New York began to transform itself as Paris had. The city was noisy and bright during the day, but there was a current of desperation behind the laughter. The bars were full; people drank a little too much, too often. Young men in uniform, new to the city, walked four abreast down Fifth Avenue, gawking, catcalling the young salesgirls on their lunch breaks. The nights were dark and quiet. If you went out after dark your footsteps echoed. People bumped into each other, felt their way home by trailing their hands along buildings during the unlit night.
During the day all the colors had a tint of brown or gray to them, yellow turning to ocher, blue to slate, red to chestnut, as if getting ready for the black of mourning. Charlie finished training that winter and was sent overseas. There was a great demand for medical officers; they didn’t waste any time getting them into Europe or the Pacific fronts. He didn’t want me to go the station with him.
Beloved Charlie, standing in the street below and waving up at me as I watched him from the window. As Otto had done.
I waved back and remembered Charlie in his dashing scarf and driving goggles, driving up to the curb outside the Café les Deux Magots, Charlie looking forward to an afternoon with his sister and his girl, Ania. I wished I had been able to capture that moment in amber.
My brother disappeared into the maw of war, and every time I thought of him, I touched something made of iron, for luck, as Schiap used to do. I had nightmares of Charlie and Otto confronting each other on a battlefield, each trying to kill the other without knowing that they were the two most important people in the world to me. But he’s a medic, I told myself over and over. He’ll be safe and he’s there to heal, not to kill. He’ll be fine, he promised me.
Gogo’s husband enlisted, too, and she, just married, couldn’t stand the boredom of waiting, the sleepless nights of worry, the fretting and pacing.
“I’m joining the American Red Cross,” she told me during one of our Saturday lunches at Horn and Hardart. “I’m going to India, to open a service club and put on little amateur theatricals for the servicemen. Mummy actually suggested it. She thought it might be fun. And safe. I think she’s afraid that New York will be bombed next.”
Schiap was traveling nonstop all over the United States and the big cities of South America as well, giving lectures on how women should dress during wartime, the importance of maintaining morale through dressing as well as possible. She was still, always, a businesswoman, and clothes must be promoted.
Horn and Hardart was full that day with all women and children, like most of New York, most of the country. When soldiers and sailors on leave did come in, all eyes turned in their direction, hopeful eyes, patient eyes, fearful eyes. And then we looked at our plates, slightly shamed to be so covetous of some other woman’s brother, someone else’s husband.
“I’ll think Mummy will be glad to have me busy, doing something. I can’t stand this waiting, this limbo.” She was gone two weeks later.
Fold and pack. Pack and fold, knit. My socks never improved, so I stuck with scarves and woolen mufflers. Days of work, dark nights of solitude and darkness, me and the radio. After working all day I spent the evenings pouring coffee and tea at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Club, anything to keep busy. The war seemed like a huge black wolf, trailing me from country to country. I did what we all did in those days: worked and waited. Put everything on hold. I hadn’t held a paintbrush since I left Paris. My fingers ached from packing boxes and knitting, packing boxes and knitting.
Gogo was back, two months later. The Red Cross women had been sent to a jungle in Bengal, where Gogo had immediately become ill with dysentery. Tiny Gogo returned thin as a rail, her beautiful long brown hair cropped short and growing in curly and wild.
She came back ill but she came back, and that seemed an omen to me. If Gogo came back, so could Charlie. Otto, too. If Schiap’s daughter returned, so could my loved ones.
But they didn’t.
In August, I was sitting in the dark, fanning myself in front of the radio, listening to Jack Benny, when the doorbell rang. A boy, too young to fight, stood there, shy and bent under the load of his heavy satchel. His green uniform was neatly pressed, but he had wrapped bands around the ankles so his pants wouldn’t get caught in the bicycle chain.
“Telegram, ma’am,” he said in a voice not yet out of the higher notes of childhood.
I almost said, No, I don’t want it. Take it back. But of course you can’t do that. You must put out your hand, take the envelope from the boy delivering it. I almost forgot to tip him his nickel.
I sat in the dark with it for a long while, holding it softly, gently, thinking perhaps if I waited long enough the news in it would change. But of course they didn’t send telegrams with good news in them.
