“That’s going to be very nice,” said Therese, who had come up behind Clara. “If you have any of the green fabric left over, you could use it as a liner for the basket where I keep my curlers. Then they wouldn’t rub on the willow so much.”
Clara replied with a noncommittal nod. I wanted to reserve the green-and-lavender color scheme for my side of the shop, she thought, a little put out. If she did line Therese’s basket, then she would do it in a different color. But she had enough to take care of for her own shop first. “If I want to open just after the new year, I really have to keep at it over here,” said Clara, but more to herself than to Therese.
“So, what are you going to call your shop?” Therese asked while she buttoned her coat.
Clara paused with the scissors in mid-snip. “A name? You don’t think ‘beauty shop’ is enough?”
Therese screwed up her nose. “It’s not exactly an elegant name, my dear. I don’t call myself a hairdresser; I’m a coiffeuse. I think the French lends it a certain je ne sais quoi. Just some food for thought.” She checked her hat in the mirror to make sure it was sitting perfectly, then said, “I’m off for the day. One of my customers has invited me to a concert at her house. A good opportunity to meet interesting people and spread the word about my business. See you in the morning!” With a friendly wave, Therese disappeared through the door.
Clara glanced at the clock that hung over the entrance. It wasn’t even three in the afternoon. “What if someone comes in?” Clara called after Therese, but she was already too far away to hear.
Clara frowned. It wasn’t the first time Therese had left early or gone off in the middle of the day—whether to accept an invitation to coffee, try on some clothes, or take a ride with her admirer, who picked her up in his horse and carriage. Clara did not find that behavior businesslike; for her own shop, she would keep regular business hours.
She had just finished with the first section of the cabinet when the bell over the door jangled. Clara was worried it was one of Therese’s customers, who would be disappointed the hairdresser was gone for the day. But when she turned around, she saw a man whose belly was so rotund that it preceded him by a good foot and a half. This is all I need, Clara said to herself.
“Well, I go away for a week and look what happens.”
“Mr. Schrott, already back from your trip?” Clara forced a smile. He would show up just then, when she was all by herself.
It was the second time that she had met the owner of the building. The first time had been ten days earlier, when, with Therese at her side, she had gone to see him about sharing Therese’s shop. The Schrotts lived in an apartment directly above the storefront. Mrs. Schrott had not been present at that first meeting, and Mr. Schrott had looked Clara over from head to toe; his probing gaze had made her extremely uneasy. “What could I have against having not one but two pretty women as my tenants? As long as the rent comes in on time,” he had said before laughing loudly.
Therese had joined in with his laughter affectedly, while Clara stood beside her, feeling unsure of herself. She could not claim to find the man very agreeable, but she was glad that he had not objected to their arrangement.
“Don’t worry about him,” Therese had said dismissively when they were outside the Schrotts’ stuffy apartment. “He’s always spouting hot air like that. Just try to ignore him. And his wife, too, if you possibly can. Lydia is an old battle-axe, I can tell you! She sticks her nose in here every day, wanting to know and see everything. I bet she even has a key and pokes around here at night.”
Clara had grinned at that. But she had still chided Therese: “Just don’t be rude! We have to get along with our landlords.”
Therese had merely shrugged.
“I hope that wall isn’t permanent.” Mr. Schrott strode to the partition and shook it. “Aha, freestanding.”
“Just like the screen at the back,” said Clara. “We’re handling everything very carefully, don’t worry.”
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that a fine woman like yourself has caring hands,” said the landlord. “Maybe I should have you take care of me a little, when everything here is done?” He snickered and stroked his bulging belly lecherously.
Clara smiled painfully. She hoped she would never have much to do with him.
Chapter Fourteen
“My God, did you empty every drawer in the Weingarten Pharmacy? That must have cost a fortune,” said Therese the next morning when she looked behind the screen. Clara had outfitted her laboratory with a chemist’s scale, glass beakers, stirring rods, wooden spatulas, scientific thermometers, a mortar and pestle, and various other implements.
