the little black dress, but Maman liked to boast that she herself had invented the little white dress.
An elderly maid, Solange, handled the cutting and basting of patterns. She said she had heard through the servants’ grapevine about the new maison de couture on the third floor of the apartment building, and when the maid demonstrated her sewing skills, Maman hired her on the spot.
The day-to-day workings of the shop were handled by the designer, Jean-Sylvain Biscottin, a small and tidy man with excellent manners. Mathilde whispered gleefully to Jeanot that Jean-Sylvain’s former employer, the celebrated Maison Bellemain, had summarily dismissed him for “taking advantage” of Madame Bellemain’s seventeen-year-old son in a changing booth. When Jeanot asked what it meant to “take advantage,” Mathilde informed him that this Jean-Sylvain was like his Oncle Yves; a homosexual, who lusted sinfully after other men. Mathilde was so scandalized by the tale of these men’s misdeeds that she couldn’t stop herself from grinning.
Jeanot only truly understood what Mathilde had told him when, on Jean-Sylvain’s first full day as Maman’s employee, Jeanot watched him very obviously and passionately fall in love with Papa, much to Mathilde’s amusement and Papa’s discomfort. Every time Papa was in the room, Jean-Sylvain seemed drawn to him like a moth to a flame. Jean-Sylvain’s eyes lingered wistfully on Papa’s retreating back, and he seemed to have a hard time focusing on his work while Papa was nearby. Jeanot knew something of these feelings from his breathtaking, sometimes very confusing moments with Babette, during which his heart would beat at a frankly alarming rate, and funny feelings inside would make him uncomfortable and uncertain. He’d seen movies and had read enough to know that this must, of course, be love, and the way Jean-Sylvain looked at Papa was exactly the way Jeanot felt around Babette.
Jeanot wasn’t sure what to think about this. After all, strange though it might have been for a man to love another man, he supposed that if Jean-Sylvain were to fall in love with any man, it at least made sense that it would be Papa. Papa was a remarkable man. Everyone loved him.
For Jeanot, the sewing room was a fascinating playground. There were buttons, endless spools of thread, machines that whirred and clattered, swatches of fabric of every color and feel. Half-naked women, too, on Thursdays, when the models came to try on that week’s creations.
Cécile and Fabienne were twenty-year-old cousins who arrived at ten in the morning, stripped to their soutien-gorges and culottes, garter belts and stockings, and walked about with complete insouciance. No one was shocked but the elderly Solange, who muttered darkly under her breath, but loudly enough for Jeanot to hear. In response, at least once every Thursday, Cécile would shed her brassiere right before Solange’s eyes and jump up and down to make her large round breasts bounce.
Jean-Sylvain hardly seemed to look at the girls. Running a maison de couture while staring at Papa, Jeanot surmised, must be hard work. Between fitting sessions, Cécile and Fabienne often played cards at one of the cutting tables and invited Jeanot to join them. Whenever she won a hand, Fabienne was fond of hugging the boy and squeezing his skull into her cleavage, which made him light-headed. He lost as often as he could.
Possibly because he had only just become aware of how attractive his Papa was to the world at large, Jeanot noticed when Papa also caught the eye of Cécile the model. Jeanot was sure he didn’t approve of that; he had never cared for Cécile, aside from her cleavage. Cécile was boring, unimaginative. She was modeling for Creations St. Paul, he’d heard her say, because it was a job and her cousin Fabienne had encouraged her, but she knew the limits of the company. Maman’s dresses, she proclaimed, would never make it into the fashion magazines.
Jeanot, certain that Maman’s dresses would greatly exceed Cécile’s mundane expectations, decided that Cécile was hardly worthy of being in love with his Papa, and dismissed her from further speculation.
The atelier provided the boy with endless entertainment. There were always strange yet kind people around and they doted on him.
