The Last Collection

by Jeanne Mackin

  * * *

  • • •

  The best part of being home was that Charlie and I were together again. He’d left Boston and was in residence at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, and already earning a reputation as an excellent pediatrician. That had become his specialty: treating young children.

  And, as he had suggested after Allen’s death, we set up housekeeping together, the hardworking doctor and his widowed sister, sharing the brownstone. Mrs. Taurasi, who was very much like her namesake, a bull who charged around, giving us orders: feet off the sofa, finish your supper, eat more, sleep more. She grumbled at me but was, I suspected, happy that Charlie’s sister had come to keep him company. “Not good for man to live alone,” she confided to me one day. “Men are not good on their own. He needs to be married. I think so. Don’t you?”

  In fact, he had been seeing a girl, was thinking about asking her to marry him.

  “But I just don’t seem able to get the words out,” he confessed that night, after we learned that Paris had been taken by the Germans and that Ania was in even more danger than he had known. “Patty’s a great kid, pretty and smart.”

  “Perfect doctor’s wife?”

  He grinned for a half second and looked a little more like his old self. “Absolutely perfect. Maybe that’s the problem. And let’s face it. I’m still in love with Ania.”

  We sat down to Mrs. Taurasi’s roast chicken and mashed potatoes, bad oil portraits of my grandfather and grandmother staring at us from over the sideboard. We were eating by the light of a single candle, both to save fuel and because New York was already rehearsing blackout, already preparing for the time when Hitler might try an invasion of our shores.

  Charlie rose and began to pace over the faded floral carpet with his hands jammed in his pockets.

  “Ania is a good woman,” Charlie said, sitting back down. “Loving and kind and with her own kind of innocence. I’d take her back in a heartbeat, husband or not. I’d find a way to get Katya here. You know, I sent a telegram to the Ritz but she never answered, and now, with the Germans there . . . I just hope von Dincklage and her husband find a way to keep her safe. They owe her that much.”

  I didn’t have the courage to tell him about Otto. By that time, being in love with a German seemed unspeakable; loving a married woman, as Charlie did, was simply a faux pas. We went and sat in the dark living room and put our feet up, since Mrs. Taurasi was in the kitchen.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Sit and knit all through the war?”

  “God, I hope not.” I held up the sock I’d begun, with its uneven stitches and worried rows where stitches had been dropped. That morning I had registered with Bundles for Britain, an organization of New York women who knitted socks and mufflers and blankets for the people made homeless during the bombings of London.

  “Now that is a sorry affair,” Charlie said, laughing at the sock.

  “I drove a truck in France, Charlie.”

  He whistled. “You drove again? Glad to hear it. About time.”

  “And there was an accident. The truck got stuck near the border, close to the shelling. Ania rescued me, Charlie. She found me and brought me back to Paris, in the blue Isotta.”

  He turned away so that I couldn’t see his face because even in the dark the sorrow could be seen there, writ large and clear. Sorrow, the opposite of gold joy and yellow fear.

  “We’ll find her,” he said. “When all this is over.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Sometimes, at home in New York, I would wake up at night and wonder where I was. I felt like I was free-floating through time. Had there really been a ball in the forest? Schiap in flames? I would fall back asleep, and in my dreams I stood in the window of my Montmartre studio and I flew right out of it, over the Place Vendôme, and looked down to see Ania coming out of Schiap’s boutique, her arms full of boxes and bags.

  I’d see Otto, waving up at me, smiling, one hand over his heart, and then I’d wake up and Otto and Ania would return to the category of what had been lost, along with Allen, my parents.

  When I went to the Red Cross office downtown, the lady who signed me up wasn’t impressed by my skills. I couldn’t type or take dictation, or nurse.

  I ended up packing parcels for the Red Cross, to be sent to the European POWs in the German camps. Bandages. Chocolate. Tins of canned meat. Aspirin. A blanket. Fold flaps. Seal. Over and over, all day long, tedious work, but when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore I reminded myself that the package might actually keep someone alive . . . maybe even someone I had once known in Paris.

