by Sofia Grant
“No, Jeanne, and there’s no sense getting cross with me. I’m just trying to explain to you how things ended up the way they did. Your father was a good man. But Frank might have been a good man too, if things had been different. If he’d had a chance.”
For a moment Jeanne didn’t say anything, trying to picture Frank, with his pockets full of butterscotch candies and his mustache that curved up when he smiled.
The immense implications of Thelma’s revelations ricocheted around Jeanne’s mind, jumbling anew all the facets of the past. The things she thought she’d known were now distorted, like reflections in the mirror at the carnival.
Her father and Frank hadn’t been as close as she’d believed. Frank had lied to them—even as her mother lay dying in the house her father bought for her. And Thelma . . . Thelma had known the truth all along. Was she, in her own way, just as culpable as Frank?
Jeanne rarely walked past the old mill because the memories of her father were still too painful, but she could envision every window, every brick in the arched entrance, every peeling letter in the painted sign.
The money from the sale of that building could have changed their lives. They wouldn’t have lost their house. Jeanne could have hired help to care for her mother, could have gotten her all the best doctors.
She would have been free to marry Charles, back when he brought up the possibility in that first feverish year, before he heeded the call of the war.
That was the thing that galled the most. Jeanne had had to learn to force her bitterness into a manageable pill that she swallowed over and over. And still she could never forget that she had been meant to marry first, not Peggy. She’d had her entire wedding planned, had envisioned the gown she would sew down to the last detail, her mother’s dress and her bridesmaids’. Peggy would have been her maid of honor, holding her skirt while she walked down the aisle.
She would have had children, four or five of them.
“You knew all along,” she said, her voice little more than a husk.
Thelma sighed heavily. She looked, for once, every one of her years. “I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “Frank made it seem . . . Frank was confused himself, I think. Oh, Jeanne, I don’t mean to make excuses for him. Or for me. Early on, when we first . . .”
Her voice drifted off and she stared out the window for a moment before continuing.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me, Jeanne. When we were together, Frank made the kind of promises that men do. I was naïve then, and I wanted so badly to believe. And I think he believed what he was saying, at least some of the time. He talked about the future we could have together, one day. The mill would give us a chance to start over. We just had to wait until . . .”
Jeanne felt like she might be sick. “Until my mother died,” she guessed.
Thelma’s reluctant nod confirmed it. “Your mother never understood your father’s will. Frank was to receive the mill only after her death and in the event that you girls married, and at the time your father had the will made, she was perfectly healthy. I’m sure your father thought it would see her through her old age.”
“But she never got to be old.”
“No. I know. But you have to understand,” Thelma added quickly, “Frank and I . . . we never imagined how it would end up. You had Charles. Peggy and Thomas had only just begun dating and we thought—Frank said—”
Her face flamed with shame and she stared at her lap.
“What? Tell me, Thelma,” Jeanne demanded.
“Frank said Thomas could come on board with him someday. When he had the new business up and running. You had Charles, Jeanne, you had a doctor. We thought you were going to be fine. Better than fine. All I wanted was for Thomas to be able to support a wife. A family.”
Jeanne put her hands over her face and saw it clearly. Charles, coming home at night to their brood, while she served his dinner and did the dishes and bathed the children. There would be housekeepers eventually, of course; school recitals and charity drives, clubs and tennis. Charles would have flowers sent on their anniversary and her birthday. They would join the same club his parents belonged to.
All of that, everything she’d dreamed of, and the thought of it now made her feel like she was suffocating. She wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted—not an attic room, and not a typing job, but something. Some existence that pushed so hard against the confines of what she knew that it broke clean through, into a future that was hers alone.
“Jeanne, please,” Thelma said, as the silence stretched. Jeanne knew that Thelma thought she was angry, and she wanted to correct her, but had no words to describe the emotions inside her. “I was wrong. I know I was wrong.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’ve . . . look, ever since Peggy came to live here, and then you, I’ve tried to make it up to you. If I could go back and do things differently—but I can’t. If you want me out—if you don’t want me to work at the mill, I’ll understand.”
