Rain fell down the windowpane, making trails like the veins in an old person’s hands.
You can temporarily erase wrinkles with cream, add false eyelashes to those grown skimpy, pinch in a widened waist with a corset, even find a surgeon to lift up the fallen face. But hands . . . there is no remedy for aged hands. Schiap put her own small hand flat on the windowpane. It was still pretty, she decided. Plump and long-fingered. But she thought of her mother’s hands, how their veins mimicked blue rain rivulets over glass. Time. So little.
The house was absolutely still, all its inhabitants, the cook, the maid, the chauffeur, wrapped in sleep, all except for Schiap, who could not sleep. She leaned her head against the window, staring out into the dark, glistening night. Three o’clock in the morning. The hour of regrets.
So many. Well, of course there were. She had lived without limits, without caution, always with passion and a certain selfishness. That is how ambitious people achieve success. If you want to be always good, always kind, always self-effacing, then marry a hardworking man and spend the rest of your life bearing and raising his children.
She’d never marry again; she’d decided that long ago. Not even to her best beau, Henry Horne, the very handsome Englishman who had helped set up her London shop and little pied-à-terre in Mayfield, or his older brother, Allan, dull, correct Allan who could be so sweet when they were alone. She had shocked even herself a little by taking both brothers as lovers. But they did get along so well, no jealousy, no quarrels, that friendly comradery during hunting weekends in Scotland, civilized dinners in London.
London. Poor London. It would not be spared. She sensed it, that loud roaring overhead like hungry lions, bomb doors whirring open.
Thunder rumbled in the distance. Schiap, afraid of lightning, jumped away from the window. She was wide awake now because of fear, her drowsy insomnia kidnapped by uncompromising alertness. She counted to two hundred by fours, her lucky number, as she wrapped her magenta silk robe around her shoulders and stepped into mules made huge and fluffy with downy feathers. She slapped down the dark hall, the staircase, past the dining room, her study, all the rooms of her glorious house filled with decades of acquiring—art, curiosities, useful things, silly things.
She listed them in her head as she passed through the dark rooms and laughed to herself when she passed the dining table and its chairs all neatly tucked into a straight row. The chairs were covered in heavy brocade now. They hadn’t always been. When she had first come to Paris, years ago, she had given a dinner party for the people who could help or hurt her new couture business. Her father, the medieval scholar, had taught her that: pay as much attention to potential enemies as to friends, or the battle is already lost.
Because she was very broke those first years and very inexperienced—admit it, she told herself, you knew nothing about fabrics—she’d had her dining room chairs covered with a cheap white rubbery material. The evening of her debut dinner party fifteen years before had been warm. Too warm. As the people sat and chattered and drank the champagne—you may skimp on many things, but not on the wine, it must always be the best—the heat of the evening had begun to melt the rubber fabric.
When her guests rose to leave, they all had white skeletal imprints emblazoned on the backs of their dresses and trousers, rubbery imprints on their thighs and buttocks. Schiap had rather liked the effect and used it, years later, in her famous, her infamous, skeleton dress. The bones under the flesh.
Chanel had been there that night. It was their first meeting and Schiap understood immediately that Chanel would be foe, not friend. When the guests rose after the long meal and discovered their ruined evening clothes, everyone had laughed, except Chanel. Her eyes had become dark beads of disapproval; the chill emanating from her had frozen the others. They all left rather hurriedly after that.
Another rumble of thunder, closer like a premonition of something huge and vicious stalking the land. Quick, into the cellar. Schiap always felt safe in the basement. Hers was very large, a series of vaulted rooms leading in and out of one another like a medieval cloister, and it reminded her of an illustration she had found in one of her father’s books, monks lined up at a long table in a vaulted room, quills in hands, heaven on their faces as they worked on their illuminated pages.
She’d had a similar table made for her cellar and had kept the room as bare as modern living allowed: there was no electricity, only oil lamps and candles, and everything was wood or stone, smelling of a pleasantly familiar damp.
She sat at the head of the table and listened. Good. Down here, you couldn’t hear the thunder. She was shivering and pulled her wrap closer. Was it also raining in Nice? Was Gogo safe asleep in her bed at whatever house she had been invited to? Hard to keep track, though she knew a mother was supposed to.
