Now even Madame Fiche blanched. All was silent at first, then a mechanical whirling sound came from the mantelpiece, and a click. A clock struck once with a deep, reverberating gong. The dog in the client’s arms squirmed and yipped.
Mrs. Brossard laughed. Madame Fiche forced out a laugh and gestured for me to do the same.
“Ha-ha,” I said thinly.
“Ha-ha!” Madame Fiche answered brightly. “Such a lively household! It pains me to have to leave so soon to attend to some dreadful business. However, my assistant will stay on to complete the fitting. I will check on her progress at the studio later this afternoon.”
Madame was leaving? The garment would not fit, and it would be all my fault.
The client brushed her hand through the air as if to say, “Yes, yes, off with you,” and called her girl—“Celeste!”—to fetch Madame’s coat.
As Celeste scurried past to catch up to Madame, I pulled out the measuring tape.
“Put that away!” Mrs. Brossard cried. “My God, how many times must a figure be measured? You designers are all the same! Give me that muslin.”
I held it out.
“Oh, forget it,” the client said as the dog once again refused to be released. “You put it on. Go ahead: let me see it on you. It’ll give me the general idea.”
I slipped into the smaller of the two muslins, adjusted the collar, pinned the waist closed, and smoothed the front panels with my palms. Though large, the piece hung elegantly enough from my shoulders, which were overly strong and wide thanks to my father’s genes and my year of waitressing in Montreal.
“Good,” said Mrs. Brossard. “That’s it, exactly!” She squeezed the dog to her ample bosom. “That’s what I want. Take it back and make it. Madame Fiche has the fabric already; you have the measurements. You understand I need it right away. Oh, it will be excellent. I have a good eye, I tell you.”
Again she called her maid. Then, ruffling the dog’s curly ears, she wandered away.
Celeste appeared, a bundle in her arms. “Don’t forget your coat, miss.”
I was bending over my bag, shoving in the useless muslins. “Thank you, Celeste, but I didn’t bring a coat.”
The girl glanced back at the doorway through which Mrs. Brossard had passed. “It’s yours,” she said quickly. “Keep it.” She pushed the bundle into my bag and hurried me out of the apartment.
I walked stunned to the subway. Once aboard, I peered into the bag: Celeste had given me a garment of blue artificial silk. A present for Madame Fiche? A simple mix-up? I couldn’t comprehend it.
Clutching the bag, I rode to the studio and climbed the endless stairs.
The day had been an exhausting disaster. At this rate, I would never prove my worth. I was unlikely to keep my job at all, never mind collect any pay. I would never make partner.
All I’d managed, so far, was to clean the studio, waste cotton, and lose Madame’s newest client. I could cry. Instead, I let myself into the studio and curled up at one end of the sofa, pulling onto my lap a length of herringbone wool that had been draped across the arm. Leo was right: I ought to look for a real job, a way to be useful. I would wait for Madame’s return to the studio, and tell her what had happened. Let Madame fire me as Mrs. Brossard had fired Vaudoit. I’d work in a factory: hard but mindless, logical work. It would be a relief.
The afternoon grew old as I waited. The sunlight that had streamed in so clear and bright this morning had dissipated to a haze. In its midst, a blade of white light, reflecting off the panes of some nearby building, quivered on the floor. I watched it tremble, my eyes tired.
It seemed just brief minutes later that an insistent pounding pulled me to consciousness. Madame was crossing the floor, each step as sharp as a hammer fall.
“What are you doing? Get up! Get off the sofa!”
My heart raced in my chest. The sky above the neighboring rooftops held a tinge of pink. “Is it morning?”
“It is night.”
“Night?”
“Thursday evening! The day you measured Brossard. I have come to check your progress and I find—nothing! You should have cut the coat by now.”
Right: the coat. Madame had left me there, left me to take the fall. Pain gripped the base of my skull. “I didn’t measure her.”
