“Yes, but you weren’t the one who had to provide.”
Grace blows across the top of her cup of coffee. “You’ve been such a help.”
“You’re my life now. Just as Claire and Tom are yours.”
It sounds like a true statement, but it isn’t quite. Grace’s life is also Gene and Merle’s house and the need to find a job, the necessity to have transportation, the desperation for money, and a desire, buried as it is, for something more.
“I’m thinking of taking the children next door,” Marjorie says. “I met the neighbor, Maureen. She seems nice, invited me over. I told her I might have the children with me.”
“I’m thinking of applying for a job.”
“Are you?”
“If I got a job, would you be able to manage?” She means taking care of the children, cooking the meals, cleaning the house.
“I think so. I’d get Aidan to help with the marketing and any heavy work. How will you get to work?”
“By bus. Walk if I have to.”
“Well, it’s only temporary, isn’t it? Until Gene gets back.”
“Right,” says Grace.
“Whatever are you going to do for clothes?”
“I’m going to do to Merle’s closet what you just did to Gene’s drawer.”
When Marjorie and the children come home from the visit to Maureen, who turns out to be the cook and not the mistress of the house—“such delicious soda bread; we won’t need lunch”—they put Claire and Tom down for a nap. Grace, not willing to open Merle’s closet without her mother, makes a flourish of it when her mother is beside her.
“Oh my Lord,” Marjorie says, “it’s enormous.”
Together they enter the massive closet and stare at the racks and racks of clothes.
“She must have had quite a social life.” Marjorie gestures. “Look at all these silks and furs. And this is no mouton coat, I can tell you that!” she adds as she holds the arm of a fur.
“I don’t know where to start,” Grace says.
“You explore while I decide what to have for dinner. Pick out a few things, and I’ll see if I can alter them to fit you. You’re about the same height, though I’d say Merle had a good fifteen pounds on you.”
Grace enters the parlor, where Aidan is sitting at the piano. She drops a pile of dresses onto a chair. “My mother wants to alter these so that I have something to wear when I look for work.”
“Where are they from?”
“Merle’s closet.”
Aidan’s sleeves are rolled to his elbows. He hasn’t shaved yet.
“You think I shouldn’t be doing this,” Grace says.
He turns around on the bench. “No, I think you have to.”
“The rules have changed, haven’t they?”
“They do in a disaster.”
“Is this stealing?” she asks.
“No, not now.”
“So what do you think of this one?” Grace holds the dress by its shoulders against her body. Her mother liked the jade green silk with gold trim at the sleeves and gold buttons. She thought it suited Grace’s coloring.
“Where are you going in that?” Aidan asks, crossing his arms.
“You don’t like it.”
“It’s a little…I don’t know…fancy?”
Grace whips the dress around and studies the front. She tosses it onto another chair. “What about this one?”
Aidan tilts his head. “It’s red.”
“Yes?”
“And it has polka dots.”
“So?”
“Maybe you should choose something a little more conservative?”
“You’re a bore.”
“Not usually.”
She smiles. She rummages through the heap of dresses and reaches for a navy blue with a white collar. She holds it up.
“Is your mother good enough to put a waist in it?” Aidan asks.
“You think it should have a waist?”
“You have a very nice waist.”
“Thank you, but this has short sleeves. Too cold for winter.”
Again Grace separates out the dresses. She spots a light gray dress with a slim skirt and a little jacket to cover her arms. It’s wool, and it will keep her warm.
Aidan nods and points.
“This is it?” she asks.
“That’s what you should wear. Are you nervous?”
“A little,” she says, laying the gray dress on top of the others. She sits on another chair. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“You are nervous.”
She pulls a cigarette from his pack and leans his way while he lights it for her. She inhales and rests against the upholstery. “Do you get nervous before a concert?”
“Sometimes I start to sweat. When it’s really bad, I get the hiccups.”
“You can’t go onstage with the hiccups. How do you get rid of them?”
“I find a knife and stick it in a glass of water, put the blunt end of the knife to my forehead and take ten slow gulps.”
“And that works?”
“Always.”
“Did you just make that up?”
“No.”
Grace stubs out her cigarette and slides out the green and gold dress—the dress deemed too fancy—from the bottom of the pile on the chair and begins to dance with it in a free-form movement she makes up as she goes along. Aidan, catching the game, plays waltz music. Grace swoons herself into the dance as if she were wearing the fabric that swirls with her. She waltzes around the parlor, encircling Aidan and the piano. When he switches to the Charleston, Grace holds the dress to her bodice and swings one sleeve back and forth as she executes the footwork of the dance of her mother’s generation. Aidan’s segue to jazz is Grace’s cue to occupy in a languid manner an empty chair, the dress still clinging to her. She pantomimes leaning forward to have her cigarette, in its holder, lit for her. Relaxing into a louche pose, she crosses her legs.
Aidan laughs, rolls his sleeves, and draws her into a slow jazz piece she thinks he must have learned at a Harlem nightclub.
“Merle’s closet is enormous. She has dozens of dresses and fur coats,” Grace says as she sits with the fancy dress folded over her lap.
“Someone should wear those clothes,” Aidan says.
“There have been pleas for clothing since the fire. Maybe I can get someone to pick them up.”
“And when your husband comes back? Won’t he mind that you’ve given away his mother’s clothing without consulting him?”
“Yes. For a minute. But then he’d see the necessity. If we’d moved in here, which he wanted to do, I suppose I’d have been given the contents of Merle’s closet.”
“Do you see yourself in furs?”
Grace laughs. “No. Can you imagine? Where on earth would I go?”
“You could come to one of my concerts. You’d be beautiful in a fur.”
A blush climbs the sides of her neck. “I hated the house when I first came here,” she remarks, glancing away.
“Why?”
“My mother-in-law wasn’t fond of me. She thought I’d ruined her son.”
“And did you?”
“Seen from her point of view, I suppose I did. He was meant to go places. Marry up.”
In her bedroom, Grace finds a hassock and climbs onto it. She strips down to her slip. In the triple mirror over the dressing table, she can see her reflection. She can’t see her head, only the body and the slip. Her skin is pale, and the slip hangs from her shoulders, not as fitted as it used to be. Common sense tells Grace that it’s her body in the mirrors, but she moves her arm just to make sure. She dips her head down to make double sure. How insubstantial she has become.
“I’ve got everything I need,” her mother announces as she enters the room. “You can get down from there. I have to do the fitting before I can hem anything. Which one did you pick out?”
Sometimes, as Grace walks the rooms of the large house, she thinks she’s won a prize. She thinks she’s stolen a prize.