Zoya (42 page)

“What are you doing with all that? Investing it?” She thought with a tremor of her late husband and his ventures on the stock market, but Simon was a great deal shrewder than Clayton. He had an instinctive sense for what worked, and in his case, what worked made a great deal of money.

“I've invested some of it, mostly in bonds, and I've put a lot of back in the business. I also bought two textile mills last year. I think if we start making our own goods, we'll do better than we do with some of our imports, besides which, I can control the quality better that way. Both of the mills are in Georgia, and
labor is dirt cheap. It's going to take a few years, but I think it's going to make a big difference in our profits.” She couldn't even begin to imagine it, the profits he had just mentioned to her were staggering already. He had built the business up from nothing in twenty years. At forty, he had already made a vast fortune. “So, my love, if you want to open your own store, get on with it. You're not going to take food out of anyone's mouth,” he thought about it quietly for a minute as Zoya tried to absorb what she'd heard in the past half hour, “in fact, I think it might be a damn good investment.”

“Simon,” she set down her glass and looked at him earnestly, “will you help me?”

“You don't need my help, sweetheart, except maybe to sign the checks.” He leaned over and kissed her. “You know more about this business than anyone I know, you have an innate sense of what's right and what's not. I should have listened to you about the Shocking Pink when we were in Paris.” He laughed good-naturedly, he had eaten all his pink fabric, the orders for it just hadn't come in. New Yorkers weren't ready for it, except the handful who went straight to Schiaparelli and bought it in Paris.

“Where would I start?” Her mind was racing ahead, suddenly filled with excitement.

“You might look for a location over the next few months. And we could go to Paris in the spring so you could order some goods for a fall line. If you move now,” he narrowed his eyes, calculating quietly, “you could open by September.”

“That's awfully soon.” It was only nine months away and there would be a great deal to do. “I could have Elsie decorate it for me, she has an unfailing
sense of what people want, even when they don't know it.”

But he smiled gently at his wife, sparked by her own excitement, “You could do it yourself just as well.”

“No, I couldn't.”

“Never mind, you may not have time anyway. Between finding the location, hiring staff, and buying for the store, you'd have too much to do anyway to worry about decorating it on top of it. Let me think about this. … I'll talk to some people I know about looking for a location.”

“Do you mean it?” Her eyes danced with green fire, “Do you really think I should do it?”

“I sure do. Let's give it a whirl. If it doesn't work, we'll close it and take a loss after the first year. It can't hurt.” And she certainly knew now they could afford it.

She talked about nothing else for the next three weeks and when she took him for mass on Russian Christmas, she whispered to him for most of the service. One of his cronies in real estate had located what he thought was the perfect location, and she could hardly wait to see it.

“Your mother would faint if she saw you walking out of here,” she laughed as she looked up at him happily. The services hadn't even made her sad this time, she was too excited about what they were trying to put together.

She had seen Serge Obolensky there for the first time in months, and he had bowed politely when she introduced him to Simon, speaking first in English for Simon's benefit, and then chatting with him in her elegant Russian.

“I'm surprised you didn't marry him,” Simon said quietly, trying to hide the fact that he was jealous, but Zoya looked up at him and laughed as they drove home in the green Cadillac.

“Serge has never been interested in me, my love. He's too smart to marry poor old Russian titles. He likes the American socialites much better.”

Simon leaned over and kissed her as he pulled her closer to him on the seat. “He doesn't know what he's missing.”

The next day Zoya took Axelle to lunch, and talked excitedly about her plans. She had told Axelle from the first, and had told her nervously that she didn't want to compete with her directly.

“Why not?” Her friend looked at her in surprise. “Doesn't Chanel compete with Dior? And Elsa with all of them? Don't be foolish. It will be terrific for business!” Zoya hadn't thought of it that way, but she was relieved to have Axelle's blessing.

And when she saw the location Simon's friend had found, she fell in love with it on the spot. It was perfect. It had previously been a restaurant at Fifty-fourth and Fifth, and it was only three blocks from Axelle's. It was in terrible shape, but as she squinted her eyes, she knew it was just what she wanted, and better yet, the entire second floor was available just above it.

