The dim, wobbling unmistakable yellow lights of a vehicle came closer, closer, the headlights now blinding us, and the nurse and I leaned against each other for comfort, stuck in one moment when all is possible, when the next breath could decide the rest of our lives and how much time was left to us, where it might be spent.
The vehicle was too far away to tell if it was military or civilian. French or German. Did the Germans take women as prisoners of war? Did truck drivers count as militants? Common sense said to hide till we knew for sure who was coming down the road.
When it stopped just a few yards short of us, I could see that it was a private vehicle, not a military or commercial one. And it was blue. A baby-blue Isotta. Almost all the cars in France had been confiscated for the war effort, but Ania still had hers. Ania had connections; she knew people.
“Lily? Are you there?”
Ania got out of the car and leaned into the darkness, calling through cupped hands, her white-blond hair gleaming like silver under a hat of gauze and feathers. She was in high heels.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. The nurse, though, didn’t need to hear more. A voice not German was all she had wanted. She stood and waved her arms over her head in greeting.
“Over here! And turn the car headlights off!”
I stood slowly, a little worried that maybe I was as delirious as Pierre. But I wasn’t. Ania ran to me and gave me a tight hug.
“How?” was all I could manage.
Ania lit a cigarette and handed it to me. “I went looking for you at Schiap’s, and she said you hadn’t come back yet. You’re very late, aren’t you?” She scolded me as if I been late for a dress fitting or a visit to the Louvre. “God, the roads are bad! My little automobile will never be the same.”
“Can we all fit in there?” the nurse asked, newly worried. “We’ll have to leave the truck until someone can come for it with a chain.”
“We’ll squeeze in,” Ania said.
I’d never been so happy to see anyone. I saw what Charlie had seen in Ania, her courage and loyalty, the strength it had required for her to leave Charlie and come back to France, to her daughter.
Pierre and the nurse squeezed into the backseat, the unconscious man wedged between them. I sat next to Ania in the front, and when I began mumbling about Schiap’s autumn collection, the matchbox cuffs that caught on fire, she hushed me and told me to rest.
“You’re injured,” she said. “Charlie will be so upset.”
“Just a little bump and shock,” the nurse called from the backseat. “She’ll be fine.”
“Then I have just the thing.” Ania opened the huge purse resting between us and took out a bottle of wine, a Lafite Rothschild, vintage 1932, not the best year but it would suffice, she said.
“Not a great idea for someone with a head injury,” the nurse said.
“Sure it is,” I shouted back. I opened the bottle, and Ania and I passed it back and forth as she drove through the black night. We sang most of the way back to Paris, on our way back to the city we loved. Ania had a lovely voice and when she sang Josephine Baker’s famous song, “I have two loves, my country and Paris,” we wept a little, and not just from the wine.
This is war, I thought. Wounded men, burning houses, anxious mothers, young people arriving at their first realization that they were not going to live forever, that they were fragile flesh. And all of this was on its way to Paris.
“But how did you know where we were?” I asked Ania. Our missions weren’t secret, but the office did not readily give out specific information.
“Coco told me,” she said. “Coco knows everything.”
Ania had a cigarette in one hand, the bottle of wine in the other, and was using just the fingertips of her cigarette hand to grip the steering wheel.
“How did Coco know?” But before I could hear Ania’s answer I was almost unconscious again, falling asleep from exhaustion. Yellow lights danced on my closed eyelids, and I heard Ania humming to herself. Did I imagine it or did she say, “I do miss Charlie. Maybe I can find a way back to him.”
• SEVENTEEN •
“Ania carries messages sometimes,” Schiap explained, fussing over the cut on my forehead with gauze and rubbing alcohol, after Ania left me at Schiap’s house. “Sit still. Ania has information. She knew who you were going for and where you might be. They had been looking for him, your Pierre, and Ania knew of the farmhouse where he was hiding. It has been used before. Ask no more. I know no more. That much I have learned from Bettina, who heard it from her husband.”
