Anio Szado (2 page)

Regardless: they had anointed Atelier Fiche, if only by dint of a single column inch and one grainy photograph. If Madame hadn’t already made plans to find a more desirably located studio or a properly impressive salon, no doubt she would do so when her end-of-school-year tasks were complete. Then, of course, she would give up teaching for good. I was keenly aware that it would take everything she had in her to advance from aspiring to arrived. I was determined to make the same commitment myself.

At 315 West 39th, as if in imprudent solidarity with Madame Fiche, a hat designer had set up shop several blocks from the Millinery District. His street-level storefront displayed miniature masculine hats of the sort ladies were pinning atop their up-dos and rolled tresses in those wartime days—a jaunty, tongue-in-cheek look that managed to simultaneously salute and belittle the men who wore the corresponding full-size versions. There were five-inch top hats like sleek black corks, teacup-sized bowlers, a tiny officer’s cap with an optimistic V-for-victory brooch glittering from its band. A pancake-sized beret was adorned with a wide-eyed peacock feather. Its lashes quivered as it watched me.

Beside the display, set back from the sidewalk, the green paint
of a metal door was peeling to reveal older and paler green layers. I pulled it open and climbed low steps to the lobby, avoiding the handrail; its varnish was black with grime. At the elevator, I closed the grate behind me and prayed for a swift ascension and a swifter return to ground. The box shuddered upward.

On Madame’s floor, walls of brick and dismal plaster disappeared into murky corners and passageways. Industrial whining came from behind closed doors, drowning out the creaking of the floorboards. A heavy, oily smell intensified with each step. Surely Madame doesn’t bring clients here, I thought. But here was her studio, “Atelier Fiche” hand-lettered in black ink on a golden card with elegant corner flourishes. Classic and carefully adorned—as expected. At NYFS, Madame had been a fanatic for hand-finished details, fine embroidery, and expensive gilt applied to suits with nipped-in waists or to respectable dresses with long, straight skirts. She had imposed her preferences with a rigid will. I had not managed to stand up to Madame that entire year; what made me imagine I might be capable of doing so now?

“Relax, Mig,” my brother Leo had said this morning. “Know your problem? You’re still thinking of Fiche as your professor. All she is to you now is a thief and a cheat. What you do is, you surprise her. She opens the door. Bang: lay it on the line. Tell her what you want. And make it good. She owes you big time.”

“All I want is an apology.”

“You want cash in hand. And a cut of what she gets, now until kingdom come. Think of the future. Future sales.”

But what sort of sales could Madame expect? The country had changed since I had designed the line. One minute, the U.S. had been committed to withholding military involvement; the next minute, we’d declared war. Four months later, we were still gearing up for mobilization, but I was certain that soon Americans would be fighting on the European front. Who would wear anything like those flamboyant designs then?

I told Leo about the new fabric use restrictions. I tried to
explain how Madame’s collection would be hamstrung by patriotic constraint.

“Temporary setback,” he said. “Any day now, Roosevelt’s going to raise his little finger and start sending in our boys. Bam! Hitler wets his pants and runs home bawling. And just like that, old Fiche goes back to selling whatever fancy clothes she wants.” He pointed his cigarette at me. “You got to look out for yourself. Take a lesson from me. When I was building popcorn machines, everyone knew the boss was knocking the bottles off the shelves with his secretary. Good for him; better for me. I figured it was fifty-fifty the guy would promote me out of his way instead of throwing me onto the street.”

“You blackmailed him?”

“I just asked him if his wife would like to see some interesting photographs.”

“You were bluffing.”

“It cost him nothing to give me a better job. But believe me, people will do a lot to save their reputations. Remember that, Miggy. This lady’s got a lot to lose. She’d be nowhere without you.”

If Leo could see this hallway, I thought as I stood poised to knock on the studio door, he might just wonder whether Madame Fiche was still nowhere. Maybe the designs she copied from my sketches hadn’t brought success to Atelier Fiche after all, despite what I had read in the magazine Mother borrowed from the Ladies’ Auxiliary of Montreal: “Debut collection takes wing … Emerging from the cocoon of NYFS, professor Madame Véra Fiche sets Manhattan society a-flutter …”

The
Women’s Wear
article had astounded me: it meant I could succeed in fashion. But I couldn’t be proud that my designs had been noticed. I couldn’t be angry that the credit went to Madame Fiche. It wasn’t right that she had taken my ideas for her own, but neither was it right that this collection was being lauded as acceptable, even exceptional.

