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 of what he filed was news. He wrote of the August strikes to protest a change in retirement age, of Charles de Gaulle and the newly formed Republican Union for Social Action, and of the first French airborne attack against Dien Bien Phu in what soon would be known as Vietnam. At the table, he tried explaining all of these varied interests and stories to Maman and Jeanot, and Jeanot, determined to be a man of the world like his magnificent Papa, pretended to be interested, but could never manage it for very long.
While Papa wrote and Maman sewed, both mostly oblivious to the complicated emotions of their employees, Jeanot watched as both Jean-Sylvain and Cécile vied for his Papa’s attention.
Jean-Sylvain’s tactics relied on appealing to Papa’s pride. Papa was a handsome man; inches taller than the average Frenchman, and he knew it. He didn’t smoke and his clothes never smelled like Gauloise butts, like so many of the fathers of Jeanot’s friends. Papa had a marvelous speaking voice, an easy gait and a winner’s Yankee smile. He’d been in the war, too; a Free French who actually knew Le Général, a decorated fighter too modest to ever mention his medals. Papa was close to being the perfect man, thought Jeanot, and Jean-Sylvain obviously agreed.
Under the pretext of designing some new men’s apparel, Jean-Sylvain took Papa’s measurements efficiently and without any hint of pleasure. He measured Papa’s shoulders, his chest, the length of his arms, and with trembling fingers the inseam of his trousers. He casually asked whether Papa dressed left or right, and when Papa admitted that he didn’t know what that meant, Jean-Sylvain explained with suspicious airiness that it had to do with Papa’s private parts. In which pant leg did Papa put them when he dressed in the morning? “The left,” Papa answered. Jean-Sylvain and Jeanot both saw Papa blush and Jeanot wasn’t too pleased with that. Jean-Sylvain remained stone-faced.
Cécile took a remarkably similar tack, appealing to Papa’s pride as well. Papa, who had visited America before the war, had decided to teach his family basic English. Cécile spoke a smattering of English. She’d spent a week in London before the war, she said, and for three days taken a British lover of little skills. Now, she sought Papa out at every opportunity, asking for the translation of this word or that. Papa said she had a good accent, and soon they were exchanging greetings, jokes and asides in English.
Papa may have been