“Tell me something,” Jeanne said thoughtfully. “The doctor who took care of me. That place—that place where you took me. Is he . . . do you . . .”
“He’s my lover, yes,” Thelma said wearily. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
“But he—but why did he take me there? To that house?”
“Oh, Jeanne,” Thelma said, shaking her head. “Do you really need to know all this? Do you want to?”
“I want to know everything. If you’re making me talk about these things, then I want to know all of it.”
“All right, fine. I met Jack—Dr. Blaylock—last year when Dr. Swenson couldn’t see me. It was when I had the shingles, just a follow-up.”
“And you started—”
“It was an affair, Jeanne,” Thelma said. “Neither of us wanted more. He’s married. It was four times, five, I don’t remember, it doesn’t matter. Then he met that Ukrainian girl—she’s a nurse’s assistant—and that was the end of things between us. Only when I found you that day, I needed someone who would come right away, who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions, do you get it? He took you to that house because he knew they wouldn’t say anything. I imagine he gave the girl some money.”
Jeanne followed the story with dizzy fascination. Was this the way things worked, outside the doors of her sheltered world? People meeting and doing things with each other, without a care for what other people would think . . . because they simply wanted to? Needed to? Was that what love really was—not a ring and a gown and letters kept in a ribbon-tied box, but what a person felt when she looked at her lover?
The doctor had been kind. His hands had been gentle.
And Thelma . . . if it hadn’t been for her, Jeanne might have died. Thelma had saved her.
How could they be evil? Jeanne had cared so much about what people thought of her, had believed they could see all the way inside her, all her fears and failures and humiliations. Thelma had been the opposite—fearless, taking whatever she wanted, indifferent to what anyone thought.
But neither of them had been rewarded. It wasn’t clear which of them fate favored, or if fate played any part at all. Thelma had offered her a chance, a new direction, without being honest about what it meant. Jeanne had accepted, without asking the questions she should have.
“Does Frank know that you were going to tell me all of this? The part about—about you and him?”
Thelma surprised her by laughing. “Of course not. He can’t imagine I’d tell you because he thinks it would shame me.”
And does it? Jeanne wanted to ask, but she chose a different question. “So he gets to keep the company? It stays in his name, and we’re his employees?”
“Well . . .”
“Wait, I have a few more questions. Are we planning to keep producing woolens?”
“We have the looms,” Thelma said. “The carding and spinning equipment. It would be a waste not to.”
“I think we should do synthetics.” Jeanne’s mind was racing ahead. “Dacron’s all over Wome
n’s Wear Daily, Thelma. There’s huge demand, the existing supplies can’t keep up, even with Dupont building factories all over the East Coast.”
“Dacron? But that’s just polyester. And you don’t need an entire mill to make polyester. You could do it in a garage.”
Jeanne knew it was true; she had seen the mom-and-pop operations herself, former gas stations in which pure petroleum was processed into fibers.
“I’m not talking about cheap polyester slips, Thelma. I’m talking about high-end blends. We could do polyester and wool. Polyester and cotton.”
“But who’d buy that?” Thelma asked. “You’ve seen what your sister wears. They’re not doing anything polyester at the Crystal Salon.”
“No, that’s true. The European designers will be the last to try it, I imagine. But we’re Americans, Thelma. Americans are innovators. Look at Sears! There’s pages and pages of synthetic fabrics in the new catalog.”
“But that’s just housecoats and lingerie.”
“Not for long, it’s not. Once women see what a little polyester can do for a fabric—the drape, the wearability, the stain resistance—there will be no stopping it.”
“Jeanne,” Thelma said. “How on earth do you know all of this?”
Jeanne blew out a breath in frustration. “For the last five months I’ve been taking dictation from a man who can barely spell his own name. He’s gone for hours at lunch, and nobody looks for me until he comes back. So I walk, Thelma. I go to the newsstands and I read the papers. I window shop. I look at things I can’t afford to buy.”