Gogo. Her beautiful daughter. She hadn’t known what love was till she held that mewling red newborn in her arms. Everything she had done—the sixteen-hour workdays, the constant search for new ideas, the courting of wealthy and influential customers—everything had been for Gogo. To keep Gogo safe, to make sure there was enough money.
Gogo, of course, hadn’t seen it that way. Gogo had known only that her mother was often away, often distracted, distant. Perhaps even a little cold, as her own mother had been. But someday, when she had children of her own, Gogo might understand that a mother’s sacrifice can be to serve love by serving her own ambition. Someday she would understand that the surgeries, the therapies that Gogo had hated, had been part of that love. She had vanquished the damage from the polio, and Gogo was perfect again, straight. Just the slightest suggestion of a limp still lingered, and, the doctors had told her, there was nothing to be done for that.
She would do anything for her daughter. But how stupid she had been, refusing to greet von Dincklage the one time he came into her Boutique Fantastique. Even her beau, Henry, that good-natured man, had been angry when she’d told him about it.
“Don’t you know who he is, who he’s likely to become, under Hitler?” he’d muttered, his words forming around the huge cigar jammed in his mouth so that the dangerous sentence chugged like a train leaving the station in a cloud of smoke. “Bloody hell, Elsa, just bloody hell.” They were still in bed in his apartment on Upper Grosvenor Street, and he’d turned his naked back to her.
She’d never make that mistake again. She didn’t know, not then, that von Dincklage would be the German officer carrying the life-and-death knowledge of when the Wehrmacht would begin its march on France, when it would approach Paris and turn the city into a prison.
No excuses, though, she told herself. You have to protect your daughter, and you can’t afford mistakes.
For months she’d been thinking of how to get an ear, a good set of eyes, inside the Chanel salon, how to get the information that would not be whispered in her own salon because she’d made her own loyalties too well known. Schiap, the Bolshevik lover; Schiap, who had refused to have lunch with Mussolini, who was a little too obvious in her hatred of Hitler, even though so many of her very wealthy customers supported him. The Duchess of Windsor still came in and bought new seasonal outfits, but when she ordered clothes for a visit to Germany she ordered only from Chanel. Hitler approved of sensible Chanel, though it was said he thought women looked best in traditional German costumes.
God, how ugly those Fraus must look in that Berchtesgaden eyrie, in their aprons and dirndls and braids coiled over their ears like huge snails. The blouses, though, the puffed sleeves and embroidery . . . those could be interesting. Things were getting complicated in Paris, and a bit of nostalgia might suit the new mood.
Schiap reached for a piece of paper and pencil—there were piles of them placed in every room. Artists never knew when inspiration would strike, and an idea could be easily lost between first thought and a finally discovered pencil.
In the darkness, keeping her hand moving within the small halo of light given off by a single candle, she sketched a dress: a long, pinched-in waist, a kind of apron that pulled back to form the beginning of a bustle. It was like something she’d found in her mother’s attic, an evening gown worn long ago by one of the women in her family, perhaps her mother’s sister, a woman said to be so beautiful priests fled in terror for their souls when they saw her.
Gogo looked a little like her, with those huge soulful eyes. Gogo was eighteen, too young to understand what was happening in the world, too young to be concerned with anything but boys and yachting parties.
Schiap, further from sleep than before, pushed away the drawing of the gown and started a list. A leaving-Paris list. Number one. Close the store in London. Thirty-six Grosvenor Street had been useful—it had spread her name and reputation, allowed her to spend time in London when Gogo was still in school. But let’s face it, she thought. The English aristocracy had a habit of not paying their bills, and the London store had lost money since its beginnings. She couldn’t afford that anymore, not with a war coming, and soon it would be impossible to shuttle back and forth between London and Paris, impossible to get the supplies she would need even for her Parisian clientele. No. Close it. Concentrate on Paris. On Gogo. Henry would understand.
Number two. Where to get information. Timing would be everything. She wouldn’t leave a day before it was absolutely necessary, but to delay even a day too late would be disastrous. Always, it came back to that: information.
Madame Bouchard. Ania, von Dincklage’s mistress. Thank God that American girl had brought her into the Boutique Fantastique.
Color is a response to the way light hits the retina, so light, and color, are time made visible. Color speaks of our mortality, and time didn’t care that Ania and Charlie were in love, or that I was still in mourning. It moved relentlessly forward at the pace of a marching army.
