“A gift,” Coco said. “I insist.” She took Schiap’s little scarlet cap and tossed it in a wastepaper basket near the door, and then she emptied an ashtray over it. “And this.” She pulled at my dress, a short-sleeved linen print. “It must fit at the shoulders. If it doesn’t fit properly at the shoulders, it won’t fit well anywhere. Have it tailored.”
Coco started to shut the door behind me, then opened it again. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “I don’t have many friends, you know. People are either afraid of me or dislike me. You seem different.”
After the door clicked behind me, I sleepwalked down the hall of the Ritz, away from Coco’s rooms, over the plush carpets, past the gleaming, curtained windows and little gilt side tables of the grand hotel. The sun blazed red over the curved glass dome of the Grand Palais, hues as bright as a Matisse interior. Crimson, scarlet, Chinese red, sienna, madder, formless shapes of pure color. Who needed line and representation? Color was enough.
I crossed the vast granite expanse of the Place Vendôme, avoiding stepping in the shadow of Napoleon’s column, no longer interested in the emperor’s swagger. What a huge, empty space, so exposed. “When the Germans come into Paris,” Coco had said. For a moment, a flash of that space crowded with Wehrmacht soldiers filled my vision, and I shivered.
I passed the Hotel Le Meurice, less grand than the Ritz but still luxurious. Ania had told me that the top floor of the hotel offered the best view of the Eiffel Tower and the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Ania knew all sorts of things like that. Maybe that was another quality that had made Charlie love her—that worldliness she wore like an evening gown, casually and with great style.
I missed her, her gayness, her energy and charm. I hadn’t seen her since the ball. Where was she? Charlie must be suffering so, I thought.
* * *
• • •
The next day, when I reported every detail of the time I had spent at the Chanel salon, the cuts, colors, fabrics, accessories, Schiap laughed, winked, thanked me, and added, “But of course I already knew all that. As Coco said, they are already being worn on the street.”
“Who was there? In the salon?” Bettina wanted to know.
“No one I recognized,” I said, “though there were several women with diamond rings the size of almonds.”
“She’s useless. Schiap, what were you thinking?” Bettina stormed out of the office, ashes dropping from her cigarette onto the carpet.
“Don’t mind her,” Schiap said, laughing. “I think she was hoping for Nazi secrets or something.”
“Would Coco have those?”
Schiap scowled. “She is friends with Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semitics.”
“You already know more than I ever will. What’s the point, then?”
“Does there have to be a purpose to everything? I don’t know yet. When I think of ‘the point,’ I’ll let you in on it. Maybe it’s just a little joke.”
Bettina came back in with her arms full of bolts of cloth and a fresh cigarette hanging between her red lips. “Pick one,” she said to Schiap. “I need some background drapery. You . . .” She pointed her cigarette in my direction. “I want a seaside scene. Can you paint waves?”
* * *
• • •
Later that day I went back to Sennelier’s for a tube of Prussian blue for Bettina’s waves, delighting in the smells of ancient dust and pigments and carefully counting out coins to make sure I’d have enough for my week’s rent.
Standing by a display of colored pencils was a girl who seemed familiar, and then, as I studied her from behind the paint rack, I saw who it was. She’d had a baby face when I’d last seen her at the English school, puffy and bland, but Schiap’s daughter had grown into a lovely, fashionable young woman.
“Marie!” I touched her shoulder to get her attention, and she turned toward me. She was dressed in Schiaparelli, of course, a summer frock printed with butterflies and a cloche hat, her brown curls carefully arranged around the edges of it. The patrons of the store, mostly men in paint-splattered shirts, gave her appraising sideways glances.
“Mrs. Sutter!”
We looked at each other for a long while, each seeing in the other’s face the shared memories of the school, the dreaded therapy room for the “special” students, those still recovering from illness, the bland overcooked food, the cold tap water, the house mistress screaming for lights out. Even the way she had said “Mrs. Sutter,” in the formal schoolgirl tone of reverence used for favorite teachers.
