Chloe (12 page)

She wondered what Minnie thought of being a model. Did she feel beautiful? “Minnie, are you asleep?”

“No, I can’t sleep. Too much gone on in my head.”

Chloe rolled to her back. “Same here. Does it seem to you like every day in New York City brings us a new surprise, a new way?”

“You got that right.”

“Does it feel funny to you,” Chloe ventured, “to be a model instead of a maid?”

“Yes, it do.”

“Yes, it does,” Chloe corrected gently. Minnie had asked her to help her learn to speak in a more educated way. Evidently, Frank’s smooth, expert use of English had impressed Minnie, too.

“Yes, it does,” Minnie repeated.

“I never knew I could do anything but be a wife. And now I am one, but I’m going to be a model, too. And I never wanted to do something like that.”

“When Madame Blanche say she”—Minnie corrected herself—“said she wanted me to walk, I didn’t know what to think.”

“Me either.”

“Do she—Does she think white women will put up with me being a model?”

Chloe mulled that over. “Well, this is New York City and she is French.”

“I wish I could write home and tell Mamma.” Minnie sounded wistful.

“Why can’t you? Your mother can’t drag you back.”

“Mi—Chloe, you know why. Any letter I send could put your daddy on your trail and make trouble for my people. We don’t know yet if your parents think we ran away together.”

Chloe went up on her elbow. “You’re protecting me, too, just like Kitty.” And Roarke. He’d written her a few notes and his parents had sent her a wedding gift—a silver candy dish engraved with Theran and Chloe’s names. Now she touched Minnie’s shoulder. “Thank you. I don’t know why you’re helping me, but thank you.”

“I told you.” Minnie’s voice was suddenly stronger. “You help me and I’ll help you, remember? Besides, everyone at Ivy Manor be glad—”

“Would be glad,” Chloe murmured.

“Would be glad, is glad you got away. People like you. You have a gentle heart, a fair heart.”

Emotions Chloe couldn’t identify rushed through her. One thing she knew for sure: Minnie was her friend and Chloe would never betray her, come what may. She lay back, holding in tears. “Thank you.”

“You be all right, Chloe.” Minnie patted her arm. “Good night.”

“Good night,” Chloe replied. She closed her eyes wondering what the morrow would bring.

A little over a month later, in early July, Chloe stood in the rear of Madame Blanche’s shop. She was wearing another new design, a pale-blue morning frock. Two seamstresses hovered around her, making adjustments to the fabric. She’d become accustomed to this routine. Madame always wanted to see the designs on her live models at different stages of production.

Chloe worried her lower lip, thinking about their plans for tonight. They’d been invited again to attend an NAACP meeting. Should they go or not? Nearby, Minnie was decked in a red-satin evening gown with a narrow train that pooled on the polished wood floor. She also had a seamstress fluttering around her, making little fussy noises. Minnie looked at Chloe and saw the same worry, the same question, about the meeting in her eyes.

Madame Blanche swept into the room. “Tomorrow is the day. Tomorrow we open. Now
le chapeau
, the hats!” The mousy girl who’d been hired as the milliner hurried behind Madame, her arms heaped with hats. “Come, come,” the Frenchwoman summoned Chloe and Minnie over to two mirrored gilt vanities with chairs. “We try them, yes?”

Chloe and Minnie sat down gingerly because of the straight pins in their dresses. One by one, they tried on hats. Such hats! So close to the head, so sleek. Nothing like Chloe had ever seen or worn. But while Minnie slipped on her hats with ease, Chloe struggled, pushing and tugged hers into place on her head. With each hat Madame frowned more. Finally, she burst forth in rapid, irritated French and from the vanity snatched up a dressmaker’s sheers.

“
Le cheveu!
The hair. It ruins the hats.” She grabbed the knot of hair at Chloe’s nape and aimed the sheers at it.

“No!” Chloe shrieked and leaped up, pulling away. “No, I’ve never cut my hair.”

In tableau, Madame Blanche and Chloe stared into one another’s eyes.
“Mon amie,”
Madame coaxed, lowering the sheers. “The hair is too big. You are
le modele de Madame Blanche.
You must have the look of Madame Blanche. The hair is too big for
le chapeau.
We must cut.”

Minnie touched Chloe’s arm. “Let her. I’ll go first if you want.”

“No, your hair is not so big,” Madame explained. “But Chloe’s hair must go.”

