Zoya

by Danielle Steel

  “That's awfully soon.” It was only nine months away and there would be a great deal to do. “I could have Elsie decorate it for me, she has an unfailing sense of what people want, even when they don't know it.”

  But he smiled gently at his wife, sparked by her own excitement, “You could do it yourself just as well.”

  “No, I couldn't.”

  “Never mind, you may not have time anyway. Between finding the location, hiring staff, and buying for the store, you'd have too much to do anyway to worry about decorating it on top of it. Let me think about this. … I'll talk to some people I know about looking for a location.”

  “Do you mean it?” Her eyes danced with green fire, “Do you really think I should do it?”

  “I sure do. Let's give it a whirl. If it doesn't work, we'll close it and take a loss after the first year. It can't hurt.” And she certainly knew now they could afford it.

  She talked about nothing else for the next three weeks and when she took him for mass on Russian Christmas, she whispered to him for most of the service. One of his cronies in real estate had located what he thought was the perfect location, and she could hardly wait to see it.

  “Your mother would faint if she saw you walking out of here,” she laughed as she looked up at him happily. The services hadn't even made her sad this time, she was too excited about what they were trying to put together.

  She had seen Serge Obolensky there for the first time in months, and he had bowed politely when she introduced him to Simon, speaking first in English for Simon's benefit, and then chatting with him in her elegant Russian.

  “I'm surprised you didn't marry him,” Simon said quietly, trying to hide the fact that he was jealous, but Zoya looked up at him and laughed as they drove home in the green Cadillac.

  “Serge has never been interested in me, my love. He's too smart to marry poor old Russian titles. He likes the American socialites much better.”

  Simon leaned over and kissed her as he pulled her closer to him on the seat. “He doesn't know what he's missing.”

  The next day Zoya took Axelle to lunch, and talked excitedly about her plans. She had told Axelle from the first, and had told her nervously that she didn't want to compete with her directly.

  “Why not?” Her friend looked at her in surprise. “Doesn't Chanel compete with Dior? And Elsa with all of them? Don't be foolish. It will be terrific for business!” Zoya hadn't thought of it that way, but she was relieved to have Axelle's blessing.

  And when she saw the location Simon's friend had found, she fell in love with it on the spot. It was perfect. It had previously been a restaurant at Fifty-fourth and Fifth, and it was only three blocks from Axelle's. It was in terrible shape, but as she squinted her eyes, she knew it was just what she wanted, and better yet, the entire second floor was available just above it.

  “Take them both,” Simon advised.

  “You don't think it's too big?” It was huge, which was why the restaurant had failed. It had been too big for their small clientele, but Simon shook his head with his instinctive sense for what worked in business.

  “You can do women's wear on the main floor, and men's upstairs, and if it works,” he winked at his friend, “we can buy the building. In fact, maybe we ought to do that right now, before they get smart and jack up the rent too high. He made a few calculations on a scratch pad and then nodded. “Go ahead, Zoya. Buy it.”

  “Buy it?” She almost choked on the words. “What'li I do with the other three Boors?”

  “Rent them out with one-year leases. If the store's a success, you can take back a floor every year. You might be damn glad to have five floors one day.”

  “Simon, this is crazy!” But she was so excited, she could hardly stand it. She had never even dreamed of owning her own store, and suddenly there she was, in the midst of it all. They hired architects and Elsie de Wolfe, and within weeks, she was surrounded by blueprints and renderings and drawings, there were samples of marble all over her library, fabrics, wood finishes for some paneling, the whole house was in a whirl as she made her plans, and Simon finally gave her a desk in his office and a secretary of her own to handle all the details for her. Cholly Knickerbocker even mentioned it in his column, and there was an article about it in The New York Times. “Watch out, New York!” the item said, “When Zoya Ossupov, the late great Countess of Axelle's, and Simon Hirsch, with his Seventh Avenue empire, joined forces last July, they might just have started something big!” And the words were prophetic.

