The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  She needn’t have worried. Daniel opened the box, and the lights reflected blindingly off the massive brilliant-cut diamond flanked by sapphires and set in platinum as he slipped it on her finger. There was something of the showman in Daniel: he held the microphone at just the right distance when he spoke his next words, so that the audience would have to strain to hear, and a hush fell throughout the room—

  “Peggy, my darling, what do you say, will you have me?”

  And what could she do? Under the heat of the spotlights, Italian silk fluttering against her legs, the only people she loved hundreds of miles away, she blinked away the memory of Thomas, of Charles, of all of them. The ice around her heart thickened as she held up her hand to catch the light, giving the audience her best profile. Already the ring felt impossibly heavy on her finger.

  “Yes,” she gasped, and the light shone directly in her eyes so she could not even see the man standing inches away. “Yes!”

  THAT NIGHT DANIEL made love to her twice, her dress in a puddle on the floor of the suite he had taken. He was even more tender the second time, if it was possible, holding himself up on his elbows while he took his pleasure so as not to let his weight rest on her. Afterward, she shut herself into the bathroom and used one of the fluffy white towels to wipe herself clean.

  “Darling,” he said when she’d come back to bed. “Let’s drive to Vassar tomorrow and surprise Claudia. I’d like us to tell her together.”

  “Oh, I—I wish I could,” Peggy said, casting about for an excuse. Claudia had been perfectly lovely when they’d met, but Peggy had seen it in her eyes—the affront of a girl whose mother had been replaced by someone, anyone, else. “But I’m going to the Pittsburgh store on Monday. I need to pack and organize the samples.”

  Daniel sighed and continued stroking her back, his hands making idle circles. After a moment he said, “You know that once we’re married you can retire and never work again. I love you, Peggy. I don’t expect you to be like the rest of those women—with their luncheons and their balls. You don’t need to serve on committees or even give interviews if you don’t want to. You can give yourself to art, like you’ve always wanted.”

  Peggy stared out into the room, the strip of streetlight seeping between the drapes. He pretended he was offering her freedom, but Daniel really just wanted her available to him, whenever he could find a break in his schedule. She could dabble, he was saying, as much as she liked—he’d build her a studio, convince a gallery to show her work, even. She might, if she was lucky, build a small following.

  But in return he wanted something she didn’t have left to give. Her love. Her devotion. Her commitment.

  It wasn’t Daniel’s fault that he couldn’t see how broken she was, or how she had brought it on herself. How God had punished her by taking not just her husband; had not been satisfied until Peggy had lost her daughter and sister and Thelma too. How she would never in her life be able to right the wrongs she had committed.

  “Perhaps . . . perhaps we might even consider having a child, Peggy,” Daniel said gently. “A child would occupy your time.”

  Peggy froze. There would be no child. She’d already made sure of that, but Daniel did not need to now about the doctor downtown, the one with no nameplate on his door.

  She suspected that Daniel didn’t really want a baby, anyway. It was just one more step in making her his, in lashing her tightly to his life.

  And inside Peggy, who knew she deserved nothing, who’d already squandered every indulgence God could ever give, the quiet spark of rebellion refused to be extinguished. As she feigned sleep, the spark took flame and burned bright.

  October 1951

  Jeanne

  The first few weeks of second grade seemed to agree with Tommie. The miserable Sister John had given way to the considerably kinder Sister Aloysius, who smelled like spice cake and told Tommie she was clever. On a wave of optimism, Jeanne suggested a party for Tommie’s birthday. But of the thirteen invited girls, only eight came.

  The regrets of the others had trickled in late in the week. First was Hope’s mother; Hope was the meanest—and prettiest—of the girls in the class, a bright little thing with tumbling auburn curls. The rest quickly followed, and Jeanne imagined the gossip among the mothers, about the homely little girl with no parents, the one whose aunt worked to send her to the academy.

  Jeanne had done her best to make light of the other girls’ absence, but Tommie had started the day solemn and quiet, barely touching the cinnamon babka for which Jeanne had made an early morning trip uptown to the bakery.

