The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

“Because you were friends with Madame Bouchard. With Madame Schiaparelli and Mademoiselle Chanel. You were of interest and so, yes, sometimes I was asked to know your whereabouts. Are you angry?”

  I wasn’t. He had given Ania time to leave, given her that chance that hadn’t worked out. And all the women in Paris who wore couture knew I was friends with both Schiap and Coco; it was no secret.

  “It is glorious,” he said, looking at Paris spread out beneath us like a toy village.

  “I used to stand here and imagine I could fly.” I crossed the room and put my arms around his waist, pressed my face against his back.

  “If only we could. Just fly away. I only have a few minutes. You must listen carefully, Lily.”

  “You are leaving,” I guessed. “I won’t see you again.”

  He turned and faced me, pushing my hands away. “Soon the German army will invade Poland. Then France and Germany will be at war. I will have left Paris by then. And you must, too. Even with your American passport you won’t be safe any longer. Foreigners may be interned in a camp. The army won’t march immediately into Paris. There will be fighting in the north and west. But France will lose. They are not prepared for what is going to come.”

  I didn’t ask how he knew. Otto was aide to the German head of Nazi propaganda in Paris.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “There will be some delay, maybe a few months before the army moves south into Paris. But you must be gone before then. I’ll find a way to let you know, but you mustn’t tell anyone else.”

  We stood there, staring at each other, memorizing each other’s faces. He held my hand, touched my hair, traced his finger along my jawline. I put my hand over his heart, over the coarse wool of his uniform, amazed that the heartbeat vibrated through so much stern cloth.

  “I love you,” I told him. “Do you love me?”

  The sadness of his smile was more than I could bear. “Yes,” he said. “But I think we will not meet again.”

  And then he was gone, his footsteps sounding loud on the creaking wooden floor, the door shutting, loud, rushed steps down the stairs to the street. When I opened my eyes again, he was in the street below me. He turned once and waved up at me, and through all that distance our eyes met. He strode off with that long, lanky stride of his, turned a corner, disappeared. It was like the sun disappearing, knowing I would not see him again. The old grief that began with Allen’s death seeped back into me, the blurred edges of loss, the fading of color.

  “Good riddance,” said the landlady, when I went out her front door a few minutes later. She spat on the ground close to my feet and slammed the door shut.

  My feet felt lead-heavy.

  * * *

  • • •

  When I went to the Louvre again a few days later, at the end of August, it was closed. The custodians had packed up the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Rembrandts and Gaugins, the Delacroixs. A convoy of dozens of trucks had taken four hundred thousand works of art into the countryside, for safe hiding. The great galleries were emptied, and sandbags were piled in front of the priceless ancient windows.

  I stood there, in the courtyard, staring at the sandbags that reached almost to the second floor, imagining the darkness inside. Without light, there is no color. That was when the war started, for me, those two days when Otto said good-bye and when the Louvre closed.

  Later during the war, after the Wehrmacht marched down the Champs-Élysées, the German officers ordered the museum reopened so that they could view whatever remained. Signs in German describing the rooms and the works were put up. The hungry Parisians, deprived of food as well as art, planted lettuce and radishes and rambling zucchini in the formal gardens of the museum. All of this, I learned later.

  That September, after the heavy, hot summer had finished, the German army invaded Poland. France and Britain had no choice, after this latest act of aggression. They declared war. Overnight, France went from a country still enjoying peace to a country at war.

  But, as Otto had said it would, the army stayed in the north and made no moves toward Paris.

  I tested Otto’s name, the various combinations to go with it. Otto, my lover. Otto, the musician turned soldier. Otto, the enemy of France. Otto, my enemy. I had to learn to hate the man I had learned to love. How, though? Love can make you a country of two. Otto, my friend, who had given me information I wasn’t supposed to have.

  In September, the Parisians who had just returned from their August holiday packed up once again and fled by the thousands, anticipating that the Germans would march in any day. In one day, Paris emptied. Every vehicle capable of carrying people or household items, from limousines to wheelbarrows, fled south, away from the northern front, where Hitler’s army was massing for the invasion of France.

