The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  Why had she been delivered into the elegance of the Crystal Salon if it was all to be snatched away from her? Why would God encourage her gifts if He only meant to squash them, to force her back into domestic drudgery? Why had He given her a child at all, if she was to have to bear the responsibility alone?

  Immediately Peggy felt chastened. She had Thelma and she had Jeanne. Far less was required of her than of many, many other mothers.

  And still it was too much.

  She walked on. At the butcher shop she paused again, staring inside at the sausages hanging from the ceiling, the cold cases wiped down and covered for the night. She inhaled the peppery, spicy aromas with their faintly rotten undertones. Rose Scopes, it occurred to her, was like a chop that had turned. Bad meat gave off a smell that Mother Nature intended as a warning; eat it anyway and She would not be responsible for the consequences.

  Rose had been turned, had gone bad. It wasn’t her fault. A husband who beat her, poverty she hadn’t counted on, children who sucked the life from her—no wonder she was nothing but a decrepit husk. But she was dangerous too. She had the power and the will to lash out at Peggy, if she didn’t get what she wanted.

  Peggy could not allow her to win.

  She walked on, along the river, past humble homes giving way to shacks. Across the river was the neighborhood where months earlier, Jeanne’s life had been saved by a stranger. Peggy was cold, the damp air seeping into her shoes, her gloveless hands. But as she shivered, her resolve grew. She would not allow Rose to hurt her. She would take care of Rose, and then she would turn her attention to the problem of Tommie. If only she could convince the others to simply sell the factory—if only she hadn’t noticed the stirring of excitement in Thelma’s eyes. There were few things, Peggy knew well, as dangerous as an ambitious woman.

  But that was supposed to have been her role in the family.

  When she finally returned home, the house was quiet. Jeanne was asleep on the sofa, her face to the cushions, her knees pulled up to her chest so that she almost looked like a sleeping child. The door to Thelma’s room was closed and Tommie’s bed was empty.

  Guilt nagged at Peggy as she prepared for bed. Another woman had cared for her child while she had been out, walking for hours.

  But she slept well that night.

  Five

  Ninon

  The French invented ninon, of course, because who else would have the patience for its delicacy, its tendency to catch on every little thing? If you must use it, consider a nylon blend, at least. Then you won’t have spent a fortune only to rip it on your date’s cuff link as he leads you off the dance floor.

  In 1947, or maybe it was 1948, there was a beautiful rose-colored silk ninon in a fabric store on Eighth Avenue. It had a tone-on-tone embroidered edge that almost called to mind Lyons lace. It was a bolt end, so it languished—but eventually someone bought it, just to have it folded in a drawer, to take it out and look at it from time to time.

  Be warned, however: printed rayon ninon will never look anything but cheap.

  Though some girls seem to like that.

  October 1949

  Peggy

  Rose waited two weeks before contacting Peggy again.

  An envelope arrived for her at work, a sheet of cheap stationery folded with a newspaper clipping.

  It was the notice that had run in the Brunskill Morning News, announcing that the former Brink Mills would be operating as Charming Mills, producer of fine textiles for the garment industry. Jeanne was listed as the “Representative Director and President.”

  The accompanying note was short, written in a spidery, tremulous hand.

  “Congratulations on your new Family business. Like we talked about, please send Twenty dollars to this address in a plain envelope. Cash. I think this is very fair. Every two weeks unless you hear from me again.”

  Peggy quickly refolded the papers and stuffed them into her purse. On the one hand, twenty dollars was not an enormous amount of money. If she cut out the little luxuries she’d enjoyed since her promotion—the new stockings and beauty salon hairstyles and restaurant lunches—she could cover it from her paycheck.

  On the other hand, what did that money buy? It wasn’t like the installment plan with which their mother had once purchased a silver tea service: after paying Rose for months—or even years—she would own nothing. Rose couldn’t unlearn her secret. No pledge of silence was worth a dime if she ever decided to tell what she knew.

  Paying her was not the way.

