The It Girls

by Karen Harper

  “Terrible!” Lucile said even louder. “That’s what I shall write you back. Cannot you hold to the better ways of the past? Must you, too, always be pushing forward? Next you’ll be wearing those tight, plain hats that smother one’s hair and straight-skirted, skinny girl clothes.” She almost didn’t read on, but her eye caught Cosmo’s name again.

  Your countrymen need you, not to mention Cosmo. Oh, yes, he cloaks missing you well, but I saw him before I left London for Paris, and I can see you have hurt him to the core and—

  “As he has done me. And you too. I shall do what I need to do, and if you are not careful, prancing near enemy lines, you will prove yourself as foolhardy as you always have, but gambling with your life this time—not just writing some romance about a real-life cad who betrayed you.”

  So many women of all classes have stepped up at home, and I am so proud of my girls. They both volunteered for the Voluntary Aid Detachment, wretched but worthwhile jobs, and both have worked their way up to acting as secretaries for important men. Margot is working for the deputy chief of air staff and Juliet for Admiral Richmond while Mother pitches in to care for the grandchildren. Although I began working at the canteen in Grosvenor Gardens in London, then moved on to deliver cigarettes and candy to our wounded boys here in Paris, as I mentioned before—but did not hear your response—I am honored to now be named vice president of the Secours Franco-Americain Society to bring relief to devastated battle areas. I will soon be touring regions which need help, and, I’m sure you’ll agree ‘if I screw my courage to the sticking place,’ it is worth the risk, and so—

  Lucile sank into her desk chair and sucked in a huge sob. Yet again, her sister’s literary reference to Shakespeare. The sticking place, indeed!

  She wadded up the long letter and threw it in the rubbish basket, then yanked it out again and smoothed it open on the desk. Her tears wet the paper and blurred the ink.

  Elinor had no right to lecture or scold her, or blow her own horn. The war effort! Bobbie was insane to have volunteered and was now stationed in Chicago. She supposed next time she was there, she might try to look him up, despite how he’d abandoned her.

  Meanwhile, Cosmo’s letters had become more scarce, though he still warned against overspending in such times. But she did have funds, on paper, coming in soon, at least. What a burden it was to worry about future money, so she needed a business manager she could trust, actually a full-fledged American partner to tend to taxes, insurance, pricing, and things like that that Cosmo had been so skilled at.

  “Well,” she said aloud, “it takes money to make money.”

  She blew her nose and wiped under her eyes. She had a staff meeting soon and would look like a harridan. So what, she thought, if she’d purchased new furniture for the beach house and still kept her New York apartment and had redecorated the front rooms of the Chicago and New York Lady Duff-Gordon establishments? She’d thrown a lovely, garden-themed party for her staff here, who had worked so hard to dress Flo Ziegfeld’s glorious, glamorous showgirls for his Follies.

  And just yesterday, she’d hired several additional skilled seamstresses, but she’d needed them. Oh, and a chauffeur for her new motorcar because she couldn’t abide driving in New York traffic.

  After all, she was contributing to society too. She was certain she must have lifted the spirits of many New Yorkers with her fantastical costumes, not to mention the Midwest farmer’s wives who bought their clothes from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, which featured her 1917 collection, designed especially for them. How strange there had been negative comments about her note in the catalog touting the personality and fantasy of every dress, not to mention that some frocks were judged “too fancy.” Perhaps they all just worked too close to the soil to grasp the meaning of romantic clothing.

  She skimmed the postscript of Elinor’s letter, another long paragraph. Her sister was going in some sort of vehicle behind former enemy lines and could find danger there. Elinor was risking her life, not her pocketbook. A great wave of guilt and self-loathing washed over Lucile, and she put her head in her hands, covering her eyes.

  Then there was Cosmo, she thought, and began to cry again as she felt the stab of guilt, regret, and longing. So, let alone Elinor with all her bragging, was her own husband behind his own enemy lines against her now?

