The Paris Seamstress Page 2

  The Chanel show was always Estella’s favorite. There, it was a true challenge to capture fifteen sketches. Although the lines were simpler, the elegance was so manifest that she had to work harder than ever to catch it; it was more than just fabric and buttons and zippers. Each dress had a soul. And, at Chanel, everything was quiet and serene. She lacked the cover of the circus atmosphere that prevailed at a house like Patou, beneath which one could easily hide their dirty work. No, at Chanel, the vendeuse had sharper eyes than a sniper. Each guest received a slip of paper to make notes on rather than a large program perfect for hiding sketches and Estella had to draw while appearing not to move her pencil at all.

  She’d always convinced herself it was a game and now that the American buyers weren’t coming over to see the shows because of the war, her income from the last season had been much smaller so she’d told herself she had to take the opportunities when they were offered. Then she could pay off a little more of the debt that she and her mother owed Monsieur Aumont for the English lessons her mother had insisted Estella take every day after school since she was six. Lessons which her mother hadn’t been able to afford and for which the Monsieur had lent them the money—French women were not allowed to have their own bank accounts, and therefore couldn’t borrow money from a bank. They couldn’t vote either; they were an underclass, meant to sit unobtrusively at home and bake and breed.

  Thus the war had come as a terrible shock for some, unused to doing anything besides dress as well as they could afford. Luckily, Jeanne Bissette, through necessity, had brought Estella up to be more resourceful than most. Which meant Estella knew that, while Monsieur Aumont would write off the debt in an instant, it was a matter of immense pride for Estella’s mother that they paid off every last cent. It would be impossible to do so without Estella’s extra income.

  It was the English lessons that had allowed Estella to do so well as a sketcher; none of the American buyers spoke French so they all preferred to deal with her. If she didn’t respond to Madame Flynn’s summonses, the debt would trouble her mother, a debt Estella had only added to during the year she’d spent at the Paris School, the French campus on the Place des Vosges of the New York School of Fine and Applied Art. There, until war had shut it down, Estella had formed a dream of one day seeing her own name on a fashion atelier, of having customers wear dresses designed by her rather than stolen by her. But it was at moments like this, with six Schiaparelli dresses stuffed beneath her cloak, that she knew it would never happen, that an American buyer like Madame Flynn taking a commission from a copy house to lend them a selection of dresses to duplicate was in poor taste and a designer like Elsa Schiaparelli would stitch Estella’s eyelids shut if she knew.

  Estella vowed this would be the last time.

  But, right now, Madame Chaput was waiting for Estella to begin. The fitters took the dresses Estella produced from beneath her cloak and made patterns while Estella sketched and Madame Chaput noted what kind of buttons she would need and stole snippets of fabric from the seams where nobody would notice. Then Madame gave Estella the money for a taxi and Estella returned the dresses to Madame Flynn along with the commission Madame Chaput paid for having been given access to the dresses to copy. Estella knew the dresses would be on a boat to New York tomorrow—if boats were still sailing given the turmoil of the last few days—and that Madame Chaput would have models made up within two days, ready to sell to her line of loyal Parisians who wanted all of the haute but none of the cost of couture in their wardrobe.

  Then Estella walked back to the Marais again, knowing she’d have to be quick if she was to sew her gold dress into being and still make it to the jazz club before midnight. Back at the apartment building, she filled a bucket with water from the tap in the courtyard. Under the gleaming eye of the concierge, who loathed Estella and her mother for their refusal to make obeisance to him and buy him port at Christmas, and who enjoyed watching the deprivation of those who lived in one of the many Parisian apartment buildings without running water, she hauled the bucket up to the top floor—the cheapest floor. She put some water into a kettle, set it on the stove and made a cup of coffee. Then she sat down at her sewing machine, took out her scissors and cut the fabric to the sketch she’d drawn at the atelier, wishing she had the luxury of a cutter who’d make the line of the dress as perfect as she wished it to be, knowing she’d never be a Vionnet who worked from scissors rather than sketches.

  It took her an hour and a half, but when it was done she grinned; it looked exactly as she’d intended. She slipped the dress on and frowned at her scuffed shoes, but her skills didn’t stretch to cobbling and she hadn’t the money to buy a new pair of pumps. She threw on her cloak in case the evening grew cold later, eschewed the gas mask she was supposed to carry but made the one concession her mother asked of her—to carry a white handkerchief so that she could perhaps be seen by cars in the blacked-out city.

  Once in Montmartre, she bypassed Bricktop’s—she couldn’t afford that—and entered a club that was decidedly less elegant but definitely more fun, where the Montmartre patois syncopated between saxophone riffs and where one man, a munitions worker no doubt, tried to squeeze past her a little too tightly. She fought him off with a hard stare and a few well-chosen words and slipped into a seat at a table beside Renée, one of Monsieur Aumont’s daughters.

  “Bonsoir,” Renée said, kissing her cheeks. “Do you have any Gauloises left?”

  Estella produced her last two and they both lit up.

  “What are you wearing?” Renée asked with a bemused laugh.

  “I made it.”