All I wanted from Madame now was the chance to see the
Butterfly Collection in person, to face it in the flesh, before letting it go and putting it behind me. If it was true that I had talent, I would find a way to make fashion a force for good.

I knocked. The studio was large: faint, sharp footsteps sounded for some moments, growing louder until the door opened. A flicker of emotion sparked briefly in Madame Fiche’s eyes.

She still had the same smooth brow plucked entirely bare, the same severe hairdo, the black strands—with some new grey filaments—pulled tight into a flawless bun. Her thin forearms were chalky and damp; they bore the clean heavy smell of plaster of Paris. She still wore the same sort of tailored black dress as always, but in place of her customary belted jacket was an unbleached cotton apron. In an accent even loftier than her usual, she said, “You have interrupted my work.”

I squeezed my hands together to stop their shaking. If only I could do the same to my words. “I’m Mignonne Lachapelle.”

“Oui.”

“I’ve come about the butterflies. The collection. My designs.”

She eyed me, her lips pinched, until my stomach grew so nervous as to almost heave. “
Entrez
.”

I entered.

This was Madame’s studio? I had been expecting a space confined and controlled, not a careless expanse that was messily meadow-like in its broad sweep, its glow, its random flowerings. Overstuffed racks dripped garments, two or three to a hanger, with more strewn over the rods. On the floor, bolts of material—some rolls fat with fabric, others just covering their cores—were stacked like colorful, mismatched plates. Long, curling rectangles of butcher paper were fastened to the walls and to the pipes that passed overhead, their surfaces filled with sketches in charcoal or in chalk. From some, silver strings of cobwebs swayed. An oversized sketch pad lay open on a table that was awash in natural light. Sunshine spread across the golden floor. I stepped into it.

So much space. So much light. I breathed it in.

I’d become used to the high ceilings of the Lachapelle family home where my mother now lived, used to hilly horizons barely breached by buildings. When I’d emerged from Grand Central Station two weeks before, I had immediately felt compacted to half my height (which was five feet ten—twenty-five years ago). The New York sky didn’t curve down to a natural horizon but perched above mile-high rooftops like a distant cap. Leo had walked uncompressed beside me with my trunk on his shoulder. Now he and I lived like mice in his small, subterranean apartment, and Madame’s studio was opening like a seashore around me, wide and warmly aglow.

I wanted this.

She led me to the back of the studio, to a cluster of chairs, a coffee table, a sofa. “Sit,” she said as she walked on, rounding a worktable beyond the sofa, where buckets and wire armatures waited. “I am constructing a new judy.” She nodded toward three headless torsos that stood on posts near a wall of windows—female forms for the fitting of garments, one of them stolen from NYFS.

“In plaster?”

“I try plaster. I try
papier-mâché
.” She turned to her task, tearing strips of paper, dipping them into a bucket, fussing over where to fit them on a half-covered armature. Leo had said to let Madame make the first move, but it was as though she had forgotten I was there.

I coughed. Madame looked up with a smile—far more disconcerting than her usual glower—before continuing silently with her work. She turned the armature, inspecting it.

“Madame. I think, I mean I know, you stole my designs. The butterfly-inspired concepts I submitted for my year-end portfolio. I saw the photo in
Women’s Wear Daily
.”

She slapped a wad of sodden paper onto the judy’s bosom. “Silly of me, wasn’t it?”

My gut jumped. “You admit it?”

“I admit. I regret.”

The most I had expected was begrudging recognition of some sliver of creative debt. Never a swift admission of guilt—not from the most unbending woman I’d ever met. It didn’t fit. There had to be more to it.

I stalled. I said, “It was wrong, what you did.”

“Wrong?” She leaned over a bucket on the floor to splash water on her arms, then dried them vigorously with a towel before walking around the sofa to perch in an armchair facing me. “It was idiotic.
Stupide
. Can you possibly imagine how much I put into that collection? All my months of hard work. And in service to what?” She gestured with a limp, dismissive hand toward something behind me. “To that.” Her voice was flat with disdain.

