The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

Work was the answer. Work was always the answer.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three days after the ball, after Charlie had left, I woke up with both my arms tucked under my head. I hadn’t reached for Allen in my sleep. That made me cry, because it seemed another kind of forgetting, so after I dressed and had a café crème at the corner I went to the Louvre. Mona Lisa was there, waiting for me, it seemed, and I sat for a long while admiring the color and geometry, trying to remember everything Allen had ever said about the painting.

  I hadn’t spoken to anyone except café waiters for those three days. Solitude had formed around me like a glass wall, and I missed everyone and everything, even Gerald’s scowls and cutting remarks, the chatter of the little girls in the hall at school, Charlie’s teasing, Ania’s laughter.

  When someone stood next to my bench I was so eager for conversation, even with a total stranger, that I had to will myself to keep staring straight ahead, at the painting.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked my new neighbor, his German accent clipping his words short.

  “Very,” I agreed, and allowed myself a slight turn of the head in his direction. It was von Dincklage’s driver.

  “Day off?” I asked, hiding my surprise.

  “Just so. The baron has gone out of town. I like to come here, to the museum, when I can.”

  “This is my favorite painting. Mine, and my husband’s.”

  “I admit to a preference for Botticelli. I am Otto Werner.” He tucked his head in a little bow.

  “Lily. Lily Sutter.”

  “May I?” he asked.

  “You may.” He sat next to me.

  He seemed shy, and I had lost the habit of small talk, so we were silent after that. We sat side by side, staring straight ahead, till I had absorbed as much of the color of the painting as I could that day. When I rose to leave, he did, too.

  When we were standing, face-to-face, he did something so unexpected it took me off balance, the way a strong wind will do. He picked up my hand and kissed it.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked, pulling my hand back.

  “You looked so alone. I am sorry about your husband.” He answered the question before I could ask it. “Madame Bouchard has told me this.”

  So he and Ania had talked about me? Why? “You are displeased. Please, I am sorry,” he said, looking now at the museum floor. “It was not gossip, I just . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “Your friend. Madame Schiaparelli. Is she well? Not harmed?”

  “I believe so, though no one would have enjoyed that little prank. What did the baron think of it?”

  “What he always thinks when women act crazy. That it was weak-minded, a sign of the less-strong sex, and not important.” Otto blushed a fierce pink. “I am sorry,” he said. “I should not speak of the baron in that manner. It is disloyal and base. He is most respectful to Mademoiselle Chanel. She is strong and hardworking, and she has good politics. And she is very lovely.”

  “Is loyalty important?”

  “It is everything. Please, tell your friend I asked after her.” A slight bow, a frown to disguise what might have been a smile, and he was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was hot that day, the first real heat of the summer announcing its arrival like a furnace blast. The sun glittered so brightly that the beams seemed sharp-edged, metallic. People moved in slow motion, sweat dripping into their eyes.

  At Place Vendôme, outside Schiap’s boutique, I looked up at the statue of Napoleon atop his column, admiring his swagger, captured for eternity in stone. He was supposed to have been indefatigable; that was why exile to an island had been especially punishing. Better than a cell, certainly, but he circled that island, round and round, trying to spend all that unused energy, searching for the way off he knew he would never find.

  That was what grief had felt like to me, a constant circling round and round, all the paths of life twisting into a circle of blame and loss I couldn’t break free of. Why had I been so angry when that young man, Otto, offered sympathy for the death of my husband? Because my grief had changed into something different, into a private wound rather than a public one, something I confronted by myself in those dark hours before dawn. It was mine alone, not to be shared with strangers.

  Schiap was upstairs in her office, shouting into the telephone about a bolt of fabric than hadn’t arrived. She looked fine, no remnant pink on her ears or fingertips, nothing to suggest she had been set alight just a few days ago.

  “Oh, how I hate having to talk on the telephone!” she complained after she hung up. “He should have come here in person instead of making me shout into an instrument. How are you, Lily? And your brother? He was very kind to me. He will make a fine doctor, I think.”