  They sailed for Paris in March on the Normandie, to buy for Simon's lines, and to select some of the mainstays of Zoya's first collection. And this time she picked all the things she loved, without having to defer to Axelle. She had never had as much fun in her life as shopping with him, and Simon gave her an unlimited budget. They stayed at the George V, and enjoyed a few rare moments alone which were like a honeymoon for them. They arrived back in New York a month after they'd sailed, happy and refreshed and more in love than ever. Their homecoming was marred only by the news that Sasha had been expelled from school. At twelve, she was becoming a little terror.

  “How did that happen, Sasha?” She spoke to the child quietly on their first night home. As he had the year before, Nicholas had come to the ship to meet them but this time in the new Duesenberg Simon had ordered before they stopped making them the year before. Nicholas had been wildly excited to see them, and then he had told Zoya the news about his sister. She had worn lipstick and nail polish to school, and she had been caught kissing one of the teachers. He had been fired summarily, and Sasha had been expelled, without hope of being reinstated. “Why?” Zoya asked again, “what could have made you do it?”

  “I was bored,” Sasha shrugged, “and going to an all-girl school is stupid.” Simon had paid the tuition at Marymount for her, and Zoya had been so pleased to see her in a better school than the one Zoya had been able to pay for. Nicholas had stayed on at Trinity, as he had before they were married, and he loved it there. He had two more years to finish before he went to Princeton, like his father before him. Sasha had lasted six months at Marymount and now she was out on her ear, and she didn't even have the grace to look embarrassed. There had been only two male teachers in the entire school, the music teacher and the dance master, the rest were nuns, and even then Sasha was able to make trouble. Zoya wondered if it was Sasha's way of punishing her for going away for so long, and being so excited about her new business. For the first time, she had second thoughts but it was too late now. She had ordered all her American lines before she left, and now she had bought and paid for the rest of it in Paris. She had to open, no matter what. And it was a hell of a time for Sasha to be making trouble. But Sasha wasn't the only thing on her mind now.

  “Doesn't this embarrass you at all?” Zoya asked, “Think of how kind Simon was to send you there in the first place.” But the girl only shrugged, and Zoya sensed that she hadn't gotten through to her, as she went back to their bedroom and found Simon unpacking. “I'm so sorry, Simon. It seems so incredibly ungrateful of her to have done this.”

  “What did she say?” Simon turned worried eyes to his wife. There was something in Sasha that had troubled him in the last few months. She had looked at him hungrily more than once, in a way that would have inspired a less decent man to treat her as a woman and not a child, but he never said anything about it to Zoya. He simply went on treating her like a little girl, which egged her on more. But she was only twelve years old after all, and incredibly pretty. She had her maternal grandmother's icy Germanic beauty, and her mother's Russian fire. Together, it was a fearsome combination. “Is she upset?” he asked, as Zoya shook her head in dismay.

  “If only she were.” She had seemed totally without contrition.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Look for another school, I guess. It's a little late in the year for that.” It was already mid-April. “I could have her tutored until the fall, but I'm not sure that would be good
for her.”

  But Simon liked the idea. “Maybe you should, for now. It would take the pressure off her.” As long as the tutor was a woman. But the only one Zoya found was a nervous young man, who assured her that he could handle Sasha without any problem. He lasted exactly a month and then fled in terror, without explaining to Zoya that she had greeted him the previous day in a nightgown that was obviously her mother's, and after that had told him that she wanted him to kiss her.

  “You're a brat,” Nicholas still accused her night and day. At nearly sixteen, he was a great deal more perceptive about her than her own mother. And she fought with Nicholas like a cat, scratching his face when she grew angry. Even Simon was concerned about the child, but just when he'd almost given up hope, she would become submissive and surprisingly charming.

  The construction at the store was going unbelievably well, and by July it looked as though they would be open in September. They celebrated their anniversary at a rented house on Long Island that year, two days after Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. Nicholas was fascinated by her, and he told Simon secretly that one day he wanted to learn how to fly. Charles Lindbergh was his childhood hero. He had been equally fascinated by the Hindenburg, the dirigible that had exploded over New Jersey in early May. Fortunately, when he had tried to convince Zoya and Simon to travel to Europe on it, Zoya had been leery of it, and they had wanted to travel by ship anyway, in memory of their crossing the year before on the Queen Mary.

