I hadn’t seen him in nearly six years. I had tried to forget him, planned to forget him. But sitting there, across from him, a longing and a tenderness surged in me that I had tried to bury during the war years. It was more than love. It was history. Our history, our brief hours together in Paris, the night at La Pausa, sitting side by side at the Louvre. He had been forced onto the wrong side of that history and had paid a price.
“Otto,” I said.
He looked up. “Lily.” His voice was empty of emotion. “You shouldn’t have come.”
“Yes, I should have. I would have come sooner, if I had known. This is how I found you.” I took the magazine out of my purse and showed him the photo. The guard tapped on the window. No exchange of objects, he mouthed through the glass. I kept the magazine on my side of the desk and opened it to the photo.
Otto leaned over without touching it. “My eyes have gone off. I need glasses.” He wouldn’t look at me.
“We’ll get them. Soon as you’re out.”
“Soon as I’m out, I’ll be repatriated back to Germany. Imagine how they’ll welcome me. I’m listed as a deserter, you know. A coward.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I thought the war was over for us, that we could go back in time, begin where we had left off. I had thought I would come here, to Fort Devens, throw my arms around Otto, and that would be the beginning of the rest of our story. Easy as that. As soon as I had seen him sit down at the desk between us, I knew that was supposed to be our ending, the resolution of everything that had led us to this moment. But it would not be that easy. Zeno’s paradox. If everything is possible, then the opposite may be true. Nothing is possible.
“Otto,” I asked him, “do you love me?”
He still wouldn’t look at me. But he moved his hands a few inches closer to mine, and I thought of Charlie and Ania, sitting in Schiap’s Boutique Fantastique, holding hands under the table where no one could see. I put my hand under the table. So did Otto. His fingers were warm and strong, and they clung to mine.
“I’ll think of a way,” I said.
“Von Dincklage had me transferred to a penal battalion,” he said. “The 999, the German North Africa corps. A penal corps. The worst the army had to offer.”
“He found out you gave me that warning, didn’t he?”
Otto didn’t answer, and that was answer enough.
“If you want me, I’ll find a way,” I promised. “Come back to me. Please. Come back to me.”
We were still holding hands under the desk, leaning toward each other. The guard outside was watching. But he turned his back to the door, and we leaned closer. Closer. Otto looked at me, and I saw in his eyes some of my own feelings. That numbed emptiness in his expression was being replaced by the memory of the time we had together in France, as brief as it had been.
We leaned even closer and pressed our foreheads together for consolation, as a promise, fingers entwined, and it was like the last application of color to the canvas, the moment when you know this is what had been waiting to be completed, this is what had existed somewhere, even if just in your imagination.
You have brought it into the richness of being. Layer upon layer of color, and when the final one is applied, gold bursts upon the back of your closed eyelids.
A quick touch of mouth to mouth and then, tap, tap. The guard grinned through the window, shaking his finger at us.
“Time’s up,” he said. Otto and I pressed our hands together even more tightly, and then let go. But just for the moment. And when I turned to go, giving him a glance over my shoulder, he smiled. I knew my future was in that smile. He would go back to Germany, because he must. And then, I would bring him back. To me.
• TWENTY-ONE •
Paris, 1954
Meet me at Café les Deux Magots. June 9. Two pm. Charlie.
Of all the fragile things in life that survive, a scrap of paper is perhaps one of the least likely. More tender even than flesh, paper rips, tears, burns, crumbles. Yet that scrap from Charlie had survived.
After I went home from the gallery I showed Schiap’s telegram to Otto. Otto went to the old bureau we used as a desk and took out the telegram from Charlie, saved all those years. I had saved as much of him as I could.
“You should go,” Otto said. “You need a vacation. And Charlie would have wanted you to, I think.” His sleeves were rolled up, and his hands, those beautiful pianist’s hands, were covered with soap suds from the kitchen sink. We had been married six years by then, as soon as Otto’s paperwork was cleared and he was allowed to travel again. I was working hard, about to have my first one-woman show in the Rosenberg Gallery. Otto was working long hours teaching piano and playing in jazz clubs in the evening. I had sold the large apartment in the brownstone and Otto and I had moved downtown, to a small apartment on Bleecker Street, where our neighbors were artists and musicians and poets and people who, if they thought anything of Otto’s German accent, kept it to themselves.
Our building was short and squat, and when we stood in front of the window, his head resting on top of mine, his arms around me, there was no sense of flight, as there had been at the window in Montmartre, but more of rootedness, like our feet could sink into the floor and we would grow branches and leaves in all the primary colors and the rainbow that forms from them.
We were busy those years after the war, building new lives on top of the older destructions. Every once in a while, in a rare free moment, I would read a fashion magazine, looking for word of Schiap. She was rarely mentioned anymore. Coco was mentioned sometimes, but fashion now was mostly Christian Dior and the New Look, the long, full skirts and pinched waists and jackets so tight that women could barely move their arms. I thought of Schiap’s dresses, feminine but whimsical, close to the body but easy to move in.
