The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  “Here it is,” Estella’s mother said, leading the way to a less busy platform, keeping her eyes firmly away from the mothers who’d lost their children.

  As they approached the train, one specially requisitioned for Americans, Estella felt guilty. She was an impostor; there was nothing American about her beyond the accent with which she spoke English but that was an accident, an effect of having learned it from an American. Their train was busy but not so full that people were having to use the toilets as space to fit more on board, which she’d seen was the case on every other train. Here, the walls of the platform weren’t covered in hundreds of chalk messages, leaving instructions to separated family members about where they were heading. There was only one possible destination for those lucky enough to be here: America. No tables of stranded babies.

  The American men wore smart suits with polished shoes, and a few had wives with them dressed in lightweight summer skirts, gloves, hats, pumps. The French people on the opposite platform wore coats, three dresses, pullovers, all the clothes that wouldn’t fit in their valises.

  All too soon, Estella reached the man checking papers. Before she handed them over, she took her mother’s arm. “Please tell me more about my father, Maman.”

  Jeanne shook her head firmly. “There isn’t time. Be good, ma cherie.” She kissed Estella’s cheeks.

  Estella wilted into her arms. “I’m always good,” she said smiling weakly.

  “You’re never good,” her mother mock-scolded. “And make sure you don’t change. Always be who you are right now.”

  Estella’s throat closed tightly, stopping up the words she wanted to say: Thank you. I will never, ever forget you. Stay safe. Her eyes dropped tears onto her mother’s blouse.

  “You must go,” her mother urged, stepping back, tapping her daughter gently toward the train as if she was a child reluctant to go to school.

  “I love you, Maman,” Estella finally managed. “This is for you.” She passed over a package, in which was a blouse made of the last pieces of gold silk, a blouse Estella had worked all night to sew. “Wear it whenever you’re sad.”

  “Go.” The look on her mother’s face was one Estella had never seen, the mask of calm removed. What had been hidden was now exposed: all the love she carried for her daughter and the desperate fear too.

  Estella made herself step onto the train. She leaned across a man—who told her to Watch it!—so she could follow her mother’s departing back through the window. Just when she thought it was the last moment in which she’d ever see her mother, Jeanne turned back, eyes scanning the train, blowing a kiss and hugging the blouse, her last remaining piece of her daughter, close to her heart. Then Maman was gone.

  Estella could only wipe her eyes, take her seat, replay that final glimpse of her mother and pray for a safe arrival in Bordeaux, where she was still terrified they’d turn her away. Even though her mother had said last night that her father was American, that she’d been born in America, it seemed impossible.

  But she forgot about the mysteries of her own life as soon as they reached the countryside. At first, what she saw moved her. Groups of proud women, thousands of them, wearing trousers, eschewing delicate dresses as not up to the task of the march to safety they’d embarked on, hair tied back with patriotic scarves in red, white, and blue. Poplar trees stood tall beside them, lining the roads, mimicking the straight-backed women, their long shadows seeming to point the way to sanctuary. But as the train drew farther away from Paris, the hoped-for sanctuary did not materialize and Estella beheld a wretchedness far greater than her own, far beyond anything that could be imagined.

  The chatter on the train ended when they came upon a fat column of thin people who’d been walking for many, many days from Belgium and the north of France and also from Paris. There was a woman carrying a cat, a child with a birdcage, an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow full of children, a pram holding a frail old lady, a child clutching a doll, so many suitcases and saucepans and pets and bundles of blankets. So many women and children, only a handful of men. Some rode bicycles. Most walked. Cars with mattresses strapped to the top as protection from bombing were unable to move through the thick mass of people. Horses and carts tried to get beyond the column. Vans and lorries tooted, so overfilled with people Estella wondered how the windows didn’t break.

  As the train pushed on, Estella saw people lying down by the side of the road. People who didn’t move. Old people who could not march so far with so little food. She began to cry again, hugging herself, knowing that if she’d seen this first, she would never have gone out last night wearing a gold dress. She remembered the day, not long ago, when she’d witnessed the stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle, swaddled in linen and taken out of the church for safekeeping. She’d been shocked at what it meant: that the government believed Paris would be bombed, but also glad that the beauty of her city would be preserved, regardless. Now she saw how futile a gesture it had been: if the government had known the city would be bombed, then why hadn’t they taken the people, wrapped them in sheets, and saved them instead of panes of lifeless glass.

  The SS Washington wore so many American flags it looked like a strange advertisement for the country and of course it was; the flags were meant to leave nobody in any doubt that this was not a warship, that it should not be torpedoed or shot at, that it should be allowed safe passage to America, unlike so many other ships that had been sunk since the war began. Estella boarded openmouthed, unable to fathom that there was still time for cranes to winch the cars of the wealthy onto the ship, still time to make sure people took from France whatever they couldn’t live without. Except for Estella, who was leaving behind the most precious thing of all—her mother.

