The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

  “It means it is time to leave.”

  Schiap sipped her coffee and thought for a moment. “Gogo travels with you. To New York.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  And what of Ania? I had promised Charlie I would look after her. How could I do that, an ocean away, thousands of miles away? And what would I tell Paul Rosenberg?

  But it was time to leave.

  Usually at this time of the day Schiap and I would speak of fabrics and colors and share gossip we had discovered about the seamstresses and fitters, who was seen at the movies with whom, who was cheating on her husband, who was putting on weight and looked to be in the family way.

  But that morning, Schiap didn’t want to gossip. Her arched black brows pulled together over her nose; her carmine lips jutted forward in anger.

  “It begins,” she said. “The destruction. The hunger. Oh, my poor Paris. And that woman is ensconced at the Ritz. She will survive, I have no doubt of it.”

  There is war, invasions and bombs and shrapnel, and there is a different kind of war waged at midnight parties and at dinner tables, fought with glances and whispered comments and underhanded business arrangements. The rivalry between Coco and Schiap would be interrupted by nothing less than a world war, and not even the war would end it.

  Schiap spent the rest of the day shouting into her telephone—Schiap, who hated having to make phone calls—and by the end of the day, the plans had been finalized. We had tickets. We had schedules. We had all the paperwork we needed.

  Outside, in the deserted streets, the morning drizzle turned to a steady rain, and when I looked out a window one last time before going to pack, it seemed as if Paris was weeping.

  * * *

  • • •

  That evening, I made one last visit to Ania at the Ritz bar.

  “You’re leaving,” she said. “I see it in your face. All you Americans will. It’s what you’re good at. Here.” She grabbed a piece of paper from her bag and scribbled onto it. “Give this to Charlie. No matter what happens, he can find me here. Or, find out about me. Now go, Oh God, look at me.” She was staring at her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. “I have undereye bags all the way down to my chin.”

  “Lily!” she called when I turned to leave. “Don’t forget me, Lily.”

  “Never.” We hugged tightly, and I remembered how beautiful she had been the night of the Durst ball, the night she left without Charlie, how heartbroken he had been, and here was all the heartbreak come back, now tinged black with fear as well as loss.

  As I went out the front door, Coco was coming in.

  “Foul weather,” she said. “That coat doesn’t fit you at all. It doesn’t hang properly from the shoulders.” She reached up and pinched the fabric, showing how it should hang. She pulled a silver case from her purse and tried to light a cigarette, but the drizzle was too thick. Click, flame, and drizzle would douse it. Click, flame, out. Four times till she gave up and threw the damp cigarette to the ground and crushed it under her patent high heel.

  “That coat is really awful on you. I’m getting soaked. Good-bye, Lily. Come see me again when this is all over.”

  I walked the perimeter of the Place Vendôme, trying to see it as I had that first time with Charlie, the grand stone façades of the galleries, the column in the middle of the huge circle, with Napoleon standing on top, oblivious to the omnipresent pigeons that cooed from his hat and the crook of his bent arm, the sandbags surrounding the base, sandbagged against the arrival of the German army.

  Thank God for pigeons, I thought. They have nothing to do with change, with history, with good-byes. In that, they were superior to us.

  In the emptied streets, my footsteps echoed. And I heard footsteps behind me. When I turned, no one was there. I forced myself to walk at my usual pace, not to panic. They were just watching, I told myself. When I made it to Schiap’s door, my hand trembled and dropped the key. When I finally had the door opened I fell into the foyer, so great was my relief. Behind Schiap’s door, I was safe.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Not that coat. This one,” Schiap insisted. “That old thing.” She took my raincoat and replaced it with one from the most recent collection, a waterproofed silk trench in khaki brown. “Hurry, hurry, the taxi is here!”

  “What about you? What will you do without us?” I asked at the train station. It was windy, and we had to hold our hats down with our hands and squint hard to keep grit from blowing into our eyes.

