry too much about any of that. But maybe there are other things you can do. Other jobs, where you could have more responsibility than you have now.”
“Like what?”
Thelma dug the last of the bread from the paper bag and handed it to Tommie, who went back to tearing off tiny bits and casting them onto the water, while the ducks swam nearby.
“Before I tell you . . . there’s something you should know. Something that affects all of us.”
“All right.”
“It’s just that—you see, our financial situation has been worse than I told you. We’re in danger of losing the house.”
“What—I don’t understand. It’s yours. Mr. Holliman left it to you.”
“It was never really mine,” Thelma said wearily. “That house has belonged to the bank for years.”
“But I thought—Peggy said—”
“Never mind what Peggy thinks,” Thelma interrupted. “When Thomas died, I did what he would have wanted me to do. I told her what she needed to hear, that the house was mine. I didn’t want her to worry, you see. And, of course, I wanted the baby under my roof.”
“But what about your savings, the money your husband left you? Was that—something you told Peggy too?”
“Oh, there was a little money,” Thelma said. “From my father. I never told Henry about it. There wasn’t much, but my father gave it to me before he died. He never liked Henry.”
Jeanne tried to process what Thelma was telling her. The house, modest as it was, was the only place she’d had to land. The attic ceiling, its contours now as familiar to her as her childhood home. The small table on which her sewing machine sat, the yellow paint showing through where the green had worn away. The pantry that Peggy had worked so hard to transform.
“But how have you been paying for things? Groceries and—and heating oil and Tommie’s things?” And the collection on Sunday, the man who came to fix the stairs, the cake of soap on the bathtub ledge and the Borax under the sink? All the little expenses added up to an enormous sum, as Jeanne knew from the months she spent managing the house as her mother slipped away. She’d squeaked by on what was in the bank, and then after her mother died, the sale of the house had barely covered the doctors’ bills and the funeral.
“There’s been enough for that,” Thelma said briskly. “I made do. I stretched what Father gave me. But now, that’s not possible anymore.”
“I’ll keep the job,” Jeanne stammered with a growing sense of panic. “And there’s Peggy—her new position—”
“That stuck-up stick she works for barely gave her a raise,” Thelma said. “Just a new title, though your sister acts like they gave her a scepter and a crown along with it. And even if you kept your job—and don’t get me wrong, I appreciate every cent you give me. But Tommie is going to need things. She deserves more than Saint Katherine’s. I want her to go to Miss Kittering’s. I won’t have her ending up . . .” Her voice trailed off, but Jeanne knew she meant: like us. Thelma didn’t want Tommie to end up like them, poor and desperate.
“I don’t understand what
else we can do,” Jeanne said. Something occurred to her. “Unless . . . should I go? So you can get a paying boarder?”
“Oh, Jeanne, where would the boarder sleep? In that tiny attic, like you do? No, that’s not the answer. God put us all together and that’s not going to change. But you’re going to have to do some things. Some . . . things to secure our fortunes.”
“I can type and file and—”
“Wait, Jeanne. Let me tell you my idea. It’s a way that we could make enough for all of us, for Tommie to wear a new dress to school every day of the week, for me to pay off this house once and for all. For you to go to Atlantic City with a girlfriend, for heaven’s sake.” She took a breath and said the rest in a rush. “Your uncle Frank is reopening the business. He’s asked me to come work for him doing the books, and I’ve agreed. And—and I think you should work there too.”
“The mill?” Jeanne asked in surprise. “Brink Mills?”
“Yes, he saw an opening in the market, and he thinks he can get it operational within a few months. We could use the money, obviously,” Thelma said. “He’s going to pay well.”
“I haven’t talked to Uncle Frank in years,” Jeanne said. She wondered how much Thelma knew—or suspected—about the rift between them. Or perhaps rift was too strong a word . . . but the last time Frank had come to see any of them had been their mother’s funeral, when he barely stayed for the Mass and skipped the reception entirely.
“You’re not close.”
“Maybe I should have tried harder to stay in touch,” Jeanne said, but she had tried; she had sent birthday cards to her younger cousins for several years, had written notes to her aunt Mary. They lived in Chestnut Hill, but Jeanne heard things now and then—that their eldest, Arnold, did nothing but stare out the window all day; that Frank was earning enough money selling combine harvesters to buy a new car. Her resentment stemmed, in part, from that success—her father had always complained that his younger brother wasn’t helping enough at the mill.