Anio Szado (22 page)

During the winter holiday in my last year at NYFS, I was home one night with my brother. It had been weeks since we’d spent any stretch of time together in the apartment—either I was at school or teaching at the Alliance, or Leo was at work or God-knows-where—and I was struck by the realization that he had changed. The pudginess that had long overlaid his muscles had faded away since the summer, since Papa’s death, leaving him rangy and hard of limb, gaunt around the eyes and mouth. His jawbone had sharpened, and his cheekbones, like rock displaced at a fault line, thrust out over the valleys of his cheeks. I was used to his harmless, crude jocularity and defiant optimism, but now they seemed tainted with desperation. He had always been so determined to be independent—but from what? It was as though Leo no longer knew where to anchor his rebellion, or whether rebellion had been worth the strain.

He had been standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me pack a suitcase for a brief trip to Montreal.

“I wish you would come,” I had said. “Mother really wants to see you.”

“No reason she can’t come here.”

“She wants to do something at the cemetery on Christmas Eve. It’ll be nice. We’ll light candles and say some prayers together before midnight Mass.” It had sounded beautiful to me: holding Mother’s hand, candlelight flickering on the snow, puffs of white breath with each “Blessed are thou.”

“You’ll freeze to death,” said Leo, and as I met his eyes I thought of Papa ice cold in his grave. Suddenly Leo’s face reddened
and rucked up, and I was alarmed to see that he was about to cry. But he groped for his cigarettes and matchbox, and waved away the moment. I locked my suitcase, closing my eyes against Leo’s heavy streams of smoke.

“Oh, hey,” he said as I slipped the key into my purse. He was cheery again: good old Leo. “Something I’ve been meaning to show you.” He unbuttoned his shirt.

I winced in anticipation. His arms were already engraved with scars from his job building carnival rides.

He removed his shirt and his undershirt. “Have a look at my back. What do you think: is it a beaut or what?”

I drew in my breath. Spanning shoulder to shoulder was a butterfly, a tattoo set off by an aura of red. Its segmented body aligned to the ridges and furrows of his spine; its graceful wings—purple, blue, crimson—spread along the arcing muscles of his back. Black antennae stretched in a vee that curved to hook his neck.

It looked wet and raw, pinned down alive, rising and falling with his breath. I touched it. Leo’s creature was a map of a thousand welts.

My final portfolio was due in three months’ time, and I had nothing. I opened my sketchbook on the train. I took my brother’s pain and used it, even as it settled fully into his skin. I made of it something stunning, extravagant, grotesque. What else are we to do with the things that sear our hearts?

Someone’s got to stand up for themselves: that was what he’d said. And maybe he was justified. Maybe I should have given him the whole lot and been done with it; let him spread its opulence among his girlfriends or streetwalkers, wherever it was that he spread his seed. Maybe no justification was needed. If it hadn’t been for Papa’s death, for Leo’s pain, for his tattoo, if it hadn’t been for my empathy and desperation and envy, and
for Madame’s uncanny manipulative skills, there would have been no Butterfly Collection at all. Where did the credit lie, and where did the blame?

Madame entered without a word as I was sweeping the floor. At her desk, she pulled out her book of accounts and made a few notations.

I crouched to use the dustpan, and a wave of exhaustion seeped in. Was it just yesterday that Antoine had been here, that he had been with me? Yesterday he had drawn the picture on the floor. And then I had drawn, too, pages and pages filled with sketches of the rose. And then Leo, come to take his due.

And today was only beginning.

I knelt, fingertips on the floor, the parallel floorboards wavering like the rain wavers down the windows at JFK.

Madame crossed over and gave me her hand. It was small and bony, firm. When I was standing, she gripped my elbow and led me to the sitting area. We settled in the chairs.

She said, “It gets no easier than this. If you cannot manage the strain of these times, you do not belong anywhere near the helm of an atelier.”

“I’m just tired. It’s been a long couple of days.”

“Every day should be long. With success, they become longer still.”

My fatigued eyes wandered to the wall behind my boss, to the hook and hanger lacking a dress.

“You have not the strength I expected of you,” said Madame, “nor the commitment you showed as a student. There was a time when you rose to every challenge I placed before you. You were desperate to learn.”

“I still am. I’m here late most nights, trying things, figuring out things that we barely touched on in school.”

“You play with textiles instead of applying proper techniques. You wrap; you twist. All of America is in tailored pieces cut high at the neck, padded shoulders, garments that make up in
diligent workmanship what they lack in generosity—and you devote yourself to draping as though it is the foundation on which everything stands. You have the skills to give women what they want, Mignonne. I don’t understand why you resist. You know better than most how to fit, how to perfect a collar, how to hang a facing, how to bind, which stitch produces which effect.”

Yes, but I’d discovered a whole range of exciting methods and effects since I’d left the classroom. Through my own research, curiosity, and trial and error, I’d learned how to shape a garment with just an iron and steam. I’d learned to use hidden weights to affect draping—in ways more exciting than stringing a ball chain through a bottom hem. I’d been experimenting with soft harnesses that made a garment’s structure virtually invisible to the eye. There were so many tricks for making the surface of the fabric perform.

I said, “Wrapping and twisting is craft, too. We shouldn’t be afraid of adopting new techniques or making things of real lasting beauty. The less we tailor and fuss, the more life we can give to a garment. Instead of starting with some rigid concept and trying to make it work for clients, we can give women clothing that will be right for their own bodies.”

