“Try the Ritz,” Bettina suggested the next day when I reported to the Schiaparelli salon for an assignment. A new window display would be put up soon, in time for the summer showings.
Because Schiap was an artist (not just a designer, not just a seamstress, she explained), there was a philosophy to her collections, and a theme that demonstrated the philosophy. She was one of the first to do this, and Schiap’s themes were more like party announcements than names of dress collections. The February collection for the coming winter, Bettina not-very-patiently explained to me, had been the Circus Collection, inspired by P. T. Barnum, with gowns full of harlequin patterns and brightly colored dresses printed with carousel animals, and buttons shaped like dancing horses. She had shown it the same day that Hitler took control of the German army.
“She pays attention, our Schiap,” Bettina said. “Bread and circuses. That’s what the Roman emperors gave the working classes to shut them up. Schiap wants to wake them up, to make them pay attention to the fascists and what’s going on.”
There had been a Music Collection, with gowns printed with musical scales and instruments. My blue-and-white gown, now tucked away in a drawer in Montmartre, had come from this collection. The Pagan Collection had elegant columnar lines, with dresses draped like the tunics on Grecian statues, and embroideries of floral wreaths. This winter she would show the Zodiac Collection, with gold and silver embroideries inspired by the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, another specific reference to power and greed and dictators.
The ensembles also paid homage to Raphael’s great painting The Judgment of Paris, just as the previous midseason collection, the Pagan Collection, had been inspired by Botticelli. Choose a side, Schiap was saying. And she had added sequined and embroidered images of the constellation Ursa Major, the same constellation on her cheek made by small moles.
The ensembles for that collection, especially the evening jackets, were heavily embroidered with metallic threads and sequins so that they shone like stars in a velvet sky, like the sun and the moon and the swirling lights of the Milky Way. There was a black velvet cape called “Fountain of Neptune” that could only be worn by a woman with some physical strength, so heavy was the gold embroidery. Elsie de Wolfe, who for decades, according to Bettina, had been standing on her head and putting her knees behind her ears and doing other yoga poses, wore it with ease and elegance. I saw a weaker woman bowed under the weight of that cape after the collection had been shown.
Fashion is about color, or the lack of it. Oscar Wilde wore mauve trousers and yellow jackets when most men of his generation were shrugging into the black-and-white suits of the modern man. Color was his badge of honor. He would have approved Schiap’s colors for her most flamboyant king of all. Hell, Louis himself, the Sun King of Versailles, would have approved.
When Bettina modeled the shocking pink velvet cape embroidered in gold thread and sequins, it seemed processional trumpets blared to announce the arrival of the Sun King; when she tried on the plum velvet gown and jacket lined in bright yellow, the fitting room filled with the smell of the perfume of Madame de Montespan. Versailles was played out in those fitting rooms, and the other models, caught up in the spirit, tiptoed and flounced and cooed like ladies-in-waiting, all except for Bettina, who stood in her usual hand-on-hip posture, coolly smoking a cigarette.
“Schiap,” she argued, “I admit the gowns are lovely, but we all know what Louis XIV did: made an absolute monarchy even more absolute, murdered all his naysayers, and martyred the poor Huguenots into practical nonexistence.”
“Exactly,” Schiap agreed, speaking around a mouth full of pins, her delicate hands pushing and pulling at the skirt of a mustard-yellow gown.
Après moi le deluge, Schiap was telling us. The flood was coming. Destruction. First the party, then the flames.
“You look awful,” Bettina scolded the mannequin that summer afternoon. “You are out too late.” Bettina carefully removed the pinned and basted jacket, and the mannequin stood, bare-armed and beautiful, winking and leering to make it quite clear that her evening last night had been, in her terms, a complete success.
“Oh, go away!” Bettina laughed.
Outside the door we heard a slight scuffle, then footsteps tiptoeing down the hall. A board creaked beneath the weight of the eavesdropper.
