by Sofia Grant
Thelma cocked her head to the side in confusion, but recovered enough to usher the girl in. Over her shoulder she watched the young man leaning against the car, staring out over the river as he lit a cigarette. In profile, Thelma could see that he was magnificent: strong jaw, defined brow, olive skin, a prominent but narrow nose—and the brooding musculature of a working man. A chauffeur, then?
“I’m so sorry to pop in unannounced,” Gladys said, standing primly in the front room with her hands folded. “But I’ve just missed Jeanne so much since the accident.”
Ah. The girl from work. Jeanne may have even mentioned her name, though Thelma couldn’t remember, other than it had been commonplace. Jeanne hadn’t said a thing about her being wealthy, however—and if the girl was rich enough for a chauffeur, what in heaven’s name was she doing working as a secretary?
“She’s mending well,” Thelma said. The day after Jeanne’s near-fatal procedure, Thelma had called the Harris Carton switchboard and asked for Jeanne’s supervisor, explaining that Jeanne had twisted her ankle and was on strict bed rest for at least a week. Dr. Blaylock says to keep it elevated at all times. “I’m sure she’ll be down in a moment—she just got out of the bath. Would you like coffee?”
By the time Jeanne came down the stairs—she’d wrapped cotton around her ankle and changed into her coral worsted, and even put on powder and lipstick—Thelma and Gladys were chatting like old friends. Gladys popped up off the couch and rushed to Jeanne, offering her arm.
“Where are your crutches?”
“Today’s the first day I’m managing without them,” Jeanne said smoothly, ignoring Thelma. “I’m much better.”
“Well, good, because it’s just awfully dull at work without you.”
“How . . . how did you get here?” Jeanne asked. “Don’t tell me you took the trolley?”
Gladys laughed. “No, silly, Anthony drove me. He had to take Mrs. Harris to her luncheon, so he said he could bring me here after, and then we’ll go pick her up. Anthony is my mother-in-law’s handyman,” she added, for Thelma’s benefit. “Jeanne, I think he may have been there one day when you were visiting.”
Then she changed the subject to Jeanne’s accident, peppering her with questions that Jeanne answered with surprising ease, making up a story of carrying garbage to the alley and tripping over a broken flowerpot.
Thelma faded into the kitchen, where she started preparations for supper while the girls chatted. By eavesdropping, she learned that Gladys was married to the son of the company’s founder, that she was expecting her first child, and that Jeanne was apparently her best friend.
And she learned something else too. Jeanne couldn’t keep her gaze from drifting to the tall front window, through which she could catch a glimpse of the young man named Anthony, who smoked and brooded . . . and cast his own covert glances at the house.
As though they were joined by an invisible length of thread.
Four
Broadcloth
What can you fashion from broadcloth? It might be better to ask what you cannot. The goal of every step of the manufacture process of this hardworking fabric is durability. Loomed fifty percent wider than its finished width, broadcloth is treated to a scalding bath and beaten with hammers, worked and fulled until it has drawn up as clean and tight as can be. It will not ravel, fray, or pill. It is not so different from certain women, who only become stronger the more hardship they are forced to endure.
September 1949
Jeanne
Jeanne scrubbed her skin so hard in the bath that it had turned red. She was done resting—she was as healed as she would ever be. The thing she had unwisely done had been undone, and if she’d had to suffer for it, at least she had been lucky enough to be pulled back from the brink of death.
All that fuss, all that blood, for a few minutes of grunting and sweating and discomfort. Now she couldn’t remember why it had seemed so important to experience the act. She certainly hadn’t cared for Ralph, beyond a vague affection. She had been curious, and she had ceased believing the church’s insistence that lying with a man outside of marriage was a sin . . . and that was really all there was to it.
Except: seeing Anthony outside the house—when she’d walked Gladys to the door, limping for effect, there had been a moment when he’d looked up and their eyes met. And there had been a sensation of heat that rocketed through her, a yearning that was indifferent to her ruined womb, to her shame. She wanted him in a way that she’d never wanted another man—and she didn’t even know him.