The morning light was blue a few days later, when Charlie sent Ania up to my room to fetch me. It was the kind of blue that brings on nostalgia, a realization that every day was not going to be as beautiful as that light promised.
Ania wore a yellow silk dress that cast gold shadows under her chin. Her face was somber.
“Is something wrong, Ania?”
She sat on my unmade bed and twirled a fringe from the covers around her finger.
“You mean more than usual? Yes. News from home. I haven’t told Charlie; it would make him, I don’t know, too quiet, and I need to be gay today. A friend of mine has been attacked. By the friends of Hitler. Her family has been driven out of their home. I don’t know where they will go, where they will live.”
Ania turned her back to me, and I understood that I was to respect that space she had created between us, that some things we must put into words go far beyond simpler commonplace reactions, a hug, a pat on the shoulder. Poland had seemed far away, until that moment. Now the threat was in the room, with us.
“I only wish . . .”
“What, Ania?”
“That my father would come here, leave Poland. But now, we talk of something pleasant. Put on your hat, and we will not talk about this in front of Charlie. No worries.” She paused in front of my dressing table, where I had stacked books bought over the past few days from the bookstalls along the river, all biographies of artists, books of color theory.
“What do you want? From life, I mean,” she asked, running her finger over the book spines.
I had wanted Allen. Allen, and a little house, and Allen’s children. Had there been anything before that?
“If you use the word generously enough, I am an artist, or at least used to be.” I ran a comb through my hair. I’d had it cut the day before, above my chin, all the way up to my earlobes so that it clung closely to my head. A single curl on each cheek made russet brown commas around my mouth. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror, and it was a pleasant sensation. “I wanted to paint and to show my work.”
“What kind of painting? What kind of work?”
“At first, portraits. I like to study people’s faces. Yours, for instance. Did you know there is a shadow at just one corner of your mouth? In low light it looks blue, like the blue around the mother’s throat in Klimt’s Death and Life.”
Ania put her hand up to her mouth, as if she might touch the color she hadn’t known was there.
“I was working on Allen’s portrait when he died,” I said. “But I couldn’t finish it. After that, I tried landscapes. But there was too much green. And then, I couldn’t paint at all.”
“Lily, did you love your husband so much when you married?”
The question weakened my knees, made me sit on the bed. “More than anything or anyone.”
“For me, it is different.”
“How?”
“I married when my father decided I should, to a man my father chose.”
“You could have refused.”
She laughed. “You Americans are so funny. You believe so much in freedom, in deciding your own way. Here, it is different. We marry to suit our families and then we . . .”
“Then you take a lover. I don’t think I’ve met a single married couple out together all week.”
“And is that so terrible? If it works, and everyone is happy?”
Happy? She was going to break my brother’s heart. Charlie was American, like me; Charlie wanted love and marriage, not marriage and then love elsewhere. He wanted Ania.
She touched the wedding ring on my left hand. “It wasn’t your fault, the automobile accident. Charlie said it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it was. Allen was tired and hadn’t wanted to go out in the first place.”
“I’m sorry. But it was an accident, Lily.”
“Perhaps. But it happened to me. To him.”
André Durst’s Bal de la Forêt was to be held in the forest of Mortefontaine. Its theme was taken from Fournier’s popular novel Les Grand Meaulnes, about a mystical chateau in the forest that comes to life, and then disappears again, driving a young man to wandering distraction as he tries, endlessly, to find that forest paradise once more. Later, I realized his choice of theme had all the splendor of prophecy. Paris, during that last year before the war, would become a lost paradise.
“What shall I be? Little Red Riding Hood?” Ania asked. “You know, in the original version it does not go well for the grandmother and the little girl. The wolf eats them both.” She gnawed at a broken nail. That broken nail bothered me. Ania was so perfectly manicured, so careful in her appearance. A misaligned tooth added to her appeal; that nail spoke of some part of Ania that neither I nor Charles knew. She had been late meeting us, but Charlie knew better than to ask.
We were standing in the street outside my hotel, still deciding how to spend the evening. The weather had changed, moved from light spring to a heavier heat, and the air, thick with damp and street grit, was almost visible, graying the colors of the city. To make the background of a painting look distant from the foreground, a thin layer of gray needs to be applied over it, to suggest remoteness.