  “Well, Mrs. Hirsch, what do you think of it?” Simon stood in the shoe department of the women's floor in her new store in early September. “Is it everything you wanted it to be?”

  Tears filled her eyes as she looked around her in silent wonder. Elsie de Wolfe had created an atmosphere of beauty and elegance in pale gray silk with pink marble floors. There were soft lights, and vast arrangements of silk flowers on beautiful Louis XV tables. “It looks like a palace!”

  “Nothing less than you deserve, my love.” He kissed her and that night they celebrated with champagne. The shop was to open the following week with a glittering party attended by the cream of New York.

  Zoya had bought her own dress for the opening at Axelle's. “This will be good for business! I might just have to say in my next ad that Countess Zoya shops here!” The two women had become fast friends, and they both knew now that nothing would change that.

  Zoya and Simon had labored long and hard over the name for her store, and finally with a gleam in his eye Simon had chuckled. “I've got it!”

  “So do I,” Zoya smiled proudly, “Hirsch and Co.”

  “No,” he groaned at the sound of the unromantic name. “I don't know why I didn't think of it before. ‘Countess Zoya’!” It seemed too showy to her, but finally he had convinced her. It was what people wanted, to touch the mystery of the aristocracy, to have a title even if it meant buying one, or in this case, buying the clothes that a countess had selected for them. The items in the columns were endless about “Countess Zoya,” and for the first time in years, Zoya went to the parties she was invited to. She was introduced as Countess Zoya, and her husband, Mr. Hirsch, but everywhere the socialites and the debs flocked around her. And she always looked exquisite in the simple gowns she wore, from Chanel or Madame Grds, or Lanvin. People could hardly wait to see the store, and women were convinced that they would emerge looking just like Zoya.

  “You've done it, my friend,” Simon whispered the night of her opening, the place was packed with every important name in New York. Axelle herself had sent her a tree six feet high of tiny white philanopsis orchids. Bonne chance, mon amie, Affectueusement, Axelle. the card had read as Zoya regarded it with tears in her eyes, and looked adoringly at Simon.

  “It was all your idea.”

  “It's our dream.” He smiled, in a sense, it was then-baby. Even her children were there, Sasha in a beautiful white lace dress, that looked demure and was something the Tsar's children might have worn, or Zoya herself as a child, which was why she had bought it for her in Paris. And Nicholas, looking incredibly handsome at sixteen in his first dinner jacket and the studs Simon had given him, tiny sapphires set in white gold with a rim of diamonds around them. They were a handsome family as photographers snapped pictures of everyone, and Zoya posed again and again with the glittering women who were to become her clients.

  And from that day on, the store was never empty. Women arrived in Cadillacs and Pierce-Arrows and Rollses. An occasional Packard or Lincoln drew up to the door, and Henry Ford came himself to buy a fur coat for his wife. Zoya had planned to sell only a few of them, she wanted most of the coats to be Simon's. But Barbara Hutton ordered an ermine wrap, and Mrs. Astor a full-length sable. The fate of Countess Zoya was sealed by the end of the year, and the sales at Christmastime were staggering. Even the men's department on the handsomely decorated second floor did well. The men did their shopping in wood-paneled rooms with handsome fireplaces, as their women spent their fortunes downstairs in the gray silk dressing rooms. It was everything Zoya had dreamed of and more, and on Park Avenue the Hirsches toasted each other happily with champagne on New Year's Eve.

  “To us!” Zoya lifted her glass, wearing a black velvet evening gown, made for her by Dior.

  But Simon only smiled as he lifted his glass again. “To Countess Zoya!”

  CHAPTER

  42

  By the end of the following year, Zoya had to open another floor, and Simon's purchase of the building had proven to be prophetic. The men's department moved upstairs, and on the second floor, she sold her furs and most exclusive gowns, and there was a tiny boutique for her clients’ children. Little girls were now being ushered in to buy party dresses and their first evening gowns. She even sold christening gowns, most of them French, and all of them as lovely as those she had seen as a child in Imperial Russia.