Clara, wearing a pure-white apron, smiled ruefully. “It did. But I can’t make creams or soaps without this equipment. Let’s hope the investment pays off.” She knew she sounded confident, but that wasn’t how she felt. After the equipment had been delivered the previous afternoon and she then spending hours arranging everything, she had lain awake half the night, fearful of her own courage—but she was excited, too. And then she had come in at eight in the morning, before it was even properly light, to get started on her products.
“What are you making first?” Therese asked, her eyes roaming Clara’s workbench.
Clara smiled. “Soap! The stuff you can buy in the pharmacy or a department store isn’t what I’d call a delight.” The corner of her mouth turned down. “My soap will have the most delicious perfume and will foam luxuriously. Rose, lavender, peppermint—if you’d like a particular scent, let me know,” she added.
“You really sound like you know what you’re about,” said Therese, honestly impressed.
Clara set to work opening a large brown package. “This is the base for all kinds of soap. I ordered it specially from Scheu & Müller’s soap factory in Berlin,” she explained. “Look!” She pulled back the last layer of wrapping paper, and a large whitish block appeared.
“It already looks so silky smooth! So fine and pure, much nicer than anything Mr. Weingarten sells.” Therese reached out to touch the block of soap, but Clara pulled it back out of reach.
“Please don’t. When you make cosmetics, hygiene is always first and foremost. I’ve already disinfected my hands with alcohol.” She turned back to her base soap and carved off about a third of the block, then divided that into smaller pieces again. Clara was not sorry to see Therese—expecting her first customer—retreat to her side of the shop. As much as she liked the hairdresser, at that moment she wanted nothing more than to be left completely alone. Would she remember every step in the process? Strangely, she felt quite certain that she would.
She felt a lump forming in her throat as she looked around at all her collected tools and ingredients. She had never believed that, after all these years, she would once again be able to do this. Without warning, she felt herself transported back through time.
She had been a young girl, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, when she had helped her father in his laboratory, and often in secret so her mother didn’t catch on. Sophie Berg preferred to see Clara doing fine embroidery or crocheting curtains, something more appropriate for a young girl. But Clara was much happier helping her father make soap in his laboratory—where no one other than the two of them was ever allowed to set foot.
“Did you steal the mincer from Mama’s kitchen?” she had asked him one afternoon as he screwed a similar device to his workbench. It was the first time that she had been allowed to help him make soap.
“Now why would I do that? No, this little device is for making my pharmaceutical soaps and nothing else. It’s a kind of grinder, and it turns the raw soap into small chips. Watch!” Anton Berg picked up a few chunks of soap that Clara had cut and pushed them into the opening. Then he put the metal lid in place and began to turn the handle. Small white flakes dropped into the glass bowl at the other end of the machine.
Clara had watched in fascination. “Can I turn it?”
Anton Berg had furrowed his brow. “You
r mother would put me out on the street if she knew I let you do this. You can help with the measuring. We need four pounds of raw mass for forty bars of soap, and then we mix the medicinal additives into it.”
While Clara weighed the crumbled soap, her father pulled out another machine, far bigger than the grinder.
“This is called a rolling mill. Without it, you can’t make perfect soap. After I’ve mixed the soap chips and the additives, I put the mixture in here, at the top.”
Clara had watched in silence as her father worked. So many steps, just to make soap! Until then, she had not given much thought to her father’s work. She never could have imagined how much fun it was to mix an ointment. Or how wildly her heart would beat when the water and oil portions of a cream bonded together. And that her hands, so often jerky and impatient when made to do embroidery, would be so calm when cold-mixing a salve. But as a girl she already knew this was her world. She could already see herself wearing a white coat and standing behind a counter, asking customers what they wanted, giving them advice. She had pictured herself studying at university to become a pharmacist.
But her mother had had other plans. She didn’t want her daughter to waste her life studying. She wanted her to be a good wife, with everything that implied: marrying well, a pretty house with a bel étage. Then, at the right time, two children, and a nanny to help her look after them. And one or two girls as servants, of course. A good life in the better circles, that was all.
