Lisette's List (39 page)

“Yes. Wagner’s Ring Cycle.” She lowered her voice. “To see all the galleries in the theater packed with German uniforms was almost more than I could bear. Was I contributing to saving French culture by keeping the Opéra going, or was I betraying France by producing only operas with Nazi approval? Later we produced Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde
. Backstage, we were secretly thrilled by the
French
soprano singing Isolde.

“That was only monumental self-delusion. Ray Ventura’s song should have alerted us. Remember, Max? We thought it funny.”

He recited the words: “ ‘All is well, Madame la Marquise. The horses died, the stables and château were burned, your husband committed suicide, but don’t worry. All is well.’ ”

“They performed it in cabarets,” Héloïse said. “A sort of comic
Résistance
. In truth, my friends and I were heartsick at the destruction in Montmartre, even up to the very walls of Sacré-Coeur. Despite that, we had to believe we could resist the occupiers.”

“How?”

“In subversive ways.” She reflected a moment. “We wore yellow-and-black handkerchiefs in our breast pockets to mock the order for Jews to wear yellow stars. It was the rage among seamstresses.”

I began to understand that Paris had been no peaceful haven.

“Countless times,” I said, “I wished I had been here rather than in the south. If you don’t mind, tell me what it was really like.”

“Nightmarish. Puffed-up Prussian military bands marching
down the Champs-Élysées, pounding defeat into our hearts in 4/4 time. Nightmarish, too, the exodus, whole neighborhoods fleeing south, clogging the roads.”

“Did you consider going?”

“Not for an instant. Maxime might find his way back. Also, for his sake, I considered it my duty to keep track of the art business. Oh, Lisette, the stream of trucks arriving at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume to deliver paintings from across France to be sorted, sold, or destroyed, other trucks leaving with paintings to be loaded into freight cars headed for Germany. My sister and I stood helpless and horrified, watching paintings by Klee, Ernst, Picasso, Léger, so many, go up in flames in the garden of the Jeu de Paume. Without its art, Paris, all of France, would never be the same.”

“I would have cried on the street.”

“We did not allow ourselves that indulgence. We kept our heartache private and held our heads high in flamboyant hats made from absent husbands’ or sons’ fedoras, in order to give the impression that we were
gaie
. Denied the freedom of words in public, we spoke our resistance with feathers and bows and silk flowers, but behind our doors, we struggled to keep warm and fed. In spite of our awkward wooden-soled gait, we walked proudly past Nazi soldiers in a cloud of French perfume.”

How subtle. How indomitable. “You made the streets of Paris into theater.”

“Oh,
chérie
, the couturiers performed such miracles of grace and invention despite shortages and rationing, despite restrictions, despite the disappearance of foreign clientele. We gladly complied with government regulations that hemlines be raised to forty-five centimeters above the ground because we held to the belief that every saved meter of fabric might contribute to a quicker victory.

“Meanwhile, interminable ranks of German soldiers goose-stepped down the boulevard, and SS men rounded up vast numbers of Jews, no one knows how many. Our own French police, under German orders, grabbed young men coming out of
métro
stations
for forced work across the border. Our grand hotels, the Crillon, the Majestic, the Lutetia, were taken over by the Nazis. But on Liberation Day, we were actually willing to see the Majestic burn to the ground if it took that to drive out the Nazis hiding there.

“Then came the reactionary executions of collaborators and black marketeers and
miliciens
who had tortured
résistants
. Nine thousand quick executions.”

“That’s hard to believe, or to stomach.”

“We were inebriated with liberty in those days, and that sudden freedom was the seedbed for extremism. The shaving of women’s heads for their
collaboration horizontale
, sleeping with the enemy, exposed their shame, but people had private shames as well.” She waved her hand as if at gnats. “Enough of this. Let me tell you what we’re going to do tomorrow.”

