The showing of a new couture collection is a rainbow of emotion: red excitement, blue nervousness, yellow optimism, violet regret. For months, Coco and Schiap and the designers had been working on new designs, new concepts and styles, dozens of them, competing not only with their rivals but with their own history. The designers cannot repeat themselves, yet they must stay close to their own brand, they must be identifiable, so that when a customer wears her new dress people can say, “Oh, that’s a Chanel,” or, “That’s a Schiaparelli. Isn’t it interesting what she has done this season?” It is a tightrope walk for the imagination.
The great houses of Paris all showed their new collections during the same week, and the scheduling is like designing a battle strategy; the showings are the battles, and there are winners, and there are losers.
That week, collection week in late August, Paris doubled in population. In addition to all the Parisians returning from their summer holiday, buyers and shoppers came from all over the world. You could walk down the rue de la Paix and hear Spanish, Greek, English, Italian, all the different American accents from Texas to the Bronx.
There were duchesses from Bavaria and buying assistants from Macy’s, English debutantes getting ready for their first season, Argentinian mistresses hoping to get one last wardrobe from a man growing bored. Wives. Daughters. Any woman who cared how she looked, who could get to Paris, did. The hotels and restaurants filled; the cafés at night overflowed. Paris throbbed with excitement.
Coco and Schiap showed their new collections on the same day, just hours apart, but Coco’s was first. I went to the late-afternoon showing and tried to ignore the glance of unpleasant surprise the doorman gave me and my Schiaparelli day dress when I handed him my ticket.
Those tickets were small miracles to come by, reserved for the big buyers, the style editors of the major magazines and newspapers, the other bigwigs in the world of couture as well as the most famous customers: the Duchess of Windsor, Elsie de Wolfe, and others of large fortune and good taste. Janet Flanner, the correspondent for the New Yorker, never missed a showing. But Coco had saved one of those precious tickets, one of those chairs in the audience, for me. A kindness? Perhaps.
Her second-floor showroom was filled with rows of silk upholstered chairs and tubs of white orchids. The air was thick with the scent of her most popular perfume, No. 5. The lighting was dim enough to be flattering to faces no longer young but strong enough to show off the clothes. A string quartet played Vivaldi. The buzz of conversation all but drowned out the quartet, and people, mostly women, shifted expectantly in their chairs.
On the showroom floor, shop assistants lurked behind pillars and in corners, ready to confiscate any pencil or pen that lingered too long over the program for the collection. Coco would not let people take notes during the showing, for fear of copyists and sketchers. Journalists and known customers would be invited back later so that they could more closely inspect the collection, but the general audience was not to write during the showing.
I checked the audience to see if the woman who had approached me and asked to sketch for her was there. She was. Hat perched too far back on her head, jacket not well constructed—I was learning some of the tricks of the trade—sitting in the third row. I caught the eye of one of Coco’s assistants and carefully, hoping no one else would see, pointed at the woman. The assistant approached her, whispered a few words. The woman shook her head. The assistant insisted. With a shrug of her shoulders, the woman handed over her small pocketed notebook.
She looked over her shoulder, saw me, and gave me a scathing glance, but I was glad I had thwarted her. I hated cheats. Coco had seen this skirmish, and when I looked in her direction again, she smiled a thank-you.
The collections were always shown in a prescribed sequence: first, the day and sport outfits, the casual clothes worn by models who looked ready for the tennis court, a ride in the Bois de Boulogne; then the afternoon and town clothes, sophisticated ensembles for tea and cocktails and matinees; then, the magnificent evening gowns and wedding dresses.
The models paraded out holding the number of their outfit in one hand, the other placed on a hip or stroking a lapel of a jacket. They turned to show the backs, turned to face us once again, and then disappeared, to be replaced by the next model, the next ensemble. The audience sat forward in the chairs, eyes flaming with covetousness as they wrote down the numbers of the outfits they wanted for their own wardrobes.
All through the showing Coco sat at the top of the stairs, half hidden behind a pillar, her face showing exhaustion and worry.
