The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

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  • • •

  Two days later my Schiaparelli gown for the Durst ball came in a huge cardboard case filled with so much tissue paper I had to rustle through many layers before my hands touched the silk. It wasn’t the simple tulle frock she had promised. It was a magnificent white column of draped silk, decorated with a dozen small painted metal brooches of insects. A beetle sat on the right shoulder; a butterfly fluttered over the left hip. Because of its simple, loose lines and because the salon already knew my measurements, it needed no fitting.

  It was a thank-you, I realized. I had delivered Ania to her, and Ania was wearing Schiaparelli to the ball. I wondered how Coco would react. I had an impulse to fold the gown back into the box, return it to the salon, and take the next boat train to England. I paused the way you do when a ladder is in your path. I’m not superstitious, you tell yourself. But you walk around the ladder, not under it, anyway.

  There was a card in the box as well, a little note from Schiap reminding me to remove all my jewelry before putting on the dress. As if I had jewels. It was one of her jokes.

  When I stepped into the dress it was as if I could suddenly exist outside my own skin, wear a new layer that was me but not me. Me, transformed.

  “Lovely,” Ania said. “So lighthearted. Stop frowning, Lily! We’re going to have so much fun tonight.” Charlie was waiting downstairs, in the Isotta, and she had come up to fetch me. “And it’s perfect for the Durst ball. Another bespoke order that wasn’t picked up?”

  “Probably. I could never afford this. How did things go with your husband, Ania?” She knew what I was asking. What was Charlie’s future?

  “We will talk of it later,” she said. “So many details.” She strapped on the wings she had made for me, wire hangers bent into demi-heart shapes and covered with silk. I wore slippers instead of high heels, and Ania twisted glass pearls into my hair and around my wrists, then tipped a jar of small sequins over me. It was past nine by then, a Parisian summer twilight, and I glittered like a Christmas tree in the dusky light.

  She was in her Snow White costume, with the red bodice and yellow skirt designed by the Walt Disney studio but made seductive, sinuous by Schiaparelli, with long, tight sleeves and clinging fabrics. Schiap had added crystal embroidery along the hem so Ania glittered with every movement. And there was the Ursa Major, embroidered on the front of the skirt, the Schiaparelli brand.

  Charlie had decided against the wolf costume and instead came as Charlie, handsome as a movie star, but with silk leaves basted onto his sleeves and lapels. They rustled in the breeze of the open windows as we motored out of Paris, to the ball.

  Ania’s chauffeur drove that night, and I was sardined in the backseat with Charlie and Ania, those silly wings of my costume backdropping all three of us, like overlarge angel wings in badly painted medieval altar pieces. Charlie and Ania, sitting next to each other, pretended, for the chauffeur’s benefit, to make conversation for all three of us. I recognized the lovers’ codes, the remember whens and do you thinks that pass for conversation but are instead lovemaking with words.

  I could sense the chauffeur’s suspicion and disapproval. He hadn’t fallen for my little act with Ania: me, the inseparable friend who happened to have a brother always tagging along. He knew what was going on; he knew what the conversation really was. And I couldn’t help thinking that this chauffeur, in the employ of Ania’s husband, wasn’t as attractive as von Dincklage’s driver, that serious, unsmiling boy with the blond hair.

  The evening shone with blue—the sheen of Charlie’s lapels, the blue crystals on Ania’s dress, the sky overhead, deep-blue velvet with glittering stars. I wasn’t happy—Allen wasn’t with me—but I was beginning to remember what happiness had felt like. Even the automobile drive, which I had dreaded, wasn’t too bad. Every once in a while the road would curve and my hands would curl into white-knuckled fists, and then the road would straighten and I would be okay again. Even so, I had a sense of foreboding, as I always did in an automobile, after the accident. Ania was in a gay mood, refusing to be serious about anything, to answer any questions.

  The air was almost too soft, the temperature too perfect. The oppressive daytime heat had tempered itself into something milder, sweeter, closer to a welcome embrace than a suffocating blanket. Charlie and Ania spoke in soft murmurs. Under cover of the wrap thrown over her knees, they were holding hands again, like they had that first day, under the tea table in the Schiaparelli showroom.

