The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

People began throwing their drinks at Schiap. “More water!” they shouted. “Where’s the fire brigade?”

  They kept throwing their drinks at her long after the flames had been extinguished.

  Schiap, safe but looking like a drowned rat tumbled in debris, began to laugh, but the sound was high and strained. I had never before seen such pleading in someone’s eyes. I knew what she wanted, needed.

  I laughed, too, put my arm around her wet, trembling shoulders, laughed ha ha, wasn’t that funny! Because if Schiap didn’t laugh, if I didn’t laugh with her, then all those others would be laughing at Schiap, not with her. And once Parisian society laughs at you, your career is over. No one likes a victim.

  Coco had disappeared by then, and no one went looking for her. Von Dincklage had disappeared as well, and I hoped he had taken Coco home. I didn’t want her to be alone.

  That may sound strange, considering what she had just done to Schiap, but the look on Coco’s face when Schiap burst into flames had frightened me as much as the flames on Schiap’s bark costume. Her face had been cold with satisfaction, certainly, and also with horror at what she had done, and a certain resignation. As if it had to be done, there was no other way to win, to conquer her rival once and for all. But every victory has a price, and Coco was already wondering what the price of this would be for her.

  “Hello, again,” Schiap said to Charlie, when he took off his jacket and put it around Schiap’s trembling, sodden shoulders. She smiled brightly at him, but I saw the lingering terror in her eyes.

  “Hi,” Charlie said. “Good to see you again.” That was what a good doctor did. Reassure. Pretend all is well, normal. “Are you feeling dizzy? Let’s get you dried off and warm.”

  Charlie was alone. Where was Ania? Gone, I realized.

  Schiap refused to admit that she was in a state of mild shock, that her fingertips and nose were pink from too-close flames. When Charlie tried to dry her face she pushed his hands away.

  “I’ll see to it,” I said.

  “Right,” Charlie agreed.

  I helped Schiap upstairs, into a powder room and out of the still-smoldering costume.

  “Look at me,” she said, sitting on a pink boudoir chair and staring into the mirror. “A disaster.”

  “Shall I find your driver?”

  “No. Of course. I’m staying. Leaving now would be the worst thing I could do. My horoscope was right,” she said. “A bad evening.”

  “For Charlie, too, I’m afraid.”

  “No one set him on fire,” she protested.

  “Just the opposite.”

  “No, don’t hug me. You’ll get stains on your dress. My makeup is a mess.”

  “We’ll just clean up a bit and you’ll be more beautiful than ever.”

  “Beautiful. Hah!” Schiap’s voice was gravelly. “Not even my own mother thought I was pretty. I had an Aunt Zia who was so beautiful her town declared a festival when she married and went to live elsewhere. Me? The priests are safe, aren’t they?”

  “No one looks their best after they’ve been set on fire,” I pointed out.

  She laughed once, a sound like something breaking. “I’ll show her,” Schiap said. “I’ll get even for this.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  Schiap snorted in fury. “And maybe two plus two makes four is an accident. God, I miss Gogo. Why is she staying away so long? I want my daughter.”

  She dabbed at her nose, her little saint’s face raw and pink from flame, then crumpled up the handkerchief and threw it to the ground.

  Schiap had been wearing a sequined sheath under the tree costume, and the smoke and water stains were somewhat masked by the glint of the metallic embroidery. She stood, checked her stocking seams to see if they were straight, then went back down to the ball.

  I found Charlie again. We shouldered our way through the laughing crowd and went outside to find a quiet bench to sit on, far from the noise.

  “Hard to believe that’s the same moon I was happy under a few hours ago,” he said.

  “Ania isn’t going back with you, is she?”

  “No. She is staying here, with the child. Her husband won’t let her have custody if they divorce.”

  “I’m sorry.” I took his hand and held it. His face was stony, the way boys’ faces get when they are trying hard not to cry.

