A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

  The Shrinking Violet rang with bright brass musical numbers and comedy skits and even a one-act play, a fun twist on Romeo and Juliet where Juliet, upon awakening to find Romeo supposedly dead, sought comfort from her scandalously dressed nurse and decided to run off with the nurse instead. Romeo awoke to an empty crypt and aw-shucksed his way off the stage to the cheers of the crowd.

  After an impressive set of croony songs usually sung by men, the singer, Luisa, joined us in our booth and traded kisses on the cheek with Frankie. “Who’s your girl?” Luisa asked Frankie, before tossing me a grin.

  As usual, Frankie spoke before I could. “Evie’s a writer. She’s gonna work for Metro-Goldwyn one of these days, mark my words.”

  “Yeah? She write about girls like us?” Luisa laughed. “Good luck gettin’ that past the censors. Maybe you could write a new act for me here. The Romeo and Juliet number’s getting a little stale, y’know? Talk to Violet. She’d love to get some new talent in the club.”

  Luisa gestured behind us to a private box at the top of the hall. A dark figure stood silent, leaning against the railing, watching over the club with what looked to me like a satisfied smirk.

  “Violet runs the club?” I asked.

  “Runs it? She owns it, books the performers, oversees all the productions, does about everything but pour the drinks and wait the tables — aw, thanks, Madge,” Luisa said, as the waitress brought her some water. “A self-made woman. And she’s always happy to help out our own, y’know what I mean?” Luisa winked. “Seriously, if you’re any good, Violet’d pay you well, I’m sure.”

  A self-made woman. Like my Kitty Cohen. Maybe they didn’t just exist in my shoddy scripts. I smiled up at Violet and thanked Luisa before she headed back to the stage for the next show.

  “That was incredible,” I said to Frankie as we headed home. “I had no idea there was — that anything like that existed.” That we’re not alone.

  Frankie grinned and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. “You can find anything in this town, Evie. Just a bit of fun, right?”

  I was too enchanted by our evening to let her words sting. “And they need writers. And probably performers too! Why haven’t you auditioned for Violet?” I asked.

  Frankie’s gaze darkened; she shrugged and glanced off down the street, where servicemen waited in line for another dance hall. “Oh, I dunno, it’s not really what I want. I might as well swing for the fences, y’know? Land a real studio gig. Then I’ll know I’ve made it for real.” She snorted. “If I can.”

  I clutched both her hands in mine. “Frankie. You’re incredible. Of course you can. You can win an Oscar, I know it. Soon the studios’ll be beating down your door. I just thought it might be nice for you to start out among girls like us, and —”

  “You really think I’ll make it?” She squeezed my hands tighter, urgency punctuating her words. “You aren’t just saying that?”

  “Of course I think so. I —” I swallowed. I knew she’d said it before, but Frankie said a lot of things. “I love you, Frankie. I know you can do anything you aim for, and I —”

  She kissed me before I could finish, a toe-curling kiss that melted away the rest of the world. Frankie loved me back — she had to, didn’t she, to kiss me that way? That’s why she’d brought me to the Shrinking Violet. I wasn’t alone in loving her, in loving girls, in finding my true self —

  “Hey, would you look at that!” exclaimed some wise Joe as he passed us on the sidewalk. “Sorry, ladies, but I bet your guys’ll be wantin’ that job back when they get home too!”

  I yanked away from Frankie, but I knew just how I looked — lips ripe and swollen, panting for breath, my every skin cell crackling and alive. The man chuckled to himself and continued down the boulevard, but his words rattled around inside me like loose rocks in my shoe as we headed back to Mrs. M’s. There was no more hiding who I was.

  I was in love with another girl.

  “Don’t be silly,” Frankie said that night, in the silvery dark of my room. “We’re just havin’ fun, you and me. No need to put a label on it or nothin’.”

