Of Irish Blood (15 page)

“No job?” he says.

“No,” I say. I explain what Madame Simone wants me to do. “I can work, but as a spy,” I say. “I don’t want to steal the designs of great couturiers,” I say. “Join Madame Simone in her fraud.”

He laughs.

“You’re worrying about stealing from the ruling class who abuse their workers and promote a system of false values that poisons
tout la Paris
?” he asks.

Sometimes his English is really good.

“You sound like a Bolshevik,” I say. “We have those in Chicago.”

Stefan stops laughing. Pounds the desk and says, “Chicago! The Haymarket. A disgrace!”

Now, you don’t mention the Haymarket incident in my family. I was only seven when a big squad of police started to break up a meeting of workingmen only to have a bomb thrown at them. One policeman was hit by a fragment and died. The other cops started shooting. Thirty people dead including a good number of police, shot by their own fellows in the confusion. Ed’s father, my uncle Steve, was one of the policemen, while my uncle Mike and his friends from the blacksmiths’ union were in the crowd at the meeting.

“A massacre,” Uncle Mike always said. “What were we—only workers trying to get decent wages. A peaceful demonstration against the blood-sucking plutocrats.”

“Anarchists! Bolsheviks!” Uncle Steve would yell. “Foreign agitators. Violent.”

Now Stefan is saying proudly, “I’m not only a Bolshevik, I am a follower of Vladimir Lenin.” Then:

“Take the job, you imbecile,” Stefan says. “You have a chance to strike at the parasites, support the workers.”

I am the only one at breakfast the next morning. Stefan allows me a second croissant but not a third.

“You have decided?” he asked.

“I will take the job,” I say to him. See, I really like the idea of being in Madame Simone’s studio with other women at work making something. Who knows? If I help with her “inspirations” maybe she’ll look at my sketches again. And there’s dinners at L’Impasse. Stefan kisses me on both cheeks.
“Citoyenne,”
he says.

You’re a long way from Chicago, Nonie, I tell myself.

Madame Simone asks me no questions when I arrive, only says,
“Vite. Vite.”
Georgette explains that the fashion houses will soon close for the
“vacances de Noël,”
Christmas vacation I guess. Getting the hang of French. Madame’s clients want gowns for holiday parties. Georgette hands me a magazine with a photograph of a woman in an Oriental-looking outfit. Beautiful really, the photo’s like a painting almost. I point at it and make sewing motions. Why can’t Madame Simone copy the photograph?

“Non,”
Georgette says.
“Il faut présenter les nouveaux.”
Madame shows me the names of five women who want gowns for Noël. Today is December 5th. How can they make five couturier gowns in ten days? By rushing.

In less than an hour, I’m on my way to Paul Poiret’s House of Fashion. I wear one of Madame Simone’s royal blue costumes with a fur cape wrapped around me. The note I carry from Alain at the Ritz introduces me as Madame Smith. Imaginative right? Well, it’s easy to remember.

Now here’s a fellow Marshall Field would like I think standing in front of his shop near the place Vendôme. Merchandise jams the window. A mannequin dressed in a gold lamé skirt and a purple velvet tunic stands surrounded by figures costumed like the sultan’s favorites, called in to entertain His Majesty. The few masculine mannequins wear long embroidered coats, and one has a peacock feather stuck into his turban.

I walk in.

“Wow!” I say to the woman clerk who comes up to me. She covers her slight wince with an automatic smile and says in an English accent, “You’re an American, I assume.”

“I am,” I say. “So happy you speak English.”

God, I’d hate to try out my charades on this one.

“Quite a display on your window,” I say.

“A scene from Mr. Poiret’s famous party this summer, the One Thousand and Two Arabian Nights,” she says.

“Oh, I get it,” I say. “Adding to the One Thousand and One.”

She nods and leads me to a large photograph. Points. “Here’s Monsieur himself dressed as a caliph,” she says. “And there’s Lord Acton. He makes a very good Oriental potentate, don’t you think?”

He looks ridiculous, but I don’t say anything.

“I’m visiting Paris,” I tell her, “with my husband who’s in grain.”

She nods again.

No racks to go through like in Field’s basement, I’ll tell you that. You sit down and models parade by you. Beautiful women. I wonder what they’re paid. Not much I’d say.