  Gogo and I walked through the Place Vendôme, marveling at its ghostly stillness. I had thought Schiap would flee as well. I had been wrong. She stayed, working, making preparations for some other event still to come.

  “He looks lonely,” Gogo said, pointing up at Napoleon.

  “And more than a little worried,” I added.

  The cafés were all shuttered; the stores didn’t bother to open. The doorman still guarded the entrance of the Ritz, waiting for a limousine to arrive, a customer waiting for his door to be opened, but no limousines arrived, no customers, and he leaned against a column, smoking.

  I hadn’t seen Ania in weeks. I missed her and hoped that wherever she was, she was safe.

  And then, because no bombs fell after that initial declaration of war, because the German army hesitated at the northern border, the people returned and Paris, on the surface at least, returned to normal. The Phoney War began, those months when France was officially at war yet nothing happened, no bombs fell, no battles were waged, everyone just waited, breath held. We were like insects caught in yellow amber, frozen in a single moment, a single emotion of shared, omnipresent anxiety, as we waited for Hitler to cross the Maginot Line in the north. Sirens were tested, blaring our ears several times each day. Metro stations were outfitted as shelters; gas masks were distributed.

  “Needs must,” Schiap said one morning at breakfast. “My new collection will have dresses and jackets with pockets so big you don’t need a suitcase. You can just grab things on your way out the door. And a military theme, with trims of braid and frogging and colors—torch pink, Maginot Line blue, airplane gray, trench brown. And culottes for bicycle riding,” she said. “Soon, there will no petroleum, no cars.”

  In that collection there were suits with huge pockets outside and tiny secret pockets inside, where small valuables—diamond rings, pearl earrings—could be hidden; frocks with Finnish-style embroidery to celebrate Finland’s repulse of the Russians. There was a new print called “daily rations” commenting on the shortages of butter and meat. Schiap’s designs weren’t just clothes and they weren’t just art; they were parts of history, and sometimes they were prophetic.

  “And I will make the boutique’s cellar into a bomb shelter. Maybe not as luxurious as the Ritz,” she said, giving me a sideways glance. “A plane flew so low yesterday it almost decapitated Napoleon.”

  She spread apricot preserves on her bread. “I will create a new perfume, one that will make people forget all about that No. 5. ‘Sleeping,’ for people in transit. Lighter than ‘Shocking.’” Shocking, her first perfume, in its bottle shaped like Mae West’s curvy torso, had sold well, but never as well as Coco’s more famous fragrance. “It will be subtle, florals with darker amber, meant to be sprayed on immediately before falling asleep, to help ‘light the way to ecstasy.’”

  That was exactly how the ads would describe it, once it was ready for market. A light to ecstasy. Pleasure in the midst of panic and fear. The bottle was shaped like a flame-tipped candle, and the color of the package, turquoise, was renamed “Sleeping Blue” that season. Perhaps the candle shape
of the bottle was a response to the Durst ball, the nightmare of the flames of her own branch-arms being set alight.

  Schiap’s other idea was to set up a soup kitchen in her cellar, because Paris, which had been too empty the month before, was now full to bursting with refugees from the north and the east, places where the German army had already invaded. They arrived in a flood of need, carrying their belongings in sacks or in carts, hungry families looking for a doorway to sleep in, a cup of hot soup. From then on, coffee and bread and hot soup would be given out to anyone who asked for it, Schiap decreed.

  “Just like Mummy,” Gogo said one evening, when we were sitting in the garden of Schiap’s house after dinner. Blackout was in effect. The city was dark except for the searchlights sequinning the dark sky, seeking out German planes. It was so dark we could see a million stars in the sky. We wrapped up in blankets and sat on pillows, staring up, each locked in our own thoughts, until we recalled Schiap’s announcement at breakfast: “Soup! At all hours. And coffee. Strong. For anyone asking for it.”

