The Seamstress (30 page)

The dressmaker nodded approvingly and lamented to Dona Dulce about the new styles coming out of Rio de Janeiro. As Emília stood on the fitting platform, she listened to what they praised and what they criticized. She’d believed that all city ladies wore the newest, most daring fashions. She saw now that there was a distinction between what was new and what was acceptable. If a lady took the flapper style to the extreme—wearing short skirts and athletic-inspired dresses—she was rumored to be morally liberal, or worse: a suffragette. But ladies who dressed too traditionally, in full skirts with corseted waists, were also mocked for being outdated. As she stood beside those many-colored bolts of fabric, Emília realized that a refined woman was the opposite of the Coelho house: she had the lacquer of modernity on the outside, but an antiquated core.

In the dressing stall, as Emília changed back into her linen travel suit, she heard the familiar clatter of sewing machines. When she left the stall, Emília did not return to the front of the store; she followed the clatter instead. At the end of the narrow hallway, the sound grew louder. There was a wooden door; Emília peeked inside. A waft of stale air made her recoil. The room was dimly lit and hot. Three rows of pedal-operated Singers cluttered the small workspace. Young women hunched over the machines, feverishly pumping the pedals and moving cloth through the needles. Some of the girls wore head scarves, which stuck to their foreheads, wet with perspiration. One girl looked up at Emília, then went quickly back to work.

“You’ve gone through the wrong door,” Dona Dulce said loudly, her voice carrying over the machines’ racket. She stood behind Emília.

“Are those dressmakers, too?” Emília asked.

“No, dear,” Dona Dulce replied, steering Emília away. “Those are the seamstresses. A dressmaker designs. Seamstresses just string things together. I thought you knew that.”

Emília fumbled with her gloves. She’d forgotten to put them back on and was conscious now of the old sewing calluses on her fingertips. They’d softened since she’d left Taquaritinga; in the Coelho house all Emília did was embroider, listen to music, take walks around the garden, and practice her etiquette with Dona Dulce. But those calluses—those markers of her old life—remained on her hands. Dona Dulce led Emília up the hall. They stopped at the back of the shop’s showroom, where the dressmaker kept bolts of fustão, all waffled and honeycombed in shades of pinks and blues.

“Isn’t this fine?” Dona Dulce asked, fingering a bolt. “We’ll be needing this soon, I expect. Since I wasn’t allowed to plan a wedding, at least you’ll let me plan a baptism.”

Emília nodded absently. She could not shake the image of that oppressive sewing room. If she had come to the city alone, as she’d once planned, she might have been trapped in such a place.

“Ceremony is important, Emília,” Dona Dulce continued. “Country people are not always hindered, so to speak, by the same conventions we keep in the city. It’s a shame you had to spend your nuptial night on the train—that’s what I always tell my staff.” Dulce stared at Emília, her amber eyes searching her face. “Do you remember what I taught you about maids? They have large mouths. They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. They have nothing to talk about in their lives so they must talk about ours. They have a verifiable network around the city. If, for example, a newly wedded groom takes to sleeping in his childhood bedroom, each time a maid makes the beds, she will speculate as to why he’s not visiting his wife in her room. Sometimes she will tell her mistress. And if you aren’t careful, she will tell others. Soon, all of Recife will know.”

Emília’s throat tightened. She had always believed that there were a dozen pairs of eyes watching her in the Coelho house. She tried to move away from the waffled fabrics, but Dulce held her. Her mother-in-law straightened her back, becoming stiff and businesslike, as if dealing with a member of her staff.

“You should treat your husband like a guest,” she said. “A good hostess learns to predict her guests’ expectations, and to meet them.”

“But Degas has no expectations,” Emília said, her voice cracking. “I can’t please him.”

Dulce once again smoothed the pink, waffled fustão between her fingertips. “No man knows what he prefers. Especially Degas. He’s easily swayed by poor influences, like that Felipe. But you are his wife now; you must influence him. It’s a wife’s job to train her husband to have tastes—so that she can practice the flattery of fulfilling them. A wife becomes indispensable that way. She becomes more than just a momentary lapse in judgment.”

The dressmaker interrupted their talk, calling them back to the measuring stand. Dona Dulce smiled widely at the woman, flashing each of her small, immaculate teeth.

