The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  But before I am gone I thought you should know something about the Girl you have taken into your home who you have been so kind to, treating her like your own Daughter which I understand because, as a mother myself I can not imagine the pain of losing any of my Boys. But I did lose a brother in the war so I know a little bit, maybe, about it. Peggy and me used to talk about him, too. We used to joke that if Peggy and Thomas hadn’t gotten hooked up, maybe she would have made a good match for Paul. I confess I used to think about that sometimes, please forgive me, if Thomas didn’t come back and Paul did, but those are thoughts best forgotten.

  I know I am beating around the bush because what I have to say to you is hard for me. But I feel you deserve to know and also Peggy has left me no choice. Peggy and me, sometimes we would stay late talking after the scrap sorting and you know how girls are. We talked about everything, sometimes the next day I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. But Peggy one day she couldn’t stop crying. I said Peggy what’s the matter, what could be so terrible, and she said she was pregnant and I said but that’s a good thing, that’s wonderful news (even though it was natural to have mixed feelings, all the girls who were expecting did, with their husbands gone) and she said no it isn’t and then she told me something that shocked me as I know it will you. Thomas isn’t the Father, she said, and she was in such a state, no matter what I said I couldn’t calm her down. I tell you I was afraid she would do something terrible, which is kind of funny because if I am brave by the time you read this I will have done the same thing. She told me that it was Charles, Jeanne’s fiancé, who got her Pregnant and she felt so awful about it but what was done was done and Thomas could never find out, and they all had to make the best and move on. But her biggest fear was, what if the baby favored Charles and she was so sure he would, Charles being so tall and Dark with those dark eyes. She showed me his picture, the picture I think it was taken at his Family’s house in Connecticut. So I knew it was true and she was right to worry with Thomas as fair as he was. That Irish blood with the blue eyes and the blond hair, just like Peggy, and how are two people like that going to have a baby with dark hair and eyes.

  Well I guess it all worked out because I never did hear anything bad. I heard about the baby from Sue Pierce because by the time she came, Peggy and I weren’t speaking really much. Once she started showing she quit coming to the WVAC and the one time I came to see her, you weren’t home that day, she was in your Front room with her feet up and it was Jeanne who fetched me a glass of tea and asked after my family, Peggy said she was so uncomfortable she could barely talk. Well I had two babies of my own so I know how it is when you get close. But mostly she just let me know in that way of hers that she didn’t really consider us Friends any more. Which on the way home I thought to myself, well isn’t that fine because I had a husband and a house of my own and she was living with her mother-in-law, no offense, and still Peggy could make anyone feel like she was looking down on them no matter if they were a Queen or a Movie star.

  I got over that though and that is not why I am writing to you today, to get even with her for that. Only I thought you ought to know. From everything Peggy told me I know you loved your Son Thomas and you were a very Good mother to him and especially with him having no father and I just didn’t think it is right for you not to know the Truth.

  Sincerely yours,

  Rose Martha (Scopes) Coffey

  By the time Thelma came to the end of the letter, she was sitting rigidly straight in the chair, her hand pressed to her mouth as though suppressing the scream building there.

  If what this girl said was true—

  This dead girl, from whom no more secrets could ever be pried—

  But Tommie. Thomas. Everything she had left of him, everything she cared about. His daughter . . . who wasn’t his daughter at all.

  Bile rose up inside Thelma and she could barely push herself away from the table fast enough, running to the bathroom and kneeling on the floor, her hands gripping the bowl of the commode while her breakfast splattered everywhere. She heaved and heaved until there was nothing, until her insides felt bruised and her throat raw. Then she pulled herself upright, holding the sink, feeling a thousand years old. She stared at herself in the mirror, stepping carefully over the mess. Some of her hair had come free of its bobby pins and clung to her sweat-dampened forehead and cheeks. She looked like a wild savage. Her eyes were glittering coals tossed in ashes, her colorless lips those of an old hag.