  I worked in a downtown basement with a dozen other women, and during our breaks we would go out to sit in the sun, to people-watch, to gossip. They were impressed that I had spent a couple of years in Paris, that I had clothes from famous designers.

  Susan, from Ohio, was the one who told us about the air-raid shelter set up in the Allerton Hotel for Women on 57th Street. “Forty-five feet below ground level,” she said. “Filled with bunks and Sanka and kerosene lamps.” She expertly folded a khaki wool blanket to take up the smallest space possible in the box she was packing.

  “There was an air-raid shelter in the cellars of the Ritz in Paris,” I said, trying to imitate her efficient movements and failing. One edge of the blanket stuck out, and I had to tuck it sloppily around the boxes of chocolate. “Tins of foie gras and sleeping bags from Hermès.”

  “Go on,” said Susan. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Crystal lampshades for the kerosene lamps.”

  “Those frogs.” She laughed.

  I missed Schiap, and sometimes I missed Coco. They were ambitious, sometimes vain, always talented, a new type of women who made their own rules.

  Sometimes, I would go to the Schiaparelli perfume shop on Fifth Avenue and sniff the various bottles, remembering which perfume Elsie de Wolfe had preferred, comparing it with the perfume Ania had worn.

  Otherwise, fold blankets. Count chocolate bars. Fill boxes to be sent overseas. And in the evening, sit in the dark listening to the radio and missing Otto, a man I’d barely known. How many times had we been together? Three? Yet he had filled the empty places inside me, the hollows left by the earlier loss of Allen, places I had thought would be empty for the rest of my life.

  And where was Schiap? She’d been in and out of Paris, traveling almost as freely as she had during peace, using contacts and connections. I read in Vogue, now available only by subscription because of paper shortages, that she was planning a new fashion line for young girls to be called Gogo Juniors, for the young miss. Not even a war could keep Elsa Schiaparelli from working.

  * * *

  • • •

  Gogo, with whom I’d been having monthly lunches, called me one Saturday in the spring of 1941. She was laughing so hard I thought she might drop the telephone.

  “You’ve got to see this,” she said. “How soon can you get here? I’m at Bonwit Teller.”

  “Half an hour,” I said.

  It was a good day, with birds singing in trees and fresh asparagus for sale at the little grocer’s shop on the corner, sun the color of lemons, and chartreuse grass springing up around the brown of tree trunks in their squares of dirt in front of the brownstones. Women had already put away their darker winter clothes and were wearing bright prints and pastels, and slowly color was returning to the wintry black and gray tones of New York. It was the kind of lovely day that made me miss Paris even more, but then the Paris I had loved wasn’t really there anymore; she was gray and ravaged.

  I met Gogo at the new Bonwit Teller department: Junior Miss, designed by Elsa Schiaparelli, a small partitioned section with racks of clothes designed for younger women.

  “This is what Mummy has been up to,” Gogo said, irritated and waving at the racks of garments. Her hair was pinned up in soft waves
instead of loose on her shoulders, and she wore a neat and subdued suit. Not a Schiaparelli suit, I noticed.

  “My God,” she sighed, sorting through a section of afternoon clothes and pulling out a girlish white dress printed with puppies. “Puppies!”

  A salesgirl saw us and came over. “It’s for the young girl,” she explained, admonishing us. “Pretty things to wear before she’s ready for black silk and the more sophisticated styles for married women.”

  “Really?” Gogo pretended to be hearing this for the first time and didn’t reveal that the designer was her own mother.

  “There’s also a trousseau collection,” the saleslady said. “White lace, for when the junior miss marries. Very tasteful.”

  Gogo and I bit our lips to keep back the comments and the laughter.

