The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

  “Where are we going this afternoon? Where’s Ania?” I asked Charlie. It was eleven in the morning. The trees made shortened, dappled shadows over the pavement, and the colors were the colors of summer, of girls in bright dresses, window boxes full of flowers, blue sky fading to silver directly overhead.

  “We’re meeting Ania at the Coco Chanel salon.”

  “I thought she’d decided she preferred Schiaparelli?”

  “Me, too. Apparently one must appease both sides. It’s more complicated than politics.” Charlie pushed his hands deep into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. A hot wind was blowing that day, stirring the dust and ashes of the streets and whipping my hair into my eyes as we crossed the busy rue Saint-Honoré. I need a haircut, I thought, tired of the old gesture of pushing my hair behind my ears.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Chanel salon was on rue Cambon, just around the corner from the Place Vendôme. They were steps away from each other, Coco and Schiap. The Place Vendôme was the most elegant shopping section of Paris, so of course they would need to be there, to be close. But it must have galled, that possibility of always running into each other.

  From the street entrance, a mirrored stairway led up to the famed Chanel showroom. Clever, I thought. What woman looks into a mirror and thinks, I look wonderful! I need no new clothes at all! No. She looks, she frowns, she tugs at her jacket, pulls at her skirt, adjusts her hat, and thinks, Time for a new look, a new wardrobe. All the way up that long stairwell to Coco Chanel, waiting to douse dissatisfaction with one’s appearance with a new dress, new sweater, new jewelry.

  Coco’s salon didn’t have the friendly atmosphere of Schiap’s; the vendeuses, all dressed in black and white, stood at attention, their hands folded in front of their waists like schoolgirls ready to recite a lesson. The rooms were intimidatingly magnificent, all gleaming mirrors and gilt furniture and thick carpeting. It was busy that day. The society ladies were being fitted for their summer resort wear, the sporty yachting outfits daring, and swimsuits, all in the famous jersey that Chanel had made so popular.

  Charlie and I sat on the beige sofas and waited for Ania to finish in the fitting room, and as we waited I watched the models pacing the room, shrugging in and out of light coats and sweaters, twirling ropes of fake pearls. The clothes were elegant and almost all in black, white, and beige. I remembered what Ania had told me, how Chanel had grown up in an orphanage ruled by nuns in their black-and-white habits.

  We carry our childhoods with us all our lives, no matter how tall, how old we become. Inside me was a little girl who would always remember the red scarves of the skaters in Central Park that last day I spent with my father, before the Spanish flu took him and my mother.

  Elsa Schiaparelli’s Roman, upper-class childhood was there in her collections, those wild colors as vivid as the boldly striped orange-and-blue uniforms of the Swiss guards of the Vatican, the ultrafeminine shapes of the bustles and corsets found in the trunk in her attic. Chanel’s childhood was in her work as well: the jersey she made chic had been the workday fabric of laborers, the subdued colors of austere orphanage life.

  Charlie grew uncomfortable, sitting on the beige sofa waiting amid all this feminine flurry, fidgeting and checking his watch.

  “How many fittings can one dress require?” he muttered. “What a waste of time.”

  “You have no idea,” Ania said, creeping up behind him and putting her hands over his eyes. “And why a waste? Think of how beautiful Ania looks in her outfits.”

  “Ania would look beautiful in a flour sack,” Charlie said, pulling her hands away and looking up at her. Don’t kiss, I thought. Not here, not with all these people.

  “You’ve never seen her in a flour sack, or probably in anything less glamorous than couture. It is part of her charm.” Ania laughed.

  “Madame!” The fitter called to Ania as if she were a misbehaving schoolgirl. “Come here! I am not finished!” Ania threw up her arms in mock terror and disappeared again.

  A door opened on the other side of the room, and Coco Chanel, dressed in beige jersey, came through the doorway. She eyed the room, taking inventory of who was there.

  “Ah. The girl from Elsie’s party,” she said when she saw me sitting there with Charlie. “And her very handsome brother.”