By the end of that showing, though, her pensiveness had given way to satisfaction. The cheering, when she descended the steps, was loud enough to satisfy even the demanding Coco Chanel.
“The lamé dress with the bolero,” the woman next to me shouted to her companion, her shrill voice barely audible over the applause.
“The printed lounge pajamas with that huge necklace!” her friend agreed.
Coco’s collection was a success.
But the Schiaparelli collection was a grand success.
A crowd of fashion-hungry women raced across the gray cobbles of the Place Vendôme in a loud clattering of heels on pavement, as soon as the Chanel viewing was over, even before the applause had died down. I watched Coco’s face grow stormy at how eager they were to see what Schiap had planned. Schiap could have scheduled her showing so that it didn’t follow so closely on the heels of Coco’s, but when I saw the women, the journalists, the buyers for the stores, racing across the Place Vendôme to Schiap’s boutique, I knew this was her revenge for the Durst ball.
I could have stayed behind, talked with Coco, congratulated her. But I, too, didn’t want to miss a minute of Schiap’s collection. I had already seen the garments, but Schiap didn’t just show clothes; she presented theater to her audience, spectacle.
The boutique was all in darkness when we arrived. A doorman solemnly opened the door, and ushers guided us up the stairs to our seats, where we fidgeted like schoolchildren. When we had grown quiet, baroque music began to play, Lully’s court music written for Louis XIV. Slowly, imitating a sunrise, the lights came up, just enough so that we could see, but not enough to dim the constellations that glowed from lights carefully arranged on the ceiling of the boutique. The show began.
Schiap’s models danced La Ballet de la Nuit, slowly twirling, arms extended to invisible partners, and we were all transported to a court ball in seventeenth-century France. We watched with breath held in, not wanting to break the spell of glamour. No one took notes; we were too enthralled with the fantasy.
The collection finished with slender evening gowns in moiré silk that changed color as the models walked, and at the very end they put on the capes meant to be worn over the gowns, all covered in glittering rhinestone embroidery. The models and gowns seemed part of the sky itself, glittering and mutable, full of shooting stars. It was breathtaking.
Gogo, returned from her stay in Nice and brown as a walnut, applauded from beginning to end, never once letting her hands rest in her lap.
“Marvelous,” she whispered in my ear. That day Gogo adored her mother, admired her, loved her. We all did.
Schiap was mobbed by journalists and buyers at the end of the showing. The society ladies stayed behind as well, shouting for the attention of Schiap’s assistants, who now allowed customers to see the garments up close, to feel the fabrics, see the details of the embroidery, as they made up their minds which outfits they would order. I stayed on the fringe of the crowd, taking it in, but Schiap looked up at me once and winked. Set me on fire, her expression said. Well, I showed her.
I remembered an old proverb my grandfather had told me once, back in New York when I was fuming over some childish wrong committed against me. When you plan revenge, you must dig two graves.
After the showings, Paris, that city of changing, dappled light, changed yet again, from sultry summer and frantic collections week to autumn. The tourists and buyers left, and the city seemed like a woman who has grown a little wiser, a bit calmer.
I was anything but calm. I was painting furiously, two, sometimes three new canvases a week, barely letting the paint dry on one before beginning another, trying to capture the light in all its variability, the colors on the trees, the mutable river, the clothing of the women, the cold-pinked cheeks of schoolchildren. There was color everywhere, and I was consumed with the need not to repeat it or try to capture it, but to talk with it, to add my own colors to the silent conversation of hue and tint.
The colors almost mixed themselves on the palette; my skies were bluer than blue, the reds shimmered with passion. The lighting in my landlady’s attic was magnificent, and more and more, instead of thinking of scenes, of people walking by the river or a dawn cityscape, the usual paintings made of Paris, I thought only of the colors. I hadn’t been able to finish Allen’s portrait, and lines, specific subjects, seemed not worth painting. The landscapes I tried, the Seine at late afternoon, the grays of Notre Dame’s façade, seemed easy, pretty, no more than souvenirs for tourists. The colors, though, appeared on my canvases in large blocks and ovals.