  We sat for a long while staring up at the traitor moon, a big round moon fit for a fairy tale, but now it looked like painted cardboard. The costume ball swirled and clattered, butterflies with gauze wings, kings in gilt crowns, but there was no more illusion; it was just people in strange clothes trying too hard to have a good time, a ragtag group of disheveled, dispirited strangers who seemed to barely know one another. It was a place where tragedy had occurred.

  The ball ended sometime after dawn, when people look their worst: makeup smeared, shadows under the eyes and in the hollows of the cheeks, costumes rumpled, some even torn. Chauffeurs lined up in their Bentleys and Mercedes to pick up their patrons, and the chauffeurs, neat in black-and-white uniforms, better rested, mindful, looked better than the partygoers.

  All the glitter had been extinguished. Diamonds need light to give back light, and the morning sky was leaden. The women’s jewels looked like cheap paste imitations; the candles and torches in the ballroom had burned themselves into nonexistence hours before.

  Charlie and I found a cab at the end of the long queue of chauffeured and gleaming automobiles and returned to Paris, alone.

  PART TWO

  RED

  • • •

  Goethe’s favorite red was a pure carmine painted over white porcelain, passion and purity mixed together. Unlike blue, there is little paradox in red. It is a color that separates and defines and cannot be contradicted. Carmine, that brilliant shade of red, comes from death itself, from the bodies of insects boiled to release an acid that is a color both beautiful and fugitive, in that carmine red does not last. Many artists use it to paint scenes of intense emotion, only to discover that like passion itself, carmine fades.

  Hitler reversed Goethe’s theory when he had his uniform designers place a white circle inside a red background, and in the center of the white circle, the black swastika.

  Flame often appears carmine red, and paintings of battle scenes are full of carmine. Battles are full of carmine.

  Red is the color of love and of death.

  And of course, always, it is the color of passion.

  • EIGHT •

  Just as there are moments of convergence, there are also moments of coming apart. Departure.

  Four hours after arriving at Charlie’s hotel, hours of thrashing, uneasy dreams, and waking regrets, we were back in a cab, rushing to the Gare du Nord. I stood on the platform with Charlie, waiting for his train, indifferent to the looks of the other waiting passengers. I was still in my evening gown, that marvelous Schiaparelli creation not quite intended for a train station, now stained with smoke and gin and Schiap’s smeared makeup.

  The image of Schiap in flames—well, her costume at least—was haunting me. It seemed a culmination of what had been, and a prophecy of what was to come. It had shaken me fully awake from the emotional semisleep I had been in for two years. Allen hadn’t been the first thing I had thought of when I woke up that morning. It had been Schiap, and Coco.

  The train station was crowded, and people jostled us. Charlie bit his lip and kept looking over his shoulder to see if Ania might be coming through a doorway, suitcase in hand. She didn’t. Such hope, bound to end in disappointment, is a terrible thing to witness. A coming apart.

  “He changed his mind at the last minute. The husband,” Charlie said. “Bastard. Won’t give her a divorce, won’t let her take the child. At the very last minute. He’s been playing us all along. Ania was supposed to leave with me this morning.”

 
His hands were trembling with anger and disappointment, so he gripped his suitcase harder, to stop the shaking.

  “What now, then? What about you? What will you do?” he asked. “Are you going back to the school?”

  “I think I will stay on in Paris a bit longer. I’m not ready to go back.” To go back seemed just that, a backward step, when Schiap had already begun pulling me into the future. I wanted to see her again, to see how she was doing. She had left the ball before I had, quietly and without saying good-bye. Slipped away. Well, being set afire will do that to a person.

  “Good idea,” Charlie said. “And as long as you’re here, you can keep an eye on Ania. I’m worried about her.”

  Charlie’s train pulled into the station, and the platform bustled with people disembarking, calling for porters and trunks, rushing into embraces. I leaned into Charlie, put my head on his shoulder. Good-bye, good-bye again, my lovely brother. Since Allen’s death I had held myself apart, even from Charlie, for fear of exactly what was happening now. I would be alone again.

