by Sofia Grant
She read through the brief message. A sob escaped her as she sank to the floor and read it again:
THE NAVY DEPARTMENT WISHES TO INFORM YOU THAT THE BODY OF YOUR HUSBAND THOMAS HOLLIMAN WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU AS PER YOUR WISHES. ARRIVING BY TRAIN BRUNSKILL PA 0930 THURSDAY OCTOBER 12.
REAR ADMIRAL JACOBS THE CHIEF OF NAVAL PERSONNEL.
Thomas was finally coming home.
Eight
Greige
Greige, of course, means any fabric which is not fully processed; which is neither bleached nor dyed. Bolt upon bolt of it, waiting in the warehouse, can be an eerie sight: pale columns of nothing, against the sepia shadows of the dye vats and pallets. You may feel as though you are looking at an old photograph, when in fact what you are seeing is sheer possibility. Will the order come in for palest wisteria or shocking violet? Will it be embroidered, overdyed, glazed, tucked? Anything, you see, can happen next.
October 1951
Peggy
Peggy was in Newark, where they had finished refurbishing a section of the misses department in order to feature the new fall Peggy Parker Originals collection. Advertisements had been placed in the paper and invitations mailed to the store’s best customers.
Peggy and her team had learned from each show, tweaking and improving along the way, and she was feeling much more confident than she had the first time. The ladies filed in, a plainer and less affluent group than those she’d already addressed, and Peggy mentally adjusted her planned remarks to focus on practicality and durability. She shuffled the rack, choosing a Dacron-cotton ensemble to lead with, and reviewed the changes in the order with the models before retreating for her customary solitude before the show.
The Newark store manager was a portly man who seemed better suited to selling farm equipment than fashion. He looked chastened as he kept to the edge of the room, staying out of everyone’s way, glancing at the script that Peggy had developed. She’d offered it merely as a suggestion, but she hoped he wouldn’t venture too far from the remarks she’d prepared for him and would allow her to conduct the show.
Peggy only half listened to him as he read verbatim from the sheet, welcoming the ladies and drumming up their fervor with a promise of a take-home gift and the luncheon to follow. She’d adopted a little private routine for luck before going out into the audience: she touched her earlobes, left and then right, feeling the comforting smooth round surface of the rose gold earrings, the only tie to Thomas that she still had. She made a sign of the cross—she still went to Mass every Sunday, at a church on Mulberry where she was one of few non-Italians, sitting alone in a pew near the back and ducking out after Communion—and then, finally, she put her hand in her pocket and touched satin. It was Tommie’s hair ribbon, which had been in Peggy’s purse the day Thelma had ordered her out of the house because it had fallen out of Tommie’s hair on the way to school and Tommie didn’t want to wait for her mother to retie it. Now, it was her only physical connection to her daughter, and she took it with her everywhere she went.
“My darling,” she whispered, rubbing it for luck. Then she took the stage.
“Ladies of Newark, hello!” she said, clapping. The ladies roared their delight and joined in, and the “Fall Fiesta” was officially begun with thundering applause ringing throughout the second floor.
An hour later Peggy’s part was done. Two salesgirls served squares of pink sugar-dusted cake and another served coffee. The models posed and allowed themselves to be admired like prize poodles, and the department manager and her assistant took orders from a long line of enthusiastic customers.
“Miss Parker,” a handsome young man called. A reporter, for the Star-Ledger, perhaps; she was becoming accustomed to press coverage and had built time into her schedule for an interview and photos.
But today she hoped she could put the young man off. She was tired; she had dinner scheduled that night with the manager of the Newark store and the regional marketing director, and she longed for nothing more than a nap before she had to dress and fix her hair all over again.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “But I’ve got to dash. Please talk to my assistant—there she is, in that fetching little hat—and we can set up a time to talk, yes?”
The man turned away, disappointed, and Peggy scanned the room looking for her exit. She’d become expert at spotting the gaps in crowds, the lulls in conversations, that allowed her to make her escape.
And then her eyes fell on a woman standing in the corner of the room, watching her, a veiled hat shadowing her eyes. But Peggy would have known her anywhere, from the set of her narrow ankles, her graceful neck and slender waist, the way she clutched her hands to her chest as if holding her heart in place.
Peggy’s breath caught in her throat, and for a moment she was frozen, watching her sister moving toward her through the crowd, astonishment giving way to sudden terror. She raced to meet her and seized her sister’s hands. “Oh God, is she all right?”
Jeanne squeezed back, her eyes brimming with tears. “Tommie’s fine,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “It’s Thomas, Peggy. They’re finally sending him home.”
Jeanne
She had planned to be furious but the fury had withered even before she stepped out of the taxi. It had been easy enough to learn that “Peggy Parker” would be appearing less than an hour away; when she called the Fyfe’s switchboard yesterday, the operator had misunderstood her inquiry and told her, regretfully, that no more tickets remained for the event. Jeanne had told Tommie only that she had to go to a meeting that might run late, and Gloria would pick her up at school and give her her dinner.
