Anio Szado (3 page)

Madame said, “American society has always followed the Parisian aesthetic, not England’s with its colorless sacks. When you brought in your sketches and I saw your butterflies, I thought I
had discovered a motif that captured the American spirit: proud and free. I thought that, in all my years of teaching, I had never seen such a perceptive rendering of
l’esprit de l’époque
.”

“You really did?”

“It was my first mistake. I let desire blind me to the truth. I let myself forget that you are not really American.”

“I am so!” I was born and raised in New York. Only Papa was French: he’d emigrated to Montreal with his parents and brother before both young men moved to New York—first Yannick, to test the market with his locally lauded
haute cuisine
, then my father in pursuit of a career in architecture, accompanied by his Canadian bride.

Madame said, “No child of Émile Lachapelle could be anything but French at heart. No wonder you have no idea what Americans want. I have no idea either, not anymore. I was expecting the theater of war to turn American woman into birds of paradise, not dull, defeated brown chickens like the Brits and Canadians.”

But the Canadians weren’t defeated—not the ones in Mother’s Anglophone neighborhood or the Francophone friends I had drunk with in Old Montreal. After two and a half years of sacrifice, Canadians still believed in the cause that drove the war and took their sons. Among them, I had finally allowed myself to grieve my father’s death, after tamping down sorrow through my final school year to impress the likes of Véra Fiche. All of Canada had seemed to understand and share my grief. The proof had surrounded me: in the
Gazette
’s details of slaughter at a beachhead; in the station one day bursting with uniforms and the next day barren of men; in the red-etched eyes of the floury baker’s wife; in the intensity with which Mother tuned the radio at night. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation delivered news with a chairman’s precision, but the signal whined in pain, the static crackled loss.

I had returned to Manhattan this spring bearing pride in
my country (
U.S. at War!
) and found an abundance of military recruiting stations jostling like street vendors for a corner spot. The city’s dim-out rule was so fresh that New Yorkers were still remarking on the romantic change. It was as though a much-anticipated show had come to town. The city was not under blackout orders, but Bloomingdale’s was selling decorative dark shades for those who strove to be fashionably ahead of the times. The neon on Broadway had been replaced with metallic sequin signs that shimmered seductively in the available light, mesmerizing the eye with the slightest breeze. The markets still offered an array of produce—under posters that advocated moderation—and despite the draft, the streets still bore plenty of young men. Yes, we had shipped dried eggs and powdered milk by the boatloads; we had delivered scores of munitions; we had built ships; but why had Roosevelt not yet pitted our troops against the Germans? Thirty-one months after Hitler invaded Poland, American squadrons had yet to be deployed in Europe.

Madame could say what she liked. The butterfly dress could only be an affront to those who were fighting overseas. It was beautiful in a way that was worse than ugly.

“You won’t receive a better offer,” she said as I picked up my purse. “Not without a portfolio. Not having squandered your chances for an entire year. Think about that, Mignonne.”

I had no intention of thinking about it. I was afraid of what I might decide.

I knocked on dozens of studio doors with my old sketches and samples in hand. No one cared that I’d graduated at the top of my class a year before; most didn’t give me a chance to say a word beyond my name. In some places, among the French expats, it was a name that could open doors—but here in the Garment District, I was just another grad, and of the worst sort: the type that wanted to create her own designs. Wasn’t that the nature of the industry now—American designers developing American styles?

Paris had always dictated the look of each season, from the silhouette down to the details, but American women could no longer visit the Continent for hand-fitted originals. There were no new French originals: none for the Rockefeller set to wear, none for the copyists and factory workers to take apart and recreate in quantity for department store racks. And so in July of ’41, with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at his side, the mayor of New York had proclaimed his city the fashion center of the universe, “not by accident, not by default of the war in Europe, but by the right of creative talent, skilled mechanics and the best dressed women in the world.” Yet on the sidewalks in the spring of ’42, in the studios and salons, in the backstreet and back alley doors to which I was directed with my portfolio, and in department store after department store where the racks were still fat with made-in-America, faux-Parisian ensembles, proof of the revolution was elusive.

One older gentleman had at least flipped through my drawings.
He considered my signature. “Related to Yannick Lachapelle, the restaurateur?”

“I’m his niece.”

“He’s done well with Le Pavillon. You don’t want to work for him?”

“I’m not interested in food.”

He closed my sketchbook and returned it. “Your concepts aren’t half bad. And your technique is sound.”

“But you have nothing for me?”

“Want to press seams for three years—or five or fifteen? And then maybe move up to beadwork or piping?”

“You wouldn’t make me a junior designer or an assistant?”

“You can get on the cart if you like, Miss Lachapelle, but the wheels turn slowly. You’d be satisfied with tracing and sizing patterns?”

“I want to be a designer.”

He steered me to the door. “You’ll find a way.”

I was a designer who did not design, as Antoine was a pilot who had long been denied flight. When I’d last seen him, a year before, he had still been grounded, decommissioned from the French Air Force, without a posting or a plane. By now, surely, he was airborne again. I was certain he would not still be in New York. There was nothing for him in New York.

I had no cause to think I’d run into him, especially not in the Garment District, yet I looked for him as I had looked for him in the cafés of Old Montreal. I had checked for his letters daily. I’d looked for news of his departure from America in
Le Journal
and for his obituary in the
Gazette
: it was there that I expected to see him if I was ever to see him again.

I had reread his books in my bedroom at Mother’s, though I’d made a point of leaving my own copies behind in New York.
Southern Mail
, which I had first read in French as
Courrier sud. Night Flight
, the story of a pilot fated to disappear.
Terre des hommes
—a title I would have translated as
Land of People
, not
Wind, Sand and Stars
or Expo’s “Man and His World.” Yet
Terre des hommes
was indeed the story of a man. They were all of them restless dramas of men, romantic loners in search of fulfillment, men who put duty above all.

I had sought Antoine in his novels. I had recalled them as adventure tales. But what I found in rereading them was his testament that the noble man was condemned to wander unprotected and alone, his duties denying him a peaceful existence with a loving wife and the joys of settling in a community for longer than the span between missions or mail drops. By the time I received a letter from Antoine—the only letter he would send me in Montreal—I was half in love with his airborne doppelgängers, with their heart-wrenching ideals and their artless bravery. I wept for them and for myself—for I’d let Antoine go. I had forfeited my chance to ease him away from his pursuit of danger and into a quiet, comfortable life with me.