I wondered what Coco had thought of this, if she had known in advance the plans the Germans had made for the relocation of the French fashion houses; if that had been part of her own reason for closing shop.
Schiap lit a cigarette and shrugged. “She’s living at the Ritz. With her German, von Dincklage. There are rumors about her, about whether or not she’s collaborating vertically as well as horizontally.” That was what they were calling Frenchwomen who slept with the invading Germans: horizontal collaborators. And those who collaborated standing up . . . they were spies as well as traitors.
Schiap’s face hardened, and her lipstick flamed on her pale skin like a scarlet wound. She was remembering the Durst ball, the night when Coco danced Schiap into the flames.
She poured the last of our reunion champagne into our glasses. “I know you miss it, but it is dismal now, in Paris. All the good hotels are filled with German officers, and the restaurants, too. No one else can afford to eat out; instead they eat potatoes and rutabagas, if they can even find those. Every day the soldiers march down the Champs-Élysées playing that terrible music.” Schiap shivered with disgust.
“I will spend more time in New York now,” she said. “While the war lasts. Maybe I will become a grandmother soon, who knows. I would like that. And I’m already designing a line of resort wear, for Florida. These American women, so much money!”
“Not all of them.” I thought of Susan, who stood next to me in the box-packing line at the Red Cross center, who lived with her mother and four sisters in a two-bedroom walkup in Yorkville, over a polka bar.
“Do you have any news of Ania?” I’d been afraid to ask.
“None. I’m sure Ania had the sense to leave Paris. She was a smart woman, clever, all those languages, and an excellent musician, I heard, though she stopped playing when she got married. Are you ill, Lily? What’s wrong?”
Being close to Schiap, to Paris through Schiap, the way we sometimes lapsed into a French phrase, missing Ania . . . it all made the ache inside me for Otto so strong I leaned my forehead into my hand.
There was a tremendous blare outside, a noise so loud that the vase on the table vibrated. Schiap jumped in alarm.
“They are just testing the sirens,” I said, already used to the frequent test alarms. “If it were a true air raid they would blast them more than once. And they have put plane spotters on top of the skyscrapers, looking for German fighter planes.”
“Ah, well. The war goes everywhere.”
She stood, and so did I. We hugged each other and promised to get together again soon. We wouldn’t, and we both knew it. Paris was behind us.
* * *
• • •
The greatest advantage of being home in New York was being with Charlie. He was working terrible hours but I would wait for him to come home and we would sit, talking, remembering, listening to the radio, following the war news from Europe, as summer turned to autumn, and then winter.
“I should enlist soon,” he said one night.
“No. We won’t enter the war, will we?”
“We should,” Charlie said. “I don’t know what we’re waiting for. Why do we have people checking the East River for German U-boats? It will come to our shores, as well.”
The next Sunday, I was at a concert at Carnegie Hall, imagining Otto there next to me, listening to the music, when I heard the announcement. Arthur Rubinstein had just finished Chopin’s E minor piano concerto, and after the deafening applause, the announcer came on stage, grim-faced. He had to clear his throat several times before he could get the words out.
The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. America was at war.
Everyone knows where they were, what they were doing, when that announcement was made. Charlie was with Patty, wondering why he felt so numb, so only half alive, when he was with her. I was alone at a concert, wondering if Otto would have enjoyed the music, when I realized Otto was my enemy twice over, a German at war now with both France and America.
Let’s fly away, he had said, standing in my Montmartre window. Away from everything and everyone.
* * *
• • •
“I’ll be with the medical corps. I’ll be completely safe,” Charlie said, when he enlisted. “Besides, they’ll start calling us up any day. Why wait?”
Concentrate, I ordered myself. Something important, something terrible, is happening here. But I didn’t want to concentrate, didn’t want Charlie to say any more.
Ticking. The grandfather clock in the hall. I realized how much I hated ticking clocks, that reminder of time already lost even when we are trying to measure it. I wanted Charlie to go back ten seconds and unspeak those words. He was all I had left.
Mrs. Taurasi put down the bowl of mashed potatoes she’d been serving and sat heavily in a chair, as if she’d been pushed. “No,” she said. She’d grown fond of Charlie—all women did—and as much as she detested Mussolini, she did not want Charlie going over to fight him; that much was clear in her stricken face.
I rose from the table and went to stand by the window. The trees were bare, stripped by the hard season, and snow fell outside the window, white flakes so large you could see the six sides that every flake is supposed to have. The night outside the window was all whites and beiges, grays and browns, a color scheme Coco Chanel would have approved. Underneath our spindly Christmas tree a box of ornaments waited to be strung and hung on the green branches.
“Close the curtain, Lily,” Charlie said.
We sat in the darkness of blackout, the air in the room thick with the memories of those we missed, those not with us, the faint smell of green pine coming from the untrimmed Christmas tree.
“If only I knew where Ania is,” he said, gulping back two inches of whiskey in one swallow. “She’s probably been arrested by now. I bet she never left Paris. They would have found out she’s Jewish, they’d have the papers, her birth certificate and passport.”
Ania, in a labor camp.
“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe she’s in hiding. Safe somewhere. With her daughter.”