I sat numb, staring at the gray-and-yellow wallpaper in the corner of the sitting room where Charlie, little Charlie, had once drawn a horse with Mother’s nail polish. Most of it had been scraped away, but the outline was still there, a red clumsy horse, rearing up. I opened the telegram an hour after it had arrived, put it off as long as I could, because I knew when I opened it I would be alone, even more alone than I had been after Allen’s death, because there was no one to see me through this one.
The Battle of Edson’s Ridge. Guadalcanal. Pacific Theater. Words. Just words. All that I understood was that Charlie had been killed.
Charlie with his blue eyes changing from deep sapphire to pale aquamarine depending on his mood, his blond hair white as a halo. Charlie, my little brother, teasing, tormenting. Charlie, who had sent the telegram: Come to Paris. Café les Deux Magots. Charlie, leaves pinned to his label at the Bal de la Forêt, Charlie climbing into the baby-blue Isotta, next to Ania. They kiss and stick their hands up in the air, laughing and waving good-bye.
I felt as if there were no ground beneath me, nothing holding me up except my body’s own stubborn unwillingness to crumple.
For weeks after getting the telegram I had the same dream. I’ve been told he’s dead, but then one day I’m walking in the Place Vendôme and there he is, with Ania in the baby-blue Isotta, pulling away from the curb, waving.
And when you can no longer deny the reality of the telegram, the bargaining begins. It was a mistake, you tell yourself. They didn’t identify the body correctly. You wait for the next telegram, saying it was a mistake. And it doesn’t come. Still, you bargain. I won’t cry, because that will make it real. When I tell my Red Cross friend Susan about the telegram, I’ll tell her, of course, it’s a mistake.
But it wasn’t a mistake. Charlie was dead.
And, what I learned months later, from a headline in the New York Times about the Vél d’Hiv disaster in Paris, when all Jews still in Paris were arrested and deported to camps: Charlie had been killed the same month Ania had been arrested and sent to a camp.
Grief becomes the gesso on the canvas over which other colors must eventually be applied. I began to paint, finding in the familiar movements and smells the absorption and release no other activity brought. When I painted, I felt maybe Charlie was close by. Otto was near, and Ania, too, we all four together, safe for as long as I painted, and when I was exhausted and put the brushes back down, I wept again.
One day, at the Metropolitan Museum where I’d gone to study Correggio’s painting of Saint Peter, wondering how the artist had used so much yellow yet kept the glow subdued, a man stood behind me and cleared his throat.
I turned in annoyance, but the irritation at being disturbed turned to pleasure. It was Paul Rosenberg.
“Not quite your style, I think,” he said. “As I recall, you had moved into abstraction.”
“I study the colors. All the old masters have blue, red, and yellow, don’t they? The primaries. Mr. Rosenberg, how good to see you!”
I would have hugged him, except the formality of his three-piece suit, those intimidating black eyebrows, held me back. Instead, we shook hands politely, somewhat stiffly. Paris felt a lifetime ago, but when I looked at him I smelled croissants from the corner bakery, roasting chestnuts, heard the hot jazz playing at Bricktop’s.
He looked older, his lean figure even leaner, his face plowed with deep furrows.
“Did you get your collection moved to safety?” I asked.
“Most, not all. Did you get your paintings to safety?”
“They are still in Paris.” I shrugged.
He sighed and folded his hands in front of his stomach, the way mourners do. “Too bad. I especially liked the blue one. Are you painting now?”
“I try. It’s difficult.”
He studied me from under those thick black eyebrows. “I’m sorry,” he said, understanding that I wasn’t just referring to the difficulty of finding art supplies and time.
“Well, I’ll leave you to your musings on Correggio. When you’re ready, come see me. I’ve opened a gallery on Madison.” When we shook hands again for parting, he gave me a little pat on the shoulder as well.
“It was hard, wasn’t it?” he said. “Leaving Paris. Poor Paris.”
This was how I survived the war: I grieved. I painted. I packed unending boxes for the Red Cross, hoping against hope that one might end up wherever Ania had been taken, that she was still alive, and Otto, too. Gogo and I met more and more infrequently; she had her own circle of friends, more stylish people who were named in the society pages, other young wives waiting for their husbands to come home from the war.
When you can do nothing but wait and grieve and fear, colors change. Yellow becomes a mocking thing, a bird cawing annoyingly from a treetop, a false sun that gives neither warmth nor light.
And then, it ended. In April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker and the German army surrendered.