  “I guessed as much. It’s not something you’d find on the racks at BHV.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Isn’t it a touch…outlandish?”

  Estella shook her head. Renée was wearing one of the Heidi-style dresses that had been hanging forlornly on the racks at Au Printemps as if they’d forgotten the way back to the mountains and she looked like every other woman in the club: demure, watered down, like the wine they were drinking.

  “Why would we expect anything less from Estella?” Another voice, one with a smile inside it, carried over to their table. Huette, Renée’s sister, leaned down to kiss Estella’s cheeks. “You look magnifique,” Huette said.

  “Dance with me.” A man rudely interrupted them. He smelled like the Pigalle at midnight—liquored, fragranced with perfume from the necks of the dozen other girls he’d already taken a turn with on the dance floor. A man reveling in the advantage of his scarceness, who would have, with his lack of manners, no chance at all were most men not away fighting.

  “No thank you,” Estella said.

  “I will,” Renée said.

  “I wanted her.” The man pointed at Estella.

  “But none of us want you,” she said.

  “I do,” Renée said, almost desperately, and Estella knew it was a sign of the times; a girl could spend all night without a dance partner and here was one before them, albeit coarse, but what did that matter?

  “Don’t,” Huette said to Renée.

  As Estella watched Huette put a hand on her sister’s arm, a spontaneous act—one that told of how much she loved Renée no matter how irritating she could be—Estella felt a stab of yearning. It was followed immediately by an awareness of how silly she was; wishing for something she’d never have. She should be grateful that she even had a mother, rather than selfishly covet someone’s sister.

  The man pulled Renée to her feet, leading her to the dance floor, making sure to hold her as close as he could and Estella turned away, revolted, when she saw him press his crotch into Renée.

  “Come and sing. We’ll change the tempo to something fast so she can get away from him,” Estella said.

  Huette followed her over to the four old-timers who comprised the band, with whom Estella and Huette had spent many evenings playing piano and singing, putting their school music lessons to work. Estella’s mother had learned to sing at a convent s
chool she’d attended when she was younger and she’d always sung at home, adorning their apartment with music rather than useless gewgaws, and she’d passed on her love of song to Estella from a very early age. But while her mother’s preference was for operatic hymns, Estella’s was for deep and throaty jazz.

  The musicians didn’t miss a beat as they kissed Estella’s cheeks and Luc, the pianist, complimented her dress in a patois so thick and dirty no ordinary Frenchwoman could have understood it. He finished the song then stood up to get a drink at the bar. Estella sat down at the piano and Huette joined Philippe at the microphone. Estella picked out the notes to “J’ai Deux Amours” and the crowd applauded appreciatively. As Estella played, she hoped everyone in the room had a love for Paris strong enough that it would save the city from whatever might soon befall it as the Germans drew ever closer. But Huette’s voice wasn’t high enough for the song so she bumped Estella off the piano and made Estella sing it, which she did.

  Every patron in the club joined her for the final chorus, letting Estella believe, for just a few seconds, that everything would be fine: that Paris was too grand, too legendary, too brilliant to ever be troubled by a short and grotesque man like Adolf Hitler.

  She stayed at the club for only a short time after that, laughing with Philippe and Huette and Luc until she became aware that they hadn’t managed to save Renée, that she was leaving with the brute of a man who’d asked her to dance and Estella suddenly felt tired, far older than twenty-two, and more melancholy than ever.

  “Time for me to go,” Estella said, rising and kissing everyone twice on the cheeks.

  Once out in the Paris night, she didn’t walk straight back to the apartment. She wound her way through the dirt and dilapidation of the Marais, a dereliction all the more obvious at each of the hôtels particulier, once grand homes of the nobles that, no matter what had been done to them—their transformation into jam factories and the desecration of their stately courtyards beneath piles of cartwheels, pallets and lean-tos—still held their heads high. As Estella brushed her hand over the stone walls, the same way she’d caressed the roll of gold silk in the atelier, she wondered if the elegance imprinted in those walls—the same as the way a couture dress never lost the line that set it apart from pret-a-porter—would withstand Stuka bombings and an army of men in cold gray uniforms.

  The Carreau du Temple was quiet as she passed, the fabric and secondhand clothes sellers all abed, ready to be up at dawn selling the discarded garments they’d found in the rubbish bins of those who lived over by the Champs Élysées. Indeed the whole area was quiet, Estella often the only one on the street as she strolled through her city, taking in things she’d grown used to but which were too beautiful to take for granted now that they might be lost: the fading brilliance of the red, gold, and blue painting over the porte de l’hôtel de Clisson, the building’s curved medieval turrets framing the gateway like a pair of plump sentries; the symmetrical pavilions and grand arched passage of the Carnavalet.

  Without meaning to, she found herself outside a house on the Rue de Sévigné, an abandoned hôtel particulier that her mother had often taken her to when she was younger, where Estella had played among the disused rooms, a place that Estella suspected was the location of her mother’s meetings with Monsieur Aumont. But with the blackout curtains in place, the streets glazed a preternatural blue by the covered streetlights, it was impossible to see if anyone was inside. Not French Baroque like its neighbors, and eschewing symmetry and form, the house lurked in true Gothic style, the hunchback of the street. Its coroneted turrets should have put her in mind of fairytale palaces but instead they made her think of women held prisoner at the top of the tower, all escape routes cut off.

