Mistral's Daughter (29 page)

One of two fake diamond clips
Maggy had picked up at Chanel
marked the lowest point of the décolletage
in the front, and as
she turned again, another was clasped at the V of
the dress in the back in a manner that no one in New York had yet seen.
 
She circled the room, the ermine whispering
on the carpet, and now a small
dreamlike smile warmed her face, enough,
just precisely enough, exactly enough of a smile to gather the spectator into
the sensuous pleasure of wearing such a dress, a smile that guaranteed
temptation.
 
She didn't look at Patricia
Falkland for approval or disapproval as she walked, but if she had, she would
have seen the
^,
woman's lips set grimly.

"Who's this?" a
man's voice demanded. Miss
Falkland jumped
but Maggy stood
still imperturbably, and waited, offering herself absolutely yet not losing her
distance.

"Someone applying for a
model job, Mr. Bianchi," she said. "I don't think she's
suitable."

"Maybe you should have
your eyes checked, Patsy. What's your
name, Miss?" Maggy's
neutral, bland look disappeared as she unfurled her unauthorized charm.

"Magali Lunel, but I am
called simply Maggy in the business;"

"You're the girl Harry
called about
—
I didn't expect... when can you start?"

"Whenever you like.
Tomorrow if that suits you."

"How about now?
 
Patsy, Mrs. Townsend just called.
 
She's
changed her mind about leaving
for Palm Beach after all, so she's
desperate for new clothes for
the Christmas parties in Tuxedo Park, and we're shorthanded."

"Now is even better than
tomorrow," Maggy said.
 
She liked
the look of Mr. Bianchi, who had once been a boy in Harry Klein's old
neighborhood.
 
He had a perfectly tended look, splendid
linen, a glossiness of hair and sleekness that was more continental than
American.
 
He was plump, as bright-eyed
as a boy, and obviously a
master at his trade.
 
She understood a man like this one.
 
He would be a demon if she disappointed him
but kind, even generous, if she
could give him the perfection he
expected.

Several hours later, after
she had modeled dozens of dresses and suits and coats for Mrs. Townsend, Maggy left
the House of Alberto Bianchi with a job that paid thirty-five dollars a
week.
 
Her heart jumped as she thought
gleefully that she had, after all, been trained for something useful.
 
Years of taking her clothes off as quickly as
possible for her artists, followed by years of watching fashion shows
—
and the ability to imitate the best models in Paris
—
had added up to a
salable commodity.
 
She would be making
enough money to pay Nanny Butterfield and still have fifteen dollars left over.

Maggy arrived at the corner
of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street and paused to look around her, to
absorb the almost tangible pledge made by the long, brightly lit thoroughfare
in the winter twilight.
 
Another Maggy,
the seventeen-year-old girl who had stood in the center of springtime
Montparnasse, and waited impatiently for her life to begin, seemed to join her,
to stand by her side and say, "Courage."
 
How little you knew then, Maggy whispered to
herself. How little I know now.
 
How
much, how very much I am going to learn.
 
She wondered where she could find a florist's shop.
 
She needed to buy a red carnation for her
buttonhole.
 

13

What was the reason for the
hold Lavinia Longbridge had over the younger members of New York society?
 
Even the bridge-playing dowagers at the
Southampton Beach Club bestirred themselves to ask each other.
 
Mrs. Condé
Nast posed the question to
Mrs. William de Rahm, and Cecil Beaton, on his frequent visits to New York, had
become enough aware of her power to inquire of Mrs. Herbert Weston if she
understood the reason for it.

One cynic had said that in
all of nature there were only fourteen different patterns into which objects
from crystals to pineapples could stack themselves, but that at the top of each
stack one would be sure to find Lally Longbridge.
 
Yet this was too simple an answer,
although
it had first been observed when, as Lavinia Pendennis, she became the most
fêted debutante of her year, her spectacular entrance into society so far
outpaced the next contender as to make all the other girls seem to fall into
one undifferentiated group.

When she married Cornwallis
Longbridge she might have been expected to fall into the traditional role of
rich young wife, but this she refused to do, maintaining in an era of couples,
a separate identity, so that Cornie Longbridge became another, although the
most favored, of her subjects.

Lally was as beautiful as she
was miniature, with black eyes and black hair that sprang away from her white
delicate face like
a
wreath above the whitest arms and shoulders
and back in New York, and the reddest lips, the only touch of color she allowed
herself; but there were many beautiful girls in society:
 
Mary Taylor, Isobel Henry, Helen Kellogg,
Justine Allen and Alice Doubleday all had their champions for the queen of
beauty.