Schiap, fighting back against the new styles, surrendering to the need for less expensive clothing after the war, had opened a branch of her company on Seventh Avenue in New York, selling mass-produced suits and dresses. The jackets were short and had pockets that looked like camera cases; the fur linings and trimmings were dyed bright colors; the coats were shaped like tents and the lingerie was accented with shocking pink.
The styles were too bizarre for a generation of women who had survived war and loss and deprivation. The Profile hat, black felt cut into the shape of the wearer’s own profile and worn like a mask across half the face, was thought a joke, not a work of art. Sunglasses made of straw and dresses with armholes that fell all the way to the waist were openly laughed at. Whimsy had been possible before the war; after, we were all more serious.
Times had changed. Schiap hadn’t, at least not enough.
“You go,” Otto said. “I don’t want to go back to Europe. I’ll stay here with Charlie.” We had named our son after my brother. Charlie, little Charlie, was five, and as much as I loved Otto, I hadn’t known the full force of love, its complete spectrum, until I had held him in my arms.
“Just for a week,” I said. “You’ll be okay without me?”
“We’ll have ice cream every night,” Otto said.
“Maybe someone will know what happened to Ania.” In all those years, I hadn’t heard a word from or about Ania, after the news of her arrest. So many people had been lost in the war. Ania, like Charlie, was one of the people I thought of late at night, when it seemed everyone was sleeping but me.
* * *
• • •
I flew for the first time, crossing the ocean in hours instead of days, as we had during the steamer ship crossings. In the Paris airport, as in New York, the women of fashion were all dressed in the New Look, with immense skirts that took up the entire sidewalk, and tiny brimmed hats with veils and flowers. White gloves. High heels.
After going through customs at Orly, I took a cab straight to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Café les Deux Magots.
It was a cold
December day, unlike the lovely June day when I met Charlie in Paris, and I was the only customer sitting outside. I had looked quickly indoors to make sure the two Chinese figures were still there, keeping watch—they were—and then decided to sit outside, remembering the day when Charlie had pulled up to the curb in Ania’s blue Isotta.
I ordered a Pernod and closed my eyes, imagining myself as I had been those years before, a young widow not knowing how to move forward, feeling guilty and ecstatic at the same time for being in Paris, waiting for Charlie to arrive. Behind my closed eyelids I saw my brother, the baby-blue automobile, the beautiful Ania.
“Another Pernod, madame?”
Could it be the same waiter, older, heavier but with that same knowing look in his eye?
I still hadn’t finished the first. Had I really drunk three of these, the day I waited for Charlie?
“No, thanks,” I said. I needed to keep my wits about me, and my head already felt detached from my body; the world was whirling. Desynchronosis, Otto, who had flown back from Germany six years before, had warned me. Caused by traveling too quickly from west to east, or vice versa, a word invented after people began flying rather than traveling by steamship. My body thought it was still in New York, still sound asleep in the middle of the night.
Even with my head spinning, though, even with the changes caused by the war, Paris was Paris. The city of light, of color. There were more cars, newer models, and the pace seemed faster and noisier, just like in New York. No more donkeys pulling vegetable carts.
I left the drink half-finished and walked along the pewter Seine, trying to clear my head, before going to my hotel. At Otto’s suggestion, I was splurging on a room at the Ritz this time, not Oscar Wilde’s favorite little hotel on the Left Bank. A cold wind blew off the river, and I huddled deeply into my coat, turning up the collar.
As I walked I tried to imagine seeing the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Élysées, the swastika flying in the Place de la Concorde, the tanks battling in the Luxembourg Gardens, seeing what I had not been there to see. There was plenty left that didn’t have to be imagined about the occupation of Paris, the bullet holes pockmarking the buildings lining the Boulevard Saint-Michel, splotches of paint covering anti-Nazi graffiti on doors.
Paris was still recovering from the war, and would be for a long while. Lights were dimmer, restaurant portions smaller. But it was still Paris, would always be Paris, with bare chestnut and plane trees lining the boulevards, pigeons cooing on the cobbles, the smell of baking bread and coffee filtering out from cafés and bakeries, the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance.
When I crossed the Place Vendôme I almost covered my eyes, the memories were coming so fast. Barely looking, I went through the hotel’s purposely small lobby and checked in quickly, thinking that I needed to get to a bed before I collapsed.
“Yes?” the porter asked, unlocking the door for me. “Is the room to your satisfaction?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Better than fine. Grand.” I tipped him, unbuttoned my coat, and fell onto the bed.
* * *
• • •
I woke up four hours later, refreshed but my head still feeling as if it were stuffed with cotton. Time, I told myself. Time to go see Schiap.
I dressed carefully in a new suit bought for the trip, a dark blue wool with a semifull gathered skirt and fitted jacket. I wore black shoes, black gloves, black hat. How boring, I thought, studying myself in the mirror, longing for the long turquoise gloves, the pink-and-gray-striped high-heeled boots, the jackets heavy with sequined embroidery, that Schiap had shown before the war. Quoth the raven, I thought. The world had become a more serious place.
The Boutique Fantastique on the Place Vendôme was doing only lackluster business when I arrived. The doors and windowsills had been newly painted and the shop gleamed, but the customers, women in their huge skirts and tight jackets, with dazed-looking men following close behind, wandered from display to display, case to case, frowning.