To Anthony, she had said nothing at all. Lord knew he’d been patient with her; she’d been waiting for the right moment to introduce him to Tommie, but until then, they were limited to once- or twice-a-week rendezvous, cut short so that Jeanne could be home for the sitter, a teenage girl whose parents had given her a strict curfew. Jeanne had given him a version of the same story about Peggy that she had told the nuns—that her sister was institutionalized, that she was ill—so there was no way she could explain the current crisis without exposing her lies.
She’d intended to use the train and taxi rides to fine-tune her fury at Peggy. She wanted to make Peggy understand how badly she had hurt them all by leaving. Thomas’s body would be in Brunskill in less than twenty-four hours, and the military escort would be expecting Peggy to be there, but before that happened Jeanne meant to make Peggy understand that Thelma would be the one to make all the decisions about the funeral, no matter who was listed as next of kin.
“You probably don’t have time in your schedule anyway,” she’d planned to say coldly. It wasn’t fair that Peggy should have the honor of burying her husband, when all that Jeanne had been accorded was to sit in the pew behind Charles’s family, squeezed between several of his cousins. Her name was not even mentioned in the program. She was not invited to stand in the receiving line. Charles’s mother was in no condition to make introductions, so many of the guests never even knew that she was the woman whom Charles had promised to marry.
Even in this last act, she had been forced to accept half measures while Peggy would receive full recognition.
But as the taxicab crawled through the late afternoon traffic along Broad Street, her resolve faltered. She remembered how Peggy had locked herself in her room after learning of Thomas’s death nine years earlier, how she hadn’t eaten or bathed for days. She’d loved him, once; Jeanne had worried then that her love would consume her, would leave nothing left over. Instead, Peggy had slowly become someone else. As the cab pulled up in front of the grand redbrick and limestone entrance, Jeanne gave up trying to hold on to her cold, hard resentment and steeled herself to witness her sister’s heart breaking all over again.
“They’re finally sending him home,” she said, and Peggy’s face had gone white with shock. But she quickly regained her composure, taking Jeanne’s hand and leading her through a service door into the
network of hallways and storage used by employees. Peggy knew her way and moved so fast that Jeanne could barely keep up, and they didn’t speak until they exited the building and crossed the street to the hotel where Peggy was staying.
“We can talk in my room, but I need to make a call first,” Peggy said. Jeanne watched in astonishment as her sister placed the call from the telephone in her elegant room and directed whoever answered to cancel all her plans for the evening. So Peggy had her own staff now; Jeanne marveled at her curt self-assurance. Somehow, the two of them had both left the past further behind than either ever dreamed.
Peggy put down the phone. She was sitting in the room’s only chair; Jeanne perched on the edge of the bed. “How did they finally get permission to send the body back to America?”
“I really don’t know any more than what I’ve told you,” Jeanne said truthfully. “Someone from the navy called the house, but he didn’t have a lot of details either. Thelma’s hoping that whoever is escorting the body . . .”
“The body,” Peggy echoed, stricken. Jeanne wanted to offer her comfort, but the gulf between them seemed too great. How formal they were with each other now. How like strangers.
“I’ll come to Brunskill in the morning,” Peggy said. “I can be there by the time the train comes. I’ll . . . I can get a room at the Falls Hotel.”
“Wait,” Jeanne said. “You can’t—Thelma’s going to be the one to meet the train. You don’t have to be there. It will be better if you’re not.”
“Of course I’ll be there,” Peggy said, but Jeanne could see that she hadn’t thought it through. How would they ever get through this? If word got out, there were likely to be crowds at the train station. In the thick of the war, the arrival of flag-draped coffins had become almost commonplace; but now that the pace had thinned to a trickle of bodies being sent home from temporary burial sites in the Pacific, people were turning out again to honor the dead.
There might be a little crowd of them, with signs and tiny flags. Photographers from the local paper would be there. Maybe the mayor. And there they would be, the dead man’s mother and his daughter, his wife’s absence a gaping hole.
People would talk. The seeds of the story they’d planted—that Peggy had been sent away after a breakdown; that she’d been maddened by grief—would spread. Tommie was too young to understand now, but how long did they have until she started asking questions? Until she heard uncharitable gossip and demanded answers?
“What about your job?” she said, a little desperately. “The Peggy Parker story?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me that,” Peggy said. “This is my husband we’re talking about.”
“You can’t do this to Tommie,” Jeanne burst out. “You can’t just—just suddenly show up and, and make her think you’re back in her life! And Thelma, she hasn’t been well, you haven’t seen her but there’s something—there’s something—”
There’s something wrong with her, she was trying to say, but suddenly she was crying too hard. It was a thought she’d never dared speak out loud, despite Thelma’s weight loss, her refusal to eat, the visits she’d canceled. All of which Peggy had missed.
“We’ll figure it out,” Peggy said, almost desperately. “Let me call the hotel and see if I can get a room for tonight. We can go back to Brunskill right now.”
“Your daughter is in Philadelphia,” Jeanne reminded her, “and while I’m sure you’ve lost track, she’s still too young to travel by herself.”
“Oh, God, Jeanne, I know that, I know, it’s just—” Peggy blinked rapidly, then pulled a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed her eyes. “But she has a nanny, right? Could the nanny bring her and . . .”