I sat next to Charlie. I put my arm around his shoulder and felt him turning to stone as he struggled with the grief. I tried to match my own memories of Ania with what might be happening to her, and I could not. Our first afternoon together, at Schiap’s boutique, felt a hundred years away, a lifetime away.
The radio was still on, and a pianist was playing Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Ania had told me once she loved playing Schubert when she was a young girl, when she still lived with her father in Warsaw and they had a baby grand in the sitting room.
“Is that why you enlisted, Charlie? Because of Ania?”
Charlie was sitting bolt upright the way people do when they are afraid they will collapse completely. “No. Not completely. But if I don’t enlist I will be drafted, sooner or later. Better to make my own choice. In fact, I’d rather be in the army than marry Patty.” He tried to laugh, but it sounded more like he had choked on something.
“Promise me you’ll come home. Safe and sound.”
“You know I can’t do that. But damn if I won’t do my best. Oh, Lily, don’t cry. I’ll be fine.”
• NINETEEN •
New York began to transform itself as Paris had. The city was noisy and bright during the day, but there was a current of desperation behind the laughter. The bars were full; people drank a little too much, too often. Young men in uniform, new to the city, walked four abreast down Fifth Avenue, gawking, catcalling the young salesgirls on their lunch breaks. The nights were dark and quiet. If you went out after dark your footsteps echoed. People bumped into each other, felt their way home by trailing their hands along buildings during the unlit night.
During the day all the colors had a tint of brown or gray to them, yellow turning to ocher, blue to slate, red to chestnut, as if getting ready for the black of mo
urning. Charlie finished training that winter and was sent overseas. There was a great demand for medical officers; they didn’t waste any time getting them into Europe or the Pacific fronts. He didn’t want me to go the station with him.
Beloved Charlie, standing in the street below and waving up at me as I watched him from the window. As Otto had done.
I waved back and remembered Charlie in his dashing scarf and driving goggles, driving up to the curb outside the Café les Deux Magots, Charlie looking forward to an afternoon with his sister and his girl, Ania. I wished I had been able to capture that moment in amber.
My brother disappeared into the maw of war, and every time I thought of him, I touched something made of iron, for luck, as Schiap used to do. I had nightmares of Charlie and Otto confronting each other on a battlefield, each trying to kill the other without knowing that they were the two most important people in the world to me. But he’s a medic, I told myself over and over. He’ll be safe and he’s there to heal, not to kill. He’ll be fine, he promised me.
Gogo’s husband enlisted, too, and she, just married, couldn’t stand the boredom of waiting, the sleepless nights of worry, the fretting and pacing.
“I’m joining the American Red Cross,” she told me during one of our Saturday lunches at Horn and Hardart. “I’m going to India, to open a service club and put on little amateur theatricals for the servicemen. Mummy actually suggested it. She thought it might be fun. And safe. I think she’s afraid that New York will be bombed next.”
Schiap was traveling nonstop all over the United States and the big cities of South America as well, giving lectures on how women should dress during wartime, the importance of maintaining morale through dressing as well as possible. She was still, always, a businesswoman, and clothes must be promoted.
Horn and Hardart was full that day with all women and children, like most of New York, most of the country. When soldiers and sailors on leave did come in, all eyes turned in their direction, hopeful eyes, patient eyes, fearful eyes. And then we looked at our plates, slightly shamed to be so covetous of some other woman’s brother, someone else’s husband.
“I’ll think Mummy will be glad to have me busy, doing something. I can’t stand this waiting, this limbo.” She was gone two weeks later.
Fold and pack. Pack and fold, knit. My socks never improved, so I stuck with scarves and woolen mufflers. Days of work, dark nights of solitude and darkness, me and the radio. After working all day I spent the evenings pouring coffee and tea at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Club, anything to keep busy. The war seemed like a huge black wolf, trailing me from country to country. I did what we all did in those days: worked and waited. Put everything on hold. I hadn’t held a paintbrush since I left Paris. My fingers ached from packing boxes and knitting, packing boxes and knitting.
* * *
• • •
Gogo was back, two months later. The Red Cross women had been sent to a jungle in Bengal, where Gogo had immediately become ill with dysentery. Tiny Gogo returned thin as a rail, her beautiful long brown hair cropped short and growing in curly and wild.
She came back ill but she came back, and that seemed an omen to me. If Gogo came back, so could Charlie. Otto, too. If Schiap’s daughter returned, so could my loved ones.
But they didn’t.
In August, I was sitting in the dark, fanning myself in front of the radio, listening to Jack Benny, when the doorbell rang. A boy, too young to fight, stood there, shy and bent under the load of his heavy satchel. His green uniform was neatly pressed, but he had wrapped bands around the ankles so his pants wouldn’t get caught in the bicycle chain.
“Telegram, ma’am,” he said in a voice not yet out of the higher notes of childhood.
I almost said, No, I don’t want it. Take it back. But of course you can’t do that. You must put out your hand, take the envelope from the boy delivering it. I almost forgot to tip him his nickel.
I sat in the dark with it for a long while, holding it softly, gently, thinking perhaps if I waited long enough the news in it would change. But of course they didn’t send telegrams with good news in them.