  Schiap gave me her comic disbelief look, one she had learned from the commedia dell’arte, with raised eyebrows, mouth dropped open.

  “I shall have peace and quiet,” she said, but none of us could laugh.

  “Mummy,” Gogo protested in a low voice. There was often little affection between them. Hugs were infrequent, I’d noticed. But this might be a life-and-death separation, and Gogo was worried, even if Schiap pretended not to be.

  “There are some matters I have to take care of. I’ll come after. Soon after. Don’t worry.”

  We three stayed like that for a long, thoughtful moment, Schiap with her hand on mine, Gogo hugging her mother, three women facing an uncertain future. Facing a war.

  “Don’t put it off too long. Please,” Gogo said.

  “Napoleon,” Schiap said.

  “And all his little soldiers,” Gogo answered.

  “Take care of my daughter,” Schiap whispered in my ear. “Promise!”

  Gogo and Schiap gave hurried instructions to the porter who had our trunks, and in the mayhem of too many people departing at once, I was jostled and elbowed by the crowd. Someone bumped into me, on purpose it seemed because he almost knocked me off my feet.

  “Pardon,” he said, not meaning it. “Madame is making a journey? Where to?” It was neither a friendly question nor an idle one. He was from the secret police, one of the men who had kept their eye on Schiap, had followed her daughter, had searched through her office. Maybe had followed me the night before.

  I didn’t answer. Schiap saw him out of the corner of her eye, and she turned to him, furious, slapping her left hand onto her right forearm, the Italian gesture that means “fuck you.” A memory forever: tiny Schiap, her face framed by black-and-white fur, her right hand balled into a fist, confronting a man a foot and a half taller than she was, his shoulders twice the width of hers.

  He took a step closer to her, and my breath stopped. But then he backed away, smirking but knowing that he had no right to detain us; Schiap had powerful friends, and we hadn’t broken any laws.

  I dug my hands into my pockets, looking for a tissue, and remembered. Ania had given me a scrap of paper, and it was in the other coat.

  “Schiap, that other coat, there’s something in it I need,” I said. “A paper.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll send it to you. Hurry, get on the train!”

  We boarded, and Schiap waved frantically from the platform, the fur on her coat collar shivering in the steam of the train.

  “And my paintings!” I called to her from the train window. “Pack them up for me!”

  Gogo pulled down the window, waving and blowing kisses. I sat back against the plush first-class cushions, numb and already grieving for the city I had grown to love.

  Good-bye, Paris, good-bye, the train wheels ground out. Good-bye, green linden trees lining the Seine, multicolored rose window of Notre Dame, red striped awnings over bistro doors, cobalt-blue overalls of laborers, black-and-white vestments of nuns and priests, pink cocktails and rosé wines, striped carousel horses in the Luxembourg Gardens, pastel cakes in boulangerie windows. Good-bye, my beautiful Paris, and all its lovely colors.

  Good-bye to the city where I had fallen in love with Allen and then with a man who was part of the war machine forcing my flight.

  Where my brother had fallen in love with Ania.
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  She’ll leave Paris, I thought. She won’t stay. So it doesn’t matter about the paper. Even so, my stomach felt as if someone had kicked it.

  • EIGHTEEN •

  The next day we were in a hotel lobby in Genoa, waiting to board the Manhattan, the liner that would take us to New York. A couple of thousand other people were sailing with us, away from France and Italy, away from the war, and the lobby was so crowded we couldn’t move.

  Gogo rolled up the little veil on her hat and looked around, trying to find a place to sit. No point in taking a room; the ship would leave in the evening. But there were no free chairs in the lobby—there was barely standing room—so we forced our way through the mass of men and women and wailing children, and went into the crowded bar for a cocktail. We, along with a hundred other people, tried to get the harried bartender’s attention.

