Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  “If we can find Cézanne’s Card Players!”

  “Precisely.”

  MAXIME LINGERED AT THE doorway to my bedroom that evening. “I haven’t been this happy for years,” he said. He kissed me lightly, barely touching my lips, and drew my head against his shoulder. We stood in that embrace until I was sure it wasn’t a dream, and then I entered the room that had been his since the innocence of his boyhood.

  IN THE MORNING HÉLOÏSE filled the three blocks to Galeries Lafayette with her exuberance, explaining that she had quit the Opéra because she couldn’t bear to work for the entertainment of German officers. Instead, she had taken a job as a secondaire at La Maison Paquin. They had just received an order for twenty gowns from a single customer, so they were hiring.

  “Our ambassadors’ wives needed to declare with fashion that France might have lost the war but Paris couture still held the admiration of Europe. The German government was preparing to move the whole French fashion industry to Berlin and Vienna. We were outraged. Lucien Lelong famously defied them and instantly became the hero of every seamstress in Paris. I posted his response, which was printed in Vogue, above my sewing machine and read it until I had it memorized: ‘Couture is in Paris or it is nowhere. A Paris gown is not really made of cloth; it is made with the streets, the colonnades, the fountains. It is gleaned from life and from books and from museums and from serendipity. It is no more than a gown, and yet it is as if the whole country has woven this gown.’ ”

  “And so the Germans relented?”

  “Indeed they did. Whoever runs the world, we said, Paris intends on making his wife’s clothes.”

  “Who ordered those twenty gowns?”

  She pursed her lips. “Oh, Lisette. We weren’t told until after the gowns were delivered. It was that lizard, Hermann Göring. I felt savagely tricked. Germans had infiltrated our businesses and institutions. Unemployed artisans could be forced to work in German industry. There were many shades of collaboration, some of them unwilling.” She turned to me, and the smooth skin of her face tightened into fine lines. “I hope you don’t judge me for this.”

  “How can I judge when I don’t know what I would have done in your situation?”

  “Right after liberation, I went back to work at the Opéra.”

  She opened the brass-and-glass door of Galeries Lafayette, and a flowery fragrance surrounded us. Balcony upon balcony rose ten stories under a circle of wide gilded arches around a glass cupola.

  “There were days in Roussillon when I thought I would never see this again.”

  She squeezed my elbow, steering me to the Art Nouveau stairway. “Let’s go directly to Dior ready-to-wear.”

  Dior’s new softness was positively voluptuous. I loved the bows, fabric knots, and rosettes. Héloïse pulled a day dress off the rack and held out its lavish ballerina skirt.

  “Eight meters, I would guess. I can see you proudly swinging that skirt down the Champs-Élysées. Try it on.”

  “Oh, no. It’s much too—”

  “Flamboyant?”

  “I could never wear that in Roussillon.”

  “You’re not going to live in that village forever, my dear. Pick out three more, any color but military gray, and try them all on.”

  I chose two fitted suits and another dress and modeled each one for her. After much gay discussion, we both agreed on a blue crêpe suit with a flowing skirt cut on the bias, black velvet piping on the collar, and a black velvet rosette at the shoulder.

  “It’s the blue of the Mediterranean, I’m sure,” I said.

  “And Maxime’s eyes,” she added.

  HÉLOÏSE CARRIED THE SUIT box, and I carried a Galeries Lafayette shopping bag containing my old wooden-soled shoes, a pair of stockings, and a scarf for Louise as we walked down avenue de l’Opéra, both of us in leather shoes, my left one bought by me, the right one by her. We angled onto rue des Pyramides, continued on through the Tuileries, and had a lunch of a salami-and-anchovy baguette on a bench overlooking the Seine.

  “Paris has emerged from the abyss,” Héloïse said. “The beauty, the grace, and the wit of centuries bred along the banks of this river have not disappeared. The city is engaged in an act of revitalization, and we are its actors and actresses. You too.”

  “Me? How?”

  “The swirl of your new blue skirt is an act of freedom.”

  “It’s more than I expected. Everything is more than I expected.”