Her hair? Chloe gazed at Madame Blanche’s close-cut hair. What would it feel like to run her fingers through her hair and find it short? Her mother’s voice intruded into her thoughts:
A woman’s hair is her glory. A decent woman never cuts it.
Chloe swallowed. What would Theran say? He’d loved her long, blonde hair, had brushed it until it danced with electricity and then buried his face in it. The sensation of Theran’s touch flickered through her. But she could always grow her hair back when Theran returned. Now she was
le modele blonde de Madame Blanche.
In a fit of determination, she closed her eyes. “Go ahead.”

Madame cooed her pleasure and pushed Chloe back into her chair. The hat was whipped off and with one hissing slice Chloe’s long hair dropped to the floor.

“I can shape it,” one of the seamstresses offered. She took the sheers and began trimming and feathering the remaining hair. Chloe peeked at the vanity mirror and saw only the girl bending in front of her, felt her clipping above her eyebrows, making bangs. Finally, the girl stepped back and Chloe looked at her reflection—a startling one. “It’s not so bad, I guess.” Still, Chloe stared at her head, which suddenly looked smaller, trimmer.

“You look modern,” Minnie breathed in an awestruck tone. “Madame, please, can’t I have my hair cut, too?”

Madame chuckled. “
Non
, your hair is small,
bon
.”

Chloe laughed and pulled on one of the hats, that fit so much better now. “Look at me. I’m modern.”

Feeling tired but satisfied, Chloe and Minnie, back in their own short-sleeved walking dresses, strolled out into the warm July evening. Yet, within a few paces they sobered. Minnie looked at Chloe. “Do we got the nerve?”

“You mean do we
have
the nerve?” Chloe corrected. “Well, do we?” Fifth Avenue bustled with fashionably dressed women and men, hustling with big-city rapid rhythm. Skyscrapers loomed around them. A few feet away an elegant woman wearing an ostrich feather boa, her maid behind her, was being ushered into a silver Rolls Royce by a liveried chauffeur. This sight definitely wasn’t anything like they’d ever seen around Ivy Manor.

Thoughtfully, Chloe touched the back of her head, which still felt oddly naked. She didn’t feel like herself at all. “We’re
les modeles de Madame Blanche,
” she declared. “Modern, twentieth-century women who are working and paying our own way. We have the nerve.”

By now, Chloe and Minnie had attended several NAACP meetings. Tonight’s meeting was at a big church in Harlem. Chloe had become at ease in Harlem, at ease being one of the few white faces among the black. It didn’t feel odd anymore. It was like being a child again with her mother and father always away and her left in the care of Minnie’s grandmother and the other Negro servants. Chloe still shared a room with Minnie. Mrs. Rascombe had worried over them this evening like a mother hen. “This war’s stirred things up. You two will be safer at home with me.”

Mrs. Rascombe had been right. Racial incidents near army training bases and defense plants were rampant in the North and lynchings rife in the South. Tonight Chloe felt her heart beating faster than usual. The church was crowded and buzzed with angry, urgent voices. Harlem was alarmed.

She followed Minnie up the wide aisle. Minnie was scanning the crowd. Then she halted. “There he is, Chloe. I mean, Lorraine.”

Today, Chloe and Minnie had taken “professional” names at Madame Blanche’s request. “Chloe” had sounded all right to the Frenchwoman for one of her models, but not “Minnie.” But Chloe had decided that working under another name would be a good idea, another way to evade her father. So she had taken her middle name, “Lorraine,” and Minnie had chosen “Mimi” for herself. Madame Blanche said that they hadn’t needed new surnames. Single names were the rage in fashion.

“Wait up, Mimi,” Chloe teased, hurrying after Minnie.

Frank Dawson, by now Minnie’s beau, and Kitty had saved space for Chloe and Minnie near the front of the large church sanctuary. Minnie let Frank take her hand and Chloe sat down beside Kitty. The meeting opened with a prayer by the pastor of the church and then the speaker, a professor from Columbia, took the pulpit. Chloe stared up at the man as he began speaking about the war.

“Even though segregated into separate divisions, African-American men have an unexpected opportunity through this war to show their patriotism and their abilities.”

Chloe thought about her husband. She’d written him daily, telling him everything that was taking place in her life. She’d finally mailed them to the military address he’d given her. But for a return address, she’d put general delivery at a nearby post office. And Mrs. Rascombe had agreed to pick up her mail. If the post office were watched, who would think Mrs. Rascombe was doing it for her? But Chloe still hadn’t received a letter in return from him. From newspapers, she knew only that he’d been in France for several weeks and she was certain he must have written to her. But how did the military deliver mail? And would her father be able to trace her to the general delivery address?