“I heard about the accident. Your husband, Mr. Sutter. I’m very sorry.” Gogo was shy again, as she had been when she was a student at the school. Even though there was only five years’ difference in age between us, out of habit she was deferential.
“Call me Lily, please,” I told her, not wanting to talk about Allen. It’s difficult to talk about that kind of grief and loss with younger people who have not yet experienced it. “And I’m now working for your mother, painting window displays.”
She stood back and gave me that very Parisian glance of assessment. “Well, Lily, then,” she agreed.
“And what brought you into Sennelier’s? Have you taken up painting?”
Gogo laughed, a full and rich laugh like her mother’s. “No. I’m just postponing the reunion with Mummy. Steeling myself. I’m back from a sailing vacation and haven’t been home yet. Come with me, let’s both go see her.”
“You’ve been here for a day and haven’t seen your mother yet?”
“Several days, staying with friends. And we won’t tell her, will we?”
In the cab Gogo and I sat politely on either side of the backseat, stealing glances at each other. How pretty she had become, and so very stylish.
“I like the bob,” she told me. “The haircut. You don’t look as fierce as you did with your hair pulled back so tightly.”
Was that how the schoolgirls had seen me? As someone fierce? Allen had sometimes called me his teddy bear, but we are different in the privacy of our bedrooms, aren’t we?
“So do I call you Gogo or Marie?” I asked.
“Gogo, in Paris. Mother and all her friends do, so you might as well, too.”
Schiap was on the ground floor when we arrived, criticizing a display of gloves in a vitrine, Bettina next to her puffing on the omnipresent cigarette and making faces behind Schiap’s back.
“Gogo?” Schiap froze.
“Surprise!”
“I thought you were in Nice!”
“And so I was. But now I’m here.”
They stared at each other for a moment, eye to eye exactly, since they were the same height.
There is a photo I saw, later, in a magazine, Elsa Schiaparelli and daughter, dressed alike, eyes locked in a gaze that excluded all others, a gaze full of love and questions and more than a touch of animosity. It is not easy to be the daughter of a very famous woman, a woman who sometimes works twelve and more hours a day, ignoring everything else. It’s not easy to be the mother of an extraordinarily beautiful young woman whom one barely knows because of so much time spent apart.
Schiap and Gogo looked at each other, and the room seemed combustible. In one shared look they seemed to express every emotion that can pass between mother and daughter, good and bad.
The mother, though, had only a shadowy existence in the daughter’s face. Gogo’s eyes were brown but not dark like Schiap’s. They were flecked with gold so that when she stood with the sun in her eyes they reflected back as amber. Her brown hair was lighter, her cheekbones more pronounced. Schiap was striking. Gogo was beautiful, and I remembered what Ania had said about Elsa’s husband, the fake Polish count, that he had been spectacularly handsome.
Gogo and Schiap, after that long appraisal, ran into each other’s arms.
I left mother and daughter to their private reunion, wondering if there was any suc
h thing as a wholehearted relationship, one not tinged with doubt or regret or bitterness. Allen had been out of sorts when we had returned from that London lunch with Elsa Schiaparelli and her daughter, years before. “A waste of time, when you think about it,” he had concluded. “So much talk about fashion.”
* * *
• • •
“The yachting party was a bore. All they could talk about was the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, how romantic it was that he gave up his throne to marry the woman he loved,” Gogo said the next day, spreading a napkin over her lap. “Ridiculous, I told them. He’s a friend of Hitler’s. If England goes to war, he probably will side with Germany and so the royal family decided to dump him. But then it turned out that a few people on the yacht also thought Hitler was a splendid fellow. Time for me to leave.”
We were at the Dome, sitting at an outside table. The heat was stifling, and every time a car went by it sent dust and grit into the air. We had to constantly shake it off our skirts, wave it away from our plates of omelet and pommes frites.