I tell Miss Rule Britannia I’d like to make a few notes. I get out my pad. Oh dear God, she’s staring right at me. How can I start to sketch? The first outfit has a silk hobble skirt in red satin and a jacket encrusted with jewels.

“Gosh,” I say to her. “Are those real?”

“Semiprecious stones,” she says.

“How much?” I ask.

“Five hundred francs,” she says.

“One hundred dollars!” I try not to let my voice squeak. That’s as much as a Model T costs.

She watches me write “$100” on my pad.

“Would you like to sketch this gown?” she says.

What?

“Well, yes I would,” I say.

“Your pencil doesn’t seem very sharp,” she says.

I look at the point.

“It’s okay,” I say to her.

“I could sharpen it for you for a small charge,” she answers.

“Oh,” I say.

“Ten francs.”

“What?” Now my voice does squeak.

“I’ll let you sketch five gowns.”

“But…”

“All right. Ten gowns. Remember the models will have to stand very still.”

“And will they get a, er, consideration too?” I say.

“They will,” she says.

Another Bolshevik? What can I do?

“Well Miss Lenin.” That freezes her. “I guess we can do business.”

“I’m Miss Jones, Mrs. Smith, and we will never meet again.”

I thought I’d have a hard time explaining to Madame Simone how Mademoiselle Jones spotted me and demanded a bribe. But all I have to do is mime sketching, then count out ten francs, and she understands.

“C’est la vie,”
she says.

I think about my brother Mart paying the fellows who deliver the
Tribune
and the
Chicago American
a dollar so he’d get the bundles of newspapers before 7:00 a.m. And what were those Christmas envelopes I gave to the janitor at Ward’s? Bribes of a kind. Greases the wheels, Mike would say about extra payments to plumbing suppliers and contributions to the aldermen’s campaign funds.

Maybe Paris and Chicago are not so different after all.

I do well. Madame Simone picks five sketches, gives me twenty-five francs. Subtract the ten I gave to Miss Jones and I’d made fifteen francs, three dollars, and still had five sketches to sell. I feel very businesslike altogether. I expect the guilt to catch up with me that night, but I elude it by eating
boeuf bourguignonne
at L’Impasse and finishing my bottle of Pommard.

By Christmas I’ve made one hundred francs, doubled my money.

So. I have my Christmas dinner with Madame Simone and Stefan at L’Impasse, which is open for special customers. But I do not go to church. Midnight Mass would overwhelm me with longing for home and my family. And well, why give the Fairy Woman a chance to remind me of my shame? In January Madame Simone tells me it’s foolish to pay for another month in a hotel. You must get a “residence.” She’s says all this in French, but the words are starting to make sense if she talks slowly and looks right at me.

Madame Simone finds me a huge room looking out on the place des Vosges next to the building where Victor Hugo lived. “The maids’ dormitory,” she says. The landlord has shoehorned a tiny sink, toilet, and bidet, which she explains, into the space under the eaves. The kitchen’s in a corner.

“Not suitable for a family, really,” Madame Simone tells him, and then points out that no artist wants to live so far away from the Left Bank or Montmartre. She tells him that he’s lucky I’m interested. A single woman, a careful housekeeper—quiet. After an hour of negotiating with Madame Simone, the poor landlord begs me to take the flat at a very reasonable rent. Seventy francs a month, fourteen dollars. Very
pas cher
, I suppose. But, I hesitate. I’ll be alone here. What if Tim McShane.…

The afternoon sun comes through the casement windows, makes squares of light on the walls. My atelier. Tim McShane is far away.

I look at Stefan, Madame, and the landlord, all so pleased to offer me such a place. I take a breath and say yes, or rather,
“Oui, oui, monsieur. Merci. Merci.”

Madame Simone, Georgette, and I spend that Sunday cleaning the place. Madame helps me buy a bed, a sofa, a table—all bargains from the flea market at the edge of the city. I group the furniture around the small fireplace. Georgette tells me I’ll need lots of coal for a room so big and drafty, and coal costs money. Well, the tourists will be returning to Paris soon. Madame Simone will offer me to her customers as a guide, she says. With those fees and my undercover work in couturier, I can pay my bills and start saving. Madame insists I open a bank account. I chose a small bank on, of course, the rue de Rivoli. The manager assures me, when I ask in a carefully couched way, that no one could trace me through my account. Shocked to think the bank would divulge private information. At that moment the sheer monumentalness of Paris makes Tim McShane seem very small.