  “He’s gone back to Boston.”

  “And you?”

  “In a bit of a jam.”

  “Like most of the world, I think.”

  Maybe this isn’t the right time, I thought. Elsa Schiaparelli wasn’t in a particularly good mood.

  “I was just at the Louvre,” I said, thinking some chatter might smooth the tense atmosphere of that crowded, cluttered treasure cave of an office, with its shimmering bolts of fabric leaning against the red-papered walls, the samples of embroidery lying here and there like jewels. “Von Dincklage’s driver was there,” I said. “He asked about you.”

  Partially, I was making small talk, to delay the moment of having to ask a favor. But it also seemed significant, that the driver of Coco Chanel’s new lover would ask about her.

  She stood and stared out the window, turning her back to me. “Did he? And you and he . . . are you friends?” Her voice had changed from shrill anger to a low, friendly purr. “This jam you are in? Is it marmalade or strawberry?”

  “Nothing so tasty. I’m broke, and I need work.”

  She sat back down, folded her hands on her desk, and smiled. She wore a black suit that day with a demure white blouse peeking out at the neck, and the costume made her red lipstick seem even redder. The desk ashtray was full of half-smoked cigarettes, their tips tinged with that red.

  “And what can you do?” She looked me up and down, assessing, always assessing. It became one of the things I loved about Paris, how everyone looked long and hard at everything, and not just the artists. All of us, assessing, noticing, remarking. Memorizing. As if we anticipated that much we saw, much we enjoyed and admired, would soon disappear.

  “Paint,” I said. “Maybe help with the window displays?”

  “Perhaps. Bettina does most of it, and of course you must answer to her, but I think she will be glad for an assistant. She will tell me if your work is good or bad, she is in charge of that, and if she accepts you, then I will give you a little cash and a good discount on your clothes. You need new clothes. Let your friend, Madame Bouchard, help you choose them. Bring her often. I will give you both good discounts. Samples, if they don’t require too much alteration.”

  I remembered the glint of satisfaction in Schiap’s eyes at the Durst ball as she had counted the women wearing Schiaparelli, not Chanel.

  And so, I entered the world of la couture at the invitation of Elsa Schiaparelli herself. Bettina, whom I met the next day, was not particularly pleased to be presented with an assistant.

  “Another arpette?” she asked. Arpettes, in the great maisons de couture, were the lowest of the low, girls whose main job was simply to pick up pins from the floor, sweep up scraps.

  “She says she is an artist. She can help dress the windows and the fitting rooms,” Schiap said. “If you like her work.” She had been staring fixedly out the window at Napoleon’s column in the middle of the square. Sometime in the evening before, sandbags had been piled around its base. Newspaper headlines that day had glared in large bold type that Mussolini had signed a military covenant with Berl
in.

  “Schiap,” Bettina said, her voice turning down in a note of complaint. She eyed me the way my aunt once eyed a stray puppy I’d brought home, without sympathy for child or puppy.

  Schiap smiled at Bettina. When Schiap smiled, she won every argument. “It will mean less work for you,” she pointed out. “And you will have someone you can boss and yell at. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  Bettina lit a cigarette and studied me through the blue smoke.

  A tall, slender New Yorker with a cool gaze, Bettina had the face of a Renaissance Madonna but a fierce temper always emphasized by the speed with which she walked and the angry clicking of her heels. Bettina, the vendeuses joked, walked as if the devil were after her. And then a second vendeuse would pipe up: No, she’s after him! Look! He runs for his life in the other direction! This exchange never occurred when Bettina was actually in the boutique or anywhere in hearing range, and she had excellent hearing. It matched the sharpness of her temper.

  “What can you do?” Bettina asked me that first day of my employment with Elsa Schiaparelli. “Certainly, you don’t know how to dress.” This was said matter-of-factly, without animosity. The vendeuses, some folding sweaters, others dusting shelves, all tilted in our direction, eavesdropping.