The doorbell jangled when Therese’s first customer entered, jolting Clara out of her memories. “Mother, if only you knew . . . ,” Clara murmured, her tone ironic.
Christmas came and went. On Christmas Eve, Clara sat with the other guests in the hotel dining room and sang the old, familiar Christmas songs. It was her birthday, too, and with the holiday, she couldn’t have been more lonely. She missed her children terribly, of course—so much so she cried in her sleep that night. But Josephine had sent her a small card that both Sophie and Matthias had signed, and that helped, at least a little. It seemed that Josephine had managed to get on the good side of Gerhard’s new nanny. She was able to visit the children occasionally and then report to Clara later. She had also managed to give Clara’s Christmas gifts to them.
Being so busy during the holidays was a help, and Clara spent the days between Christmas and New Year’s with final preparations for opening her shop. Lilo had advised her to send a personal invitation to all the wives of the town dignitaries. The mayor’s wife. The priest’s wife. Count Zeppelin’s chief designer’s wife. So Clara had bought lavender-colored writing paper in the stationery store and sent the invitations Lilo had suggested. She also sent invitations to Josephine in Berlin and Isabelle in France, but, sadly, neither could come. Josephine could not get away from her own business, and Isabelle hated the idea of traveling so far in the winter. But she had sent Clara two crates of champagne. For your grand opening! I will open a bottle myself and raise a glass to your success, she had written in a card, words that had warmed Clara’s heart. Where would she be without her friends?
It was the seventh of January. The night was clear and bitterly cold, and at eight thirty in the morning, the land around Meersburg still shivered beneath a layer of frost. The lake was dark gray and still, and small ice floes had formed along the shore in places where the water was particularly shallow.
Clara buttoned her lavender dress with feverish haste. Then she put on the lime-green lace collar she had embroidered during the holidays. Lime green and lavender purple—the colors of her brand.
She was checking her hair one last time when there was a knock at her door.
“Ready?” Lilo asked as she stuck her head into Clara’s room.
Clara nodded and said, “I am so happy you’ll be giving me a helping hand today.” Her mouth was dry with excitement and she could hardly speak.
Lilo sniffed dismissively. “Giving you a helping hand? I’d much rather be there for your first triumph! A grand opening on January 7, 1907!”
Arm in arm, the two friends made their way up Steigstrasse. “I can hardly wait for spring to get here so I can finally go swimming again,” said Lilo, and every word ascended into the chill winter air like a little cloud.
“How can you even think about swimming today?” Clara laughed. “I’m so cold, I’m wondering if I should serve hot punch instead of champagne.”
They had just turned into Höllgasse Lane when Clara pulled up short. Lilo, her arm still hooked into Clara’s, was forced to stop as well.
“I don’t believe it,” Clara whispered, and she pointed to the crowd gathered in front of the shop: a throng of women, chatting excitedly and all in their finest dresses, among them several guests from Lilo’s hotel. “Have they really all come to see me?”
Even Lilo looked surprised.
“Come on, we really have to get a move on,” said Clara, who took a step forward, but Lilo held her back by her sleeve.
“You have to explain one thing to me. How in the world did you come up with that name? It’s very pretty, I admit, and it fits perfectly, but it’s certainly unusual.” She pointed to the sign that hung directly beside Therese’s: “Bel Étage” was printed in white letters on a lavender background.
Clara laughed gently. “It’s a long story. But, in a nutshell, my mother always wanted me to live in a big house with a bel étage, a lovely second floor with a drawing room or a library, perhaps a music room. Unfortunately, I’m not much good on a grand piano. But now I do have a Bel Étage.”
“It smells so good in here!”
“I’d like a jar of the face cream.”
“What’s this light-green one for?”
“Would you have something for the crow’s feet around my eyes?”
“Oh, what gorgeous jars you have.”
“Champagne? So early? Don’t mind if I do!”