“But what is it? I see only red and blue,” said Solange, the housemaid who swept my floor once a week in exchange for an English lesson.
“That’s what it is,” I said. “Color.”
“But it must be something else,” she insisted. “A tree. A swimming pond. Two lovers, there in the corner where the blue and the red swirl around together.”
“So you do see more than color.”
She thought about that, biting her lip and leaning on her broom handle.
The day that I finished my first canvas without any representational lines at all took me by surprise. I had meant to sketch in two children playing with a beach ball, but they refused to appear. Instead, there was a blur, a spiral brushed into a splotch of yellow. There were brushstrokes of joy, not children feeling joy. It was the memory of joy.
I no longer dreamed of Allen at night. I no longer woke up with my arms formed into an empty searching circle. It wasn’t forgetting. What I felt for Allen is never forgotten, never finished. But it was an acceptance, both of loss and of a need to take a step forward each day, into the unknown future. The future, like some art, is abstract. We must see what we can in it and accept the unknowing of what is not seen.
And as I was accepting the facts of my life, Paris was unwillingly accepting her own changes. By the end of September, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini, and Hitler had redrawn the map of Europe, surrendering Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s army. He hadn’t stopped after annexing Austria, as many had hoped. I wondered what color Czechoslovakia, now a puppet state of Germany, would be in this new map.
“A mistake,” Schiap said. “A big mistake. To make deals with a man like that. He is a monster.”
Overnight, it seemed, sandbags multiplied all over Paris, protecting monuments, buildings, bridges. There were sandbags in front of Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe, in front of Saint-Michel and Les Halles. The leaves began to fade from green to yellow, the weather turned cooler, and Paris, lovely, gay Paris, began to feel sad.
There was a sense of urgency in the air. People walked a little faster. My landlady began stocking up on flour and sugar and wine, hoarding bags and boxes in the alcove under the stairs.
Ania came and went like a bird, a butterfly. During the summer, her husband had taken her child with him to the South of France, but now they were back and Ania spent weekends with them, in a house somewhere just outside Paris. When she wasn’t with her daughter, she was visiting friends in London, going to a spa in Vichy.
One day at the end of November I found her again at the Ritz.
She was tanned and wore huge sunglasses, larger even than Coco’s tortoiseshell spectacles, but they still weren’t big enough to hide the dark smudge circling Ania’s right eye. It was dark in the bar; with those glasses on she must have been all but blinded.
The Ritz bar was getting set up for cocktail hour—candles on the tables, white cloths, aproned men and women straightening chairs and tables. In the darkened room they seemed like attendants from an unpleasant dream, unsmiling, silent, looking sideways at Ania and me at the bar. I had never liked the Ritz bar. Too many came just hoping to find the writer Hemingway drinking there. Too many men still regretted the good old days of just two years before, when women, not allowed in the bar, were required to sit in a small room, separately, on the other side of the hall.
“What happened to you?” I asked, pulling off the glasses and studying the bruise around Ania’s eye.
“I walked into a door.”
“Looks more like a fist smashed into your face.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I walked into a door, and if you say otherwise to anyone else I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” She couldn’t think of a suitable revenge. “Another. And one for my friend.” Ania slid her martini glass over the zinc counter to the bartender.
“Is Guido still out there?” she asked, not looking up from her martini glass. Guido was the chauffeur.
“Yes. And not looking happy.”
Ania flung coins onto the glistening zinc, and the bartender sullenly fetched them.
“Well, he’s not happy. He’s lost all his free time because he’s been told to keep an eye on me. I’m not allowed to drive myself anymore. Anywhere. My husband doesn’t approve of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.”
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Not with von Dincklage. With a friend, a woman, at Beauville, to get some sun. I turned down an invitation to von Dincklage’s house party.”