  “I can paint the backdrops and scenery for your displays.”

  Bettina took a long drag on her cigarette and studied me some more. I met her gaze without flinching, even lowered my chin in a bull-about-to-charge pose to add some ferocity to my face.

  This amused her. “Okay.” She laughed. “Paint me a sunrise. A very big sunrise, big enough to fill the window.”

  “Seen from which vantage?” I asked.

  Bettina dragged again on her cigarette. “It only rises in the east, I thought.”

  “But the sunrise is to be seen from which part of Paris?”

  “Take your pick. No one will know the difference. It’s only a sky.”

  Only a sky? I thought of the illustration for April in de Berry’s Book of Hours, how the sky changes from pearly pale blue to the deepest marine and the blue garments of the lovers in the foreground echo the drama overhead. “The embroidery of the sun,” Allen had quoted the poet d’Orleans to me once; I’d had to look it up.

  That was what a sunrise was about. The embroidery of the sun adding coral and gold to a gray skyline. And because beauty requires opposition, the fire of the sunrise would be offset by a cool undertone of blue and green lingering in the west.

  That afternoon, I went to Sennelier’s on Quai Voltaire, across from the Louvre, the store where Cézanne and most other artists after him had obtained their art supplies. I stood transfixed in front of the trays of pastels and tubes and brushes, and something moved in me that had been slumbering for two years. Color. So much color. I bought paper and a box of pastel crayons and an extra handful of indigo, cerulean blue, and carmine crayons.

  But how, in my tiny hotel room, was I going to paint a sunrise big enough to fill the shop window?

  The next morning, at first light, I began painting the sunrise on small pieces of paper that would have to be collaged together. If I was allowed to hang it as I wished, the lines wouldn’t register; the one large sunrise would be a series of smaller ones. A month of sunrises, all seen at once, some stormy, some serene, some all pastel, some gray.

  “It works,” Bettina agreed two days later, after I had pieced it together with straight pins instead of tacks. I had made a sunrise that looked somewhat like a dress in progress, pinned together, not yet stitched.

  Schiap came in later that morning and stood on the street a long time, staring pensively at the boutique window.

  “It is very strange,” she said. “I think it works. Come with me, Lily. We will now select the gown that will be in the window with your many sunrises.”

  I thought Bettina would be angry that I had been given this honor, but when I looked over my shoulder she was smiling, a little catlike smile as if she had let the mouse get away so she could play with it again later. Men who persist in the belief that women are soft, sentimental creatures have never worked in the fashion industry.

  “When I was a child,” Schiap told me that afternoon as we searched through a rack of gowns for one in particular she wanted to show me, “I used to climb up alone to the attic high atop our villa in Rome—so many stairs!—and play with the clothes in the trunks put away up there. I dressed up in them, Spanish lace mantillas and Chinese brocades, bustles and corsets, boots with two dozen buttons on each. There was one dress that looked like something a medieval princess would wear, like something worn by ladies in the Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours.”

  “I was thinking of de Berry’s Book of Hours when I painted the sunrise,” I said, surprised.

  “Then you have painted well, because I saw it there, in your collage. My father had a seventeenth-century copy of it in his library, in Rome. He was a scholar, you know. Oh, the books we had. Like this,” she said, pulling a purple gown from a rack that held models of her most recent collection. “This is for a medieval princess.” The gown’s waist dipped low in front and was decorated with a garland of orange and gold musical instruments, trumpets and horns and piano keyboards.

  “And these.” Short gloves in the same purple silk crepe, with a cello embroidered on one hand and a tambourine on the other, in gold and silver thread.

  “Lesage embroidery,” Schiap said. “The best. Always the best. What do you think?”

  “Magnificent. Like walking music,” I said.

  “Good. Yes, walking music. A miracle. You know, once I jumped into a vat of quicksilver, when I was very little. I thought it was water and I wanted to walk on the water, like Jesus did. That was how strong my faith was.”

