Estella found her next job with relative ease. Even though America wasn’t fighting in the war, it had called up men for military service and so women were needed to fill positions in the fashion workrooms of Manhattan. She started at Maison Burano, an upscale New York couturier where she thought she’d be in the thick of things, rubbing up against ideas she could admire. But the couturier was so derivative in its styling that Estella thought they might as well hang up a sign out the front that read: “The American Home of Chanel.”
Still, the work was easy, sewing dresses she’d sketched two seasons ago. Maison Burano made variations of the best-sellers, altering a neckline a quarter of an inch or changing a cuff, never straying from the basic shapes all American dressmakers had deemed were in fashion—based on what they’d seen in Paris—never once considering what women actually wanted to wear in New York City.
After only a month, the première was so impressed with her work that she allowed Estella to help at the client fittings, which was how Estella got into trouble. The première had been called out of the fitting room for a moment and, as Estella studied the tall woman in the dress before her, she couldn’t resist making the sleeves less roomy, more sculpted, pinning them in, changing the line. Chanel had always wanted the woman to come first, to be noticed before the dress, and Estella believed that now, with the sleeves molded to the woman’s elegant arms rather than camouflaging them, she’d achieved just that.
She stood back with a satisfied smile until the première returned, took one look at the sleeves and hissed, “Excuse us,” to Estella.
“You seem to have made an error with the sleeves,” she murmured once they were out of earshot of the client.
“Oh no,” Estella said with genuine enthusiasm. “I’ve made an improvement.”
“It’s not your job to make improvements.”
“But it looks so much better,” she pleaded.
“It’s not the fashion,” the première snapped back. “You’re a seamstress. How would you know what the ladies of the Upper East Side want to wear.”
“I live on the Upper East Side,” Estella retorted, which was true, even though she knew very well that the Barbizon Hotel for Women was not the kind of accommodation the première was referring to.
“I hope you have some money tucked away in your Upper East Side home because you no longer have a job here.”
Just like that, Estella managed to get herself fired again. Nobody in American fashion had foresight. Nobody wanted to give anything new a chance. As she packed her things, she could hear the exclamations of the client. How much she loved the dress. Especially the way it flattered the arms, made them look so graceful. Could she order one in black and one in red?
“Of course,” the première purred.
Estella waited for ten minutes for her to come back and apologize. But that didn’t happen. Maison Burano sold two dresses with Estella’s sleeves and Estella walked out the door with nothing.
Later, at the Barbizon, Janie was sympathetic. “Perhaps it’s a blessing. Maybe now you’ll find a place that appreciates your talents.”
“I hope so,” Estella said, although she doubted it.
That night, the night of her twenty-third birthday, she wrote to her mother again after Janie had fallen asleep, the tenth letter she’d written, all of them unanswered. She’d asked at the post office and they’d told her that letters might be getting through to Paris but they certainly weren’t coming out. The Germans didn’t want the world to know what they were up to. All she could do was curse the man she’d given the maps to in Paris for separating her from her mother and then spin a story of how happy she was, hoping that with every word she wrote, she might sustain her mother through whatever she was facing.
Janie had been lucky enough to gain employment as a house model at Hattie Carnegie, a made-to-measure salon, and Sam was cutting for a ready-to-wear establishment at 550 Seventh Avenue and seemed cheerful enough about it.
“It’s a different set of skills to the House of Worth,” he said to Estella and Janie one night when they all went out for a drink together. “I’m enjoying it. The clothes are awful, but I wonder if it’s a better skill to have for the future.”
“What do you mean?” Janie asked.
“What do you wear to work?” Estella asked her, knowing just what Sam was thinking. “It’s not like twenty years ago, not even like last year, before the war. So many women work now. We don’t have time to dress for the day, to dress again for home, and then again for dinner. We need clothes to wear to work, to wear out for a drink afterward; something that can be as wearable behind a desk as it can be on a date after work.”
“Because you go out on such a lot of dates after work,” Janie said dryly.
Estella laughed. “Married men and elderly tailors are the only men I meet at work so I don’t have much opportunity for dating.”
So she went back to Seventh Avenue for her next job because she thought Sam was right; ready-to-wear was a business that suited the times more so than couture which now seemed as much of an aberration—given that across the ocean men were dying—as newspaper pictures of Germans at the Ritz.