  Charlie blushed a bright red.

  Coco smiled at us, standing in the pose that had been photographed over and over again: one leg slightly ahead of the other tilting the hips forward, one hand in a pocket, the other on her hips, opening space between her arms and body the way men of power do in Renaissance portraits.

  Small head with short black hair, sharp nose with nostrils permanently flared, as if a fit of temper was coming, going, or already upon her. That Coco was famous for her fierce temper I already knew from Ania’s gossip, but her lean body had the fragile, sinuous curve of an ivory figurine.

  Ania was beautiful. Schiap had verve and confidence. But Coco was the epitome of style.

  She gave us her bright, metallic smile, her face turned slightly sideways, just short of coy and flirtatious. She may have started out as a half-nude singer in a cheap revue in the South—Ania’s gossip—but she had acquired grace and class, had learned the hard lessons that turn a peasant child into one of the richest women in the world, with the beauty and social skills to match.

  “You need a new wardrobe,” she said, giving me a hard look.

  “I do, but my stock portfolio is a little low at the moment, and I’d hate to sell the family jewels,” I said. “I’m only a schoolteacher, Mademoiselle.”

  My impertinence took her by surprise. People did not talk back to Coco Chanel.

  She laughed, then raised her hand, and I saw she was holding a small scissors, not a cigarette. “May I?” she asked, and, not waiting for a reply, grasped the faded silk rose corsage that had been stitched onto my old cardigan. Deftly, she cut it away and smoothed the cardigan flat over my collarbone.

  “Better,” she said. “No need for frippery. The sweater is a good color, once it can be seen.”

  I looked in the mirror. It was better without the old cloth corsage. Simpler, cleaner, classier.

  “Ania will be out in a minute,” she told Charlie. “We’re almost done. Such a lovely woman. I wish all my clients wore my clothes as well as she does. Too bad about that Schiaparelli dress. Not right for her, not at all. And you . . .” She turned back to me. “Come to me sometime. Let’s see what we can do.” She smiled again and disappeared back through the doorway. When she was gone, the vendeuses sighed with relief.

  “I can’t afford vanity,” I said to Charlie.

  “Dressing well is not vanity. Even if the fittings do take too long.” Ania was out of the dressing room again, lipstick freshly applied, white-blond hair smoothed back from her forehead. Charlie jumped to his feet when he saw her. I wished he could hide his emotion just a little, make her guess just a little, but then I saw the light in her eyes and knew she felt the same about him.

  “You have been honored,” Ania said to me. “Mademoiselle Chanel usually does not come out to speak with her customers. You have sparked her interest, I think. She likes Americans.”

  “You’ve made a conquest,” Charlie joked.

  We spent the rest of the day together, walking, eating when hungry, sightseeing. On Boulevard Saint-Germain we passed a long line outside a pharmacy, mostly men, a few women, avoiding eye contact with those around them.

  “They’re saying that France is going to ban contraception,” Ania said. “They want us all to have more babies. Lots of babies.”

  “Countries want lots of babies when they know a war is coming,” Charlie said. “Of course, all of the would-be fathers will be off in the trenches, so it’s not even logical.”

  “There won’t be a war,” Ania argued. “France does not want one. That’s what everyo
ne says. That’s why they let Hitler take Czechoslovakia.”

  “But Hitler does want one. Condoms won’t be the only thing disappearing soon. If I were you, I’d buy a good warm fur coat. There are some cold winters coming.” Charlie jammed his hands deeper into his pockets.

  “Charlie, you’re frightening me,” Ania said.

  “I want to frighten you. I want you to leave with me, when I leave Paris.”

  “You must see the Pont Alexandre III,” she said. “We must go to Saint-Roch, where Corneille is buried. The puppet show in the Parc Monceau, the catacombs in Montparnasse,” she said. And we went, Charlie pretending to huff and puff, Ania’s face radiant with joy, racing through the sights of Paris as if we had this day, this one day, to enjoy it. I should have paid better attention, I realized years later.