  An idea had begun to form, one that shamed Peggy as much as it appealed to her as a possible solution.

  What if she and Tommie simply left? What if, come Sunday, she were to wait until the others had gone to church, claiming that Tommie had a fever, and pack her suitcase with a few dresses and notebooks? She had enough saved in her dresser drawer for a deposit on a little apartment. She’d promised Lavinia an answer by the end of the week. What if that answer was yes?

  Fyfe had suggested that if her line ever became a hit, she might be moved to the flagship store in Philadelphia. But what if she were to move there now and commute to Plainsfield? If she found someone to take care of Tommie during the day—perhaps a woman with children of her own—then why should it matter where she lived? She could give Tommie things in Philadelphia that she would never have here in Brunskill. Culture—they’d visit the museums and the symphony. Travel, perhaps. A better education than she could get at St. Katherine’s or even Miss Kittering’s.

  And she could laugh in Rose’s face. “So tell them,” she imagined saying. “Tell them everything.”

  But at the thought, a chasm opened inside her, and her bravado evaporated. She could imagine a life for her and Tommie in Philadelphia; she could imagine Tommie with a whole new set of friends. But she could not imagine life without her sister. And Jeanne had come under the influence of Thelma in ways Peggy didn’t understand. The household had realigned, with the two of them in league as they’d never been before. Peggy sensed a break in the line that connected her to Jeanne, a vulnerability where there had been none before.

  “Is everything all right?” Lavinia asked, frowning. Lavinia had been unusually attentive as the deadline approached.

  “Lovely,” Peggy said, in the bland, disinterested voice she had cultivated for work. “Just a bit of a headache.”

  “It’s because you don’t eat enough,” Lavinia said. “How I envy you.”

  Peggy felt a little better. This landscape—of deprivation and jealousy and competition among friends—was comfortingly familiar. There were ways to deal with Rose—there was always a way, when you were strong and fearless. When you were willing to do what must be done.

  As she left the store, she tore Rose’s letter into a dozen pieces and flung them down into the sewer. Then she stepped on a trolley headed away from home.

  Fifteen minutes later she was standing in front of the dilapidated house on a run-down street. A flash of dizziness passed through her as she remembered the angry women who lived there, and Jeanne lying on their couch, barely alive.

  But this time, she knew why she was here and she knew who the enemy really was. Resolutely she walked up the steps and knocked. Inside she could hear children yelling and the radio being turned down.

  The man who opened the door was the man she’d come to see. Actually, either of them would have done, these brothers or cousins of the young woman who’d looked at Thelma with such hatred. He regarded her curiously in his suspenders and stained undershirt as he wiped a heavy wrench with a greasy rag. The wrench seemed to confirm that Peggy had made the right decision by coming here.

  She looked past him, into the small house with its smell of cabbage and cooking grease. Little had changed. On the couch where Jeanne had lain, the old woman sat darning a sock. The children were stacking fruit crates; they’d put a baby in one, where he sat roly-poly and dazed. They paid her no mind. There was no sign of the young woman who had been so hostile that night—but the
wilted roses, arranged in a milk bottle on the table, suggested an entire narrative. If she was shrewd, she’d have worked the situation for all it was worth. And girls like her were often shrewd.

  “Your family did mine a favor,” Peggy said. Inside her pocketbook was every cent that she’d managed to save from her paychecks. She took out the envelope and for a moment allowed herself to feel its heft, its thickness. She had earned this. She alone. She held out the envelope, showing the man the edges of the bills. “Now I want to do one for you.”

  FOR A WEEK Peggy heard nothing. During this time she endured the nightly talk about the new business, from which her sister and Thelma excluded her as casually as if she were a child.

  One evening, her uncle Frank stopped by. It was the first time she’d seen him since their mother’s funeral, and yet he barely appeared to have aged. His hair was peppered with silver and he favored one leg slightly as he walked, and his smile seemed forced, but his hug still smelled like peppermint and aftershave.