  Thelma had arrived the night before and been up early to bake the birthday cake, and she was finishing it in the kitchen, piping on roses, when Jeanne came in half an hour before the first guests were due to arrive. Thelma didn’t hear her come in, and Jeanne paused at the door, alarmed. Thelma was hunched at the sink, holding her stomach and whimpering softly in pain.

  “Thelma?” she asked in alarm. “Is everything all right?”

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said, instantly straightening. But her face was pale and the lines around her eyes seemed deeper.

  “You’d tell me,” Jeanne said, “if something was wrong—wouldn’t you?”

  Thelma’s expression softened. “It’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Thelma—please.” There was more that Jeanne suddenly wished she could say. That she loved Thelma . . . that she was all she had left, besides Tommie.

  Thelma turned away. “I’d better get a move on,” she said. “This cake isn’t going to decorate itself.”

  Jeanne’s housekeeper rushed into the kitchen. “Miss Brink, Miss Brink! Tommie wants to cancel the party. She is very upset!”

  Jeanne followed Gloria back down the hall. Tommie wasn’t in her room, where Thelma had spent the night on the foldaway cot, but in Jeanne’s room, sitting on the bed sobbing into a pillow.

  Next to her was the magazine. The one with Peggy’s picture on the cover.

  Jeanne’s heart fell. She’d been so careful; she’d stowed the magazine in the drawer of her dressing table, where she thought Tommie would never bother to look. But the dressing table was littered with cosmetics, hair ornaments, and perfume, and suddenly Jeanne understood—Tommie had snuck in here to borrow Jeanne’s things, to prepare for the party.

  Jeanne’s heart broke for Tommie. All of this disappointment in one day was too much: to know that her classmates shunned her—then to see her mother’s photograph on the magazine.

  Only the package from Peggy was still safely hidden in the closet. Jeanne had nearly relented and allowed Tommie to have it, but Thelma had talked her out of it last night.

  “It’ll be worse, knowing she isn’t here,” Thelma said. “It will just be a reminder that she left. The sooner she forgets all about her mother, the better.”

  And now, it was Jeanne’s fault that the wound had been reopened. She sat down on the bed next to Tommie, took her head in her lap, and stroked her hair. There were clumsy smudges of rouge on the girl’s cheeks, and her hair had come undone. It didn’t matter.

  Thelma sat down on Tommie’s other side. She picked up the magazine and slid it under the bed with a significant look. Jeanne would get rid of the magazine later.

  “Why isn’t she here for my party?” Tommie sobbed. “Doesn’t she care about me anymore?”

  “Now that’s enough,” Thelma said firmly. “Your mother has a job to do and that’s just the way it is. You’ve got lots of nice things here, and your aunt is every bit as nice as any of those other mothers, isn’t she?”

  Tommie’s sobs were growing hoarse with exhaustion, gradually turning to heartbreaking whimpering.

  Gloria poked her head in the door. “Miss Jane Weatherby is here.”

  Thelma’s and Jeanne’s eyes met. “You get her ready,” Thelma said. “I’ll go entertain Miss Jane.”

  WHEN JEANNE LED Tommie—halting, shy—from the room five minutes later, her hair had been repaired, her fac
e washed, her tears wiped away. Jeanne had dabbed a bit of perfume on each of Tommie’s pale wrists.

  Jane Weatherby was sitting at the table with Thelma, cutting out paper hearts. They were meant for a game the girls were to play later, but Jeanne knew that by giving the little girl a task, Thelma had made her an ally.

  “Hello, Jane,” Tommie said formally, and Jeanne was struck by her near-imperious tone, so like her own when she’d been a schoolgirl. Jeanne had not been very nice to the other little girls when she was in first grade, but at the moment she was pleased to see Tommie hold herself back a bit. “I’m glad that you could come to my party.”

  It was as though some switch had been reset. Girls continued to arrive, their mothers openly appraising the apartment, which Jeanne had just had redone top to bottom. Ivory silk dupioni drapes hung from the tall windows, the walls were papered with a bold Colefax & Fowler stylized print, and she’d bought all new furniture from Heywood-Wakefield. Jeanne knew that the apartment made up in style for what her address lacked in cachet, and that these women would spread the word to the mothers who had shunned the party about this curious, perhaps dangerous single woman who was living successfully on her own.