  By nightfall we were exhausted and ended up in a Montmartre poetry café, slumped on rickety ancient chairs, drinking beer and eating cheese sandwiches. The poetry at the café that evening had a rough quality of anger. My schoolroom French couldn’t accommodate all of it, but what I understood had a knife-edge quality of danger combined with sour bitterness. It made me think of what my aunt had said one night about the bread lines and shantytowns that had mushroomed after the market crash, that people had grown a layer of scar tissue over their emotions. After Charlie and I had finished high school in New York, she and my now-retired uncle had left the city and moved to Los Angeles, looking for more sun, for an easier life.

  Two loud people at a table next to us began arguing, shouting. It was political, one man agreeing with Chamberlain that Hitler would stop in Austria, the other shouting, “Never!”

  “This is dreary,” Ania said, forcing a smile. “Let’s go to the Casino and see the new Maurice Chevalier revue.”

  “Can’t afford it,” Charlie mumbled.

  “But I can. Oh, Charlie, please. To make me happy.”

  So we ended up at the Casino, surrounded by men in tuxedos, women in feather boas, and waiters who tried to seat us as far from the center of the room as possible, till Ania pressed a wad of bills into their palms.

  The revue, The Loves of Paris, featured, as they usually did, many naked girls and some exotic dance troupes—it was “The Sixteen Red and Blond Greasely Girls” that season, but Maurice Chevalier was the star. He sang all of his biggest hits, tipping his hat, tapping his cane, and winking his way through “Valentine” and “Prosper.” But it was when he sang “Lili Marleen” that the audience rose to its feet, howling with pleasure and clapping.

  He sang it in a strong German accent, mocking the voice of Adolf Hitler, making the love song comic and ridiculous.

  Ania laughed so hard she coughed up champagne, and Charlie had to thump her back.

  Not everyone was laughing, though. Coco Chanel sat six tables away from us and the look on her face was a combination of hostility and wistfulness. Only someone with those very large black eyes, those heavy brows, could manage such an expression. She was at a table with von Dincklage. Oh God. Did Ania know he was there?

  “Time to leave,” I said, and both Charlie and Ania understood instantly. Ania left twenty more francs on the table, and we ducked out a side entrance, laughing like truant schoolchildren.

  By then Paris had grown quiet and dark and shuttered, and we were sitting exhausted on a bench alongside the Seine.

  “Maybe that is enough for today,” Ania agreed. “But we must not waste any time, you know. You can buy anything but time.”

  “Right,” Charlie agreed, looking up. Black clouds shuttled overhead in the midnight sky. A brisk wind whipped Ania’s skirt around her knees and knocked off Charlie’s hat. “I think a storm is coming. We’re going to get soaked,” he shouted, chasing his pale gray Stetson down the street.

  • SIX •

  SCHIAP

  Rain fell down the windowpane, making trails like the veins in an old person’s hands.

  You can temporarily erase wrinkles with cream, add false eyelashes to those grown skimpy, pinch in a widened waist with a corset, even find a surgeon to lift up the fallen face. But hands . . . there is no remedy for aged hands. Schiap put her own small hand flat on the windowpane. It was still pretty, she decided. Plump and long-fingered. But she thought of her mother’s hands, how their veins mimicked blue rain rivulets over glass. Time. So little.

  The house was absolutely still, all its inhabitants, the cook, the maid, the chauffeur, wrapped in sleep, all except for Schiap, who could not sleep. She leaned her head against the window, staring out into the dark, glistening night. Three o’clock in the morning. The hour of regrets.

  So many. Well, of course there were. She had lived without limits, without caution, always with passion and a certain selfishness. That is how ambitious people achieve success. If you want to be always good, always kind, always self-effacing, then marry a hardworking man and spend the rest of your life bearing and raising his children.

  She’d never marry again; she’d decided that long ago. Not even to her best beau, Henry Horne, the very handsome Englishman who had helped set up her London shop and little pied-à-terre in Mayfield, or his older brother, Allan, dull, correct Allan who could be so sweet when they were alone. She had shocked even herself a little by taking both brothers as lovers. But they did get along so well, no jealousy, no quarrels, that friendly comradery during hunting weekends in Scotland, civilized dinners in London.