  Nothing was said about Peggy’s absence the last time he visited. After dinner, he and Thelma and Jeanne pored over documents Frank had brought in a leather valise, Thelma tapping the table lightly with the point of a mechanical pencil.

  Thelma seemed energized by the new business. She had unearthed her old adding machine from the basement, and her fingers flew over the keys like birds attacking spilled seed. It was as though she suddenly spoke a language none of the rest of them knew. Even Tommie had noticed; skirting the edge of the table, she looked forlorn, clutching the French curve that Thelma had given her to play with.

  There was no place for Peggy in the discussion of the new equipment they would buy, the experienced tradesmen they would hire, the suppliers who would deliver polyester and cotton and wool from which they would create their new, blended fabrics. When talk turned to potential customers, she recognized some of the brands that were mentioned, the makers of clothes that would never see the inside of the Crystal Salon: moderately priced dresses and skirts and blouses that every housewife in New Jersey had in her closet.

  Peggy had other things on her mind. Every moment of the day was devoted to worrying about whether Olek Petrenko (a name she learned only after money was exchanged) had done as she asked yet. Sometimes it was like wondering about the ending of a book she’d misplaced; but at other times she imagined being arrested, jailed, tried in court. She focused her attention on Tommie, bathing her each evening with great care, setting her hair in pin curls, which, in the morning, she’d arrange just like Jeanne Crain’s. She coaxed Tommie to tell her about school, the girls who had excluded her, the teachers who’d scolded her. She heaped praise on the drawings Tommie made and encouraged her to make more.

  All the while, Thelma and Jeanne planned and schemed and seemed to forget she was there. But Peggy knew she wasn’t entitled to resentment, not yet. Not until she’d fixed the problem she had created for herself all those years earlier, the one that had come back to haunt her in the form of Rose Scopes.

  Monday morning of the next week, after an eternity of a weekend in which Tommie clung to Peggy like a milkweed pod on a branch, Peggy got her ready for school and they left together for the quarter-mile walk to St. Katherine’s. Autumn was moving in fast now that it was October, and Peggy tugged her headscarf tighter against the inhospitable wind and tried to hurry Tommie along. But they’d made it only to the corner of their street when she saw him.

  Olek Petrenko was leaning against a lamppost, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a wool cap pulled low on his brow, his heavy work boots crusted with mud.

  “It’s done,” he said as they came abreast of him, then flicked his cigarette into the street and strode away.

  “Who was that?” Tommie asked.

  “I’ve no idea,” Peggy said, watching him go, waiting for the heaviness to lift from her heart. Instead she experienced something else: a premonition that everything she’d worked for, all of her careful plans and sacrifices, had taken her to a place she’d never intended to go. It was as though a door was slowly opening, and through the opening could be glimpsed a kaleidoscope of colors, the whole not yet discernable. And Peggy felt excitement mixing with dread. The future was unstoppable, it was her fault, and she was about to tumble into it.

  Thelma

  Thelma spread the newspaper carefully over the table. This was her favorite time of day, with Tommie off to school and Peggy at work, the breakfast dishes done and put up, a second pot of coffee perking on the stove, and Jeanne taking her time getting dressed. She savored the solitude that had once been her bane and was now her singular pleasure.

  She read the local news first, then the business section, and finally the lifestyle and obituary pages, which she combed for news of people she’d known through the years. This last was a bitter pleasure, a balance of longing and pain, where she learned the news of Thomas’s friends’ marriages and their children’s births, the deaths of people she’d grown up with. Garden club prizes awarded, vacations taken to Florida and Lake Placid, silver anniversaries and gold-watch retirements—all the pleasures that had slipped away from her but that now did not inspire yearning as they once did. Because after the newspaper and the coffee, when Jeanne joined her at the table, came the balance sheets and invoices and payrolls that she’d once thought she’d put behind her forever.