“Listen to me, Mignonne—”

“We can be making pieces that outlive all the trends.”

“
Écoutez-moi
! We are not gods in the heavens that we should imagine our work everlasting, and scorn society’s direction. You believe you have a vision. It is not one I share. So: you will pursue it on your own. I will not be derailed by your base obsessions. Atelier Fiche no longer requires your talents.”

For a moment I felt as though blackout drapes had been passed across my eyes. “But Madame. I thought we were working things out. You gave me the white silk.”

She straightened in her chair. “I do my utmost to uphold proper ideals, Mignonne, but I am an
artiste
. The artist’s eye is amoral. It doesn’t care that some things of beauty are better left
unseen. I abhor the baseness with which you clothe yourself, yet it is the artist’s nature to be moved by the sight of a youthful figure sparely and provocatively draped. I gave in to impulse; I gave you the silk: more the shame on me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being moved, Madame! You shouldn’t regret it.” Or punish me for it. I suspected she wasn’t simply prudish; she seemed to feel that a love of inherent beauty was a weakness. And not just human beauty: she had whipped the white fabric in the air as though trying to snap away its powers of enchantment.

I thought of how it fluttered to the ground like petals or leaves. “Let me tell you a story my father told me.”

“No, thank you.”

“There were dandelions on my grandparents’ lawns in France, and it used to make my grandmother mad to have to pay the gardeners to pull them when they could be tending the formal gardens. One day when the dandelions were white, Papa started picking and blowing on them, and his mother came out yelling. But when she went over to him, she saw how pretty it was—all those lacy floating seeds. She even blew on a flowerhead herself. You see what I’m saying? She just had to shift her perspective to see how powerful natural beauty could be.”

“Very touching.” Madame’s mouth twisted. “Your father’s mother paid the help to tend the gardens and the lawns and the weeds. My mother dug up dandelions with her own hands to have something to put on the table for dinner.”

I felt sick. I had so much still to learn, and the means to learn it here. I couldn’t start over on my own, with no studio and few tools, no reputation, no boxes of fabric stacked and overflowing, with supplies quickly getting scarce on the street. Talk of the birth of American design was starting to seem like mostly talk. Where were the jobs? I would have to resign myself to working as a copyist in a department store studio, anonymous and stagnant, as girls like me had always done.

And what about Madame? How would she survive? “What will you do on your own? How will you pay the bills and the rent? You can’t build your name by taking in more sewing jobs. How will you create a new collection?”

“I hope you are not suggesting I cannot conceive of a collection on my own.”

“It’s a lot of work, a lot of time to invest without money coming in.”

“Work can be shared. There are a thousand girls who would love to take your place.” Girls who would build their own advancement upon the foundation I had laid. “And as of September money will no longer be such a concern. The school has approved my return to teaching. The rent will be paid.”

“You can’t teach and try to keep the studio going.”

“Of course I will.”

“You need all your energy for Atelier Fiche!” Madame’s passion had to fire the work of her hands and eyes, not be spat away in frustration and cursing as she walked between students’ desks. I needed this studio and this job. Madame needed to not throw it all away.

I jerked my head in frustration—and my gaze met the wall where the dress had hung. Thank God for Leo’s sense of entitlement; he’d been right that I needed some of that myself. I took a deep breath. “NYFS won’t hire a proven plagiarist.”

Madame froze for a moment; only her nostrils moved. She said, “Ah, you play your card. Very amusing. However, your threat is empty. There is no proof.” She stood up and held out her hand. “You may leave the studio now. Give me the key.”

“I have the issue of
Women’s Wear Daily
at home. It proves that you presented my butterfly concept as your own.”

“It proves nothing. No artwork has ever been created in a vacuum. It would be entirely acceptable if your work inspired the profile of my collection.”

“My work didn’t inspire your collection, it
is
your collection!
The dress in that
Women’s Wear
photograph matches the sketch in my portfolio in every possible way.”

“You are forgetting that you did not retrieve your portfolio from my office. I had no choice but to throw your sketches in the trash.”

“I don’t think so, Madame. I found them gathering dust on top of a shelf on one of my first days here.” There had been no shock in coming across them as I had cleaned the studio, nor had I been excited to see them again. It had been largely in pursuit of tidiness that I had taken them home.

Madame sat down. She cleared her throat. “You claim the resemblance is not general. Your argument has no basis. Whatever your sketches show or do not show, the photograph is no comparison; it is too small to capture the garment’s details.”

“I’ll show them my sketches and I’ll show them the actual dress.”

“If you only had such a dress.” Madame smiled. “It is entirely logical that a designer might destroy a garment of her own design if new regulations rendered the piece difficult to sell, don’t you agree? These days, every sequin and notion is precious and must be harvested from stagnant inventory. Oh yes, there once existed a dress vaguely resembling a butterfly. It is true that some people have seen a butterfly dress, of some sort, displayed on my studio wall. But believe me, Mignonne, all trace of it will have disappeared from the studio before you even reach the street.”

I pointed past her to the empty wall. “I’m not leaving Atelier Fiche. And you are not going to teach.”

Madame spun in her chair to look, and for a long time she did not turn back.

INSPIRATION AND ANTOINE

His readers will like that, especially the fans who believe that Antoine is living on asteroid
B-612
. Soon we’ll be sending men to the moon; maybe they’ll see him up there.