In a clothing factory, working with the seamstresses, she began to see that it might be possible to marry America’s talent for mass production with her own original designs. She learned a hell of a lot about the need in ready-to-wear for fewer pattern pieces and cheaper fabric. She learned what each machine was for—the spreader to lay out each piece of fabric atop the other without stretch or wrinkles, the grader for changing the pattern to each different size. She heard about factor banks for the first time and began to understand the risks of a ready-to-wear business—that she would need loans from a factor bank based on an order from a retailer because it was usually ten weeks from the time an order was placed until the time it was paid for. An enterprise like Stella Designs would require her to save up a lot more money than she’d first thought.
She held her tongue for longer than she’d managed to at Maison Burano but when she was asked to sew a bias cut in a way that made the fabric stretch over the tummy and wrinkle at the hips, the ache in her jaw reminded her that she couldn’t possibly swallow any more words.
Fired from three jobs in five months. Her résumé was so bad that, after being unemployed for a fortnight, she took the only job she could get: at a furrier, so far below 550 Seventh Avenue that it might as well have been Battery Park. The Fur District. And Estella’s job was to be the drudge who swept the floors and hefted the furs and did nothing skillful at all.
“I worked in an atelier in Paris,” she said sharply to Mr. Abramoff, the workroom supervisor. “I can probably sew better than you can.” As soon as she said it she wanted to stuff a handful of fur in her mouth. Why, why, why couldn’t she learn? “I’m sorry,” she apologized.
In response, Mr. Abramoff passed her a broom. “Now you sweep.”
Sweep the damn floor, she ordered herself. It’s a means to an end. Money, which she needed if she was ever going to do anything about the dream that she and Janie and Sam had toasted to months before. Real life began at six o’clock at night, she reminded herself, when she worked on her own sketches, between smoking cigarettes at the Barbizon and chatting to Janie.
The furrier was even viler than she’d thought it would be. Workers doing one thing only: sleeves, or collars, never the whole garment. A head bent over a sleeve until it was finished, then another sleeve and on again, an endless parade of something more boring than any sheep on a sleepless night could ever be.
By the end of the day, Estella’s arms ached from the weight of the furs and the constant sweeping but she still had a job and she just smiled at Sam and Janie when they went out for a drink that night. But after only a fortnight, she caught Mr. Abramoff looking up her skirt when she was bending down to collect scraps of fur and she suddenly understood why he was always so desperate for her to sweep.
She pushed the broom across a worktable laden with cut sleeves and collars and swept everything—pattern pieces, fur, and pins, onto the floor. Then she passed Mr. Abramoff the broom. “Since you enjoy watching the sweeping so much, you can have a turn yourself.” She picked up her purse and stalked out.
“Four jobs in six months!” she moaned later to Sam after she double-kissed his cheeks—a habit Janie had now decided to acquire too, especially when handsome men were around—and sank onto the bed in Sam’s new apartment at London Terrace in Chelsea.
A large, modern building of identical apartments that was really too square and angular and ordinary for Manhattan, its facade reminded Estella of the boulevards of Paris, all lined with symmetrical apartments too. She’d met Sam on his lunch break and he’d given her the key, told her to let herself in, that he and Janie would meet her there after work.
When Sam arrived, he made her a sidecar and sat on the chair while she lay on her stomach across his bed, as if she were in a sorority house, and bemoaned her fate.
“Do you regret walking out?” Sam asked, sipping a whiskey.
“Not for a minute!” Estella said emphatically.
“Then I have no sympathy for you.”
Estella threw a pillow at him. “You could at least pretend.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to trudge around tomorrow looking for a job. Again. At this rate, I’ll have worked everywhere there is by the end of the year.”
“There’s one place you haven’t worked,” Sam said.
“Where? The moon?”
“No.” He paused dramatically. “Stella Designs.”
“But that’s for later. When I have the money. I can’t do that right now.”
“Why not?”
Janie burst through the door with a grin on her face, arms laden down with magazines that they’d planned to spend the evening poring over, before they went out for a drink. “Get your glad rags on. We’re going to a party.”
“What party?” Sam asked.
“A proper get-dressed-up, swanky, putting-on-the-Ritz-style Christmas party down in Gramercy Park,” Janie said triumphantly. “One of the ladies I was modeling for today left her bag unattended with a bunch of invitations sitting prettily on top. I helped myself.”
“You stole party invitations?” Sam asked incredulously.
“Only three, so you can’t bring a date. But you’ll have us to escort,” Janie said as if that should make Sam perfectly content. “I’ve been in New York more than a year and despite my best attempts at flirting, I haven’t been anywhere near a society party. So we’re going. I stopped off and got our clothes,” Janie said to Estella. “I came to New York to find myself a husband and this will be the best place to do it.”
“I thought you came to New York to be a model,” Estella said in surprise.