  “And I’m to help advertise it,” Gogo complained when we were back out on crowded Fifth Avenue. “She’s taken out ads, and telling some people I designed it. There will be photographs of me playing canasta at home in my ‘gay and cozy’ New York apartment.”

  In the darkening street bustling with honking, swerving traffic, we waited for Gogo’s car and driver to arrive, and my bus.

  “What news does your mother send?” I asked, wishing I had worn more comfortable shoes. I had a long walk uptown, back home.

  “There are swastikas all over Paris and the only people who can afford to buy anything are the German officers. They are emptying the shelves. It’s impossible to get supplies or food. She set up a workshop in Biarritz and right now she’s in Portugal, planning a trip to New York. But I will be married before she gets here.”

  “Gogo! I take it it’s the young man we met in the Genoa hotel, the one who was so talented at flagging down distracted bartenders, among other things.”

  “The date is set. Soon. I’m not waiting for Mummy to schedule me into her travel and promotion plans.”

  Powerful women often have a narcissistic side to them; they suck the air out of the room and, when it comes to daughters, can be even more overbearing than they are with other women. I couldn’t blame Gogo for wanting to plan her own wedding, to do things in a quiet and calm manner that would have been foreign to the flamboyant Elsa Schiaparelli.

  “Have you heard anything about Ania?” I asked. Gogo’s driver had pulled up, and she was climbing into the back.

  “Not a word. Not about Otto, either. Was that his name? Lily, if you buy any of those clothes from the junior miss collection I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “I’m too old for them, and I’m on the broke side. I don’t think I’ll be buying any new clothes for a while.” Otto’s name hung in the air between us, between Gogo’s disapproval and my longing.

  * * *

  • • •

  Gogo was true to her word and was married before her mother arrived in New York in July. It was a small wedding, as society weddings went. I was not invited and that felt right, somehow. Paris was behind us. We were going separate ways.

  New York, too, was become divisive. Bundists marched regularly in Times Square, demanding that all “foreigners” be sent back to their own countries and no more admitted; New York had its own share of Nazi sympathizers and American Aryanists. I couldn’t begin to imagine the various strings Schiap had pulled, the contacts she had used.

  I heard about her arrival not from Schiap herself or Gogo but from the newspapers announcing the designer’s arrival.

  Elsa Schiaparelli arrived with four suitcases of her own clothes and a fortune in jewelry—wealthy women during the war traveled with their jewels sewn into the hems of their coats because one never knew when a bank might be closed, a home looted. But she didn’t arrive with the new collection she had hoped to show in New York. The boat carrying it had been torpedoed.

  After a quick reunion with Gogo and meeting her new son-in-law—I was glad I wasn’t there for that quarrel: “You got married without your mother?”—and after a harried flock of seamstresses replicated the collection that had been sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, Schiap set off on a lecture tour of the country, telling women what they should wear. She showed a new collection of sixteen designs, very conservative coats and suits. Schiap was changing; war does that.

  I followed the tour in the fashion magazines and newspapers, reading passages aloud to the Red Cross volunteers as we packed boxes. When the collection was shown in New York I went to the Schiaparelli lecture at Town Hall and watched from afar as the models strutted the stage and a beaming but exhausted-looking Schiap described the outfits, her microphone sometimes giving out piercing squeaks. The stage lights accented the shadows around her eyes. I remembered the first day I had met her, in the boutique in the Place Vendôme, when she had looked like a medieval saint to me, all shadows and glitter, and authority.

  When the showing was finished, I went backstage, one of dozens of admirers who had found my way through the wings and backstairs where Schiap held court, surrounded by models and photographers and journalists. Schiap was in midsentence when I forced my way through the circle of store buyers surrounding her, and she threw up her arms, yelled with joy, and rushed at me.

  “I was hoping you would come,” she said. “Oh, no. What are you wearing? Did I teach you nothing?”

  Flashbulbs went off, zing, zing, zing, blinding me.