  “What a night,” Ania sighed. “I’ll never forget it.”

  Charlie whispered something to her, and I saw the driver’s eyes dart into the rearview mirror, checking.

  “Ania, are my wings okay? They’re not getting crushed, are they?” I asked, reminding them they weren’t alone.

  It was my first, my only, full-dress costume party. They were events planned for, and attended by, the very rich and sometimes, I suspected, the very bored or at least those who feared boredom more than any other condition. People with more money than I could imagine, dressed to kill in disguises that sometimes defied description. The worse the economy grew—and in Europe and the United States it was growing worse by the day—the fancier the balls became. It was fairy-tale time, as if truth could be ignored.

  . . . as if the reality that was Hitler could be ignored.

  When reality threatens to become unbearable, we make believe. Children do, and adults, too, except their make-believe is more expensive, in terms of either dollars or emotional cost, because reality is there, waiting for you around the next corner.

  Paris that year had already concocted a silver ball, where everyone dressed in silver and the rooms were plated in silver. A golden ball had followed; a Racine ball with everyone dressed as characters from a Racine play, the ancient regime risen from its own, moldy grave.

  It was mad, this ignoring of reality just as reality was about to turn horrific. There were so many things we should have been paying attention to, newspaper headlines, a look of fear in some people’s eyes, a restlessness like that in a herd before lightning strikes. We were the passengers on the Titanic, still hoping that the thud and shudder of the ship was just a large wave, not an iceberg.

  • SEVEN •

  Outside Paris, the city lights dimmed behind us so that the stars were even brighter overhead. Ania and Charlie began singing Cole Porter love songs to each other, Charlie in his deep but tuneless baritone, Ania’s voice wandering in and out of the English lyrics like a child lost in a toy store. “You’re the top!” Charlie boomed at her, and she came back with “You’re my hat on Gandhi,” instead of “Mahatma Gandhi.”

  When we laughed, there was an edge to it. Tonight, Ania decided Charlie’s future. And hers. I almost wished she would send him home alone. It would, in the long run, be so much easier. But then I remembered Allen, and what the word alone meant after you had been in love with someone, and I hoped with all my heart she would leave her husband for Charlie. But what if the husband wouldn’t let her take the child with her?

  When the car pulled over in the long gravel drive, we put on our masks before getting out. Mine was white, to match the dress, with crystals circling the eyeholes and feathers at the corners. As soon as I put on that mask, I stopped thinking and entered the dream.

  André Durst had created a perfect replica of an enchanted chateau in the forest of Mortefontaine, with rooms of mirrors and greenery, gauzy screens instead of walls . . . the inside was the outside. We couldn’t tell which was chateau, which was surrounding forest. People costumed as birds, druids, satyrs roamed the rooms and the gardens. A woman costumed as a leopard glided through the fields with a man costumed as a lion. A group of people arrived together as a flock of doves; a rabbit danced with a flower.

  And it was all illuminated by thousands of candles on branching candelabras.

  Ania and Charlie danced away together almost as soon a
s we arrived, leaving me alone in rooms glittering with so many candles, so much crystal, the rooms looked like they were on fire. In the midst of darkness, there was light everywhere, prisms of it casting rainbows on walls, mirrors throwing out reflections, windows with their darker light, still shimmering. It was like walking through flames without being burned.

  In a costume, I discovered, you don’t mind being unpartnered. Perhaps that is the nature of solitude: it requires a sense of self and separateness. When you are not yourself, when you are costumed, you are no one and everyone; there are no borders, no separateness, perhaps not even between life and death. A breeze tickled my neck, and it felt like a memory come back to life, Allen’s breath tickling my neck.

  I started to feel like a creature of the forest, solitary, wary, visible only to those who have the patience and the eyes to see the truth of you, to catch the movement of a life in camouflage, in disguise. If someone took my hand, a red-caped Richelieu or Harlequin, I danced, coupled in a waltz that made my dress flare at the hem, or in a line of dancers, each one with a hand on the shoulder in front of her, snaking in and out of the crystal rooms.