Thelma shook her head in admiration. “You’re a smart girl, Jeanne. But what you’re talking about . . . it’s all new equipment. New processes. Hiring workers with new skills . . .”
“That’s not all.” Jeanne thought of the care Thelma had taken to save her, the home she had given her. “We’re going to be partners.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ll hire a lawyer. I want—I want half, for me and Peggy. A quarter for you and a quarter for Frank.”
Thelma looked at her in astonishment. “Half of what, Jeanne? It’s some dusty old buildings and equipment that we’re not even going to use, if we do this your way. Where are we going to get the money to get started? How are we going to pay ourselves until we start making a profit?”
“Loans,” Jeanne said, with more confidence than she felt. “We’ll go to the bank.”
Thelma was already shaking her head. “You’re an unmarried woman,” she said. “I’m a widow. No bank is going to give us the time of day.”
Jeanne allowed herself a smile. “That’s why Uncle Frank gets a quarter.”
Peggy
On a tart autumn morning cool enough for a wrap, after exchanging their customary greeting, Lavinia surprised her. “You won’t need the calendar this morning. We’re going upstairs for a meeting.”
“A meeting? With who?”
Lavinia gave her an unreadable smile. “You’ll see. Come on, you don’t need to bring anything.”
As they walked through the store, up the elevators to the general manager’s office, Peggy’s curiosity turned to alarm. “What are we—”
“Mind your p’s and q’s,” Lavinia said, with an uncharacteristic grin. “You’re about to meet Archie Fyfe.”
Archie Fyfe was the grandson of Prescott Fyfe, as every employee knew. Before Peggy could ask why she was being invited to meet the man in charge of the entire Fyfe’s empire, Lavinia had whisked her inside the office overlooking the mall’s courtyard. Seated at a polished conference table were two men and an elegantly dressed woman in her fifties.
“Peggy, you know Garrett McAuley, our general manager,” Lavinia said, as the men rose from their seats.
Peggy recognized the shorter man with a shiny bald spot, but she was quite certain he had never noticed her.
“Mr. Fyfe,” Lavinia continued. Archie Fyfe did not much resemble the photo that hung in the employee lounge. He was grinning, for one thing; and he’d gained weight since the photo was taken. He was wearing a three-button suit in a flecked beige tweed that would have flattered a younger and leaner man.
“And Mrs. Virginia Harris,” Lavinia said. The elegant woman nodded coolly, but Peggy was too shocked to respond. Mrs. Harris . . . Jeanne’s boss. She’d found out about the drawing—she knew that Jeanne had lied. Had she come here demanding that Peggy be fired?
“Peggy, please take a seat,” Lavinia prompted, taking her own place next to Mr. McAuley.
“Ginny here has made a most unusual request,” Mr. Fyfe said. “She came to see me with a drawing of a dress that she said you’d made, and asked us to produce it for her.”
He opened a folder that was lying on the table. There was a drawing Peggy had made only a few weeks ago, of a fanciful ball gown loosely inspired by a pair of dresses she’d seen in the Women’s Wear Daily coverage of the Paris shows. Ever since the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture had begun requiring the Paris houses to present their collections to the press several years earlier, Peggy eagerly awaited the first photographs to appear in the American papers, because the trends that began in Paris inevitably ended up being adopted all over the world.
Peggy’s drawing had been a caprice, a juxtaposition of a sleek velvet Givenchy column gown with Jacques Griffe’s signature voluminous, poufy silhouette. Peggy had been pleased enough with the result to shade it with her colored pencils, and her version featured an obsidian velvet bodice and lean, pleated gold silk skirt—overlaid with a cloud-like bustle of vivid scarlet sashing over the hips.
“There’s your signature,” Lavinia said, tapping the corner of the page, where Peggy had dashed off her stylized “P. Holliman.”
“That dress is a stunner, all right,” Archie Fyfe said admiringly, lighting a cigarette with a gold lighter. “I’m no expert, but I think it’s safe to say that Fyfe’s has never sold a dress like that before.”