Everyone applauded and Chloe joined in, then played with the fringe on her beaded purse. Unfortunately, after all the years of listening to her father’s speeches, she couldn’t seem to make her mind focus on a speaker.

Chloe hadn’t written to her parents. After her father finding out Theran’s stateside address and making her leave that address, she’d decided they knew she had reached New York safely and had married Theran. They didn’t need to know anything else. Besides, if her father hadn’t interfered by finding her in New York, she wouldn’t have had to move and wouldn’t be afraid now that she wouldn’t be able to receive Theran’s letters.

“But,” the speaker was declaiming as he hit the pulpit, “the white segregationist does not want to let the black soldier think he is the equal of the white. Everywhere in the South and North, unrest is stirred by black men appearing in the US Army uniform, a new sign of equality, dignity.”

Chloe had written to Theran’s parents and had received an oddly restrained reply from his father. It had included no invitation to come to Buffalo to meet them or any stated intention of their visiting her. Minnie had agreed that was odd. Why wouldn’t they want to meet their son’s wife?

Chloe became aware of a sudden rustling in the crowd, and the sound of yelling.

“Riots! Race rioting in East St. Louis!” A black man was running forward up the center aisle, waving a newspaper extra sheet. “They’re killing people over jobs!”

The next morning, Chloe and Minnie peered out through a crack at the rear door into Madame’s showroom, which was elegantly decorated in bold art deco in shades of white and black. A chattering bevy of fashionable prospective clients and the press gathered in Madame’s showroom. Every seat had been filled. Three men stood in the rear with pen and notebook in hand. July wasn’t the usual season to be launching a fashion collection. But the war had affected many things. Madame had taken out a full-page ad in the
New York Times
, announcing her collection, and then had sent out a few gilt-edged cards to the press and some well-placed, well-heeled friends of Marshfield Crowe’s.

Watching the crowd, Chloe recalled the NAACP meeting the night before. In East St. Louis, a riot over jobs at a defense plant had killed nine whites and nearly forty Negroes. The NAACP reaction had been swift. The leaders were planning a show of sympathy for those who had been murdered. Did Chloe have the nerve or not to participate? Even Minnie had looked shaken last night, and even more so today. With good reason—this was the day of their debut as models. In this racially charged atmosphere, what would be the response when Minnie, the first black model on Fifth Avenue, stepped out front?

“Ladies,” Madame beckoned them away from the door. “We begin. Remember: you are so beautiful that you don’t care what the people think of you. You stun them with your beauty. This modeling bores you. You are rich, you are young, you are desirable, no?”

Chloe and Minnie assumed the half-reclining posture and the world-weary expression Madame had schooled them to.

“Bon.”
Madame clapped her hands. “I go out and make the introduction.” Wearing a white linen dress, diamonds, and her scarlet lip rouge, she swept out the door.

Tingling with a mix of anxiety and excitement, Chloe looked at Minnie and Minnie looked back. “I scared, Miss Chloe.” The words came out in a dry gasp, and she shook with one sharp tremor. Minnie hadn’t called her Miss Chloe for weeks now. She must be very nervous. The race riot in East St. Louis couldn’t have helped Minnie’s confidence. But bringing up all that wouldn’t help either.

“You are rich, you are beautiful, you are bored,” Chloe parroted, gripping both of Minnie’s wrists in her hands, feeling Minnie’s speeding pulse under her fingers. “You can’t show any weakness.” Chloe squeezed tighter, trying to dredge up words that would make Minnie bold today. “You have to act like being a model is just everyday to you, like you were born to be here and do this. And you were, Minnie. When you walk out there, you aren’t Minnie, you’re Mimi,
modele de Madame Blanche
. You’ve got to feel it. You will be acting, just like you wanted to. This is your first part, your first play.”

Minnie nodded and inhaled, but shakily. Polite applause drifted back from the showroom. One of the seamstresses pushed wide the door.

Taking a deep breath, Chloe dropped her hands to her side and turned. She walked forward down the short aisle between the rows of chairs.
I am rich, I am beautiful, I am bored,
she recited to herself. The faces before her ran together but she looked over them. Her nerves were jumping with something like St. Vita’s dance. Then she recalled the day she’d first seen Theran, the speech she’d made. It bolstered her. She imagined Theran standing at the rear, smiling at her. And he would. He’d love seeing her here, looking so good. His admiration swept through her like a caress, a whisper of a kiss.