  “Things are going to heat up over here soon,” he said. “It won’t be safe, Lily.”

  “If there is a war, America won’t join it.”

  He tried a different tactic. “You know, you could come to Boston with me. We could set up housekeeping together.”

  “Oh God, Charlie,” I joked. “The brilliant young doctor with his widowed sister keeping house for him?”

  “You wouldn’t be expected to iron the linen and write menus,” he grumbled.

  “Even so, no thanks. Don’t worry about me, Charlie.”

  Charlie looked absolutely destroyed. His blue eyes seemed pale to the point of colorlessness; his white-blond hair lay limply on his head, revealing the shape of his skull.

  Charlie would travel to England, and from there to New York. “The same route the Titanic took,” he pointed out.

  “That’s not funny.”

  The crowd on the platform was thinning again. People were getting on the train.

  “Sure it is.” He forced his mouth into a rictus of a smile, made a noise somewhere between a chuckle and a sigh, and it magically turned into a real laugh.

  “I’ll miss you.” He put his arms around me and hugged hard. “Be good.”

  “As good as you.”

  “Then we are in trouble.” The old jokes, only this time they had significance.

  Hiss. Steam. A grinding of metal on metal, women around me crying and waving handkerchiefs, children demanding sweets from the one-legged man who sat at the newspaper kiosk, cooing beady-eyed pigeons, a shrill whistle from the conductor, a last-minute wave out the window, a blown kiss. My brother was gone. I stood there till the train was out of sight and the gray puffs of steam and smoke had melted into the hot, sooty morning.

  I went back to my hotel, ignoring the puzzled glance of the concierge, and climbed the dusty, creaky steps to my attic room. I changed into a plain skirt and blouse, splashed water on my face, and looked back at my reflection in the cracked mirror that turned my face into separated cubist planes.

  Look at you, I thought. Wide-eyed as a frightened rabbit. I felt hollowed out, like a well that has gone dry and is waiting for the answer to fall into it.

  And I was hungry. Very hungry. I checked my purse, the dog-eared copy of Goethe’s Theory of Color, where I had tucked what remained of my savings. I was going to have to find work.

  COCO

  Coco put on her warmest, most charming smile, the one that required her to tip her head down ever so slightly, the way children do when they are being both shy and mischievous.

  “And the problem with the dress?” she asked. The salon was almost empty, so she kept her voice very low, almost a whisper, so that she wouldn’t be heard by the few people who were there.

  “Madame says the color no longer suits her.” The maid spoke loudly, and heads turned in their direction.

  Coco felt her face flare into a warning red blush. Madame had sent a maid for this errand. Madame wouldn’t face Coco Chanel.

  “It’s not been worn,” the maid lied, as she had been instructed.

  Madame had worn the dress last night, at the Durst ball.

  The morning after, Coco called this event, when the “angels” of society began returning worn garments, demanding a full return or a new dress in exchange. She knew by name at least three other Madames who would be returning their gowns, now that the Durst ball was over, all with unabashed lies.

  How was a hardworking woman supposed to earn a living?

  Or perhaps this time would be different. Maybe the angels would decide to keep their gowns as souvenirs of the night Mademoiselle Chanel made a fool of herself. Coco shivered and forced the memory back into the shadows of her imagination: those flames, Schiaparelli’s evident terror, the laughter of the others, too drunken to see what was actually happening. How had she done such a thing?

  “If she wants to return it, of course I’ll take it back,” Coco said. “Vera, take the dress away and mark it for the discount rack . . . since, yes, it has been worn. There’s a stain. Egg, I believe, from the hors d’oeuvres. But we will list a credit on Madame’s account.” Her sales assistant took the dress from the maid with a snort of disdain that would certainly be reported back to Madame, but that was just as well. Mademoiselle was gracious. Her assistant, well. Someone had to be the store watchdog, didn’t she?