The skin at the corners of her eyes was crinkling: she was pleased or amused. It had been the same when she’d railed against my sketches. Her tone had hurled disgust as she dismissed my work as misguided, amateur, ugly, a waste of paper, a misuse of time—yet there had been a brightness in her cheeks. On that day, as on this one, there had been a strange intensity in her eyes.

She waited for me to take the cue, to look. I had been thinking about this moment for weeks: when I would see and touch my creation—her creation—the hybrid born from my drawings and brought to life by Madame’s hand. I stood up and found it necessary to steady myself on the armchair before turning around.

Hanging high on the brick wall behind my chair was an astonishing garment. It was even more dramatic than I’d envisioned it could be as I was working out its features in my sketchbooks, far more striking and detailed than the black-and-white magazine photograph had conveyed. Madame had constructed the dress of rich silk velvet. It had an asymmetrical hem that rose slightly in the front and fell from a gathered waist to what
would be well beyond floor length at the back. On the lower portion, dark beaded flowers glinted subtly against the expansive sweep of velvet, which was itself dark, almost black-blue. On the same velvet backdrop a butterfly—lavishly constructed of beads, sequins, silver cording, and satin insets—inhabited the entire top half of the dress, imbuing it with ruby red, violet, and dark green. The neckline plunged in an angle that contained the antennae and pointed to the ruching that defined the insect’s body down the center of the dress. The batwing sleeves draped straight down from the hanger. I walked over to lift a sleeve. Flowing lines of beading and embroidery carried across the full span of the triangle.

I said, “If you were going to copy someone’s work, I don’t understand why you would ever choose mine. Not this line. How could you even show it? How could anyone think it was appropriate?”

“
People need a luxurious escape these days, no?”

The fashions in Montreal had been simple, pedestrian, restrained. They didn’t insult anyone with their disdain for the troubles of the times. They didn’t make me feel ill. Men were dying; whole families were starving; and Madame was talking about luxury. “People in Canada would never wear something like this. You should see how they scrimp.”

Madame’s tone was mocking. “You are an expert; you have been rationing with the brave Canadians. Poor you. And here I have been elbow deep in sequins and velvet, stupidly trying to make a living, shamelessly eating my fill. Mind you, appetite is a tricky thing. It is prone to failure when the fate of one’s family is unknown.”

Her family. Of course Madame Fiche would have relatives in France. I hadn’t thought about that.

She drew a watch from her skirt pocket and fastened it on her wrist, then shook her hand briskly to shift the band into position. “If the collection were as inappropriate as you believe
it to be, its launch would have gone unnoticed. You would be none the wiser; only I would bear the cost of the effort. But it has succeeded.
Alors
, fate unrolls as it must. You come to extract my penance; I agree to hire you as my assistant; we continue to collaborate to secure ever increasing fame for Atelier Fiche.”

“Pardon?”

“There are worse alternatives—for us both.”

“You want to hire me?” It wasn’t possible. I could not work with a woman who had stolen my designs. But my gaze went involuntarily, longingly, to the studio before alighting again on the dress.

“Listen,” said Madame. “In France, that garment would have been a sign of
résistance
. When the men were called to the Front, the wives dressed in pure silk. That’s right, even as the Brits and your beloved Canadians went without. The Frenchwomen wrapped themselves in it by the meter so
les Boches
couldn’t take it for their own wives. Do you see? That is why I thought the collection was inspired; it is why I did not cancel the launch when Roosevelt declared war. You are wrong about wartime fashions, Mignonne: the most admirable pieces are extravagant in purpose and in spirit—nothing like the insipid styles mandated by this country’s pencil pushers.”

Resistance, spirit: this was what Madame saw when she looked at my designs? There had been a time, before Montreal, when I had defended the role of fashion in a world at war. I had argued its importance to Antoine. Maybe I’d been right then. Maybe Madame was right. I tried to imagine Frenchwomen wearing the butterfly dress. The hubris of the notion sent a ripple of shame through me—but better to picture the piece on defiant Parisians than on Americans too absorbed in liberty to restrict what they put on their backs.