The Paris Seamstress

by Natasha Lester

  Love Will. Yesterday the words would have been enough for her to laugh with delight. Today they hurt. Love and hurt, hurt and love. The two seemed to go together far too well. What was the good in loving Will when she lived so far away? What was the good in loving her grandmother if it hurt this much to face the thought of losing her?

  Not long after Fabienne returned to the hospital, a nurse touched her shoulder. “Here are your grandmother’s things.”

  Fabienne opened the bag. Estella’s nightgown sat neatly folded at the bottom. On top was her watch and the Tiffany key Fabienne’s grandfather had given Estella on her seventieth birthday, which she’d always worn around her neck. But there was also another chain, with a medallion or a pendant attached to it. Fabienne recalled always seeing a glimpse of another silver chain glinting beneath Estella’s collar and she reached into the bag for it. The medallion was made of silver, crudely carved with three witches on broomsticks. Fabienne turned it over. There was nothing written on the back. It was the strangest thing. Not lovely at all, and clearly of no monetary value, unlike the diamond-studded Tiffany key it had sat beside. Why would her grandmother have worn it every day of her life?

  A memory stabbed through the confusion. She’d seen a cloth patch bearing those same witches at the exhibition at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. What had the plaque beside it said? She closed her eyes, straining to remember something she’d paid little attention to at the time.

  Then Estella stirred. Her hand clutched Fabienne’s. Her eyes jerked open, not delicately flickering, not gradually moving from death to life.

  “Mamie!” Fabienne moved to press the buzzer to summon the doctor.

  Her grandmother shook her head. “Love,” she whispered.

  “You don’t need to talk,” Fabienne said. “Let me talk.”

  “So much to say.”

  And so little time. The unspoken words echoed in the room.

  “Two kinds of love,” Estella said, her voice almost transparent in its thinness. Fabienne couldn’t quite make out the rest of what she said; it sounded like, “…had both…lucky…”

  “Grandpa loved you so much,” Fabienne said, remembering the way Mamie had looked at Fabienne’s grandfather when he lay dying. Fabienne had seen her heart breaking, not in shards, not piece by piece, but in one long rent, too large to ever stitch back together.

  Estella smiled, her words stronger now, rushing over Fabienne who tried to shape them into some kind of sense. “Love like a toile,” Estella said. “The pattern on which one’s whole life is shaped. But nobody sees the toile, or knows it ever existed. Nobody understands that, without it, nothing can be fashioned.”

  “Mamie…” Fabienne began but her grandmother spoke again.

  “And love like a spool of thread, running on, strong enough to pull everything together.” Estella studied Fabienne. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “I’m not sure,” Fabienne said slowly. She opened her hand, in which the medallion lay. “What is this?”

  Estella reached out for it and closed her hand tightly around it. “Don’t wait for anything, Fabienne. It all goes so fast.” Then Estella fell asleep, hand embracing the silver pendant, face a tracery of longing.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hours later—Fabienne checked her watch and couldn’t believe that she’d been sitting for eight hours by the bedside—her grandmother stirred again. She opened her mouth. A noise came out, like a moan, which seemed to surprise her grandmother as much as it surprised Fabienne.

  “Have some water,” Fabienne said, raising the end of the bed a little and passing Estella a glass with a straw. Her grandmother sipped. Then she moved her mouth again and it issued another groan, a malformed word.

  “I’m getting the doctor,” Fabienne said, grabbing the call button.

  Estella gripped Fabienne’s arm. Her eyes were huge, pleading, struggling to make Fabienne comprehend the incomprehensible. Fabienne felt her stomach turn over, nausea rising into her throat at her inability to soothe, at her fear of exactly what her grandmother’s lack of speech implied.