“I don’t want to model forever. A husband with an apartment on Park Avenue, a summer house in Newport, and the ability to start up a trust fund for our four children would be just about perfect.”
“Really?” Estella said. “I had no idea…” Her voice trailed off. That your ambitions were so conventional, she didn’t say.
“You don’t plan to get married sometime soon?” Janie asked.
“No,” Estella said. Truth be told, she’d never thought about it. Marriage seemed meant for others, not for her, not now. Not when there was so much to do, so much that she wouldn’t be able to do if she married herself off to a man. “Would you really prefer that?”
“Who doesn’t?” Janie said. “Mademoiselle magazine’s latest survey said that only seven percent of women think you can actually have marriage and a career. It’s one or the other and I’m planning for a wedding.”
Estella didn’t know why she was so surprised. After all, many of the women at the Barbizon who she talked to in the dining room were all looking for the same thing: a man to marry. And, she supposed, Janie was the epitome of those women, always wanting to dress well, always on the lookout for an opportunity to smile at a man who might ask her out to dinner, and coveting, apparently, the natural finale: a ring on her finger.
“If I started making my own clothes, where would I do it?” Estella mused, in a tangential leap back to her earlier conversation with Sam.
“Right here,” Sam said. “What’s the point in having a perfectly good space in Chelsea, right next to the Garment District, that’s empty all day long?”
“I can’t work here,” Estella scoffed.
“Why not?” Janie asked, lighting a cigarette and lying down beside Estella on Sam’s bed. “You draw, Sam can cut for you at night, then you can sew during the day. When you’re ready, we just need to hire a room for a private showing where I’ll model everything and you’ll have so many orders that you’ll be able to take out your own lease at 550 Seventh Avenue.”
“You wouldn’t want me cluttering up your apartment,” Estella said to Sam.
“Course I would. Besides, I have selfish reasons for wanting you to do it,” Sam said cheerfully.
“Which are?”
“I want to cut that gold dress the way it should be cut.”
“Do you really mean it?”
“Yes.”
“So simple.”
“I don’t want to rain on your gold silk parade but,” Janie searched through the magazines she’d brought and extracted one, “last year, Vogue ran a spread called ‘Fashions America Does Best.’” Janie passed the magazine to Estella. “Play clothes, knits, and prints are, apparently, all we can do here.”
Estella flipped through the pages. “But who designed these?” she asked. “There are no names.”
“Nobody bothers to name American designers in the magazines. They’re not important enough,” Janie said.
“They don’t name the designers?” Estella repeated.
Sam shook his head. “Nope. Claire McCardell has to see her clothes bear the name Townley Frocks. Ask anyone on the street and they’ll tell you Chanel makes clothes. I bet they couldn’t name a single American who does.”
Estella stood up and began to walk in a semicircle around the bed. “Which means it’s not just about making clothes. It’s about making people believe that clothes made right here are every bit as good as Chanel’s and deserve to have the designer’s name attached to them.”
“And it’s about making them cheap,” Sam added.
“Affordable,” Estella corrected. “It’s obscene to make clothes that cost hundreds of dollars when there’s a war on anyway.”
“Janie,” Sam said, “have you got the one you were telling me about, where Vogue says there are four types of women? Leisured Lady, Globetrotter, Limited Income, and Businesswoman or something like that?”
“Here it is!” Janie said triumphantly, producing another magazine. She put on an exaggerated Upper East Side accent and read aloud: “The Businesswoman works at the office with concentration and efficiency from nine-thirty to twelve-thirty. Twelve-thirty to two: has her hair done at Charles Brock’s because she believes that a smart coiffure is one element of her success. While her hair dries, she has a manicure…”
Estella snorted. “It doesn’t sound like the Businesswoman has all that much work to do if she can take the afternoon off to get her hair and nails done. Are any of these people real? How many Globetrotters exist now there’s a war on? I want the women who actually work. Like we do. Real Women, they should be called. I want to make clothes for them that are comfortable, stylish, and have a little unexpected beauty.” Estella’s thoughts tumbled out, forming as she spoke them. “The flowers I used to make, I want those to somehow be a signature of the label.”
Janie raised an eyebrow. “That could work.”
Maybe it could. All she really needed was her sketchpad, her sewing machine, and a whole lot of bravado. With Sam cutting for her, she’d be better able to reduce the number of pattern pieces, to work out how to get them off her drawing paper and into finished form affordably. And if Janie modeled them—well. Nobody would be able to resist. She just needed customers.
“I need to make it work pretty damn quickly though,” Estella said. “Otherwise I won’t even be able to afford my cot in your room at the Barbizon.”