She scrubbed harder.
When she emerged from the bath, her skin was raw and pink and smelled of Peggy’s French-milled lavender soap. Peggy would be miffed later, but in this peculiar moment, Jeanne didn’t care. She pulled her slip up over her hips, noticing how it stayed up on its own, rather than sliding down to her hipbones. She’d gained a little weight lying in Thelma’s bed, eating the rich meals she made. She rummaged through the clothes hanging from the pipe in the attic, past the suits and dresses she had sewn and altered, and chose an old shirtwaist that fit loosely.
Downstairs, Thelma had put away the coffee things and laid the table for lunch, setting out cold sliced chicken, canned peaches, and the thickly sliced rye bread she had been buying every day.
“Your friend seems nice,” Thelma said.
“She is.” Jeanne tried to find something to add, and came up short.
“You’ll have to tell them you’re quitting, you know.”
“I know.” Jeanne had said nothing to disabuse Gladys of the belief that Jeanne would be back at her desk on Monday. “I’m trying to figure out . . . how to say it.”
“Sit,” Thelma ordered her. “Eat something, and I’ll tell you what I think.”
Dutifully, Jeanne served each of them. The food tasted good, better than she could remember chicken tasting, the bread dense and flavorful. After she’d eaten everything on her plate, she dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “You were going to tell me what you think?”
“Well.” Thelma sighed and pushed her own plate away. “What I think is that working at the mill is going to do you good, more good than wasting your talents at that company. You can always stay friends with the girls you met there outside of work. But at the mill, you’ll learn things—everything I can teach you, and more.”
“You don’t have to convince me, Thelma. I’ve agreed—and I’m feeling much better.” They had never discussed what Jeanne had done—the closest they’d come was when Jeanne overheard Thelma talking in low tones with Dr. Blaylock as she drifted in and out of consciousness that first night—and Jeanne was grateful for the tacit agreement between Thelma and Peggy never to bring up what had happened. It was as if she were recovering from a particularly virulent case of the flu. Maybe, in time, her memories would soften and shift, the way they sometimes did, and she’d be able to forget the worst of it herself. “I’m ready to begin. I’ll call my boss this afternoon and quit.”
Thelma shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Good. Yes. But before you do . . . it’s just that there are a few things I left out, before. When I told you about Frank opening the mill again.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well. You see, the mill doesn’t belong to Frank.”
“It doesn’t?”
She looked Jeanne in the eye, and in her expression Jeanne saw shame and fear reflected back. “It belongs to you and Peggy.”
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1937, Thelma was returning from a trip to the thrift shop, where she’d sold all of Henry’s clothes for a few dollars, when she saw a familiar car in front of the house.
It was lunchtime and Thelma was hungry. Thomas wouldn’t be home from school for a few hours, and she had planned to fix a sandwich and then go through Henry’s tools in the garage. Maybe there was more that she could sell.
The car in front of the house belonged to Frank Brink, the younger of the Brink brothers, one of Henry’s largest accounts. She girded herself for the visit, s
uspecting it wasn’t just a social call. Twice in the past weeks, acquaintances of Henry’s had come by to tell Thelma that he owed them money. One, a man who knew Henry from the tavern, had graciously forgiven the debt when he saw Thelma’s humble circumstances: the threadbare furniture, the worn rugs, the front steps that needed fixing. But the other, a man Thelma had never seen before, had done the opposite, making veiled threats until Thelma agreed to go with him to withdraw the money from the bank.
Henry had been friendly with the Brink brothers—the younger, Frank, more so than Leo Brink, who was a taciturn man, serious and shy. Thelma knew them only from the biannual company picnics, when Frank made the rounds among the customers, shaking hands and telling jokes, while Leo stayed on the sidelines, looking pained.
