The Painted Kiss (22 page)

I
was almost thirty and except for one brief flirtation as a girl I had never thought of anyone but Gustav. But I was coming to realize that there would always be another Alma, another Adele. If they married, or moved to Paris, or died, it wouldn’t make any difference. I needed to make a decision. I could continue on this way with Gustav, knowing that he would never marry me, or I could look for someone else.

I told myself that getting over a broken heart and finding another love was easy; didn’t people do it all the time? I went to Secession parties and tried to flirt. But what Pauline had said years ago turned out to be true: everyone knew of my association with Gustav and no one dared to offend him by approaching me, especially when it was clear that my heart wasn’t in it. There was an unbreachable wall around me, it seemed. So I decided to focus my energies in another direction: the salon. I decided that after years of preparation it was time for Schwestern Flöge to come into being.

My sisters and I rented two floors in the Casa Piccola on Mariahilferstrasse. It was not far from the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Of course it would have been more fashionable if we had been able to locate inside the Ring instead of just outside it, but we couldn’t afford it. Our mother, faced with the prospect of living alone in the apartment where we had grown up, decided to sell it and move in with us. All she asked, she said, was for her own rooms with a separate entrance and kitchen, so that she could be entirely independent. We enlisted Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser to design the apartment and the salon. They worked quickly and efficiently, and soon we prepared to move from one side of Mariahilf to the other. While I wrapped lamps in tissue and packed boxes full of blouses and blankets, I worried about the salon and the risks I was taking. Years of planning had gone into it, months of construction, hours of taxing figures and standing in lines at government offices and filling out paperwork. Days of anxiety when we thought we wouldn’t have enough money to finish, or a bolt of fabric arrived wet and ruined. Now everything was in place. The seamstresses sat at the machines, already at work on preopening orders by Berta and others. The cutting tables already had shreds of fabric and spilled pins on them. Pauline’s head already hurt from squinting at narrow columns of figures, and Helene already felt cranky from waiting in the sitting room for someone to come so she could be charming and agreeable to them.

Every detail of the rooms was as perfect as Josef Hoffmann could make it, which was saying a lot. The salon was serene and spacious. The walls were white, the furniture black, the carpet gray. From the sofa in the receiving room I could look across through the large windows that looked west, to the Kunsthistorisches. The panes were among the largest yet made, and Hoffmann had insisted that no fussy draperies mar the view of them or of the city beyond. At first, Helene said, it was like going to the opera and seeing the soprano naked onstage, but she soon got used to it. For Pauline the room was a cell for the criminally insane, bare and clinical, and nothing I said could change her mind.

Yes, it was all perfect, but I was worried sick. What if the clothes I made fell apart after one wearing? What if they were considered tasteless or vulgar or ugly? What if no one bought them? What if too many people bought them and I couldn’t accommodate the demand? What if we couldn’t pay our seamstresses? What if everyone laughed at me, at my amateurish efforts to run a business? It seemed that there were endless ways to fail. The possibility of success, on the other hand, seemed wildly improbable. How could the thing coalesce?

When I unlocked the doors that day in September I felt as if every lady who passed the building was looking at me critically, evaluating my outfit and the sign on the door and judging it worthless. Why else would they walk by without stopping? It didn’t matter that none of them had appointments, and that the lady who did, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, was peering in the window, pacing impatiently in small circles before the door. I took her wrap and held it across my chest as we ascended the stairs. I didn’t want her to see how I was shaking.

Margaret wanted a white velvet dress with an embroidered skirt. Gustav had told her what to order, she said. He was going to paint her in it. How wonderful, I said. It was a good advertisement for the salon, our clothes in a portrait by a famous artist. She had wanted Poiret, she said, but Gustav had talked her out of it. She was black-haired and long-necked; soft-spoken and shy. She was very young. I talked about the painting and about Gustav and at the end of an hour she decided to order a coat and a blouse as well. She liked my patterns, she said. I was so lucky to have Klimt to do the artistic things for me. And to pay the bills. I wanted to tell her that I had drawn those patterns myself, that Gustav held a promissory note with my signature on it for the full amount he had invested, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. There was nothing to do about the gossip but ignore it.

Though I have to admit I dawdled a bit on making Margaret’s coat, and padded the bill just a little.

Telegrams kept the door opening and closing all day. Every time I heard the bell my heart began to beat faster. Would someone walk in without an appointment? Would someone come early? And most of all, would Gustav come by during the day to see how things were going? As each appointment ended, I tidied up the changing rooms, and another customer arrived, in one-hour intervals, all day, only stacking up in the sitting room to eye each other aggressively when Berta stayed too long at her appointment, unable to stop talking about the party she’d been to the night before. Eight hours, seven appointments. It was hard to know if that was a success or not. An established house could see dozens more. After each customer left Pauline quickly tabulated the charge for their order, subtracted the projected cost of labor and materials, and added that number to the day’s column, but I didn’t want to know. The running total made me too anxious. Instead I supervised the progress of the seamstresses when I wasn’t with a customer. At the end of the day Pauline showed me the day’s final number. It was enough to make the payroll for the month. We had priced the clothes well. They were expensive enough to compensate for the small volume, but no one had blanched at their bill. At least for one day, we were a success. But Gustav had not come.

The next day all our appointment times were full, but on Wednesday we had several hours free. So I was surprised when the bell rang in the middle of the morning. It was not the kind of place to get walk-in business. I left the cutting room and walked down the hall to open the salon’s brass door.