England and the school seemed far away, and the distance felt good and right. I had realized that I didn’t need the sight of the actual oak tree outside the gate of the walled garden to remember Allen sitting under it. In fact, the memory seemed clearer from this new distance.
“I think you should go as Snow White,” I said. “She fled to the forest to escape her wicked stepmother, and you look so beautiful, all in white.”
“I like that. Snow White,” Ania agreed. “Pure, virginal. No one will recognize me.”
Charlie made a kind of growl in the back of his throat and crushed his cigarette under his heel. He didn’t like it when Ania made comments like that, self-deprecating poisoned arrows. “If Durst expects virgins, he’d better invite some gals from out of town. I doubt there are any in Paris,” he said.
“We should ask Elsa Schiaparelli to do your costume, shouldn’t we? It will need a touch of humor, a kind of slyness, to make it work,” I said.
“Coco has asked to do my costume. Maybe I’ll order one from each, then choose that day.” Ania grinned with mischief. “Keep them both guessing.”
“You keep too many people guessing,” Charlie grumbled. “Make up your mind!” Ania’s mouth began to tremble. “I meant about where we’re going tonight,” Charlie said more gently, and put his arm around her shoulders.
“You.” Ania pointed at me. “You must go in something pretty, something diaphanous. I know. You must be a woodland fairy, all pink and green gauze and wings. I will make up your eyes, blue shadow and lashes longer than Joan Crawford’s, and put beauty marks on your cheek.”
“Sounds good,” Charlie agreed.
“To Bricktop’s,” she said. “I want music. I want to dance. Come on, the night is wasting away.”
“Bricktop’s,” Charlie agreed, forging down the street like a man on an important errand.
How could a young man convey such a sense of urgency when the night was so heavy, so enervating? All the time I’d been in Paris, three weeks now, he’d been full of the kind of energy you feel when you are already late for an appointment and the bus just isn’t coming; when the doctor looks at you with pity and can’t find the words.
“Charlie, not so fast!” Ania, laughing, pursued him, her white-blond hair shining silver in the dim light of evening.
“Come away with me, you fast woman,” he said, slowing down and hugging her again in a tight embrace. “Come away, come away.”
They kissed, standing in the street, a long, slow kiss that burned me with the salty blue flame of what had been and, for me, was no more.
Bricktop’s on rue Pigalle was packed. The denseness of the crowd, the smell of alcohol and sweat and smoke combined with the sultriness of the summer evening, made the air even heavier. You could almost see the notes from the trumpet suspend in the air before they fell onto the heads of the dancers.
Bricktop herself, with her flaming red hair, came to welcome us. She greeted Ania with three kisses on the cheek, right, left, right. Was there anyone Ania did not know? Or maybe the connection was not with Ania but with her husband. Maybe he was a financier, one of the behind-the-scenes people who kept so many businesses afloat during the bad times? I tried not to think about the husband, just as Charlie tried not to think about him, nor about the lover, but they were there, invisible authorities watching over us.
“Looking swell!” Bricktop shouted at us in her West Virginia accent. She was famous for the cigars she smoked, and the blazing hair and freckles inherited from her Irish father, while her soft African features and tight curls had been inherited from her mother. Bricktop had started out as a revue dancer, had taught Cole Porter how to dance the Black Bottom, and now she owned nightclubs in several countries. That was Paris, before the war. You could come from nowhere, be a nobody, and end up a society queen and rich as hell.
Red-tipped cigar leading the way, Bricktop guided us to a table in the far right corner, the table with, I saw, the best vantage point in the club. We could see almost every other table, but we were in the shadows and they could not see us. Django Reinhardt and his band were onstage. He smiled when he saw me. I waved back.
“I thought Josephine Baker would be performing tonight,” a peeved woman’s voice said behind us. “Instead, it’s just that gypsy guitar player.”
“Josephine’s gotten uppity,” her companion said. “Gone and married a French Jew. Won’t they just have a future.” His laugh was guttural and cruel.
Ania froze, one bare arm escaped from the light sweater she wore, the other arm crooked into a stiff angle. “What a shame, darling,” she said to Charlie in a voice meant to be overheard. “More dreadful tourists. Do you see that rag she’s wearing! They ruin the place.”
The woman turned white. “Jeesh. What’s her problem?” her companion muttered.
We danced for hours, the three of us, arms around one another’s shoulders, a little tipsy, a little desperate, each for our own reasons.
