The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  “Your own line, Peggy,” Fyfe explained. “Under the Fyfe’s label, of course. I’d take credit, but Helen Perkins put the bug in my ear after Ginny called her too. You would design for the store—perhaps half a dozen pieces for the inaugural collection and then we’d see how it goes.”

  “You mean . . .” Peggy felt faint at the suggestion, and at the fact that Miss Perkins had put in a good word for her. “I would have the freedom to design whatever I wanted? And it would be sold in the stores?”

  “Yes, in limited release. The collection would be debuted in Philadelphia, though Ginny insists that she would have her pick of it here in Plainsfield.”

  “I’d—I’d be in charge of the whole line?”

  “Well, yes and no. You’re still green, I think you’ll agree. We’d arrange for you to meet with our manufacturer’s reps. And the marketing department would review everything before any decisions were made. Honestly, for the first season, we probably won’t deviate much from what we’ve got on the drawing board. Our existing suppliers won’t have any trouble with a limited release, but we’ll need to focus on growth right from the start. Because if this is successful, then we’d need to be prepared to produce the collection in far greater numbers, for distribution to all the stores. It would be exclusive to Fyfe’s, of course.” He drummed on the table with his fingers. “How is this sounding to you so far?”

  “I’m—I have no idea what to say,” Peggy said. “I mean, yes. Yes. I don’t even know how to begin to thank you.”

  Jeanne had only been trying to cover her tracks; Ginny Harris, never imagining the implications of the gesture, had put something much bigger in motion. Peggy had lied when she led Lavinia to believe that Tommie was her niece—not her own child. Jeanne had lied when she made Mrs. Harris’s outfit for the fashion show, pretending the design was her own; and again when she offered Mrs. Harris the drawing of the gown. All of the lies that led to this moment had one thing in common—they left no room for Tommie. And yet Peggy had just said yes to the tantalizing offer, as eagerly as Judas had accepted the silver coins. And just as Judas must have felt the weight of all of that silver in his hands, Peggy tasted the implications of her words that still echoed in the room.

  “It’s Ginny you should thank,” Fyfe was saying. “Her and my wife, and Miss Perkins and Miss Cole here. Hell, we all agree this place could use a little fresh blood. As long as you don’t start coming after my job.”

  “I never, I wouldn’t—” Peggy said, as Fyfe chuckled.

  “It’s all right. I like you, young lady. You’ve got a heck of a future. Free of the distraction of marriage and children . . . frankly, we could use more gals like you.” Fyfe slid a business card across the table. “I think that about does it for now. Until we see if this takes off, of course, you’ll stay here in Plainsfield, and continue reporting to Lavinia. But if the response to the first collection is good, we’ll talk about moving you over to the flagship store.”

  “I haven’t told your sister any of this,” Mrs. Harris said, looking extremely pleased with herself. “I thought you might want to do that yourself.”

  Lavinia stood. The meeting was over. Somehow, Peggy managed to get through the goodbyes and follow her back to their own office, where she collapsed in her chair.

  “Naturally, you’ll need to keep this all to yourself for now,” Lavinia said, opening the date book as though she hadn’t just turned Peggy’s life completely upside down. “We’ve got plenty to do here until I can figure out who can take over some of your duties.”

  “Lavinia, I think I’m dreaming.”

  “No, dear, you’re not. You’ve got talent. Mrs. Harris knows you were made for better things than kneeling on the floor with pins in your mouth. And, of course, once she found out about your mother she wanted to help. But just imagine—down the road, you could get a darling little flat in Center City.”

  Down the road, after her long-dead mother expired. “I just . . . I’ve never lived anywhere but Roxborough and Brunskill.”

  “I know it’s a lot to think about, but there would be a raise involved.”

  Peggy tried to focus her many emotions. If this really did happen, there were many steps to be taken before the first collection debuted. It would be a full eight months before the pieces could be made available in the store, another few months until they could assess the sales data. By then, Tommie would be a first-grader, in school from eight-thirty in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon.

  There had to be a way to make it work.