  There was nothing in the reflection to show she’d been a grandmother, a mother. Thomas might as well have died in her womb, all those years ago, and his history would be more scoured from the earth than it was now. He had no child. He had no wife—because any wife who could do what—what—

  At the thought of Peggy—whom Thelma had taken in, whom she had treated as her own, no, better than she would have treated her own daughter, because she would have expected more grit and spine from her own daughter—Thelma felt sick all over again. But she had nothing left to expel. She was empty, as empty as a worn and faded flour sack.

  She reached for her toothbrush by rote and mechanically scrubbed the foul taste from her mouth. She splashed water on her face and used one of the rough cloths she kept folded in the bathroom for cleaning to scrub her face, until it was as raw as she felt. Then she went to fetch the bucket, and filled it with the hottest water the tap would give and enough bleach to scorch her hands. She cleaned her mess without gloves, her knees painful on the hard tile. Pain was all she deserved. Pain was all she had left.

  Peggy

  Peggy stopped by the bakery after work and picked up four tiny iced cakes. One for each of them, but mostly for Tommie; the thought of her sticky kisses eased the dread of what lay ahead.

  But when she let herself into the house, it was cold and dark. The kitchen was empty; nothing simmered on the stove, no bread sat cooling on racks. A thin pool of light came from underneath Thelma’s door. Bewildered, Peggy knocked.

  “Come in,” came Thelma’s tired voice.

  Peggy eased the door open.

  Thelma was sitting at the little desk where she wrote letters, but the stationery box was closed and her hands were clasped on her lap. When she turned to face Peggy, her face was stony.

  “Is . . . is everything all right? Where’s Tommie?”

  “Tommie’s fine. Jeanne’s taken her to get a hamburger.”

  Peggy tried to process this piece of information. They never went out for hamburgers during the week—the only time Thelma would agree to eat lunch at the diner was on the rare Sunday after Mass.

  “Wasn’t Jeanne with Frank today?”

  “Yes. Earlier. They got back a couple of hours ago.”

  “Did the meetings . . .”

  “Peggy.” Thelma barked her name, standing up abruptly from the desk. She crossed the room in two strides and Peggy had no idea what was happening until Thelma had slapped her hard across the face, sending her staggering into the doorframe. She put her hand to her stinging cheek in astonishment, tasted blood where she’d bitten her lip.

  “For years I have given you a roof over your head,” Thelma said in a voice as sharp and cold as ice. Her face was pale, the lipstick she’d applied a harsh slash on her mouth, her hair loosed from its pins.

  “I know, and I’m grateful, and—”

  “I got a letter from Rose Coffey today. She’s dead, did you know that? I saw the notice in the paper the other morning. I showed it to Jeanne.”

  Rose Coffey.

  A chill sliced through Peggy like lightning striking a stump in a field. She sagged against the doorframe. But if Rose was dead—but how could Rose be dead? She’d come to see Peggy only two weeks ago. She had children.

  Had Olek . . . ? But that couldn’t be. Just frighten her, she’d told him. Push her around a little. Make her believe there’ll be worse in store for her, she’d said, even though the threat was an empty one, because Peggy would never be able to follow through.

  The
lma was shaking with rage, her lips pressed together so hard that her jaw trembled too. She picked up a letter from the bed—Peggy hadn’t seen it lying there, the stack of rumpled blue sheets—and shook it in Peggy’s face.

  “Rose wrote to you?” she asked, faint with confusion.

  “Yes. What happened, Peggy, did you cut her off because she knew, all those years ago? You thought that if you never spoke to her again, your secret would be safe?”

  “She’s dead?” Peggy echoed stupidly. “But—how?”

  “‘Died suddenly,’ the paper said, but I know people. I made some calls. That fool girl jumped off the Dubuyk Bridge. Left behind a mess—two children and a good-for-nothing husband. But we’ve all got our troubles, don’t we, Peggy? I mean, look at you.” Spittle had collected in the corner of her mouth, and her hands hung useless at her sides. “Look at you.”