Madame swore. “Are you stupid? The measurements from Vaudoit were completely wrong!”
“She wouldn’t let me. She hates being measured.”
“Merde! That bastard!”
“I’m sure it was just a mistake on his part.”
“Stupid and naïve! He would have known well her resistance to the tape. Il est un serpent. He sabotaged me.”
Even in my tired state, I knew she was being ridiculous. “Vaudoit has no reason to do anything like that. Clients change designers. It’s not personal.”
“Oh, it is. Everything is personal. You have not seen what the French here are capable of; you were too long under the shelter of your father’s wing. He could have told you, at least, that not one among us succeeds unless the others want him to do so. It is all to do with one’s politics: all personal.” She perched stiffly on the edge of the sofa. “You see what Vaudoit did to me today. He relishes the chance to break me.”
“It’s a competitive industry.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself. I am not speaking of fashion, but of country. Do you know nothing of what is happening under the German Occupation? The French government in Vichy has been working with great delicacy to ensure that France does not entirely disappear. But those who support General de Gaulle against Vichy are blind to the realities of diplomacy and survival; they mewl about collaboration with the Nazis. The Gaullists would lead a fresh invasion of France, spilling more French blood, destroying everything we have retained.”
“I know what’s happening there. I just don’t see how it has anything to do with Mrs. Brossard’s measurements.”
“Vaudoit must be a Gaullist. It is this, above all, that sets him against me. As a point of honor, he must ensure my failure. I should have seen it. It is my own fault.”
Madame bent forward in her chair as though she were in pain—or perhaps her script was written on her low-heeled, black shoes. “And your fault, Mignonne, even more so. You compound the failure, and I must carry it on my shoulders. Tomorrow, I tell Mrs. Brossard that due to your ineptitude, I have been unable to complete her coat on time. I will lose yet another client. You will have taken me, in four months, from Women’s Wear Daily to a new level of defeat.”
My mind was finally coming awake. “No.” Fault or not, I would not let Madame think I had failed. “I’ll make a new muslin tonight.”
She gave me a baleful look. “And waste yet more fabric?”
“It will fit, I promise you. You can judge tomorrow if it’s worth going forward with the coat. Go home now, Madame. In the morning, we’ll cut the client’s fabric. In the afternoon, we’ll sew.”
When she had left, I found the bag I had carried from Mrs. Brossard’s apartment. I laid the muslin and the mysterious blue garment side by side on a table. The cotton muslin coat I had made was crudely sewn but sleekly shaped, its lines elegantly cinched, while the blue dress, though evidently designed for a body-hugging fit, was almost bulbous.
I turned the dress inside out. At the nape was an embroidered satin tag: “Atelier Vaudoit, Paris France, New York USA.” Stitched into a side seam was a short loop of soft cotton ribbon. Handwritten on it were a code number, a date (03/42—the dress had been created just one month earlier), and a name: Brossard.
I considered working from the intact garment, manipulating the dress this way and that way on gridded paper to create pattern pieces from its various sections. I had done this sort of thing dozens of times—enough times to know it required a mind sharper and more focused than mine tonight. The alternative was tiresome, but I felt incapable of doing the job any other way. I would separate the garment into its segments, tackling one simple piece at a time.
Into the night, I picked at the seams of the client’s dress, my eyes stinging with the effort of finding blue stitches in blue fabric, my lips twitching with satisfaction each time a few judicious snips released three or four inches of thread into my pulling fingers.
Soon, or later—there was no point in marking the time—the sleeves, the bodice, each section of the dress was detached and smoothed, and rested like a blue island on the brown sea of the table. I gathered the pieces without labeling them—I could read their shapes as easily as one reads words—and unspooled a roll of paper.
The new muslin I designed and sewed wasn’t exactly as the coat Madame had planned for the client. I had interpreted the form for a woman of girth, drawing the imaginary waistline at a higher latitude, closer to the bosom—a trick that had been employed in the Vaudoit dress—and extending the V-neck lower to exaggerate the vertical effect. The narrowness of the coat’s line, a necessity of the times, would skim the client’s ample curves without accentuating them; I had planned it so.
