“Our Vivvie can sew like the devil!” Celia said, proudly.
“It’s true,” put in Peg. “Vivian is our resident dress professor.”
“She makes all the costumes for the shows,” said Celia. “She made the ballet tutus everyone was wearing tonight.”
“Did you?” said Edna, more impressed than she should’ve been. (Your cat could sew a tutu, Angela.) “So you’re not only beautiful, but gifted as well? Imagine that! And they say the Lord never gives with both hands!”
I shrugged. “All I know is that I can fix this. I would shorten it, as well. It would be better for you if it landed at mid-ankle.”
“Well, it appears as if you know a good deal more about clothes than I do,” said Edna, “because I was ready to relegate this poor old gown to the ash heap. And here I’ve been, filling your ears all night with my noise and opinions about fashion and style. I should be the one listening to you. So tell me, my dear—where did you learn how to understand a dress so well?”
—
I can’t imagine that it was fascinating for a woman of Edna Parker Watson’s stature to listen to a nineteen-year-old girl blather on about her grandmother for the next several hours, but that’s exactly what happened, and she bore it nobly. More than nobly—she hung on every word.
Somewhere during the course of my monologue, Celia wandered out of the room. I wouldn’t see her again until just before dawn, when she would come tumbling into our bed at the usual hour, in her usual state of drunken disarray. Peg ended up excusing herself, as well—once she got a sharp knock on the door and a reminder from Olive that it was past her bedtime.
So it ended up being just me and Edna—curled up on the sofa of her new apartment at the Lily—talking into the wee hours. The well-raised girl within me did not want to monopolize her time, but I could not resist her attentions. Edna wanted to know everything about my grandmother and delighted in the details of her frivolities and eccentricities. (“What a character! She should be put in a play!”) Every time I tried to turn the subject of the conversation away from myself, Edna would turn it back to me. She expressed sincere curiosity about my love of sewing and was astonished when I told her that I could make a whalebone corset if I had to.
“Then you’re born to be a costume designer!” she said. “The difference between making a dress and making a costume, of course, is that dresses are sewn, but costumes are built. Many people these days can sew, but not many know how to build. A costume is a prop for the stage, Vivvie, as much as any piece of furniture, and it needs to be strong. You never know what’s going to happen in a performance, and so the costume must be ready for anything.”
I told Edna about how my grandmother used to find the tiniest hidden flaws in my outfits and demand that I fix the offending article on the spot. I used to protest that “Nobody will notice!” but Grandmother Morris would say, “That is not true, Vivian. People will notice, but they won’t know what they’re noticing. They will just notice that something is wrong. Don’t give them that opportunity.”
“She was correct!” said Edna. “This is why I take such care with my costumes. I hate it when an impatient director says, ‘Nobody will notice!’ Oh, the arguments I’ve had about that! As I always tell the director: ‘If you put me in a spotlight with three hundred audience members staring at me for two hours, they will notice a flaw. They will notice flaws in my hair, flaws in my complexion, flaws in my voice, and they will absolutely notice flaws in my dress.’ It’s not that the audience members are masters of style, Vivian: it’s merely that they have nothing else to do with their time, once they are held captive in their seats, except to notice your flaws.”
I thought I’d been having adult conversations all summer, because I’d been spending my time around such a worldly group of showgirls, but this was truly an adult conversation. This was a conversation about craftsmanship, and about expertise, and about aesthetics. Nobody I’d ever met (except Grandmother Morris, of course) had ever known more about dressmaking than me. Nobody had ever cared this much. Nobody understood or respected the art of it.
I could have stayed there talking to Edna about clothing and costumes for another century or two, but Arthur Watson finally burst in and demanded that he be allowed to go to ruddy bed with his ruddy wife, and that put an end to it.
The next day marked the first morning in two months that I did not wake up with a hangover.
TEN
By the next week, my Aunt Peg had already begun creating a show for Edna to star in. She was determined to give her friend a job, and it had to be a better job than what the Lily Playhouse currently had to offer—because you can’t very well put one of the greatest actresses of her age in Dance Away, Jackie!
As for Olive, she was not convinced this was a good idea in the least. As much as she loved Edna, it didn’t make sense to her from a business standpoint to attempt to put on a decent (or even halfway decent) show at the Lily: it would break formula.
“We have a small audience, Peg,” she said. “And they are humble. But they are the only audience we have, and they are loyal to us. We must be loyal to them in return. We can’t leave them behind for one play—certainly not for one player—or they may never come back. Our task is to serve the neighborhood. And the neighborhood doesn’t want Ibsen.”
“I don’t want Ibsen, either,” said Peg. “But I hate seeing Edna sitting about idle, and I hate even more the idea of putting her in any of our draggy little shows.”
“However draggy our shows may be, they keep the electricity on, Peg. And just barely, at that. Don’t chance it, by changing anything.”
“We could make a comedy,” Peg said. “Something that our audiences would like. But it would have to be smart enough to be worthy of Edna.”
She turned to Mr. Herbert, who had been sitting there at the breakfast table in his usual attire of baggy trousers and shirtsleeves, staring sorrowfully at nothing.
“Mr. Herbert,” Peg asked, “do you think you could write a play that is both funny and smart?”
“No,” he said, without even looking up.
“Well, what are you working on now? What’s the next show on deck?”
“It’s called City of Girls,” he said. “I told you about it last month.”
“The speakeasy one,” said Peg. “I remember. Flappers and gangsters, and that sort of fluff. What’s it about, again, exactly?”
Mr. Herbert looked both wounded and confused. “What’s it about?” he asked. It seemed that this was the first time he’d considered that one of the Lily Playhouse shows should be about something.
“Never mind,” said Peg. “Does it have a role that Edna could play?”
Again, he looked wounded and confused.
“I don’t see how it could,” he said. “We have an ingénue, and a hero. We have a villain. We don’t have an older woman.”
“Could the ingénue have a mother?”
“Peg, she’s an orphan,” said Mr. Herbert. “You can’t change that.”
I saw his point: the ingénue always had to be an orphan. The story wouldn’t make sense if the ingénue wasn’t an orphan. The audience would revolt. The audience would start throwing shoes and bricks at the players if the ingénue wasn’t an orphan.