There were parades everywhere all that week, official ones and spontaneous ones, music blaring from loudspeakers, confetti tossed from windows, and people hugging, kissing, dancing. Times Square was one giant embrace that lasted for days, full of lovers reuniting, strangers bumping into each other, the entire city dancing, celebrating. The war in Europe was over.
Susan’s young man came home soon after. We were still packing boxes for the Red Cross because it would be another year or so before all the prisoners were brought home, before the camps would be emptied of those who had somehow survived. Susan shook all over with fear and joy, wondering if he had changed, if she had changed, if the future they had promised each other was still there waiting for them.
“Come with me,” she begged. “I don’t think I can do this alone. Come with me!”
“Of course!” I stood in front of the cracked mirror in the ladies’ room, arranging and rearranging my hat, one of the little summer cloches Coco had given me years before. I pulled it down over one eye, thinking of what Coco had said, that young women didn’t need mystery, their faces should be open. But then . . . You’re not that young anymore, I told myself. You’ll be thirty soon. That’s not young, is it? I pulled the hat even lower over my eye, the way Schiap had instructed.
“You look swell,” Susan said, tugging on one of her stockings. They were silk, and she had been saving them just for this day, the one day in her life when she was going to go all out instead of drawing stocking lines up her legs with eyebrow pencil as we had during the war, when silk and even cheap nylon were needed for war materials, not stockings.
I wore a beige jacket from Coco and a black skirt from Schiap, mixing them together in a way that would have infuriated both of them. Susan’s eyes darted back and forth between my chic veiled cloche and her own battered felt hat. Impulsively, I pulled my hat off and arranged it over Susan’s curly hair.
“No. I couldn’t . . .” she protested, already reaching up to touch it in a way that indicated ownership.
“Of course you can,” I said, and it was the same words that Coco had used one day when she had given me a pair of kidskin gloves. I hadn’t heard from her, or even heard much of her during the war years, except for what Schiap had told me, that she had holed up at the Ritz with her German lover, von Dincklage. Impossible, I thought. I’m actually missing Coco. I hope we’re friends, she had said, at the end.
I gave the cloche one more little tug over Susan’s right eye. “There. Keep it low, seductive. A little mysterious.”
We went out into the street, humidity making our clothes stick to our backs after five minutes in the subway. The subway car was full, and I tried to read the expressions on people’s faces, whether they had had good news or bad. Some people smiled, caught up in the ecstasy of a coming reunion. Others either didn’t look up from their newspaper or stared straight ahead, their faces frozen into mourning.
We arrived at the dock just a few minutes after the Queen Elizabeth, which had been converted into a troop transport ship for the war, sailed back into the Narrows, with five other troop transport ships following her. The pier was even more crowded than the subway, and we jostled back and forth, a wave of humanity.
“Oh God, Lily, I’m so excited I think I’m going to pee.” Susan stood on tiptoe, straining to see. “Oh, Lily. I forgot about Charlie. See, that’s how excited I am. I wish he was coming home, too.”
“Me, too,” I said. “But this is your day. Be happy.”
Susan’s young man was one of the last to leave the ship, and Susan was almost ready to give up. She was terrified that something had gone wrong, that he had missed the transport call, been wounded at the very last minute. But there he was, coming toward us at last, tall and lanky, smiling from ear to ear. When he swept Susan up into an embrace that lifted her off the ground, I slipped away through the crowd. Otto had lifted me up like that, once. Right off my feet. Dead or alive, Otto, I thought. Where are you?
Not long after that, I saw Schiap again, on East 55th Street, in front of the St. Regis Hotel. If the Germans had taken over the Ritz in Paris, the French in exile had taken over the Regis in New York, and sometimes I went there and sat alone at the bar, just to hear French being spoken.
Schiap was pacing and puffing angrily on a cigarette, her heels clattering on the sidewalk, her turban hat ever so slightly askew. She was dressed with unusual simplicity in a gray linen suit with a very modest amount of jewelry.
I froze, torn between surprise, joy, and disbelief.
“Schiap?”
“Lily? It is you! A friendly face, just when I need one. But what are you wearing?”
She gave me that old Parisian glance that said, This simply will not do. I was wearing an old coat, frayed collar and all, over the painting smock I hadn’t bothered to change when I had decided I needed a walk, to clear my head of turpentine fumes.
Schiap was older in more than years. Her face was lined, and her mouth turned down at the corners in a sad little expression of disappointment. There were huge bruise-colored circles around her eyes, exacerbated by slightly smeared mascara.
