The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

  “You’re right. It’s a difficult color. I’ve been asked to use it for a dress for Madame Bouchard.”

  “But . . .” I almost said, Ania has left Paris, but closed my mouth in time.

  “That’s a . . .” I said instead, looking at the tapestry hanging on the wall, a hunting scene rich with flowers and forest animals and a hunter, horn raised to mouth, dogs dancing in and out of his horse’s feet.

  “Yes. Aubusson. Authentic,” Coco said. And that was a giveaway. Schiap, born to a well-off family, would never have said such a thing. It would have been taken for granted. “She’ll be back, I suppose,” Coco said, and I knew we were still talking about Ania. “Sooner or later. That’s why I will go ahead and make the dress she ordered.”

  Did everyone know Ania had left Paris? Did von Dincklage know?

  “He doesn’t know. Yet,” Coco said, when I asked. “And I don’t think he’ll mind that much when he finds out. Not anymore. You know, at first, I was furious at you. You were the one who took her to the Schiaparelli showroom, right? Well, now, I think maybe you did me a favor. I lost a little business, perhaps. Very little. But you helped make other people reconsider their opinion of Madame Bouchard. She looks ridiculous in those Schiaparelli monstrosities. It is hard to stay in love with a woman who wears such things.”

  “She’d look lovely in anything. And a little humor never hurt.”

  “Do you ride?” Coco asked. On a side table in her sitting room was a photo of Coco on a gleaming chestnut horse. Riding was one of the skills she learned while living in other people’s mansions, using other people’s stables.

  “I ride a little,” I said. “And swim. I had dancing lessons when I was seven. In one of Isadora Duncan’s studios.”

  Coco threw her had back and laughed. “Oh God, don’t tell Schiap that. Don’t you know? It was Isadora Duncan who ran off with her husband. That affair didn’t last long. Duncan knew a poseur when she met him. Schiap’s husband was very good-looking, I’ve heard. A little like Boy Capel. Or so people have told me.”

  An expression flickered in her face, less than a second, you see it and then you don’t. Pain. Regret.

  Coco lit a cigarette and studied me. Other than that, there was no reaction. She went on with her favorite theme: Elsa Schiaparelli.

  “Isadora was attractive, in a pretentious kind of way,” she said. “I saw her perform in her salon on avenue de Villiers. It was cheap. She was a muse for the provinces.” That, of course, was the greatest insult a Parisian could give an artist, to call her provincial. “Even so, Isadora was much prettier than Schiap. Much better dressed, usually, even in her most pretentious costumes.”

  “Lunch is served in your office,” a white-aproned maid announced, creeping up behind us in the hall.

  “Too busy for a leisurely meal today,” Coco said. “An omelet will do. I love eggs. When I was a child, I lied and said I hated eggs. Why do I tell you this?”

  “Oh, I suppose I’m just a good listener,” I said.

  “Are you? I will remember that. Well, thank you for your opinion on the violet. And the next time you come, make sure you are announced first.”

  She walked to the window and stared down into the Place Vendôme. “All those sandbags,” she said. “So unnecessary. And give Schiap a message. My next collection will make everyone forget her. She might as well go back to Rome.”

  “There really is room for both of you in Paris,” I said.

  “No, there is not. I am the best, and will remain the best.”

  There was such a fierceness in her words, her posture, with both hands fisted and raised to her waist. Again, I saw the child she had been, raised without love, without joy or pleasure, grabbing for whatever had been put on the table before others could take it away from her.

  Her eyes softened when I smiled at her. “Come back and see me again,” she said. “I like you. But you shouldn’t wear your dress belted that tightly. It makes lumps, and you can’t breathe properly. Loosen the belt, like this.” She pushed and pulled at me, then turned me around to face a mirror. “See?” she said. “Softer lines. And more comfortable, isn’t it?”

  • THIRTEEN •

  “Purple?” Schiap asked, when I told her I had been to see Coco again. “Well, of course. Coco is thinking in terms of royalty. The empire.”

  “The Roman Empire?” I asked.