“Chanel seems to approve of Hitler, as well,” I said.
“You’ve met her?”
“Several times. We had lunch a few days ago, and she gave me a hat and some clothing advice.”
Gogo gave me an appraising look, seeming more like her mother than she might have wished. “You are dressing better,” she said. “Is that one of Mummy’s dresses?”
“Yes. An abandoned order from last year. She gives me a discount, and sometimes she just gives me a frock.”
“I bet Coco asked you to wear the hat when you were with Mummy.”
“Correct.”
“They detest each other. When Mummy first came to Paris she invited Chanel to a supper. Chanel came out of curiosity but was rude. She literally held her nose as if she smelled something bad. She made fun of Mummy’s furniture.”
Gogo put down her fork and took a sip of water that had grown warm and flat with the heat. “It must have been terrible,” she said. “Losing your husband. I remember him. How I dreaded that math class. He would get so impatient with us.”
“Allen was impatient?”
“Not always. But sometimes, yes, very.”
I tried to imagine Allen as impatient.
“I want some more fries, but don’t tell Mummy. She’s terrified I’ll get chubby again.” Gogo signaled for the waiter, and he came over at a gallop, eager to wait on the pretty young woman who was making passersby on the Boulevard du Montparnasse do double takes.
“Why Paris?” she asked. “Why not back to New York? That’s where you’re from, isn’t it?”
“My brother was here. And I’m not ready to go back.” Every day was a new way of losing Allen, but once I crossed the ocean and left behind all the places we had known, the loss would be complete, and I was not ready to face that.
“Are you still painting? I mean, things other than window displays?” Gogo had left the school the year before Allen’s death. She didn’t know about the empty canvases sitting in the corner of my studio at the school.
“I stopped painting when my husband died.”
“Well, time to start again, I think,” she said, sounding very much like Schiap.
“There may be nothing there. Gone.”
Gogo looked at me from under her very long eyelashes. “Maybe you just have cold feet. Do you know what Mummy’s first creation was? An evening dress, to go to a ball in Paris, the first time she was here. Before I was born, before she married my father. Only she couldn’t afford to buy one, so instead she went to the Galeries Lafayette and bought some dark blue crepe de Chine and orange silk. She couldn’t sew, not a stitch, so she just draped it around herself and pinned it in place. Off she goes to the ball, and tangoes for the first time and of course she doesn’t know how to tango. Does that stop her? What almost stopped her was the dress, because the pins started falling out. Her partner had to scoot her out of the ballroom before she was stark naked. And now look where she is.”
“That’s an interesting pep talk. But—”
“No buts, Mrs. Sutter. I mean, Lily. Do you know how many times she has told me that story? She wants me to become ambitious, like she is.”
“And what do you want?”
“A husband. Children. And to be far away from Mummy. I love her, of course, but she is so tiring. She sucks all the air out of the room when she’s in it.”
I thought of the plans Allen and I had made: a little house, children. When Allen died, I lost the future as well as my husband.
Our desserts came, small chilled cups of chocolate.
“You,” she said. “You should paint. What have you got to lose?”
We ate in silence for a few minutes, relishing the food, the company, even the sultry weather.
“So this brother of yours. Is he good-looking?” Gogo smiled at me over her coffee cup.
“Very. And very in love with someone already.”
“Too bad.
“More than you know.”
• TEN •
“What are you doing up there, Madame Sutter? The maids are complaining about the mess.” The hotel desk clerk glared at me over his eyeglasses. I had planned on leaving my room earlier than usual in an attempt to avoid him, but he seemed to have come on duty early.
“Nothing,” I said, smiling in what I hoped was a winning manner.
“Are you painting up there?”
Caught. Perhaps that stain of carmine from a dropped pastel had been the final giveaway. And the rainbow streaks in the washbasin, and one or two splotches on the sheets . . .
“A little,” I admitted.