  The waiters were doing a brave job of it, sprinting from table to table, taking orders, throwing down coasters and drinks. The noise was deafening, especially after the gray silence that had fallen over Paris. The bartender, a middle-aged man who looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, kept looking over our shoulders, ignoring us, serving everyone around us. A dangerous crease of anger, very similar to her mother’s, appeared between Gogo’s brows.

  “Can I help?” A good-looking young man had worked his way through the crowd to the bar and stood next to Gogo. He had an American accent and a well-cut suit. More importantly, in the midst of the clamor and panic and shoving, he had wonderful manners, a kind of chivalry; he was the kind of young man you’d want to be near in case of emergency, a women-and-children-first set of circumstances.

  “We’re trying to get cocktails, but the bartender is pretending we are invisible.” The crease disappeared. Gogo smiled at him.

  He snapped his fingers at the man. The bar was so noisy we couldn’t hear the snap, but the bartender saw the authority in the gesture and responded.

  “Champagne cocktails,” the young man said. He left money for them on the zinc bar, tipped his hat at us, and worked his way back through the crowd, where he had left his suitcases unattended.

  We sipped our drinks and once in a while looked back over our shoulders at him. He smiled every time.

  “He’s flirting with you,” I told Gogo.

  “I think that would be nice, if it’s true.”

  The young man turned out to be Robert Berenson, an American shipping executive of Jewish descent, and he courted Gogo all the way across the Atlantic.

  * * *

  • • •

  The crossing was difficult. The weather wasn’t too bad, but there were submarines patrolling the Atlantic, German submarines, and we faced the omnipresent threat of being torpedoed. Under those conditions it’s difficult to act normally, to make conversation at dinner and remember to walk around the deck in the morning, for fresh air and exercise, but we did it. Robert Berenson had his dinner seating switched to our table by the third day of the crossing. In the evening, when there was music and dancing in the ballroom, he danced every fourth dance with me, so that I wouldn’t feel excluded.

  When I danced with other men, strangers, I would sometimes close my eyes and try to pretend that man was Otto, but something always spoiled the illusion: the wrong cologne, a faulty sense of rhythm, a sweaty hand. Only Otto was Otto, and I missed him constantly, deeply. On a personal level, the war was another fatal accident for me. I would never see Otto again, and the grief would have overwhelmed me except this time I could not hide away; I did not have that luxury. Get on with it, I could hear Schiap saying. And Ania.

  “That’s a lovely dress,” Robert said to me one night during a fox-trot.

  “You find it strange, admit it,” I said. I was wearing one of Schiap’s, a very tight violet sheath with a yellow bustle.

  “A little,” he admitted sheepishly. “I don’t quite understand it. How are you supposed to sit?”

  “Carefully. A suggestion: Gogo’s mother designed this dress. I wouldn’t express any dislike of it. She may complain about her mother, and she probably will, but she is fiercely loyal to her.”

  “Now that, I understand,” Robert said.

  By the time the Manhattan sailed, safely, unharmed, untorpedoed, into New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty, Gogo and Robert Berenson were engaged.

  We arrived in New York on June 10, almost two years to the day when I went to Paris to meet Charlie. The excitement of our arrival, the cheers and shouts, the bustle of porters, made it feel like a holiday, even though I could not celebrate. And the feeling was short-lived. The reality of war had reached across the Atlantic. Clearing customs took a very long time. They opened every suitcase, checked every document, but after we’d finally been cleared through, Gogo and Robert and I shared a cab uptown.

  The cabbie took us through Times Square, and we saw the news band blinking its way around the Times Tower, news of the Blitzkrieg in Britain. We watched it silently, wondering if and when Paris would be likewise bombed. Beautiful Paris.

  They let me out at West 65th Street, at the stoop of the brownstone where Charlie was living, where I would be living as well until . . . Until what? Endings were impossible to guess.

  It felt so strange, being back in New York, as much a journey through time as geography. It had been home, before I lived in England with Allen, and then Paris. I stood in front of the door, hesitating, wishing I could magically be whisked back to Paris, before the war. Schiap, even at a distance, gave me courage. Oh, just knock! I heard her say. And straighten your hat.

