The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (23 page)

Like the heroine of
Virtue's Reward,
which I had seen just two days before, I stepped back and fanned myself. "Mr. Curran, stop! You frighten me."

He smiled, and my knees truly weakened. I had thought that phrase only a turn of speech. "No, I don't."

He saw me as far as the streetcar stop, and we agreed to meet again in a week. A bill outside the auditorium had advertised the next lecture: "Well-Being Is Within Your Grasp."

The speaker, Mr. Randall Mirliton, preached a seven-step pathway to success, which he demonstrated with a ladder beside him on the stage, every rung labeled: Vision, Clarification, Plan, Helpmeets, Consolidation, Re-Formation, and Investment. The ladder's two sides were tilted toward each other, forming a triangle, "because at every step some will fall away. Are they forced off the ladder to well-being, you ask? Far from it! Well-being invites us all in. Well-being has room for everyone. But nevertheless, some will fall from every rung. They grow weary of the task before them. They grow downhearted. They forget the very vision they worked so hard to attain. Well-being is available to all, but not all can muster the fortitude to attain it. Are you among those few? Can we look forward to meeting one another again in the years ahead, filled with the joys of attainment?" Mr. Mirliton had red hair that snapped back from the razor-sharp part above his eyebrows. He strode back and forth before his ladder, his hands wide, and his face grew pale in his excitement. "Shall we meet here again, having achieved all we hope for?"

George leaned toward me. "We had better say yes. It seems to mean so much to him."

"I hope you have your vision ready," I said. "Otherwise he looks prepared to supply you with one."

"Only one? I can come up with a vision for everyone in this room."

I should have been listening to Mr. Mirliton, who was now walking his hands up the ladder. Instead, I gestured at a couple two rows ahead of us, the man balancing a too-small bowler on his balding head, the woman beside him wearing an old-fashioned blue bonnet whose brim unhappily echoed the swoop of her chin. "What's their vision?" I murmured.

"After their dinner of spinach cooked in water and one chop apiece, they go to bed and dream of perfect digestion."

I nodded to a dandy, his hair so brilliantined that the fellow sitting beside him could probably make out his reflection. "Easy," George said. "A Packard."

"Too easy," I said. "What else?"

"A great-aunt with a fortune and a heart condition," he said.

The bold thing then would have been to ask about George's own vision, but I had not entirely lost my moorings. I turned my attention back to the talkative Mr. Mirliton, who was urging us to remember that we could achieve whatever we might envision, if we only had a Plan. A small, impatient sigh escaped me.

I glanced again at George. He was broad but not tall and might have looked like a brawler except for the correctness of his suit and his sweetly alert expression. Later, I would think of a kitten ready for mischief. "Do you intend to stay all the way through Investment?" he said.

A basket for contributions sat at the side of the stage. I had no desire to help fill it, but still I shook my head. "It's rude to leave before the final hymn."

"Growth!" Mr. Mirliton was calling. "Re-Formation allows us to see our plans in a larger field. Not just a garden, but the vast prairie! Not just a puddle, but all of the ocean!"

"Not just a boot box, but the whole boot!" murmured George, and I was so tickled that I had to scurry out of the hall, covering my face with my hand as if I were ill. Solicitous George stayed a step behind me, his hand hovering near my elbow.

When we were safely out in the sunshine, I let my giggles take over, while George said, "Why was that comical? That wasn't the most amusing thing I said."

"I don't think you need to know the answer to that, Mr. Curran." My drop from dignity was so steep that I started to giggle all over again, this time at myself.

"I do need the answer to that," he said. "I also need to know your name."

"And why is that?"

"So that I can call on you properly," he said. Surely he knew that the world was not so uncomplicated. But he continued to look cheerfully at me with small, round, wide-set eyes, and I wondered what it would be like to look at the world through those eyes.

"Nell Presser. Miss Presser."

"Miss Presser, may I come to call on you?" he said.

"What would be the purpose of your call?"

"I have a vision I would like to share," he said.