  The nurse arrived and Fabienne was bundled out of the room, told it would be at least a couple of hours before they’d finished the tests they needed to do. She went to the cafeteria and bought a tea, unable to forget that awful expression on her grandmother’s face, like a child without the language to explain to its mother that a dragon lay just behind, breathing fire down their necks. The over-brewed tea made her nausea worse and she threw it in the rubbish bin. Through the door, she saw a familiar head of dark hair, a chin more stubbled than the last time her cheek had brushed against it, a flash of blue eyes.

  “I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you,” Will said.

  Rather than answer she wrapped her arms around him. She tried not to cry, blinked her eyes open and shut, open and shut, cheek pressed into his chest, one of his hands threaded into her black hair, holding her close to him. And then, because it would be so good to think about somebody else for just a moment she whispered, “How’s Melissa?”

  “Tired. More tired than she should be.”

  It was her turn now to run her hand up behind his neck, to bring his head down to rest against her forehead, to hold him so hard that she hoped he would know she understood.

  “Talk to me about something normal?” she said when she at last drew back.

  “Something normal.” He thought for a moment. “Sometimes I think I forget what normal is,” he admitted. “Do you have time to sit down?”

  Fabienne nodded and they found the least sticky of the cafeteria tables and sat on plastic chairs with cups of a questionable substance masquerading as coffee, which Fabienne made herself drink.

  “I’m supposed to be designing the new collection,” Will said once they’d settled. “Tiffany produces a Blue Book each year; people covet it. They save them and old copies sell for thousands on eBay. The new collection is showcased in the book; it’s a big deal. But for the first time in my life I don’t have an idea to design the collection around. Is that normal enough? Or still too depressing?”

  Fabienne gave a small smile. “I’d say that’s normal enough. It’s the one good thing about curating rather than designing; I only need one idea to focus each exhibition. It’s not quite as tricky as coming up with an idea for an entire collection of jewelry that the whole world is waiting for.” She frowned. “Wow, I just totally increased the pressure for you, didn’t I? Some help I am.”

  Will smiled too, and reached out for her hand across the table. “You didn’t. Because it’s not the pressure of expectation that’s bothering me, I don’t think. It’s just hard to come up with ideas for beautiful pieces of jewelry when Liss is so sick.”

  “What normally inspires you?” Fabienne asked, pushing doggedly on with the conversation so that one word—sick—wouldn’t set the fear in her stomach twisting and turning again at the thought of what the doctors might be discovering as they examined her grandmother.

  “It’s hard to say. Usually just something I see or hear. It might be anything from a painting to a song to a leaf, even.” He sighed. “I’m sure something will come eventually. It kind of has to. But I also know ideas don’t like being forced.”

  Fabienne sipped her coffee, grimaced, and pushed it away. “No, they don’t. I always used people as my inspiration when I sketched. I’d draw a dress that I thought, in my immature teenage mind, would be perfect for Estella, or for her best friend, Janie, or someone else I loved. God, if they’d ever seen the sketches and known I’d designed it for them, they’d probably have been horrified.” She’d managed a smile when she’d begun to speak but the minute she said Estella’s name, it quickly turned watery and now she felt herself blinking back the fresh rush of tears.

  Will slipped his finger under her chin and kissed her softly. “I bet they would have been honored.” He studied her. “And I think you’ve just given me an idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”
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  “Well, at least this day has one good thing in it.” She rested her head on his shoulder, feeling his hand stroke the nape of her neck in a way that, momentarily, made her feel a little better.

  “I’m glad I came to see you,” he whispered against her ear.

  “Me too,” said Fabienne. “Me too.”

  “She’s had another stroke,” the doctor said to Fabienne later. “And now she has aphasia. Which means the part of her brain that controls speech is damaged. We can’t tell yet whether it’s permanent.”

  Now there really were no words. Just her grandmother’s eyes on her, pleading with her to fix it, to make it better, to let her say all the things she hadn’t yet said. After an hour or so of pointing and gesticulating and making that awful moan, Mamie began to cry and Fabienne did too.