“Not allowed. You have until the end of the week to remove yourself or you will be removed.”
“But . . .”
The glare turned into a merciless scowl, with his eyebrows dipping all the way down to the corners of his eyes. “There is no but, Madame Sutter.”
I slumped into the chair underneath the wall calendar and sighed.
The smile hadn’t endeared him, but the sigh helped.
“It will be August soon,” he said in a tone that was perhaps one degree friendlier. “People are giving up rooms and apartments and quitting the city. Some will not return. I can give you the names of a few landlords.” The scowl turned into a half smile. “If you are painting, Madame, you will require better light than that room offers.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome. And please remember to tip the maids when you leave. It was only when the laundry complained that they reported you to me. Oh, and this came for you. Telegram.”
From Boston. I tore it open. Arrived safely, already in my scrubs. Miss you and the house rosé from Café Magots. Worried about Ania, haven’t heard from her. Please look in, report back. Love.
I hadn’t seen Ania since the Durst ball and realized I had no idea of how to find her. She had never mentioned a home, a street, a town or village anywhere in France. I could ask at the Chanel salon, perhaps they had a delivery address, but somehow that didn’t seem a wise thing to do. Chanel had set her cap at Ania’s lover or protector or whatever von Dincklage was, and even asking an innocent question might start a battle. What if Ania was living with him?
First things first, I reminded myself. I would soon be on the street, and needed to find a room to rent where I could paint without worrying about the floor. I felt a thrill of excitement when I told myself that. And for the first time since Allen’s death I wanted to paint, to find an image and get it on canvas with all its colors, shining or muted, reds and blues and yellows, the dominant one sending a vibration of sensation.
I spent all that day, and the next two besides, walking up and down the steep cobbled hills of Montmartre—Rue Lepic, Boulevard de Rochechouart, the Place Saint-Pierre, knocking on doors, spying into attic garrets from bare-lightbulb hallways. The hills
of Montmartre are not easy going in the summer heat, even in sandals and a sleeveless shirt. When I could, I stopped into Sacré-Coeur at the very top of all the hills, to let the cool air of its dark interior bring me back to sweating, panting life.
Montmartre, the highest hill of Paris, hadn’t become part of the city until about seventy years before, and it still had a renegade air, an untamed quality, and for me, a sense of newness. Allen and I had never visited this part of the city.
On the third day I found my room at the top of a three-story building on rue Ravignan. It was a single large room with two windows facing north. Northern light is the most consistent, staying the same for most of the day, avoiding the dramatic changes that occur in the eastern, western, and southern sky. Northern light, like the North Star, is an anchor; you can put your trust and faith into it.
The two windows took up almost an entire wall and fell exactly between two chestnut trees, so the light was not blocked by them. Best of all, though, the other arrondissements of Paris were spread out beneath me like a crazy quilt. Standing at the opened window was as close to flying as I had ever been, it was so high up.
“You are not melancholy?” the landlady asked suspiciously. “It is a very great fall down from here.”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. I’ll take it. One month in advance for the rent?”
Her eyes glittered. “Two,” she said.
“I can’t afford that.” Soon, my small savings would be gone completely. I’d have to ask Schiap for a better wage, and tell her I couldn’t afford any more clothes, even at discount, but if I was careful and ate once a day I could afford the studio.
“One, then. But pay promptly each month, understand?”
I returned to the hotel, packed my bag and my paints, and moved into rue Ravignan, putting Allen’s photo on the table and my Schiaparelli gown from the Durst ball, wrapped in tissue, in a drawer of the chipped, wobbling bureau.
And now, I thought, to find Ania. I had coffee at a little café near the Moulin Rouge, sitting in the shade of a chestnut, and tried to remember all of my conversations with Charlie’s lover, to see if I could remember a place she might have mentioned. I couldn’t. My knowledge of Ania was as blank as a canvas with no paint on it.
The Last Collection Page 15