  Charlie’s housekeeper opened the door, an elderly woman from Naples who looked at me suspiciously.

  “I’m Lily,” I said. “Charlie’s sister. Didn’t he get my telegram?”

  “Ah! Yes. Sister. Come in, come in.”

  Charlie was still making his rounds, she said, but I should be comfortable, eat something, drink something.

  “This is you?” she asked, guiding me through the living room and pointing out an old photograph of me that Charlie had put on the fireplace mantel. Me, years before, my hair still long and wrapped in a braid around my head, my eyebrows thick and wild, my dress shapeless, an off-the-rack thing. Me, before Paris.

  “You look different!” she said. “Better now.”

  Charlie had taken some old family things out of the storage crates in the basement, and I recognized the silver candlesticks on the table, the paintings on the wall, all nineteenth-century landscapes of poplar trees and moonlight and pretty young women in rose gardens. This had been my grandfather’s house, and then my father’s before my uncle had leased it out, after my parents died. I wondered where that other family had gone, if they’d been happy here. It felt more their home than mine; those scratches on the wall in the hallway had been made by someone else’s dog; the living room wallpaper chosen by a different woman. My little room in Schiap’s house at rue de Berri seemed more my home than this place, where I had spent a few years of childhood.

  I took my suitcase upstairs, and after a quick meal of bread and cold chicken, I sat in the dark living room, waiting.

  “Lily?” Charlie came home at midnight. I had fallen asleep on the sofa, and my legs were numb with lingering fatigue when I stood.

  We held each other for a long while, and it was like having a little bit of Paris with me, again. Charlie, who had met me at the Café les Deux Magots, taken me to the Durst ball and helped get Schiap out of her burned costume; Charlie, who walked with me through every park in Paris, who sat with me and watched the old men playing boules. Paris didn’t seem as far away.

  “Ania is still in Paris,” I said. “She gave me her address, but, Charlie, I left it behind.”

  He turned white, then shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s impossible to get letters back and forth. She knows how to reach me, if she wants to.”

  He had aged since I had last seen him. Hi
s smile was slower, his blond hair was cut very close to his head, his dashing mustache trimmed of its curling tips. There were lines in his forehead that hadn’t been there before. His plans to open a new clinic with investors had been put on hold, for the duration of the war.

  “Sorry I was so late tonight,” he said. “We’ll celebrate tomorrow. I’ll take you to Delmonico’s for a steak.”

  But we didn’t celebrate the next day, either. It was Charlie’s afternoon off, and we were sitting in the living room, listening to the radio, when the announcer said that the German army had marched into Paris.

  Oh God. Ania.

  Charlie put down the glass of sherry he’d been drinking. “You cut it close,” he said. “Good thing you left when you did.” But he was thinking about Ania, and so was I. Where was she? Was she safe?

  I tried to imagine a swastika flag flying from the Eiffel Tower, tried to imagine the shopkeepers who were still in business putting German-language signs in their windows. In Paris, they would be rounding up, arresting Jews, as they had in Warsaw. And communists. Ania and Schiap. Were they still there?

  Was Coco still at the Ritz, waiting to welcome the German officers who would be stationed there? Von Dincklage would have returned to Paris. Had he taken Otto with him?

  Not knowing was unbearable, but it was impossible to get phone calls or telegrams through. Charlie and I, like thousands and thousands, could only wait and hope that eventually there would be good news of friends and loved ones.

  “Charlie, Ania carried messages for the Resistance,” I told him.

  He put his face in his hands and rubbed at his eyes. “Oh God,” he said.

  Later that evening I called Gogo and asked her to contact her mother any way she could, to ask if she had found the raincoat and the paper in the pocket.

  “Sure,” she agreed. But Schiap was traveling, and it was weeks before a message came to me. The old raincoat was gone. She thought the housekeeper had given it away. If we could reach Ania, I didn’t know where.