“‘Or I go,’” I finished. Those supposedly had been poor Oscar Wilde’s last words before he died. He left; the wallpaper stayed.
Charlie turned the steering wheel, and the automobile pulled away from the curb. I flinched as soon as he put his foot on the accelerator pedal. “It’s safe, Lily,” he said.
Two years had passed since the accident, but I still felt dizzy with fear whenever I got into an automobile, still felt the sudden lurch off the road, into the stand of trees.
“Where are we going?”
“To buy you a birthday present. Something to wear to a party.”
“A party. How nice of you, Charlie.” I tried to sound enthusiastic, but he heard the reluctance in my voice. I forced my hands to relax in my lap, fingers unclenched, palm up.
“How long since you’ve had some fun, Lily? A while, I’d guess. We’re going to change that. I do have my motives. If all goes well and we get the thumbs-up, I’ll be invited to an even bigger party later. One with lots of rich potential donors. I need you to look your best, so we’ll get you a dress. Have any cash on you? I may not have enough.”
“A little. And my birthday isn’t for another two months.”
“Who’s counting? So, on to Chanel!”
“Coco Chanel? Couture? Shouldn’t we go to a department store?”
“Not off the rack this time. You need to look swell. Better than swell. Magnificent.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Charlie. Even if we did find a swell—a magnificent dress that didn’t cost every penny we both don’t have, it takes weeks for the fittings.” Besides, magnificent, even swell, weren’t adjectives for a woman in mourning, a woman who, when she bothered to look in her mirror, saw a tragedy of her own making.
“Please, Lily,” said my little brother, just the way he’d said when we were small and I wouldn’t let him play with my pick-up sticks, even though now he was twenty-one and I twenty-three.
I pulled off his driving cap and ruffled his hair. “You win. But not Chanel.” I wanted to go somewhere else for that party dress. Allen had sometimes looked over my shoulder at the fashion magazines I read and hadn’t liked Chanel, thought the clothes too severe, almost masculine.
“You’re kidding. What woman doesn’t want a Chanel evening frock?”
“This woman, at this moment, wants Schiaparelli. Let’s go there. Her daughter was a student at the school. I’m curious to see if she remembers me.”
The student, Marie Schiaparelli—she used her mother’s name, not her father’s—had been a girl with the kind of accent acquired only by belonging nowhere and everywhere, a girl born in New York, educated in France and Germany and England. She’d had polio, and Allen and his brother, Gerald, had been fascinated by her medical history, the long list of therapies and surgeries that had transformed the polio-crooked, thin legs into those of a beautiful young woman who swam and skied.
Her mother came up from Paris sometimes on Sunday afternoons, draped in furs and heavy jewelry and impossibly stylish frocks and suits, to take her daughter out for a Sunday lunch. “And to see her London lover,” Marie had told me straightforwardly. “Actually, both of them. Brothers.”
One dreary November Sunday when the sky was littered with gray clouds, Madame Schiaparelli had invited Allen and me to join them.
“Gogo tells me that she loves your art classes,” she had said, standing in the school’s reception room, her tiny head peeking out of a huge sable coat. “So, come. Roast beef and a salad. No bread or puddings. This school is making my daughter fat!” Even in the dim room, Madame glittered with jewels and gold embroidery, a bird of paradise who had wandered into a pigeon coop.
We drove into London, Madame’s chauffeur maneuvering around bicyclists and strolling parsons, and at a hotel dining room lavish with gleaming silver and white cloths we stuffed ourselves on roast beef, more meat than we’d normally eat in a fortnight at the school.
Marie—I couldn’t yet call her by that strange nickname, Gogo, that her mother used—was shy and did not look up often from her plate. Madame Schiaparelli was full of jokes and gossip. Even the stiff waiter smiled when Madame told the story of how, as a young woman, she’d traveled to Cuba with the singer Ganna Walska. She’d had to smuggle Walska out a back entrance between acts because the Havana audience had begun to riot, Walska’s voice was so bad.