“That sounds like something we should toast to.” Janie’s eyes twinkled. “And the best thing about a party is the drinks are free.” She brandished her stolen invitations in the air.
Sam laughed. “She’s right,” he said to Estella. “All you need is a dress. And I know you have a spectacular gold one somewhere.”
“I brought it with me,” Janie said, pulling it out of her bag.
“Then I’d best get changed.” Estella ducked behind the screen in the corner and put on the dress.
Janie did the same, followed by Sam. Soon Sam was handsome in his tuxedo and Janie gorgeous in what should have been a severe black dress. It buttoned to the base of her neck and fell in a long, thin column to the floor. With Janie’s blond hair, voluptuous figure, and red lips, she looked as if she were just waiting to be unbuttoned, which was the effect Estella had been hoping for when she designed it.
They clinked glasses, took a final swallow of their drinks, covered up their finery with their coats—Estella ruing the cloak she’d had to leave with the inscrutable man in Paris and wishing she could afford something nicer than her day coat to wear out at night—then Sam hailed a taxi for Gramercy Park.
The taxi pulled up outside a house that loomed in a familiar way over the street. The streetlamp was out so Estella couldn’t see it very well but it made her shiver all the same and she pulled her coat tighter around her as if the December night had reached into her bones.
“Cold?” Sam asked.
She shook her head. “No. Just felt a ghost float past.”
“Let’s get into the lights and the champagne and there’ll be no more ghosts,” Janie said as she glided up the steps, winked at the doorman, passed over the invitations and had them all whisked through with barely a murmur. “Told you it’d be as simple as a Kansas model to get in here,” she said.
The party was smoky, but not enough to obscure the many sparkling gemstones worn by the women and which Estella took to be real. She was glad of her dress, which made her feel a little more as if she belonged. It didn’t take Janie long to find a man wanting to spin her around the dance floor, nor did it take Sam long to find a group of men playing poker and drinking whiskey, which he thought it was his duty to join. But he too was soon cajoled to join the dancers by a pretty brunette and then a redhead, before the brunette returned to claim him once more.
Which left Estella at the bar occasionally, and at other times on the dance floor as well, dragged out by a succession of young and ever drunker men who were all eager, although she kept declining, to show her the library, where she suspected reading aloud to her wasn’t what they had in mind. After the fourth such suggestion, she switched to French, pretended not to understand, and drank far too much champagne.
Which was probably why, when Janie appeared at her side, Estella said, more loudly than she should have, pointing to a woman some distance away, “Look at that poor, ruined Lanvin copy. I sketched that very dress at a show last season. If I’d known what they were going to do to it, I’d never have copied it.”
Janie followed Estella’s finger across to a woman dancing in a dress with a handkerchief skirt, made out of panels of white and black silk, and a black bodice held up at the neck by a collar of pearls.
“They’ve scrimped on the panels to save money,” Estella said. “It’s meant to be twice as full. It looks like a butterfly one wing short of a set.”
Janie laughed. “Any others?”
Estella twirled around and came face-to-face with a woman who had clearly overheard Estella’s commentary and who wore a bud of a smile that looked as if it would take more than sunlight to open. “You’re very sure of your opinions,” the woman said, her tone far from friendly.
Estella could see why. The woman wore a copy too, a calamitous version of one of Estella’s favorite Chanel gowns, one which was meant to skim the body like a lover’s hand. The Chanel original was of black lace, flaring out gently into a long skirt, a bouquet of white linen camellias arranged over the right breast, concealing some of the cleavage exposed by the heart-shaped neckline. In this woman’s version, the camellias were pinned too low so all you saw was the cleavage, the lace was poorly stitched to the lining so it rode up at one side, and the skirt collapsed to the floor, rather than falling gracefully down. The woman’s defensive air indicated that she suspected Estella knew the dress did not possess the couture bloodline it claimed.
“I just wonder why so much energy is expended on something that isn’t what it’s supposed to be,” Estella said, her tongue loose with champagne honesty, but trying to be kind.
“And what is your dress supposed to be?” the woman asked. “A little burst of sunshine?” The sneer was too evident to ignore.
“An original. Stella Designs. Come and see me when you’re tired of imitations.”
“Stella Designs. I’ll remember that.”
The woman stalked off and Estella couldn’t help feeling as if she’d just made a huge mistake. That, once again, she should have buttoned her mouth one sentence earlier. She reached for another drink—gin this time—and Janie spun back out onto the dance floor.
Soon after midnight, Estella heard the words, “Alex is back,” whispered around the party, accompanied by smiles from the women and the kind of frisson that an unexpected riff on a saxophone might bring. Estella wondered who could possibly cause such a commotion among people who seemed so hard to surprise.