  The maid turned on her heel and left without a thank-you. They always did, leaving Coco to fume over the angels who rarely paid cash, returned worn clothing, and used her sales assistants as confessor priests and analysts, taking up their time and keeping them from other customers.

  Oh, she was tired, and not just from lack of sleep. That stupid stunt last night was going to cost her plenty. Just to keep angels from talking, she’d have to put up with all sorts of rudeness and being taken advantage of.

  She hadn’t planned it. Of course she hadn’t. Had she? She knew the different levels at which the mind worked, one layer singing a silly cabaret song, another layer feeling the pinch of the cheap high-heeled shoes that made her toes bleed, the top layer scanning the crowd, looking for a good face, a generous and well-bred face, the kind of face that belonged to the kind of man who could show a girl a good time while also helping her out of that cabaret, out of that cheap costume. Layers upon layers, all working at once.

  So had she planned it, without even knowing?

  Merde. Of course not. An accident. She hadn’t even seen the candelabra. And that was the lie that made even Coco Chanel blush. Who couldn’t see a flaming candelabra just inches away?

  I didn’t. I didn’t see it.

  The shop was quiet today, and just as well. There would be the inevitable returns and little else, perhaps a little tourist traffic, out-of-towners wanting to buy a touch of glamour, a souvenir of what their own lives lacked, the sophistication and leisure of a Paris society angel. Perfume. They’d come in and buy the smallest bottle of Chanel No. 5 because that was all they could afford and even then their husbands, bank clerks from London, dairy farmers from the Auvergne, would stand and scowl as they paid out the money. For perfume? For a bottle that small? they’d complain.

  “I’ll be in my office. No interruptions,” Coco told the sales assistant.

  “Certainly, Mademoiselle.”

  Merde again. Was her own clerk smirking at her? Was there anyone in Paris who did not know?

  Coco shut the door a little more loudly than she had intended. Behind that closed door, she put on her glasses and leaned back into the desk chair, slouching the way she would not allow herself when someone else, anyone else, was around.

  The Durst ball hadn’t been a total failure, though. The baron had put Ania in a taxi and sent her home. And he himself had seen Coco back to Paris in his chauffeured automobile. At the door to her Ritz suite he had kissed her hand and smiled in a w
ay that meant, Soon, soon. But not tonight.

  God, he was good-looking. And rich. Money itself did not matter, but oh, what one could do with it, and there was never enough to completely bury those early memories, the breakfast bowl of stale bread and milk, sleeping with all your sisters in the same bed, the wooden clogs always bought several sizes too big so that one could grow into them, and meanwhile your feet spread and spread into things that looked like broken spatulas.

  Never enough to make her forget those early years, the dark and hungry years.

  And meanwhile, there were the society angels, looking to cheat her, often getting away with it, and her own workers demanding, always demanding, a better salary, a shorter day, a better lunch with meat every day.

  As in all the couture houses, Coco ate a communal lunch with her staff, served in a room reserved for the meal and for breaks. They’d had roast chicken today, and a soup made with the last of the season’s asparagus, and they’d complained. The dessert biscuits had been stale; there was no fresh fruit.

  She’d show them. Maybe tomorrow she’d let them eat a half-empty bowl of stale bread and milk. See how they liked that. She couldn’t, of course. It would be all over Paris before the bowls had even been washed out. The Bolsheviks would march with protest signs in front of her shop.

  Let those complainers put in the hours she had worked, the risks she had taken to get ahead! She’d pulled herself out of nowhere, worse than nowhere, and now they envied her the wealth she had earned. The Germans were all that stood between hard workers like herself and the Bolsheviks.

  She picked up a sketch pad and studied the drawing she had been working on, an evening gown of white satin with a striped bodice of red, blue, and white. Like a gypsy dress, she thought. With more than a touch of patriotism adorning it. It wasn’t as subtle as she liked. The sleeves needed to be a little narrower, the striped border on the hem less extravagant. She pushed her glasses higher up her nose, picked up a pencil, and started making corrections.