  “It’s not just fun for me.” My heart was throbbing, sore and worn out. “This is who I am — who I’ve always been. I just never admitted it before.” And I wanted it to be more. The way she looked at me sometimes, like I was the only one who knew the roles she wanted to play — that’s the way she made me feel all the time. “I don’t want to be someone I’m not anymore.”

  Her laugh was like metal shearing in two. “You think you can just declare it, and no one’s gonna mind?” She turned away from me. “That Mrs. M would keep renting to you? That the studios would hire you? Ain’t it tough enough, just being a gal? Why do you want to make it even harder for yourself?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.” I cupped my hand around hers. “All those girls at the Shrinking Violet — they aren’t afraid. I shouldn’t be either.”

  “Those girls at the Shrinking Violet can’t get work anywhere else. Even in this day and age, with no menfolk around. You think they’re there because it’s so lucrative?” She pulled her hand away. “Get some sleep, Evie. I think the champagne’s gone to your head.”

  After she’d left that morning, I was back at my typewriter. If she didn’t think I should declare myself to the whole world, well, there was at least one person to whom I owed the truth.

  I’m coming to understand something about myself that I hadn’t known before. I care deeply for you, but I’m not sure I’m able to be a wife — to you or any man.

  Once the words stared back at me, black ink on white, I realized they were the words I’d been searching for all along.

  I’d come to Los Angeles to find myself — the work and life that I wanted. Now, for the first time, I felt that I actually knew who I was. Behind the scenes, writing the script, not acting out someone else’s story. Loving a girl who inspired passion in me, instead of a man I was expected to look to for security. It was terrifying, to throw away the script I’d been working from my whole life — but now I felt certain that I could write my own.

  “I told him. I told James the truth about me.” I gazed into Frankie’s eyes that night, aching to drown in their depths.

  “What truth?” She turned away from me and buried herself in her script. Another audition, this time for a supporting role. Frankie supported no one, but she was, I could tell, grateful the studio had given her a second chance.

  “That I like girls. That I like you.” I reached for her shoulder, but she shrugged me off.

  “I don’t see why you worry about defining it.” She leaned back in her chair. “How should I say this line? ‘Oh, Deborah, I don’t know how you always land the right man!’” She rasped breathlessly. “Or is it a joke? ‘Oh, Deborah, I don’t know how you always land them . . . ’”

  I wanted to believe, though, that Frankie appreciated me telling James the truth. She just needed to get her big break — we both did. If we couldn’t do it now, with the war on, then when would we get another chance?

  As it turned out, my letter never reached James.

  One afternoon, Mrs. M called me to the front door, and I bounded out of my room, thinking Frankie had rushed straight from her audition to tell me she’d landed the part.

  But I didn’t recognize the dark-haired man standing there, crow’s-feet crinkling his damp eyes, hat crushed in his restless hands. And yet I knew him — his features lined up so well with James’s.

  “Listen. You’re — you’re Evelyn, right?” He took a deep breath, eyes wrenching shut. “I’m James’s father. Ricky Falcone. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  I sank into the armchair, no longer able to feel my legs.

  The explosion had ripped straight through the hull, he said. James had died trying to save his fellow sailors. Smoke inhalation, shrapnel wounds . . . An honorable death. But it didn’t matter. I felt dishonorable — I’d never properly ended things with James. He died thinking I loved him, th
at I’d been true. He’d never heard my words. My declaration of me. Hot tears of shame and grief needled at my eyes, threatening to spill.

  “James told me he wanted to make a wife of you when he returned,” Ricky continued. His eyes never really found mine. “If you’re in a — a situation, or you need money, or anything —”

  “No. No, I couldn’t, Mr. Falcone.” James had been a good man and a good friend; I thought I’d loved him once. But I couldn’t accept his father’s help. “You’re very kind, but I . . . I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  I was no one’s responsibility. I was my own woman, for good and bad.

  When Mr. Falcone left, I slumped against the door and allowed myself a few raw tears. James deserved to be mourned. He deserved someone better than me — but no, I told myself, that wasn’t quite right. He’d deserved someone different from me. Someone who could have loved him fully. Didn’t we all deserve that? I wanted to believe so.

