“I wondered if she’d been released or . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
As we passed through the shop, Schiap touched everything with her fingertips, as if saying farewell. She was.
“Have you noticed,” she asked, “all the new designers—they’re men, aren’t they? I think an era is ending.”
She grew fierce. “I will pay every penny I owe the creditors,” she said. “The perfumes still sell. I will finish with honor. And what else do you do, there in New York? You must have a very busy life, but it can’t be all work, all changing nappies.”
“I do volunteer work with a new organization called the March of Dimes. We raise money for children with infantile paralysis, and for research. Our fund-raiser this spring will be a fashion show. All the top models have agreed to be there, and many designers . . .” My voice trailed off.
“Not me. I will be in my hammock. But this is a good thing you do. When I think of how little Gogo suffered . . .” Her voice trailed off.
We stood at the window, looking out at the Place Vendôme, and the column with Napoleon posed on top, once again being harassed by pigeons, but there were no sandbags at the base. “When I am in New York, I’ll call,” Schiap said. I knew she wouldn’t.
“Come over for supper,” I said, playing the game. “I’ll make spaghetti. I remember your recipe.”
She took my hand and gripped it tightly. “Courage,” she said both to me and herself. “Napoleon . . .”
“And all his little soldiers.” It was the best way to tell her I would never forget her. She had been a friend, a good friend, and at moments had filled some of the empty places my mother’s death had left.
On the way out the door, she called over her shoulder, as if casually, “Stop in and say hello to Coco. She’s back in Paris. Returned, finally, from Switzerland. And somewhat lonely, I imagine. Show her the evening gown I gave you. She’ll die of jealousy. Oh, and something else. Wait a minute.”
She disappeared back into her office and came out holding a coat. The raincoat I’d been wearing the last time I had seen Ania. She still had it.
“You asked about this the day you left, remember? I thought it had been given away, but there it was, in the closet. Do you still want it? I don’t see why, it’s old, very out of fashion.”
I took it from Elsa and checked the pocket. The torn corner of paper was still there. An address where I could contact her. The ink had faded with time, and when I unfolded the paper it crumpled where the crease had been. But it was still readable.
* * *
• • •
From Schiap’s Boutique to Coco’s reopened showroom on rue Cambon was just a matter of steps. It was growing dark in the way of winter afternoons, the sky turning from pearly gray to blue shot with stars. Electric lights streamed from the windows of 31 rue Cambon, where the seamstresses and fitters were still working. Coco would still be there, too. She worked longer hours than any of them, I remembered. When I sent my name up to her, one of the vendeuses showed me up that famous and familiar mirrored staircase to Coco’s private apartments.
“Look at how that coat fits!” was the first thing she said to me. “I’ve told you, a garment must fit perfectly in the shoulders or it won’t fit anywhere.”
Coco Chanel was seventy-one years old that winter. She had just come out of a fourteen-year retirement; she had survived accusations of treason, the deaths of friends and lovers, a war, exile. It showed in her face but not in her posture or her gestures. She moved like a young girl, stood tall and straight when she rose from her beige sofa to offer me a kiss on both cheeks.
“You have a bag from Schiaparelli,” was the second thing Coco said.
“Yes. I have just been to see her.”
We sat on the beige sofa, and Coco rang a little bell for her maid to bring us cocktails. Coco’s famous coromandel screens were back in place; the walls were lined with books. It could almost have been before the war, the rooms looked so much the same. But it wasn’t. The rooms hadn’t been occupied or looted during the war years, but there was a sense of desolation anyway, that boot scuff on the door where someone had kicked it, the tarnish on the unpolished silver candle holders.
“How is Schiaparelli? I heard she is closing her business.”
I listened hard, listened for gloating and satisfaction, but Coco had trained her voice to a steady neutrality.
“She’s fine. Happy in fact, looking forward to time with her grandchildren, time in the hammock.”
“Ha!” Coco snorted. There it was. The old competition surfacing, the old hostility.
“Do you ever wish you’d had children, grandchildren?” I asked Coco. It was a rude question to ask a Frenchwoman. They are more private than Americans. But my curiosity got the better of me. I tried to imagine my life without little Charlie, and could not.
“I came from a large family. A large, unhappy family,” Coco said. “I don’t see that having children would have made me happier. I know that people say that my sister’s son was my son. I loved him like one, and that was enough motherhood for me. He almost died, you know. In a Nazi camp. I would never have forgiven myself.” She paused to light a cigarette, and her hand was trembling.
She leaned over and rubbed the fabric of my blouse sleeve between her fingers. “Good quality,” she said. “It will last. Couture. That was my life, and a good one, too. As for Schiap, you mark my words, she’ll be busier than ever, visiting her Hollywood friends, Hepburn and Myrna Loy, vamping it up all over the world. Hammock, my foot.”
“What about you?”
“I won’t lie. I can’t, can I? Schiap will already have told you the gossip. My new collection was not well received. Remember how people used to linger after a showing? Stay behind and meet the designer, gossip, drink champagne. They fled. Nothing to say. I was so furious I wanted to burn the salon.”
