68
In April 1943, Bernard and I joined a crowd that had gathered at Grand Central Station to say goodbye to husbands, brothers, and sons. Antoine’s train idled, waiting to take him to a port from which a convoy of ships would plough the width of the Atlantic carrying thousands of men, one of whom had told me he was eager to till the clouds. My heart bucked when I saw him appear at an open window, but I kept my place. Bernard pressed forward and clasped Antoine’s extended hand.
Antoine scanned the faces all around. As the train began to move, he swept his large fingers through the air in a broad, easy wave.
He must not have seen me, I thought. He would not be so cruel as to leave in such a way: with his face aglow with anticipation, his smile clear and wide.
69
INSPIRATION AND ANTOINE
If you enter from the east door, the work on your right is from Press Week, July ’43. These six grey bolero jackets comprised the whole collection. No fuss: just gunmetal lining with a thin border of red binding tracing the edges of selvage inside. I paired them with grey chiffon skirts, short grey gloves, peacock-feather broaches on felted berets.
This was the first-ever Press Week, the first time reporters had come from across the country to cover a fashion event in New York. They were exhausted. They were glad for simplicity. So glad that they proclaimed this line the epitome of minimalist wartime chic—and I launched my first fashion house with commissions from all quarters. You never think you’re ready to act until someone claims you’ve already made the leap.
I skipped the next Press Week, that winter. I was setting up my new studio and staff, I had a new apartment, my brother had just gone overseas. So my next collection—there’s a sample in the revolving case—came in the summer of ’44. That Press Week had a theme: the People’s Fashion Show.
And what was people’s fashion then? Women were wearing epaulets and insignia, eagle emblems, brass studs in the shape of bullets accenting sleeves or a yoke, Bakelite sailors pinned at wide, padded shoulders, cap badges on hats and scarves. Airplane-shaped buttons flew around waistbands or down from throats. The de rigueur colors had names like Valor Red and Salute Blue. Women’s fashion made men’s uniforms seem like jaunty fun, and turned weapons of war into trinkets and trim.
Instead, I wrapped synthetic silk tight around my models’ chests. Frothy, stormy purple-green clouds billowed around their waists and hips. You know the sort of sky that makes your stomach feel hollow and scared? The models looked as though they could be blown away. Underneath the clouds, their bindings hobbled them and stunted their breath.
70
Algiers, June 30, 1944
Dear Butterfly,
On my birthday yesterday, I flew again over France. I write to reassure you: the end is in sight. You will not see your country in flames.
My left engine malfunctioned and I missed the mocha cake back at the base, but as always, I returned. I return and I return. Once, when I delayed the lowering of the landing gear, I arrived to find an ambulance speeding to welcome me. Each time I land, I see in the expressions of my superiors that they will endeavor to make the mission my last.
Bit by bit, I am being pushed aside by time. Yesterday, on the morning I turned forty-four, I learned that my books have been banned in North Africa, where I serve. I have been reduced to a single letter by my American companions: they call me Major X. Even here, where I live out my purpose, it seems I disappear.
I am lonely, Mignonne, even in the air where I have always loved to be alone. Maybe there is a star where life is simple. My plane is something more like a city than a machine. The old Caudron Simoun and the Breguet 14 used to read my mind. Now my head pounds with migraine from the English that scrapes my ears while a hundred and forty-eight levers and buttons blink and blare at me. When one’s plane has four cameras and no gun, one survives through altitude, fear, and speed. But I fly low to look over my country, and I no longer wish to speed. I am exhausted and I am lonely, but I am not afraid.
Do not be afraid for me.
Yours,
Antoine
71
They’re tired, I thought. My second design assistant was quarreling with my apprentice about the translation of peau de soie. “Peau doesn’t rhyme with cow,” I told them, “but doe. Peau means skin. Peau de soie is a skin of silk.”
None of them knew more than a few words of French. There was not a big demand for it; the émigré community was no longer the largest segment of my clientele. It had been twenty months since the Little Prince production. It had been a year since the first Press Week and Yannick’s prodding had convinced me to put my inheritance to use.
I had presented my second Mignonne NYC collection just days ago. There had been no bright spot in the line, no giving women what I presumed they hoped to see. Afterward I had retreated into the studio, not ready to know the effect the designs would have on my career. When the girls tried to read to me from the newspapers, I declined to hear.
But one thing was unmistakable: the collection had been noticed. I had been forced to hire a girl to answer the ever-ringing phone.
The new receptionist came in from the foyer. “A man to see you, Miss Mignonne.”
“Give him my apologies, Esther, as with everyone. And if you have time, please type up the messages from the last few days.”
“I’ve been trying to send him away, miss. He insists that I tell you he won’t ever leave.”
She led in Bernard. He was holding a newspaper.
“It’s wonderful to see you,” I said, closing my eyes to his broken expression as he kissed my cheeks.
“I know you’re busy, my dear. I thought maybe you wouldn’t have seen this yet. I thought you wouldn’t want to read it alone.”
I laid the newspaper down on my table. It was as though my fingers were not my own. They spread across the page, evening out its wrinkles as I would straighten a length of fabric, moving with slow precision as though smoothing a child’s hair.