  “She’ll probably want to serve lobster bisque or something impossible,” Gogo said. “Well, I’ll find suitable recipes and give them to the cook. Perhaps beef broth and potatoes. We used to have that in boarding school twice a week.”

  “Or chicken with dumplings.”

  Gogo considered. “Rooster with cockscomb.”

  “Clams with silver dust.” We laughed as each suggestion grew more impossible than the one before. Then we grew serious again.

  “I’ve decided I’m going to join the motor transport,” Gogo said. By then, the German army had outflanked the Maginot Line. There was fighting in the north.

  Gogo was tiny, barely five feet tall, and looked as fragile as a china doll.

  “Your mother will never allow it,” I said. “Besides, I know she’s making plans for you to leave.”

  “I will leave when I am ready. For this, I do not need permission.”

  We heard a commotion from the house and knew Schiap had come back from her boutique, where she had been working longer hours than ever. The storm before the calm, she called it. Getting everything in order before departure to safety. She found us in the garden. She looked exhausted, the shadows under her black eyes reaching down, down to the scarlet mouth, new hollows in her cheeks giving her face a sculptured quality.

  “What are you two talking about?” she asked.

  “I am going to become an ambulance driver,” Gogo said.

  Schiap paused, cigarette in one hand, already-lit match in the other. She blew out the flame without lighting her cigarette. She was wearing an Oriental tunic over slim trousers, heavy, beautiful silk with a jeweled neckline and cuffs, an outfit that could have come straight out of the volumes of Eastern art her scholar father had in his library.

  “Over my dead body,” Schiap said. “Don’t be ridiculous.” That was that, for the moment. Both Schiap and Gogo knew better than to prolong a quarrel because eventually each would do exactly as she pleased. Gogo might have had her father’s Slavic good looks, but it was Schiap’s determination that formed her character.

  Schiap sat and joined us in our stargazing, and we spoke only of small matters, gossip, menus. “Chicken broth with gilded asparagus” was her contribution to the fantasy menu planning. “Remember, Gogo, in India, when they gave us rice pudding with silver leaf on top? I hear silver is good for you, though if you eat too much you turn blue. Maybe . . .” Her voice grew speculative. “Maybe I’ll work that into a collection.”

  Every once in a while I caught Schiap staring at her daughter, her eyes flaming with worry.

  “At least let me take you to the tailors to have the uniforms properly fitted,” Schiap tried to joke, knowing this was a battle she wouldn’t win.

  Uniforms. Plural. She was going to hold me to my promise of keeping my eye on Gogo.

  “I’m afraid to drive,” I muttered.

  “Speak up,” Schiap snapped.

  “I’m afraid to drive. I don’t even like to be in automobiles.”

  Schiap smiled. “I didn’t ask if you wanted to,” she said.

  PART THREE

  YELLOW

  • • •

  If blue is the color of paradox, and red the color of life and death and the passion between beginnings and endings, then yellow is the color of what is most precious. It is the color of sunshine, of gold, of saints’ halos and daisy centers. It is the color of eternity, of autumn leaves and the yellow grasses poking through winter white, new springtime shoots before they turn green.

  Yellow reaches the eye faster, and from a greater distance, than most other colors, so it is also the color of warning, and assistance. Amelia Earhart’s first plane was canary colored, so that it would be seen on the blue ocean, if it went down. Her favorite evening gown was one designed for her by Schiaparelli, a gown with winglike panels so that Earhart seemed to be flying, even when she walked. Yellow is the color of flight and escape.

  Yellow is the color of the badge that Hitler required all Jews to wear.

  And yellow is the color of fear.

  Elsa Schiaparelli, in love with yellow ever since her childhood, those illuminated books of saints in her father’s library, loved to add touches of gold embroidery, thin yellow stripes, to her costumes. We all need a touch of immortality.

  • SIXTEEN •

  Three weeks after Gogo announced she was joining the Motor Transport Corps, I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a truck, trying not to cry.