11

Three weeks after visiting the atelier, Emília received her collection of beige, brown, and gray linen dresses. Dona Dulce had also supervised the purchase of two pairs—one brown, one black—of tasteful, low-heeled lace-up slippers. She’d ordered Emília a black silk parasol and a broad-brimmed hat with interchangeable grosgrain bands to match her dresses. Emília contemplated leaving the hideous hat in the courtyard, at the mercy of the turtles. She contemplated angering the prune-skinned maid so that the woman might be careless with the embers that flew from her iron when she pressed the dresses. But Emília could not bring herself to do this—the dresses’ linen was expensive, the hat’s straw finely woven, and the shoes’ leather the softest she had ever owned. If she could not have stylish things, at least she had fine ones.

That day, instead of leading Emília to the mirrored room for her afternoon lesson, Dona Dulce instructed her to put on a new dress and pin back her hair.

“We must put your lessons into practice,” Dona Dulce said.

The afternoon heat had subsided by the time they arrived in Derby Square. A sea breeze cooled the air. The trolley cars did not clang their bells. The few street peddlers who circled the park had already sold the bulk of their vegetables or brooms, and they were quiet. The trolleys’ black wires crisscrossed the skyline, resembling the cat’s cradles Emília and Luzia had woven between their fingers. Homes, larger and more beautiful than the Coelho house, circled the park. At its farthest end sat the immense, white-domed headquarters of the Military Police. Emília and Dulce began their promenade along the park’s winding path.

Other women, some young, some old, all well dressed, walked side by side along the pathways or sat demurely on the wrought-iron benches. When Dulce and Emília passed, the women smiled or gave a polite nod. Then, as if there was an unspoken agreement between them all, they were silent until they had left each other’s range of vision. Only afterward did they tilt their heads together and whisper.

Dona Dulce also followed this code, pulling Emília close and quietly explaining who they had just passed and if they were Old or New. The women from the Old families were thin lipped and tasteful. Their dresses had intricately beaded collars with round, pearl brooches at the throats. Their hats were short-brimmed cloches with a single thick feather tucked into the bands. When they saw Dulce and Emília, they nodded but rarely smiled. The New women did not have the same imperturbable elegance as the Old. They wore shorter dresses with more jewels and many-feathered hats. Some even wore flesh-colored silk stockings, giving their calves a nude appearance. They, too, eyed Emília and Dulce, but often smiled and stopped to chat, speaking loudly and letting out long, high laughs.

“Welcome!” Teresa Raposo, the dark-haired matriarch of a New family, said. She’d tried to pry Emília away, but Dulce had held fast to her arm. Thwarted, Dona Raposo lowered her voice and winked. “This city needs new blood.”

“Disgusting,” Dona Dulce muttered once they had left Teresa Raposo. “Like a horde of vampires. As if the old blood wasn’t good enough!”

Emília remained silent. Her feet hurt from her new shoes. Her head pounded from the worry of making a mistake: slouching or rushing or fidgeting when she wasn’t supposed to. Dona Dulce walked quickly toward their carriage. She’d had enough for the day. She was still tall, rigid, commanding, but she had looked old-fashioned and tense beside the New women, and nervous and reverent in the face of the Old. When they reentered the Coelhos’ gates, Dona Dulce let out a long sigh, of relief or fatigue Emília could not be sure.

They went to Derby Square once a week after that, to perform their “footing,” as Dona Dulce called it. Slowly, through Dona Dulce’s hissed rules, Dr. Duarte’s stories, and Emília’s own observations, the city and its divisions began to take shape. Any person of importance was either Old or New. The rest—dark skinned or light, educated or dumb, street sweeper or scholar—were part of a nebulous horde without money or family title. Newspaper reporters, seamstresses, basket vendors, trolley conductors, even the children of ranchers and colonels fell into this group. Either they were nameless, or poor, or both, and they would live and pray and suffer as the nameless and the poor always had—invisibly.