“Unfortunately, I have to work tomorrow,” Maxime said. “Monsieur Laforgue wants me to meet with someone who may have a lead about finding a painting.”

“So I’m going to take you to Galeries Lafayette. Imagine! Christian Dior is designing ready-to-wear, and selling it there. The endless restrictions on numbers of buttons, pockets, skirt lengths, and the bans on double-breasted jackets, embroidery, and lace are—poof! Gone! By this time tomorrow, you will be dressed anew. It will be my pleasure to give you an ensemble.”

“Oh, my goodness! You hardly know me.”

“Oh, yes I do. Maxime tells me everything.”

“That’s very kind of you. Beyond kindness.”

“The day after tomorrow,” Maxime said with anticipatory buoyancy, “you and I will promenade the Seine, and I will introduce you to Monsieur Laforgue, and we will go to the Jeu de Paume, to see if—”

“If we can find Cézanne’s
Card Players
!”

“Precisely.”

M
AXIME LINGERED AT THE
doorway to my bedroom that evening. “I haven’t been this happy for years,” he said. He kissed me lightly, barely touching my lips, and drew my head against his shoulder. We stood in that embrace until I was sure it wasn’t a dream, and then I entered the room that had been his since the innocence of his boyhood.

I
N THE MORNING
H
ÉLOÏSE
filled the three blocks to Galeries Lafayette with her exuberance, explaining that she had quit the Opéra because she couldn’t bear to work for the entertainment of German officers. Instead, she had taken a job as a
secondaire
at La Maison Paquin. They had just received an order for twenty gowns from a single customer, so they were hiring.

“Our ambassadors’ wives needed to declare with fashion that France might have lost the war but Paris couture still held the admiration of Europe. The German government was preparing to move the whole French fashion industry to Berlin and Vienna. We were outraged. Lucien Lelong famously defied them and instantly became the hero of every seamstress in Paris. I posted his response, which was printed in
Vogue
, above my sewing machine and read it until I had it memorized: ‘Couture is in Paris or it is nowhere. A Paris gown is not really made of cloth; it is made with the streets, the colonnades, the fountains. It is gleaned from life and from books and from museums and from serendipity. It is no more than a gown, and yet it is as if the whole country has woven this gown.’ ”

“And so the Germans relented?”

“Indeed they did. Whoever runs the world, we said, Paris intends on making his wife’s clothes.”

“Who ordered those twenty gowns?”

She pursed her lips. “Oh, Lisette. We weren’t told until after the gowns were delivered. It was that lizard, Hermann Göring. I felt savagely tricked. Germans had infiltrated our businesses and institutions. Unemployed artisans could be forced to work in German
industry. There were many shades of collaboration, some of them unwilling.” She turned to me, and the smooth skin of her face tightened into fine lines. “I hope you don’t judge me for this.”

“How can I judge when I don’t know what I would have done in your situation?”

“Right after liberation, I went back to work at the Opéra.”

She opened the brass-and-glass door of Galeries Lafayette, and a flowery fragrance surrounded us. Balcony upon balcony rose ten stories under a circle of wide gilded arches around a glass cupola.

“There were days in Roussillon when I thought I would never see this again.”

She squeezed my elbow, steering me to the Art Nouveau stairway. “Let’s go directly to Dior ready-to-wear.”

Dior’s new softness was positively voluptuous. I loved the bows, fabric knots, and rosettes. Héloïse pulled a day dress off the rack and held out its lavish ballerina skirt.

“Eight meters, I would guess. I can see you proudly swinging that skirt down the Champs-Élysées. Try it on.”

“Oh, no. It’s much too—”

“Flamboyant?”

“I could never wear that in Roussillon.”

“You’re not going to live in that village forever, my dear. Pick out three more, any color but military gray, and try them all on.”

I chose two fitted suits and another dress and modeled each one for her. After much gay discussion, we both agreed on a blue crêpe suit with a flowing skirt cut on the bias, black velvet piping on the collar, and a black velvet rosette at the shoulder.