No one had been meant to see that drawing. Peggy had signed it almost as a joke, a plaintive reminder to herself that she drew for an audience of one. Her face burned with embarrassment and anger—Jeanne had not only pilfered another drawing, she’d evidently confessed the truth to Mrs. Harris.
But no one was mocking the dress. In fact, Ginny Harris had liked it.
“When your sister admitted to lying about the outfit she made me, I will admit that I was angry at first,” Mrs. Harris said. “But then she explained about your mother.”
Her mother?
“I didn’t know, Peggy,” Lavinia said, in a gentler tone than Peggy had ever heard her use before. “I do wish you had been comfortable confiding in me, dear. In the days ahead, should you need . . . extra time, we’ll work it out.”
“A hell of a thing, pancreatic cancer,” Mr. Fyfe said, shaking his head. “Lost an uncle to it. Real sorry for your mother.”
“She must be so proud of you,” Mrs. Harris said. Turning to Mr. McAuley, she explained, “Mrs. Brink’s lifelong dream was to see Peggy’s talent recognized. That was why Jeanne made the outfit for the fashion show—she was just trying to help.”
“She—she was so happy,” Peggy said, scrambling to keep up as the pieces fell into place. She should have guessed that Jeanne would come up with a whopper to explain what she’d done—Jeanne always talked her way out of the jams she got into when they were younger, usually leaving Peggy to take the blame.
“Naturally, we understand that Jeanne had to quit working to care for your dear mother,” Mrs. Harris said. “And Jeanne assumed that you would have to quit too. But she is so proud of your work here at Fyfe’s—and that gave me an idea.”
Of course she acted proud of me, Peggy thought, faintly queasy at the magnitude of the lie Jeanne had told—which gave her a convenient excuse to quit her job at Harris Carton, so she could go to work for Uncle Frank. She’d stolen the drawings to bolster the lie, thinking she was paving the way for both of them to make a graceful exit from their jobs.
“Mrs. Harris is conv
inced that what you’ve come up with is something entirely new,” Lavinia said.
“You’ve got a unique talent, young lady,” Mrs. Harris said.
“Ginny here knows her stuff,” Mr. Fyfe said. “Don’t suppose you happen to know what her maiden name was?”
“No, sir.”
“Elliott. Her father is Gordon Elliott. Does that ring a bell?”
Peggy’s head spun. The Elliott family held a minority interest in the store, though their main fortune was tied up in steel. Gordon Elliott’s grandfather had served as New Jersey’s lieutenant governor several decades earlier, and his descendants were still socially prominent.
“I’m so sorry, I had no idea. If I’ve overstepped—”
Mrs. Harris laughed, waving the comment away with her elegant, ringed hands. “Hardly.”
“I’ve known Ginny for years,” Mr. Fyfe said. “Our families summered together when we were kids. She and my wife are good friends. Anyway, she has made something of a campaign of convincing Fyfe’s management to give you a new role.”
Peggy was still recovering from Jeanne’s lie, trying to understand what it meant for her. To have one of her designs produced for an actual department store—even a design such as this, which Peggy had never intended as a serious piece—was more than she had ever dared to imagine. “Are you saying you would create the dress for the salon?”
“Eh, no,” Archie said, puffing on his cigarette before crushing it out on the heavy crystal ashtray on the table. “The economics don’t make sense. Our margins on imported couture aren’t something that can be replicated domestically. But what we do well, what we’d like to do more of—we want to offer something really distinctive to the Fyfe’s ready-to-wear customer.”
“A branded collection,” Lavinia explained. “All American. Not only are we not trying to duplicate anything being done in the European houses, but we want to make a statement—that American fashion suits American women.”
“That’s pretty good, Lavinia,” Mr. Fyfe said. “‘American fashion suits American women’—do me a favor and write that down for me.”
“Imagine this,” Mrs. Harris said, holding up a finger and drawing an imaginary scroll in the air. “Peggy Parker Originals. I think it works a bit better than ‘Holliman,’ don’t you?”