“In Havana, people on the street mistook me for Anna Pavlova. We looked much alike,” Madame said. “Too bad. I’m not particularly fond of dancers.”
Marie tilted her head up and raised her one eyebrow knowingly. “They tend to steal other women’s husbands,” she said. Her mother ignored her.
Elsa Schiaparelli, as she revealed in a streaming monologue punctuated by jokes, had been born in Rome; escaped—the word she used—a strict family by fleeing to New York with, I assumed, the husband who had later left; and then, solo again, went to where all artists and city adventurers went: Paris.
“I go back to Rome only to see my mother, as little as possible. Rome is filled with brown shirts.” She shivered. “Oh, that awful man, Mussolini. What he is doing to my country. When I saw his photo in the paper with Hitler next to him, I sat on the curb and wept.”
“Mussolini and the Italian fashion board have forbidden Mummy’s designs to be shown there,” Gogo added. “She refused a luncheon invitation with Il Duce.”
“Let it be said, now and forever, I have nothing to do with fascists, and I certainly don’t want them wearing my clothes. God forbid. Coffee? Then we must start back.”
“Wasn’t she charming?” I asked Allen later, when Madame’s limousine was pulling away down the school drive. “So confident and worldly. Sophisticated. That beautiful fur coat.”
“Not bad for an old lady. I like them younger.” He kissed my neck, just where the itchy wool collar of my dress ambushed the skin.
* * *
• • •
“And now,” Charlie said, taking back his cap and tilting it over his forehead, “Schiaparelli it is. Your choice. But I have to make a quick phone call. We were supposed to meet someone at the Chanel salon.” He went into the café and was out again a minute later, smiling sheepishly.
Charlie aimed the blue roadster into the thick traffic of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. We prowled down lanes and avenues, dodging around fruit and vegetable carts, policemen on horse, jaywalking pedestrians, and other automobiles. We crossed over the Seine. “Pont Royal!” Charlie shouted. “Tuileries,” he shouted as we whizzed by pastel gardens. “Remember?” We had played there as children. Charlie saw me gripping the door, white-knuckled, and slowed down.
A silver Seine, trees in full leaf, pots of red geraniums on every stoop, under windows, rows of schoolchildren in uniform following black-and-white nuns, handsome gendarmes, and over it all, hanging like an invisible presence, the sense that this was the best place to be. Even I, indifferent to so much, felt it. June in Paris.
“Place Vendôme.” Charlie pulled over to the curb.
The huge open square shimmered white with sun on pavement and stone façades.
“That’s Napoleon up there,” he said, pointing to the top of the tall central column, a bronze shaft made from the melted cannons from the battle of Austerlitz. “They keep pulling him down, melting the bronze, and redesigning his outfit.”
“I don’t imagine the emperor would appreciate the pigeons sitting on his shoulders.”
“And this, it seems”—he waved his arm—“is the Schiaparelli boutique. You’re sure about this? I mean, look at the crackpot window!”
Gilded bamboo stalks made a grid over the panes so that the window was like a museum display, or a shuttered palace, or . . . a jail? Inside the window, behind the gilded bamboo, straw figures stooped over trays of earth, watering jars in hand, as if they were tending a summer garden. But instead of flowers, out of the earth poked lobsters, some
still half-buried, their red claws jutting against the painted backdrop of the sky. The figures wore dresses that hung straight down from the shoulders and past the knees, brightly colored, adorned with buttons of different colors and shapes. Some of the buttons were fish-shaped; others were large squares or flowerpots.
“Very strange,” I agreed. The colors of the dresses were beautiful, though, deeply saturated shades of orange, blue, red. “Schiaparelli made the trousseau for the Duchess of Windsor. There was a photo layout of it in Vogue.”
“I bet she didn’t wear that necklace of gilt pine cones.” He pointed at it.
“Probably not,” I agreed.