  It was the disgust in that single syllable that finally made Peggy understand: Thelma knew.

  Peggy swallowed and backed toward the doorway. “I . . . have to get Tommie,” she mumbled, her voice quavering. “We’ll go somewhere. I’ll—there are some girls from work.”

  “Is that what you think?” Thelma said, seeming to swell with fresh fury. “That you’ll just take her and go? Without—without even explaining yourself?”

  Somehow Thelma had managed to back Peggy away from the door and into the corner of the small room, where the wallpaper was peeling up from the baseboard. Peggy felt the walls against her shoulder blades and wished she could be swallowed up inside them, wished she could be anywhere but in the relentless beam of Thelma’s fury.

  “But there isn’t anything to explain,” she whispered.

  Thelma threw back her head and made a sound of such anguish that Peggy winced. Thelma would hit her again, and Peggy wouldn’t stop her; maybe Thelma would keep hitting her, over and over.

  “He was my son!” Thelma screamed.

  “I know that.” She was crying now, crying hard. This was her greatest fear, come to life, worse even than the telegram saying that Thomas was dead. “I loved him too.”

  “Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare.”

  Peggy was silent, but she wanted to say it again—she had, she had. She had done her best to love him with all her heart. Thomas knew that. It wasn’t his fault, but somehow it wasn’t not his fault either. Because she had tried to tell him, right before he went away, right before their quick secret wedding—she had tried to warn him that what they had was cooling too fast to last a lifetime, that when they kissed, already she felt a heaviness, a reluctance. But he’d said it was just jitters. He’d been so insistent, he’d begged, comically, singing her made-up words that he claimed were an aria of love . . . she could still see him as he was that day, kneeling before her in the park in front of the courthouse, a little crowd of their friends cheering him on. Marry me, he’d shouted, not caring that people passing by could hear. Marry me, Peggy, and make me the luckiest guy alive, and she couldn’t resist, how could she be expected to resist? When every day another batch of them shipped off, another bevy of girls stood crying at the train station, how could she resist the tide that swept her in with the rest of them?

  And by then it was done, and she felt the shame so thick it smothered her, strangled her. She would have done anything to take back that night. It was Christmas Eve—Christmas Day, by the end of it, the cotton-mouth early morning hours when Charles dropped her off in front of the house before driving back to the house of the friend who’d first introduced him to Jeanne.

  It was too much champagne, dancing in that living room—it had been a sort of going-away party, three of them would be shipping out in the first week of the new year—and the boys had urged each other to drink more and more and coaxed the girls to kiss under the mistletoe. They had been drunk—of course they were drunk. Peggy was fearless that way, had a bit of a reputation, in fact. The truth was she liked the lightness it gave her, the way it loosened her words and made her seem carefree. Peggy was never carefree, but no one needed to know that.

  Jeanne hadn’t felt well and one of the girlfriends, Peggy couldn’t even remember her name, had offered to drive her home, and a thousand times Peggy blamed herself for not going with them. But Thomas—Thomas had pouted comically and begged her, Just stay until midnight, kiss me on the stroke of Christmas, and then passed out half an hour before.

  She’d gone to get her coat. She was sure of that. She was going to get her coat and then find the friend, Bart was his name, because Bart had a car and even though he shouldn’t be driving, it wasn’t so very far. Thomas would stay on the divan where he’d fallen asleep, and in the morning Charles would drive him home.

  She remembered hearing laughter, a girl’s teasing scolding, and she’d gone looking for the girl because the girl was with Bart and maybe she would come too, all three of them would drive back to her house, she could offer to make them coffee. Instead she opened a door and there was Charles. He had looked at her and she had looked at him, and there had been a moment when she could have simply turned around and walked back out again, but there was something so curious in his expression. Something sharp and wolf-eyed, but also sad and almost regretful. What’s the matter, she was about to ask, when he took her wrist and pulled her to him while with the other hand he pushed the door shut.

