Mistral's Daughter (28 page)

"It's too late to change
your mind.
 
We agreed, fair market
value," Mr. Klein said, looking up as she burst in, cheeks flaming.

"I've got to get a
job!
 
Here in New York!
 
I'm not going back to France, I've just
decided..."

"Doing what?"

"I don't know.
 
Do you have any ideas for me?"

"A girl who's never
worked a day in her life
—
are you kidding?"

"Well, I have done a
little modeling."

"What kind of
model?"

"For...
 
fashion designers."

"So."
 
He looked her over carefully.
 
He didn't know anything about fashion models
but he knew a stunner when he saw one.
 
"I have a friend who's in the fashion business, we play poker twice
a month, Italian fellow.
 
He's done very
well
—
a boy from the old neighborhood but today you'd never know
it.
 
Alberto Bianchi
—
we used to
play stickball, today he's pretty fancy.
 
I'll give him a call, see if there's anything doing."
 
He retreated to his back office to telephone
and returned beaming.
 
"Maybe they
can use a girl
—
just maybe.
 
One
of their regular models took off with the husband of their best client.
 
The fellow decided to give himself a
Christmas present for a change.
 
Go quick
—
these days jobs don't stay empty long.
 
Here's the address and here's," he said, giving Maggy a quick kiss
on her cheek, "a kiss for good luck."

Maggy was as nervous as a
goldfish as she approached the entrance to Bianchi's.
 
The glass doors on East Fifty-fifth Street
were smoked, and there were no show windows flanking them, merely the discreet
bricks of a modernized townhouse.

She entered through the doors
and, for the first moment since she'd been in New York, she felt immediately at
home.
 
Shocked, she stood still and
breathed deeply.
 
All around her the
pulse of the establishment beat with a rhythm so familiar that she recognized
in her blood, the rhythm of a
maison de couture
.
The sounds were
the ones she knew: the voices behind fitting-room doors, those of the
saleswomen deferential and unruffled, those of the customers high-pitched,
indecisive and spoiled.
 
The smells were
the same; the mingled perfumes of a hundred rich women lingered in the air
mixed with the smoke from their cigarettes, underlaid by pungent aromas of new
fabric and fur.

Her heart lurched as she
drank in the atmosphere, that special distillation, that intensity that goes to
a woman's head like a bolt of
electricity, compounded of the million
fantasies that had been brought to this place; fantasies of how a woman might
look if she found that right, that perfect dress; of how that perfect dress
would transform her; fantasies that placed a greater belief on the power
clothes
than clothes could ever fulfill.

It was the Lourdes of vanity,
Maggy thought.
 
Here they came
not
to be cured but to be made into their dreams of themselves; younger, more
beautiful, thinner, more desirable.
 
The
concentrated force of these fantasies seemed strong enough to blow the walls of
the dressmaker's apart, yet a controlled calm reigned over the gray
velvet,
mirrored reception room.

Patricia Falkland, a
beautifully tailored, dark-haired middle-aged woman, sat behind a polished desk
on which stood only a single bud vase containing one white rose.
 
She had worked for Alberto Bianchi for years,
supervising all the salespeople and fulfilling the absolutely necessary role of
mediator between saleswomen and clients.
 
She never acted as a saleswoman herself but she was responsible for
giving advice to vacillating customers, and for dealing with all the personnel
of the house.
 
Sizing up new customers
was her specialty.

Miss Falkland could spot, in
a dowdy, middle-aged woman, the wife of a major meat packer from Chicago who
would spend thousands of dollars, as easily as she could pick out the young-
society woman, dressed in the latest fashion, wearing every evidence of luxury,
who would never settle her bills.
 
She
knew each one of the wealthy women of New York who preferred to come to Bianchi
for his brilliantly edited copies of Chanel and Vionnet and Lanvin, rather than
going to Paris for their clothes.
 
Throughout the 1920s, although fashion was dictated absolutely by Paris,
there were many American women who refused to devote several months of each
crowded year to traveling back and forth to France and subjecting themselves to
the exhausting round of collections and fittings.

As Maggy entered, Patricia
Falkland pursed her lips in an inaudible
imperceptible whistle, that
whistle of unqualified approval that
few women ever elicited from
her.
 
Maggy embodied an ideal that
the
richest women couldn't buy.
 
As Patricia
Falkland's eyes traveled their customary swift path upward, taking in all the
details of Maggy's ensemble, from the exquisite, perfectly polished shoes to
the cunningly wrought hat, she knew that she was looking at someone who was
dressed in the original of the clothes that Alberto Bianchi would be
reproducing for his customers, someone who was dressed in the
real thing
,
that uncapturable essence of Paris that could never be duplicated, no
matter how closely they copied fabric for fabric, seam for seam, button for
button.
 
How
the hell do those
bastards do it?
 
She always asked
herself that question when she saw Parisian dressmaking at its best, and it was
still the only question for which she had no answer.

For a second, neither of the
women spoke.
 
Maggy stood, looking around
the reception room, with that inimitable air of a prospective customer that the
atmosphere of the room had brought out in her, that stance; appraising,
judgmental, yet absolutely sure of her welcome, which she had grown into
during the last two luxurious years.
 
It
was a stance that could never be achieved by deliberate practice, never assumed
by anyone who wasn't accustomed to spending a great deal of money.
 
It came from an inner, unconscious attitude
toward clothes.
 