A new life.

I miss Rose and Mame McCabe and my family, Mike and Ed especially. Though I’m glad enough to be away from Henrietta’s accusing finger pointing out my flaws. And yet, renting an apartment and banking money makes my separation from home seem somehow permanent. Not simply here for work staying at a hotel. My own place. Starting over.

But every time I pass a church, I feel strange. Guilty, I guess. And in Paris you can’t look down a row of buildings without noticing a spire or two. Even in my neighborhood, Le Marais, churches rub shoulders with the synagogues: St. Paul’s, St. Antoine’s, Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux—Our Lady of the White Habits, named for the nuns whose convent church it was—and St. Martin and St. Nicholas, also formerly parts of an abbey, then Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrement, to distinguish it from all the other churches in Paris dedicated to St. Denis. All those saints I’ve known all my life. Reproaching me.

Let me see a Gothic façade, pass a carved wooden door, or hear the Angelus bell and a queasy net of regret drops over me. I’d been bad, no other word for it. Fornicating to beat the band, all the while pretending to be a virtuous woman, sidling up to Communion every Sunday. Hypocrite. “Be good, Nonie,” Mam’s dying words. And I wasn’t. Even Paris can’t completely distract me from my own guilt and remorse. Ah, well. I’ll stay out of the churches. Stick with Joan of Arc. She’ll understand.

6

SPRING 1912

So. Happy to see crews of workmen planting flowers in the Tuileries and the chestnut trees unfurling their leaves. Not many meals at L’Impasse that first winter. Careful with my money. Still avoiding churches and the saints. Tough when every other rue or boulevard’s named for one. But busy enough now.

Madame Simone’s American clients return, drawn by Paris in the spring. They pay my fee of five francs to Madame Simone. I get four. But often the ladies add a generous tip, usually in dollars, which the bank changes for me. I’m buying crepes on the street and eating at L’Impasse. Not hard to show the ladies the Paris they want to see: the Louvre, the Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower—the sites people at home will ask about.

Then tea at the Ritz, or a glass of champagne at Foquets—all part of the tour.

And I continue to copy Madame’s inspirations. Nervous though the first time I sit in the back row of Charles Worth’s fashion show. Then I notice men openly sketching the gowns. Gentlemen of the press, I see. Legitimate. So I pull out my notebook. “Le Tribune Chicago,” I say to the usher who stands behind me. No one notices me. Another twelve francs in the bank.

So I’m happy this May morning. Not really thinking of going home. Chicago seems very far away.

A proper Midwestern wife, Cornelia Wilson of South Bend, Indiana, arrives all delighted with herself and the new hat she’d purchased around the corner on rue Cambon from a woman called Gabrielle Chanel.

Madame Simone only grunts.

The hat has none of the fruit and flowers usually piled onto the chapeaus of fashionable Paris, but I like its spare and simple shape and the one white feather.

“And,” Cornelia Wilson says, “Miss Chanel says she’s going to sell dresses. I saw a sample, such odd colors, gray and black, made of a soft material.”

“Jersey,” Madame Simone says to me. “I know all about Madame Chanel’s experiments. Tell this woman her husband would not approve. Chanel does not dress respectable women.”

“What is she saying?” Cornelia asks.

“She thinks Chanel may be too, well, advanced for you.”

“No corsets,” Cornelia says. “That’s probably what Madame Simone means. But why,” she says, lifting up her arms, “do we have to bind ourselves? We went to see Isadora Duncan’s recital last night. There she was, practically in the altogether. But why should a woman be ashamed of her body?”

My goodness, I thought. What was going on in South Bend? Was Cornelia a suffragist?

Madame says to me in French, “Chanel’s clients sell their bodies. Coco does too. Her clothes match her morals.”

Madame always understands more English than she admits to. Madame Simone believes in the more-is-better school of dress, and in designs that require controlling undergarments. Often goes on about the scandalous fashions popular after the French Revolution. Women dressing themselves like Roman statues, baring their bosoms. No decorum. No respect.

“When a woman loses her reputation what does she have?” Madame Simone says in her frequent lectures to Georgette and the young seamstresses. “Don’t succumb to the sweet words,
ma petite filles
,” she tells them. “Give away your virtue and you lose all chance for a decent life. No home. No children.”