The Chameleon (12 page)

Just a few employees were taking inventory today to prepare for the Christmas rush, the burst of year-end revelry that would fill the dressing rooms of the new but already touted “28 Shop” for weeks to come. Field's expensive and deluxe “Store within the Store” was her mother's kingdom, and Violet had poured herself into it just as her clientele poured themselves into the newest pencil-slim fashions from Mainbocher and Claire McCardell. The September opening had been covered by every important magazine and paper in the country and hardworking Violet, finally rewarded for her years of service, had been appointed the new salon director.

The newest jewel in Field's crown was breathtaking. Joseph Platt, who had created the Hollywood sets for
Gone With the Wind,
had been dispatched to design the shop with the single instruction to “outmatch anything in the world—even the most fashionable establishments of Paris.” And so he did.

The twenty-eight dressing rooms were sinfully spacious and each decorated in uncompromised luxury. The “salonettes” were arranged in fourteen opulently designed pairs, with each room facing its twin in a circle around a grand oval foyer. The spacious, regal main salon, with its customer-flattering recessed lighting and hand-rubbed pink oak walls, was furnished with Louis XV gilt tables and Regency chairs covered with gold-studded turquoise velvet and silks. And if gossip ever had a home before, now there were twenty-eight private parlors for high society's greatest pastime, dishing the social dirt. Since each dressing room was decorated in duplicate, any customer could have her favorite room even if it was already in use by a rival, a friend, or the subject of another woman's unflattering remarks. One pair of dressing rooms was a dazzle of cut-glass sconces, beveled mirrors, and tufted rose-satin banquettes; another pair was done up in black marble trim and peach silk; while a third set of private salons, reserved for the viewing of casual hacking-around clothes, was covered with café-au-lait pigskin. English tea was served to the clients from elaborate silver services, and while the salesgirls walked softly and spoke in whispers, the noisy customers had a whale of a good time in the party atmosphere, trying on clothes and trading juicy tidbits.

And there was no tidbit juicier or more vigorously dissected than the long-running affair between Slim and Cyrus Pettibone. It had been six years since the day young Claire had brought the unsuspecting Mr. Pettibone home to tea. For four of them, knowledge of the quiet little romance had stayed within the protective quilted cocoon of Marshall Field's fitting rooms and immediate environs, whispered about and speculated upon by shop girls, society matrons, caterers, hairdressers, hem fitters, and down the fashion food chain. The latest news often circulated with malicious speed, moving along the telephone wires and onto the pastel carpet of the 28 Shop's fancy fitting rooms.

“Slim is taking elocution lessons so she can talk like his hoity-toity socialite wife,” a fitter confided to a customer.

“I don't think it's her elocution he's interested in.”

“Slim's got a body most models would kill for.”

“She could be killed for her body now, by Mrs. P.”

“Pettibone won't walk out on a wife and four daughters.”

“Not if he wants to continue to be on the board of the Art Institute.” Mrs. Armstrong poked her aquiline nose out of her fitting room.

“Not to mention the Chicago Stock Exchange.” Mrs. Dunworth inhaled.

“Slim won't be able to close this sale. Even if she bathes in Paris Nights all day long,” the Jean Harlow blonde modeling a satin figure-fitting evening gown drawled.

“I hear he's taking her to Paris.”

Every saleslady in the custom salon was struck dumb.

Mrs. Winterbotham's jaw dropped to her girdle. Too bad she couldn't run with it, but gossip wasn't “hard news.”

Every woman within earshot poked her head out of the dressing room, no matter what stage of undress she was in.

“But nobody's actually seen them together, have they?” she queried.

Miss Violet waltzed in with a gown draped over her arms. “Ladies, ladies, we can't wear rumors. Facts and fabric, that's what we deal with on Six.” Violet's singsong denials were Slim's best defense.

“Poor old Cyrus must have been seduced in his sleep,” Cora Woodnorth told two friends next door in the beveled-mirrored dressing room. Like a slinky incubus armed with a nightie from Lingerie on Field's fifth floor, they whispered to each other, Slim had aroused his desire, driving him insane for six years.

“And to think”—Hanna Rusk stamped her foot, splitting a stitched seam and sending an arsenal of straight pins flying all around the ultraplush fitting room—”I purchased that silver dinner suit from her only last week.” She shook off Slim's taste. She'd never wear that outfit again, out of deference to Millicent.