Pascale, the dwarf accountant struck in childhood by poliomyelitis and now strapped to a wheelchair, had frightened him at first, but won him over with weekly gifts of tin cowboys and Indians. Trudy had become much friendlier when she realized leftover swatches of fabric could be made into fashion accessories. She came by the atelier daily, exchanged English lessons for remnants in which she swathed herself and paraded through the apartment.
Pascale the Accountant was joined by Marie-Louise, whose responsibilities within the concern were hazy. Marie-Louise was an artist who specialized in museum copies. An old friend of Maman’s from pre-war days, she was often found snoring on the living room divan with a half-empty bottle of Calvados at her side. Marie-Louise always wore the same clothes; a shapeless brown skirt, a white blouse with a frayed collar, and a grey sweater scarred by dozens of cigarette burn marks. One day, Jeanot watched her pass out on the couch with a lit Gauloise between her lips. He’d stood ten minutes, immobile, to see the ember reach Marie-Louise’s mouth. Just before it did, she spit the mégot out. It landed on her sweater in the center of her chest. Marie-Louise licked two fingers and extinguished the glowing ember without opening her eyes.
Kharkov, the Russian concierge, became one of Maman’s customers. He came to her with a sketchbook of White Russian Army uniforms, explaining that his sainted father had served under General Drosdowsky’s regiment against the Bolsheviks. To honor him, the concierge wanted a white jacket with gold epaulets, buttons and piping, black jodhpurs, and a red, white and gold kepi with a patent leather bill and chinstrap. He already owned the belt and boots which his son shined weekly.
Maman created the uniform but suggested Kharkov find a kepi at a second-hand clothing store, which he did. Within a week the concierge had his first fitting and Jeanot, sitting on the floor of the cutting room as his mother pinned and adjusted, thought Monsieur Kharkov looked very dashing.
From that day on, Kharkov wore his uniform every Sunday when he went to Russian Orthodox mass. Jeanot watched him leave on Sunday mornings, and listened to people whispering about him in the building’s lobby. The attire made him celebrated, the subject of much gossip, and he announced some months later that he had been elected president of the Sons of White Russia. He asked Maman to sew a few stripes of rank on his left sleeve. Next, he ordered an aide-de-camp uniform for his adopted son Rémy, a far simpler thing of khaki flannel sans piping of any color. Jeanot judged from the boy’s expression that it was not a comfortable outfit, so Maman lined the pants and shirt free of charge. Jeanot found the father and son an interesting pair when in uniform, but was glad his own Papa didn’t have to dress up in white and gold.
Shortly after this, Jacqueline Répaud, who lived on the rez de chaussée, decided she would surprise her ex-husband Clovis with a new uniform as well. Clovis had suffered frostbite during the Great War. Now, almost four decades later, the uniform he proudly wore on Bastille Day was threadbare and bulging around the middle. Though no longer married to him, Jacqueline still loved Clovis in a motherly way; they were each other’s confidants, far better, insisted Papa, as devoted friends than they ever had been as husband and wife.
Maman’s staff patterned the new uniform exactly on the original, which Jacqueline had acquired by telling Clovis she was going to have it professionally cleaned. When he saw the finished garment, Oncle Répaud wept, which Jeanot found somewhat embarrassing. Oncle Répaud pinned his medals on, shined his boots, sucked in his stomach and hired a photographer to take a photo of him seated next to Soldat, his three-legged dog.
Jeanot was particularly thrilled by the collection of scissors around the atelier. They were everywhere, shiny and sharp, too many pairs for anyone to keep track of. If he sat quietly in a corner of the atelier, no one noticed him and he could cut patches of fabric into parachutes to which he tied lead soldiers. These he dropped out of the third floor windows into the courtyard with varying success. Some floated elegantly down, swaying in the breeze. Others’ parachutes did not open and they hit the pavement with soft thuds, reducing the tiny figures to shapeless globs of colored metal.
Chapter 10
Papa had found work as a freelance writer for a number of British newspapers. He had what he called “an easy style” and liked human interest stories, though most