“You have given up,” she said. “You look terrible. Women should not give up, not let themselves go, no matter the circumstances. Do you have time for a drink?”
She seemed nervous, kept looking over her shoulder and then down at the ground, like a child afraid of discovery by an angry parent. That was how I knew something was wrong because Schiap was never afraid.
We went into the Old King Cole bar of the hotel and sat at a table close to Maxfield Parrish’s painting of the merry old soul, neither of us feeling particularly merry. It was early in the afternoon, and the bar was almost empty. Schiap had a shot of whiskey. Schiap never drank whiskey.
“What is it?” I was terrified she was going to say she had cancer, or something had happened to Gogo.
She slammed the glass down on our table. “The French Fashion Syndicale wants to question me. At two o’clock, upstairs, I have to appear before them. They want to know what I did during the war. Should I have another drink? This is not good, Lily. Not good at all. I think they want to blacklist me. And if they blacklist me I cannot have showings of my new collection.”
“Coffee,” I said to the waiting bartender.
Schiap’s hands trembled, and as she drank the coffee I dabbed at her eyes with my napkin, wiping away some of the smears.
“There. Now. Tell me, what did you do during the war?” I wasn’t surprised they had decided to interview Schiap. She had been trailed by the FBI for years for her communist leanings. After the war, there was much finger pointing, much blaming. Who did what. Who didn’t do what.
“My activities. That was the word they used. They want to know about my activities. I trained as a nurse, you know. I learned how to assist at operations. I didn’t eat meat for a year. I fed refugees in Paris and carried suitcases of vitamins for children when I traveled. Those were my activities! And now, they send spies to go through my mail, they have men follow me. They stand at the back of the room and stare when I give a lecture.”
“No one looks completely innocent, these days,” I said, trying to reassure her. But Schiap had somehow traveled freely from country to country and across the ocean when other people couldn’t even get a bus to go to the market. She had important connections, and she had used them. She also had some dubious friends, and in New York she had been decidedly friendly with the leftist Vichy crowd.
We sat and talked, and I tried to calm her by talking about the new styles that were beginning to appear, the short skirts and tight jackets and thick-soled shoes.
“It is because of the war, of course. People still have a rationing sensibility. It will pass. I will help it pass. Let me show you something.” She opened her bag and took out an envelope of photographs. “Elsie sent me this. You remember Elsie de Wolfe? This is how the women of Paris dressed during the war, to thumb their noses at the Germans.”
The clothes were bizarre, far beyond whimsical, with skirts that had dozens of yards of fabric in them, despite the textile restrictions, colors brighter than Schiap’s harlequin collection.
“I see my influence in this, don’t you? I allowed women to have fun, to laugh, to not always take things so seriously. This helped the women of Paris get through the war.” She was proud, and rightfully so, I thought. I was glad, though, I hadn’t had to wear any of those hats. They had to be heavy as hell and as difficult to balance as a showgirl’s headpiece.
“You know . . .” Her eyes gleamed, and she leaned closer to me. “When I was a little girl I found a trunk of clothes in the attic, beautiful old things made of lace and embroidery, so much you couldn’t see the fabric underneath, and with bustles and seaming that turned women into hourglasses. Imagine, a body made of time.”
Her fingers twitched as if she wanted to draw what she was remembering. “I used that shape, reworked my grandmother’s clothes into my evening gowns. And now . . .” Her mouth turned down.
Two o’clock. Time.
“Will you wait for me?” Schiap grasped my hand.
“In the lobby,” I agreed.
I waited almost three hours. When Schiap returned, she was pale but triumphant.
“They wanted to know about Bettina!” she complained. “They said I had Bolshevik tendencies. I told them it wasn’t illegal to support workers’ rights, or to have friends in the Vichy government. Or to sell to the military. If that were the case, most of France would be in jail. They’d stopped just short of accusing me of spying. Me, who had refused luncheon with Mussolini, who had fought so hard to keep the French industry from being moved to Berlin! Because I had kept my business open and sold to Germans, to Göring’s pretty wife, Emmy, to avoid putting even more people out of work.”
She lit a cigarette, and her hands trembled with anger. “Men fight the wars, but women, who have no say in them, we suffer, too,” she said. “I wept the day that Mussolini sided with Hitler and declared war against France. And this is how they repay me.”
“But you are free to go?”
“Yes. Free. But they will not let me be part of any of the parties for the fashion collections.”
