Secrets of a Charmed Life (3 page)

Isabel’s mouth straightens into a thin, hard line and I am wondering whether I offended her and just ruined my last chance at an interview.

But then Isabel inhales deeply and I see that she is not angry with me. “You are absolutely right, my dear. Absolutely right.” She takes another sip of tea and her mouth lingers on the rim of her cup. For a moment she seems to be very far away, lost in a memory—an old and aching place of remembrance. Then she returns the cup to its saucer and it makes a gentle scraping sound. “So, what will you do when you return to the States, Kendra?”

“Well, I’ve another year at USC and then I’m hoping to head straight to grad school,” I answer quickly, eager to be done with pleasantries and get to the reason I am here. “I plan to get my doctorate in history and teach at the college level.”

“A young woman with plans. And how old are you, dear?”

I can’t help but bristle. The only time a person asks how old I am is when they think the answer is somehow relevant to him or her. It usually never is.

“You don’t have to tell me, of course. I was just wondering,” she adds.

“I’m twenty-one.”

“It bothers you that I asked.”

“Not really. It just surprises me when people ask. I don’t know why it should matter.”

“But that is precisely why it does bother you. I felt the same way once. People treat you differently when they think you are too young to know what you want.”

The bristling gives way to a slow sense of kinship. “Yes, they do.”

“I understand completely. You are the oldest in your family?”

“I have a sister who’s four years younger.”

“A sister. Just the one?”

I nod.

She seems to need a moment to process this. “I’d surmised you might be the oldest. We firstborns are driven, aren’t we? We have to be. There’s no one leaving bread crumbs for us on the trail ahead. We blaze our own trail. And the younger ones, they look to us. They watch us—they take their cues from us, even if we don’t want them to.” She drains her cup and sets it carefully on the tray.

I’m not sure what she is getting at. “I guess. Maybe. I’m not sure my sister would agree. She’s got pretty strong opinions of her own. I think she’d say she’s leaving her own bread crumbs.”

Isabel laughs and it is light and airy. It’s the kind of laugh that spills out when a memory is triggered; the kind of memory that perhaps was not funny in the slightest when it was being made.

“What is your sister’s name?” she says as her laughter eases away.

“Chloe.”

She closes her eyes as if tasting the word. “What a lovely name.” Her eyes open. “Have you a photo?”

I pull my cell phone from my messenger bag and find a photo of Chloe and me taken in front of Christ Church on the last day she and my parents were here. My sister is a brunette like me, wears her hair shoulder length like I do, and has the same gray-blue eyes. But she puts ketchup on everything, plays lacrosse and the violin, and wants to be a civil engineer. We are close, Chloe and I, but none of those things interest me. Not even the ketchup.

I extend the phone and she studies Chloe’s and my smiling faces.

“She favors you,” Isabel says.

“We look like my dad, actually.” I take the phone back and find a picture of my parents from the same day. My mom’s red curls are dancing a ballet in the breeze and she is smiling so wide, her eyes have narrowed to slits. Dad, blue eyed and brown haired with a brushstroke of gray at the temples, has his arm around her. Their heads are nearly touching.

Isabel studies this picture as well, memorizing it. Then she hands the phone back. “You have a lovely family, Kendra. I hope you know how lucky you are.”

I’ve never known quite what to say when someone says I have a lovely family. It’s nothing I can take credit for, so saying thank you seems silly. But that’s what I say as I smile and slip the phone back inside my bag.

“Now, then,” Isabel says, and I sense she is at last shifting the focus from me. “Charles tells me this interview is more than just for an essay for a class.”

It takes me a second to make the connection that Charles is Professor Briswell. “Yes. The seventieth anniversary of VE Day is next month. The professor for one of my other classes has made an arrangement with a London newspaper. The five best term papers will be published in the paper the week of May eighth.”

I watch her face carefully to see whether this additional information is going to spell trouble for me.

“So what you write will be read widely?’

“Only if mine is one of those chosen. And I don’t know that it will be. Is that okay with you if it is?”

“You will write to win one of those spots, yes? You’ll be happy if yours is chosen.”

“Well, yes.”

“This other professor, he is friends with Charles? Can you count on him to judge your essay on the strength of your writing alone? Be a shame if he discounted yours because a fellow professor assisted in helping you secure an interview.”