“Isn’t this too strange?” I heard one woman quip to another as they examined a jacket of shocking pink with black beaded embroidery.
“Is that a bustle?” her friend asked in disbelief.
I went up the stairs, ignoring the salesgirl who offered to help me. “I know my way,” I said. “I’ve been here before.”
“My dear.” Schiap rose from her desk to greet me, after I had knocked on that familiar wooden door to her office.
We stood and stared at each other for a long time, remembering.
The first time I had seen her, I’d been with Charlie, and Schiap came rushing into her boutique, her arms full of fabric samples. All the vendeuses had snapped to attention but Schiap had ignored the other customers and gone straight to Ania. Ania, whose husband promptly paid all her bills, a couturier’s delight.
Schiap, now sixty-four, seemed even tinier than she had that day, despite her high-heeled shoes. She didn’t slump—no woman of fashion would let her posture dissolve into lazy rounded shoulders or curled spines—but she looked as if time itself were wearing her away, days and years become waves that diminish the shores that are our bodies. Her dark hair had some silver in it; her heavy-lidded black eyes were not as bright. She wore her pearls doubled around her throat, not around her wrist, as she once had. Like me, she was dressed in dark colors.
“You wanted to see me?” I asked. Schiap laughed. It was if I had been away for the weekend, not for years.
“Yes, my dear. You’ve heard, haven’t you, that I’m going out of business. Bankrupt. Retiring.”
I thought at first it was one of her jokes. But she had stopped laughing.
“No,” I said. “I hadn’t heard. I don’t follow the fashion news anymore. Why a telegram? I thought something awful had happened. You could have called!”
“You know I hate the phone. And if I called, you would have had a choice. You wouldn’t have come, would you?”
“No,” I admitted. “I’m busy. I’m having a show. My first one-person exhibit.”
“You were about to be in a show when you left Paris, as I recall. Congratulations. But come. You must have first choice before the vultures arrive for the pickings.”
“I can’t believe you are closing down,” I said. “Impossible.”
“All too possible. And necessary. I’m bleeding out money and need to close. I thought you might want to take some things back with you.”
The great Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel’s most formidable rival, was calling it quits.
I went to the window and looked out at the Place Vendôme, at the huge column with Napoleon standing on top. He had been a kind of patron saint for her. She would share his fate. Exile, not from France or Paris but from the center of the fashion world, the Place Vendôme.
“He looks better without those sandbags all around him, doesn’t he?” Schiap asked.
“Much better. How is Gogo?” I asked. “And her babies?” By then, Gogo had two daughters, Marisa and Berry. I didn’t see her often in New York anymore . . . the distance between us that started during the war continued. She had her life and I had mine, and we met only three times a year, for a Christmas brunch and on our birthdays.
“Well. And the babies are beautiful, of course. And you are married, with a baby of your own, she tells me.”
“A good marriage. To a good man,” I said. “You met him. Otto, the driver.”
“The German. That can’t have been easy. Here, you would have been called a collaborator and had your head shaven, carrying on with him like that.”
“He was the one that got me, and Gogo, out of Paris in time.”
“Well, give him my regards.”
“You know, Elsa . . .” Why had I done that, switched from Schiap to Elsa? Just to remind myself how different things were, as if I didn’t live the difference, the change, with every breath. “Elsa, I kee
p expecting Bettina to come charging in and yell at me for being late with a display painting.”
Elsa laughed. “She’s still around. We get together once in a while. Did you know her husband was the ambassador of Vichy to the Soviet Union? After the war he was tried as a collaborator but acquitted.” Elsa sighed and lit a cigarette. “So many people were put on trial.”
A heavy silence fell around us as we both realized, tried to accustom ourselves to, the fact that now, now she was closing business. Paris without Schiaparelli. Incredible. But bankrupt is bankrupt.
“I loved that little cabinet.” I pointed at the built-in storage Schiap had for her buttons and trimmings, dozens of little drawers, all carefully labeled. “It was like a treasure chest.”
“Almost as good as a trunk in the attic,” Elsa agreed. “But come, I’ll show you Elsa Schiaparelli’s last collection.”
“Truly the last?”
Schiap grinned. “I have built a house in Tunisia with the most comfortable hammock and view of the sea,” she said. “I want to catch up on my reading. And I will spend time with Gogo and my grandchildren.”
Schiap showed me around the salon as if it were the first time, the downstairs boutique where gloves and sweaters and handbags were sold, the upstairs showing room and fitting rooms. The last collection she had titled “Fluid Line,” and it was just that . . . dresses with lines and materials fluid as water, elegant pieces that would be easy to wear, seductive to the viewer, and always with a touch of humor to them.
She gave me one of the dresses, a slender orange gown with a bustle attached. “You won’t have time to have it fitted here,” she said. “Take it home to your tailor.”
“Of course,” I said, not admitting that in New York I didn’t have a tailor, in New York I only wore ready-to-wear. I would find a tailor, if just for this one dress.
“Do you ever hear from Ania?” I asked, hoping.
“No. Haven’t seen her since the war, since before she was arrested.”
The Last Collection Page 31