So the women customers closed ranks in the pinky beige foyer of the 28 Shop with the kind of unity only seen when one of their own was facing childbirth, breast cancer, or divorce, while the salesladies secretly rooted for Slim's success. And amidst the din, Cyrus was forgotten and forgiven, as if he had innocently fallen out of a tree, pants off and ready to go, and landed right in Slim's conniving lap.

Each time Cyrus had to cancel a romantic rendezvous, Slim fell onto the steady shoulder of her loyal friend Violet, who led her to their usual table at Trader Vic's for a good long cry. Slim, her mascara streaking down her cheeks, would ruin martini after mai tai as the colorful paper umbrellas stuck into the exotic drinks couldn't keep her tears from falling into her frosted glass. Gloomily, Slim would return to her apartment alone, slip into a black peignoir, smoke two packs of Gauloises, and retire to her bed, where she reread Fannie Hurst's
Back Street,
the popular tearjerker about a woman in retail who was also in love with a married man. And then Slim would be ready to face the world again.

Yet despite appearances, the years as a married man's mistress had been kind to Slim. He had, in fact, provided for her. Not only was the State Parkway apartment, where she lived with her Persian cat Chat and a canary for company, put into her name, but he also built a small stock portfolio for Slim that included five hundred shares in the Ice Capades. It made Slim feel very proud indeed to take Claire to an evening performance seated in the best box seats on the ice, her full-length mink coat, a Cyrus present, thrown around her shoulders to keep off the stadium chill, knowing she owned a little piece of the show. And Claire took it all in as just another dimension of her after-school education.

Well, here she was, not liking it, to meet her mother and the Aunties to select a dress for Cilla Pettibone's debut dance, just a fortnight away. Claire had been in the background of enough of these black-tie rites of passage to know that they were little more than chic cattle auctions where the sons of the wealthy could choose from among the daughters of the rich. With their imported, out-of-season orchids and papier-mâché stars, these evenings had in fact little to do with love and romance and everything to do with mergers and acquisitions. Claire sighed, squared her shoulders, and resolved not to deny the ladies their pleasure. Yet she worried sometimes over the weight of expectations they placed on her as if she, daughter of the hired help, with one quick spin around the dance floor would find true love, a husband, and financial security (in that order), just because she had on a pretty dress. Claire had no illusions. Having nothing to merge, she was not worth acquiring. The best she could hope for was a passing hors d'oeuvre, a waltz before supper with a nice boy who didn't mind twirling a nobody, and a quick smooch in the bushes. Auntie Slim had unwittingly shown her as much.

“Hi, Mother.” Claire smiled and leaned down to kiss Violet's powdered cheek and give her a warm squeeze.

“You work too hard, Mother. It's Sunday. I thought success meant you got to work less.”

“Success can only be measured by busy hands,” quoted Miss Wren, rushing up to Claire and offering her a Frango mint from a crystal candy dish usually reserved for the customers. “But don't eat too many, dear, we've picked out the loveliest dresses for you and then your mother is taking us all for Sunday supper at the Blackstone.” Miss Wren started to return the candy dish to its proper place but kept getting confused, between all the mirrors hanging as big as doorways around the salon.

“Wren, put those bonbons away!” Slim was directing this production. A strong-smelling French cigarette dangled from her fire-engine-red lips. Somehow the last couple of roller-coaster years had only made her more beguiling. “We're redoing Claire for the ball, girls, not fattening her up like an Armour hog for the slaughter!” She turned so quickly that a glimpse of a well-shaped thigh was exposed.

“Oh, that reminds me.” Violet was all business. “Where is the white velvet we have on hold for Bitsy Armour?”

Slim reappeared from behind a plaster Corinthian column with an armful of gowns that had been especially ordered for the gala debutante parties. A dozen girls were due in tomorrow for their fittings. As a buyer for the shop, Slim spent as much time in New York as in Chicago. Of course, before Hitler's invasion of France, she had spent a great deal of time in Paris, too, either buying or “copying” designs for her customers. These excursions quietly coincided with Cyrus Pettibone's overseas business trips.