  “Oh, Peggy.” He’d sighed against her mouth, before kissing her. At first it was a soft kiss, and Peggy was inert with shock but also . . . she had been strangely electrified. She had never wanted him, never longed for him, never thought of him when she was kissing Thomas. Charles was like a middle-aged man in a young man’s body; Peggy made fun of him with her girlfriends. That striped tie—that signet ring.

  But now he was kissing her and with a breathtaking rush of understanding Peggy knew that he had watched her from the start, that all those times he’d watched her, with what she told herself was brotherly concern, it had been something else.

  He was Jeanne’s—but it was Peggy he wanted. And because of the secret thrill of that knowledge, she hesitated a second too long.

  She knew it was her fault, because why else would he have shoved her up against the wall, filling her mouth with his tongue so that she couldn’t speak, crushing her hands against the plaster so she couldn’t push him away? He’d felt her hesitation, he’d known her betrayal. She tried to cry out but he was breathing right into her face, hard, fumbling with his belt, his pants, her skirt. She was crying—please, please, please, chanting and sobbing—but she didn’t dare raise her voice because what if Bart heard, what if he came running, what if he threw open the door and found them like that? The thought of Jeanne finding out silenced her as Charles grabbed her breast right through her dress and squeezed.

  At some point he pushed her onto the bed and her ankle jammed against the bedpost. That pain, sharp and instant, was what she focused on as he pushed himself against her. Until this moment Peggy had allowed one boy to touch her that way—through her underpants—and that boy was Thomas and it was Thomas she had promised this to, what was happening now please please in this bed in this house. When he shoved her skirt up and pushed himself into her he growled against her ear, “You want this you know you want this you want this Peggy you made me do this,” over and over again, as she squeezed her eyes shut and bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.

  After, he didn’t look at her. “It would kill your sister to know what you did,” he said matter-of-factly as he pulled up his pants. “Don’t make me tell her.”

  He left the room and he closed the door very softly behind him and Peggy knelt on the floor; the rug was a braided rag rug, she remembered that detail. Some mother or grandmother had made that rug with the rags from her basket, and in the rug were scraps from the clothes that the people in the family had worn. Peggy rested her forehead on the rug and pinched her wrists, hard, to make herself stop crying, because she still had to get home somehow and she couldn’t let the others know.

  But when she finally c
ame out of the room, Charles was waiting with her coat over his arm. He helped her into it, and he was back to being the Charles that she knew, the one whose stuffy manners she had mocked. He walked her down the drive and held her elbow because the streets were icy. He said nothing on the drive home—it was a short drive, maybe five minutes, and they didn’t pass another car—but when she got out of the car he told her “Good night” as though it were any other night.

  So. That was how it happened.

  She’d have walked the entire earth to be able to rewind that evening, except that there had also been a part of her that had known, the next morning, through the headache and the nausea—that had felt a tiny pinpoint of surprise deep inside her as Tommie was begun like a match to a sparkler.

  “Thomas never knew,” she pleaded, unable to look at Thelma. “I never told him and he never—I wanted him to believe that the baby was ours. I never would have told him. I would have been a good wife, I swear it.”

  “Get out,” Thelma said. “Get out of my house and don’t come back.”

  “But—Tommie—”

  “Go!” Thelma grabbed Peggy’s upper arm so hard it felt like she’d yank it from its socket, and pushed her out the bedroom door. She half dragged her through the house, Peggy stumbling and nearly losing a shoe.

  Somehow Peggy was out the door and on the street, and it had begun to rain, huge splattering cold drops that hit her scalp and ran down her face. The door slammed and lights came on behind the drapes, and for a moment Peggy thought she would demand to come back in, that she’d pound and pound until Thelma at least told her where Tommie was.

  She stood, chest heaving, her clothes sodden and hair plastered to her face, for what felt like a very long time. Behind her, a car slowed, stopped, then moved on when she didn’t turn around.

  Finally, she turned and walked away in the darkness.

  September 1950