“He’s as enigmatic as Gatsby,” one woman at the bar said knowingly to another, “and his origins are just as murky. I’ve heard tell that his father was a pirate on the Oriental seas.” The woman tittered, then continued her tall tale. “I know being a lawyer pays well but he seems to have more money than one could legitimately earn. Add that to lethal charm and you can see why all the women in the room are quivering right now.”
Estella smiled. A pirate with lethal charm was someone she should keep Janie away from. He didn’t sound like the marrying kind. She cast her eyes around the room, searching for Janie, but couldn’t find her. She walked around the perimeter, throwing a smile to Sam who had another young woman—blond now—comfortably ensconced on his knee, but Estella soon realized she was less steady than she should be. Home would be the best place for her. Janie was smart enough not to walk a pirate’s plank.
She found her coat, drew it over her dress, then walked to the very edges of the room where she hoped to find the door. But the shadows beneath the pillars, out of the light of the double-story void, were disorienting. She could hardly see anything. It didn’t help that the room whirled a little with her champagne vision.
“Alex!” a man called as he knocked against her in his rush, pushing her farther behind the pillar, spilling a little of his drink on her. “I heard the rumors.”
“They’re not rumors,” another man, the mysterious Alex obviously, replied cheerfully. “I’m back.”
“Until we run you out of the country again.” The first man laughed grimly while Estella shook his whiskey off her fingers.
“With you chasing, I’ll be in the country for decades,” Alex said. “Excuse me.” His voice was familiar. Unaccented, almost.
Before Estella had a chance to look up from brushing down her damp coat, she found herself swept into someone’s arms, a very unchaste kiss planted near her earlobe. “I found you,” the same voice—Alex’s—said.
Estella’s mind raced.
Who the hell was he? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of drunken and ginned-up nights at parties. It was too damned dark to see very much, just that his hair was dark and his lips were moving toward hers.
In a flash from a nearby cigarette lighter she caught a glimpse of two glittering brown eyes and the outline of a face that was séduisant, a word that she didn’t believe had an exact English translation, handsome being too insipid for what séduisant implied and seductive being too obvious, too showy. No, this man was so attractive it almost hurt to look at him: attractive in a reckless way—as if he knew precisely the effect his looks had on people—attractive in a way that was best avoided. But also memorable. Had she met him before?
The flare of the lighter was so quick that the impressions rushed over Estella in a moment. They were immediately plunged back into darkness before she could make out his features exactly, before she could trace back the path of a memory to discover where she might know him from.
Then this Alex began to kiss her in a way she hadn’t been kissed for a very long time—in fact, she’d never been kissed like this—and because it felt so good, she responded immediately, opening her mouth, searching out his tongue. One of his hands threaded through her hair so he could kiss her even more deeply and the other dropped to her hip, stroking the fabric of her coat, making the skin beneath burn.
The clawing of desire stronger than anything she’d felt before made her step backward, away from this man she didn’t know but who she was kissing as if she knew him better than anyone. His gaze remained fixed on her face, which almost felt like standing naked before him, her skin peeled back and her heart on view. And she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted this man to see her heart.
“Wait,” he said softly, a whisper of a word, so gentle, like his hand had been as it ran down her back, but also hungry, wanting something from her that she felt certain he got far too often and far too easily, especially if he made a habit of kissing women like that.
His hand reached out and his fingertips met hers but that was all; a tantalizing and magical hiss of flesh against flesh before she turned away.
Meet me at Jimmy Ryan’s tomorrow night, she thought she heard him say before the bodies of the dancers took her into their midst and the man, Alex, was swooped upon by voices both friendly and displeased. She stumbled once, twice, as if she were a sauced-up broad who couldn’t hold her liquor when she was, in fact, just stunned, knocked out by a kiss.
She somehow found the front door, felt the same shiver as she ran through the Gothic arch and down the steps, hailed a cab but then realized she had no money. So she walked the long, long way back to the Barbizon, alone, lonely, images of her mother playing across her eyelids in a desolate stream.
When she arrived, she didn’t bother to take off her dress, just fell onto the bed, curled on her side, and dreamed of being gathered against a man, naked, his arms wrapped around her, languorous and lovely with sleep.
When she awoke, it was morning and she curved her body back to feel the man but there was only emptiness and she recalled, in pieces, the night. The kiss. The man who was at once both familiar and strange, the realization that everything that had come after had just been a dream. A lump lodged in her throat, tears threatened her eyes.
Meet me at Jimmy Ryan’s tomorrow night. Had that been a dream too?