“I think Yvette is not the only spy among us,” Schiap said. “My desk has been gone through. Again.” She said it lightly, but I heard something else in her voice, a darker tone of the beginning of fear. Her daughter was in Paris now. Everything had significance.
“My purse was searched yesterday, when I left it on the counter for a minute,” Bettina said. “Nothing stolen, but I’m certain it was gone through.” The Paris police that summer were going out of their way to search out and arrest communists for any minor offenses—expired business licenses, disorderly conduct, things they might otherwise have turned a blind eye to.
“They are already doing Hitler’s work for him,” Bettina said bitterly. “Get rid of the communists and no one stands in the way of fascism.”
Schiap muttered something under her breath, one of her Italian curses. She left to go meet with a mill owner who had some fabric samples for her.
“I’m certain they are looking for something more than fashion,” Bettina said after Schiap was gone. “Could be a spy for Mussolini. You know, after she refused to have tea with Mussolini last year, he had her mother’s Rome apartment searched. Plumbers, or so they claimed to be, came at two in the morning, looking for a nonexistent leak. They went through all the rooms, and she had to stand and watch and pretend to believe they were plumbers.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Probably propaganda for the Russians. The Germans would want that as well, if it exists.” The year before, Schiap had visited the Soviet Union as a guest of Stalin, had designed dresses for the Soviet women. Even communists have to get dressed in the morning. Even communist women would rather have an attractive dress than a sack.
“For a dress designer, she does seem to have the knack of making disastrous enemies and friends on the political level,” I said.
Bettina did not like this comment since she herself had married a French communist. A very good-looking one, but a communist just the same. There was a joke around Paris, one based on fact, that you could always tell which woman had flirted with Monsieur Bergery, Bettina’s husband, because there would be cigarette holes in her clothes from where Bettina had jabbed her burning Gauloises, for revenge.
Schiap knew about Bettina’s bad habit—everyone knew it—and every once in a while she would tell Bettina she really should stop, she might set someone on fire, and Schiap, superstitious, would shiver with fear. And then Coco had done just that, set her on fire.
“You draw little boxes,” Bettina said, putting down the pencil she’d been doodling with over my sketch for the new window display. “You think you can close the lid and be safe inside. You are wrong. When the war comes, none of us will be safe. All those little boxes will be crushed, with you inside.”
“And Coco? How does she feel about the communists?” I asked.
“Loathes them. Hates unions, workers’ rights, the whole kit and caboodle. Anything that might come between her and more profit.” Bettina’s sneer was so exaggerated it could have been drawn as a cartoon. “Coco and Schiap. You’ll never find two women more different in their ideas,” she said.
“They seem to also have a lot in common. Talent. Ambition.”
“Everyone in Paris, at least those whose names you know and will remember, have all that. Remember, being beautiful is really just another form of talent. Ask your friend, Madame Bouchard. She is full of talent. You want to find her? Try the Ritz. It is where talented women go.
“A constellation. A night sky. Can you do that?” Bettina called to me before she disappeared into a dressing room.
&nb
sp; A red sky, I decided. The red just before sunrise, red skies in the morning, sailors take warning. A cautionary sky, and the constellation would be Ursa Major with Schiap’s large shadowy eyes staring out at us from behind the stars. In the corner, the eastern corner, would be a pink the color of scorched fingertips, the color of geraniums wilting in the August heat.
* * *
• • •
That evening I found Ania at the Ritz, sitting alone at a table close to the bar. She was wearing one of her Schiaparelli dresses, the one she had ordered that first day in Paris, when she and Charlie had sat, holding hands under the table in Schiap’s showroom.
“You must despise me,” she said.
“No, I don’t.” I meant it. Beneath her beauty, lurking like a pentimento in a painting, a mistake that the artist has tried to cover, Ania had a vulnerability that showed in the way she looked quickly over her shoulder, the way she tapped her feet if there was an argument going on near her, as if she were ready to run.