  Frankie didn’t land the part, but we celebrated anyway. I’d set aside City of Angels; in truth, Frankie was all I could think of those days. I saw her in my mind when I awoke and tasted her on my lips when I fell asleep. That, and factory production had ramped up, and everyone said Berlin would fall to the Allies any day. Frankie and I worked double shifts, side by side, daydreaming of how we’d use the money from our war bonds when we cashed them in.

  “A mink coat,” she said with a swoon, “just like Marlene Dietrich.”

  “A house of our own,” I said.

  Frankie rolled her eyes, though she was smiling — that smile was like a hook where I always hung my coat. “A night at the Brown Derby.”

  That was Frankie — she was the comet blazing through the sky, and I wanted to be the tail. But it was dangerous to think anything was a guarantee with a girl like her. Every moment with her slipped too quickly from my grasp.

  A commotion at the factory; gasps and squeals threading through the raucous din of the machines. Frankie! Frankie! They called her name like the legions of fans she dreamed of outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Frankie pushed her goggles up into her kerchief-wrapped hair and shut down her equipment.

  A hardness formed in my gut, clenching like when I’d written my letter to James, like when his father had sat me down to tell me of his death.

  A swarm of girls pressed around the corner, ushering a young man on crutches with them. “Francesca,” he said, like she was the sweetest honey. And she was.

  But I also knew, then, that she was no longer mine.

  He’d been rescued with a dozen other army privates from a camp and spent weeks recovering in a hospital bed in England. He was feverish, too ill to write to her, but as soon as he was mended he received a medal and an honorable discharge and came straight for her. I overheard all this with the dozens of other girls crowded around, swooning and clutching their hands to their hearts. They’d been dazzled by Frankie and her lies and exaggerations and her starlight.

  She never returned to the factory after that day. Soon more servicemen trickled in, claiming their girls or, more often, claiming our jobs. The shift mother called me to her office and asked me if I wouldn’t mind stepping aside for another GI who’d come home and, she said delicately, needed the work more than I did. He’d served his country, after all. When I started to mind, though, I realized she wasn’t really asking.

  We declared victory in Europe, though the battles in the Pacific raged on, over the same stretch of sea where James had lost his life believing I was waiting for him back on shore. I wandered Los Angeles and all the places Frankie and I had been. The drugstore where we got milk shakes, now packed with soldiers and their gals. The place she shared with her roommate — twice I tried to find the nerve to knock, to call, but the third time, as I paced the sidewalk, I saw a young family leaving the apartment, crossing the parking lot under the hot white gleam of California summer.

  “You’ll find work again,” Mrs. M said, as I chewed on the night’s meal (pork chop, no longer rationed) and stared out the window as the late-evening sun splashed across the new cars whizzing by on the avenue. “Maybe once I cash in my war bonds, I can hire you to do some cleaning for me. Or I can check with the other ladies in my bridge club. . . .” She stirred her Ovaltine. “What about Francesca? Did she finally land a role? Maybe she could get you work as an assistant at the studio. . . .”

  “Francesca’s not coming around anymore.” I dropped my fork. “Listen, Mrs. M, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s none of your business, but if I don’t tell someone, it’s going to eat me up.”

  Her lips quavered. “Evie, dear, if you’re in any sort of trouble —”

  “I was in love with someone, but it didn’t work out.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Another girl.”

  Mrs. M didn’t say anything for a long time. Slowly, I opened my eyes to find her staring at me expectantly. “Well?” she asked. “Is that it?”

  “You’re not going to — to kick me out?” I asked.

  “Is it going to keep you from paying rent?” She took a sip of Ovaltine, leaving a chocolate mustache on her upper lip. “Dear, we all came to California in search of ourselves. Herbert and I wanted better weather for his illness, though it turned out it didn’t do him much good. You came here ’cause you have a story to tell. Might as well tell it.”