“Take them both,” Simon advised.

“You don't think it's too big?” It was huge, which was why the restaurant had failed. It had been too big for their small clientele, but Simon shook his head with his instinctive sense for what worked in business.

“You can do women's wear on the main floor, and
men's upstairs, and if it works,” he winked at his friend, “we can buy the building. In fact, maybe we ought to do that right now, before they get smart and jack up the rent too high. He made a few calculations on a scratch pad and then nodded. “Go ahead, Zoya. Buy it.”

“Buy it?” She almost choked on the words. “What'li I do with the other three Boors?”

“Rent them out with one-year leases. If the store's a success, you can take back a floor every year. You might be damn glad to have five floors one day.”

“Simon, this is crazy!” But she was so excited, she could hardly stand it. She had never even dreamed of owning her own store, and suddenly there she was, in the midst of it all. They hired architects and Elsie de Wolfe, and within weeks, she was surrounded by blueprints and renderings and drawings, there were samples of marble all over her library, fabrics, wood finishes for some paneling, the whole house was in a whirl as she made her plans, and Simon finally gave her a desk in his office and a secretary of her own to handle all the details for her. Cholly Knickerbocker even mentioned it in his column, and there was an article about it in
The New York Times.
“Watch out, New York!” the item said, “When Zoya Ossupov, the late great Countess of Axelle's, and Simon Hirsch, with his Seventh Avenue empire, joined forces last July, they might just have started something big!” And the words were prophetic.

They sailed for Paris in March on the
Normandie
, to buy for Simon's lines, and to select some of the mainstays of Zoya's first collection. And this time she picked all the things she loved, without having to defer to Axelle. She had never had as much fun in her
life as shopping with him, and Simon gave her an unlimited budget. They stayed at the George V, and enjoyed a few rare moments alone which were like a honeymoon for them. They arrived back in New York a month after they'd sailed, happy and refreshed and more in love than ever. Their homecoming was marred only by the news that Sasha had been expelled from school. At twelve, she was becoming a little terror.

“How did that happen, Sasha?” She spoke to the child quietly on their first night home. As he had the year before, Nicholas had come to the ship to meet them but this time in the new Duesenberg Simon had ordered before they stopped making them the year before. Nicholas had been wildly excited to see them, and then he had told Zoya the news about his sister. She had worn lipstick and nail polish to school, and she had been caught kissing one of the teachers. He had been fired summarily, and Sasha had been expelled, without hope of being reinstated. “Why?” Zoya asked again, “what could have made you do it?”

“I was bored,” Sasha shrugged, “and going to an all-girl school is stupid.” Simon had paid the tuition at Marymount for her, and Zoya had been so pleased to see her in a better school than the one Zoya had been able to pay for. Nicholas had stayed on at Trinity, as he had before they were married, and he loved it there. He had two more years to finish before he went to Princeton, like his father before him. Sasha had lasted six months at Marymount and now she was out on her ear, and she didn't even have the grace to look embarrassed. There had been only two male teachers in the entire school, the music teacher and the dance master, the rest were nuns, and even then
Sasha was able to make trouble. Zoya wondered if it was Sasha's way of punishing her for going away for so long, and being so excited about her new business. For the first time, she had second thoughts but it was too late now. She had ordered all her American lines before she left, and now she had bought and paid for the rest of it in Paris. She had to open, no matter what. And it was a hell of a time for Sasha to be making trouble. But Sasha wasn't the only thing on her mind now.

“Doesn't this embarrass you at all?” Zoya asked, “Think of how kind Simon was to send you there in the first place.” But the girl only shrugged, and Zoya sensed that she hadn't gotten through to her, as she went back to their bedroom and found Simon unpacking. “I'm so sorry, Simon. It seems so incredibly ungrateful of her to have done this.”