Ania and Charlie kissed again when we were walking home later, oblivious to me, to the stares of passersby, to everything they were trying to lock outside of that embrace.
“Snow White? Yes!” Elsa Schiaparelli could barely contain her enthusiasm. “It must be the correct shade of white, more cream than gray,” she said to Ania. “You don’t want to look washed out. And a red vest over it, a red vest sewn with sequins to flash and shine.”
She was almost dancing, she was so excited. She knew Coco was to have done Ania’s ball costume. Of course. These Parisian women seemed to know everything about everyone, who was sleeping with whom, whose father or husband or lover was dangerously close to bankruptcy, whose teenage daughter had gone away for half a year to visit an “aunt” and left behind an illegitimate child, who had bruises hidden under the silk dress, who was using morphine a little too frequently to sleep through the night. That last one, I’d heard, was Coco herself.
Where a woman bought her clothes was almost a matter for public record, compared to the other whispered rumors that buzzed through the salons and cafés and dinner parties of the city.
“I will have the white skirt embroidered with sequins making the constellation of the bear,” Schiaparelli said.
Ursa Major. Her own symbol, known all over the world. Elsa Schiaparelli had a cluster of moles on her face in the exact shape of the Great Bear, or what Charlie and I, as Americans, called the Big Dipper. She designed jewelry and embroidery to match that constellation, and it was as effective as writing Designed by Elsa Schiaparelli on the garments and jewelry. Coco Chanel would be furious.
“And you?” She looked at me with more than a little skepticism. “What will you be?”
“A woodland fairy,” Ania answered for me. “All pink and glittery, with wings.”
“Hmm.” Schiap leaned her little pointed chin into her fist and considered me with as much concentration as the housewives at the fish market considered the catch of the day. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it can work. I have some leftover tulle. All it will need is a gathered waist and ribbons holding it at the shoulders. An hour’s work.”
“What about you?” Ania asked. Of course Schiap was going. Everyone but the dairy maids of the Auvergne seemed to have been invited to the Durst ball.
“Me. I will be a tree,” Schiap said, lifting her arms and waving her fingers as if they were leaves shivering on a branch. “Secret. Don’t tell anyone!”
The salon was full that day. There must have been forty women in various stages of shopping and ordering and fitting. One of them listened closely; one of them took notes and had a little conversation with Mademoiselle Chanel. The next day a box was delivered to Ania from Coco’s salon: a Snow White dress of simple beige jersey with a rust-colored vest. She brought it to my hotel room and tried it on for me.
“It’s beautiful,” I agreed. “Elegant. But . . .”
“But not fun,” Ania agreed. “And Charlie likes the Schiaparelli dress. How will I tell Mademoiselle I can’t wear this?”
“Maybe she won’t notice. Maybe it doesn’t matter,” I suggested, but Ania looked at me as if I had just said the world was flat.
“And I think maybe I won’t tell Elsa about this. It would be war.” Ania folded the dress back into its box.
Ania wasn’t with us the next day. “She’s gone to see her husband,” Charlie said. “To try and sort things out with him. About the child.” He was in the most serious mood I’d ever seen him in. But I understood what was at stake.
Two days later my Schiaparelli gown for the Durst ball came in a huge cardboard case filled with so much tissue paper I had to rustle through many layers before my hands touched the silk. It wasn’t the simple tulle frock she had promised. It was a magnificent white column of draped silk, decorated with a dozen small painted metal brooches of insects. A beetle sat on the right shoulder; a butterfly fluttered over the left hip. Because of its simple, loose lines and because the salon already knew my measurements, it needed no fitting.
It was a thank-you, I realized. I had delivered Ania to her, and Ania was wearing Schiaparelli to the ball. I wondered how Coco would react. I had an impulse to fold the gown back into the box, return it to the salon, and take the next boat train to England. I paused the way you do when a ladder is in your path. I’m not superstitious, you tell yourself. But you walk around the ladder, not under it, anyway.
There was a card in the box as well, a little note from Schiap reminding me to remove all my jewelry before putting on the dress. As if I had jewels. It was one of her jokes.
When I stepped into the dress it was as if I could suddenly exist outside my own skin, wear a new layer that was me but not me. Me, transformed.
“Lovely,” Ania said. “So lighthearted. Stop frowning, Lily! We’re going to have so much fun tonight.” Charlie was waiting downstairs, in the Isotta, and she had come up to fetch me. “And it’s perfect for the Durst ball. Another bespoke order that wasn’t picked up?”