  The judgments they made today could chart Tommie’s social course for the next few years at least, and Jeanne had prepared well. The tea cart was set with her mother’s coffee service, one of the few beautiful things that Emma Brink had owned. Gloria’s luncheon—pinwheel finger sandwiches, ham salad, individual gelatin molds—was laid out beautifully on lacquered trays Jeanne found at Florence Knoll. Jeanne was wearing a smart Claire McCardell wrap dress, a nod to the nascent American couture industry, and of course there was her figure—as trim as ever, the envy of these women whose post-childbearing bodies had softened like water-soaked sponges.

  But it was Tommie who seized the day and made it her own. Whatever she’d resolved, after her tearful tantrum, she was different now. The clumsy taunts and snubs that had wounded Tommie as recently as yesterday now glanced off her harmlessly. Besides, the other girls seemed oddly cowed. Maybe it was the apartment’s chic glamour, so different from the old-money mansions to the north. And maybe it was the enormous collection of dolls and clothes and toys in Tommie’s room, gifts from Thelma.

  But Jeanne knew that mostly it was Tommie finally hardening herself to her mother’s absence, shutting off her heart to further hurt. She held her head high as she led the girls on a tour of the apartment, showing off Jeanne’s wardrobe of shoes, her dressing mirror, the racks of clothes and handbags. She showed them the polished Gaggia espresso machine in the kitchen, the ice maker in the new refrigerator. She made up a story of how a baby had fallen down the mail chute and died.

  During the party games her voice stood out above the others—bossy, demanding, sly. When one of the girls pouted after losing a game of pin the tail on the donkey, Tommie announced, “You might as well stop or you’ll have to sit by yourself in the kitchen,” in a voice so like Peggy’s that Jeanne did a double take. She opened her gifts with theatrical timing, pulling off the paper slowly, thanking each girl with a sigh that suggested the gift did not quite meet her expectations. Somehow, she’d mastered the art of indifference, and the girls lapped up her scorn like kittens at the milk dish.

  She held her composure until the very end. As the last girl’s mother was gushing over the party favor that Jeanne had made by a seamstress they sometimes employed at the showroom—little velvet purses embroidered with each guest’s initial—Tommie tried to slink from the room.

  “Come back here,” Thelma said, grabbing her arm and hauling her back. “Please tell Betsy how much you enjoyed having her at your party.”

  “I didn’t, though,” Tommie said, staring up at Thelma in feigned innocence. “Betsy smells like boiled eggs.”

  All three women looked at her in shock. Betsy—who was, it was true, an ungainly little thing, with a red birthmark shaped like a large comma on one side of her face—burst into tears. “I do not, I do not,” she wailed, pressing her face to her mother’s coat.

  But Jeanne recognized the resignation in that mother’s eyes; she too had lost sleep over her child’s social woes, she too suspected deep down that there was some damage she would never be able to repair.

  “I’m so terribly sorry,” Jeanne said to the mother, but there was a part of her that felt pure secret joy, that there was now to be a new class outcast, and it would not be Tommie. “Tommie, that was perfectly awful of you. Apologize at once.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Tommie said through heavy-lidded eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Maybe you could borrow some of my perfume if you like.” Then, turning to the mother before any of them could react, she said, “Genevieve gave me a bottle of Little Lovely. It’s just for girls. It comes in a pink glass bottle.”

  “How—how nice,” the mother said as her daughter wiped her eyes and sniffled.

  “We’ll have to get the girls together to play,” Jeanne said.

  “That would be very nice.”

  Thelma ushered them to the door, and when they were gone, she turned and collapsed against it. “I’m too old for this,” she said, and it was there in the blue circles under her eyes, the sagging of her skin, the echoes of the pain and exhaustion Jeanne had glimpsed earlier.

  But she seemed happy.

  They decided to go out for tea while Gloria cleaned up. Jeanne went to fetch Tommie, but she was fast asleep on the floor of her room, clutching the shabby old stuffed rabbit that Peggy had bought her with her very first paycheck.