  “Your faith in God?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No. My faith in myself. I thought I would walk over cool water, the tops of my feet not even getting wet, only the bottom. But quicksilver burns like fire. Instead of walking on water I sank in silver flame. I would have died if a servant hadn’t been following me and saw what had happened and saved me. My mother always had a servant following me. But I’ve been afraid of fire, since then.”

  Her black eyes narrowed, and I knew we were both thinking of the Durst ball.

  Bettina carefully arranged the dress on the shop dummy, Pascaline, a tall wooden female form with short, classically carved curls and a sphinxlike gaze. I was to be trusted with paper and pencils and ink, but not the clothes themselves. Bettina turned Pascaline sideways, so that she was looking into the distance with those always-calm wood-and-glass eyes. Next to her, on the floor, Bettina placed a child’s drum and pipe and splashed confetti and pastel streamers in drifts of even more color. It looked like the end of a party, and there was a quality of sadness mixed with the gaiety.

  “It will do,” Bettina said, and that was the highest praise she ever gave.

  Later that day, when I returned to the boutique to again admire my work, a handful of women had gathered in front of the display. I mixed in with them and got my comedown when I heard that the talk and oohing was all about the dress and gloves, not about my sunrise. But that is how it should be, I reprimanded myself. You painted the background. That is all. That was why Schiap’s boutique modeled the clothes on simple straw figures; fashion is about the clothes.

  Schiap and Bettina were skulking in a fitting room doorway, staring out at the women in the store, when I went into the boutique.

  “Yes. She’s here,” Bettina muttered darkly.

  “I see her,” Schiap agreed.

  “Who?” I whispered, joining them.

  “Mademoiselle Yvette. She works for Chanel,” Schiap said.

  “She always comes to inspect the new displays,” Bettina added. “And then she goes back and tells Chanel.”

  Bettina hissed a few words in French whose meaning I could only guess, but they definite
ly were not schoolroom vocabulary. “Chanel hates it when others copy her.” Bettina pulled a silver cigarette case from her pocket. “And here she is, sending a spy to see what we are up to.”

  Mademoiselle Coco, I would learn, like the other couturiers, liked to keep a close eye on the competition.

  Chanel’s spy, Mademoiselle Yvette, gave the salon floor one last turn before going to a shelf of sweaters, white with blue bows knitted into them. These, she probably had seen before since they were not the most recent items, yet she felt she must carry on her charade of being a woman in for a little casual shopping.

  A minute later she waved cheekily in our direction and left. Bettina lit her cigarette. The vendeuses, who had been standing straight and silent during this performance, clicked their tongues in annoyance and went back to their tasks.

  “Do you think she was the one in your office last week?” Bettina asked Schiap. “Did she sneak upstairs?” Papers had been gone through, drawers left open, Bettina explained. Such a to-do, but nothing stolen. Even so . . . She and Schiap exchanged covert glances.

  “No,” Schiap said. “She would have tried to cover her tracks. Whoever was in the office wanted me to know they had been there. Ah, my dear,” she said, taking my arm. “You look a little frightened. Didn’t you know I’m a wanted woman?”

  “Don’t joke,” Bettina said. “This is not a safe time for jokes like that. Yesterday they arrested one of Gaston’s comrades. The police are on the lookout for communists; all they need is a little information.”

  “They are ridiculous, these people,” Schiap insisted.

  “Who? Who is ridiculous?” I asked.

  “Let me count.” Schiap sat on one of her shocking pink chairs and held up her hand. “One. The Americans. I was a communist in my youth, you know, when I lived in New York with . . .” She paused. Schiap never mentioned her ex-husband’s name. “The Americans never forget that. Two. The French communists, because they think I am not communist enough.” Bettina grimaced. Her husband was one of the leading communists in Paris. “The Italians, because I live in France, and the French because I was born in Italy. Five. Coco Chanel and her people, because Time magazine said I was more important than she was.”