Ania looked beat up and miserable with smeared mascara, untidy masses of blond hair falling out of the chignon she wore in the afternoon. Her dress was a shade of mauve that did not work well with her coloring; she needed vibrant colors. Yet, looking at her, I knew that Charlie would see none of this, would have seen only the love of his life, here on a bar stool, well beyond tipsy. That black eye would have made him fighting furious.
“Strange husband, who prefers his wife to be with her lover rather than a friend.”
Ania blanched. “I told you, Lily. Von Dincklage has important connections. We’ll need them, and him, in the days to come.”
“There’s a word for your husband in English,” I said. “Do they have it in French, too? Pimp? Procurer?”
“Merde, Lily, it’s not that simple or sordid, and could you for a moment stop being judgmental? If not, finish your drink and go.” She was crying then, so of course I couldn’t leave. Instead I put my arm around her and let her sob quietly against me as I finished my martini.
“Better,” she said, drying her eyes and wiping away black smears of makeup with a handkerchief. “Let’s go see a movie. I need distraction.”
She tripped leaving the barroom, and Olivier, the maître d’hôtel of the Ritz who happened to be passing by, caught her by the elbow. “Madame Ania,” he said gently. “Are we under the weather?”
“Never,” she said, giving him her brilliant smile.
We saw Algiers with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer, and Ania made catty, silly remarks all the way through so that the people sitting unfortunately close to us made repeated attempts to hush her. “Look at that dress! A rag! See how she stoops. If she keeps eating and drinking like that she’ll have bosoms down to her waist before she’s thirty.”
At one point, during one of the long kisses between Hedy and Charles, she took my hand. “I really miss him,” she said. She stared straight ahead at the screen, where Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr fled, their arms around each other, through the labyrinth of the Casbah. “But there is so much I’d have to leave behind.”
Ania looked even more devastated than before, when we left the cinema. “I think maybe it wasn’t a good idea to see a love story,” I told her. “Meet me tomorrow? At the Ritz again?” Something in her face frightened me, the complete lack of expression in her eyes, as if she was about to do something desperate.
“Yes. Tomorrow,” she agreed.
I painted all the next morning, but the colors wouldn’t mix right, looked flat on the canvas, as if my worry about Ania and Charlie was interfering with the chemistry of pigments. And I was running out of supplies. I had gone through the money Schiap had given me for papers and pastels for her windows.
When I went to the boutique Schiap was upstairs, checking inventory lists with her premier fitter, getting ready to begin order fulfillment for the new collection. It was a chore even the best generals couldn’t have achieved with minimum chaos: the Schiaparelli boutique made many thousands of gowns and ensembles a year, hand-sewn, hand-fitted not once but many times—even something as simple as a nightgown could require three fitting sessions. And it was all achieved on a tight schedule so that they could begin work, as soon as possible, on the next collection.
I went into the office and sat in a shadowy corner, waiting, knowing better than to interrupt while Schiap and Bettina and the premier murmured together, flipping through charts and button cards.
When they had finished, a tense half hour later, Bettina gathered up her jacket and purse to leave. “Did you hear?” she asked me. “Schiap’s black silk moiré dress with the strip down the side is so popular that six women wore it to the same event.” Bettina cackled with delight. She was a beautiful woman who loved fashion, but she also loved to poke at the too-rich.
Schiap closed the door after her and we sat together, each waiting for the other to begin. She could be a mind reader, Schiap. She always knew when something was up, when my appearance was more than a friendly visit.
She eyed me for that usual long, critical appraisal. “You know, most women overestimate their looks, their charm. You do the opposite. But you have a good sense of color. I like the pale blue blouse with the gray skirt. Maybe I will have them displayed like that on the sales floor.” She had given me both the skirt and the blouse at separate times, not intending them, I think, to be worn together. But as she said, the colors worked.
She lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The silk threads Lesage ordered aren’t identical to the ones he used for the models,” she sighed. “He will ruin me. He has to order a whole new shipment, dyed to order, and it will put that model a week behind the production schedule.”
