The Bridesmaid's Daughter

of the shoot was “youthful fashion at an affordable price,” and it featured Carolyn and two other models standing against a giant white backdrop with an ironing board, an iron, a laundry basket, and a hamper filled with clothes. For the next few hours, the models posed as laundresses, carrying, folding, and pressing laundry. Carolyn had two looks in the final spread. One was a gray cotton lawn dress “with baby sleeves, tied into little puffs and a very deep ruffle around the hemline.” The other was “sand-colored pillow ticking, striped in thin lines of white, with a trim Eton jacket and a cummerbund skirt pinch-pleated all the way around.” In one of her photographs, Carolyn looks down, examining her iron pensively, assessing it for the correct heat. In another, she’s playfully hitched her dress over the ironing board while wearing it, so that another model can press her skirt, as if such duties were in fact every young girl’s dream.

Before long, she was modeling in advertisements for junior fashion lines, wearing sundresses, playsuits, and nightgowns.

On one of her shoots, Carolyn ran into the young photographer who’d introduced her to Conover. She told him that thanks to him, her career had officially begun. The photographer smiled and asked her if she’d like to go away with him for the weekend, as if she owed him something for his help. Carolyn was horrified. She told him no, that she wasn’t that kind of girl, that they hadn’t even been on a date together! Then she quickly made her excuses and fled back to Sixty-third Street, where Oscar the doorman waited, hat tipping as she flew through the revolving doors, into the lobby, across to the elevator, and up to her room, where no man could follow.

*   *   *

IT WAS CAROLYN’S first Christmas in New York. Grace went home to Philadelphia, to be with her family, but Carolyn had worked so hard to get to Manhattan that she couldn’t afford to leave just yet. On Christmas Day, a blizzard began to swirl outside her hotel window, and when she woke up the following morning, New York was covered in white. Cars and buses were stalled in the streets, and the subways were halted. The city was silent; the only occasional sound was the scraping of a superintendent’s shovel making a path along the sidewalk. Dark gray clouds blotted the sun. In the space of less than twenty-four hours, the snowfall had reached almost twenty-six inches.

In the afternoons, she joined the other hotel-bound residents on the mezzanine for company and the complimentary afternoon tea. She wasn’t the only one who stayed on at the hotel over the holidays. There were girls from Michigan and Texas, Illinois and Arizona—so many others who had come too far to go home, girls who were here in New York to pursue all kinds of careers, as nurse’s aides, dental assistants, bookkeepers, receptionists, and hat-check girls. There was even one young woman who had qualified as a carpenter, obtaining her union card.

Thanks to Mrs. Sibley’s efficient vetting process at the front desk, most of the Barbizon girls were still in their teens and early twenties, but there was a small group of older residents who always came out of their rooms around teatime, lured by the complimentary cookies. These were the Barbizon ladies, some of them in their forties and even fifties. They were women who had arrived in the city during their younger years but who had never married and so had never left; some of them had been at the hotel since it opened in 1927, twenty years ago. The younger girls shuddered to think of it. Imagine never leaving this place! The Barbizon was fine for a bit of an adventure, just as long as you didn’t have to stay forever. You wanted the hotel’s revolving doors to spin you out into the city, not back into the lobby again.

CHAPTER 4

Nina

When I was a child, my mother often took me into Manhattan. She didn’t trust the doctors on Long Island, so we would always drive into New York for my appointments. In photographs from that time I’m a thin and pale-faced child with dark circles under my eyes; I never seemed to have rosy cheeks. I was prone to stomachaches, fatigue, sore throats, strep infections, all kinds of ailments and illnesses. From a young age, I knew the city was the place you went to be rescued, to be made better again.

At the wheel, my mother smoked with the window cracked, tapping her cigarette into the pull-out ashtray. I sat quietly at her side, looking out, wondering what the doctors would say this time. I was accustomed to the examining rooms, with their bright lighting and silvery equipment. I knew all about wearing the little cotton gown, sitting on a tall chair with my legs swinging while the nurse took my blood pressure and the doctor pressed a cold hard stethoscope to my back. I was very good at sitting still and sticking out my tongue; I’d had a lot of practice. My father once told me my mother had taken me to as many as fifty doctors in a single year.

The problem was that each doctor we visited usually sent us home with a pat on the shoulder and the reassurance that everything would be just fine, that I would get better soon. My mother wasn’t so easily convinced. We would have to see the next doctor and then another. We were always looking for the right test, the right medicine; the miracle cure.

After each appointment was over, if I was lucky, my mother would take me to the doll hospital on Lexington Avenue as a reward for being a good girl. I had one particular Tabitha doll that I loved. The doll was modeled on Elizabeth Montgomery’s daughter from the TV show Bewitched. Like me, my Tabitha was often sick; I knew I needed to take good care of her. The doll