I sat numb, staring at the gray-and-yellow wallpaper in the corner of the sitting room where Charlie, little Charlie, had once drawn a horse with Mother’s nail polish. Most of it had been scraped away, but the outline was still there, a red clumsy horse, rearing up. I opened the telegram an hour after it had arrived, put it off as long as I could, because I knew when I opened it I would be alone, even more alone than I had been after Allen’s death, because there was no one to see me through this one.
The Battle of Edson’s Ridge. Guadalcanal. Pacific Theater. Words. Just words. All that I understood was that Charlie had been killed.
Charlie with his blue eyes changing from deep sapphire to pale aquamarine depending on his mood, his blond hair white as a halo. Charlie, my little brother, teasing, tormenting. Charlie, who had sent the telegram: Come to Paris. Café les Deux Magots. Charlie, leaves pinned to his label at the Bal de la Forêt, Charlie climbing into the baby-blue Isotta, next to Ania. They kiss and stick their hands up in the air, laughing and waving good-bye.
I felt as if there were no ground beneath me, nothing holding me up except my body’s own stubborn unwillingness to crumple.
For weeks after getting the telegram I had the same dream. I’ve been told he’s dead, but then one day I’m walking in the Place Vendôme and there he is, with Ania in the baby-blue Isotta, pulling away from the curb, waving.
And when you can no longer deny the reality of the telegram, the bargaining begins. It was a mistake, you tell yourself. They didn’t identify the body correctly. You wait for the next telegram, saying it was a mistake. And it doesn’t come. Still, you bargain. I won’t cry, because that will make it real. When I tell my Red Cross friend Susan about the telegram, I’ll tell her, of course, it’s a mistake.
* * *
• • •
But it wasn’t a mistake. Charlie was dead.
And, what I learned months later, from a headline in the New York Times about the Vél d’Hiv disaster in Paris, when all Jews still in Paris were arrested and deported to camps: Charlie had been killed the same month Ania had been arrested and sent to a camp.
Grief becomes the gesso on the canvas over which other colors must eventually be applied. I began to paint, finding in the familiar movements and smells the absorption and release no other activity brought. When I painted, I felt maybe Charlie was close by. Otto was near, and Ania, too, we all four together, safe for as long as I painted, and when I was exhausted and put the brushes back down, I wept again.
One day, at the Metropolitan Museum where I’d gone to study Correggio’s painting of Saint Peter, wondering how the artist had used so much yellow yet kept the glow subdued, a man stood behind me and cleared his throat.
I turned in annoyance, but the irritation at being disturbed turned to pleasure. It was Paul Rosenberg.
“Not quite your style, I think,” he said. “As I recall, you had moved into abstraction.”
“I study the colors. All the old masters have blue, red, and yellow, don’t they? The primaries. Mr. Rosenberg, how good to see you!”
I would have hugged him, except the formality of his three-piece suit, those intimidating black eyebrows, held me back. Instead, we shook hands politely, somewhat stiffly. Paris felt a lifetime ago, but when I looked at him I smelled croissants from the corner bakery, roasting chestnuts, heard the hot jazz playing at Bricktop’s.
He looked older, his lean figure even leaner, his face plowed with deep furrows.
“Did you get your collection moved to safety?” I asked.
“Most, not all. Did you get your paintings to safety?”
“They are still in Paris.” I shrugged.
He sighed and folded his hands in front of his stomach, the way mourners do. “Too bad. I especial
ly liked the blue one. Are you painting now?”
“I try. It’s difficult.”
He studied me from under those thick black eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” he said, understanding that I wasn’t just referring to the difficulty of finding art supplies and time.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your musings on Correggio. When you’re ready, come see me. I’ve opened a gallery on Madison.” When we shook hands again for parting, he gave me a little pat on the shoulder as well.
“It was hard, wasn’t it?” he said. “Leaving Paris. Poor Paris.”
* * *
• • •
This was how I survived the war: I grieved. I painted. I packed unending boxes for the Red Cross, hoping against hope that one might end up wherever Ania had been taken, that she was still alive, and Otto, too. Gogo and I met more and more infrequently; she had her own circle of friends, more stylish people who were named in the society pages, other young wives waiting for their husbands to come home from the war.
When you can do nothing but wait and grieve and fear, colors change. Yellow becomes a mocking thing, a bird cawing annoyingly from a treetop, a false sun that gives neither warmth nor light.
* * *
• • •
And then, it ended. In April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker and the German army surrendered.
There were parades everywhere all that week, official ones and spontaneous ones, music blaring from loudspeakers, confetti tossed from windows, and people hugging, kissing, dancing. Times Square was one giant embrace that lasted for days, full of lovers reuniting, strangers bumping into each other, the entire city dancing, celebrating. The war in Europe was over.
Susan’s young man came home soon after. We were still packing boxes for the Red Cross because it would be another year or so before all the prisoners were brought home, before the camps would be emptied of those who had somehow survived. Susan shook all over with fear and joy, wondering if he had changed, if she had changed, if the future they had promised each other was still there waiting for them.
The Last Collection Page 29