  “I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to say it in front of my son. In 1937, we went to the Exposition Universelle and saw some paintings by Picasso.”

  “I know. He wrote to us about that.”

  “Maybe he wrote about Guernica. We saw it again in the Art and Résistance exhibit here after he returned. That pile of bodies in grotesque postures in black and white, like a cinema newsreel, depicted the rawest human emotion. Against my will, I was mesmerized by the horror. I imagined my son in it. I am certain every mother in the exhibit hall did the same.

  “And The Weeping Woman. A tortured face, the woman stuffing a sharp-edged handkerchief like jagged ice into her mouth. Her eyes floated out of their sockets because of the flood of her tears. Do not let that be you, Lisette. We can destroy ourselves by grief and disillusion as surely as by bombs, only our life erodes more slowly.”

  After a few moments, she placed her hand gently over mine on my lap. “What Maxime wants, I want for him, and I would move heaven and earth for him if I could. Honesty compels me to tell you one thing, though, and I don’t want it to upset you. The night before you came, Maxime had a nightmare again. He hasn’t had one for a year.”

  My chest collapsed, and all my breath leaked out. “I am the cause of it.”

  “No. War was the cause of it. The prison yard was the cause of it. This is precisely what I am saying. Don’t take it upon yourself. Some men would take to the bottle. Others might turn cold and uncommunicative. Still others might live bitter, revengeful lives. We can be grateful that Max has been spared those fates. He’s melancholy at times, when he misses the men he lived with in prison. It’s a loss that I cannot assuage. I have to tell you, though, that sometimes fury erupts in him when he thinks I pay too much attention to inconsequential domestic things.”

  “I feel inadequate to help him.”

  “Just be prepared, and understand that if he rages, it isn’t meant to hurt your feelings. Go gently. That’s all I mean. His heart is open but fragile.”

  I nodded, understanding. She seemed an angel, guiding me with wings of steel.

  My vow number seven slid unwanted into my mind: Find André’s grave and the spot where he died. I would cross it out when I got home and never mention it to Maxime.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  PARIS, ENCORE ET TOUJOURS

  1947

  THE NEXT MORNING, SLOWLY, WITH EXTRAVAGANT CARE, I put on the luscious blue suit. I heard a knock on my door and opened it to find Héloïse, so I turned in a pirouette to swirl the skirt.

  “Splendid, Lisette. A perfect fit. That means you’ll have a perfect day, the natural consequence of Paris fashion.”

  In the parlor, Maxime was waiting for me.

  “Oh là là!”

  “Is she not a Dior woman, the very picture of the New Look?”

  “Bien sûr. Sans doute. A portrait of loveliness, with the shapeliness of a Dior model.”

  The charming Maxime who had teased me with his dalliance so long ago, alive again.

  “The blue is exquisite on you.”

  “That’s because it’s the color of your eyes,” I said, then glanced quickly at Héloïse to see if I had revealed too much. She nodded in agreement.

  “Where are you off to first?” she asked.

  “To breakfast in place Saint-Germain, then to pop into the galleries of rue de Seine until the Jeu de Paume opens.”

  “I can walk there,” I said, pointing one toe forward in my new shoes.

  “No, chérie. You’ll be on your feet al
l day,” Héloïse said. “Take the métro.”

  We three left the apartment together and walked to the Opéra, where Héloïse went in through a side door, to work, and Maxime and I descended into the métro. We came out at Saint-Germain.

  “What’s your pleasure? Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots?”

  “Café de Flore. Maybe we can eavesdrop on an argument of existentialists.” I laughed at myself. “Let’s get an outer table on the terrace so I can see the spectacle across the street at Les Deux.”

  I spent a few enthralled moments watching the corner live and move and have its vibrant being encore et toujours. Again and always, it would be so.

  “In Paris, one’s home is in cafés, in squares, on bridges, don’t you think? They allow us to lay claim to the city,” I said, utterly happy.

  “Truly, my erudite one.”

  “You call me that here, where intellectuals toss philosophy over their coffee cups? No, no. I’m just trying to get over being a provincial by wearing a Parisian suit.”