Final mission, I read. Missing. Did not return.
72
Consuelo is in a hotel room. The Hotel Windsor, her old favorite, in Montreal. She phones the desk.
“Any messages for Countess de Saint-Exupéry?”
“No, madame. Not since you last called.”
Fine: she will make her way to the Terre des hommes fair without the help of the ungrateful mayor.
Consuelo enters the United States Pavilion. The crowds and lines are horrific everywhere. She is going to be late—if there is anything for which to be late. The weather here is calm; she’s not sure about New York. She still doesn’t know how to reverse tempests or time, unless by wishing it so.
She asks for directions to Mignonne Lachapelle.
“That would be the Star Pilot show, ma’am, just here on the map. Ignore the printed schedule. She’s on a loop.”
She almost asks, What is a Mignonne-on-a-loop? But she’d rather picture the possibilities.
The room is all windows and glass cases, and no Mignonne. Visitors wander through, taking photographs and pointing to clothes. The outfits enjoy the natural light, but where is the girl whose blush was rosier than the sun? There is no podium, no microphone; there are no reporters to set the record straight.
She walks among the cases, considering the displays. Such anger in these storm-cloud skirts. Who knew Mignonne had it in her? Who knew, in fact, that she had such an unconstrained sculptress’s way?
A sudden turn. Consuelo finds herself in the 1960s—silver stretch suits with helmet-like hats. She shudders and decides on a counterclockwise path. 1950s: how decisively Mignonne had shunned the influences of the New Look. Her designs echoed the aesthetic of mechanics’ uniforms, and garments to wear at play. 1940s: Consuelo slows down here. The awful awesome clouds. A clutch of nothing jackets—hems and lapels folded back to show piping as red as new scars. Then a mannequin whose dead-eyed form strips the life from a gold silken sheath.
Consuelo puts her hand on the
glass. She is overcome by sadness. Sadness comes with age. She remembers touching this garment and almost weeps.
Then remembers another: the daring white dress of silk ribbons and skin. She turns in a circle. Where is the ribbon dress?
Where the hell is the rose?
A click. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you in person.”
Consuelo looks around. The voice is older. It is louder. It is Mignonne’s voice coming from the air.
“Fortunately, the wonders of world fair technology can overcome even the nastiest tricks of nature: I’m phoning from a rained-out airport to record my talk today. I’m Mignonne Lachapelle of Mignonne NYC, and what surrounds you is a selection of my design work spanning the last twenty-five years.
“It all began at an interesting time. The world was at war. On the fashion front, France was suddenly missing from the global scene. So the American industry was slapped into being—and it was slippery as any newborn, complete with awkward parts that couldn’t be steamed.”
Get to The Little Prince, urges Consuelo silently. Tell the world the story of the rose. A voice deep in her body speaks to the bodiless voice of Mignonne. Dress me with words, it says in the way memories speak to memories. Make me, it says to the memory of the girl.
73
Twenty-five days after Antoine’s disappearance, France was set free.
I had breakfasted oblivious in my apartment, radio off, but I felt the change the moment the elevator opened to the lobby. The concierge met my gaze with unusual eagerness that floundered under my cranky silence. Outside, the world seemed to have tilted slightly, weakening the laws of gravity, allowing the spines of passersby to have straightened noticeably. Their heads swiveled, curious and light on their unburdened shoulders, as they amused themselves with the discovery that they could look strangers in the eye. It unnerved me, this being glanced at by all (and all acting as though there were something brilliant they wished to share), until I turned the corner and saw the line at the newsstand, and heard the proprietress singing her spiel while her young son pressed papers into hands and her younger son picked his nose. “What a news! France liberato! What a big news!”
Underground, the air itself could have powered the train. People read newspapers over others’ shoulders and arms, dispensing with surreptitiousness, ravenous with the need to understand what it all meant for them, to know if their sons and husbands and friends would be coming home.
Had Leo been one of the liberators? Leo, whose parting words on the platform had been a reassurance that if the going got too rough he’d trade a minor body part for an easy discharge.
There was a whole country of people to be happy for—including distant Lachapelles; Madame Fiche’s family; the relations of the socialites who supped at Le Pavillon and who could surely now begin to put differences aside at the Alliance; the friends and family and countrymen Antoine had worried for, for whom he had left me; the heirs of the compatriots he had returned to serve. I could be happy for my brother, who might see fit to reconsider aiming weaponry at his own toes. But I felt removed from the levity that had unlined the faces surrounding me, and immune to the frisson of optimistic energy that ran the rails.
I thought of what my brother said when Antoine decided to go: “He signs up to die for his prickly, pretty France.”
The country had been liberated by the likes of Leo, with Antoine nowhere in sight. The man I had loved was not recovering in some makeshift field hospital, or living incognito on a tropical island, or choosing his moment to leave some sympathetic girl. He would not have missed this action if he were alive anywhere on earth. I had not realized until that morning that I’d placed so much on chance, not until the last card was played and the game lost even as it was won.