I remembered then what Coco had told me once, years before, about her childhood, how she had hated the orphanage so much she had wanted to burn it down.
“Surely they couldn’t have hated everything in the collection,” I said.
“There are still hard feelings from the war, and all of these new young men are climbing up. Dior. Givenchy. They’ll never dress women the way we dressed them, never understand how a woman’s body is supposed to move. Corsets! They are designing corsets again. There was one suit they liked, though.”
Coco brushed back hair that looked a little too black. “Tidy little tweed, with straight skirt and jacket trimmed with braid. I think that will take off. That will restore me. Meanwhile . . .” She stopped and sipped delicately at her martini. “Women will want that suit. I’ll give those new designers a run for their money.”
I could hear the beginning of a new rivalry. Coco was coming back to life. “I’ll be bigger than ever,” she said. “Meanwhile, I have sold La Pausa to pay my bills, to keep going. It was necessary. And there were too many memories there, weren’t there?”
La Pausa. My first night with Otto, that soft Provençal air, the stars overhead.
“You had von Dincklage as a guest,” I said.
“Spatz. Those years are over. No more lovers for me, I think. Time to give up that game. And you had a guest as well, didn’t you?”
The silences I had shared with Schiap had been nostalgic, the kind of pause that happens just before a door gently closes. The silence I fell into with Coco was harder and embarrassing. With Schiap there had been too much to say. With Coco, too little. She was a woman who did not easily trust, and without trust friendship is a more fragile thing.
“You were a good-looking couple, you and Otto. Even Spatz thought so.” Coco smiled conspiratorially over her martini glass.
“We married, you know. After the war. We have a son.”
“No! Well! Congratulations, then. I must give you something to remember me by, before you leave. I
bet you named your boy Charlie, didn’t you? That brother of yours. One of the most beautiful men I’d ever seen. No wonder Ania fell for him. Poor Ania. Spatz was devastated when they arrested her.”
“I thought he was going to keep her safe. Wasn’t that the plan, wasn’t that the deal?”
Coco flinched. Affairs always have a touch of business arrangement to them, or at least of “understandings,” but such arrangements were rarely spoken out loud.
“She herself made that impossible, when she began carrying messages. The Gestapo had her name; there was nothing Spatz could do for her, once she was arrested. After the war, they were going to accuse me of being a collaborator, you know. But Winston made a phone call and kept his old friend out of prison. It pays to have friends in high places.”
I remembered the room at La Pausa, filled with Churchill’s favorite history books.
A knock on the door, her assistant standing there. “The buyer from the New York perfume branch is on the line,” she said. “Can you speak with him?”
I stood. “Thanks for the drink. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to say hello. I expect it will be a while before I’m back in Paris.”
Coco rose, too. “Thank you for coming. And do have that coat tailored. Before you go, here.” She picked up her silver cigarette case from the coffee table. “A little souvenir.” She put it in my hands and folded my fingers over it. “Remember me.”
A maid had already helped me into my coat and opened the door into the mirrored hallway when Coco said, “It was an accident. That night at the Durst ball.”
No, it wasn’t, I thought. It had been a prophecy of the war to come, where so many had been hurt or killed. We had all been danced into the flames.
“I run into Schiap once in a while,” Coco said. “She looks well, I think. We even had a drink together, the other day. Imagine that.”
“I bet that was an interesting conversation.”
Coco laughed. “In fact, it was. We are not as different as you might think. We both believe in beauty and elegance. In strong women who know their own minds. No one will look good in her clothes if she doesn’t walk as if she owns the world. Remember that, Lily. It’s ours, all the beauty we want, if we want it hard enough.”
And then she did something totally unexpected. She hugged me, tightly, affectionately. I hugged her back.
* * *
• • •
The next morning I gave Ania’s scrap of paper to a taxi driver and we went out past the Bois de Boulogne, to Neuilly-sur-Seine, to a little street looking onto the river and a stone house with a wooden door and a flower box filled with winter-browned geraniums.
A woman came out the front door to bring in a milk bottle that had been left on the step. When she bent, her white-blond hair fell over her face. My heart stopped. Ania?
I called her name. “Ania!” and she looked up. This girl was too young to be my friend, but she looked so much like her, I already knew what she would say. It was Katya, Ania’s daughter.
“Ania was my mother.” She frowned. “Do I know you?”
She was aloof in the way the Parisians often are, needing to know a little more before they offer a smile, a handshake. She came to the gate to see me more closely. Ania had been slightly nearsighted as well.
“No. You don’t know me. But I knew your mother. Before the war.”
“Oh. Well. Did you? You’d better come in, then. It’s cold out here.”
She made tea for me in the little kitchen of the stone house, and when she poured, she said, “We don’t have a lot of time. I have to begin my shift at the hospital at noon.”
Her voice was Ania’s, her movements, her height.
“How did you know my mother?”
“My brother was in love with her. Before the war. And I knew her. We used to meet for drinks at the Ritz.”
Katya made a face, disapproving. “The Ritz. I couldn’t afford that if I gave up eating for a month. But that was Maman. Before the war. I remember the clothes she used to wear. I still have some, packed away in the attic. Much good they do me. Nurses don’t wear sable.”
