Eight Girls Taking Pictures (30 page)

On a gray day in March 1927, Charlotte Blum stood back from the mannequins that she had been wrestling with all afternoon in the spotless display windows of Wertheim, one of the city’s premier department stores, to take in the effect of her arrangement. The point was to sell sunglasses, items one usually saw on movie stars, so casually glamorous in the casually glamorous sunshine of California. The citizens of Berlin seldom found themselves wishing for a pair of dark glasses in their often overcast city, but if Charlotte had learned nothing else in her twenty-four years it was never to underestimate the lure of dreams.

Her department manager, Miss Schmidt, thought as long as they were selling the outrageously stylish glasses, perhaps they could add an evening dress? Maybe some high-heeled shoes with open toes, in silver metallic leather? What about sequins on pajama trousers? Oh, and even though it’s early March, isn’t there still time for someone to purchase a fur for the unpredictable weather of a German spring?

What Charlotte and her manager didn’t discuss was the recent easing of the violently hard times that had come on the heels of the Great War, impoverishing so many Germans. Had Charlotte mentioned it, Miss Schmidt would have said, “But you aren’t talking about
our
customers, Miss Blum.”

It was true, there were still well-heeled shoppers who strolled the elegant Leipzigerstrasse; the manager’s unspoken sentiment was a swipe at the young men and women crowding the streets. Especially the women, with their corsetless figures moving freely in their light garments: the short skirts, the loose blouses. Charlotte knew that her manager, a middle-aged woman who had known her place all her life, bore no affection for the New Woman, who was now—or so Charlotte felt—only a reminder of how devastating it can be to be born at the wrong time.

Miss Schmidt checked her wristwatch, a gorgeous object that
Mr. Wertheim himself had brought back from Geneva as a gift to her. It was still common to see women wearing small lapel watches on their blouses, or men relying on pocketwatches, so wearing a wristwatch immediately made the manager look modern. How Charlotte envied her that watch! For all Miss Schmidt’s complaints about the “girls of today,” the manager was aware that the watch gave her a certain contemporary cachet; it made her less easy to peg as the traditionalist that she really was, and Charlotte knew this sort of misrepresentation pleased her. It wasn’t so she could pass herself off as something she wasn’t; it was so she could, in some small way, be a part of the sexual revolution that was already leaving her behind.

There were so many ways for a woman to be frustrated, thought Charlotte. Even when you bestow a new life on young women, by definition you leave the older ones out. The truth was, this new Berlin didn’t belong to all young women; it easily excluded the ones who were working-class or poor. Factory workers who considered themselves New Women still cleaned and cooked on their days off. Wives still had children to look after, along with the husbands. And then there were the secretaries, who could never hope to have positions equal to their bosses’. Women who had less opportunity to be New Women than those spirited, athletically built middle- and upper-class girls in summer dresses. Girls who smoked, openly took lovers, chose bohemian society, and pretty much did as they pleased because they, like the manager, were affected by the accident of birth. In their case, into money. Charlotte knew this because she was one of those girls who came from comfortable circumstances and privilege, though it didn’t prevent her from observing the world around her.

Even her window-dressing job came as a consequence of studying typography, having spent two summers drawing advertisements for a design firm. Her education came because her parents could afford it, and because they, particularly her father, were progressive, never thinking to offer something to her brother that they would not offer to her.

It didn’t occur to Charlotte that this was unusual parental behavior in those pre–Great War years, and when it did finally occur to her to ask
about it, her father had laughed and said, “I never really thought about it, but I will say I made more of an effort after our Denmark holiday.”

When Charlotte was nine years old, her parents had traveled with her and her brother to Denmark. In Copenhagen, placed all by itself on a rock in the harbor, sat a statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. It wasn’t very big, the size of a real girl actually, and Charlotte was entranced by this fishgirl, her lower body half legs, half fins, and the tragedy of her inability to win the love of her prince.

Nothing in the city enthralled her as much as the statue, who sat so close to the shore Charlotte felt she could march right out and touch her.

On the second day, her family indulged her request to visit the statue again; on the third day, her mother and brother refused to go. “Charlo, how can you keep coming back to this little tourist statue?” asked her father.

She didn’t want to say because she was so beautiful, with her slim figure, her pretty, downturned face, her hair loosely gathered at the base of her neck. The mermaid seemed like a girl she could have gone to school with. So delicate, the sort of girl the other girls might have crushes on. Charlotte wouldn’t have thought to say this to her father, because she wouldn’t have articulated it in this way, but her feelings could be summed up as, What’s the difference between my loving to look at this bronze girl, a creature of fantasy, and my friends who like the girls in the cinema?

“The story of this little mermaid?” her father said. “That’s not your story. You will never fall in love with a prince you’ve rescued who isn’t even smart enough to know that it was you who saved him. You will never sell your voice for legs that feel like a thousand knives every time you walk.”