I am still not sure whether it is helping me or hindering me that this paper I am to write might be published in a London paper. “I don’t know that they are friends. I suppose they are since they teach at the same college. I happened to mention to Professor Briswell that I was in a bind for another class. He was nice enough to want to help me.”

Isabel leans back and I can see she is satisfied with my answer. “What did Charles tell you about me?” she says.

I’d done all the research on the effect of the Blitz on London’s female population and had needed only the interview to write the paper and be done with it. When the woman I was to interview died, it was too late to change the subject matter without setting myself so far back that I would never finish the paper on time. I had mentioned as much to Professor Briswell, just in passing, and he had told me that an elderly friend in his family might be convinced to help me out. This person was one to decline interviews, though, even regarding her watercolors for
which she was known throughout the southwest of England. He’d ask her anyway and tell her I was in a tight spot. But he said I should expect her to say no.

“He told me that you typically decline interviews,” I say.

She smiles. “That’s all?”

“He said you are known for your watercolors. I love your work, by the way.”

“Ah, yes. My Umbrella Girls.”

I turn my head in the direction of one of the more prominent paintings in the room: A young girl in a pink dress is walking through a field of glistening-wet daisies and holding the trademark red-and-white polka-dot umbrella. A brave sun is peeking through clouds that are plump with purpose. “Have you always painted girls with umbrellas?”

“No. Not always.” Her answer is swift and without hesitation. But the way she elongates the last word tells me there is more behind the answer. She doesn’t offer more even though I wait for it.

“Tell me, Kendra,” Isabel says after a pause. “What is it about the Blitz that you would like to know? I should think there are dozens of books out there. What information do you lack that you cannot read in a book?”

I fumble for an answer. “Well, uh, aside from that I’m required to interview someone, I think . . . I think information is only half of any story about people. Personal experience is the other part. I can’t ask a book what it was like to survive the bombs.”

Isabel cocks her head to one side. “Is that what you want to ask me? What it was like to have my home bombed?”

It occurs to me that I posed a rather elementary
question with surely an equally elementary answer. I am suddenly superbly underconfident about all my questions. I glance at the notepad in my lap and every bulleted sentence looks superficial to me.

What was it like in the shelter night after night?

Were you afraid?

Did you lose someone you loved or cared about?

Did you wonder if it would ever end?

“Are you going to turn that thing on?”

I snap my head up. Isabel is pointing to my little voice recorder on the coffee table. “Do you mind?”

“You may as well, seeing as you brought it.”

As I lean toward the table to press the
RECORD
button, the notepad falls off my lap and onto the thick Persian carpet at my feet.

As my fingers close around the tablet, I realize that there is really only one question to ask this woman who for seventy years has refused all interviews, and who told me not ten minutes ago when she told Beryl to shut the door that she would say only what she wanted to.

I place the pad on the seat cushion next to me. “What would you like to tell me about the war, Isabel?”

She smiles at me, pleased and perhaps impressed that I figured out so quickly that this is the one question she will answer.

She pauses for another moment and then says, “Well, first off, I’m not ninety-three. And my name’s not Isabel.”

EMMY

London, England

1940

THE
wedding dress in the display window frothed like uncorked champagne, bubbling toward Emmy Downtree as she stood on the other side of the broken glass. Glittering shards lay sprinkled about the gown’s ample skirt, sparkling as if they belonged there. Yellow ribbons streamed from behind the pouty-lipped mannequin, simulating a golden, unaware sun. At Emmy’s feet, jagged splinters were strewn on the sidewalk at menacing angles. A hand-lettered Help Wanted sign, still partially taped to a fractured edge, pitched forward onto the frame, and fifteen-year-old Emmy knelt to pull it gingerly from the glassy ruin. She could hear the owner inside Primrose Bridal talking on the telephone to the police, demanding attention be paid her. Someone had crashed into her storefront during the night.

Julia, Emmy’s seven-year-old sister, looked up at her. “Why don’t the Germans like wedding dresses?”

Emmy didn’t laugh at her sister’s assumption that the Luftwaffe had blown the window to bits. For the past year they had lived with wailing air raid alarms, drills at school, and mandatory blackout curtains. Several uncomfortable nights had been spent with Mum huddled in the shelter nearest their flat with a dozen of their neighbors when a raid had seemed imminent. Both girls had carried a gas mask to school the past term. It was not so far off the mark that Julia saw the destroyed window and concluded that what they’d been told for a year could happen at any moment had at last happened.