  When a waiter passed with a tray of champagne, I took a glass. Many glasses. A couple of hours later someone put his hand on my waist for a fox-trot.

  It was von Dincklage’s aide, that solemn German boy.

  “You should at least be wearing a mask,” I told him. “It is a costume party, after all.”

  “I think we won’t be here very long,” he said. So von Dincklage was here. Of course. I hoped that Charlie and Ania were keeping to the shadows.

  He pressed slightly on the small of my back, bringing us closer together. I could feel his warm breath on my cheek and closed my eyes for a second, enjoying his scent of cloves and aftershave. For a moment, his face brushed against my hair. Then we both took a half step back and we were again two almost strangers.

  “You dance well,” he said stiffly, trying, and failing, to make small talk.

  “Where is the baron?”

  “Somewhere nearby, I’ve no doubt. He won’t object if I dance, I think. It is a costume party, after all.”

  So we danced.

  That night there were people whose faces I recognized, a blur of memory from my first night in Paris, at the Ritz, and many more people whom I didn’t recognize at all, men with military posture, women covered with jewels, men in dresses, women in tuxedos, ingénues in pastel gowns. And Charlie and Ania, beautiful Charlie and Ania, so immersed in each other’s gaze they could have been alone rather than dancing through crowded rooms.

  Ania saw me over Charlie’s shoulder, saw my dancing partner, and her eyes opened wider. They were on the other side of the room, near a doorway draped in a garland of flowers, and Ania steered Charlie through it, out of the room. Von Dincklage’s aide had seen them before they disappeared, though. He said nothing.

  Coco arrived around eleven, in a diaphanous green gown that looked like fern fronds moving in a breeze when she moved. It was Coco, blending into nature, but still Coco.

  Schiap arrived soon after, dressed, as she had promised, as a tree, covered in a rough brown cloth that looked like tree bark, with branches extending from her arms and the crown of her head. Several cloth and feather birds perched on her shoulders. Whimsical, humorous, always-make-it-look-easy Schiap. Schiap got the louder applause when she made her entrance, and I saw Coco’s smile fade.

  Schiap came to me and gave me a tight hug, and I felt the rough-edged sackcloth of her tree bark bite into my bare arms. “Look,” she said, “there’s Elsie in the spangled orange tulle. I designed her gown. And that one, and that one . . .” She surreptitiously pointed at all the women in the room wearing costumes by Schiaparelli, her brown-bark little hands covered with green felt leaves dancing right and left.

  “I see so far only three gowns by Coco. Yes,” she said. “It is a night for victory. Even so, I have a bad feeling. No, keep smiling. Maybe it is nothing, maybe it is just the stars lining up strangely. My horoscope indicates this is a complicated time for Virgos.”

  I knew by then that Schiap was superstitious, but that evening her words brought gooseflesh on my arms. There was so much at stake, and Charlie, born in September, was also a Virgo.

  Coco, in her diaphanous green gown, came over to us to greet Schiap: the runner-up admitting the prize goes elsewhere. Her face was frozen into a smile, her red lips stretched so taut her teeth flashed.

  The partygoers danced around us, a dangerous tableau of Schiap and Coco, and me, with the music, a boisterous rendition of “Pennies from Heaven,” sounding too loud, too fast.

  Ania danced by with someone I didn’t know, and he gave her a twirl under his arm as she waved to me. The twirl made Ania’s Snow White skirt flare into flower-shaped fullness, and there, bright and unmissable, was the embroidery in the outline of Ursa Major, Schiap’s insignia.

  Something dangerous flickered in Coco’s flinty eyes.

  “She’s not wearing the costume I made her,” Coco said, to everyone and no one.

  Von Dincklage was at her side, then, carrying two martinis. He offered one to her, and when Coco took it her hand was shaking so much it spilled.

  “Easy!” Von Dincklage laughed.