  “You were never a provincial, Lisette.”

  “You haven’t seen me milk a goat. I got pretty good at it.”

  “Yes, I have. You’ve forgotten.”

  The memory sent a tiny bleat of sadness through me. Maxime rested his hand over mine as it lay in a shaft of sunlight slanting in under the scalloped awning. Despite my urgency to find The Card Players and to meet Monsieur Laforgue, we lingered in the warmth of the sun and of each other. Beneath our casual conversation lay the deeper issues—what we both thought about in solitary moments, and how revealing we ought to be.

  I ventured an opening question. “Are you doing better? Are you more at peace?”

  “Most of the time. When I’m busy with people in the gallery or poring over documents of provenance, yes. But when I see something unexpected that reminds me, like an amputee, I’m thrown into despair about man’s hunger to hurt.”

  “It’s not right that it lasts this long.”

  “Monsieur Laforgue still remembers things from the Great War.”

  “You are not Monsieur Laforgue.”

  “True, but I am also not the same man you knew years ago.”

  I placed my hand on top of his, which was on top of mine, a lumpy tower of knuckles. “Yes, you are. You showed me that this morning when I came into the parlor. If a man is pushed and falls into a mud puddle and is covered with muck, he is still the same man.”

  He thought about that for some minutes.

  “On second thought, you’re a better man. We have to acknowledge that those waiting years have served to ripen in us the qualities we need to go forward.”

  “Us? You also? Are you at peace?”

  “Of course I miss him, especially during long evenings with little to do other than think where to search next. At other times, I’m quite content. I have Maurice and Louise and Odette and her little grandson, Théo. We make a family out of odds and ends.”

  “And the constable? No more throwing shit on his boots, Lisette.” Maxime’s crassness made me chuckle. It was so unlike him. “Not that you have to make him a friend.”

  “He wants to be. In fact, more than a friend. He invited me to go to Paris with him. I said no, of course.”

  “Were you tempted to say yes?”

  I remembered the wreath, his venturing a truce, his revelation of his sorrow, the fleeting mutuality of our griefs. “For a fraction of a second, when I thought of Paris. But I wanted to be here with you.”

  “Lucky for me.”

  “Let’s go.” I set my napkin on the table.

  THE ART IN THE galleries between the secondhand bookshops of the rue de Seine was widely varied. I was seeing work new to me, and I began developing opinions. I liked Matisse better than Léger or Duchamp.

  Outside Galerie Laforgue, as aware of my unpreparedness as of the odds against me, as hopeful as I was doubtful, I strode across the threshold, knowing that I had a trump card in my handbag.

  An older man, his thick, silver-white hair swept back from his forehead in a perfect wave, was talking on the telephone. While we waited, I was drawn to the paintings of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Bonnard’s paintings of the life of the streets and cafés made me feel a part of the grand sweep of Paris again. Maxime explained that Bonnard was a transition between Impressionism and abstract art. I tried to see it, but I didn’t know enough. Vuillard’s depiction of claustrophobic parlors and bedchambers and bathrooms—Parisian private life—piqued my curiosity but did not move me as much as Bonnard’s streets and intimate domestic scenes.

  When Monsieur Laforgue was free, Maxime introduced me as his good friend. “Remember before the war we spoke about the possibility of Madame Roux training to be an assistant?”

  He thought awhile, as though it were an effort to remember such a little thing after all the catastrophes that had taken place. There was a mistiness in his eyes that suggested the losses he had suffered. He was on the razor’s edge of saying no, he didn’t remember, so I leapt in and said, “Just being in this room is a dream and a pleasure, monsieur.”

  “Ah. You like the Nabis and the Symbolists? How about the Intimists?” His eyes opened wide. “I saw you looking at them.”

  Did he notice my embarrassment at my ignorance? Those terms were as foreign to me as Arabic and Swahili.

  “I … They’re beautiful. I especially like the colors and the patterns of the fabrics.”