When I retrieved the herringbone wool and reclined on the sofa to complete the short stretch until morning, my shoulders were tight, my back sore. My facial muscles were clenched as though I still held straight pins between my lips. But soon enough my lips and my hands fell open, and I was asleep.
11
A couple of weeks later, on a changeable April afternoon, I was hunched over hand-sewing while Madame Fiche sat sketching: a satisfied Mrs. Brossard had requested a dress to match her coat. Madame blew a stray hair off her forehead, her upward exhalation less a solution than an expression of frustration. It was pleasing to see her with at least one hair out of place.
Someone knocked on the studio door.
I could swear Madame growled. “The landlord. Son of a pig.” She bent her head lower over her paper.
Pity the man who had to try to squeeze rent out of her.
The knock came again. Madame curled her lip and put down her pencil. “Enter,” she yelled without leaving her table.
The door cracked open. “Excuse me.”
I stood up so quickly, I almost upset my chair.
Madame Fiche’s carriage was perfectly erect as she stood, her hands clasped tightly, the knuckles sharp peaks. “Count de Saint-Exupéry,” she breathed. “What a remarkable surprise. Please, do come in.”
Antoine had met my eye with a boyish, amused look. Now his expression took on a formal mask as he faced Madame Fiche.
She minced around her table, her hand extended, her fingers arched. “It is such a tremendous honor to make your acquaintance at last, my lord.”
Antoine obliged with a chivalrous kiss of her hand. “My wife has been speaking highly of your enterprise.”
“Has she, now?”
“Please forgive me my whim,” said Antoine. “I wished to see your studio for myself. It is good for the spirit to be in a working space. One’s apartment isn’t always conducive to creativity. But I see that your studio …” His voice drifted off, then rose in excitement. “But what a studio, Mignonne!”
“It is Madame’s.”
Instantly, he caught himself. His visage was again that of a refined and formal military man.
Madame said, “It is a place for only the crudest elements of our profession. The cutting and sewing; the fight to the death with one’s sketch pads. The most important part of our work happens in the salon, where we see our clients. It is there that the magic happens, where even the ugliest of society ladies is given the opportunity to be beautiful.”
“I admire your perseverance. I too battle to put pen to paper in a way that, if fortune smiles, might have a chance of withstanding the test of time. But allow me to say, surely this is the sort of studio that brings creativity to life. The openness and the light … The light is profound.”
It was true. At that moment, the light had a clarity that made me wonder if by some trick I was seeing through the eyes of God.
Madame asked, “Are you searching for studio space of your own?”
“Searching, no. But I do find myself working in a few favorite places where friends are kind enough to indulge me.”
Madame put a hand on his arm and said with a coy smile, “You might like to sit with us for a while, and write. It’s very jolly to have many creative hands at work.”
“He works only at night,” I said, then cringed as Madame eyed me.
Antoine’s expression betrayed nothing. I thought, I must learn to be more like him.
Madame said, “The space is fine at night as well. I imagine you would find it inspiring. You should try borrowing it in the evenings, when we are not here. You could have your own key.” She tilted her head as though a thought had just occurred to her. “Bring your wife to see our studio! She will know what is best for you. Wives always do. I would be delighted to show her the space, as well as the wonders we create here.”
Antoine bowed slightly. “I will let her know. Thank you.” He turned to me. “Would you be so kind as to guide me to the exit, mademoiselle? The elevator seems to be broken, and the route to the stairs is somewhat confusing.”
He opened the door to the hallway. As he followed me out, I caught a glimpse of Madame Fiche watching from the middle of the studio. Her mouth was set. She was raising one eyebrow—or would have been, if she had had any eyebrows.
Even with his inflexible leg—a souvenir of a crash—Antoine moved swiftly, pulling me along the hallway with his hand cupping my elbow. We reached the stairwell and braked to a stop.