Antoine was not on the earth but within it, or deep within its cold waters. I couldn’t know whether, in the end, he had given his life to fulfill the day’s mission or had simply given up. Maybe Antoine’s real secret was that the prince did not return to his planet or his rose, but gave himself to dust or the jaws of desert beasts.
Would that make The Little Prince a love story, a war story, or simply a pointless tragedy? If Antoine was the prince, which character might I be? The fox, dispensing counsel about responsibility to reconcile the prince with his rose, then weeping when the lessons took; the snake, scheming to solve every problem presto-magico in a flash; the heartbroken pilot, begging acquaintances forevermore to look for signs of the disappeared boy? I even saw myself in the businessmen and the old monarch who, having built their lives’ work on questionable grounds, are unable to move on.
The prince was gone, and I was everywhere in his story. Every story needs a fool.
I arrived at the studio to find that the girls had set up a party of sorts. Bottles of soda and wine cluttered Esther’s reception desk. The girls stood around, laughing about boyfriends and homecoming plans. They hushed as I approached.
I waved off the offer of a celebratory glass. In the depths of the studio, I gathered what remained of the Little Prince Collection. Many of the original pieces had been refitted to suit purchasers or sold outright to a collector of theatrical designs. Versions of several of the outfits had made their way onto women’s bodies large and small, old and young. It had turned out that stylish grandmothers, no less than youthful girlfriends and all manner of well-positioned wives, liked to think of themselves as roses. Antoine had been quite right to claim that his wife was not the only one around.
Consuelo herself, lacking an actual rose dress, now inhabited that character in mind alone—in fact, in thousands of minds across the continent and beyond. When I had eventually pried the dress from her, I’d refused to give it back, not for any payment or favor, or for any promise that was sure to be proven a lie. It was mine, after all, if it was anyone’s.
But that was the question. Based closely on Antoine’s drawing, created without his consent, earning notice thanks to his name and his fame, was the rose dress really mine? Was the collection mine at all?
And what of the flourishing business that was Mignonne NYC, expanding as vehemently as a baobab tree? I’d never imagined I could feel even a modicum of resistance to accolades and acclaim, yet I was uneasy. I was being slowly strangled by regret that the roots of my reputation lay in the success and the wreckage of Antoine’s Little Prince.
From now on, it would come from hard work alone.
I boxed up the pieces: the Little Prince’s simple jumpsuits and two-piece suits, his cape that had done its job without ermine, the flower ensembles. On top of them all I folded the centerpiece of the collection, the ivory sheath that bore the rose. Perhaps every designer felt this way about her most significant works: that they were both triumph and travesty. Maybe the dichotomy itself was what made a work significant.
The rose had had its accomplishment. It would end there; I wouldn’t let this dress come to mock me as the butterfly jacket had done. But I would not take my scissors to the dress as Madame Fiche had done. I could no more attack a gown than deface a book.
From the shelf above my desk, I took my copy of The Little Prince. It was not inscribed to me; it was unsigned. Its publication had come just a week before Antoine’s departure. I opened the book to its title page. Copyright 1943, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1900—.
Where had he gone—this man who aspired to be as simple as a child? I imagined the boy he had once been, with golden hair as untamed as the Little Prince’s and a spirit as unconfined. I imagined the child he would never give to me.
The book went on top of the rose dress. Its cover design was so modest against the scarlet sequins. The Little Prince looked surprised to find himself there. I closed the box, sealed it, and addressed it to myself care of my mother in Montreal. Mother would be accommodating. She would put the box in the dark on a closet shelf in her rambling home to wait for me, and the collection would all be forgotten one day.
I was drinking wine with the girls, and breathing more easily, when the entrance do
or opened. Bernard leapt into the foyer and swung me in his arms.
By dusk, a fine, feverish drizzle had sprung from the humid air. Night came, and with it, intermittent rain. Bernard and I sat on the roof of Le Bocal, tucked between ductwork, sharing a bottle of port. A blanket made a tent; its two rounded peaks were our heads.
Bernard handed me a letter that Antoine wrote on the day he left.
New York, April 13, 1943
Lamotte,
I don’t say au revoir, for I cannot promise we will see each other again. I say only that I return to my first and most important duty, and I commend you for staying on to attend to yours.
I could add that one is no less honorable than the other, except that I am not sure there is any honor now in an expatriate Frenchman fighting for the remains of France. The concept seems to have gone out of vogue. Certainly few of our number in New York are scrambling to join the operation that has been my fixation for years. Still, progress has been made. If you were less industrious and more inclined to pass your evenings sipping champagne at the Alliance Française, I would not have to inform you that my reputation there has been elevated from that of “traitorous imbecile” to simply “imbecile.” In fact, the latter is now occasionally spoken with indulgence, if not affection. Perhaps it is only sentimentality that warms our compatriots’ thoughts: they once again associate me with the land they have loved, even as they tut at my assertion that France shall be regained.
I don’t expect more from them, I promise you. Nor do I feel disappointed in them. One can hardly fault a being or a community for reaching the limits of its ability to hope. At any rate, their opinions are no longer of significance to me. To those who have claimed I go in search of glory, I reply that acclaim is assured only when one acts to please others—an aspiration I would be embarrassed to possess.
Anio Szado Page 30
