Mistral's Daughter (27 page)

Maggy drew herself up to her
full height and looked at herself
sternly in the mirror.
 
You have nowhere to go but straight ahead,
she told herself, and firmly put her mind to planning the perfect costume in
which to sell her jewelry.
 
First the
black, plainly cut, Vionnet dress.
 
Then
her black Schiaparelli coat, a complete transformation from last season, with
its wide, padded epaulet shoulders
and double-breasted, wooden-soldier
silhouette.
 
It looked as martial as she
wanted to feel, severe, dashing and above all, absolutely new.
 
With it she'd wear a strict black Caroline
Reboux felt hat, its angular line strikingly defined.
 
Did she look widowed?
 
Surely that was the effect all that black
gave
—
but not a pathetic widow who could be led into a mistake of
judgment.

The next day, clad in her
arrogant armor, Maggy walked calmly
into Tiffany's in search of the
salesman whose name Louis Fairchild had given her.
 
He brightened as she introduced herself.

"I find myself with some
jewels that no longer suit me," Maggy
said casually.
 
"Mr. Louis Fairchild told me that you
might be able to help me dispose of them."

The salesman's face
fell.
 
"You mean buy them back from
you?"

"They weren't bought
here
—
they were made in Paris."

"But, Madame, we never
buy back even our own jewelry, it's a policy of the company."

"Do other American
jewelers have the same policy?" Maggy asked casually, allowing herself to
sound mildly surprised.

"So far as I know.
 
Particularly these days, Madame.
 
There are so many ladies who are discovering
that they have
more jewelry than
they need."

"Indeed. Ah well
—
how
—
inconvenient."
 
She
hesitated, sighed and then gave him a lightning, sideways look, overtly
conspiratorial and mischievous.

He coughed discreetly.
 
"Look, you'd have more luck in a smaller
store.
 
Those little jewelers are more
flexible.
 
They're in business for
themselves so they're always on the lookout for a good buy."

"Do you recommend any of
them?" Maggy asked
with a wicked appealing note in her voice that
made him yearn to kill dragons for her.

"Recommend?
 
No, I wish I could go that far.
 
But there’s a fellow
around the
corner, on Madison, down a couple of blocks, who's got a nice little place
—
Harry C. Klein.
 
But it is only a
suggestion, not a recommendation, you understand."

"Of course, and I'm
grateful to you.
 
You've been most kind.
"Say, listen, it was a pleasure. You're the first person I've talked to
all day.
 
But this Wall Street panic
can't last.
 
So when you're in the market
again come back and see me.
 
Tiffany's
will still be here."
 
He looked
after Maggy with wistful lust.
 
He'd give
almost anything to see her wearing that new ruby and diamond necklace with
matching earrings.
 
And nothing else, no,
not even a pair of high-heeled shoes.

Harry C. Klein had had a bad
morning.
 
An old customer had come in to
have a sapphire ring he'd sold her a number of years ago put into a new
setting.
 
She had insisted on
"sitting with" her stone while the work went on so that it couldn't
be switched for one of less
value. Paranoid!
 
Everybody was going bananas.
 
He'd almost told
her to go away and
find a jeweler she could trust but, business being what it was, he'd
agreed.
 
The men in the workroom would be
furious.
 
And now this young woman had
just tipped out a bunch of pieces on his counter.
 
Did she think he was Santa Claus?
 
No one in his right mind was interested in
adding to his inventory.
 
He looked at
the clips and earrings and bracelets with a quickly appraising eye..,

"I can see you're
definitely no gold digger," he sighed to Maggy.
 
Too bad.
 
Melée
—
that's what you've got."

"Melée
—
but in
French that means a fight, a struggle in a crowd," she said puzzled.

"For jewelers it just
means a lot of little stones," Morosely he flipped over a pair of large
clips thickly paved in tiny diamonds.
 
"See, no big stones."

"But big stones are
dull!" Maggy exclaimed.
 
"I
only wanted to wear amusing pieces, the witty ones
—
big stones are for
old princesses at the Opera or for the Dolly Sisters
—
they are too
serious for me."

"Big stones are for
resale
,"
he said, wagging a lecturing finger in her face.

"I never thought of
jewelry as an investment," Maggy said in a low voice.
 
She pushed out of her mind the gay lunches in
the Ritz garden followed by the lighthearted search for a glittering folly in a
jeweler’s window.
 
So even there she had
be a
poire
—
Perry would have given her anything she fancied;
acres of those thick diamond bracelets she had scorned as " service
stripes."

"Lady, lady, don’t you
know that jewelry is only an investment if you plan to hold onto it for fifty
years?
 
And even then it’s a
crapshoot.
 
Sure you can always sew it
into the lining of your skirt and flee the country.
 
But where would you go?
 
I’m talking
resale
, lady, not
investment.
 
I’m talking about getting
something close to what you paid for it.
 
Resale means big stones and even then only if they’re good quality, good
clarity.
 
Better a two-carat ruby with
the right strawberry gleam than a five-carat ruby that’s a bit off.

"But look at these
designs, this workmanship!" Maggy exclaimed angrily.
 
Could all her treasures be worthless?
 
This man must be trying to rob her.

"Means nothing.
 
Only the weight of the stones and the value
of the metal settings count when you go to sell
melée
.
 
Look, I have a safe full of loose stones
upstairs, little ones like these, maybe not as fine, but fine enough.
 
I bought them all at wholesale.
 