Adele was climbing the stairs behind two men who worked in an accounting office on the fourth floor. In the strong daylight she looked frailer than she usually did. When she reached the landing where I stood she seemed out of breath. Searching for a pleasantry, she admired the marble turning staircase, praising it as if I had carved it myself. She thought the words Schwestern Flöge, pressed into the door in a typeface Moser had come up with, was a wonderful idea, and the fanciful watercolors he had done for the hall were charming. I wondered if this was the startling, bitter woman I knew. I offered to take her coat, cutting her off before she started in on the color of the walls, or, God forbid, me. The last thing I wanted was personal praise from her, whether she meant it or not. She slipped off her voluminous mink and handed it to me. I nearly buckled under its weight, and wondered idly how much it had cost.

“My husband told me to be on my best behavior,” she confessed as we headed toward the sitting room. “He said he didn’t want any scenes like that night at the party. He was quite menacing.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You can be yourself.”

“Thank God,” she said. “I was tired already, complimenting that ridiculous staircase not fit for a place of business, trying to think of something nice to say about you and not being able to think of anything.”

The sitting room was elegant, white and black like the rest of the salon. The built-in cabinets were painted with a stylized floral motif, and were so unobtrusive most people thought the walls were paneled. Here and there floor-to-ceiling mirrors made the room look twice as large as it was. Hoffmann’s furniture, a simple sofa, a couple of ebony chairs, several tray tables, and a vitrine, managed to be both delicate and substantial. I was proud of the room, as I was of all the others. There was not one extraneous feature. I knew that it might look odd to someone used to so much more opulence and ostentation. I almost hoped she’d be shocked, or horrified. Instead she looked delighted. She almost smiled.

“I wish you’d let me copy this room at my house,” she said as she slid onto the white divan and lay across it as if she were going to take a nap. “I’ve been dying for an excuse to throw all of my furniture away. It’s so heavy and those carved armchairs with their horrible lion’s feet make me want to scream. Well, you’ve seen it, you know. My husband loves it, of course, the way he loves all those mounted heads in the library. He loves to shoot things. That’s why I never go into that room, they all stare at me so reproachfully for letting him kill them. But of course I can’t stop him. I imagine that if I stood in between him and a mountain goat he wanted to shoot, he’d shoot me to clear me out of the way.”

“Here are the books,” I said. As she made no move to open them, I sat down beside her and turned the pages for her. I couldn’t decide whether she was used to being waited upon, she wanted to humiliate me, or she was embarrassed to show her hands.

“He’s painting my portrait, you know,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t like the sketches. They make me look too pretty. I think I need something new to wear.” I waited for her to say something about the dress I had sent her, but it seemed that she was going to pretend it had never happened.

“Something to make you look ugly?” I almost laughed. “I’m so pleased you thought of me.”

“Something to make me look interesting,” she said. “Something new, something different.”

As I turned the pages for her I marked the designs she liked with little pieces of paper. After a while she brought her hands to her lap, though she kept the tips of her fingers curled under. Coral bracelets carved to look like snakes twisted up both arms.

“It would help me help you if you’d tell me about yourself, what you’re looking for, what you need.”

“I have no needs,” she said with a perfectly straight face, “only unfulfilled desires.” She stared off toward the window while I tried to think of a way to talk to her. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met, and I was new to the business of selling things to people. I hadn’t known how complicated it could be.

The nervous tapping of my foot finally broke her concentration and she turned to me, brusque now. “What can I tell you that you haven’t already read in some gossip column or been told by some chatty dinner partner? My husband is president of a sugar company. He is frequently away on business, as they say. I am in poor health and cannot have children. I rarely engage in outdoor activities. I read too much Heine and Goethe, I entertain, I make everyone around me as miserable as I can. Is that the proper kind of information?”

“Well, I won’t be measuring you for a riding habit, for a start,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, mollified. “Of course you would need to know these kinds of things.”

Over the course of the afternoon I learned that Hoffmann had just agreed to redecorate her entire house, they hadn’t signed the papers yet, but it was all settled. She had known Gustav for eight years. The night they met he had told her she looked like a biblical heroine. He had asked her to pose for him as Judith holding the head of Holofernes. She had been intrigued and flattered by the comparison, and had agreed. I was taking her measurements as she told me this. She stood there in her corset, as uncomfortable and helpless as a snail pulled from its shell, and I took perverse pleasure in her discomfort. She flinched when I touched her with the measuring tapes. She seemed unable to stand up straight. I resisted the temptation to stick her with pins.

At the end of the first week we had a small party at the salon, to celebrate the opening. Moser designed the invitation, of course, an etching of a young woman in front of a mirror, printed on handmade paper from the Wiener Werkstätte. It was sent to all in the Secession and Wiener Werkstätte, and a few others. Moser came early, bringing with him a gift, a bronze vase he had made. He carried it around the room with him, looking for the perfect place for it. He often collided with Hoffmann, who was acting as set designer, covering all of the sconces with blue wax paper until the salon looked submerged, an Atlantis. There was not a flower in sight; he wouldn’t let one in the door. Instead there were lacquered boxes and empty vases on the tables. They were as proud of the place as if it had been their own child.

When Hoffman arrived he had handed me a heavy object wrapped in tissue paper; it was a silver chalice he had cast, decorated with scrolls of vines and leaves. It was breathtaking and my sincere comments embarrassed him. Unlike Moser, he was unwilling to express an opinion on where to put it. The others helped me decide. On the mantel, said Moser, where everyone could enjoy it. In my bedroom, said Helene, it was too beautiful to share. But when Hoffmann said that every object he made was meant to be useful, not decorative, I knew where it should go. I put it on the cutting table to hold my pins. The customers might never see it, but the seamstresses would, I would; it would serve a purpose. It served it well; it stayed in that same spot for thirty-four years.