Merely thinking of his smile the next day would make me smile. George looked out at the same world I did, but he saw it better—brighter, more delightful, opening its arms to embrace us. He greeted me in the parlor of my rooming house under the glower of my landlord, who should have been pleased to see me meeting such a respectable fellow in broad afternoon. Noting the disapproval, George helped me with my cape and took my arm. In ice cream parlors and, later, over cups of tea, he and I talked about opportunities, which were the signs of good investment, and the vision required to see them. We did not tire of talking about the future. When I went back to my room, I envisioned the days unfurling before me, so richly colored. Mrs. Hoyt had grudgingly accepted my most recent set of dresses, on which I had set the waists half an inch lower than she had specified—not enough to change their look, but a more flattering line for the girls wearing them. "On the next movie, we might bring you to the lot," she said. "If you can fit us into your schedule."

"I keep a well-regulated calendar," I told her. Merely going to the lot, being on hand for fittings, guaranteed five dollars more per day, and public association with Mrs. Hoyt.

Possessed by new optimism, I tried my hand at haberdashery, making a tie out of patterned navy foulard. The tie emerged slightly crooked and didn't have the proper fullness above the seam, so I offered it to my landlord. He looked at me with suspicion and said, "Your rent is not going to go down."

"I'm not asking you for anything," I said.

"Oh, yes you are."

"Could you do with some pocket handkerchiefs? I have beautiful linen."

"No," he said, but I made them anyway and hummed every stitch of the way.

Without any apparent effort, George had reached into me and brought forth the best Nell, who laughed and had time for people, and who was fundamentally kind. For the first time, I understood fairy tales and why anyone could imagine a kiss might awaken a princess from her death-in-life. Mama had told me that story once, while we were doing laundry, and I regretted now that I had reacted with scorn.

I did not tell George about Mama. When he asked questions, I told him small things—cowboys, cattle drives, Pa's bitty ranch. A farm boy himself, George was easily diverted into talk about crops and tools, never imagining that there were other questions that a canny investor should ask. His very innocence pricked at me. He, neither stupid nor unworldly, nevertheless had no reason to make certain kinds of suspicious inquiries or—far worse—to conduct an investigation.

The thoughts crowded at the edges of my brain, but I would not let them in. George would surely stop calling if he knew my whole history. But a man who hadn't lived through a winter in a sod house with hard, silent people was unlikely to understand why a girl—a child!—would run away. A child had no business being married or bearing children. Maybe someday I would tell George the truth, an idea I used to tickle myself into a state. Never before had I yearned to plan a "someday" with a man.

I leaned toward him like a plant leans toward light. I felt a room brighten the moment he entered it, and I did not believe I deceived myself that his smile widened as soon as he found me. He called me witty, and that was true. Encouraged by George's admiring laugh, I did not fold back the comments that often filled my mouth and did not restrict myself to Gallic moues when a thought struck me as ironic. On the occasions that I forgot myself and dropped into Madame Annelle's silences and pointed looks, George roared with laughter and pretended to imitate me, sniffing at the teacup before him in a manner we thought of as French. With George, I could not be Madame Annelle, and I was not a shop girl, either. Who was I? Nell the businesslady. Nell, the girl handy with the needle. Nell Presser. Nell Curran! I practiced the name before I owned it, growing so feverish with anticipation and desire that when George finally proposed, I barely recognized what the words meant.

"I've been looking for a girl who can see where she's going," he said, and waited for me to reply.

"I believe we want to turn left at the next corner," I said, a line that he would tease me about for years. At the moment, though, he simply touched my elbow and waited until I looked at his broad, smiling face. Then I swayed, and George caught me. He would call it my Hollywood moment.

Three months after Mr. Mirliton's lecture, which George insisted was a date worth commemorating, we went to the courthouse. On the license application, I wrote "1894" rather than "1884" as my year of birth, and the image of Jack's face suspiciously inspecting a cow flashed into my mind. Shutting that face away, I added one more silent promise to my wedding vows: I would not tell any other lies to George. We were building something together, and I was going to make it strong and secure.