  “I’m honored,” she said. “I never dreamed that I would have an opportunity like this.”

  “Well, keep it under your hat for now,” Lavinia said. “Mr. Fyfe is a bit of a loose cannon. I’m not saying he didn’t mean the offer, but as you could probably tell from what he was wearing, the finer points of fashion tend to escape him. And we still have the entire fall season to sell. Not to mention the fact that you know how gossip travels among the girls. They already resent you for your success. If they get wind of this, there’s likely to be an all-out revolt.”

  PEGGY FOUND TOMMIE in the backyard, riding her tricycle around the tiny patch of lawn while Jeanne sat in one of the metal chairs with a stack of papers in her lap. All Peggy could think of, staring at her sister, was the lie that Jeanne had told, thinking that Peggy would never know.

  “Mommy, look!” Tommie said, as she pedaled as fast as she could, only to lift her feet from the pedals and coast into the shrubs separating their yard from the neighbors’.

  “Hurray!” Peggy cried, clapping her hands. Tommie clambered off the tricycle and ran over for a hug.

  “It’s nearly four,” Jeanne said, annoyed. “You said you’d be back early today. I’ve got all these bids to go through. Thelma and I need to make a decision about the tuck-pointing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Peggy said. She couldn’t tell Jeanne what had happened yet—not when she’d promised to quit her job at Fyfe’s by the end of the month, when the mill was slated to reopen. Three weeks—she had three more weeks to figure out how she was going to handle Tommie and the job, all on her own. “Thank you so much for watching her.”

  Jeanne said nothing as she went back to the paperwork.

  Peggy desperately wanted to confront her about the lie. How could you say those things about Mother, she wanted to know. How could Jeanne have used those terrible months, when the house they grew up in echoed with their mother’s stifled moans of pain, to concoct her ruse?

  There was a coldness to her sister that she hadn’t seen before, a willingness to say and do things Peggy would have once thought beyond her capacity for calculation. As a child, Jeanne had thought nothing of lying about a spilled glass of milk or a broken dish, blaming Peggy with stunning indifference. But Peggy had always assumed that was simply the way of sisters, especially sisters as close as they had been.

  Now, she watched Jeanne for signs of change. When had she hardened, when had she become so calculating? Had any of it been true—had Jeanne thought of her when she showed the drawing to Mrs. Harris, had she felt any pride in Peggy’s talent?

  All of their lives, Jeanne had effortlessly earned the admiration and envy of others. Peggy chafed at the knowledge that despite her popularity and her accomplishments, Jeanne could be as petty and selfish as any other girl. Jeanne’s specialness had been accepted for so long, by their parents, their classmates, their teachers, that Peggy had begun to believe it herself—and its inverse, that she was lesser, standing next to her sister’s bright light.

  I’ve been offered my own line of clothing, she longed to say. I matter too.

  But Tommie wandered away from the tricycle, wiping her hands on the dress she’d worn to school, the dress Jeanne should have made her change out of when she got home, except that Jeanne was busy with her own plans, her own schemes.

  “Mommy, I’m starving,” Tommie said mournfully.

  “All right, darling, we’ll have a little something to tide you over
.” She really ought to insist that Tommie wait—she barely fit into any of her clothes, and as they all got busier they had taken to pacifying her with sweets and crackers. But Peggy didn’t have the energy for an argument. Not today.

  “Three weeks,” Jeanne called after them as they reached the back door, and Peggy stopped with her hand on the handle, biting back her retort. The lie Jeanne told had given her this chance. Did that make it wrong? Or could she, for once in her life, seize the chance she’d been given?

  PEGGY WAS EATING lunch at her desk as she usually did, paging through the latest Harper’s Bazaar and nibbling at the cottage cheese plate she’d had sent down from the lunchroom, when one of the runners poked her head shyly into the office.

  “Excuse me, Peggy, I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  Peggy gazed at her coolly, dabbing at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. This awkward, strawberry-blond girl was the most deferential of the staff, but she was also hopeless at her job: impossibly shy, she could barely look at the clients when she brought out their garments.