He said, “So you have not forgotten me as Consuelo claims.”
I shook my head.
“You even remember my work habits.” His smile hadn’t changed: it was quick and candid, full of playful mischief. “I’m glad I found you. I scoured the city! I asked your whereabouts of every person I met!”
“That must have been difficult given that you don’t speak English.”
“My point exactly. My tutor abandoned me.”
“My student rejected me.”
A pained expression crossed his face.
A year ago, he had told me that he and Consuelo had long since agreed to follow the dictates of their own hearts. He had kissed me—on a studio rooftop, in the back stairwell of the Alliance, in the inexplicably empty foyer of the Central Library, behind a shelf in a musty used bookstore while the aged proprietor napped. He had touched me, his mouth descending to my breast, his hands pushing aside my dress. I had told myself every time that this was all I would allow, that it was enough.
But Antoine bested my restraint with his own. Before I could protest, he would be fixing my blouse, pulling away, apologizing for his thoughtlessness, his recklessness, his distress. If he had wanted to leave me pure, he had succeeded instead in leaving me feeling deprived, depraved, and ashamed.
I continued. “He told me that he, too, was about to leave New York.”
“I remain hopeful. The minute Roosevelt approves it, I will join the American Air Force and be gone. My plans have not altered; I only expected it would not take so long. I wish I could say otherwise, but nothing here has changed.”
“Nothing?”
There was an awkward pause.
He said, “I should have warned you about Consuelo.”
“There was no need. You’re entitled to be with your own wife.”
“But you’re wrong, Mignonne. The need is clear. If I’d known you were back, I would have told you to be careful of her. Look how she has already gotten her hooks into you. She is using you to get closer to me.”
I was wary of discussing fashion with him; it had never stopped being something of a sensitive topic between us. But surely he hadn’t tracked me down simply to resume our old argument. Last year he had insisted I should be doing work that contributed to the war effort, though at the time the U.S. was still rabidly isolationist; it had not yet been attacked and was eight months from declaring war. He had told me, “With your language skills and allure, you could get into places a man could never go. How can yo
u throw yourself into a fashion career when you could be working for the good of the entire world?” In Montreal, I had begun to ask myself if he had been right. But now I was working for Madame. I was on a path; I was finally on my way.
I said, “Consuelo is not using me to get to you. She’s interested in my work.”
“She is only interested in things she cannot or should not have.”
“I should get back,” I said. “Is there a purpose to your visit? Or did you really come just to see our studio?” It wasn’t impossible. He used to tell me about his friends’ apartments and studios, where his creative juices flowed more freely than in his own home.
“There is something I must ask of you.”
“Yes?”
“I am glad to see your career is going well.”
He didn’t look glad. I said, “But?”
Antoine tucked his hands under his armpits, which raised the shoulders of his suit jacket unnaturally; he looked like a hulking brute. “I wanted to speak with you about the Alliance Française.”
“The Alliance?”
“I would like to continue to frequent it regularly. But it has changed. And now you threaten to take from me its last remaining virtue.”
“What have I done?”
“You can have your pick of clients, yes?”
Not a single high-worth client had darkened Madame’s doorway since I had joined the atelier. Women came with sewing jobs or low-paying, straightforward commissions. Madame had bragged to me of the interest of this or that socialite, but no one of significance had come on board. As for my contacts, only Consuelo had hinted that a commitment might be coming. I said, “Maybe.”
Antoine lowered his voice. “Then you will not mind if I ask a favor of you. If you still harbor any affection or compassion for me, I would like you to stay away from my wife.”
The hallway was so quiet, my ears were nearly ringing. Somewhere down the hall, a door scraped open.
Antoine peered toward the bend of the corridor. He took my arm and led me down the stairs, all the way to ground level and out onto the sidewalk, into the cacophony of the street and the strange pressure of an imminent summer storm.
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