  “That, too. What Hitler dreams of, world conquest.”

  For her next collection, Schiap was using as her inspiration the commedia dell’arte, with gowns as bright and light as a Vivaldi concert, as sexually suggestive as a negligee.

  “Classical Italian comedy,” Schiap explained. “Columbine, Harlequin’s mistress who plays cruel tricks on her employer; Capitano, the military man in his bright diagonal stripes who is silly but very dangerous; Dottore Graziano, the know-it-all who actually knows nothing; Pierrot, the innocent in his baggy white suit; Scaramouche, the boastful clown, dressed all in black.”

  They all had correlatives in the world around her. Scaramouche was her stand-in for Mussolini. Capitano was Hitler, with his silly mustache. Poor Pierrot represented all the young men who would soon be put into uniform and sent to the front. That season, Schiap made one of the strongest political statements of the year—and everyone just called it fashion.

  “Eat, drink, and be merry,” she said. One of her mannequins came into the office wearing a muslin mock-up of one of the gowns. “This,” Schiap said, pointing out the underside of the jacket, “this will be lined with shocking pink, my color. And you . . .” She turned back to me. “What are you painting for me? A wave? A sunset?”

  “Something much better.” I was already working on it, back in my studio. “A backdrop from one of the commedia dell’arte plays. The study of Il Dottore.” Dottore Graziano, in the commedia dell’arte, is always an old man who misquotes Latin to show off his education, and his study is typically book-lined and full of globes, but with a bit of female lacy clothing sticking out from under a chair.

  In the doctor’s study I had painted a globe, and in a dark shadow of the upper right-hand corner of the poster I had inserted a little free-floating mustache, instantly identifiable as Hitler’s. And on the astronomer’s chart I painted in the Great Bear, for Schiap.

  “How is Madame Bouchard these days? I haven’t seen her in many weeks.” Schiap shivered and buttoned her jacket tightly. It was late afternoon, already dark out, and the cold seeped through the walls.

  “On her way to Boston,” I said. Everyone would know soon enough.

  “Is she? Just as well, considering. Though there was a costume I had planned just for her.” Schiap sighed. “Chanel must be ecstatic about it. Von Dincklage will be all hers. For a while, at least. He is not a man who values fidelity. They say he has slept with half the beauties of the Riviera.”

  “What about the other half?”

  “Their husbands own pistols, I suppose,” Schiap joked.

  “I don’t know if von Dincklage knows Ania has gone. He’s out of town, according to his driver.”

  “You’ve seen his driver?”

  “Bumped into him at the Louvre.” And then spent much of the afternoon with him, I didn’t say. Schiap gave me a strange look. Not just appraising. Considering. The same way she looked at a wheel of ribbon, wondering how it could be used.

  The next day, the next week, the next several weeks, I stayed in my studio, painting, working on a new canvas, reconsidering completed ones, trying to imagine how Rosenberg would see them, what he might think of them.

  * * *

  • • •

  Neither Charlie nor Ania were very good correspondents, so at first I wasn’t worried when I received only one brief note from Ania. I’ve learned how to cook a pot roast. Charlie says it is very good but I think maybe he hides some in his handkerchief. How is Maurice? Maurice was her favorite bartend
er at the Ritz.

  Going splendidly, Charlie wrote. Two more patrons have offered financial backing for my clinic when I’m ready to begin working on it next year. One was at the Durst ball and is now back in New York. Neither of them said how happy they were, how well things were going or how Katya, Ania’s daughter, was.

  Time magazine named Hitler as man of the year, that January. Charlie sent me a copy of the issue, with a brief note: “Come home,” he wrote.

  The cover was chilling: a grimacing, satanic Hitler playing an organ, and on top of the organ a giant Catherine’s wheel hung with broken bodies. I took the magazine to the Place Vendôme and showed the cover to Schiap. She shivered. “I need spaghetti,” she said, putting away the fabric samples she’d been studying and slamming shut the cabinet door. “Call people. Anyone. Tell them to come over tonight.” Schiap hated using the telephone, was even a little afraid of it, so she always had other people make her phone calls.