  “It’s all right, Mavis,” Peggy said generously. “What can I do for you?”

  “There’s a woman in the waiting room who doesn’t have an appointment.”

  “You know we can’t accommodate her this week. Tell her that we are simply unable to find room in the schedule and send her downstairs. Nicely, please.”

  “I know that, Peggy, and I did try to tell her, but she was very . . . insistent. She says she is a personal friend of yours.”

  Peggy’s fingers stilled. Slowly, she lowered the napkin to her lap. “Did you get her name?”

  “Yes. She said you’d know her by her maiden name, Rose Scopes. She says you were in the AWVS together.”

  “I see.” As calmly as she was able, Peggy pretended to look at her watch. “I vaguely remember a girl with that name. Well, I suppose I could take the rest of my lunch with her. Please let Lavinia know that I might be a bit late.”

  “Of course, Peggy . . . thank you.”

  Peggy sat for a moment in the quiet office, her appetite completely gone. Of course she remembered Rose Scopes, Rose with the narrow face and uneven teeth, the beautiful wavy red hair.

  Those days in the American Women’s Voluntary Services, when she and Jeanne and dozens of other Roxborough girls had hemmed sheets for hospitals and collected scrap metal and paper for the war, were a blur all these years later. She remembered smoking together out on the steps of the side entrance to the USO building, and Rose’s red ponytail bobbing when she laughed, which was often. Rose had been sharp as a whip, if catty toward most of the other girls, but she and Peggy had gotten on fine. After their scrap-sorting shifts, she and Rose would sometimes stay late and help clean up, and Rose brought a little silver flask in her purse, and when everyone else had gone home and the USO hall was shut tight and locked for the night, they would sit on the steps and look up at the stars and marvel that thousands of miles away, the same stars shone down on the soldiers on the other side of the world.

  They’d talked about other things too, when the whiskey was gone and the night grew cold but they couldn’t bear to go back to the lives that were theirs now, lives of waiting and not knowing, lives that were more absence than presence.

  Peggy stood and dumped the remains of her lunch into the wastebasket, and set the plate on her desk, where one of the girls would retrieve it and take it back to the cafeteria.

  Outside in the waiting area, one hunched figure seemed to fade into the shiny gold brocade cushions of her chair. It took Peggy a moment to confirm that it really was her. Rose had lost at least twenty pounds and with them the pleasant roundness that had made up for her small, sharp features: a narrow, pointed nose, eyes set too close, a thin, compressed mouth. Her hair was no longer the gay red, but a dull brown, sagging from a careless set. Rose’s blue cotton dress had been tailored by someone not nearly as adept with a needle as Jeanne, the waistband tacked in lumpy folds, the neckline gapping over bony shoulders.

  “Peggy,” Rose rasped. Even her voice seemed worn down by the intervening years. Her smile revealed a broken tooth, which she tried unsuccessfully to cover with her hand. “Look at you.”

  Peggy did just that. She looked down at herself, at the voluminous sleeves and gathered hip panels of an ivory day dress that had been made for a client who discovered she was expecting for the second time and canceled her entire order. She knew she looked chic and pretty.

  She looked back up at Rose. “Let’s take a walk.”

  PEGGY LED THEM down St. Georges Street, away from the Community Square and into the long tree-shaded avenues with their sprawling old homes.

  Neither spoke until they reached the bus stop at the corner. The noon bus had come and gone, and there wouldn’t be another for several hours. This was as good a place as any. “Why don’t we sit for a moment?” she asked politely, as if Rose were a guest in her living room, and they settled onto the bench.

  “So, Rose,” Peggy said, “what’s new with you these days?”

  Rose shrugged. “Nothing you probably want to know about. I married Dickie, I guess you can tell.” She held up her left hand, where a thin gold band spun loose on her ring finger. The little diamond solitaire, of which she’d been so proud back then, was gone. “I’ve got two boys now. Ricky’s three and Sid is two.”

  “How wonderful,” Peggy said. “Congratulations.”