Emmy rose to her feet with the little sign in her hands. “The Germans didn’t do this, Jewels. None of the other windows on the street are broken. See? A car probably hopped the sidewalk. Hit the gas instead of the brake. Something like that.”

Julia’s gaze hung on the wreck of the window. “You sure?”

“Positive. We would have heard the sirens, right? It was quiet last night.”

In fact, the sirens had not whined for more than a week, and the buzzing hum of the Luftwaffe over their heads hadn’t been heard in twice that long. It was as quiet as it had been almost a year ago when the war was new and undefined.

“No one will want that dress now,” Julia said, apparently satisfied that the Nazis didn’t hate wedding dresses after all. “It’s got glass in it.”

“It can be shaken out. I bet the bride who buys it will never even know.” Emmy flicked away a sliver of window glass from the Help Wanted sign and read the smaller words beneath it.
Hand-sewing and alterations.
Eight to ten hours a week
.
Inquire within
. She hadn’t seen the placard before and wondered how long it had been taped to the window. Surely it had only been within the last few days. Emmy was familiar enough with the window at Primrose to know the sign was new.

“I wouldn’t wear that dress. I like your brides better anyway. Yours are prettier.”

Emmy laughed easily. “Think so?” She looked past the ruined display to the woman inside who was becoming more adamant that a policeman come that very moment.

“No, I haven’t been burglarized.” The woman’s voice easily reached the two girls on the sidewalk. “That’s not the point! Someone has run into my window and smashed it.”

“This one’s too poufy,” Julia continued. “Yours are much nicer.”

“Mine are just drawings, Jewels. Hard to know what they’d look like if they were real.” Emmy looked to the chemist’s across the narrow street and saw Mum through the window at the register. She’d be coming out soon. Emmy replaced the placard, but lowered it to the display window’s floor facedown. She would come back later—when the owner wasn’t so distracted—and with her best bridal gown sketches in hand, just in case she needed extra proof that she was worth considering.

“Yours are still prettier,” Julia said.

Their mother stepped out onto the sidewalk across from them. Annie Downtree walked between slow-moving cars toward her daughters. A man in a shiny blue Citroën tipped his hat as he stopped for her. Emmy watched as the driver’s eyes traveled past Mum’s honey brown curls, her slim waist, to her long legs and slender ankles. With only sixteen years separating her mother and Emmy, they had lately been taken for sisters. Emmy had been annoyed at
first, but realized quickly that such a mistake meant she came across as the adult she was so ready to be. The sooner she was independent of Mum, the sooner Emmy could chase her own dreams. Mum behaved as a sister toward Emmy most of the time anyway, confiding secrets one moment and withholding them the next, reading magazines and smoking cigarettes while Emmy made dinner, coming home late at night when the mood struck her, asking Emmy for advice when it came to dealing with Neville, Annie’s on-and-off-again lover and Julia’s father. Mum’s intermittent displays of maternal competence were largely spent on Julia, who had never been mistaken for Mum’s sister.

“Let’s go, then,” Mum said when she reached them. She slipped a little white parcel that she had picked up for her employer into her handbag.

“Look what happened to the bridal shop, Mum,” Julia said urgently.

Their mother cast a disinterested gaze toward the ruined window. “Well, that’s too bad. But no one’s getting married these days, anyway. Come on. I still need to go to the butcher before work. Mrs. Billingsley demands a ham.”

“That’s not true,” Emmy said.

Mum, already several steps ahead, turned halfway around. “Yes, it is true. I told you yesterday that I had to work today.”

“I mean it’s not true that no one’s getting married. If that were true, this shop wouldn’t still be open.” And the owner wouldn’t be hiring.

“For the love of God, Em. There’s a bloody war on, in case you’ve forgotten.” She swung back around to resume her hurried pace.

“But the Germans didn’t break this window!” Julia chirped.

Mum turned in midstride, her frown deepening. “What are you filling her head with, Emmy?”

“I’m not filling her head with anything. She asked if the Germans bombed this place and I told her they hadn’t.”

Mum sighed but kept walking.

“We like looking at the wedding dresses,” Julia said. “We don’t want to go to the butcher.”

“Yes, well, I like looking at the crown jewels,” Mum called out over her shoulder.