The ground floor of the boutique was full of ready-to-wear: hats, scarves, handbags, sweaters, gloves, those things that could be worn without the many fittings bespoke clothes required. Vendeuses dressed in elegant black-and-white suits glided through the room, opening cases, answering questions. I tried on a large-brimmed summer hat.
“That’s the hat that Marlene Dietrich bought,” a vendeuse said. “It suits you.”
“Not today.” Charlie pulled it off my head and whispered, “No accessories. We’re not at Macy’s, and there’s a reason why there’s no price tag on these things.”
“Right,” I said, amused by a pair of gloves I spied. They were the color of poached salmon and had a frill stitched up the center that looked like fish fins.
Women turned in our direction and coolly assessed me and my clothes; they found me wanting, judging by the disdain in their faces. These women, rich and stylish, wouldn’t be caught dead in off-the-rack and hand-me-downs. But when their eyes went to Charlie, they fixed on him the way children fix on cake and candy displays. Tall and slender, he looked a little like the aviator Lucky Lindy. Charlie had to be the handsomest man in Paris, with his thick, white-blond hair and sapphire eyes, the way he shuffled his feet shyly and held his hat in front of his chest as if in need of protection. Something about the suggestion of vulnerability in a man brings out the flirtatiousness of women.
Charlie ignored them, which made them stare even harder, and we walked up the stairs, to the showing room. We sat on little gilded chairs. Charlie placed the automobile keys on the tea table between us.
“Can I help you, monsieur?” asked a young woman, her eyes narrowed with pleasure.
“Yes, please. A frock for my sister. Something . . .” He struggled for the word. “Something swirly, if you know what I mean.”
“Sister?” She gave me a sly, sideways glance. While Charlie is fair in that Nordic white-blond kind of way, I’m dark. Brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin, a throwback to my grandfather from Italy. “Certainly,” she said in that knowing way of salespeople.
“Is blue still your favorite color?” he asked me.
“I suppose. Haven’t thought about it. It was Allen’s.”
“A blue frock,” he told the salesgirl. “For evening.”
A few minutes later a mannequin with eyes ringed with black glided past us in a midnight-blue floor-length gown, tight to the knees, then swirling out to the ankles. The pink jacket that went over it was embroidered with elephants.
“No,” Charlie said. He was right. I, unused to evening wear, would trip in such a thing, although I thought the elephants added a pleasant touch, something unusual.
“Something shorter,” Charlie said. The next dress had a neckline that plunged almost to the waist. Charlie winced. The third gown was worn with a violet matador’s bolero embroidered with plumed dancing horses.
When the mannequin reappeared in the fourth selection, her pasted-down spit curls no longer as precisely arranged and a glint of impatience in her eyes, Charlie and I both leaned forward with interest. This dress was white chiffon printed with blue lines of sheet music, with red roses dotted here and there as notes. The neckline was scalloped, the waist tight.
“That’s the one, isn’t it, Lily? How much is it?” Charlie asked, another testament to his charm, because no one else could have asked that crass question in a couture salon and gotten away with it. The salesgirl bent toward him and whispered something in his ear. The dress whispered as she moved, the red roses fluttered.
His fingers drummed on the wooden arm of his chair. “It’s three months’ salary for an intern,” he whispered to me. My heart sank, and the drowning of desire for that frock was like an I told you so. How dare you want. Anything.
There was a commotion in the arched doorway. Everyone turned to look at the woman who had just come in, tall, majestic, her pale summer dress billowing about her knees as if she carried her own personal breeze with her, a woman with the kind of looks and style that made heads turn. Her hair was blond without the brass that peroxide gives; her eyes were copper, long and narrow so that she seemed to be smiling even when she wasn’t.
“Charlie. How good to see you!” She came to us and bent to give him a kiss on the cheek. Was I the only one who noticed that she discreetly picked up the keys he had placed on the table? She slipped them into her purse.
“I got here as soon as I could. What a to-do! Charlie, whatever did you say to that woman? Coco is having a tantrum because I left without making an order.”
“Only that we were meeting at the Schiaparelli salon instead,” Charlie protested.