  “This isn’t my first venture into a devastated area, you know,” Elinor said in French to the officer, General d’armee Jacques Presque, who accompanied her in the big motorcar. With other press representatives, she had been assigned to the Third French Army. Actually, she was relieved to get out of Paris for a while, since life there went on madly as if no danger lurked and no men died, and Elinor thought that quite immoral. German aeroplane air raids had hit Paris, so why did that not sober up the populace? They fiddled while Rome burned, just as she felt Lucile was doing in America.

  “Oui, madame,” Officer Presque told her, obviously pleased with her good French, “the Huns were here for a while. You will soon see the name we have for them—the Vandals—is well founded.”

  Though they had an excellent chauffer driving, the roads were full of holes, and their journey was so jerky and bumpy that she did not take notes but studied the ruined countryside and listened to him. Officer Presque had suggested she take the front passenger seat so she could see better, but she had said the backseat would be fine so they could converse more easily.

  They were entering an area just this side of the front. The fact that she wrote articles for American newspapers, and the French needed the Americans in the fight, was her pass to such adventures. She reported on what she’d seen, and it bolstered the foreign support effort in what was being called the Great War. In short, she was proud of risking her neck and hoped she’d inspired Lucile to join the effort in some way, though she could hardly picture her here in one of her fancifully named tea gowns, smoking a straw-tipped cigarette and leaning on her Bo-Peep walking stick.

  Nothing “great” about the so-called Great War, Elinor thought, but of course great meant widespread. She understood that even more as they passed through little towns that were now behind the French lines, places the Germans had devastated. The once beautiful pastures, small villages, crops, gardens, and cottages now lay ravaged by battle. She’d heard terrible tales of livestock slaughtered, people brutalized, and women raped.

  How painful it was to see that the retreating Huns had hacked off the tops of new cherry and apple trees, obviously just from pure spite and hatred. She saw few civilians, and those looked hungry and dazed.

  They passed massive rolls of barbed wire and poles among signs in French and English directing convoys toward the front. Huge, gray lorries lumbered past on the road with a honk of the horn. More than once their vehicle stopped at railway tracks as boxcars full of what the men said were ammunition and guns chugged past. Occasionally, they saw rows of ditches that had held retreating or advancing men, the sites of the terrible trench warfare stories.

  “These trenches have been evacuated for two months,” Officer Presque told her. “The fierce battle raged here for days. I am sorry for the stench, Madame Glyn. Death still hangs here, oui?”

  Before she could answer him, they heard the growing buzz of an approaching aeroplane. They craned their necks to the windows, looking up. It was coming right at them, swooping low.

  “It’s a German Taube—a bomber! Go! Go!” Officer Presque shouted in French to their driver.

  They sped up, when Elinor thought they should be fleeing in the opposite direction, but they obviously wanted to get past the plane before it could drop a bomb. The holes in the road made her bounce into the ceiling and the window. The officer shoved her down behind the front seats as if that would help and shouted at the driver, who began to weave on the road as the plane roared over them.

  “It’s circling!” the driver shouted. Officer Presque hunkered down to look up through the side window again. “It’s coming back!”

  A huge blast boomed be
hind them. The car lurched. Debris flew, breaking the back window and spewing glass shards at them. The driver accelerated even more. Another boom at closer range shook the car before the scream of the plane lessened as it veered away.

  Lifting her head at last, Elinor saw why. Ahead of them, through the smoke, blasts came from huge, hidden guns shooting madly at the plane.

  “A hidden antiaircraft battery!” the driver screamed. “It’s ours, but I don’t know if they hit the Taube!”

  Chaos, noise, smoke ahead. As shells burst skyward again, the plane was gone—hit, she hoped—as the battery went silent and was hidden by its camouflage of trees once again.

  Keeping an eye on the sky, both men got out to look at the motorcar. Besides the broken window, they told her the boot had been hit by flying stones or shrapnel, and three of the four tires were punctured and ragged.

