“Don’t you know who he is, who he’s likely to become, under Hitler?” he’d muttered, his words forming around the huge cigar jammed in his mouth so that the dangerous sentence chugged like a train leaving the station in a cloud of smoke. “Bloody hell, Elsa, just bloody hell.” They were still in bed in his apartment on Upper Grosvenor Street, and he’d turned his naked back to her.
She’d never make that mistake again. She didn’t know, not then, that von Dincklage would be the German officer carrying the life-and-death knowledge of when the Wehrmacht would begin its march on France, when it would approach Paris and turn the city into a prison.
No excuses, though, she told herself. You have to protect your daughter, and you can’t afford mistakes.
For months she’d been thinking of how to get an ear, a good set of eyes, inside the Chanel salon, how to get the information that would not be whispered in her own salon because she’d made her own loyalties too well known. Schiap, the Bolshevik lover; Schiap, who had refused to have lunch with Mussolini, who was a little too obvious in her hatred of Hitler, even though so many of her very wealthy customers supported him. The Duchess of Windsor still came in and bought new seasonal outfits, but when she ordered clothes for a visit to Germany she ordered only from Chanel. Hitler approved of sensible Chanel, though it was said he thought women looked best in traditional German costumes.
God, how ugly those Fraus must look in that Berchtesgaden eyrie, in their aprons and dirndls and braids coiled over their ears like huge snails. The blouses, though, the puffed sleeves and embroidery . . . those could be interesting. Things were getting complicated in Paris, and a bit of nostalgia might suit the new mood.
Schiap reached for a piece of paper and pencil—there were piles of them placed in every room. Artists never knew when inspiration would strike, and an idea could be easily lost between first thought and a finally discovered pencil.
In the darkness, keeping her hand moving within the small halo of light given off by a single candle, she sketched a dress: a long, pinched-in waist, a kind of apron that pulled back to form the beginning of a bustle. It was like something she’d found in her mother’s attic, an evening gown worn long ago by one of the women in her family, perhaps her mother’s sister, a woman said to be so beautiful priests fled in terror for their souls when they saw her.
Gogo looked a little like her, with those huge soulful eyes. Gogo was eighteen, too young to understand what was happening in the world, too young to be concerned with anything but boys and yachting parties.
Schiap, further from sleep than before, pushed away the drawing of the gown and started a list. A leaving-Paris list. Number one. Close the store in London. Thirty-six Grosvenor Street had been useful—it had spread her name and reputation, allowed her to spend time in London when Gogo was still in school. But let’s face it, she thought. The English aristocracy had a habit of not paying their bills, and the London store had lost money since its beginnings. She couldn’t afford that anymore, not with a war coming, and soon it would be impossible to shuttle back and forth between London and Paris, impossible to get the supplies she would need even for her Parisian clientele. No. Close it. Concentrate on Paris. On Gogo. Henry would understand.
Number two. Where to get information. Timing would be everything. She wouldn’t leave a day before it was absolutely necessary, but to delay even a day too late would be disastrous. Always, it came back to that: information.
Madame Bouchard. Ania, von Dincklage’s mistress. Thank God that American girl had brought her into the Boutique Fantastique.
* * *
• • •
Color is a response to the way light hits the retina, so light, and color, are time made visible. Color speaks of our mortality, and time didn’t care that Ania and Charlie were in love, or that I was still in mourning. It moved relentlessly forward at the pace of a marching army.
The morning light was blue a few days later, when Charlie sent Ania up to my room to fetch me. It was the kind of blue that brings on nostalgia, a realization that every day was not going to be as beautiful as that light promised.
Ania wore a yellow silk dress that cast gold shadows under her chin. Her face was somber.
“Is something wrong, Ania?”
She sat on my unmade bed and twirled a fringe from the covers around her finger.
“You mean more than usual? Yes. News from home. I haven’t told Charlie; it would make him, I don’t know, too quiet, and I need to be gay today. A friend of mine has been attacked. By the friends of Hitler. Her family has been driven out of their home. I don’t know where they will go, where they will live.”
Ania turned her back to me, and I understood that I was to respect that space she had created between us, that some things we must put into words go far beyond simpler commonplace reactions, a hug, a pat on the shoulder. Poland had seemed far away, until that moment. Now the threat was in the room, with us.
“I only wish . . .”
“What, Ania?”
“That my father would come here, leave Poland. But now, we talk of something pleasant. Put on your hat, and we will not talk about this in front of Charlie. No worries.” She paused in front of my dressing table, where I had stacked books bought over the past few days from the bookstalls along the river, all biographies of artists, books of color theory.
“What do you want? From life, I mean,” she asked, running her finger over the book spines.
I had wanted Allen. Allen, and a little house, and Allen’s children. Had there been anything before that?
“If you use the word generously enough, I am an artist, or at least used to be.” I ran a comb through my hair. I’d had it cut the day before, above my chin, all the way up to my earlobes so that it clung closely to my head. A single curl on each cheek made russet brown commas around my mouth. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror, and it was a pleasant sensation. “I wanted to paint and to show my work.”