“My God. No wonder. Coco and Schiap detest each other. She is, what do you say, fit to be tied?”
“They are in the same business. You’d think they’d be colleagues,” Charlie said, blushing.
“That is how a doctor thinks, not a dress designer.” She laughed, showing a misaligned tooth, an imperfection that made her even more charming. “But why are we here? You know I love Chanel.”
“My sister’s choice. Ania, this is my sister, Lily.”
“How do you do?” she asked formally. “I think I am a little afraid of you. Charlie talks about his older sister so much.”
The salesgirl pulled a third chair to our table, and Ania sat between Charlie and me. I could see their fingers touch under the table, then twine together so tightly their knuckles whitened. I looked away, overwhelmed by the intimacy.
“Very strange, this place,” Ania whispered. “That window! Have they shown you something you like?”
“Yes, but the cost is . . .”
“Formidable, of course. Which costume is it?” Charlie described it, and one of her long eyebrows, pale as a moth wing, shot up. “I have seen that dress. It is from the collection Schiaparelli showed the season before the Circus Collection.”
The way she said “Circus Collection” indicated we should know it. I, an art teacher in a girls’ school, and Charlie, a medical student, did not. Ania read our ignorance in our faces.
“The Circus Collection,” she repeated. “Buttons shaped like leaping horses, gowns embroidered with elephants and drums. She showed the collection in February when Hitler took over the German army, when they began to call him the ringmaster.”
“That madman,” Charlie muttered. “Why don’t the Germans get rid of him?”
“He promises them work,” Ania said quietly. “He promises that he will make Germany great. And they believe him.”
“He’s already gotten the communists working. In labor camps,” Charlie said.
There was a long moment of silence. Talk about Hitler did that to conversations, truncated them and turned words into meaningless sounds. No one knew what to make of him, of what was happening in Germany and Austria, and what would happen next. We’d already begun hearing about the camps, how Hitler had exempted them from all German laws and left the prisoners at the mercy of the guards and administrators.
We sat, making small talk about the weather, the latest Hollywood films, whether or not Mae West would make a comeback. Her latest film had bombed, and the Hollywood Reporter had put her name on the box office poison list, along with those of Greta Garbo and Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn, names,
they assured us, we’d never be hearing from again.
Ania leaned over Charlie to speak directly to me, and I caught him inhaling her perfume, eyes briefly closed and head tilted as if the sun had suddenly caught his face. “Did you have a pleasant trip?” she asked me. “The Channel crossing was not too bad? I get, what is the word, Charlie, mal de mer? Seasick?”
“If you look straight ahead and not down, the motion sickness is not as bad,” he said, opening his eyes.
“Your brother is so smart.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “He is.” Head of his class at Harvard Medical, but Charlie didn’t like to boast about that.
End of that conversation. The ormolu clock ticked away on a marble mantelpiece.
The salesgirls whispered in corners, worked lethargically at straightening displays and folding sweaters . . . the strangest sweaters, with bows knitted into the pattern, like a surrealist joke.
“Madame would like to see something?” The salesgirl who had sniffed at me like I had come in through the wrong entrance all but groveled before the beautiful Ania.
“No, I think not. Too strange!” She laughed.
“Go ahead, Ania,” I said. “As long as we’re here.” Why did I say that? Was I making small talk, encouraging this beautiful Ania to try on a dress that was humorous and not necessarily beautiful?
“We have a little time,” Ania agreed.
The parade began again, the model strutting out in dress after dress as Ania tilted her head, put a scarlet-tipped finger to her dimpled chin, and contemplated. Her wedding ring was set with a huge diamond that glittered each time she moved her hand.
“That!” Ania exclaimed when the model had come out in a long, clinging gown of black satin worn with a white organza blouse tied at the waist, peasant style. A half hour later she had also ordered a brown-and-yellow morning suit with oversized buttons, a sequined cocktail dress that glistened like mermaid scales, and extravagantly wide silk beach trousers in four different colors.
The Last Collection Page 3