“This is for me to figure out,” Jeanne said, trembling with fear and anger. “I’m here as a courtesy. I—we—thought you should know. But there’s no need for you to come.”
Peggy blanched. “You can’t keep me away, you can’t—”
“You were with him for a few months,” Jeanne said. “He’s been dead for years. I’m not going to let you put Thelma through—put Tommie through—”
The words wouldn’t come, because how could she describe her fears for Tommie, her refusal to let the girl suffer any more heartbreak because of Peggy’s selfishness? How could Peggy dare to show up and risk upsetting Thelma now, when she was so weak?
But Peggy hadn’t seen either Thelma or Tommie in two years. She couldn’t know about the changes in either of them.
“I’m going back alone now, to my apartment,” Jeanne said, suddenly exhausted. “I need to be with Tommie; I want to be there before she goes to bed.”
Emotions passed over Peggy’s face that Jeanne could not identify. “You’ve become a real little mother, haven’t you?” she finally asked quietly. “What do you tell her about me?”
“We don’t talk about you. I don’t give her your letters.”
“I didn’t suppose you had. But what does she know about why I left?”
“We told her you’ve got an important job to do. We try to keep her from seeing your picture in the magazines.”
“It wasn’t meant to be forever,” Peggy said, almost desperately. “Only until I got things sorted out, until I could get a place for us both—”
“Oh, stop it,” Jeanne said. “It’s me you’re talking to. Don’t lie to me. Tell yourself whatever you need to believe to get through the day. But don’t pretend you ever meant to have her with you.”
“Things could be different now. I’ve got money. A lot of it. She can come and live with me.”
Here was the moment that Jeanne had dreaded and feared. She had sworn she would never allow Peggy to hurt Tommie again. But she hadn’t factored Thomas into her plans. He was a hero now, and if the press sussed out that Peggy Parker was actually his wife, they wouldn’t be able to resist the sensational story.
Of course, Jeanne could go to the press too, and tell the truth about her sister, how she’d abandoned their child and walked out on her mother-in-law. That might dampen the papers’ enthusiasm for the war-widow angle.
But either way, the stakes were too high, because it was Tommie who’d be caught in the middle.
“Peggy.” She tried to soften her voice, swallowing down her bitterness and fear. “Once Thomas has been given a proper funeral, and things settle down again, maybe you can visit Tommie. But right now, she’s too vulnerable. She’s had to live with the fact that you walked out on her, that she had to move away from the only home she’d ever known—”
“You’re the one who moved her to the city,” Peggy protested angrily. “You won’t let me see her, won’t give her my letters—”
“We have done what we believed was right for her,” Jeanne shot back. “I put her needs first every time. She finally has friends now, did you know that? Little girls who come over to play. Her own bedroom. Room for all her toys.”
She saw Peggy do the calculations, saw her trying to add the months and years to the child she remembered. “She can have all of that in New York,” Peggy said uncertainly.
“What makes you think she’d be happy there?” Jeanne demanded. “You can’t keep this up, all of this—running around. I see the society pages, you know. I hear the talk. You’re out every night of the week.”
“That’s not true!”
“And what are you going to tell him, anyway?” Jeanne and Thelma had pored over photographs of the couple in Vanity Fair, posing at a ball the night he proposed. “The news that you were married might come as something of a shock, don’t you think? Oh, and the press will love it.”
She watched the implications dawn on her sister and took little pleasure from her horror.
“Daniel is—that’s over,” she said uncertainly.
“Oh! Really?” Jeanne pointed to her sister’s left hand. “Why aren’t you wearing his ring? I understand you accepted it.”
“I—I don’t wear it for travel,” Peggy said. “I don’t . . . Jeanne, listen. There are things you d
on’t understand. Please, I need to talk to Thelma. I need to—”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Jeanne said forcefully. In truth, Thelma had been curiously unconcerned about Peggy; she was wholly focused on Thomas now. Frank was with her; Jeanne had implored him not to leave her alone.
I can’t believe it, she’d said, over and over, since she got the news. I can’t believe he’s finally coming home.
Peggy was searching her face. “She’s still my child,” she said in a small voice. “I . . . still love her.”
“Like you loved Thomas?” Jeanne said icily.
“Of course I did,” Peggy said, aghast. “You know I loved him. How could you doubt that?”
Jeanne stared at her sister, regretting her words. No: she didn’t really believe that Peggy hadn’t loved her husband. Or her child. It was just that there was something broken in her sister, some inability to care for others. She had been too much of a child herself, too caught up in her own needs, her impulses and fleeting desires.
But the woman in front of her had changed. She was on the cover of magazines, her name known to women all over the East Coast. She had money and power and did not seem to be afraid of either.
Had Jeanne misunderstood her, all those years when she’d aimlessly haunted their home? Underestimated her? Had all of them?
“I’m sorry,” she said, hearing the hollowness in her own voice and hating it. “I have to go. I’ll call you when it’s all over.”
“Please,” Peggy whispered, but she made no move to stop Jeanne as she strode to the door. “Please.”
Jeanne stepped into the hallway and shut the door behind her, the sound muffled by the thick, expensive carpet, and hurried to the elevator.