The Dress in the Window

by Sofia Grant

  What had they done? How had they lost their faith in each other? If only they’d held on—if only they’d been more generous with each other. If only they’d known that grief wasn’t forever, that life inevitably would carry them someplace new.

  The elevator reached her floor and Jeanne stepped inside, barely nodding to the other well-dressed passengers. She crossed the well-appointed lobby without really noticing it and stepped out into the drive. A brisk wind had come up, spitting rain. Jeanne turned up the collar of her coat as the bellhop tried to flag down a cab for her.

  She was heading home, to Thelma and their work, the lives they’d carved for themselves. To Tommie, who needed her. She would protect what they had made. Thomas would finally receive the honors due him, and would be laid to rest next to his father. In the spring, Jeanne and Thelma would help Tommie plant flowers around his headstone.

  But Jeanne understood now that Peggy would not give up. That her sister would come for Tommie and that there was nothing they could do to stop her. Legally, they had no right to the child; and with some clever management of the press, Peggy could easily spin the story in her favor. Six years after the end of the war, America had a powerful hunger for happy endings.

  Thelma would accept her daughter-in-law back into the fold if it was the only way to stay in Tommie’s life. In the calculus of love, Jeanne knew that she—with no blood connection to Thelma—would always come a distant second to her granddaughter. Perhaps Thelma would move to New York. There was money now, enough for all of them.

  Jeanne would be left behind. She would run the mill and honor their father’s memory and, she supposed, buy a house of her own someday. She would go back to being only Tommie’s aunt; she’d visit on holidays and the occasional summer weekend. Anthony would grow weary of her sadness and leave her, and then she would be a spinster; perhaps eventually she’d become an eccentric.

  If Peggy played her hand, all of this would come to pass. And once again there would be no place in the world left to Jeanne.

  Peggy

  After Jeanne left, Peggy collapsed on the luxuriant bedcovers, clutching herself, making herself so small she thought she might disappear entirely. Thomas, back on American soil. Back home. It was almost more than she could fathom. Every time she thought she might fully absorb the news, an image would come to her—the soldier who’d delivered the telegram when Thomas was killed, exhausted from having to break too many hearts. Jeanne’s face crumpling in on itself eighteen months later when Charles’s father called with the news of his death in Italy. Being wheeled down the hall in the hospital after she went into labor, with Jeanne holding her hand right up until they took her into the operating room.

  Holding her newborn daughter, alone.

  If her Thomas had been alive he would never have allowed her to suffer such crushing loneliness. Thomas had been more than other men, better than other men. “I’ll send angels to watch over you until I come home, darling,” he had said that day at the train station, holding her close, whispering in her ear as his mother hovered too close. And Peggy had believed it. Stupid, naïve, unforgivable—but yes, she had believed it.

  The guilt had followed her everywhere. There hadn’t been a day since she betrayed him that she’d ever forgotten or not known she was being punished. The pain and shocking mess of Tommie’s birth, the horrible sameness of the days with an infant. The infected, cracked nipples; the awful light-headedness of sleep deprivation, the changes in the body she’d once taken for granted. And Tommie, insatiable, irrational, unforgiving.

  Peggy deserved all that and worse.

  She thought of poor Rose Scopes, dead by her own hand but only because Peggy had given her the push. Rose had only been a bystander. Peggy had ruined everyone, had hurt so many. Why she hadn’t just told Jeanne the truth, Peggy didn’t know. But Jeanne would know soon enough.

  Peggy roused herself and went to the mirror. She splashed water on her face and blotted it with one of the soft towels. Her reflection stared back, her makeup smudged, her eyes red. What if, instead of going back home tonight, she went to Philadelphia? She would stay up all night; she would wait outside Jeanne’s building, and when they emerged in the morning, she would snatch Tommie up and run, straight to an attorney’s office, who would . . .

  The reflection seemed to sneer at the ludicrousness of the thought. Did she imagine that Tommie, who hadn’t seen her since that awful day that she walked away, would be glad to see her? Besides, Tommie would be different too: Could Peggy keep her resolve when she saw her daughter older, taller, wiser? Capable, perhaps, of understanding how completely her mother had failed her?