  Schiap wore a simple black dress and a white turban and very little makeup. She looked subdued and uncomfortable. “I’m adapting to the States,” she said, “more practical styles for women who don’t have time to spend fifteen minutes every morning just tweezing their eyebrows.”

  She gave me a cool glance. “Those simple skirts and blouses never suited you. You need more sophisticated clothes. Meet me in my suite, in an hour. I’m at the Astor.”

  An hour later, sitting with Schiap, drinking champagne in the middle of the afternoon and eating pâté on toast points, enjoying the familiar amber and rose of her perfume, the sound of her voice, I thought again how much I missed the distinctive smell of baker’s yeast and exhaust fumes and expensive perfumes, the strong smell of Bettina’s cigarettes, the eye-rolling of the vendeuses and seamstresses when Schiap grumbled at them. Otto.

  “Don’t worry,” Schiap said, reading my thoughts. “Paris will be there when you go back. For me, too. Traveling is becoming too hard. Even for me.” She grinned an unspoken admittance that favors had been requested and returned, visas granted when no one else could get them, first-class staterooms and rare airplane seats when even princes were traveling second class if they could travel at all.

  We looked out the window at the grimy sky, wondering.

  “Elsie is still in Versailles,” Schiap said. “She refuses to give up her place, for fear the Germans will occupy it. I have people living in the rue de Berri house for the same reason. If it’s empty, the Germans will occupy it. And I have some bad news for you.”

  I lit a cigarette and braced myself. There were so many possibilities for bad news, that year.

  “My house has been safe,” Schiap said, shrugging. “It is under diplomatic protection—a friend of a friend helped arrange it—so nothing has been looted, though swastikas have been painted all over rue de Berri. Imagine. The German flag flying on the Arc de Triomphe. I can’t stand to think of it. But I couldn’t have your paintings shipped over. The paperwork was impossible.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get them. After the war.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “After the war. Besides, the Germans wouldn’t take them. They don’t like abstract work.”

  We stared out the window some more, the silence becoming a little uncomfortable. I could see that her thoughts were racing in many directions and she was eager to get on to the next item for the day, whatever that was. And soon I would have to do the marketing for Mrs. Taurasi, before the shops closed.

  “It’s good that you left when you did,” Schiap said. “Some of
the Americans who stayed in Paris are now interned in Germany. There are rumors about how you knew exactly when to leave. They think I had information.”

  I couldn’t tell her that the warning phone call had been from Otto. I had promised not to, and I knew what he had done could lead to trouble for him. I changed the subject.

  “I like your new designs, especially that day dress with the secret hem that can be turned into a full-length gown for evening.”

  “It is very clever,” Schiap agreed with her usual modesty. “Two dresses for the price of one, two dresses with just a little more material than I would have used for one dress. Oh, Lily, it is hard in Paris. So many textile shops doing nothing but turning out woolens for army uniforms. No more handmade buttons, or silk. Silk is for parachutes now.” She shook her head and sighed. “So many people out of work. And you should see the way women are dressing. Ridiculous hats, joke hats, and the Germans buy the joke hats because they think they are French. I heard some officer bought a hat with a painted tin can on it.”

  It was, I thought, diplomatic of me not to point out that she had once made a hat shaped like a telephone, and one like a high heel. “Your boutique is still open. That was a kindness to your workers.”

  “An artist must do what she was put on this earth to do. I do not give up and go into my little safe cocoon.”

  “You mean Chanel.”

  “I do mean Chanel. Closing shop and putting all those poor girls out of work. She’s still making a fortune, you know, just selling perfume. The German officers are buying No. 5 by the crate. She says it is just business, but then why did she close her boutique? She is too friendly with the Germans. Did you know that the Germans plan to move the French fashion industry to Berlin? Over my dead body. When this lecture tour is finished, I return once more to Paris. Jeanne Lanvin, Nina Ricci, Marcel Rochas, and Lucien Lelong, we have agreed, we will make sure the fashion industry stays in Paris.”