A waiter came and took my order for a martini.
“Another for you, Madame?” he asked Ania.
“Two more,” she said. He smiled knowingly.
“Cheeky bastard,” I said, when he had left.
“He knows me, you see,” Ania said.
“Charlie says hello. I had a telegram from him. He’s worried about you.”
“Charlie. Sweet, sweet Charlie.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. “I miss him. So very much. But not as much as I would miss my daughter, if I had to leave her. How could a mother do that?”
Ania crushed out her cigarette and folded her hands onto her lap. “Anton, my husband, will never let me take her. He has a mistress, and he loves her very much, I think. But he wants his daughter, too.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Now you want to ask about von Dincklage, but you are too polite to ask.” She pushed a strand of hair off her cheek, and her face grew hard. The vulnerable Ania disappeared, and back in her place was the confident, worldly, beautiful woman who strode into Schiap’s boutique as if she owned it.
“He has good connections. For me and my husband, and my father, as well. Men aren’t like wine, you know. You can’t compare vintages. It is possible to enjoy both a Bordeaux and a white Rhine. Oh, well,” she said. “That’s life, right?”
“You don’t love him?
“Love von Dincklage? That is the most childish thing I’ve ever heard. I think that a storm is coming, and von Dincklage may be my umbrella.”
“Unless you went to Boston with Charlie. Even if France goes to war, the United States won’t.”
“Boston. Tea with the other medical faculty wives. I can just see it.” She laughed, and the strangest thing was that there was no bitterness, no cynicism in her laugh, only wonder, as if I had proposed taking a tiger to the opera. “I am not good for Charlie, am I? He is ambitious, and someday he will be a very great doctor. He needs a good wife, the right wife. Not me.”
The bar was full that night, and noisy, but when Coco entered it grew silent. Everyone turned and stared, as if on cue. She was in one of her black sheaths, and with the black garments and her black hair her powdered face seemed captured in a bright spotlight. Von Dincklage was with her, and Otto, his driver.
Coco paused in the doorway, surveying the room, looking for a good table, and she quickly saw Ania and me sitting together. So did von Dincklage. He made that slight bow of acknowledgment, then turned his back on us and followed Coco to a table where a waiter was setting up folded napkins and silverware for them.
“Damn,” Ania said, turning her back on them.
“Are you jealous?”
“Not at all. But didn’t you see the way she looked at me? I am wearing Schiaparelli. She will complain to him about it. I’ll have to go to her salon tomorrow to make it up. I need to be on good terms with her.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to be on good terms with him. Don’t you see what is happening in the world, Lily? What they are doing to the Jews in Poland? What they will do to the Jews here if the Germans come? Do you know where I grew up in Warsaw? On Zlota Street. The Jewish community.”
We finished our drinks in silence. What could be said? Ania could go to Charlie and be safe. But she would have to leave her daughter behind. Heartbreak, either way. I had thought only Allen’s death could hurt this much.
When I left, Ania was sipping another martini and Coco and von Dincklage were deep in a private conversation, their heads huddled together over their table. They ignored me, but Otto, sitting off to the side, gave me a cautiously friendly smile.
I nodded a hello and walked out into the Place Vendôme, feeling his eyes on my back, watching, and remembered the touch of his hand on the small of my back as we danced. Evening hadn’t brought any coolness, and heat shimmered off the pavement in dusty gusts. I went back to my Montmartre studio, now as hot as an oven, and stood in front of those windows, watching the lights of the city blinking and twinkling below me. From that great height everything seemed distant and detached, even my grief for Allen. Where there had been jagged pain, there was now an emptiness. And fear, for Charlie, for Ania. And the memory of Otto’s hand gently pressing me closer.