  The truth was that Tommie as a baby had been hard enough. Tommie as a person—an individual with opinions and dreams—was unfathomable.

  And what was she to tell Daniel? It was a damning admission to reveal to a man whose life was subject to public scrutiny, who was keenly aware of his stature in society. Daniel had chosen her partly because of how well she was received by the press. But the attention she would bring his way if the truth about her was revealed would not be welcome anymore.

  Her reflection seemed to distort and blur, but it was only her own tears. Peggy sagged against the bathroom wall, feeling the cold tile against her skin. She remembered a day at the shore, shortly after she and Thomas had started going steady. It had been a group of them that day; they all crowded into a train car and arrived in the shimmering heat of a late September afternoon, and the boys whooped and hollered and carried the girls like Egyptian goddesses to the blankets they’d spread on the beach. Late in the afternoon she’d fallen asleep in the sun, and when she woke, Thomas was lying next to her, propped up on his elbow, staring at her with a funny little smile on his face. Peggy had bolted awake, her hands going to the straps of her swimsuit. “What?” she’d demanded, looking about for the others. “What?”

  “Just thinking,” he’d said. “Wondering what you’ll look like when we’re old.”

  “Oh, what an awful thing to think about! I’ll be ugly, and wrinkled, and I’ll have yellow teeth and—”

  “And you’ll still be the most beautiful girl in the world,” he’d said softly. “I don’t care what happens, Pegs. You’re meant for me and me for you.”

  He’d been wrong, of course. They’d been like children, carefree and careless, believing in fairy tales. Neither was meant for anything at all. She was Peggy Parker now, and their love might as well have never existed.

  Peggy wearily sank down to the edge of the bathtub. Everything that had happened, she had brought on herself . . . but who was to say it would have come out any better if she’d behaved perfectly? It was like one of those old-fashioned stereographs she remembered from childhood. You held it up to your eyes and—like magic—you peered into a whole other world, mustachioed gentlemen chasing blushing women in voluminous skirts. But Peggy had always wondered, even as a child, what had happened next. It was unknowable: when you put the thing down, the image vanished. And yet it lived on in her mind.

  If she could go back in time—to that beach, to that sultry afternoon—and do everything differently . . . well. There would be no Tommie. And that alone was enough—enough to give Peggy the resolve to do what must be done.

  She stood and fixed her face, adjusted her clothes. Threw her things into her suitcase and called down to the desk for a cab.

  “WHAT WAS SO urgent, love, that you had to see me right now?” Daniel spoke lightly, but there was a faint edge of irritation in his voice. Even in light of what she’d come here to do, Peggy marveled that she hadn’t noticed it before. Or, rather, if she were truthful with herself, she had noticed and chosen to push it deep down inside her. With a man of Daniel’s stature, one had to accept a bit of impatience, an expectation that the world would conform to his wishes. After all, he was accustomed to getting what he wanted.

  “Well,” she said. Daniel had mixed her a drink without being asked, the gin rickey that somehow had become her signature cocktail. Th
ey were in the living room in his sprawling home in Connecticut. Several times before, during a cocktail hour in this room, Peggy had grown bored by the conversation among Daniel’s friends and let her mind wander to the dead wife. Had she played the gleaming piano? Had she chosen the paintings that flanked the fireplace, or had a decorator?

  Had she and Daniel ever made love here, when their daughter was small, when they’d come home giddy and a little drunk from an evening out, after they sent the sitter home?

  The drink Daniel handed her was perfect, a little sliver of lime floating in it. She sipped slowly, buying time. Daniel sat down next to her, his tumbler of bourbon balanced on his knee, and reached for her hand. He knew that she kept the ring in a safe in her townhouse when she traveled, but she could feel his faint disapproval as he turned her hand over before lacing her fingers with his own.

  “There are some things I should tell you,” Peggy began. “Things I probably should have said before. About me, about my past.”

  His hand stilled on hers. He shifted, almost imperceptibly, away.