  “She’s not wearing the costume I made,” Coco said again, this time specifically to von Dincklage.

  “So! It is just a dress. Don’t be so mercenary.”

  The word mercenary made her visibly cringe. Well, of course she was. She was a businesswoman. She was the kind of woman who would have been shown the servant’s entrance at his baronial estate.

  He would have been kinder if he had thrown his drink at her. Of course a baron like von Dincklage, old family, old money, centuries of wealth, would think that her motives were merely mercenary, not realizing that nothing less than honor and reputation were at stake.

  Coco turned white. Her face froze into a mask of hatred.

  Schiap was dancing across the room by herself, surrounded by a clapping group of drunken admirers. She waved her branch-arms, leaned her head side to side so that the treetop looked like it was swaying in a strong wind. People laughed and applauded even more loudly.

  The music changed to a soft, sweet “The Way You Look Tonight,” with the band singer giving a credible imitation of Fred Astaire’s quavering voice.

  Coco began to sway, her head and shoulders moving in subtle willowy circles. Von Dincklage took her in his arms for the dance, but she broke away from him. Instead, she danced toward Schiap, her billowing green skirt making the forest floor for Schiap’s brown tree. They danced together, two women no longer young but still deeply needing admiration, two businesswomen locked in fierce competition, two women who couldn’t be more different in their aesthetics, their way of being in the world.

  Time slowed like it does when you see a car slide out of control, heading for a tree. Time slows, but all you can do is watch because you, too, have slowed, you are in the same altered time as the approaching disaster.

  Who knew what else was going through Coco’s mind that evening? Perhaps she had dreamed the night before of those cold white walls and black doors in the orphanage, the father who had abandoned her and the mother who had died, the many wounds of childhood that still haunt the adult. Perhaps, all those wounds of childhood, the fear and rejection, had reawakened when she saw Ania in the Schiaparelli costume.

  Perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all but only reacting, the way dry wood reacts when a match is put to it.

  Coco danced forward, her hips and arms swaying, and Schiap, laughing, kept dancing back, until Coco finally caught her and pulled her into her arms the way a man would have. Their faces were just inches away from each other, both women grinning, laughing, dancing. Coco, leading, danced Schiap back, back, back until she was against one of Durst’s floor-standing candelabras. Coco released her and stepped away.

&
nbsp; For a moment, Schiap stood there, not realizing what had happened, what was about to happen. Then her halter of branches, her costume of tree bark, caught fire. An azure shimmer appeared over her shoulders, rising up from her back, where she’d danced into the candelabra.

  We watched, frozen in horror like moviegoers waiting for the train to fall over the tracks into the gorge.

  Blue phosphorus flames danced down the branches extending from Schiap’s arms and her head, the flames dangerously close to her face, her fingers. Schiap, no longer laughing, turned in confused, panicked circles, the way wounded beasts do when danger is near but they are too terrified even to run. She turned in circles of blue flame tinted red at their tips, as the partygoers moved into concentric circles around her, pointing and laughing.

  I’m dreaming, I thought. This is a nightmare. The flames shimmered, opalescent, blue. The glittering wood of Schiap’s costume welcomed the flames so that soon, in seconds that felt like hours, the flames were licking her hands, singeing her hair, and I stood there, still frozen, staring in horror and guilt.

  Leopards, tigers, clowns, several Cleopatras removed their masks the better to laugh, believing this was an illusion, part of the festivities. Hadn’t Elsie de Wolfe, at her Circus Ball, hired acrobats and dancing elephants? They thought Coco and Schiap had planned this, though how they could have believed that, knowing as they did—we all knew—how Coco and Schiap felt about each other, was beyond comprehension.

  Finally the horror that had frozen me in place—how long? Three seconds? Four?—turned to panic and I ran to Schiap.

  Charlie was beside me, urging me forward, thrusting a seltzer bottle into my hands. “The hands,” he instructed, as he himself threw water over Schiap’s head, dousing the flames moving closer, closer to her eyes, her ears. With a hiss and sparks, the branches on her head accepted the water, and with resignation, the flames died.