“It’s the blue of the Mediterranean, I’m sure,” I said.

“And Maxime’s eyes,” she added.

H
ÉLOÏSE CARRIED THE SUIT
box, and I carried a Galeries Lafayette shopping bag containing my old wooden-soled shoes, a pair of stockings, and a scarf for Louise as we walked down avenue de
l’Opéra, both of us in leather shoes, my left one bought by me, the right one by her. We angled onto rue des Pyramides, continued on through the Tuileries, and had a lunch of a salami-and-anchovy baguette on a bench overlooking the Seine.

“Paris has emerged from the abyss,” Héloïse said. “The beauty, the grace, and the wit of centuries bred along the banks of this river have not disappeared. The city is engaged in an act of revitalization, and we are its actors and actresses. You too.”

“Me? How?”

“The swirl of your new blue skirt is an act of freedom.”

“It’s more than I expected. Everything is more than I expected.”

“I want to tell you something, but I don’t want to say it in front of my son. In 1937, we went to the Exposition Universelle and saw some paintings by Picasso.”

“I know. He wrote to us about that.”

“Maybe he wrote about
Guernica
. We saw it again in the
Art and Résistance
exhibit here after he returned. That pile of bodies in grotesque postures in black and white, like a cinema newsreel, depicted the rawest human emotion. Against my will, I was mesmerized by the horror. I imagined my son in it. I am certain every mother in the exhibit hall did the same.

“And
The Weeping Woman
. A tortured face, the woman stuffing a sharp-edged handkerchief like jagged ice into her mouth. Her eyes floated out of their sockets because of the flood of her tears. Do not let that be you, Lisette. We can destroy ourselves by grief and disillusion as surely as by bombs, only our life erodes more slowly.”

After a few moments, she placed her hand gently over mine on my lap. “What Maxime wants, I want for him, and I would move heaven and earth for him if I could. Honesty compels me to tell you one thing, though, and I don’t want it to upset you. The night before you came, Maxime had a nightmare again. He hasn’t had one for a year.”

My chest collapsed, and all my breath leaked out. “I am the cause of it.”

“No. War was the cause of it. The prison yard was the cause of it. This is precisely what I am saying. Don’t take it upon yourself. Some men would take to the bottle. Others might turn cold and uncommunicative. Still others might live bitter, revengeful lives. We can be grateful that Max has been spared those fates. He’s melancholy at times, when he misses the men he lived with in prison. It’s a loss that I cannot assuage. I have to tell you, though, that sometimes fury erupts in him when he thinks I pay too much attention to inconsequential domestic things.”

“I feel inadequate to help him.”

“Just be prepared, and understand that if he rages, it isn’t meant to hurt your feelings. Go gently. That’s all I mean. His heart is open but fragile.”

I nodded, understanding. She seemed an angel, guiding me with wings of steel.

My vow number seven slid unwanted into my mind:
Find André’s grave and the spot where he died
. I would cross it out when I got home and never mention it to Maxime.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

PARIS,
ENCORE ET TOUJOURS

1947

T
HE NEXT MORNING, SLOWLY, WITH EXTRAVAGANT CARE
, I put on the luscious blue suit. I heard a knock on my door and opened it to find Héloïse, so I turned in a pirouette to swirl the skirt.

“Splendid, Lisette. A perfect fit. That means you’ll have a perfect day, the natural consequence of Paris fashion.”

In the parlor, Maxime was waiting for me.

“Oh là là!”

“Is she not a Dior woman, the very picture of the New Look?”

“
Bien sûr. Sans doute
. A portrait of loveliness, with the shapeliness of a Dior model.”

The charming Maxime who had teased me with his dalliance so long ago, alive again.

“The blue is exquisite on you.”

“That’s because it’s the color of your eyes,” I said, then glanced quickly at Héloïse to see if I had revealed too much. She nodded in agreement.