“What kind of painting? What kind of work?”
“At first, portraits. I like to study people’s faces. Yours, for instance. Did you know there is a shadow at just one corner of your mouth? In low light it looks blue, like the blue around the mother’s throat in Klimt’s Death and Life.”
Ania put her hand up to her mouth, as if she might touch the color she hadn’t known was there.
“I was working on Allen’s portrait when he died,” I said. “But I couldn’t finish it. After that, I tried landscapes. But there was too much green. And then, I couldn’t paint at all.”
“Lily, did you love your husband so much when you married?”
The question weakened my knees, made me sit on the bed. “More than anything or anyone.”
“For me, it is different.”
“How?”
“I married when my father decided I should, to a man my father chose.”
“You could have refused.”
She laughed. “You Americans are so funny. You believe so much in freedom, in deciding your own way. Here, it is different. We marry to suit our families and then we . . .”
“Then you take a lover. I don’t think I’ve met a single married couple out together all week.”
“And is that so terrible? If it works, and everyone is happy?”
Happy? She was going to break my brother’s heart. Charlie was American, like me; Charlie wanted love and marriage, not marriage and then love elsewhere. He wanted Ania.
She touched the wedding ring on my left hand. “It wasn’t your fault, the automobile accident. Charlie said it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it was. Allen was tired and hadn’t wanted to go out in the first place.”
“I’m sorry. But it was an accident, Lily.”
“Perhaps. But it happened to me. To him.”
* * *
• • •
André Durst’s Bal de la Forêt was t
o be held in the forest of Mortefontaine. Its theme was taken from Fournier’s popular novel Les Grand Meaulnes, about a mystical chateau in the forest that comes to life, and then disappears again, driving a young man to wandering distraction as he tries, endlessly, to find that forest paradise once more. Later, I realized his choice of theme had all the splendor of prophecy. Paris, during that last year before the war, would become a lost paradise.
“What shall I be? Little Red Riding Hood?” Ania asked. “You know, in the original version it does not go well for the grandmother and the little girl. The wolf eats them both.” She gnawed at a broken nail. That broken nail bothered me. Ania was so perfectly manicured, so careful in her appearance. A misaligned tooth added to her appeal; that nail spoke of some part of Ania that neither I nor Charles knew. She had been late meeting us, but Charlie knew better than to ask.
We were standing in the street outside my hotel, still deciding how to spend the evening. The weather had changed, moved from light spring to a heavier heat, and the air, thick with damp and street grit, was almost visible, graying the colors of the city. To make the background of a painting look distant from the foreground, a thin layer of gray needs to be applied over it, to suggest remoteness.
England and the school seemed far away, and the distance felt good and right. I had realized that I didn’t need the sight of the actual oak tree outside the gate of the walled garden to remember Allen sitting under it. In fact, the memory seemed clearer from this new distance.
“I think you should go as Snow White,” I said. “She fled to the forest to escape her wicked stepmother, and you look so beautiful, all in white.”
“I like that. Snow White,” Ania agreed. “Pure, virginal. No one will recognize me.”
Charlie made a kind of growl in the back of his throat and crushed his cigarette under his heel. He didn’t like it when Ania made comments like that, self-deprecating poisoned arrows. “If Durst expects virgins, he’d better invite some gals from out of town. I doubt there are any in Paris,” he said.
“We should ask Elsa Schiaparelli to do your costume, shouldn’t we? It will need a touch of humor, a kind of slyness, to make it work,” I said.
“Coco has asked to do my costume. Maybe I’ll order one from each, then choose that day.” Ania grinned with mischief. “Keep them both guessing.”
“You keep too many people guessing,” Charlie grumbled. “Make up your mind!” Ania’s mouth began to tremble. “I meant about where we’re going tonight,” Charlie said more gently, and put his arm around her shoulders.
“You.” Ania pointed at me. “You must go in something pretty, something diaphanous. I know. You must be a woodland fairy, all pink and green gauze and wings. I will make up your eyes, blue shadow and lashes longer than Joan Crawford’s, and put beauty marks on your cheek.”
“Sounds good,” Charlie agreed.
“To Bricktop’s,” she said. “I want music. I want to dance. Come on, the night is wasting away.”
“Bricktop’s,” Charlie agreed, forging down the street like a man on an important errand.
How could a young man convey such a sense of urgency when the night was so heavy, so enervating? All the time I’d been in Paris, three weeks now, he’d been full of the kind of energy you feel when you are already late for an appointment and the bus just isn’t coming; when the doctor looks at you with pity and can’t find the words.
“Charlie, not so fast!” Ania, laughing, pursued him, her white-blond hair shining silver in the dim light of evening.
“Come away with me, you fast woman,” he said, slowing down and hugging her again in a tight embrace. “Come away, come away.”
They kissed, standing in the street, a long, slow kiss that burned me with the salty blue flame of what had been and, for me, was no more.
Bricktop’s on rue Pigalle was packed. The denseness of the crowd, the smell of alcohol and sweat and smoke combined with the sultriness of the summer evening, made the air even heavier. You could almost see the notes from the trumpet suspend in the air before they fell onto the heads of the dancers.