  “I’m so sorry,” Fabienne whispered as she stroked the fine strands of her grandmother’s once abundantly beautiful black hair.

  It took a long time to calm Estella down. When at last the tears had dried, Estella’s hands reached up to her neck, eyes growing large, tears threatening once more when she felt nothing there.

  “It’s here,” Fabienne said, removing both the key and the medallion from her handbag, unsure which one Estella wanted.

  Estella clutched the medallion and then motioned at Fabienne’s handbag as if urging her to take out something else. Fabienne held it open for Estella, who rummaged through, pulling out every piece of paper until she eventually found Fabienne’s father’s birth certificate.

  Estella unfolded the paper. Then she pointed to the medallion and her finger moved from it to Alex Montrose’s name. Back and forth, each time becoming more emphatic.

  “Is it his medallion?” Fabienne asked, warily.

  Estella nodded, something more than frustration showing in her eyes for the first time all afternoon.

  “Why do you have it?” Fabienne asked. “And why have you kept it for so long? Who is he? And Lena, who is she?” Now Fabienne’s eyes blazed with frustration. Of course Mamie couldn’t answer any of the questions. That was the point. They’d waited too long and now nobody might ever know.

  Estella closed her eyes and within seconds was asleep, the effort and vexations of the day having worn her out utterly.

  Fabienne stared at the birth certificate, stared at the medallion, mind replaying her grandmother’s words about love: that she’d had two kinds. Fabienne had supposed she’d meant some kind of youthful infatuation but if she was talking about it now, when she was being robbed of life, for it to have been an infatuation didn’t make sense. And none of it explained why Estella’s name, why Fabienne’s grandfather’s name, weren’t on her father’s birth certificate. What if it was true? That Estella wasn’t Xander’s mother? Then, despite the fact that they both had black hair, Fabienne wasn’t related to Estella at all. Which was a thought too awful to contemplate.

  Days passed. Through each of them, Fabienne sat by her grandmother’s bed, texting Will and Melissa or talking to them on the phone, and reading aloud to her grandmother. Eventually the doctor said she could take Estella home if she wanted to. If she felt it would be a more comfortable place for Estella…

  To die.

  And so Fabienne rode in the ambulance back to the house in Gramercy Park. She made sure her grandmother was comfortably settled into bed. She moved her grandfather’s picture close by, propping against it the medallion her grandmother seemed to treasure.

  Estella had been sedated for the move and didn’t stir. The nurse said she’d be unlikely to wake until morning. Which is how Fabienne found herself downstairs, sketching clothes, finding solace in drawing pencil lines onto paper, letting the confusion of her thoughts take shape in the lines of dresses. They weren’t very good, but she didn’t care. It was meditative, the movement of pencil over paper, the appearance of something she hadn’t intended to draw forming in front of her through her subconscious.

  She drew for hours, into the night, stopping for nothing. She even took out her grandmother’s watercolors and painted each one, messing up the first few as she was so out of practice, but gradually recalling how to work with paint and water to transform the sketches into dresses with movement and dimension.

  At around two in the morning, her hand stilled. Her head shot up. Time unpleated before her, opening up a gap into the past and she could feel something falling into it, leaving the present and going back, far away, to a time Fabienne could never reach.

  She raced up the stairs to her grandmother’s room. “No, no, no!” she cried as she ran over to the bed.

  One entire world had ended. Not just a life. A world of bravery and courage and things that mattered.

  Part Five

  Estella

  Chapter Seventeen

  July 1941

  For weeks after the disastrous showing, Estella got up every morning and went to work at André Studios. She sketched copies without comment, dutifully and well, doing only as she was asked. She read the first of the newspaper reports of the showing, which were no more than gossip columns speculating on her relationship to Lena and which mentioned, right at the end, that she made clothes. She stopped reading them after that. She did not sketch anything of her own. She did not sew. At nighttime she dreamed because that was the best place to have fantasies, in the dark where nobody could see them.