This was no small thing. Fashion depended on publicity, and publicity depended on being seen. The syndicate was rendering Schiap invisible.
“It could have been worse, I suppose,” she said. “One of my friends in Paris refused to sit next to a German officer’s wife at one of the fashion showings. And that woman died at Ravensbrück just because she had switched chairs and offended a Nazi officer. Not going to a few parties. It is nothing.”
A man and woman entered the lobby, and she sat on a sofa as he went to the desk to register them. Schiap ran her eyes over the woman’s outfit, taking in the uncomfortably tight waist, the slightly puffed shoulders of the jacket, the too-high heels.
“Cut all wrong,” she whispered to me. “The skirt should be on the bias to give it better drape. I’ll show them courage,” she said, her eyes burning. “As soon as I have my travel papers, I am returning to Paris. I’ll be there before the syndicate returns, and I will have a new collection ready for the fall. Beautiful things. Schiaparelli dresses. A collection that will show Chanel once and for all who is the best designer in Paris. I’ll make people forget her. They already have, I think.”
So the old rivalry was still on.
“Is she going to reopen?” I asked. “I haven’t heard anything about Coco for a long while.”
“She is in Switzerland, moving from hotel to hotel. She got out of Paris as soon as they started arresting collaborators. They wanted to arrest her because she’d spent the war hiding in the Ritz with her Nazi.”
Schiap leaned closer. “People are whispering that she spied for the Germans. But her perfume shop is open, and they give away bottles of No. 5 faster than the factory can produce them. Every GI who goes into her shop gets a free bottle. That is how she buys her friends these days, that is how she buys American support.” Schiap glowered. “She’ll be lucky if she doesn’t go to prison. Collaborationist.”
On that fine early-summer afternoon, sitting in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel, Schiap and I fell into a silence that sometimes happens when old friends have been through so much, and yet have also missed so much of each other’s lives.
“I still have the blue-and-white gown you gave me when I was first in Paris. Charlie helped pick it out. He died, you know. During the war.”
Schiap picked up my hand and held it tightly, in sympathy.
“You wore it to the Durst ball,” she said. “It looked very fine on you, even though you had attached those silly wings. And Ania . . . how beautiful she was that night. She and your brother looked so happy until . . .”
Until von Dincklage had arrived. He arrived, and Coco had arrived, and Coco danced Schiap into a flaming candelabra. Schiap on fire, whirling in panic as everyone laughed at the joke, everyone except Coco, who had terrified herself, and Charlie, who knew how to put out flames, and me, who watched, horrified, remembering Allen’s death.
“Was Ania arrested, Schiap? Do you know for certain?”
“I heard she was caught up in the Vél d’Hiv mass arrests. That beautiful woman. It doesn’t bear thinking about. She and your brother made such a couple. Everyone looked when they walked by.” Schiap sighed, gripped my hand a moment longer, then released it. “One must never give up. Here. You might like to look at this. There’s an article about me.” She paused, considering, the same expression that used to come over her face in her Paris office when she had to choose from those trays of wonderful handmade buttons. She made up her mind and poked the copy of Today’s Woman magazine toward me. “And some other interesting reading.”
When she had left I ordered another drink and thumbed through the magazine. There she was, page 26, dressed in a bizarre party costume, a giant birdcage. It was a good publicity shot, but I didn’t think the costume would convert many people to her particular fashion style.
I kept thumbing through as I sipped my drink. The second-to-last page had been folded over and creased. It was a photo page of candid shots, news from across the country, and in the upper right-hand corner was a photo of German prisoners of war kept at a camp in Massachusetts.
The British had taken so many POWs they couldn’t intern them all in England, so thousands had been sent to the United States. Now that the war was over the prisoners would eventually be repatriated. Meanwhile, the journalist wrote, life goes on and for some of them much better than it would have for them in Germany. Take this group (photo above) of Germans enjoying an impromptu concert in their recreation room.
At the keyboard was Otto.
I put down my drink and brought the magazine closer, not believing my eyes. But it was Otto. I put my index finger on his face, remembering the boyish softness of his skin. Otto, alive, in the States.
In classical oil painting technique, wet paint is applied over dry paint. Each layer must ripen, before the next layer of the image can be applied. All the layers of my life beneath this moment were ready for the next moment to come. There was another layer, another color, waiting.
But was Otto waiting for me? Or had the war destroyed us, along with so much else?