“What did she say?” Simon turned worried eyes to his wife. There was something in Sasha that had troubled him in the last few months. She had looked at him hungrily more than once, in a way that would have inspired a less decent man to treat her as a woman and not a child, but he never said anything about it to Zoya. He simply went on treating her like a little girl, which egged her on more. But she was only twelve years old after all, and incredibly pretty. She had her maternal grandmother's icy Germanic beauty, and her mother's Russian fire. Together, it was a fearsome combination. “Is she upset?” he asked, as Zoya shook her head in dismay.

“If only she were.” She had seemed totally without contrition.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Look for another school, I guess. It's a little late in
the year for that.” It was already mid-April. “I could have her tutored until the fall, but I'm not sure that would be good for her.”

But Simon liked the idea. “Maybe you should, for now. It would take the pressure off her.” As long as the tutor was a woman. But the only one Zoya found was a nervous young man, who assured her that he could handle Sasha without any problem. He lasted exactly a month and then fled in terror, without explaining to Zoya that she had greeted him the previous day in a nightgown that was obviously her mother's, and after that had told him that she wanted him to kiss her.

“You're a brat,” Nicholas still accused her night and day. At nearly sixteen, he was a great deal more perceptive about her than her own mother. And she fought with Nicholas like a cat, scratching his face when she grew angry. Even Simon was concerned about the child, but just when he'd almost given up hope, she would become submissive and surprisingly charming.

The construction at the store was going unbelievably well, and by July it looked as though they would be open in September. They celebrated their anniversary at a rented house on Long Island that year, two days after Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. Nicholas was fascinated by her, and he told Simon secretly that one day he wanted to learn how to fly. Charles Lindbergh was his childhood hero. He had been equally fascinated by the
Hindenburg
, the dirigible that had exploded over New Jersey in early May. Fortunately, when he had tried to convince Zoya and Simon to travel to Europe on it, Zoya had been leery of it, and they had wanted to travel by
ship anyway, in memory of their crossing the year before on the
Queen Mary
.

“Well, Mrs. Hirsch, what do you think of it?” Simon stood in the shoe department of the women's floor in her new store in early September. “Is it everything you wanted it to be?”

Tears filled her eyes as she looked around her in silent wonder. Elsie de Wolfe had created an atmosphere of beauty and elegance in pale gray silk with pink marble floors. There were soft lights, and vast arrangements of silk flowers on beautiful Louis XV tables. “It looks like a palace!”

“Nothing less than you deserve, my love.” He kissed her and that night they celebrated with champagne. The shop was to open the following week with a glittering party attended by the cream of New York.

Zoya had bought her own dress for the opening at Axelle's. “This will be good for business! I might just have to say in my next ad that Countess Zoya shops here!” The two women had become fast friends, and they both knew now that nothing would change that.

Zoya and Simon had labored long and hard over the name for her store, and finally with a gleam in his eye Simon had chuckled. “I've got it!”

“So do I,” Zoya smiled proudly, “Hirsch and Co.”

“No,” he groaned at the sound of the unromantic name. “I don't know why I didn't think of it before. ‘Countess Zoya’!” It seemed too showy to her, but finally he had convinced her. It was what people wanted, to touch the mystery of the aristocracy, to have a title even if it meant buying one, or in this case, buying the clothes that a countess had selected for them. The items in the columns were endless
about “Countess Zoya,” and for the first time in years, Zoya went to the parties she was invited to. She was introduced as Countess Zoya, and her husband, Mr. Hirsch, but everywhere the socialites and the debs flocked around her. And she always looked exquisite in the simple gowns she wore, from Chanel or Madame Grds, or Lanvin. People could hardly wait to see the store, and women were convinced that they would emerge looking just like Zoya.

“You've done it, my friend,” Simon whispered the night of her opening, the place was packed with every important name in New York. Axelle herself had sent her a tree six feet high of tiny white philanopsis orchids.
Bonne chance, mon amie, Affectueusement, Axelle.
the card had read as Zoya regarded it with tears in her eyes, and looked adoringly at Simon.

“It was all your idea.”