No, it was not just
popularity and beauty that accounted for her enormous influence
—
it was
the generous manner in which she had pledged her life to having a good
time.
 
For the only way Lally could have
a good time was when she bestowed it on others.

In Lally Longbridge the
reckless gaiety of that great party of the twenties had danced right on into
the first frightening year of the thirties.
 
Cornie Longbridge's fortune was secure and her life was devoted seriously
to entertaining unseriously; her home was like a reassuring campfire that could
be counted on to warm everyone who came near.
 
Lally was considered the best bartender in the city and certainly she
knew all the best bootleggers.
 
She
invented the buffet supper; meals at her house always had the charm of picnics;
and her roving taste for people was the spice that made her parties go like
rockets.
 
Lally asked jazz musicians to
her parties and newspaper reporters and professional boxers and tap dancers
from Broadway shows and songwriters from Tin Pan Alley and, jealous hostesses
whispered, even gangsters, which only made the parties more thrilling.
 
She welded them all into one bright unit by
her laughter and friendliness.

Often after a party had taken
off, Lally would step back into the shadow of an alcove and watch for minutes
at a time the new and unexpected groupings she had caused to happen, feeling
like the most successful of stage directors.
 
Her entertainments were as frequent as they were spontaneous, never
planned more than a day or two in advance, with the knowledge that her
household was organized around hospitality, her servants chosen for their
capacity to cope with large groups as carefully as if she were an ambassador's
wife.

Lally Longbridge had had
dresses made at Bianchi's since her debut.
 
She was one of those exceedingly rare short women who possess the gift
of dressing in
a way that made her look tall. The heart of it lay in the
fact that Lally never perceived herself as tiny
—
everybody else she
felt was simply too big.
 
Until Maggy
came to work at Bianchi's she had never found a model who understood this and
who would willingly show her dresses that, in theory, only tall women could
wear.

In the last
year and a
half she had become increasingly interested in Maggy.
 
Mrs. Lunel was far from being the usual house
model, obviously, but what
was
the mystery of this widowed Frenchwoman
who couldn't be drawn into speaking of herself?
 
Everybody she took an interest in was
supposed
to tell Lally
about herself
—
it really was most curious, almost vexing.

One day in the spring of
1931, she astonished Maggy by inviting her to a party the following evening.

"Say you'll come, Maggy,
do!
 
After dinner we're having a
scavenger hunt and there'll be a fabulous prize for the winning team
—
 
it'll be great fun."

Maggy hesitated.
 
The house models never mingled with the
customers.
 
A social gulf, which everyone
acknowledged, separated them.

"Now don't be
stuffy!
 
I know what you're thinking and
it's too silly for words.
 
Lots of women
work these days
—
it's getting rather smart.
 
That doesn't mean that you're prohibited from
having a good time."

"I'd love to,"
Maggy said decisively.
 
She owed herself
some kind of romp.
 
For the past year and
a half she'd led a life of discipline and hard work, at the beck and call of
Bianchi and his customers for as long as ten hours a day, rarely off her feet
for more than a few minutes at a time.

But it was healing work that
kept her from thinking about the past, exhausting work that let her sleep
soundly, waking only occasionally to dreams of Perry Kilkullen, which made her
weep, waking too often to dream of Julien Mistral, which made her rage.
 
How could she still dream about a man she
hated?
 
She'd asked herself that
uncomfortable question furiously, trying to deny the profound, rolling orgasm
that had awakened her.
 
She was, on those
mornings, particularly glad to run off to a job that left no time for
uncomfortable introspection.

Maggy was now the leading
model at Alberto Bianchi's and the other nine models all looked up to her.
 
Even Patricia Falkland had been forced to
admit, if only to herself, that no one could show and
sell a dress like
Maggy.
 
In the scattered moments that the
models had to congregate in their dressing room the other girls asked Maggy's
advice and there was nothing about which she didn't express firm, immediate
approval or disapproval, from the line of a new hairstyle to the shade of a
pair of stockings.
 
Somehow Maggy found
herself calming the girls when they had jitters or complaints or quarreled
among themselves.
 
She listened to their
accounts of their many romances and administered stiff but compassionate doses
of tough-minded advice in which her own hard-learned wisdom was mixed with bits
of Paula's well-remembered admonitions.
 
She even found herself scolding the girls who put on a pound or two, and
advising them about the placement of their rouge and eyeshadow.