  “I’ll radio for help,” Officer Presque said. “But we’ll take shelter over there in that village until someone arrives. I think the sign said we’re in Peronne. Let’s leave the vehicle right there and hike, find a cellar. Perhaps the men in that battery will come for us or send help, but that bomber could return.”

  He hauled his wireless apparatus out of the maimed boot of the motorcar and, keeping low as if they were being attacked again, they scuttled like crabs in a ragged line toward the ruined village.

  CHAPTER Thirty-One

  My dear, old friend, so lovely to see you!”

  “Now, don’t you dare call me old,” Lillie Langtry said with a smile as she swept into Lucile’s private office, “but I know what you meant.”

  Lucile was greatly cheered when her longtime idol Lillie Langtry stopped by the shop in New York for several new frocks. Though Lillie was sixty-four now, Lucile thought she still looked fabulous, and she told her so.

  But how, even without reminiscing, Lillie’s mere presence brought back powerful memories: Lucile pictured herself and Elinor as girls, hiding under a dressing table to catch a glimpse of their shining star from Jersey. And when they had heard she was the mistress of the Prince of Wales—well . . .

  “Keep looking forward, not back, that’s my motto,” Lillie said as she stood on the fitting platform while Lucile draped satins on her to see which colors she preferred. She had instantly known what her friend would want for an evening gown, or so she thought, though Lillie had said to forget some of the silk roses and what she’d called “froufrou.” Lucile frowned at herself in one of the many mirrors in the room. However she had complimented Lillie, it was amazing how time passed, how people aged. She herself had silver hairs threaded through her hair. And Cosmo—she hadn’t seen him for several years. Would he have silver in that handsome mustache?

  “Hard to believe America’s finally thrown her might and her men in with dear, old England,” Lillie said, drawing back Lucile’s attention.

  “If we could only have that horrid war end before Americans lose their lives too,” Lucile muttered through her mouth of pins. She almost never did fittings or suggested samples anymore, leaving that to her ample staff, but with Lillie, it was different.

  “A dreadful business! But on this skirt, a bit less swag and sway, I think. I must keep up with the tighter, straighter skirts now, though at least we’re out of that terrible hobble skirt style. Women need more freedom today, not to totter along as if we must have someone to lean on.”

  “I never could abide those, as they made the silhouette so choppy and broken—no grace and flow. But we designers are trendsetters, not followers,” Lucile insisted, after taking her pins from her lips and sticking them in the pin cushion on her wrist.

  “Another goal is to never look my age!” her friend said. “Never have and never will. That’s been one lovely thing about your styles over the years, they just floated along, but now there’s more hustle and bustle to life, more—well, plain reality than some of your frocks show.”

  Lucile almost felt as if Lillie had slapped her. “I—I guess my heart belongs to the past and nothing plain. We need romance and escape and beauty, especially, in these trying times.”

  “Of course we do, but the trappings are different in different times. Those sleeve ruffles you sketched—can we smooth them out too? Oh, I hope my skin stays tight for all the sleeveless frocks that are so in style now. I swear, I work on lifting books each day to firm up, and I adore those shiny jet beads in place of those heavy ropes of pearls. No way I shall advertise I belonged heart and soul to an older generation and age, so . . .”

  Lucile froze inside as she chattered on. For one strange, shattering moment, she felt so depressed she’d just as soon be dead.

  “Is she dead?” Elinor whispered to Officer Presque in the dim cellar.

  They had run into an underground haven of a bombed-out house that still had parts of four walls, half a ceiling, and rickety cellar stairs. The remnants of the remaining structure reminded her of a skeleton, and they had not expected to find anyone inside.

  But a young woman lay on a hemp sack with another one pulled over her for a meager blanket. They could not make her out well as dusk fell above them until their driver produced an electric torch and turned it on.

  “Not dead,” the officer whispered. “Sleeping. With something stuffed in her ears, maybe to mute the bombs.”