  Somehow, he knew what was coming—hadn’t they both, almost from the start?

  Thelma

  “This is going to be a very exciting day for you,” Thelma said. She was sitting on the painted wicker chair in Tommie’s room, part of a set she’d given her granddaughter for her birthday. There was a matching dressing table complete with a small oval mirror, and a monogrammed sterling brush and comb. Tommie loved to sit in front of the mirror, but rather than play dress-up, she sketched her own reflection in her notebooks.

  The chair was uncomfortable, but then again, most everything had begun to hurt. It wasn’t just the stomach and back pain anymore. The disease was reaching into her bones, spreading through her body. Thelma had lost eighteen pounds already, pounds that even six months ago she would have been delighted to see disappear. She would continue to lose, she supposed, until she had to be put in some room somewhere, to finish dying . . . she didn’t like thinking about that, and it wasn’t because she was afraid. It just seemed like a lot of fuss when she already knew the outcome.

  A problem for another day.

  Because tomorrow, Thomas would finally be returning home. Today she and Tommie would ride back to Brunskill, where she had given the house a deep cleaning. The room where Tommie had spent the first eight years of her life with her mother had been returned, as best Thelma had been able, to the state it was in when Thomas lived there. His plaid bedspread had been brought up from the basement. His dresser had been stripped of the flowery shelf paper Peggy had put in it. His portrait, resplendent in his naval uniform, sat in pride of place. When guests came back to the house after the funeral, they would see it as it was, when he had lived at home.

  The dining room, which more and more Thelma treated as an office, had been cleared. She’d had to put the ledgers and adding and duplicating machines in her own bedroom, but that was all right. Once the funeral was over, it could all go back as it was.

  She’d gone with Frank to choose a casket, a handsome, simple one with brass fittings. Arrangements had been made for the mortuary to meet the train and take care of transporting the remains. Some women from St. Katherine’s were preparing the luncheon. The church basement had been offered, but Thelma wanted people here, in her home. She would do what she could in the time she had left to protect Thomas’s memory, even if it meant exhausting herself hosting the mourners.

  She had one nagging worry: it would be only natural for people to ask after Peggy. Surprisingly, only Mrs. Slater had made the connection—the version of Peggy in the news was different enough from her old appearance that most people didn’t realize it was her. But they would have to be prepared to tell the truth now—the version of the truth that Thelma had devised for Mrs. Slater, anyway. She just hoped that people would have the sense not to bring it up in front of Tommie.

  If the press figured out the truth, they’d have a field day. But Peggy was a clever girl, a survivor. Thelma was reasonably sure that whatever story Peggy told to explain herself, the press would eat it up, playing it for emotional appeal. She’d have to forgo her current beau, of course, and stay out of the news for an appropriate length of time. But she’d get another chance. Girls like her always found a way.

  As long as she didn’t come after Tommie.

  Thelma had done things that the world might not forgive her for. But she was weak and growing weaker. She no longer had the strength to protect all of them. And so she had to choose.

  “Are we going to the museum?”

  Thelma forgot that she had promised to take Tommie to see the Costume Institute’s exhibition called “The Seeds of Fashion.” Thelma knew that Tommie was only interested because the exhibit advertisement was a fashion illustration like the ones she remembered her mother making. Ever since her birthday party, Tommie had been obsessed with her mother, and it broke Thelma’s heart to watch her trying to revisit the memories, already going hazy, from before Peggy left.

  “No, sweetheart, not the museum, not today. We’re going back to Brunskill, to my house—we’re going to be having some special visitors.”

  “Who?” Tommie said suspiciously, putting down the Baby Mine doll that Jeanne had given her for her birthday.

  “It’s—well, you see, there is going to be a special funeral for your father. He didn’t get to have a real one when he died, but now we’re going to bury him in the cemetery next to your grandfather.” Thelma had prepared this little speech earlier, wanting to avoid mentioning anything about the body, to squash Tommie’s curiosity about where it had been all this time and focus on the ceremony. Because how was she supposed to explain to an eight-year-old that Thomas had been hastily buried in a dirt field with only a wooden marker for the last nine years? How would she describe what had been shipped home, what was now sitting at Grenholm Mortuary, waiting to be buried?