  I ended up having to cash out most of my war bonds when a new job never materialized — no need to hire a dark-skinned girl like me when hundreds of vets needed work. I went to the movies — and walked right back out when one of the shorts in front of a Bogart show starred Francesca Miller in a Daniel Fiorelli production. I didn’t need to see those eyes watching me, that smile scrawled across the screen.

  More important, I had time to write, and the first thing I tackled was a new draft of City of Angels, this time as a one-act play. I’d sit in a corner booth at the Shrinking Violet and sip on soda water while I reworked the story. I’d chat with Luisa and Madge when they had breaks, and while I never felt the same spark with them that had flared in me with Frankie, it was nice to have a few friends in this world who didn’t make me feel like I had to hide.

  Plus, it was good to have their support for what I was about to do.

  I climbed the stairs to Violet’s office with legs like gelatin, hugging my brown folio tight to my chest. Violet’s guard, the only man I’d seen in the whole club, ushered me inside. Violet lounged behind her desk, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, her creamy satin gown crisp against her dark skin. “Evelyn,” she said, my name streaming from her mouth in a puff of smoke. “The girls tell me you have a play for me. Something a little more serious to be part of our revue here at the club.”

  “It’s called City of Angels.” I hesitated, then held the folio out to her. “In a city of women, all the men called off to war, a gun moll named Kitty Cohen decides to seize control of her old squeeze’s gang for herself. But she’s pursued by a clever young detective on the force, Mary O’Shea. Sparks and bullets both fly as they outwit each other, and fall for each other —”

  “I get the idea.” She tapped away the ash from her cigarette as she flipped through the script. “Ha. ‘Looks like we’ll have to share this town.’ That’s cute, I like that.” She glanced up at me. “You got studios interested in this?”

  “No, I didn’t think —”

  “What’re you asking, a thousand? Two? I can give you two, but I can’t go any higher. I gotta pay my girls. Six months exclusive, you can revise it, then you can take it to the studios —”

  Two thousand dollars! I could live another year off of that. Enough time to write another script. Maybe two — one for the studios and another for the Shrinking Violet. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”

  Rosie the Riveter endures as the most instantly recognizable symbol of American women’s contributions to World War II, though the munitions and aircraft assembly lines were far from the sole opportunities women found for employment on the home front. In fact, countless jobs traditionally res
erved for men opened to them — transcription, logistical support, translation, scientific research, engineering and industrial design, transportation, and much more. Government-sponsored propaganda posters like “We Can Do It!” glorified these jobs while at the same time reassured any doubtful (or, okay, sexist) husbands that it was their wives’ patriotic duty to work. While women were barred from serving in the United States armed forces until 1948, thousands joined civil defense groups like the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps or served as nurses in the field.

  Hollywood, too, served an important function in the Allied forces’ efforts to unite public opinion and discourage the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan. Movies produced during World War II often featured critical comedic portrayals of the Axis leadership, rousing patriotic musical numbers, and sweeping dramas like Casablanca (whose epic ending Evie could surely sympathize with). While censorship in this period focused on preventing the leaking of information that could compromise military action, the Hays Code restricted studios from portraying anything that might “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” which unfortunately included homosexuality, as far as the code’s authors were concerned.

  1.

  I’D ALWAYS BEEN A GOOD GIRL. ALWAYS followed the rules. Kept my nose clean, as Granny liked to say.

  Our farm was a whopping twenty-seven acres, and I had the run of the place. The garden, the orchard, the barn, the fields. When a hot breeze blew, I would follow it. Hike up my skirt, run off the porch and down our long grassy drive to the dirt lane that led to the rest of the world. Most times I could run straight out into the road and just stand there. Let the wind swirl around me as it tunneled between the fields on either side. Two cars a day passed by, maybe, headed to or from other farms down the lane. You could tell when they’d gone past, because those tires stirred up dirt and left a silt-brown cloud hanging above the avocado trees lining the drive. You could tell when they were coming too. The dust would rise, a long way off, and billow closer.