  She had converted the basement of her rue de Berri mansion into a bar and dining room, and the effect was fabulous. The upstairs rooms were filled with flowers, tapestries, leopard-skin-covered chaises, and shocking pink cushions, but this subterranean room was simple with low, vaulted ceilings and almost no decoration, the kind of cell monks would have dined in. The austerity added to the sense of forbidden bacchanal. The room was said to have a secret passage that connected it to the Belgian embassy next door, and Schiap joked once that it would provide a good escape route, if needed. Conspiracies, old and new, hung in the air.

  Bettina was there that night, and Elsie de Wolfe and a few other people, including a Frenchman from the fashion syndicate and his wife, both of whom seemed involved in imports, so we had a table of eight. Schiap taught me the ancient Roman formula for a dinner party: you and your partner, your two closest friends, two people you would like to know better, and two people who can be of use. Except we were only seven, since Gogo, who would have had the partner’s chair next to Schiap, wasn’t there.

  Schiap cooked a huge pot of spaghetti for us. She was a good cook, preferring simple ingredients and old Roman recipes. At dinner, we were forbidden to discuss politics, forbidden to discuss that Time cover of Hitler playing his unholy organ. There were long silences between bouts of gossip, who was living a little too largely on the Riviera, who was no longer paying bills, often an omen of a bankruptcy to come, which couples were likely to separate in the coming year.

  “Happiness,” said Elsie, one of Schiap’s two closest friends there. Bettina was the other. “How to find it, and keep it? That’s the question, isn’t it? It is somewhat easier when there isn’t already a husband involved, unless one is contented with a string of lovers after marriage. I personally think that is very hard on the complexion and the waistline.”

  “Eat your spaghetti, Elsie. It won’t make you fat, not like bread does.” Schiap put a large forkful into her mouth to make the point. She chewed thoughtfully, her huge black eyes solemn, even a little mournful. “I can’t say from my own personal experience that husbands are so handy to have around.”

  It was the most I had ever heard her say about her marriage to Compte William de Wendt de Kerlor so many years ago. It had been Bettina who had filled in the details, including a quick snip that his name had been longer than his capacity for fidelity.

  “Girls don’t understand marriage, any more than I did,” Schiap said. “There was I, barely out of childhood, thoroughly convinced by my mother that I was unlovely, unlovable, and there was this gorgeous man telling me otherwise.”

  “And so you married the first man who asked,” Elsie said. Elsie, who purposely hadn’t married till she was on the other side of middle-aged. Elsie, who’d had many women as lovers before setting up home with her Lord Mendl.

  “Not quite the first,” Schiap said, grinning. “When I was a child, still living in my father’s house, I’d had a Russian suitor. My family liked him but oh, he was ugly. He was why I ran away from home, and I thank him every night in my prayers.”

  “And, of course, there was the sheik,” said Elsie, who had heard these stories before.

  “Just thirteen,” Schiap said, checking her watch once more. “Traveling with my father in Tunisia, and there was this Arab sheik dressed in white floating robes wanting my hand in marriage. Father said no. You should have seen the fantasia the sheik performed under my window, those dancing horses and their riders.” She sighed. “Lost romance. And who needs a husband? They get in the way. They give orders. Though children are worth everything you have to go through to get them. Oh, the illnesses, though. When Gogo was ill with polio I wanted to die, I thought.”

  “I hear that Wallis and Edward plan to visit with Herr Hitler. Again.” Elsie de Wolfe twirled a modest forkful of spaghetti and jabbed it into her mouth.

  “That’s not the wisest event to put on your social calendar,” said Bettina, lighting a cigarette. Her husband wasn’t with her that night— or most nights, for that matter. He was busy with politics, with his meetings with the other communists of Paris, the artists Picasso and Miró among them. I didn’t know at the time, but the Resistance was already beginning, already being planned for, even before the invasion.

  “No politics,” Schiap said.