I began building on the next day by rising with my new husband and making his breakfast—eggs, still gelatinous when I set the plate before him. "Is this what I have to look forward to?" he said, and I took a step back.

"I didn't dare tell you about my cooking," I said.

"I thought cooking was something all girls knew," he said, watching the yolk slither. "Didn't your mother teach you?"

"She tried," I said miserably. Anyone could see that George wasn't intending to hurt me. He wasn't Jack, or Pa. He was adjusting his expectations, like a man who finds that his new machine—thresher, motorcar, no matter—does not function as smoothly as he would hope. Looking at his amiable face made me vow to learn to cook an egg properly. A child could do as much.

"Maybe you'll finally make me slimmify," he said.

"I don't want any less of you."

"I'll slide up from behind and surprise you," he said, his voice full of wicked meaning.

"Mr. Curran!"

"Missus Curran. Now that I've got you to come home to every night, I can see I'm going to have to be an athlete."

"Any more talk like that, and I won't let you in the door."

He laughed, bless him, kissed me on his way out the door, and I set the frying pan in the sink. Later I would practice with eggs until I got them right. For now, I unfolded a half-finished dress resting on top of the Singer we had carried into the house the night before. At first, George had not wanted me to keep up my work as a
modiste,
but I told him the sums I earned, weekly and monthly. Even allowing for the outlay of fabric and streetcar fare against my fees, profit was steadily going up. George started to jot numbers, then pushed back his hat and whistled. "You are my secret weapon," he said.

"Oh dear. Am I mustard gas?"

He nodded at the Singer. "That right there is a Gatling gun. And you are a good marksman. Don't do anything else but sew. Don't even plant a garden." As if I'd planned any such thing.

There were other plans to make while I guided fabric under the neatly punching needle. War had begun in Europe. Headlines blared conflicting opinions about conscription, and rumors ran in every direction. George and I spent Saturdays attending the hasty weddings of men he worked with. A dozen times we witnessed the joining of couples who scarcely knew each other's names. Right now men needed wives. I tried not to listen to the rumors about men soon needing children, too, if a real call-up began. Surely that would not be so. Surely the country could not take away a man simply because his wife was tragically unable to bear children.

"I don't see why not," George said as we watched the new couples awkwardly dance. "Marriage is the first security, but tykes will make them safer still. These two had better get to work."

"Listen to you—so cynical. You are discussing the future of our country."

"And you will tell me that you never thought of children as insurance?"

"I never did," I said truthfully.

That night, as every night, we did what we could to bring more security into our lives, though I knew what I was hoping for would demonstrate a miracle. I always made sure the sheet was drawn up, so he couldn't see my slack belly. If he asked, I promised myself, I would not lie. Questions were not impossible. George knew that I had once been a shop girl, and shoppies had a loose reputation for a reason. It was well known that a certain kind of girl could use a buttonhook to rid herself of a baby; I knew of two and had helped a third, who begged for my aid while I was still living in my first rooming house, the respectable one. Perhaps one day, frustrated as he looked at my slight frame, George might ask, "Is there a reason we have no child?" If he asked, I would find some way to tell him: a difficult birth on the plains, a country doctor with unsanitary forceps, a baby who did not come out right and had not wanted to cry. The conversation needn't be ruinous, I told myself, but I knew better. Just imagining George's face, I could make myself queasy with fear.

Thirty years old. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Seven years older than George, though he thought three years younger. When we went to the pictures or walked through the tiny park near our house, his eyes followed the children. He especially loved the toddlers, who crowed while they stamped along on their tiny feet. I lost track of the parents my husband introduced himself to, in order to bend down and greet their children. I stood nearby, smiling, my fingernails digging into my palms.

Once, after we came home, I said, "I am doing what I can, you know." George was so puzzled that I had to explain myself, making things worse: "I want a baby, too. More than anything."

"I know that, Nell."

"It's been so long."

"It's taking its time. That only means that once it arrives, it will be a baby for the ages." He cupped my chin in his hand, making me look at him. "What have you done with your Vision?"