Although Clara, Therese, and Lilo did what they could, they were unable to answer every question. The crush was simply too great. When Frieder Weingarten arrived to offer Clara his congratulations and, simultaneously, to hand over some things she had ordered, the chaos was perfect.
Elisabeth Kaiser, who came carrying a bouquet, took in the situation at a glance. “Where can I put my coat?” she asked Clara, who nodded frantically toward the back in response. As if she had done nothing else her entire life, the fisherwoman then took over with the champagne, opening one bottle after another. She rinsed the used glasses and poured fresh ones for newcomers.
Clara glanced appreciatively at Elisabeth before turning her attention to a customer asking for advice about the little red veins traversing her cheeks. “I don’t have anything in stock for that today,” Clara said politely. “But perhaps you could come by again at the end of the week? I can make a special facial toner just for you by then.”
The woman’s cheeks grew a shade redder as a joyful smile spread across her face. “I’ll be back; you can count on it! And for today I’ll take one of the small jars of cream and a bar of soap.”
“While you’re there, I’d like half a dozen bars of soap. The lavender scented, please!” added another customer.
Around twelve, the landlord’s wife put in an appearance. She looked more bad-tempered than ever, the deep creases framing her mouth even deeper than usual.
“This noise is too much, really. I can hear the clomping around upstairs,” said Lydia Schrott, and she looked around Clara’s shop with envy. “Just once, I would have loved to find a crowd like this in my fabric shop.”
Clara laughed. “It’s just because it’s opening day. I’m sure things will quiet down tomorrow,” she said. Then, from a shelf, she took a jar of cream with a delicate vanilla perfume and handed it to Lydia. “For you. To make up for the inconvenience.”
Without a word of thanks, Lydia took the jar and left the shop.
“There isn’t a cream in the world to save a face as pinched as that,” said Lilo, who had followed the exchange.
Clara waved it off. “Ther
e isn’t anyone or anything that can ruin my good mood today,” she said, then she picked up two champagne glasses.
“We haven’t even drunk a toast yet!” she said, holding a glass out to Lilo. Laughing, they raised their glasses to each other and took a sip, but the next moment, Lilo had to go back to her duties at the register.
Clara took a moment to look around. Beside her, the mayor’s wife was testing a hand cream, and she sighed with pleasure when she smelled its rose perfume. At the front window, Elisabeth Kaiser smoothed a peppermint-scented lotion onto a townswoman’s temples, both of them talking excitedly. Another woman gathered up several pots of cream and marched over to the cash register.
Clara smiled. If things continued like this, she would have to start making new stock that very evening. Then she filled her mouth with Isabelle’s turn-of-the-century champagne.
Chapter Fifteen
Northern Italy, autumn 1907
It was not the people themselves that Roberto loathed more with every day he and his brother traveled. It was their smell. The smell of poverty. Of hunger, decay, disintegration. It was wearing him down more and more.
He had been in business as a caviè for five years, which meant traveling every fall, September to December, and always with his brother, Michele. He didn’t know if it was the same for his brother, but Roberto had learned to recognize every odor in the small, cramped huts they visited. It made no difference where they roamed—Veneto, Trentino, or the Po Valley. There was always the warm stench of chickens or rabbits in a kitchen corner, awaiting their day of slaughter. The fetor of damp shoes and jackets, the rancid stink of goat bones and potato peelings boiled too many times. Fumes from a fireplace with a chimney that drew badly or barely at all. Soot-blackened walls spattered with cooking grease. The miasma of too many bodies sleeping, making love, having babies, and dying in confined spaces. Bare tabletops rank with beer and fat. Full diapers. Oily, unwashed hair. The men who lived in those huts reeked. Their coarse, pocked skin gave off a stench of unwashed asses, of piss, of farting, of semen. None of it made much difference to Roberto. As soon as he and his brother knocked at a door, the men retreated, as if they did not care about the sacrifices their wives and daughters made. As if they did not want to see how close the good-looking brothers came to their women.
The Queen of Beauty (The Century Trilogy Book 3) Page 11