  Impulse made her push open the wooden door that led into the courtyard, the statuary of the Four Seasons gazing imperiously down on her from the walls of the house, including a headless Summer bereft of his power. The gravel paths had not been swept and raked for many years but still formed a star shape, each spoke divided by hedges that had long since outgrown formality and now shot and twisted where they wished. Mint, probably once confined to an herb garden, waved its stems wildly, perfuming the air with the hot scent of danger. And then she heard it. The scrape of a foot over stone. Fear ran its teeth along her back like a zipper.

  She turned. There, collapsed on a rickety bench, was Monsieur Aumont. The smell of blood and panic rose off his clothes and his skin.

  “Mon Dieu!” she gasped.

  He lifted his head and Estella saw a dark stain on the front of his shirt. “Take these,” he whispered, passing Estella a small bundle, “to the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Please. For Paris. Find l’engoulevent—the nightjar. You can trust him.”

  “Where is Maman?” Estella demanded.

  “At home. Safe. Go!”

  He slumped over again and Estella moved in closer to see how she could help him. She was able to lean him back against the bench, to see his pleading eyes. “Go,” he repeated roughly. “For Paris.”

  Whatever she held meant nothing but danger. Yet it was important enough for him to have been injured seriously and also precarious enough for him to have added that one word—safe—when she’d asked about her mother. Had it only been an hour ago that Estella had been singing of her love for Paris? And now she was being asked to do something for her city.

  Monsieur Aumont closed his eyes. Estella unrolled the bundle. Maps of a building drawn on silk. She could slide them into the pockets she’d sewn discreetly into the lining of her cape, pockets perfect for moving copied dresses around the city. But she was so conspicuous: a cape of blue-black velvet trimmed with silver beads over a shining gold dress.

  “Go!” Monsieur Aumont whispered for a third time, through gritted teeth.

  Estella nodded at last. Because now she felt the absolute truth of the words she’d sung at the club: her city was being violated and, perhaps, if she did as Monsieur Aumont was begging her to, she could prevent one more trespass on Paris’s honor.

  Chapter Two

  Estella hurried out of the courtyard and into the street, the maps whispering like rumors in her pockets, unable to stop thinking of all the stories she’d heard: Germans dropping poisoned sweets by air into the streets to make the children in the city ill; Germans dressed up as nuns to spy on the citizens of Paris; German parachutists landing in the city at night. Every person she passed she feared might be part of the Fifth Column, fascist sympathizers helping the Germans, who would therefore do anything to stop her from reaching the theater with her delivery. Still, she moved down Rue Beautreillis, past the ancient clock that hung rusted and unceasing, reminding Parisians that while their city might be immortal, they were not, and neither was she.

  Then, hoping the circuitous route she’d taken might have allowed the city to draw its cape over her and hide her within its folds, she turned right and walked on to the Palais-Royal. Finally she reached the theater and thanked God for her dress which might be just fine enough to make it seem as if she belonged in a place like this.

  She ascended the curving, plushly red staircase and, at the top, found herself in an intimate and opulent reception room—beautiful in any other circumstance—well lit by a chandelier so large and so dazzling that she drew her hand up to her eyes. Swagged red velvet curtains hung over openings that she assumed were entrances into the theater itself. The walls were papered in deep burgundy trimmed with gold; everything was accented in gold—the chandelier, the balcony railing above, the cornices, the trimming around the ceiling fresco, the bas-relief that arched elegantly over the door at the far end of the room. Women wearing dresses Estella recognized as Chanel, Lelong, Callot Souers lounged in a scattering of low red velvet chaises and men laughed and sipped cognac and calvados. She knew that, for many, life cavorted on and the parties and revelry continued but after what she’d just witnessed, entering the theater was like stepping onto the moon, or someplace else equally removed from the reality of a German army on the
march into Paris.

  The notes of a foxtrot rang out from a piano and a few couples began to dance, although there was hardly the space. Estella let the hood of her cape fall from her head, shook her long black hair loose and stepped into the room.

  How would she know who or what the nightjar was? Her gaze swept over the women and then the men. She saw the eyes of one man, who stood in the center of the room surrounded by a circle of people, flicker curiously toward her in a manner different from the lascivious stares a handful of others were bestowing upon her.

  It wouldn’t do to quail, to act as if she didn’t belong. She crossed the room boldly, cape flying behind her, dress concealing her shaking legs. She didn’t need to push her way through the circle because it opened to allow her in, the confident attitude of her shoulders and head, an attitude she’d copied from the house models she’d seen at the fashion shows, gaining her admittance.

  Once at the man’s side, she kissed both his cheeks, smiled and said a loud, “Hello darling,” her voice again copied from the house models who tried to seduce the husbands of rich clients, often with success.

  “I’m glad you came,” he murmured, sliding an arm around her waist, playing along so she knew she was right.

  “I have an interest in ornithology,” she whispered. “Especially les engoulevents.”