  Confusion and distress flitted across Tommie’s face. “I don’t want to go.”

  “Well, you must. You’re his daughter,” Thelma said, more shortly than she would have liked. She didn’t have the energy for an argument today.

  “Is Mama going to be there?” Tommie asked. Her eyes were wide and blue, a navy tinged with brown edges, unlike Thomas’s faded cornflower ones.

  “No, of course not, darling.” Thelma should have anticipated this. “You know your mother is very, very busy in New York City.”

  “Well, she was married to him. If I have to go, why doesn’t she?”

  A sharp ache in Thelma’s back nearly took her breath away. If only Jeanne was here; handling Tommie was too much for her today.

  “Because we told her not to,” she snapped between gritted teeth. “And that’s that, so let’s not hear any more about it.”

  “You told her she couldn’t come?” Tommie asked, dumbfounded. “But I could have seen her there!”

  “Thomasina,” Thelma said warningly. “That’s enough.”

  “No it isn’t! If Mama’s not going then I’m not either! She loved him, she told me. She used to cry because he died. I remember. It’s your fault she won’t come. She hates you.”

  This was news to Thelma. She’d seen Peggy cry over things—a botched haircut, a sad movie, sheer exhaustion when Tommie was small and inconsolable—but never over Thomas.

  “You don’t hate me,” she said flatly, her irritation impossible to ignore. It had been like that lately, her emotions more insistent, her reserves growing thin. “Tommie, you’re being ridiculous. Auntie Jeanne has already packed your suitcase and you’re coming with me.”

  “I don’t want to go. What if Mama comes here while I’m gone?”

  “Your mother’s not coming here,” Thelma snapped. “Not ever.”

  “Yes she is.” Tommie’s face set stubbornly. “I wrote her a letter. I asked her to.”

  “When did you do that?”

  “At school.”

  Thelma guessed—hoped—that Tommie was fibbing. “Tommie, listen to me. I know you—you
miss your mother, but she is much too busy to come.”

  “No,” Tommie said, suddenly leaping up, knocking over the doll wardrobe. “She is not too busy.”

  “But what matters right now,” Thelma continued doggedly, “is that Uncle Frank will be here soon, and I expect you to be ready to go. We need to do something with that hair. And you need to have your lunch.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Tommie!” Thelma yelled it, and finally she seemed to have the girl’s attention. “Your father loved you,” she finished, inadequately.

  “No he didn’t. He never even met me. And besides, I hate him!” Tommie ran from the room, her footsteps echoing through the apartment. Why, why had Thelma insisted on doing this alone?

  She got painfully to her feet and followed Tommie. One foot had fallen asleep and it clumped awkwardly on the floor, tingling almost unbearably. Tommie had gone to her hideout in the closet under the stairs, where she liked to go with a book and a flashlight whenever she was cross. Jeanne had allowed her to take some old blankets to sit on, and sometimes Tommie fell asleep in there.

  She stood outside the closet door. “You need to come out this instant, missy,” she said. “Uncle Frank is going to be here soon.”

  “I’m not going, I’m not! I hate you! I just want my mom!” Tommie’s wails were muffled and pitiful, and yet they did nothing to diminish Thelma’s irritation.

  She rattled the doorknob, but Tommie had locked it from inside.

  “I hate you! I hate you!” was her only response.

  The ache in Thelma’s spine took her breath away. Something twisted—something new, a further insult to her system, and she collapsed against the wall, gasping for breath. She pushed her hand against her lower back and tried to press the pain away but succeeded only in bringing black spots to her eyes. She breathed in, out, in, out . . . until slowly the spots receded and the pain shrank just enough that she could stand all the way up again.

  She staggered to the living room, already regretting the way she’d spoken to Tommie. Now she would have to wait out the child’s tantrum. But she was just so tired. She’d lie down for a few moments, they would both calm down . . . and then Frank would come and they would go home.