The door of Frank’s car opened as Thelma drew near, and Frank stepped out, holding a potted lily. So apprehensive was Thelma about the purpose of his visit that she didn’t realize that he meant the gift for her.
“Hello, Mr. Brink,” she said, standing uncertainly between him and her walk.
“Thelma. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
Belatedly she realized he was holding out the lily to her. She blushed as she accepted it and before she could thank him, he spoke again.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t attend the funeral. The truth is that we didn’t hear until . . . afterwards.”
It was true that Thelma had insisted on holding Henry’s funeral two days after his death, but that was for Thomas’s benefit. The sooner his father was buried, she reasoned, the sooner her son would come to terms with his loss. As they had little family and few friends, the arrangements were simple. The notice appeared in the paper the day of the service. But this was the first time anyone had implied that they might have attended, if they had known.
Thelma was unexpectedly moved, to the point of not knowing how to respond. And then she felt she needed to make up for the uncomfortable silence and blurted out an invitation for coffee. To her surprise, Frank Brink accepted.
As she let him in the house, she wished she’d known she would have a visitor. The house was tidy, but she’d neglected the dusting in the days since the funeral, and a faint odor of oil used once too often for frying hung in the air.
Thelma hadn’t invited a man into her house in many years, and she felt suddenly tongue-tied. She busied herself making a fresh pot of coffee while Frank made awkward conversation, sitting in Henry’s chair at the head of the table. The demand for silk was plummeting, he said; some of their competitors had abandoned it entirely to go into rayon, the new and popular fabric woven from viscose that could be had for a fraction of the cost.
“I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be able to keep the doors open,” Frank admitted with more cheer than the comment seemed to warrant.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Thelma said, setting a cup down in front of him. “Would you care for milk or sugar?”
But she never got an answer to her question, not that day. Because Frank ignored the steaming coffee in front of him, and looked up at Thelma with something close to reverence.
“Won’t you sit with me?” was what he said.
“IF HE HAD told me I was beautiful then, I would have thrown him out,” Thelma said.
Jeanne was aghast. “You can’t be saying that Uncle Frank . . .”
“He says he never planned on what happened,” Thelma shrugged. “But most men are like that. If they aren’t proud of something they’ve done, they’ll come up with a new version of events and convince themselves that’s how it was.”
“But he was married.” Jeanne hadn’t seen her aunt and uncle in years, not since her mother’s funeral. There had been some sort of falling out between her father and Frank before her father’s death, an episode her mother refused to discuss. Aunt Mary had cried as they lowered Emma Brink’s casket into the ground.
Thelma laughed. “Jeanne, dear. Lots of men are married. But that doesn’t stop them from having urges.”
She went on to explain how, during that visit, they’d simply talked. Frank had been kind, asking after Thomas, if she had everything she needed. Of course, Thelma lied and said everything was fine—her pride prevented her from even hinting at the hardship in which Henry had left them.
But Frank seemed to guess at it. Later, of course, she understood that Frank knew a lot more about Henry’s character than he admitted. But on that day, his simple kindness had been enough to unleash the flood of emotions she’d been keeping locked up. She found herself confiding in Frank Brink, about how hard it was to fall asleep alone for the first time in over two decades. About how she sat down to answer letters and found herself staring out the window for hours instead. About how the hours seemed to stretch out endlessly while Thomas was at school.
“Is that when he, you know . . .” Jeanne asked, fascinated despite her shock.
“Oh, no. That came later. The first day, he only fixed my steps. And offered me a job.”
FRANK BRINK MADE it sound like she would be doing them a great favor. He knew about her bookkeeping skills, he said, because Henry had bragged about how helpful she was to him. Thelma suspected that was a lie, but she also saw the offer for what it was: an opportunity to bring in much-needed money. Frank said she could come in when it was convenient, that a few hours a week would be fine to start.