  “No! Easy on the clutch! Do you want to strip it? This equipment is expensive, and if you can’t drive properly you should go somewhere else. Go roll bandages for the Red Cross or something.”

  The driving instructor was not known for his patience, and he had already explained to me that he had gotten the short straw, which was how he got stuck training me. He was my third instructor that week. The others had turned their backs on me and found other tasks to attend to.

  “I have to do this,” I insisted. Gogo, already very adept at clutches and gears and oil levels and gas tanks, sat on the grass, laughing. Higher up on the hill of the Bois de Boulogne where we trained, a Spanish family, refugees from the south, sat passing around a baguette and pointing at me, also laughing.

  “Have you ever seen the inside of a vehicle before?” the instructor shouted, wiping his brow and blowing a puff of air out of his mouth in exasperation.

  I turned off the ignition and glared back at him. He wasn’t half as frightening as Bettina. The fitters and salesgirls in Schiap’s boutique could have reduced him to a cringing ball of fear in minutes, but I decided not to tell him that. We were, by his terms, the weaker sex, and I didn’t think it was my job to enlighten him.

  “Look, I had a bad automobile accident. In England,” I told him. “I haven’t driven since then.”

  “What caused the accident? Did you try to downshift?” His sarcasm hit the target.

  “An icy road. I hit a tree.” Now, tears of frustration started in my eyes. Some things you aren’t supposed to forget, once you have learned them. Riding a bicycle. Kneading bread. Working a transmission. But I had forgotten how to drive, and every time I tried, my heart pounded in my chest, because I remembered the accident that had been my fault, that had killed my husband.

  The instructor sighed. He was a mechanic from Brittany completely at home with all sorts of engines, and his initial joy at being made the instructor of several young Parisian women had soured after he started working with me.

  “Try again,” he said, a little more gently. “Ease up on the clutch slowly, and don’t let the truck slide down the hill.”

  I tried four more times, each time bouncing halfway down the hill before I got the clutch and shift balanced. But on the fifth, I did it, and the truck, its motor humming, perched exactly where the instructor had left it for me, ready to move forward, like an obed
ient animal.

  Gogo and the Spaniards cheered.

  The instructor blew out another puff of air. “Enough for today.”

  “Well done!” Gogo shouted.

  “You learned how to balance a clutch in an hour. It took me three days,” I pointed out.

  “But you learned. Let’s celebrate. Let’s have a walk, get the smell of gasoline out of our noses, and then I’ll buy you a drink somewhere to thank you. I know you didn’t want to do this. I know Mummy forced you. Believe me, I know her methods of persuasion. But we need to do something, we can’t just sit around, waiting for the Wehrmacht to arrive. We have to do our part.”

  “My driving might make me more useful to the enemy,” I said.

  “You’re getting better. You can do it.” A quality of her voice made me think she was repeating words she had heard for most of her childhood, during that long recovery from polio.

  Gogo was a good walker, with a steady, long stride. It had been part of the strict exercise program for her rehabilitation, and I remembered her at the English school, walking round and round the playing field, rain or shine, sometimes for an hour or longer. That day, we walked from the Bois de Boulogne to the Champ de Mars, all across Paris to the 19th arrondissement. Paris had staged the 1937 World’s Fair on this field. Little remained of the buildings except the Palais de Chaillot, and we climbed up its stairs to the terrace.

  Before us was spread out most of Paris, with the Eiffel Tower in front of us, the Invalides on the left, and the Panthéon and Notre Dame on our right. It reminded me of the view I’d had from my room in Montmartre, the sense of flying that overcame me just from standing in the window. There, I had begun painting. I had begun recovering from grief, climbing out of the black hole of widowhood. There hadn’t been a war, omnipresent fear and anxiety. Perhaps we best recognize joy when it has already faded.

  The first smell of autumn reached us, that half-musk, half-dying-flower scent that is the essence of yellow as perceived by the nose, not the eyes. It was the smell of endings.