  I liked the nudes too but was embarrassed to say so. Despite my blank look and inane answer, Monsieur Laforgue treated me with the graciousness he would show to a wealthy client. That must be what Héloïse meant by the power of couture. His refined manners emboldened me to say, “If you will permit me, I would like to show you something that might interest you.” I laid Pascal’s pages of the wives’ conversation on the broad desk in front of him.

  He read for a few moments. “How is it that you have this, madame?”

  I explained, then gave him time to read the rest.

  “You say your grandfather wrote this?”

  “My husband’s grandfather. Yes. He knew both of the artists and their wives. He traded the frames he made for paintings.”

  Monsieur Laforgue cast a glance at Maxime. “Extraordinary. If this can be documented, it may be worth something. Did he keep records of his encounters with them?”

  “Only a few notes. He was a simple man. He just told me what he could remember.”

  “So you know more of his conversations with Pissarro?”

  “I know what he told me.”

  “And Cézanne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Write it down, madame, as much as you can remember. Maxime, make sure that she does this. Firsthand recollections of these two great painters are of inestimable value.”

  He put the pages in a large, stiff envelope and handed them back to me. “Keep this safe.”

  “I may be able to find more of his notes.”

  “Excellent. Keep them all together and bring them when you come again.”

  Maxime tapped his index finger on Monsieur Laforgue’s chest and said, “Another day, when I bring her back, ask her about Chagall. She knew him during the war, and she knows his work.”

  I thanked Maxime with my eyes for supporting me.

  “Formidable!” Monsieur Laforgue declared.

  “Do you happen to know, monsieur, whether he and Bella are safe? I’ve had no way to find out,” I said.

  “They made it to America safely.”

  “Oh, thank you, monsieur. I’ve been so worried.”

  “In fact, there was a large exposition of forty years of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

  “How wonderful for him.”

  A scowl of thought passed across Monsieur Laforgue’s forehead. His penetrating gaze rested on me for a long moment, which made me uneasy. What did he know that he wasn’t telling me? He added, “I may have kept a clipping. I will look in my files.”

  “Yes, please do. Marc—I
mean Monsieur Chagall—gave me a painting that I believe he painted expressly for me.”

  “Astonishing! Is it signed?”

  “Yes, with the words May it be a blessing to you.”

  “Merveilleux, madame! I must see it someday.”

  Monsieur Laforgue came to the door with us, and Maxime went back to the gallery owner’s desk to write something down. Monsieur Laforgue said, just to me, quietly, “Maxime is a great help to me. I rely on his spirit to keep me from discouragement.”

  “I’m glad to know that. It’s my deepest wish to help you too,” I said, “even if it’s just dusting the frames.”

  He gave me the kind of gentle smile an uncle might give a niece, and on the strength of that, I swung my skirt and stepped out the door with Maxime following, my new shoes hardly touching the sidewalk.

  CROSSING THE SEINE ON Pont des Arts, the iron footbridge linking the École des Beaux Arts to the Louvre, we observed its damage from an aerial bombardment. Despite this reminder of war, I was heartened by Monsieur Laforgue’s report about the Chagalls. Maybe some wonderful day, I would see them again. I tossed a leaf off the upstream rail, and we hurried to the other rail in time to see it emerge. “See? That’s a sign. When the Seine is flowing, life is flowing,” I said.

  We walked along the quay to place de la Concorde and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. It had been open for only a few months, Maxime said.

  “You’ve been in it?”

  “Of course.”

  The ground floor displayed the precursors of Impressionism. Of them, I liked best Corot’s fishermen’s cottages at Sainte-Adresse. On the floor above, Maxime took me a roundabout way through the Impressionist galleries.

  “I’m saving what you want to see most for last.”

  The way his eyes sparkled playfully made me hopeful that The Card Players would be just around the corner.

  It didn’t take much to sweep me up in the parade of color and inviting locales. In the Monet gallery, watery reflections quivered, regattas gave the Seine over to pleasure and sport, clouds of steam puffed out from Gare Saint-Lazare, and a black-and-white magpie sitting on the rail of a gate reigned benevolently over the tranquillity of a snowy field.