Slim's travels had allowed her to befriend the great European couturiers, her favorite of whom was Coco Chanel. Chanel had closed up her design house when the Germans marched into France the year before, but Slim had her ways. She had coaxed the last two Chanels out of Paris via London. One was currently being steamed free of wrinkles by Madame Celine for Claire in the back room and the other, far more elaborate and costly, was sailing on the USS
Coolidge
for New York in Priscilla Pettibone's precise measurements, or at least the most recent measurements, for the youngest Pettibone had chronic weight fluctuations.

“Bring out the Dress. Our little Orphan Annie is here ready to be done over.” Slim called back to Celine, rolling up her sleeves. “Hurry up, Claire. Give me that coat. Your auntie Slim had to use every pull in her pouch to get Coco's seamstresses to whip up this masterpiece. It's straight from her sketches.” Slim smiled excitedly.

“Isn't Chanel fraternizing with the Nazis?” Wren worried, following at Slim's heels to the most grand of the fitting rooms.

“C'est la guerre.
A woman has to do what a woman has to do to keep her head afloat. Besides, I'm sure she doesn't really like them.” Slim picked up a lank strand of Claire's hair.

“What is your hair saying, Claire?” She frowned, dropping the strand, which fell in all directions full of static in the dry radiator heat of the store.

“Your hair is making no statement whatsoever. Not saying a thing.” She shook her own short, sassy, pitch-black hair.

“And just what, Aunt Slim, would you like it to say?” Claire laughed.

“Who you are, dear, who you're going to be. Men are very responsive to a woman's hair.” When her lips stopped moving, her smile was quite pretty.

“No, it's the legs. Everyone knows that” Wren pushed the fitting stool directly beneath the chandelier. Since she was top heavy, her thin legs were her best feature.

“Nonsense, you two,” Violet corrected. “It's brains and stability that a man wants in a woman. And that message can be conveyed by what she chooses to wear. Goodness knows I've dressed enough women held in high regard to know a thing or two here.”

Slim interrupted. “High regard? Well, all the men
I've
known would rather hold a woman in their arms!” She blew out her cigarette smoke, encasing her words in a puff of parentheses.

Violet soothingly adjusted the light in the fitting room to simulate the low evening light of a debutante party. “Now then, let's all get in the right mood.”

“Precision.”

“Right mood?” Claire rolled her eyes. She couldn't believe that one fussy old maid, a virgin for sure, one head-over-high-heels-in-love-with-love kept woman, and her mother, who hadn't been touched by a man that way in seventeen years, were now going to advise her on how to be alluring.

“Celine, aren't you done with that Chanel yet?”

“No, Madame Slim.”

“Well, in the meantime, let's see this deb dress. This one is simply to die. So chic.” Slim shook a Valentina at her niece. “Valentina dressed Garbo.” Wren helped Claire step into the folds of duchess satin.

“What's this dress saying?” Slim put her fist to her chin like Rodin's
The Thinker.

“It's saying I'm flat chested.”

“Yes, dear, we can hear it.”

‘Take it off me.” Claire struggled with the silk-covered buttons.

“To thine own self be true,” Wren comforted.

“Yes, but do we have to emphasize my faults? Don't I have enough of them as it is?” Claire groaned. “Poverty, social obscurity, breasts as small as our bank account.”

“Oh dear, we can fix that bust nicely with a little stuffing like I do all my ladies,” Violet said kindly, while tucking some tissue into the bodice and rebuttoning the back.

“Eleanor Roosevelt says, if you have to compromise, compromise up.” Wren pushed her hands up under her own full bosom. She hadn't completed a single day without an Eleanor quote since the day she sold her the knitting needles back in 1932. She read Eleanor's daily column, “My Day,” aloud every morning over coffee in the employees’ lounge.

The Aunties all took a step back, like fussy fairy godmothers, to assess their work so far.

“Well, the bosom looks fuller now.” Slim straightened the padding in the watersilk bateau neckline, adding curves to the poker-straight bodice.

“And the full skirt hides the fact you have no hips.”

“Well, you ladies have certainly camouflaged me.”

“We're just getting started.”

“Sure, but how do I get in the door? Sideways?” Claire turned counterclockwise on her pedestal to view her billowy silhouette.

“At last. The Chanel!” Slim exclaimed as Madame Celine finally appeared. A piece of couture designed by Chanel in her last season, 1939, the dress was embroidered, embellished, and hand-sewn by the couturiere's seamstresses, as a favor to Slim. The pale silk baby rosebuds at the bodice looked as if they had just been plucked from a secret garden.