  London. Poor London. It would not be spared. She sensed it, that loud roaring overhead like hungry lions, bomb doors whirring open.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. Schiap, afraid of lightning, jumped away from the window. She was wide awake now because of fear, her drowsy insomnia kidnapped by uncompromising alertness. She counted to two hundred by fours, her lucky number, as she wrapped her magenta silk robe around her shoulders and stepped into mules made huge and fluffy with downy feathers. She slapped down the dark hall, the staircase, past the dining room, her study, all the rooms of her glorious house filled with decades of acquiring—art, curiosities, useful things, silly things.

  She listed them in her head as she passed through the dark rooms and laughed to herself when she passed the dining table and its chairs all neatly tucked into a straight row. The chairs were covered in heavy brocade now. They hadn’t always been. When she had first come to Paris, years ago, she had given a dinner party for the people who could help or hurt her new couture business. Her father, the medieval scholar, had taught her that: pay as much attention to potential enemies as to friends, or the battle is already lost.

  Because she was very broke those first years and very inexperienced—admit it, she told herself, you knew nothing about fabrics—she’d had her dining room chairs covered with a cheap white rubbery material. The evening of her debut dinner party fifteen years before had been warm. Too warm. As the people sat and chattered and drank the champagne—you may skimp on many things, but not on the wine, it must always be the best—the heat of the evening had begun to melt the rubber fabric.

  When her guests rose to leave, they all had white skeletal imprints emblazoned on the backs of their dresses and trousers, rubbery imprints on their thighs and buttocks. Schiap had rather liked the effect and used it, years later, in her famous, her infamous, skeleton dress. The bones under the flesh.

  Chanel had been there that night. It was their first meeting and Schiap understood immediately that Chanel would be foe, not friend. When the guests rose after the long meal and discovered their ruined evening clothes, everyone had laughed, except Chanel. Her eyes had become dark beads of disapproval; the chill emanating from her had frozen the others. They all left rather hurriedly after that.

  Another rumble of thunder, closer like a premonition of something huge and vicious stalking the land. Quick, into the cellar. Schiap always felt safe in the basement. Hers was very large, a series of vaulted rooms leading in and out of one another like a medieval cloister,
and it reminded her of an illustration she had found in one of her father’s books, monks lined up at a long table in a vaulted room, quills in hands, heaven on their faces as they worked on their illuminated pages.

  She’d had a similar table made for her cellar and had kept the room as bare as modern living allowed: there was no electricity, only oil lamps and candles, and everything was wood or stone, smelling of a pleasantly familiar damp.

  She sat at the head of the table and listened. Good. Down here, you couldn’t hear the thunder. She was shivering and pulled her wrap closer. Was it also raining in Nice? Was Gogo safe asleep in her bed at whatever house she had been invited to? Hard to keep track, though she knew a mother was supposed to.

  Gogo. Her beautiful daughter. She hadn’t known what love was till she held that mewling red newborn in her arms. Everything she had done—the sixteen-hour workdays, the constant search for new ideas, the courting of wealthy and influential customers—everything had been for Gogo. To keep Gogo safe, to make sure there was enough money.

  Gogo, of course, hadn’t seen it that way. Gogo had known only that her mother was often away, often distracted, distant. Perhaps even a little cold, as her own mother had been. But someday, when she had children of her own, Gogo might understand that a mother’s sacrifice can be to serve love by serving her own ambition. Someday she would understand that the surgeries, the therapies that Gogo had hated, had been part of that love. She had vanquished the damage from the polio, and Gogo was perfect again, straight. Just the slightest suggestion of a limp still lingered, and, the doctors had told her, there was nothing to be done for that.

  She would do anything for her daughter. But how stupid she had been, refusing to greet von Dincklage the one time he came into her Boutique Fantastique. Even her beau, Henry, that good-natured man, had been angry when she’d told him about it.