“Disaster,” I agreed, wondering if Churchill in England and Daladier in France paid as much attention to details and schedules as did the couture women of Paris.
“Well, he’ll just have to hire some more embroiderers and make them work overtime, when the silks arrive. And I think it’s time to stock up on inventory. Soon, it will be difficult to get silk threads in any color other than khaki.”
She pursed her mouth, considering, looking at all the cabinets and cupboards in her office, worrying that a day would come when she would open them and find nothing inside.
Schiap looked at me from under glowering black brows. “You want something,” she said.
“An advance. Or to borrow a little.”
“Is that all? I thought it was something about Gogo. Do you see much of her?”
“Yes, when she’s in town. But she has so many friends.”
“And she likes to travel. We are going skiing in January. Before that, she’ll probably spend a month in London with her circle there.” Mama Schiap gloated with pride. “She’s the prettiest girl in London. How much? The advance?”
I asked for a small sum, the equivalent of a few hours’ pay, just enough to settle with Sennelier so that I could keep painting. The cost of linen and cadmium red had doubled in just a few months. Inflation, and fears of shortages, were affecting the price of everything.
“The next time you go to Sennelier’s, wear a good suit. One of mine,” Schiap advised. “You’ll get more credit if they think you are a rich amateur.”
It was already midafternoon by then, too late for painting, and time for cocktails with Ania, so I crossed the Place Vendôme to the Ritz. A small crowd had gathered and was watching a bellhop from the Ritz scrub at something on the granite pavement in front of it. I forced my way through to see. Death to the Jews had been painted, in red.
“The graffiti is all over Paris,” Ania said, coming up behind me and looking over my shoulder. “Some little Nazi-lover has been very busy.”
The Ritz was subdued that afternoon. People spoke in whispers and kept their jackets close by, as if they might need to leave suddenly. Monsieur Auzello, the hotel manager, was beside himself, pacing and talking to himself, pulling at the lapels of his suit. He was a muscular, square-faced man who looked like Clark Gable. To see him so distressed, a man usually in control, confident, was unnerving.
His wife, Blanche, a pretty brunette born in New York, whispered something to her husband, then came over and stood next to Ania.
“Are you all right?” she asked, putting her hand on Ania’s arm.
“Just fine,” Ania said, knocking back her martini. Madame Auzello tilted her head to the side and left.
“She’s Jewish,” Ania said. “She says she’s Catholic, but she’s Jewish. So am I.”
“But you’re married and a French citizen now. Won’t that protect you if . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. The rules seem to be written as we go along.”
“All the more reason to leave,” I said. “I’ve had five letters from Charlie this month alone, and every time he asks about you and wonders if you might change your mind.”
“I won’t leave my daughter. But, oh Lily, I love Charlie so much. Even more, now that he’s gone. And yes, I am a little frightened.”
We drank a lot, that afternoon. And by the end of it, Ania had decided, finally, firmly, to come to some sort of arrangement with her husband. Maybe he would let her take the child for half the year, or the school year. “Or even for a visit,” she said. “A trip to New York. And when we were there, we would stay. Just not come back.” She would book passage on the Île de France, leaving from Le Havre to New York. First class, of course.
Three days later, I was seeing her off at the train station. Her daughter wasn’t with her, but Ania seemed full of hope.
“I did it! I finally talked him into it. He will let me take her.”
“How, Ania?”
“I told him we would both come back after a couple of months. I lied. He will send her to me, next month, with her nurse.”
I wondered if Ania’s lie had been as fully believed by her husband as she hoped, if he might also have been lying to her. “I love Charlie. I really do,” she repeated, fussing with the tags on her luggage, and I wondered if she was convincing me or herself. “I know there will be problems.” Her voice trailed off.
Understatement. The other medical faculty wives, for a start. And how does one arrange a divorce long distance? How would Ania manage in Boston? I tried to imagine her in a sedate black day dress, her only jewels small pearl earrings, her shoes with sensible one-inch heels. Without that blue Isotta and driver she’d be doing a lot of walking. Did she know how alone the wives of doctors could be, how independent and resourceful they needed to be, just to keep their families together?