  Her own daughter loved to come to the store, and pick out new dresses whenever she wanted, but Zoya curbed her finally. She seemed to have an insatiable appetite for expensive clothes, and Zoya didn't want her to overindulge it.

  “Why not?” Sasha pouted angrily the first time Zoya told her she couldn't go shopping on a whim.

  “Because you have lots of pretty things in your closet already, and you outgrow some of them before you even have a chance to wear them.” She was tall and lanky at thirteen, as Natalya had been. She was already almost a head taller than her mother. And Nicholas towered above them both at seventeen. He was in his last year of school before going to Princeton.

  “I wish I could go into business now, like you,” he had said admiringly to Simon more than once. Simon had been good to all three of them, and Nicholas adored him.

  “You will one day, son. Don't be in such a big hurry. If I'd had the chance to go to college like you, I would have loved it.”

  “It seems like a waste of time sometimes,” Nicholas confessed, but he knew that his mother expected him to go to Princeton. And it wasn't too far from home, he was planning to come into the city whenever possible. He had a busy social life, but he also managed to do well in school, unlike his sister. She was a beauty at thirteen, and she looked easily five years older than she was as she slinked around the room, in the dresses Zoya still bought her.

  “That's too babyish!” she complained, eyeing the evening gowns at the store. She could hardly wait until she was old enough to wear them.

  And when Simon offered to take her to the new Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, she was highly insulted.

  “I'm not a baby anymore!”

  “Then don't act like one,” Nicholas taunted. But she wanted to dance the samba and the conga instead, as Simon and Zoya did when they went to El Morocco. Nicholas wanted to go with them too, but Zoya insisted that he was too young. Instead, Simon took them all to “21,” and they talked seriously about what was happening to the Jews in Europe. Simon was deeply worried about what Hitler was doing by the end of 1938 and he felt certain there was going to be a war. But no one else in New Yor
k seemed to be worried about it. They were going to parties and receptions and balls, and the dresses were flying out of Zoya's store. She was even thinking of opening another floor, but it seemed too soon. She was afraid business might slack off, but Simon only laughed at her worries.

  “Face it, darling, you're a success! Business is never going to slack off. Once you've made it, as you have, that doesn't go away. You're backing up your name with quality and style. And as long as you have it to sell, your customers will be there.” She was afraid to admit he was right, and she worked harder than ever, so much so that they had to call her at the store, when Sasha got suspended from school again, just before the Christmas vacation. They had gotten her into the Lycoe Frangais, a tiny school run by a distinguished Frenchman, but he tolerated no nonsense there, and he called Zoya himself to complain about Mademoiselle. She took a taxi to Ninety-fifth Street to beg him not to expel the child. Apparently, she had been playing hooky, and she had smoked a cigarette in the town house's lovely ballroom.

  “You must punish her, madame. And you must adhere to strict discipline, otherwise, madame, I fear we will all regret it some day.” But after a lengthy conversation with Zoya, he agreed not to expel her. Instead she would be put on probation after the Christmas holiday. And Simon promised to drive her to school himself to make sure that she got there.

  “Do you think I should leave the store every day when she gets home from school?” Zoya asked Simon that night. She was feeling guiltier than ever about the long hours she worked at the store.

  “I don't think you should have to,” Simon said honestly, angry at Sasha himself for the first time. “At almost fourteen, she should be able to behave herself until six o'clock when we both get home.” Although he knew that sometimes Zoya didn't get home until after seven. There was always so much to do at the store, so many alterations she wanted to oversee herself, and special orders she wrote up herself so there would be no mistakes. And part of the success was her availability for clients who demanded Countess Zoya. “You can't do it all yourself,” Simon had told her more than once, but she secretly thought she should, just as she thought she should also be at home with the children. But Nicholas was almost eighteen by then, and Sasha only four years younger, they were hardly children anymore. “She's just going to have to behave herself.” And when he told her as much that night, she flounced out of the library and slammed her bedroom door, as Zoya cried.