  She skimmed the obituaries, recognizing the name of an elderly man who had once been an undertaker himself, clucking at the loss of a child who hadn’t made it to his second birthday, and her eyes caught on a grainy photograph of a girl. She was pretty, smiling shyly, her hair pulled back in a severe style that showed off delicate earlobes and a long neck. Rose Coffey, the obituary read, age thirty. Survived by loving husband, Richard, and children, Richard Junior and Sidney, sisters . . . mother and father . . . Thelma read the announcement a second time, looking for clues. A girl so young, and it wasn’t an accident and there was no mention of a “long illness,” so it had been suicide, then—a sin that always seemed like the worst one of all, when men like her Thomas would have gladly lived out all the days she had thrown away.

  The girl hailed from Wayne, but in the last lines of the obituary Thelma saw that she had served in the WVAC in Roxborough. She would have to ask the girls if they’d known her.

  Jeanne came into the room, humming and adjusting an earring. “Good morning, Thelma.”

  “Good morning. Did you know someone named Rose Coffey? Her maiden name was Scopes.”

  “A little bit. She was in the WVAC with us. Peggy knew her better than I did.”

  Charles hadn’t joined the Rangers until late in 1942, when he decided he was needed as a medic on the front lines and left his newly formed partnership with his father. And Jeanne hadn’t joined the WVAC until their mother died and Charles left, when she finally had nothing else to occupy her besides serving with the other women whose men were overseas.

  “Well, she passed away. Left behind two children too.”

  Jeanne peered over Thelma’s shoulder to read the obituary. “That’s her,” she confirmed. “I wonder why she did it?”

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, on a Monday, Thelma was alone at her table, paying invoices for the raw materials that had been coming in almost daily now that they were in production. Jeanne and Frank had left for the day to visit a manufacturer in Newark, to close an order for nearly eight hundred yards of polyester-cotton, one of their largest yet.

  Frank had arrived early in the morning to pick Jeanne up, and they left the house in a cloud of Jeanne’s perfume and tangled nerves. Next week she was going to the city to meet with several large wholesalers in the garment district. Thelma would go along for that trip, but she’d thought it would be wise to let the other two go on these early calls without her; with her growing responsibility, Jeanne seemed to be blossoming, her confidence increasing every day.

  Thelma wrote out checks and recorded them carefully in the new register, only yesterday delivered from the printer with their new company logo e
ngraved at the top. Each time Thelma wrote a check, she paused to admire the stylized letters spelling out “Charming Mills.” The “Char” in “Charming,” of course, was for Charles, but secretly Thelma also thought it could be for Thomas, who’d been charming when he wanted to be.

  The mail came through the slot in the door, and Thelma glanced up at the clock and was surprised to see that it was already half past noon. She stood and stretched and thought about making some toast for lunch, to go with last night’s cold chicken, and then fetched the mail, her mind having moved on to wondering how Jeanne and Frank were doing. Having lunch in downtown Newark, perhaps, after concluding their morning appointment; if it had been a successful call, perhaps they were celebrating a bit.

  On top of the stack of mail was a square blue envelope, Thelma’s name and address written in a delicate, spidery hand. The postmark was Wayne. Curious, Thelma opened the letter with the long steel opener that she’d unearthed, along with the adding machine and her old office supplies, from the basement. She pulled out several thin sheets of inexpensive stationery and laid them flat on the table, pushing the check register out of the way, and began to read.

  Dear Mrs. Holliman,

  I hope you don’t mind me writing to you but you see I feel as though I know you already. Us girls sure talked a lot when the war was on and the boys were gone and we had all that time just to wait for them to come back. Peggy told me all about you and I will give her this, she always said she got a good mother-in-law, unlike some we knew of.

  They say I should feel lucky to have my Dickie back but there is no luck in having a grown man like a child crying in the middle of the night so you can’t get any peace and angry all day long so you don’t ever know when it is he’s going to turn on you. Or on your children which is worse. It’s for my kids I’m doing what I have to do, they will go to my sister and he won’t see them any more and that is better then never knowing when he will treat them bad.