The first time she went to his office, a Tuesday, he was wearing a fine tailored pinpoint shirt and his hair was combed flat. That was when she knew that her instincts had been correct.
Thelma did not tell Jeanne everything that happened that day. That as they sat close together behind the desk, reviewing Brink Mills’ accounts, she had grown warm under her dress, merely from the scent of him. That it was she, not he, who first allowed a hand to graze his knee as she turned a page.
That, two weeks later when they first stole a few hours together late at night in the company offices, each of them having snuck out of their sleeping households, he had cried afterward.
It was not the last time a man would tell Thelma that she was an incredible listener.
“BUT HOW LONG did it go on?” Jeanne said. Then she had a thought that made her light-headed. “—or are you still . . . ?”
“Oh, no,” Thelma said. “After Thomas died . . . I just couldn’t anymore. And their boy Arnold came back from the war, the way he was . . . we just couldn’t be together after that. Frank wasn’t himself anymore. He said he needed me to help him get through it, but what he needed was to be home with Mary and the other children. I saw it, even if he couldn’t.” Thelma shrugged. “I don’t know what you think of me now, Jeanne, but I did have some standards for myself.”
“I don’t think anything.” Jeanne realized how ridiculous her lie sounded, and tried again. “I can’t understand what it was like for you.”
“Did you love Charles?”
“Did I . . .” Jeanne had heard the question, but couldn’t begin to think how to answer it. Of course she had loved him. From the moment they met, she’d found him easy to talk to; they never had a single argument. They were interested in so many of the same things.
“What I’m asking is, and I don’t mean to pry into things that aren’t my business. But did you need him?” Thelma pressed a fist to her stomach, and her expression was almost pained. “Did you feel like you’d die if you couldn’t have him?”
“Thelma,” Jeanne protested. She had allowed Charles to put his hands under her skirt, and there had been a moment—something about his warm, strong fingers splayed on the bare skin near the edge of her panties’ elastic—when she’d felt something—a warmth, a sort of moving along an unfamiliar continuum.
But what Thelma was describing . . . Jeanne had felt a confusing rush of need only a few days ago, when she looked out the front window at Anthony Salvatici leaning against a car. She’d felt it for the first time when he set down the heavy urn and looked at her with an intensity she was certain no one had looked at her with before; she had felt seen—every p
art of her, the ones she kept secret as well as the ones she tried to hide even from herself. Watching him walk away, watching him drive out of view, was like gasping for breath. Thinking of Anthony—which she’d done every night—was like catching an intoxicating scent, only to have the breeze spirit it away.
Thelma’s eyes bored into hers, and Jeanne understood that she was asking about the man who’d made love to her. The dalliance whose end had been the cold porcelain floor of the bathroom, slicked with blood. Jeanne dropped her gaze, her face aflame. With Ralph, it had never risen above affability, and the instinctive pleasure of warm skin on hers. That, and the taut anxiety when she placed her hand on his belt. It had been a kind of excitement—but not what Thelma had described.
“Well, all right, I guess I don’t need to know. But for my part, all it took was that first time with Frank and I couldn’t get enough. Don’t look at me like that, Jeanne, because you weren’t in my shoes. I had so little that was mine, you see. But when I was with him, for a few minutes I could forget everything else. And he felt it too, I know he did.”
“I’m . . . sure he did.”
“I didn’t feel what we did was right,” Thelma said, misunderstanding her hesitation for judgment. “I wouldn’t let him talk to me about Mary, about what was wrong between them. But I know that he never felt like he escaped your father’s shadow. It was hard for him. When we were together, I think he could forget all that for a while.”
“Dad adored him,” Jeanne said. “I don’t know what Uncle Frank told you, but Dad would have given his right arm for him.”
“I’m sure that’s true. But sometimes I think it’s possible to love someone too much. It makes you do things for them they’d be better off doing for themselves. And then they end up weak.”
“Is that what you think happened to Uncle Frank? That Dad made him weak?”