She’d once had a nightmare about those lasts—people were dancing, but their feet were bare, made only of the smooth, featureless wood. She’d been just five years old, but the rows of them that her father had hanging on the wall still gave her the heebie-jeebies.
And yet she loved working with her hands. Creating something both useful and beautiful. Sometimes she envisioned joining John in carrying the family business into a third generation.
“We can set up in the workshop,” she said, pointing to a back room. Gladys and Dottie followed.
The tanned smell of the leather was so familiar that Margaret no longer noticed it. It was the scent of her childhood as a cobbler’s daughter. Even Dottie was unaffected, having spent much time here while John fashioned the grommets for shoelace holes. This was not Gladys’s everyday scene, however, and Margaret watched as her nose wrinkled.
“Let’s get this business done and maybe we can catch a few hours with the rest of the young New Yorkers who are out having a good time.”
“Is anyone having a good time during the blackout?” Margaret asked. Of late, she’d spent the hours after dinner reading by candlelight, as if it was the era of pioneers in caravans heading west.
“There are places that are still lively after the sun goes down. Windowless basements where music and cigarettes and homemade alcohol flow in abundance. You know, the Stage Door Canteen is hopping all night. Admission costs a bag of sugar or something else they can use to fill their pantry. And you can dance the night away with a handsome soldier or two. It’s downright patriotic, if you ask me. Almost un-American if you don’t go.”
“Is this really so bad, Gladys?” Dottie’s voice, always sweet and considerate, sounded ruffled.
“Not if you want to live your life in a humdrum. I worked next to a girl at the canteen couple of weeks ago who is going places. She was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar back in March. The one featuring the American Red Cross. You remember that one.”
Dottie nodded. “I do. I donated some blood after they ran that article.”
“Yeah, that was her. The girl in the white hat smack on the front of it. And there she was next to me, elbow to elbow, making five hundred ham sandwiches together on a Monday night. You know what? She’s not sticking around here. She’s going to Hollywood. Just got cast in a Bogart flick and is heading out next month. Her name is Lauren Bacall. I’ll bet you now—we’re going to see her name in lights.”
“So you want to be like this Lauren girl?” asked Margaret. “You’ve never had the acting bug.”
Dottie giggled. “Though you do have a knack for theatrics.”
Gladys ignored her. “Nah. Not the acting bug per se. It’s just that she set her sights on bigger things. And me, I want to do something bigger too. Not”—she shrugged—“knit socks like an old granny on a weekend.”
Margaret gave her a light punch on the arm. “Well, when my brother’s feet freeze in the cold English winter, it will bring me great comfort to know that you were hobnobbing with movie stars.”
Gladys slumped into her chair. “See? You’re an old granny. Already adept at guilt as thick as molasses.”
Dottie settled in next to her and opened the bag so the girls could examine the bounty. The skeins were leftovers in various states of use, remnants of other projects, but entirely suitable for tonight’s purpose. Margaret’s fingers tingled with possibility, just like they did when she entered a fabric shop or walked by a window display with art supplies.
The skills she’d learned from her mother were not being put to their best use at the Navy Yard, where she spent hour upon hour sewing the straight red and white stripes of the American flag. And sometimes the stars. Easy enough work for a beginner, let alone someone who had practically been born with a needle in her hand. It would be little to go on when she interviewed to be a mechanic, but at least she could count on the precision and quality of her work as a recommendation.
Margaret dusted wood shavings off the seat of her father’s fraying tweed chair and scooted it over to where Gladys and Dottie were sitting. She looked at Dottie, confident that years of friendship would convey in an expression what they didn’t say in words.
When are you going to tell Gladys about the baby? she asked by raising her eyebrows and nodding ever so slightly at Dottie’s belly.
Dottie shook her head, nearly unperceptively. Not yet, she seemed to say.
Margaret worried that Dottie would keep a lid on this secret for too long, and until it was too late. For all one could say about Gladys, she was resourceful. Margaret was certain that she would know what to do.
Gladys shivered and pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders. “It’s either an icebox in here or a ghost just walked through me.”
Margaret grinned. “No ghost would dare haunt you.”
Gladys sat up straight even as Dottie ignored them and started sorting the skeins on the table between them. “Whyever not?”
“Because you’d tell them to wrap up whatever business was keeping them on this planet and go along their merry way.”
“Damn right I would.”
Dottie’s head jerked up. “Gladys! You can’t talk like that when—”
Margaret’s heart stopped. She knew what Dottie had been about to say. But maybe it was for the best.
Gladys didn’t miss a beat. “When what?”
Margaret could see the defeat in Dottie’s eyes. And then the beginning of tears.
“What did I say? Have you never heard a woman say damn before?” Gladys leaned forward in her chair, hands on the arms, looking like she was about to spring up. “You’re more of an innocent than I thought.”
“No. It’s not that. It’s not you.” Dottie shook her head and pulled a handkerchief from her pocket. “I was going to say, you can’t use words like that when…when the baby comes.”
Margaret breathed an inward sigh of relief. They couldn’t do the work of taking care of this until Gladys knew. But Margaret would never have been the one to tell. Not behind Dottie’s back.
Gladys was speechless. For about ten seconds, which might have been some kind of record.
“A baby,” she whispered in reverential tones. “You do beat all, Dorothy Troutwine. You do beat all. So much for being an innocent. You’ve gone and gotten randy on us!”
Dottie’s cheeks reddened. She and Margaret waited for Gladys to speak again and were rewarded by one of her classic retorts.
“I suppose our boy Johnny will be safe during this war. Because apparently he can hit a target.” She grinned.
“Gladys!” Margaret and Dottie shouted her name at the same time. Margaret flushed with embarrassment, but she was both relieved and surprised by what happened next: Dottie broke into a fit of giggles.
She hadn’t heard Dottie laugh like that in many months, and it was as delightful as the twinkling lights that were put around town at Christmastime. The corners of her own lips widened until Margaret, too, started laughing. Gladys had already contributed to the harmony, and Margaret had to admit that it had been far too long since they’d given themselves over to such joviality.
When they’d settled down—and after Gladys had dribbled some hot chocolate onto her white blouse—Dottie repeated all that she’d told Margaret the night before, including her concerns about what her parents might do. Just one more Troutwine girl who would disappoint and scandalize the parishioners of St. Charles Borromeo if they didn’t intervene.