Emmy pulled her gaze away from the remains of the window, the yards of organza, and the placard lying on its face.

Julia slipped her hand into Emmy’s as they stepped away from the shop, their shoes crunching on silvery slivers. “I don’t like the butcher. His store smells like dead things. I don’t like it.”

“We can wait outside.”

The girls had taken only a dozen steps when Emmy heard the swish of a broom and the tinkling of glass against the edge of a dustpan. And then a voice cried out, followed by a murmured curse. Emmy turned to see a broom hit the pavement. The owner of the shop held one hand in the other and her face was wrenched more in annoyance than in pain. The broom and dustpan lay at her feet.

“Catch up with Mum.” Emmy turned from Julia and retraced the few steps to where the owner stood. A crimson line crisscrossed her palm where a piece of glass had cut her.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” Emmy asked.

“Yes, yes,” the owner mumbled as she yanked a handkerchief from a dress pocket and shook out the folds. She pressed the cloth to the wound. Emmy bent to retrieve the broom and dustpan.

“Careful there! No sense in both of us slicing our hands to ribbons,” the woman said.

“Would you like some help with this? I can sweep this up while you take care of your hand.”

The woman peered at Emmy, as if unprepared for such spontaneous kindness from a stranger. Then her eyes widened in recognition.

“I know you. I’ve seen you looking in my window, haven’t I? Many times.”

Heat rose to Emmy’s cheeks. “Yes, ma’am. I like . . . I like your gowns. I hope to have a bridal shop of my own someday.”

The woman smiled as she wound the handkerchief around the cut and a scarlet thread of blood began to seep through. “Well, I surely hope for your sake happier times are in your future.” She nodded toward the broken display window. “As you can see, it isn’t always a charmed life, running a business on your own. Especially with a war going on. If you’ll excuse me, I need to find some gauze. I’ll get to that mess later. But thanks.” She started to head back into her shop.

“I see that you’re looking to hire someone,” Emmy blurted.

The woman turned, her head cocked in negligible interest. “I am.”

Emmy swallowed back her nervousness. “May I come back later today and speak with you about the position?”

The woman hesitated. “How old are you?”

“Nearly sixteen.” The little lie flew out of Emmy’s mouth before she could stop it. Her birthday was nearly a year away. But a fifteen-year-old was still a child. A fifteen-year-old could still be evacuated.

“Have you any experience?”

Another swallow. “I’ve some.”

Pressing the handkerchief tighter to her hand, the shop owner nodded once. “Come back at closing time and we’ll talk. Six. I’ll need references.”

“Oh. Um, okay. Six, then. Right,” Emmy stammered, her mind already reeling with the prospect of convincing this woman that her sketches of wedding gowns would have to serve as references.

“My name’s Mrs. Crofton and I don’t like it when people are late. Just leave the broom and dustpan there.”

“I’m Em-Emmeline Downtree. I will be here at six. Thank you, Mrs. Crofton.”

The owner stepped into the shop with a wordless tip of her head. Emmy set the broom and dustpan against the glassless window frame and walked away, amazed at the turn of luck that had come her way. For the better part of a year she’d been peering into Primrose Bridal’s windows on market day, captivated by the gowns that hung fairylike from mannequins and padded hangers. This newfound affinity had eclipsed her fondness for doodling dress designs during math class and making countless paper dolls for Julia. Mum was one to walk right past Primrose Bridal; not so much in a hurry as in indifference. Mum had never married, and if perhaps someday she would marry, Emmy doubted she would wear white. For a half second Emmy wanted to thank the scoundrel who had run into Mrs. Crofton’s window and set in motion the events that had resulted in her being granted an interview.

She rounded the street corner and nearly ran into Julia.

“Why aren’t you with Mum?” Emmy gasped.

Julia frowned at her. “I don’t like the butcher’s. I don’t like the way his store smells.”

Emmy grabbed her sister’s hand and pulled her down the sidewalk. “You should have done what I said.”

“Why were you talking to that lady?”

“Never mind that now.”

“But I saw you talking to her.”

“I was just offering to help her sweep up the glass.”

“She cut her hand.”

“Yes.”

Emmy quickened their pace. Mum would surely give them grief about taking so long. But she likely wouldn’t ask why.

Mum wasn’t interested in why Emmy liked gazing into bridal shop windows.