Bricktop herself, with her flaming red hair, came to welcome us. She greeted Ania with three kisses on the cheek, right, left, right. Was there anyone Ania did not know? Or maybe the connection was not with Ania but with her husband. Maybe he was a financier, one of the behind-the-scenes people who kept so many businesses afloat during the bad times? I tried not to think about the husband, just as Charlie tried not to think about him, nor about the lover, but they were there, invisible authorities watching over us.
“Looking swell!” Bricktop shouted at us in her West Virginia accent. She was famous for the cigars she smoked, and the blazing hair and freckles inherited from her Irish father, while her soft African features and tight curls had been inherited from her mother. Bricktop had started out as a revue dancer, had taught Cole Porter how to dance the Black Bottom, and now she owned nightclubs in several countries. That was Paris, before the war. You could come from nowhere, be a nobody, and end up a society queen and rich as hell.
Red-tipped cigar leading the way, Bricktop guided us to a table in the far right corner, the table with, I saw, the best vantage point in the club. We could see almost every other table, but we were in the shadows and they could not see us. Django Reinhardt and his band were onstage. He smiled when he saw me. I waved back.
“I thought Josephine Baker would be performing tonight,” a peeved woman’s voice said behind us. “Instead, it’s just that gypsy guitar player.”
“Josephine’s gotten uppity,” her companion said. “Gone and married a French Jew. Won’t they just have a future.” His laugh was guttural and cruel.
Ania froze, one bare arm escaped from the light sweater she wore, the other arm crooked into a stiff angle. “What a shame, darling,” she said to Charlie in a voice meant to be overheard. “More dreadful tourists. Do you see that rag she’s wearing! They ruin the place.”
The woman turned white. “Jeesh. What’s her problem?” her companion muttered.
We danced for hours, the three of us, arms around one another’s shoulders, a little tipsy, a little desperate, each for our own reasons.
Ania and Charlie kissed again when we were walking home later, oblivious to me, to the stares of passersby, to everything they were trying to lock outside of that embrace.
* * *
• • •
“Snow White? Yes!” Elsa Schiaparelli could barely contain her enthusiasm. “It must be the correct shade of white, more cream than gray,” she said to Ania. “You don’t want to look washed out. And a red vest over it, a red vest sewn with sequins to flash and shine.”
She was almost dancing, she was so excited. She knew Coco was to have done Ania’s ball costume. Of course. These Parisian women seemed to know everything about everyone, who was sleeping with whom, whose father or husband or lover was dangerously close to bankruptcy, whose teenage daughter had gone away for half a year to visit an “aunt” and left behind an illegitimate child, who had bruises hidden under the silk dress, who was using morphine a little too frequently to sleep through the night. That last one, I’d heard, was Coco herself.
Where a woman bought her clothes was almost a matter for public record, compared to the other whispered rumors that buzzed through the salons and cafés and dinner parties of the city.
“I will have the white skirt embroidered with sequins making the constellation of the bear,” Schiaparelli said.
Ursa Major. Her own symbol, known all over the world. Elsa Schiaparelli had a cluster of moles on her face in the exact shape of the Great Bear, or what Charlie and I, as Americans, called the Big Dipper. She designed jewelry and embroidery to match that constellation, and it was as effective as writing Designed by Elsa Schiaparelli on the garments and jewelry. Coco Chanel would be furious.
“And you?” She looked at me with more than a little skep
ticism. “What will you be?”
“A woodland fairy,” Ania answered for me. “All pink and glittery, with wings.”
“Hmm.” Schiap leaned her little pointed chin into her fist and considered me with as much concentration as the housewives at the fish market considered the catch of the day. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it can work. I have some leftover tulle. All it will need is a gathered waist and ribbons holding it at the shoulders. An hour’s work.”
“What about you?” Ania asked. Of course Schiap was going. Everyone but the dairy maids of the Auvergne seemed to have been invited to the Durst ball.
“Me. I will be a tree,” Schiap said, lifting her arms and waving her fingers as if they were leaves shivering on a branch. “Secret. Don’t tell anyone!”
The salon was full that day. There must have been forty women in various stages of shopping and ordering and fitting. One of them listened closely; one of them took notes and had a little conversation with Mademoiselle Chanel. The next day a box was delivered to Ania from Coco’s salon: a Snow White dress of simple beige jersey with a rust-colored vest. She brought it to my hotel room and tried it on for me.
“It’s beautiful,” I agreed. “Elegant. But . . .”
“But not fun,” Ania agreed. “And Charlie likes the Schiaparelli dress. How will I tell Mademoiselle I can’t wear this?”
“Maybe she won’t notice. Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I suggested, but Ania looked at me as if I had just said the world was flat.
“And I think maybe I won’t tell Elsa about this. It would be war.” Ania folded the dress back into its box.
Ania wasn’t with us the next day. “She’s gone to see her husband,” Charlie said. “To try and sort things out with him. About the child.” He was in the most serious mood I’d ever seen him in. But I understood what was at stake.
The Last Collection Page 10