I couldn’t offer you anything except
considerably less than wholesale, because with your fancy, funny piece there’s
a lot of labor involved just to break them up to get the stones out.
 
Anyway, I can't buy them because my business
is strictly a question of supply and demand and ever
since the Crash,
demand has disappeared."
 
He looked
at her pearls and nodded in regret.
 
Those cost a fortune, didn’t they?
 
Burmese, I’ll bet?
 
And then the
Japanese learned how to cultivate them and now..."
 
He sighed mournfully at the sight of the
gleaming, once
coveted objects that even Maggy had known were
impossible to sell.

"So," Maggy sighed,
echoing his mood, touching her lovely, devalued
fantasies, "
Bubkes
... nothing."

"
Bubkes
?" he
said, startled. "You're a Jewish girl?"

"But of course.
 
Does that turn my
melée
into one big
valuable ruby?"

"No such luck.
 
But what's a beautiful Jewish girl like you
doing without her basic diamond solitaire?" Harry C. Klein demanded
severely.
 
"How come you didn't get,
at least, your major sapphire, your important ruby?
 
Smart you weren't."

"Smart I wasn't,"
Maggy agreed emphatically, grinning in spite of herself at his outrage.
 
She unfastened the row of big brass curtain-ring
clips that Schiaparelli had used in place of coat buttons and slipped out of
her narrow sleeves.
 
Mr. Klein's shop was
overheated and it had occurred to her that in her black dress she looked even
more definitely widowed than with her coat on.
 
Perhaps this nice
man had a soft spot for Jewish widows?
 
It was worth trying to sell
her
melée
,
even for next to nothing.

"Wait a minute
—
what's this?"
 
He grasped her arm
and took a look
at the bracelet she had decided to keep.

"More melee, I suppose,
plus some emeralds."

"Those emeralds look
interesting.
 
Take it off, I'll take a
better look
—
with your luck there's something wrong with
them."
 
He examined the bracelets
with his jeweler's loupe, scrutinizing each emerald in turn.
 
Finally, with a grunt of satisfaction he gave
it back to Maggy.
 
"Good,
very good.
 
For these emeralds I don't
mind making an exception.
 
So what if I
don't sell them for a long time?"

"You mean you want to
buy the bracelet?"

"Definitely, and I'll
give you the fairest possible price.
 
Have it appraised first if that'll make you happier, be my guest."

"But Mr. Klein,"
Maggy said sharply, "I don't want to sell just the bracelet, I want to
sell everything.
 
The person who buys the
bracelet has to take the other pieces too."

Totally
dumb she wasn't,
Harry C. Klein thought with a mixture of pleasure and gloom.
 
The chances of a small jeweler like himself
ever being able to buy four perfectly matched emeralds of two carats each was
remote.
 
An important jeweler might have
to wait a long while before laying ,his hands on such a set.
 
You could make two pairs of magnificent
earrings from them or even a necklace
—
no,
two
necklaces with
two emeralds in each, surrounded by diamonds. If stones like that ever lost
their value, nothing they've dug up the days of King Solomon's Mines would be
worth anything.
 
Even if he had to sit on
the emeralds for years, he couldn't pass them
up.

 
Maggy put the bracelet back on and reached for
her coat.
 
"Where are you
going?"

"To find somebody who'll
buy the lot."

"All right, all
right.
 
Don't start to shop around, it'll
only confuse you.
 
We'll make a deal...
don't be in such a hurry."

She looked at him
suspiciously and then relaxed.
 
He hadn't
had to tell her that the emeralds were good ... but first she'd get that
appraisal.

By the time Maggy concluded
the sale of her jewelry to Harry C.
Klein they had become good
friends.
 
He knew her sad history: the
French husband, handsome David Lunel, who had invested so unwisely in the
United States and, while investigating the extent of his losses in New York,
had died in an automobile crash, leaving
her stranded with their baby
daughter.
 
He knew of Rabbi Taradash and
of her grandmother and even of her grandmother's secret recipe for
pot-au
feu,
but he knew nothing of the fevers of Montparnasse nights or of a
painter named Mistral or of a comic carefree girl who had let her green silk
kimono slip off her naked body unconcernedly in front of the eyes of anyone who
would pay to paint her.
 
When the time
came for the delivery of the twelve thousand dollars that Maggy's jewels
finally fetched, of which the lion's share was paid for the emeralds, Harry C.
Klein took a proprietary interest her future.

"I suppose you're going
to take the little girl and go back home?
 
Maybe start a little business?
 
You can do a lot with that much cash these days."

"I haven't really
decided."

Maggy walked up Madison
Avenue slowly, deep in thought, her check safely tucked inside her
brassiere.
 
She had a nest egg, enough to
provide for herself and Teddy for four or five years in moderate comfort if she
found a small flat in an unfashionable part of Paris.
 
But when her money ran out, what would she
do? What sort of small business could she establish, untrained as she was?
 
And what
if the business failed and
she lost all her money?
 
Could she get a
job as a
vendeuse
perhaps, in one of those shops in which she used to
lavish Perry's money without asking the prices?

She looked around her and
sniffed the air.
 
It was a few weeks
before
Christmas: the bright blue day flapped around her like a
flag.
 
New York was stunningly alive with
a crackle of promise, an irresistible
rush of vitality that made Paris
seem old-fashioned, tradition-laden, unbeckoning.
 
Why not make a clean break?
 
Why not stay here where she was Mrs. Lunel, a
widow, rather than go back to a country where too many people knew too much
about her? Excitedly she turned and almost ran the short blocks back to the
jewelry store.