“Probably. I could never afford this. How did things go with your husband, Ania?” She knew what I was asking. What was Charlie’s future?
“We will talk of it later,” she said. “So many details.” She strapped on the wings she had made for me, wire hangers bent into demi-heart shapes and covered with silk. I wore slippers instead of high heels, and Ania twisted glass pearls into my hair and around my wrists, then tipped a jar of small sequins over me. It was past nine by then, a Parisian summer twilight, and I glittered like a Christmas tree in the dusky light.
She was in her Snow White costume, with the red bodice and yellow skirt designed by the Walt Disney studio but made seductive, sinuous by Schiaparelli, with long, tight sleeves and clinging fabrics. Schiap had added crystal embroidery along the hem so Ania glittered with every movement. And there was the Ursa Major, embroidered on the front of the skirt, the Schiaparelli brand.
Charlie had decided against the wolf costume and instead came as Charlie, handsome as a movie star, but with silk leaves basted onto his sleeves and lapels. They rustled in the breeze of the open windows as we motored out of Paris, to the ball.
Ania’s chauffeur drove that night, and I was sardined in the backseat with Charlie and Ania, those silly wings of my costume backdropping all three of us, like overlarge angel wings in badly painted medieval altar pieces. Charlie and Ania, sitting next to each other, pretended, for the chauffeur’s benefit, to make conversation for all three of us. I recognized the lovers’ codes, the remember whens and do you thinks that pass for conversation but are instead lovemaking with words.
I could sense the chauffeur’s suspicion and disapproval. He hadn’t fallen for my little act with Ania: me, the inseparable friend who happened to have a brother always tagging along. He knew what was going on; he knew what the conversation really was. And I couldn’t help thinking that this chauffeur, in the employ of Ania’s husband, wasn’t as attractive as von Dincklage’s driver, that serious, unsmiling boy with the blond hair.
The evening shone with blue—the sheen of Charlie’s lapels, the blue crystals on Ania’s dress, the sky overhead, deep-blue velvet with glittering stars. I wasn’t happy—Allen wasn’t with me—but I was beginning to remember what happiness had felt like. Even the automobile drive, which I had dreaded, wasn’t too bad. Every once in a while the road would curve and my hands would curl into white-knuckled fists, and then the road would straighten and I would be okay again. Even so, I had a sense of foreboding, as I always did in an automobile, after the accident. Ania was in a gay mood, refusing to be serious about anything, to answer any questions.
The air was almost too soft, the temperature too perfect. The oppressive daytime heat had tempered itself into something milder, sweeter, closer to a welcome embrace than a suffocating blanket. Charlie and Ania spoke in soft murmurs. Under cover of the wrap thrown over her knees, they were holding hands again, like they had that first day, under the tea table in the Schiaparelli showroom.
“What a night,” Ania sighed. “I’ll never forget it.”
Charlie whispered something to her, and I saw the driver’s eyes dart into the rearview mirror, checking.
“Ania, are my wings okay? They’re not getting crushed, are they?” I asked, reminding them they weren’t alone.
It was my first, my only, full-dress costume party. They were events planned for, and attended by, the very rich and sometimes, I suspected, the very bored or at least those who feared boredom more than any other condition. People with more money than I could imagine, dressed to kill in disguises that sometimes defied description. The worse the economy grew—and in Europe and the United States it was growing worse by the day—the fancier the balls became. It was fairy-tale time, as if truth could be ignored.
. . . as if the reality that was Hitler could be ignored.
When reality threatens to become unbearable, we make believe. Children do, and adults, too, except their make-believe is more expensive, in terms of either dollars or emotional cost, because reality is there, waiting for you around the next corner.
Paris that year had already concocted a silver ball, where everyone dressed in silver and the rooms were plated in silver. A golden ball had followed; a Racine ball with everyone dressed as characters from a Racine play, the ancient regime risen from its own, moldy grave.
It was mad, this ignoring of reality just as reality was about to turn horrific. There were so many things we should have been paying attention to, newspaper headlines, a look of fear in some people’s eyes, a restlessness like that in a herd before lightning strikes. We were the passengers on the Titanic, still hoping that the thud and shudder of the ship was just a large wave, not an iceberg.