* * *
• • •
You could see the August heat in the faces of the shopkeepers, the office workers, the bartenders, the desire to be away, to leave stifling Paris for the coming holidays to the seaside, the ancestral village, the mountains. The women wore plain blouses over light skirts, or dresses that bared their arms and shoulders. The men pulled open their shirt collars and rolled up their sleeves, and sweat glistened over upper lips, on foreheads.
Despite the steamy heat, I was painting in my Montmartre studio, hours every day, beginning at dawn and lasting through the heat of the afternoon, when most of Paris seemed to be asleep. I had painted a wave for Schiap’s window, and after that a forest scene with blue trees instead of green. The colors had been jewel-like, intense rather than subdued, the colors that exist in dreams on the verge of becoming nightmares, balanced on a knife edge of yes or no, come or go, together or alone, colors that exist in possibility more than reality. They pleased me. And all the while, I was wondering what my canvas would be. It was there, in the corner, primed, waiting.
I wasn’t the only one working through the heat wave. The great couturier houses of Paris were preparing for the next collections, in the middle of summer pinning up and basting the furs and heavy brocade costumes of the winter to come. I went in frequently to see Schiap, and when I was there she was tired, stressed, busy, muttering often and waving me away if I lingered too long.
One day when I went to the boutique to check on a drawing with Bettina, a Mercedes was parked in front of the boutique, motor running, and with a load of girls in the backseat, fanning themselves with their hats and laughing.
Gogo came rushing out the door and almost bumped into me in her hurry. “Have to go,” she said, “quick, before Mummy comes out. Oh! Did I step on your foot?” She handed her valise to the driver, who tipped his cap at her and prodded it into the trunk of the automobile.
“Not at all,” I lied. “Where are you going?”
“Not certain. Anywhere there is water and a breeze. Mummy is upset, of course.”
“It does seem as if you have just arrived.”
“Keep your eye on her for me. She does seem to get into trouble. Make sure no one else sets her on fire.” Gogo gave me a kiss on the cheek, clambered into the crowded backseat, and was gone.
Schiap came out the door just as the Mercedes was pulling away. She waved frantically and blew a dozen kisses in the direction of the fleeing automobile, gave me an accusing glare, and disappeared back into her boutique.
One Tuesday in the middle of August, I was at the corner café, alone as usual, ready to order my usual six o’clock Pe
rnod, when I was approached by a woman wearing a knockoff of Schiap’s little knit madcap. I wasn’t absolutely certain, but I thought perhaps her black suit was a Chanel knockoff, and her shoes were supposed to look more expensive than they actually were. Under the tutelage of Schiap and Bettina I was learning to recognize such things.
This well-if-dubiously-dressed stranger sat next to me and ordered a coffee and a roll with butter.
Our waiter thought we were sitting together and jotted both orders together.
“No,” I said, “we aren’t—”
She interrupted. “It’s okay,” she said, waving him away. She had a hard voice with a New York accent. “Please, allow me. It would be nice to have someone to talk to.”
She wore her summer jacket slipped off her shoulders and draped over her back. Schiap disapproved of the custom since it was so hard on the jacket. “Some women do it just to show off the labels,” she had criticized. “And usually they are counterfeit labels, when they do this.”
“You are enjoying Paris?” the stranger asked, obviously feeling free to open a conversation because she was treating me to a Pernod. “Not too expensive?”
“No,” I said.
“But still, more expensive than one had expected. It is so hard to come by work these days, what you call a ‘job’?” Her roll and butter arrived, and she ate greedily, breaking off large chunks and smearing them with butter, then popping the entire piece into her mouth. Her cheeks filled like a chipmunk’s, and when she followed the bite with a large swill of coffee she rolled it around her mouth before swallowing.
That last question, I didn’t answer. I was unofficially employed by Schiap, paid under the table. I never referred to her as my employer, and when I was in the boutique I acted not as an employee but as a friend of Bettina’s. There were strict laws about such things, and while Schiap didn’t mind bending the rules in her favor, she didn’t want to get caught at it.
The Last Collection Page 16