  The girl heard them or sensed the light. She woke and sat up, cowering against the damp wall, hands to her throat, shrieking. The officer tried to quiet her and assured her they were French. Elinor knelt, pushing him away with her shoulder and tugging pieces of rags out of the girl’s ears. As she had hoped, the sight of another woman halted her hysteria. Elinor spoke to her in French, telling her they had come out from Paris, that a battery of guns was nearby to protect them and shoot down any more planes.

  The girl wore a dress that reminded her of more ripped-up rags. Had she no coat or hat? When she calmed, Elinor asked, “What is your name?”

  In a small, shaky voice, she said, “Fleurette, madame.”

  “Are you alone here?”

  “I came back from Paris. My family’s house—gone. The village gone. I thought I could help. I cannot. No one can.”

  “Perhaps we can. We will take you back to Paris with us when we go.”

  Fleurette was slender and shaking. Even in the dim, reflected light, which their driver no longer shone in the girl’s face, Elinor could see she was beautiful, with shoulder-length auburn hair and a classic face with high cheekbones, perfectly arched eyebrows, and Cupid-bow lips. When she tried to cover her torn, filthy clothes with the hemp sack blanket, Elinor shrugged out of her coat to wrap it around her, and Officer Presque gave Elinor his big, warm coat.

  “Madame, I used to be a mannequin and wear the most lovely fashions for women—before the war,” Fleurette said, starting to cry again, though she must know she was quite safe with them now.

  Elinor drew in a sharp breath. “Not—not for Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon’s shop?”

  “For Monsieur Worth,” she told her, swiping tears from her sooty cheeks that made gray streaks, yet still looking heartbreakingly lovely. “But I had to come home, to see my people, my family. How could I stay in the famous fashion world when all this was going on? But then, they were not here,” she repeated as she collapsed into sobs.

  This girl was a gift from God. While Fleurette cried on her shoulder, Elinor held her tight and thought of another way to prod Lucile to champion the war effort and not just hide behind her own mannequins.

  Lucile had not mocked or ignored Elinor’s next letter. With all your brilliant talent in fashion, cannot you do something for this girl we’ve brought back to Paris? Or beyond that, something to raise money for displaced, broken people like her?

  Elinor’s lengthy description of Fleurette and her past had haunted and inspired Lucile. Grateful and glad to have a cause—one that could combine promoting fashions with the war effort—she had leaped into action with all sorts of schemes. Charity shows were de rigueur in the city, so why not design one around t
he story of Fleurette?

  Calling her creation Fleurette’s Dream at Peronne, Lucile presented a short drama she wrote herself with a prologue and eight scenes. Elinor, she told herself, could not have done better. She hired a small orchestra for background music to set the various moods. In the show, while the pitiful girl slept in her cellar, she dreamed of her dear Paris and the clothes she used to wear for her designer—not Worth, of course, who had criticized Lady Duff-Gordon designs as passé from time to time, but her own Lucile fashions.

  “I adored the dream scenes,” a reporter—a female, fashion-only reporter—had told Lucile at a party. “Especially the one where she dreamed she took a walk with a friend and the one where she went to a dance with a beau. Did you create those scenes from your own past or memories?”

  “I chose universal events, ones we all can recall,” Lucile told her. But the truth was, as she had created the scenes and designed garments for them, they did come from her own memories. Times with Elinor when they were young, but especially thoughts of Cosmo. He’d written he was proud of her for raising money for the war effort, but that she could surely do that in England and Scotland, too, that she should come home to present Fleurette’s Dream there.

  She was besieged by other women who had seen the presentation and wanted to order the fashions. She reminded them that a part of their orders would go to the war effort as did the ticket prices for the show she intended to take on the road at least on the East Coast and Midwest, first to Chicago.

  But her thoughts still clung to Cosmo. He had not said he still loved her, but at least he had only warned her once in his latest note about too much spending. True, she had paid for all this herself, so that every penny could go to the war effort. But, for the first time, she seriously thought about his request that she come home. Whether he lived in a castle or a cellar, yes, wherever Cosmo was—really, wasn’t that home?