  The ship was only half full, which again surprised her—couldn’t they have taken some of the desperate people she’d seen flooding through France, despite their lack of papers?—but then it was ordered on to Lisbon to pick up those who’d missed it at Bordeaux. So full was the ship then that cot beds were set out in the Grand Salon, the library, the Palm Court; even the swimming pool, drained of water, was now a bedroom. Despite all the people, the ship was quiet, as if they were ghosts, visible but soundless. Worry and fear were present on faces but remained unspoken, especially after they were told to sleep with their life jackets under their pillows. Every day came more news of loss. The Germans were kicking at the door of Paris. The government prevaricated, then fled too. Paris was covered in ash from the papers burned by government ministries to prevent the Germans getting their hands on them.

  In the early hours of the morning on the eleventh of June, as they were steaming from Lisbon to Galway to collect yet more American passengers, Estella stood on the deck in the unearthly night, unable to sleep. Out beyond the ship it was dark but, where she stood, the sky dazzled with the glow from the ship’s American flags which were fully illuminated, attracting attention rather than allowing them to slip past unnoticed. And she dazzled too, having put her gold dress back on as a surrogate for her mother’s arms. She closed her eyes and imagined her mother wearing the blouse Estella had made for her, connected across the seas by a bolt of silk.

  Always be who you are right now. Her mother’s last words to her played over in her mind. But who was Estella right now, given she had no home, no job, no family, and a past full of lies and fabrications?

  She felt someone appear at her side.

  “Lucky Strike?” a man asked.

  “Where did you get American cigarettes?” she asked the man, who was sandy-haired and amber-eyed and had a friendly smile, offering her something other than worry. She took a cigarette and breathed in gratefully.

  “My parents brought cartons with them when they came to France last year. Despite how much we’ve all been smoking, we still haven’t run out.”

  “Didn’t they know we have cigarettes in France?”

  “You’re French?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said firmly, proudly. “But I was bo
rn in America.” The words seemed to hang like a flare in the night, stark, unsafe.

  “Then you’ll probably be offended when I tell you my parents think Gauloises are the equivalent of smoking soil.”

  “Whereas these are the equivalent of smoking air,” she teased, smiling a little.

  He placed a hand to his heart, mock hurt. “Are you saying the French are hardier than we are?”

  “We have to be. Nobody’s invading America.” Estella flicked ash into the water, into the darkness that hid God only knew what horrors: U-boats, torpedoes. Nobody even thought about icebergs anymore.

  “I’m Sam, by the way,” the man said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “Estella. And you don’t need to be sorry, unless you’re planning to attack Paris too. What were you doing in France?” Estella asked.

  “My father’s a doctor, my mother’s a nurse. They came over with the Red Cross. But now they’re leaving.”

  “Won’t people need the Red Cross more than ever now?”

  “Yes, but my mother’s ill. She was shot a few weeks ago by a soldier who accidentally discharged his weapon in the hospital and she has an infection.”

  “Will she be all right?” Estella asked, remembering that other people had mothers too, that others besides her were worried.

  “She’ll be fine. My father’s embarrassed though. Feels like he’s running away. But I suspect he’s actually glad to have an excuse to leave. If Mother hadn’t been ill, I think I would have stayed.”

  “Are you a doctor too?”

  “No.” He hesitated. “You’ll laugh if I tell you.”

  “Then you have to tell me. Laughing would be a nice feeling right now.”

  Sam smiled. “All right then. In order to make you laugh, I can disclose that I’d taken a year off medical school to come with my parents to France but I was working as a cutter at the House of Worth. And the reason I came over to talk to you is because I’ve been trying to figure out who designed your dress. It’s got the lines of a Vionnet and the modernity of a McCardell. Whoever designed it is someone I wouldn’t mind cutting for.”

  “A McCardell?”

  “Claire McCardell. An American designer.”

  “Well, she didn’t design this,” Estella said. “I did.”

  Sam whistled. “Where did you learn to make dresses like that?”

  “My mother taught me to sew. I’ve been inside an atelier almost all my life. My métier was artificial flowers. And I went to the Paris School for a year. Since it closed down, I’ve been going to the markets in the Carreau du Temple every weekend, buying whatever I could afford of the secondhand couture they sell there. I’d take a dress home, unpick all the seams and sew it back together to see how it was done. Then I’d trade it for a new piece the following week.”

  “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say I’d rather cut fabric than cut people open. Here.” He passed Estella another cigarette as she’d smoked hers quickly, the first she’d had in days.

  “How does a medical student become a cutter at a fashion house?”

  “Like you, my mother’s always been a good dressmaker. I was the only child so I used to help her when I was younger. My parents have always nursed and doctored Manhattan’s less well-off, so I spent a lot of time playing in the hallways of Italian hand-finishers and Jewish tailors and Polish cutters. I picked it up. Then, when all the men in Paris went off to join the army, there was a job. I got it.”

  “You must be very good to get a job at the House of Worth,” Estella said. At the same time, a light pierced the night.

  “What the hell was that?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know.” Fear roiled through her like the waves below.

  The ship’s engines were cut and the sudden silence of the sea, with only the slapping of water against the boat, was as terrifying as the loudest of all noises. The watertight doors of the ship closed. An alarm sounded. An announcement: all passengers were to be loaded into lifeboats.