  “Well, the fascists have got the trains running on time.” This, from an Englishman I had disliked at first sight, a friend of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, a rotund and pompous fellow of limited conversational skills, who had been silent most of the evening. He had been pinching Schiap’s maid when he thought we weren’t looking. I already knew that all the mannequins and vendeuses at Schiap’s boutique stood clear and made faces behind his back. He was there that evening as one of the people who might be of use to Schiap. A businesswoman must, on occasion, court money and influence, no matter where it came from.

  “It will be a high price they pay for those timely trains,” Elsie said.

  He harrumphed at her, and Schiap hastily passed around the bowl of grated cheese.

  “And what will we do when Hitler invades Poland?” Bettina asked, leaning aggressively forward. “Will we let him destroy the country?”

  “Poland’s problem,” the Englishman said. “Should we die for Danzig? What a mistake that would be.”

  “Experience is the name we give our mistakes,” I said, hoping to lead into a different conversation. Schiap was looking angry and unhappy.

  “That’s an Oscar Wilde–ism.” Elsie put down her fork and looked hard at me.

  “Our Lily has been educated,” Schiap said, and I preened a little at the flattery.

  “A knowledge of Oscar Wilde is hardly suitable for a lady’s education,” grumbled the Englishman.

  “I met poor Oscar.” Elsie leaned forward, her elbows on the table. “When I was just a girl myself, living in New York. I had an afternoon salon full of freethinkers, some good conversation about art. All the bohemians came, and when Oscar Wilde was in New York he came, too. A charming man.” She glared at the Englishman, who had spilled tomato sauce on his tie. “So well dressed and well mannered. And wit. When he spoke, you thought diamonds should fall from his mouth, like in a fairy tale.”

  The Englishman harrumphed again and murmured something under his breath about sodomy and the Germans knowing better. We all ignored him.

  “When I first came to Paris, I stayed at the L’Hotel Paris, hoping I might get his room, the one with the terrible wallpaper,” I told Elsie.

  “That particular wallpaper is long gone,” Schiap said. “You know, he hated the Ritz and all that in-room plumbing. Thought it noisy and unhygienic.”

  “Well, there’s my point, exactly,” said the Englishman.

  We were having dessert by then. Schiap put down her spoonful of lemon sorbet and rolled her eyes, finally exasperated beyond endurance. “Dear Coco loves the Ritz . . .”

  Before she could finish her thought, the door of the dining r
oom was opened and Gogo rushed in, her hat crooked on her head, her cheeks flushed. “Mummy!”

  Mother and daughter flung themselves into a tight embrace.

  Something was wrong. Gogo had been in and out of town all autumn and often returned to Paris without telling anyone. She was sometimes aloof with her mother, the way children are when they are grown but still haven’t quite forgiven all the wrongs of childhood. Schiap hated it when Gogo was away, but sometimes she was too busy to spend time with her when she was in Paris.

  That evening, they hugged as if she’d been away for years, not a few days. As if they were frightened. They hugged so tightly that the smart hat Gogo wore fell to the floor and was trampled on. After having her office searched twice, Schiap was worried even more than usual that her daughter might be arrested on a trumped-up charge, or even abducted. Schiap wasn’t as wealthy as Coco, but she was still pretty damn rich. Ransom might be asked. They had taken Lindbergh’s child; why not hers? We were moving into days when trust would be a very limited commodity. But I had never seen Gogo afraid before. Gogo, who had survived childhood polio and long separations from her mother, years of pain and therapy. She looked fragile, but she was tough, that girl. That evening, she was shivering, and not just from the cold.

  “Hi, Lily,” Gogo said when Schiap had released her. She inclined her head slightly to the door.

  I excused myself and followed Gogo back into the hall, where a maid waited to take her coat. The hat was still on the dining room floor, forgotten, dripping onto the carpet.

  “I don’t want to tell Mummy. She’d fuss and shout and never let me out of her sight again. But I was followed. I’m certain of it,” she said. “A taxi behind mine. He got out at the corner when the taxi stopped here. He walked behind me.”

  “You must tell your mother. She should know.”

  Gogo considered for a moment. I was flattered that she had confided in me, but this was too important to keep as a secret between us.