  She returned the first of Elizabeth Hawes’s telephone calls and thanked her for her assistance, apologized for letting her down and said, “I think you were right. That all the beautiful clothes are made in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want them.”

  “I wrote that two years ago,” Elizabeth said bluntly. “Things are changing and you know it.”

  “Yes,” Estella said. “Things are changing. I’ve learned not to be so overconfident. That unthinking optimism only turns out badly.”

  And so she existed in the life she’d dreaded. Without her mother. In a strange land. Doing a job she detested. But she’d spent all her money, and scattered all her contacts with Harry Thaw’s maniacal giggles. What she did have, she could count on one hand: a cot bed in a room at the Barbizon; Janie’s and Sam’s friendship, which seemed unshakable despite everything; twenty clothing samples that she couldn’t bear to look at. What she didn’t have was a list far too long for anyone’s hand: her own atelier, her own designs sold in stores, a reason to do more than survive, a safe homeland, a mother who hadn’t lied.

  In spite of his gravest misgivings and only after trying everything else he could think of, Alex found that he needed Estella’s help. One night in late July, after he’d returned to New York, he told Lena what he hoped to do and she nodded. A small gesture, bleak, hopeless, but that was Lena. A person wafting through life with no expectation of happiness or pleasure. Which was why he also had to help both Lena and Estella sort out their own mess.

  Luckily for him, it turned out that Estella’s friend Janie was dating a big-shot banker who was having a society party the following night to which Lena had been invited. Janie would be there with her friends—Estella and that man, Sam, who Alex still hadn’t been able to properly place in Estella’s life.

  “You can come as my date,” Lena said and he didn’t know if she was being bitter or pragmatic.

  He chose to believe the latter and, when he collected her the following evening, she looked as stunning as ever in a gown made for her: silvery fabric that showed off her cleavage and a strand of spectacular pearls around her neck that he knew would never get the same attention that the body they adorned would.

  “You look incredible,” he said as he kissed her cheek. He felt her shift a little so the kiss fell on the corner of her mouth.

  I’m sorry, Lena, he wanted to say but then Lena smiled and said, indicating the dress, “It’s one of Estella’s. She made it for me.”

  “She’s very good.”

  “She is,” Lena replied, voice inscrutable.

  When they arrived at the house on the Upper West Side, Alex saw
Estella as soon as he entered the ballroom; she wore a black velvet dress the same color as her hair and she looked like midnight come to life. The gown had a strap that sat just below one shoulder; the other shoulder was bare and her creamy white skin beckoned a hand to run down the line of her neck. He breathed in sharply and Lena noticed.

  “She looks beautiful,” Lena said.

  “Like you,” he replied.

  Lena moved away, drawn into a crowd of people who kept her like a pet for her infamy, just as they kept debauched Hollywood stars and Broadway showgirls for the frisson. He heard the rustle of gossip as fingers pointed subtly at Estella and at Lena, wondering about the likeness, eager for the latest installment in the legend of Lena’s notorious life. He frowned, seeing Lena’s back straighten into a false confidence that belied the way he knew she would feel about the whispers. At the same time as he made up his mind to join her—to shield her from the murmurings—she shook her head at him, which he should have expected. Lena always liked to fight her own battles.

  So Alex turned his attention back to Estella, hoping she wasn’t aware she was the subject of rumor and speculation too. He watched her sip champagne and pretend to listen to a man who was flirting with her as appallingly as a schoolboy. Her eyes roamed the room and settled upon something that seemed to please her because she smiled a little and lifted one eyebrow and Alex could see that Sam was the recipient of those facial antics.

  Estella made as if to move away and the callow youth bellowed loudly and enthusiastically at her, “Come find me when you finish powdering your nose.”

  “She’s above your pay-grade,” Alex muttered as he strode over, lighting a cigarette and drawing on it deeply before taking his place next to her at the bar. “Sidecar?” he asked and she nodded.