She put down the bloody tissue and frowned at me. “That may scar. Too bad. But it will make a good story for dinner parties, after all this is over.”
Ania was a messenger for the Resistance. That was all von Dincklage needed to find out. I cursed her husband, Anton, for the hold he kept over her. But maybe by that time Ania had already decided to stay, to do what she could, like Gogo.
“Sleep,” Schiap said. “Tomorrow, you spend the day in bed. And I have work to do, tracking down suppliers. I can’t get enough silk to finish the orders we have.”
Business for all the couturiers of Paris was beginning to dry up, and supplies—fabrics, buttons, even pins—were becoming difficult or even impossible to get. Schiap was forced to reduce her work staff of six hundred down to one hundred fifty. She wept in her office the day she laid off seamstresses and sweepers and fitters. “Where will they go? What will they do?” Schiap said. She muttered something in Italian, and I couldn’t tell if she was praying for her workers or cursing the war.
But Schiap kept the boutique open rather than closing completely. “It is a question of patriotism,” she declared at her basement canteen one night, when Gogo and I were testing a new soup recipe.
“Paris is fashion. Fashion is Paris,” Schiap said. “We must keep the industry going to show that we will not be defeated, no matter what happens. Without la couture the entire French economy would collapse. So, we keep going, however we can, even if we end up selling to Germans. Money is money, and salaries must be paid to those still working.”
“It is a question of patriotism,” Coco said to me the next evening, when I went to see her. “I will close the business. I will not sell to the Germans.”
She poured us both a glass of wine, ruby red, and sat on the sofa with her slender, athletic legs tucked under her.
“I heard of your adventure,” she said. “Up north. It was Ania who came for you?”
There was danger in that question. Best not to speak of Ania. I picked up the sketch pad on the low table beside her, and she let me look at it.
“My last collection,” she said. Like Schiap, that season was the last season, though I didn’t yet know it. She was working with military themes, trim suits in neutral colors, braiding and frogging for trim, practical clothes, not party clothes.
“After I close the business I will live quietly,” Coco said. “Rest. Wait. They will take Paris, you know. Eventually. And when they do, I will not sell to them. To the Germans. They have some good ideas, and they will rid us of the Bolsheviks. But France is my country.”
The evening was damp and windy, and an occasional draft at the window rippled the draperies to show strips of the darkness outside. The Ritz hotel suite felt austere, somehow impersonal, despite the dark carved wood screens, sculptures, crystal vases, and other furnishings Coco had installed there. Some rooms embrace you like a friend; other rooms let you know you are completely insignificant, and this room felt like a showcase, not a home. It felt as if Coco was returning to the anonymity of her childhood.
“But what will your workers do?” I asked. “No income, no job.”
“Go to the countryside, I suppose. Most people are, anyway.”
Two years before, Coco’s workers had gone on strike against her, protesting the hours and the pay. Schiap’s employees had, as well, and
Schiap, that admirer of Lenin in her younger days, had responded with pay increases and handshakes. Coco had not been as amiable and she had never, it was gossiped, really forgiven her employees.
“People may say this is revenge,” I warned her. “For the strike. Revenge, not patriotism.”
“People always talk. Let them.” And like that, two thousand workers, mostly female, were laid off without warning, just as their husbands and fathers and brothers were going off to war.
“Safer, maybe,” I argued that evening. “And a little hungry, without an income.”
“We will all be a little hungry, I think,” she said. “Even those of us living at the Ritz. Have you come to say good-bye? You will go home, now, of course. New York. It is good-bye for now. I am tired.” She rose.
“We are friends, aren’t we?” She kissed my cheek. I kissed hers. She pushed me gently toward the door, but before she opened it, she said, “It was an accident, you know. That night at the Durst ball.”
I didn’t believe her, and she knew I didn’t.