  Thelma

  It seemed fitting that the restaurant at the hotel he chose, half an hour away in Ridgewood, should be drafty and dark. She drove herself in the first car she’d ever owned, a 1950 Nash Rambler, and found him sitting at a table nearly hidden in the back, wedged between the serving door and a tall ficus tree.

  “Imagine running into you here,” she’d joked when she arrived—and then she’d seen the look in his eyes, and knew that it was worse than she’d feared.

  But later, after the dinner had been brought and taken away, nearly untouched—because one still had to go through the motions of ordinary life, still had to speak cordially with the waiter who had no idea of the poison you carried inside you, the seconds ticking away all the things you thought you had time for—some of her good humor returned.

  “I’m not afraid, you know,” she said over coffee laced with Irish whiskey.

  “Please, Thelma. Let’s not talk any more about it tonight.”

  “Look, Jack. I’m not just another one of your patients. You don’t have to protect me.”

  “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that it’s not you I’m protecting? That despite everything you’ve accused me of—all the mistakes we’ve both made—I still love you?”

  “Don’t,” she said automatically, for it had been a rule since the first time and it would be a rule the last time she ever saw him, because what he had told her would not change their arrangement. Then she softened a little. “You do know I want the best for you,” she said gently. “There’s still time, for you. I would hope you would make the most of it.”

  “Time for what?” he said in a harsh whisper. “Time to replace you? Is that what you want from me? To stare in some stranger’s eyes and never stop wishing it was you?”

  “Of course not,” Thelma said, and then she couldn’t help it. She laughed. The diners at the next table looked over and smiled—perhaps they’d noticed the handsome older couple, their fine clothes, his gold watch, her still-lovely face. “Time for you to make an honest woman of your little Ukrainian girl. Or to go back to Patricia. Make her happy, be the husband you should have been.”

  “You’re cruel,” Jack finally said. “You’ve always been.”

  “Oh, hush now, let’s go upstairs,” Thelma said. Because in the end there was that—always, there had been that.

  MUCH LATER, WHEN the first pink glow of dawn was seeping through the window, they woke. They
watched each other, not talking, as they dressed, Jack knotting his tie with the same practiced speed as the first time they’d been together, Thelma zipping a far nicer dress than the one she’d worn then.

  He walked her to the door. She would go first; he would wait, though surely the porters and concierge knew exactly what was going on.

  “When will I see you again?”

  “Oh, Jack.” She sighed, smoothing his collar as she’d once done for Henry. “Don’t ask me questions like that.”

  His mouth worked; he searched for something to say. There wasn’t anything, of course. Men were so unequipped for moments like this.

  “All right. Call me in two weeks. We’ll figure something out.”

  His kiss, dry and cool and papery, seemed to linger. On the drive home Thelma put her fingers to her cheek and let herself imagine it sinking into her skin, branding her poor body with his benediction. She would not see him in two weeks. She would not see him again, because from this point on it would only be worse, and he would only see her deterioration and know he was losing, losing, losing her.

  At home she set her bag down in the hall and leaned against the wall, tired already though the day was only hours old. She would make a pot of coffee and sit with the papers and drink a cup, and then, perhaps, she would go to bed. She had no calls or appointments today; Mondays were reserved for the books. Tomorrow, she would feel better. Tonight, she would call Jeanne and lie to her, tell her that the doctor said she’d be good as new soon.

  She’d rinsed her cup in the sink and taken off her shoes when there was a knock at the door. She padded to the door in her stocking feet.

  It was a messenger, a young man with a cloth cap. “Telegram for Mrs. Thomas Holliman, ma’am.”

  Thelma automatically reached for it before realizing that it was not intended for her, having somehow only heard “Mrs. Holliman,” then stood staring at the envelope in her hand for so long that the young man grew embarrassed. He cleared his throat and stepped off her porch, and she thanked him and closed the door, then ripped open the envelope. It was wrong of her to open a telegram meant for Peggy; but it was a minor transgression compared with everything her daughter-in-law had done.