Anio Szado Read online

  “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.

  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 i
n 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.

  3

  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.

  New York, October 11, 1941

  Dear Mignonne,

  My pen wishes to speak of your beauty that presents itself to me in poignant images as I lie in bed and cannot sleep: your blond hair that tries charmingly to conceal the emotions of your eyes; your slender fingers that hold your pencil gracefully and loosely even when your mind fights the productivity of your hand; your nose and lips that pout so prettily that I can hardly take seriously your frustrations and your anger.

  My pen wishes, but I coax it to behave responsibly. A girl who has left a man should not be subjected to his morose and heartless nostalgia.

  I will admit to this, my sweet Mignonne, and damn me for it if you must: not once did I believe that you did not care for me, nor did I anticipate you would leave me here, stranded, alone in New York. Never mind whether or not you expressed discomfort or misgivings about our friendship. It is a young woman’s fate to be taken lightly. It is the role of her respectable older gentleman to dismiss his pretty friend’s concerns and to give her a little frou-frou to diminish her worries and calm her nerves.

  I am not one for frou-frous. I do not play the role you might expect me to play. And you, too, have admirably broken the rules. You claimed that you were leaving to visit your mother because Madame Lachapelle had requested it and a short jaunt was due. When you then posted a letter within the week, from afar, to sever any expectation that our very tender friendship might continue as it had been, this seemed to me to be beyond comprehension. It has taken me months to understand.

  But such is man. To find the grain of fault in another being, he will dig as tirelessly as a child with a sand shovel. (A weak analogy, for the child labors only to see what he might discover. Today’s man digs in the hope of laying bare a core of ugliness at another’s heart.)

  Forgive my blindness, Mignonne. It has taken me this long, a full half year of your absence, to understand that the fault lies not in your expectations of me or in my failure to live up to the same, nor in your stubbornness (which I might more graciously call determination, and which I have much admired when it was not directed at my English conjugations or at my refusal to compromise who and what I am). The fault, if there is fault, lies in one simple fact: the world that I have so loved has changed.

  It was not long ago that freedom meant more than having a predetermined choice of toothpastes and po
wders on a drugstore shelf. Soon the sidewalks shall deliver us directly into the store aisles, where shelves laden with mind-numbing extravagances will empty themselves into our complacent hands. Gone are the days when one could rally thirty men from the sidewalks of Paris, as I did upon the fall of France, lead them cheerfully into a stolen plane, and fly to unoccupied North Africa, from whence to stage an attempt to regain our homeland. That the territory proved to be already occupied is immaterial to the point of my story, which is this: all now is rules and technology. Man stripped of choices is stripped, too, of honor.

  How is one to act on the convictions of one’s spirit? “Of course you must,” they tell me, “only first ensure that you meet these criteria”—as they pull out their clipboards. “For your own safety, you understand.”

  My friends and my peers in the military have colluded to protect me from myself, volleying an endless stream of concerns to impede my reengagement in the war. “He is too old, he’ll never survive, do you want to go down in history as the man who sent Saint-Ex to his grave? He is a legend, aristocrat, celebrity, source of commissions, the pet of powerful so-and-so, deluded, irrational, at the height of his creative powers, over the hill …” What nonsense they spew in their well-intentioned conspiracy. In preventing the sudden snuffing of my life they only kill me more slowly and painfully from the inside.

  If I cannot act, I am not alive. Thought and action must be one—have not I often said so, in one way or another, as we spoke of our beliefs and our dreams? The most worthy of lives can be described without adjectives; the soul of a man can be revealed through verbs alone. If I cannot fly, if I cannot work to free my people, I do not exist.