And did she really believe her husband’s promise?
“Don’t cry, Ania. Charlie will make it work,” I said, hugging her.
“Do you really think so?” She looked at me with the pleading, open gaze of a child who has been told she can go to the circus after all. “How do the women in Boston dress? I hope I packed the correct clothes.”
As if her wardrobe was going to be the most serious problem. “Oh, my dear, Charlie loves everything you wear, you know that. As for the others, they’ll adjust. Bring them a touch of Paris.”
I helped her find a porter to wheel away her many cases and trunks, helped her choose magazines from the kiosk—Vogue, Time, Journal de la Semaine.
It was a gray morning, damp and distracting with the last leaves falling, people huddled into the turned-up collars of their coats. We bought cups of coffee at the train station buffet and took a little table near the window to wait for her train.
Ania knocked back a shot glass of whiskey she had bought to go with her coffee. “Von Dincklage doesn’t know I am leaving. Maybe he won’t care. I think he and Coco are lovers now; why does he need me? Maybe I’ll have a second shot. I feel nervous. Do I look alright? Lily, what will I do in Boston, after I have set up my apartment? I’ll get pink curtains for Katya’s bedroom. She likes pink. I’ll have to find a ballet teacher for her. She has just started studying, and loves to dance.” Ania’s hands trembled. Outside the window, a train pulled away with a loud grinding of metal on metal, clouds of steam, people shouting their good-byes, the same sounds that had accompanied Charlie’s leaving.
“Have you considered taking a class? Studying something?” I knew how my aunt would have answered that question: Be a good companion to Charlie, improve yourself. Charlie would be working twelve hours a day. There would be no parties, no cocktail hours, and there was Katya.
“What kind of class?” Fear made her voice small and thin.
“Well, have you ever wanted to paint? To sculpt? To learn German? Dressmaking?”
“German I already know.”
“Maybe a night class in the classics? Aristotle and Voltaire?”
She made a face like a bored schoolgirl.
“Can you cook?” I asked. Ania and Charlie would be living not together but in separate small apartments, side by side. Cohabitation before they were able to marry would be more than Boston could cope with, although everyone who knew them would understand the situation immediately.
“Yes!” Ania finally smiled. “I can scramble eggs. I can make escargots and cassoulet. Oh, I make a wonderful tarte tatin.”
Snails and duck confit might be a little difficult to find in Boston, but if she said the tarte was an apple pie that would work.
“Then make meals for Charlie. Keep him company, and when you have time visit museums, take long healthy walks with your child.” Oh God, it was the advice Allen’s mother gave me, when Allen and I married, before I had become the school art mistress.
She looked at me as if she no longer understood my language. “I studied piano when I was a child,” she said. “Perhaps . . .”
We finished our coffee just as her train departure was announced.
A doctor’s wife should read medical books so that she could follow his conversation when he came home from the clinic. She should entertain his friends, men who spoke only of research and funding, and their wives who talked of their children. I couldn’t see beautiful, worldly Ania doing any of that.
I was afraid for Ania and for a moment was angry with Charlie. He, who had criticized Josephine Baker once because she kept a cheetah for a pet and walked it on a jewel-studded leash, was going to try to leash Ania. I loved my brother completely, unconditionally, yet I knew he could be demanding and stern.
We paused for a hug outside her train compartment, and for a moment I thought Ania might change her mind. But she sighed, smiled, tipped her hat bravely forward, went up the steps, opened the door, and disappeared into the great unknown.
When the train had pulled out I realized how very alone I was. I tried to be happy for Charlie, who was getting his wish, but there was a nagging premonition that this was not going to go well for him. Nor for Ania.
The numb hollowness that had replaced my mourning and grief after Allen’s death made my stomach lurch.
By instinct, I went to the Louvre. The train station had been so gray, so busy with farewells and the sadness that hangs in the air when people part. I needed color.