  She wondered if they’d inherited their father’s coarse, dark hair and stubby limbs. She’d never met Dickie, but during those AWVS shifts all the girls passed around pictures of boyfriends and fiancés and husbands. These photographs were the currency of their lives as the ones who were left behind; they were the threads that united the girls.

  “Congratulations,” Rose echoed in a mocking tone. “Well, thanks a lot.”

  Silence stretched between them.

  “How’s Jeanne?” Rose said after a while, taking a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She offered it to Peggy, who shook her head. She hadn’t smoked since Tommie was born.

  “Jeanne is fine,” Peggy said. “How kind of you to remember her.”

  “And she never married?”

  “No . . . not yet.”

  “Of course not. She was so very devoted to Charles.”

  The hairs along Peggy’s forearms tingled. Fear clogged her throat. “She was.”

  “And do you miss Thomas, Peggy? Do you still think about him?”

  The fear thinned and spun, curdling with anger. “What do you want?”

  “Me?” This time when Rose smiled, she didn’t bother to conceal the broken tooth. Now that they were outside, Peggy could make out other evidence of damage in Rose’s face. Tiny broken capillaries traced red lines that she had been unable to cover up with makeup. A faint yellow patch on her neck looked as though it might have been a bruise. “Why, I’ve got everything I could ask for. A husband and kids. Isn’t that what we always said we wanted, Pegs? Only, it’s not quite what we thought it would be. I hate to tell you that. To take away the dream. And you a widow and all. But having your husband come back from the war . . . it’s not what I thought it would be.”

  Peggy didn’t know what to say to that. She watched Rose exhale twin wisps of smoke through her narrow nostrils and wished she’d said yes to a cigarette.

  “He has dreams. Bad ones. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all. He says drinking is the only way to make it stop, but some days he’s drinking before he goes to work. When he can keep a job, that is. Do you know how many jobs he’s had since the war?”

  “I thought he went back to Sears,” Peggy said stupidly. Before the war, he’d been an assistant manager at the Wayne branch.

  “Oh, that,” Rose laughed. “No, Peggy, he’s not at Sears. He worked at the Ford dealership for a while. Now he’s working as a mechanic. But he’s already had a reprimand. And . . . anyway, you don’t want to hear our troubles. I came here to ask you if you remembered those talks we used to have. Dickie loves to hear abou
t them. Sometimes, on a good night, he wants to know all about what happened to the girls I knew. I like to keep him talking, you know. It’s better that way.”

  She kept her gaze fixed intently on Peggy. Peggy refused to squirm or blink, even though she could feel perspiration popping out along her hairline, under her arms.

  “We need money, Peggy,” Rose said abruptly, crushing her cigarette on the bench. “Dickie sent me to ask you. He says he thinks you won’t mind. What with your fancy job, and having help with your baby. It must be so nice to have help. Your mother-in-law and your sister. You got on well with Thomas’s mother, as I recall.”

  “Yes,” Peggy whispered, because Rose’s purpose was suddenly, horribly clear.

  “You must be a great comfort to her. After losing her son, at least she has you and the baby. Her granddaughter.”

  “I don’t have a lot of money.”

  Rose laughed, throwing her head back so that the dress gapped even more and Peggy could see that the bruise purpled farther down. She wanted to leap up off the bench and run and keep running until she’d left Rose far, far behind—where she should have stayed in the first place. Those days were over. They had been nothing but a dream, anyway—a cotton-fluff intermission between the lives that came before and after.

  “Well, Dickie and I don’t need a lot. Only what we deserve, for helping you keep this pretty little life you’ve made for yourself.”

  PEGGY LEFT WORK early that afternoon, claiming cramps. She could see the relief in the eyes of some of the girls. Unease had replaced envy among them as Peggy learned from studying Lavinia how to distance herself from them, how to assign each the right responsibilities to keep her compliant, to know when to join in their gossip and when to keep herself apart.

  “Have a nice evening, Peggy,” one of the salesgirls called after her, but Peggy barely heard.