She laughed. Ania’s laugh.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“You don’t know? Died in a camp.” Silence. The girl—she was about twenty-one, I estimated—pushed away her teacup. “What happened to your brother?”
“Died. Guadalcanal.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
A door closed in my imagination. Charlie and Ania were on the other side of it, both gone from me.
The kitchen, with its big tiled stove and bunches of dried herbs hanging from the rafters, was pleasant but I couldn’t imagine Ania in such a rustic place. Ania of the Ritz.
“Did your mother live here?”
“Only on weekends. I lived here with my father. It was grander, then. He owned the meadow on the side, too, but I’ve had to sell it. We had gardens, a pony. He’s dead now. Didn’t survive the war.”
Katya sighed and folded her arms over her chest. “They didn’t get along, my mother and father. They lived separately, most of the time.” The girl sniffed in a combination of disdain and disappointment, exactly the way Ania had when something upset her.
“Maman had lovers, I know. A German officer was one of them. Von Dincklage. I met him once. He brought me a doll, and Mummy said he would be her umbrella during the storm. I laughed, thinking of that tall, skinny man as an umbrella. Later, I understood what she meant, except he wasn’t. He didn’t protect her. She was arrested. I came home from school one day and my father told me she was gone. They took her away, and she never came back.”
“I’m so very sorry.” The words are useless, meaningless. Tragedy sometimes defies our ability to describe it, to respond to it. After VE Day, when the photos of the camps were being published for the first time, I had looked at them and wept for Ania.
The girl plucked at a loose thread on her sleeve. “I’ve sold the furs, got a good price for them. But the gowns. They still have her perfume on them. Was your brother named Charles or something like that?”
“Charlie.”
“She told me about him. She didn’t talk that much about her friends, but she talked about him. I was five, and she told me a story about a princess and a prince, named Charlie. I think she was in love with him.”
“I’d better let you get ready for work,” I said. “Thanks for the tea.”
* * *
• • •
The taxi was still waiting for me, clouds of blue cigarette smoke floating out of the open window as the driver whistled and fumed. Before I got back in, I stood by the river and watched the sun glint silver on it, the tiny ripples of little fish in the shallows turning the muddy green water to miniature circles of pale violet. I threw in the piece of paper with the address Ania had written fourteen years before and let the Seine carry it away.
From the ashes rises the phoenix. The new from the old. Ania was gone, but her daughter was here, safe.
How she must have suffered, that beautiful woman who drank champagne at the Ritz.
The next day I changed my plane ticket for an earlier flight and I was back on the plane, leaving Paris, going home to Otto, to my son, to the future. Paris was my past. I had spent one afternoon at the Louvre, sitting in front of the reinstalled Mona Lisa and saying hello to the other artworks that had been in hiding during the war, now returned to their proper places, and there was nothing more for me to do in Paris.
I had an orange bustled Schiaparelli gown in my suitcase and it would be a struggle, but I would find some place, some time, to wear it, in honor of my friends, in remembrance of Charlie and Ania.
I left Coco and Schiap and Ania’s daughter, and all the colors of Paris, the reds and yellows and blues, the primaries from which all other colors emerge in grief and joy.
When I was a child, one of my favorite pieces of clothing was a white cotton shirt with French words written all over it. I didn’t know it then, but many decades before, an Italian woman living in Paris had designed the prototype for that newsprint fabric.
Later, as I read more about Elsa Schiaparelli, I discovered that she was responsible for some of my most whimsical fashion choices: turbans, roomy skirts with huge pockets, shoulder pads, a leopard-print coat, folk embroidery, funky buttons, a little evening bag of meshed gunmetal as a kind of “make love, not war” statement, even a see-through blouse, though mine had strategic double layers for the pockets. They all originated as Schiaparelli designs that took up permanent residence in the fashion world, filtering all the way down, through the decades, to small-town girls like me who bought their clothing in department stores, off the rack.
The thirties was a golden age of couture, and it was dominated by one city: Paris, and that city was dominated by two women: Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli. Everyone has heard of Coco; too few have heard of Schiap, as she called herself (pronounced scape with a hard sch, as in school). Unlike Coco, whose rough, deprived childhood is legendary, Schiap was born into wealth, grew up surrounded by books and art and educated people. Yet as soon as she could, she ran away, first to New York and then to Paris, and chose her own path, her own life, one of hard work, occasional hard knocks, and more than a little heartache.
It was inevitable that she and Coco would become lifelong rivals in that city, in that industry.
One of the central scenes in this novel, that of Coco dancing Schiap into a flaming candelabra, is based on an actual event. That was the passion of their rivalry. The polarity of their political beliefs, as portrayed in my novel, is based on fact. They were both suspected of collaboration with the enemy and spying.
Did they help the Germans? Schiap traveled freely, made and maintained important connections, and, during the war, had many wealthy Germans among her clients. However, in her early years, thanks probably to the influence of the husband she loved, and who had abandoned her, she had been a known Bolshevist and political activist. In Paris she joined an antifascist group and during the war she fought to keep the fashion industry in Paris, though Hitler wanted it moved to Berlin.
The Last Collection Page 32