Charity fashion shows had
become a rage in New York and the House of Bianchi was constantly asked to participate
in them.
 
Soon Maggy
found herself
in demand by the organizers of these shows who were all amateurs.
 
She was able to run herd on the models, most
of them dithering, nervous, awkward society women who had never walked on a
runway before.

Because of this extra work
Maggy's salary was raised to fifty dollars a week.
 
She had had to dip into her precious nest egg
to furnish the small apartment just off Central Park West, on Sixtythird
Street, that she'd taken for her little family.

Nevertheless, Maggy's salary
was just enough to support Teddy and Nanny Butterfield.
 
Her own expenses were minimal; her Paris
clothes were still in style, chosen as they had been from advanced designs that
embodied ideas that were still fresh to the American eye...
 
not that it mattered really, Maggy thought,
since she had no occasion to get really dressed up.

The other manikins at
Bianchi's had, in her first days there, invited her to go out to speakeasies
and nightclubs with them
—
there were always many young men who wanted
to meet her.
 
But she had refused time
after time, and eventually they stopped asking.
 
She never mentioned her choice of solitude in her letters to Paula, who
would, she knew, have disapproved deeply.
 
As soon as work was over Maggy hurried home every night to have an early
dinner with Teddy and soak her feet.

Now, reacting to the
flattering surprise of Lally Longbridge's invitation, she felt that she'd gone
as long as she could endure without an evening's break, just one night of sheer
fun.
The Jazz Age was finished, killed by the Depression, but an
unsubdued audaciousness in Maggy told her how badly she still thirsted for the
sound of a saxophone, the thrum of a guitar.
 
The melody of "Sweet Georgia Brown," forgotten for six years,
came back to her lips.
 
As she dressed
for the party she realized that on a May evening, even New York, that lonely,
tense city of metal and concrete, could turn electric and rosy with
expectation.

When the impulsive business
of inviting guests was over, Lally Longbridge gave an hour's concentration to
the composition of the teams for her scavenger hunt.
 
There was no point in putting the same kind
of people together, people who already knew each other
—
a scavenger
hunt was only as much fun as the team members made it.

Maggy Lunel, she thought, was
so smart that she should be on the team with Gay Barnes, who spun nothing but
nonsense in her bubbly blonde head.
 
Gay
had been the most famous of the showgirls in Earl Carroll’s
Vanities
before she married Henry Oliver Barnes, who must be thirty-five years older
than she.
 
Lally, who was always
interested in how others packaged their personalities, realized that
Gay
had managed to win over stuffy New York society by two simple
means: she
was amazingly decorative and she had a killingly funny way of seeming to never
know when a man made a risqué remark
—
remarks she had most definitely
provoked.
       

Which two men with those two
women? She bit her
thumb pensively.
 
Why not Jerry Holt?
 
The
entertainment column he wrote for the
World
was read by everybody in
town and he was as witty as his reputation was dubious.
 
And...
 
yes...
 
it would serve him right
for being so hard to pin down; the other man would be Darcy, Jason Darcy, whom
everyone called by his last name.

How amusingly outraged that
rather too self-satisfied twenty-nine-year-old
wunderkind
of the
publishing business would be to find himself teamed up with an ex-showgirl, a
dress house model
and a, probably, pansy columnist.
 
It was the kind of team that would give Lally
a special kind of good time.
 
At every
party she gave she arranged for at least one such ill-assorted group, a secret
game she played, for her own delectation.

Hours later, after dinner,
the ten teams gathered in Lally's fashionably sterile chrome and glass drawing
room, filled with white
tulips.
 
There was groaning and protesting over the lists she had handed them.

One debutante of this season, only beautiful
ones count

One of Miss Ethel Barrymore's shoes

One dog, must be pure white

One program from
Smiles
signed by both
Adele and Fred Astaire

One tablecloth from the Colony Restaurant

One English butler — no fakes

One brand-new copy of
A Farewell to Arms

One single yellow glove

One New York City policeman's hat

One waiter's jacket from Jack and Charlie's

"This is simply
fiendish," Gay Barnes wailed. "We'll never win, never."

"How long do we
have?" Maggy asked.

"Two hours," Jerry
Holt explained.
 
"The team wins that
brings in the most by the deadline."

"I've had an
inspiration!" Gay Barnes announced.
 
"It doesn't say anywhere that we can't split up, does it?
 
What's the point in all four of us going
after the same things?
 
I think Jerry and
I should take the first five and you
two take
the others.
 
How about it?"