Many of the Old families had lost their fortunes, or at least substantial chunks of them, but not their prestige. Their ancestors were the Portuguese and Dutch who had cleared away trees in the Zona da Mata and planted sugarcane or pau-brasil trees grown for their red dye and fine violin wood. They were the Feijós, the Sampaios, the Cavalcantis, the Carvalhos, the Coimbras, the Furtados, the van der Leys. They owned vast plantations and sent their children to Recife, then Europe for their educations. But the price of sugar fell, the need for dye subsided, and the families preferred to live in the capital and not on their farms. Still, they had their elegance, their political influence, and most important, their good names.

The New families weren’t new at all, not in Emília’s mind. Most had been in Recife for centuries since the Dutch had invaded and allowed all kinds of groups—Jews and Gypsies and Indian traders—to do their business freely, turning the city into what the Portuguese called a Sodom and Gomorrah. The New families could not trace their lines as neatly as the Old, so their pasts had the possible taint of trading boats and fishmongers and moneylenders. The New families were not interested in land, but in business. They were the Raposos—a dark-haired clan whose women had the subtle sheen of mustaches on their upper lips and whose men were squat and prone to brawling. They owned the hugely successful Macaxeira textile mill. The Lobos owned the
Diário de Pernambuco
newspaper. Their men were quick-witted and charming, their women energetic. All shared the large, curved Lobo nose. The Albuquerques owned the Poseidon Fish Company, and were a short, bronze-skinned clan known for their quiet and patience. And the Lundgrens, who owned the Torre and Tacaruna textile mills, were tall, long-faced people often teased for their dull humor but praised for their handsome daughters.

As weeks passed, Emília was allowed to take more walks in Derby Square and to accompany the Coelhos to Sunday mass. They attended a newly built church in Madalena, with white walls and cushioned pews. The Old families worshipped in the city center’s ancient cathedral, which had a longer mass and vaulted ceilings. There were many unspoken differences between the clans. They preferred different newspapers, backed different politicians, lived in different neighborhoods. Men—New and Old—often did business together. Dr. Duarte imported machines for one of the Feijós’ molasses mills. The Lundgrens’ factory made burlap bags for the Coimbras’ sugar harvest. Dr. Duarte sometimes lunched with an Old family man at his club, and Emília often saw Old and New men standing in the shade of Derby Square, smoking cigars and patting each other’s backs. But those same men would never invite each other for lunch or coffee at their homes. Their wives would not allow it.

The Recife women, it seemed, had longer memories and harder hearts. There were two prestigious women’s clubs in the city: the Princess Isabel Society and the Ladies’ Auxiliary of Recife. The Princess Isabels were all descendents of the Old families, and they believed that by helping the church—funding new chapels in the countryside and performing time-consuming restoration projects in the city—they helped society. The Ladies’ Auxiliary, a New family creation, performed food drives, knitting marathons, and benefit dinners in order to aid the poor directly. The Old family women proclaimed the Auxiliary vulgar, while the New family women called the Isabels useless. They generally kept their distance, except in Derby Square. Once a haunt of the Old families, the New had slowly tried to claim it. Neither would part with their afternoon footings in the square, so Old and New walked side by side along the Derby’s pebbled paths, and Emília walked among them. She felt nervous and awkward. She didn’t know when to smile and when to simply nod. It upset her when the women from the Old families began to ignore her. Some even chuckled when she and Dulce passed.

“That is a good sign,” Dona Dulce said when they returned to the Coelho house. Her voice was strained and tired. Each outing seemed to exhaust her. “If one group loathes you, the other will surely take you up.”

That evening, the young housemaid interrupted dinner. She held a tray with a single envelope upon it.

“Come along,” Dulce snapped, motioning for the maid.

“It’s for Senhora Emília,” the girl replied.

The envelope was thick and the color of freshly whipped butter. On the front, written in blue ink was her name, and on the back, a seal embossed with:

Baroness Margarida Carvalho Pinto Lapa

“She is a baroness by marriage, not by blood,” Dona Dulce said.

The baroness had been Margarida Carvalho, a cattle rancher’s daughter, Dona Dulce continued. She’d been a spinster until the elderly Geraldo Pinto Lapa, one of Brazil’s last remaining barons, met her and took her to Recife. Shortly after their only daughter was born, the baron died, leaving Margarida to dictate her own allegiances. She’d married into a respectable Old family, but her presence had made it a New.