I got as far as rue du Mont Thabor before the damp wind blowing my hair around my face reminded me that I had left my hat behind. It was a hat Coco had given me at discount, a lovely little white beret trimmed with faux pearls, so I went back for it.
This time when I knocked a maid didn’t open the door, but Coco herself.
“Oh,” she said. “I was expecting something from the kitchen.”
“I forgot my hat.”
“There it is.” Coco dropped something small and metallic onto the table and picked up the hat. She arranged it carefully, almost tenderly, avoiding the bandage on my forehead. She was very pale, and in the weaker light the deep shadows around her eyes looked like bruises.
Only then did I see the syringe where she had dropped it.
“Morphine,” she said. “It helps me sleep. Oh, don’t look like that. It’s not as uncommon as you think.”
“Isn’t it a little dangerous? A habit?”
“Oh, so what?” She sighed. “We have said our good-byes.” She pushed me back out the door.
Coco was someone you never really got close to, but sometimes when she looked at me with those black eyes, I saw a different person asking for understanding, someone who, like me, knew more than a little about loss and grief. And then she would blink, and Chanel would be back, stylish, hard, cynical Chanel.
* * *
• • •
It was an era of good-byes, a reversal of the convergence that had brought me to Paris, to Charlie, to Ania, Schiap, Coco, and Otto. Departure was in the air, so I wasn’t even surprised when, the last time I saw Ania, we met at the Ritz bar, as usual, and Django Reinhardt was playing.
“His orchestra was playing at Elsie de Wolfe’s party, my first night in Paris,” I told Ania. “Remember?”
“Of course I do. Charlie was still sulking a little because we had spent so much time at Schiap’s boutique.” Ania tried to laugh but couldn’t quite do it. She felt it, too. That sense of endings, of departure.
Django waved hello, and I wondered what would happen to him and the other gypsies of France. They were, by Hitler’s standards, undesirables.
Ania was wearing Schiaparelli that night, a dress with a fitted blue-and-red jacket over a tiered white skirt suit; it looked like the dress that Manet had painted in Nana. The Ritz was doing a thriving business. It was loud with the clatter of glasses and the buzz of conversation, and dark because of the blackout. The windows were covered with thick curtains, and the lights in the bar were as dim as possible. Ania and I sat at a little table and made a running commentary on the outfits the women were wearing.
“Cheap,” Ania said of one woman dressed in tight purple silk that glimmered with a vulgar eggplant glow even in dim light. “Not well tailored,” she said of a woman in tweeds.
“With all that’s going on in the world, why should clothes matter so much?” I asked.
“If looks don’t matter, why do we spend so much time and money on them?” Ania countered. “It makes us more desirable, and it makes other women jealous. It is amusing.”
“I don’t want to be amused,” I decided.
“Of course you do. We all do. All except Charlie. He wants to save the world. Charlie has a mission.”
I didn’t point out that she had acquired one as well. No one spoke of those anonymous nighttime drives, the messages and people carried back and forth. We ordered martinis, and when mine came, I raised it to Django. He remembered the night we had talked at Elsie’s party, and he began playing “Dark Eyes” because I had told him I liked his version of it, the upbeat jazz of it.
“I wish I could go to Warsaw,” Ania said. “See my father. Anton would let me take Katya, I’m certain. To see her grandfather . . .”
“If you go to Warsaw, I think you’ll never leave,” I warned her.
General Hans Frank of the occupying German army had already constructed his ten-foot-high wall topped with barbed wire around the Jewish neighborhoods, imprisoning the people who lived there. People who tried to escape were shot on sight.
In Paris, the anti-Semitism was growing stronger, fueled by Hitler’s proximity, the graffiti more frequent, more hateful, Jews pushed off the sidewalk, shouted at.
She ordered more martinis for us. “Let’s think of the list of people who must be invited to your exhibition at the Rosenberg Gallery,” she said.
“There will be no exhibition.”