It said, as if she had
spoken aloud, "There Isn't anything you have to sell me that I cannot buy
if I choose.
 
But will
I?
 
It is for you to tempt me.
 
And even then I may be so sated that I will
refuse to be lured.
 
Spread your best out
in front of me.
 
If I want it I will have
it.
 
Or perhaps not
—
that is for
me to decide."

The instant of silence passed
as Patricia Falkland rose deferentially and advanced toward Maggy.
 
"May I help you, Madame?" she asked
in the voice she reserved for the best customers.

"I hope so," Maggy
replied.

"If you'd like to sit
down, I'll call a saleslady immediately." Miss Falkland smiled as if to
apologize because a saleslady had not materialized out of the floor at Maggy's
arrival.

"No, please do not
trouble.
 
I would like to speak to
someone about the modeling job."

"A job?" she
repeated as her smile vanished.

"I
understand that you need a model.
 
I
would like to apply for
the position."
          

"That's
quite impossible," Miss Falkland said sharply, a note of anger in her
voice.
 
How dare this woman waltz in the
giving herself the airs and graces of a customer when she wanted a job?
 
It was quite outrageous.
 
It was unforgivable.
 
Absolutely, unheard of.
 
Her heart hardened toward Maggy who had
caused her to make a mistake in the judgment of which she was so proud.
 
It was infuriating to have been caught
putting on her most welcoming manner for a mere job hunter.

"I
was informed by my friend Mr. Harry Klein that the House of Bianchi needs a
dress model.
 
Mr. Klein talked to Mr.
Bianchi himself, no more than a quarter of an hour ago, so I came
immediately."

"Mr.
Bianchi is looking for a professional model, a working girl, not a
dilettante.
 
We pay thirty-five dollars a
week, which wouldn’t buy one of your shoes, and our girls work like brutes for
that money, or they don't last a week.
 
We'd never even consider someone without experience."

"Please,
give me a trial," Maggy insisted.
 
This female, she thought, is not going to get rid of me.
 
I'm no longer a sniveling child who is too
modest to take off her knickers.
 
"Mr. Bianchi told Mr. Klein he needed..."

Patricia
Falkland heard and noted the determination and stubbornness in Maggy's
tone.
 
For years she had deplored the
masculine aberration that led her employer to continue to keep up an
association with his poker-playing friends from his past, but, she knew
perfectly well how sentimental he was about it.
 
She bowed to fact that she couldn't brush Maggy off without trouble from
Bianchi.

"Follow
me," she said brusquely. "But it's a waste of your time."
 
She led the way up one flight of stairs into
a room, empty at the moment, where the new French originals hung on long racks
next to the tables the models used for their makeup.
 
She picked out a white satin evening dress,
intricately cut on the bias, so low in front and in back that it was difficult
to tell which was which.
 
With a gathered
peplum flounce that projected between the hip and the knee, it was, quite
possibly, the most unwearable gown that Madame Jeanne Lanvin had ever created.
She handed it to Maggy without a word and went back to her desk.

Damn
that creature, Patricia Falkland fumed.
 
She knew enough to wave Klein's name around like a sword, but she didn't
have the sense to realize that she was totally unsuited to showing
clothes.
 
The last thing a model must do
is to seem like competition to the customer.
 
No matter how good-looking she is, she must not stir up any response of
envy in the customer, she must never appear to be on the customer's social or
economic level.
 
The customer must be
encouraged to feel superior.
 
It was
something bone deep, understood by everyone who sold clothes.

She
was still immersed in angry thought when Maggy appeared at the top of the
stairs, wrapped in an ermine cape she had appropriated from another rack in
the model room.
 
Her bare head revealed
hair like a carefully tended bonfire, still parted at the side as Antoine had
first styled it, but longer now and waved tightly over her ears.
 
A living statue, she advanced at a subtle,
gliding pace that was neither slow nor rapid, a pace calculated to allow the
spectator to absorb the details of what she was wearing with ease, yet her
eyes, looking serenely into the middle distance, did not permit any personal
contact.
 
Vanished, as if it could never
have existed, was the unconscious, privileged challenge with which Maggy had entered
the reception room and in its place was a demeanor that indicated clearly that
she was there only and uniquely for the pleasure and service of others.

Look,
look not at me, she seemed to be saying, but at what I'm wearing, because if it
tempts you then it can be yours.
 
I am
only the medium who indicates to you how you can realize your dreams.
 
I am neutral, the clothes are everything, and
are they not beautiful?
 
I am proud to
wear them, for a few minutes.
 
But they
do not belong to me.
 
Think how marvelous
you could look in this.

Maggy
reached the last step and walked across the reception room.
 
Miss Falkland, regarding her with an
unfriendly, impassive eye, noted that she had found a pair of white satin
evening shoes from some model's cache.
 
But anyone, even a born frump, could wrap herself in ermine and create
something of an effect.
 
There hadn't
been a model who worked for Bianchi who hadn't fought to show that wrap and
they'd all looked well in it.
 
The test,
the trial had been sidetracked and she was unimpressed.

Maggy
turned in front of the desk and walked back to the foot of the staircase.
 
There, slowly, with a gesture to which
she
gave all that she had ever learned of allure, a gesture that told all that
could ever be learned about handling fur, she threw back the cape, folding it
as easily as if it had been made of organdy, and let it trail from one hand as
she revealed herself in the white satin dress that had, by the act of her
having put it on, become ultimately desirable.