  “What’s out there?” Estella asked, not really wanting a reply, remembering every ship blown apart in the water by the Germans over the past year.

  “The Germans,” he said, confirming her thoughts.

  This is how it ends, Estella thought. At sea, surrounded by black water and even blacker night. Without her mother. Without anyone she knew, besides this man, Sam, with whom she’d shared no more than a few cigarettes.

  How would it happen? she wondered, hand gripping her cigarette so tightly she could no longer smoke it. Would there be an explosion? Or would it be silent, the bomb slinking like a shark through the water, pouncing on them when they least expected it so they weren’t even aware of dying. Goddamn the dark-haired man at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal—but for him, she wouldn’t be here.

  I love you, Maman, she thought.

  “Come with me,” Sam said.

  “You should go to your parents,” she said. “I’m fine.” She tried to look composed, as if being alone on a ship that was about to be torpedoed wasn’t the most frightening thing that had ever happened to her. She drew on her cigarette for courage as passengers thronged around them, the ship’s officers shouting orders over megaphones, relaying the message that a German U-boat had the SS Washington in its sights.

  “You’ll be doing me a favor,” he said. “They’re loading the women and children first. My mother will be on the brink of hysteria and neither my father nor I will be allowed in the boat with her. Perhaps you could look after her for me.”

  Even as Estella suspected that Sam might be exaggerating his mother’s nerves, she was glad of it. “All right,” she said, following him as he pushed his way through the people on deck, searching for his parents.

  They found Sam’s mother being loaded, most unwillingly, into a lifeboat.

  “Sam,” his father said. “Thank Christ.”

  “This is Estella,” Sam said to his mother. “She’ll keep you company until we meet again.”

  “Sammy,” his mother said, kissing his cheek. “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” Sam asked with a puzzled frown.

  “For not letting you do what you want. You should, you know, if…”

  If we survive.

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” Sam said. “See you somewhere in the water,” he said to Estella.

  His words galvanized her. “You will,” she said firmly. Because the one thing she must hold on to, no matter how evasive and slippery a thing it became, was hope. She couldn’t let the Germans take that away from her too, like they’d taken it from the people whose bodies she’d seen by the roadside as her train passed by. She took her seat beside Sam’s mother.

  Everything was orderly, quiet, not at all how Estella thought such a moment might be. Nobody wailed or cried; in fact very few tears were shed. Perhaps that was what happened to people when the last week of their lives had been beyond terror; they’d seen too much and it had numbed them to ordinary ways of reacting. At least that was how Estella felt as she listened to the ship’s officers say that the Germans had allowed them ten minutes to evacuate the ship, which would give them all a chance of surviving, of bobbing up and down in the middle of who-knew-where, of perhaps being rescued.

  Estella reached out and took Sam’s mother’s hand in her own. She would do the same for her mother, and Sam’s mother looked as if she might disappear into herself at any moment, shoulders hunched into her chest, neck sunk into shoulders, head bowed.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Sam’s mother said.

  She was using her other hand to clutch the silver-sequined and pink-beaded neckline of the dress she wore under her coat. Estella could just see that it was an excellent copy of Lanvin’s cyclone dress, a glorious whirling two-tiered evening gown of gray silk taffeta, a dress meant for a ballroom, not a lifeboat in the Atlantic facing down a German U-boat.

  “I suppose you think I’m a little mad, or extremely frivolous, wearing this at such a time,” Sam’s mother said apologetically, not
icing Estella’s gaze. “Sam’s father certainly did. Gave me a stern telling off when I put it on.”

  She opened her coat slightly and Estella saw the decorative sequined pocket to the side, the inky ripple of fabric, dark as the night they were trapped in but shining too, like hope.

  “If so, then I’m equally as mad,” Estella said, indicating her own dress.

  “It’s a dress that makes me brave.” As she spoke, Sam’s mother straightened her back, neck emerging from her shoulders. “Every time I put it on, I feel like the best version of myself. Like I can be, for a night, the woman I always wanted to be. I don’t suppose you understand that at all.”

  Estella felt the shine of a tear in each eye. When she replied, her voice was husky. “I understand exactly.”

  Because she did. In the same way that Sam’s mother’s dress gave her the courage to face a German U-boat with dignity, Estella’s gold silk dress had transformed her nine days earlier, making her into the kind of woman who thought beyond herself and to a greater good, the kind of woman who would go on a fool’s errand to meet a stranger at a theater because somebody she trusted had told her it was the right thing to do. And it had brought her some comfort earlier that evening when she’d stood on deck, thinking of her mother embracing the blouse in place of her daughter.

  That a piece of clothing could do so much. That it had power beyond the fabric and the thread and the pattern.

  Hovering above the black sea, in the lifeboats still strapped to the sides of the ship, yet to be lowered into the water below, with the risk of death closer than it had ever been, Estella vowed that if she survived this, she would follow her dreams rather than allowing them to be impossible. She couldn’t fight in the war and she couldn’t help Paris but she could make clothes and, with those clothes, she could make women feel stronger and bolder and more courageous, as they would need to be through these dark times.