“They will make a treaty,” Ania insisted. “France and Germany. God, look at what they are eating.” She nodded at a table in the corner where a roast beef had been served, stuffed artichokes, fresh salad. France was at war, yet they were still serving four-course meals in the Ritz dining room, still had their full staff of busboys and bartenders in starched uniforms.
“You’ll have to smile at that worm, Rebatet, when he comes to the exhibit,” she said. “He covers all the openings, but remember he hates most modern art so don’t talk about art with him. Talk about Coco Chanel, I think. Let him know she is a friend. He’ll be kinder to you. It helped Picasso. Don’t talk about Schiap, though. They detest each other.”
Ania lit a cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring. Charlie had taught her how. “They will house German officers at the Ritz, you know,” she said. “If they come here, to Paris.”
When I left the Ritz to go back to Schiap’s, Monsieur and Madame Auzello were in the small lobby, talking quietly but with obvious agitation. She nodded hello when she saw me and then continued that whispered conversation with her husband. I wondered how she, a famous beauty who had once been courted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, felt about housing German officers at the Ritz. She, a New Yorker by birth, like me, and a Jew like Ania.
Ania and I said good night, and she gave me the two kisses on the cheek common for Parisians. “One for luck,” she said. “One for remembrance.”
* * *
• • •
I walked back slowly, making my way cautiously through the dark streets, because the city was in blackout. Life was happening inside, behind closed curtains, shuttered windows, but outside all was darkness and stillness. My footsteps echoed.
The streets were emptied of the chauffeured cars of the wealthy, emptied of cars in general. People walked, or rode bicycles, or stayed off the streets, sheltering in their homes. Color had disappeared. Paris had turned black and gray.
I wanted to make time stand still, to freeze us all into a safe moment when good things might yet happen, when Otto and I could be safe together. The moon made silver ripples on the river, and I paused by the bridge, grateful for those small glitters of light amid all the darkness. I threw in a pebble to make the ripples dance and went back to Schiap’s house.
“Monsieur and Madame Auzello won’t have a choice,” Schiap told me over morning coffee. “If they refuse, the hotel will be closed, and if the h
otel is closed, it will be taken over by the Germans anyway. See? No choice.”
We were sitting in her bedroom because the rest of the house was filled with Belgian refugees, sleeping in beds, on chairs, some even in the stairwell.
The basement, the private bar and dining room, Schiap had offered as a secret meeting place for British officers and volunteer American ambulance drivers. When I couldn’t sleep I would hear doors opening and closing, heavy footsteps, men’s deep voices. They were always gone by morning. I knew that for months now Schiap had been putting her affairs in order: packing up papers, diaries, trunks of clothes. Like most Parisians, she hid many of the valuable things that could not be carried away.
The couturiers had closed up their shops, as Coco already had done: Mainbocher, Vionnet, one by one the doors closed, and their windows were painted over for blackout.
“By the way,” Schiap said, pouring coffee from a heavy silver pot into her cup. “You had a strange phone call last night, when you were out. A man’s voice. He asked for you, and when the maid said you were out, all he said was ‘now.’ And then he hung up. Who was it? What does it mean?”
It means, I thought, that Otto hasn’t forgotten me. He hasn’t. It was the warning he promised me. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he was thinking about me.
Schiap was in a red-and-orange silk robe and had tied a turban around her head and, except for the violet shadows of worry around her eyes, looked as far away from a woman expecting war and invasion as a woman can look. Perhaps that is the point of fashion and couture. It is part of the mainstream of history, yet it can also, to a point, protect us from that history. Dressing well is resistance, revenge, pride, a form of control over forces that try to control us. That’s why, when taken prisoner, the first thing your enemy takes is that outer layer of your identity and independence: your clothes. That is why prisoners are put in identical uniforms. They no longer exist as individuals.
“Well?” Schiap asked. “Who was it, and what does it mean?”
The Last Collection Page 26