“I know,” said Charlotte.

“It’s a terrible story, you know.”

Charlotte nodded.

Father and daughter gazed at the little statue. “Mr. Andersen,” said her father, “never had a daughter.”

Charlotte couldn’t tell her father that the story of the Little Mermaid frightened and fascinated her.

“Come on, kid,” he said. “Your mother and Trilby are meeting us at the Tivoli Gardens.”

Reluctant to leave the bronze fishgirl, Charlotte followed her father to the amusement park.

“Miss Schmidt,” said Charlotte, “would it be all right if I stepped out for a moment?”

Her manager looked at her watch and said, “Ten minutes.” That Charlotte was being timed was a given, for productivity, and for Charlotte to be reminded of the beautiful watch that belonged to Miss Schmidt.

 • • • 

Being outside allowed Charlotte to get some fresh air, which she immediately polluted by lighting up a cigarette. She was raised to believe that women shouldn’t smoke, and, if they did, smoking on the street was déclassé. Even Charlotte thought it lowbrow. So when she did it, it was because she was courting an image that no more represented her true self than Miss Schmidt’s modern wristwatch represented her; it wasn’t rebellion as much as it was a kind of game of pretend.

She stood across the street from the windows she was working on, her coat pulled tight against the wisps of snow as she held the cigarette she barely inhaled. Sunglasses. How to get passersby to look at the sunglasses? These same pedestrians bustled around her as she remained stationary.

Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette beneath one well-shod foot. The windows were shaping up, but something was missing, something that would catch the feminine eye. There was talk about making Charlotte a permanent window dresser, which meant more pay and job security in the union. It wasn’t a completely unattractive prospect, since she believed the job carried a possibility for theatrics.

Until now Charlotte had not moved very far from the prim Wertheimer
aesthetic—smartly dressed salesgirls, tasteful music, perfectly modulated lighting that fit the architecturally graceful arches at the entrance and the soaring atrium—but all at once she saw another direction for the windows. In her excitement, she hurried back across the street, arriving at her post with two minutes to spare and never noticing another young woman who had been watching Charlotte as Charlotte had been watching the storefront windows.

Charlotte Blum worked quickly. Three scenes: In the first window, a wife and mother cooks dinner in the kitchen. In the second window, a secretary sits at her typewriter, Dictaphone nearby as she transcribes a recording. In the third, a woman works in a factory.

“Do you find this job amusing? Do you think this is just for fun?”

Miss Schmidt was standing just outside one of Charlotte’s tableaux, refusing to enter while still able to see the passersby who stopped to stare at the mannequins. “Am
I
amusing?” said Miss Schmidt, insensible to the crowd that was attracted to the windows but stayed on for the obvious reprimand Charlotte was receiving.

An arm of the mannequin in the kitchen caught Miss Schmidt’s critical eye: On its rigid, skinny wrist was a beautiful watch. She stepped in and yanked the arm out of its pose to get a closer look, then shoved it into an opposite, awkward pose in disgust. “Is this what you think of . . . of . . . of all of us?” as she made a sweeping gesture with her own watch-adorned arm. “Our customers? They aren’t secretaries. They are to be treated with respect, not like some burlesque.”

“It wasn’t meant as ridicule—” Charlotte began.

“Stop!”

It seemed Miss Schmidt had more to say, then thought better of it as she turned and left Charlotte in the kitchen scene, unsure of what was expected of her.

When Charlotte had examined the display windows from outside the
store as she smoked her cigarette, the idea of women daydreaming came to her in full. The sunglasses, of course, they represented a life of sunshine, vacations, paradise, and moonlight. If she were to make tableaux depicting an expensive lakeside resort, or a midsummer’s picnic in the heart of New York City, then where is the dream? Where is the unexpected? Where is the connection to the dreariness of life and the flight of fancy?

It was the juxtaposition of the two things that would draw the eye and stimulate the fantasy, then the desire to make it real, then the sale of the thing being sold, in this case, the sunglasses.

In the wake of Miss Schmidt’s departure (and presumed march up to the floor supervisor), Charlotte remained motionless near the stove. The mannequin mother, intent on cooking dinner, wore a silk dress, a shimmer of pale blue ice that seemed the weight of a butterfly’s wing. Delicate ropes of diamonds wound around her throat and wrists, with individual stones scattered in her upswept hair. A pair of black-framed sunglasses shielded her eyes from the harsh light of the display windows as she went about her task, her pose indicating that nothing was amiss in her hausfrau attire. Her children sat in the corner, constructing a tower from a metal Erector set. The message, Charlotte tried to explain to Miss Schmidt, was that her family may see her one way, but this glamorous costume was how she saw
herself.

The secretary in the next window wore red-framed sunglasses with green lenses as she transcribed a business letter on her typewriter, a full-length mink coat casually flung over the back of her chair.