The Property of a Lady (36 page)

When she opened the lilac envelope later that night, she found four crisp ten-dollar bills. She knew Elise’s dresses cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, but forty dollars for only four days’ work! She could pay Rosa back her five dollars, pay her rent, pay off her new coat, buy Azaylee
the new boots she needed, and there would still be enough left over for food. She could even pay Zev Abramski back ten dollars. Missie laughed; she just couldn’t wait to see his face when she gave him the money and told him her story tomorrow at the Ukrainian café. Why, she could even take
him
to supper this time.

Zev stared at the ten-dollar bill lying on the table between them and then at Missie. She looked different: stronger, bursting with energy as if life’s spark had somehow been rekindled.

“So,” he said quietly, “you found luck with the job?”

“Oh, Zev,
what
luck. And
what
a job!” She laughed gaily and people turned to stare curiously at them as she began to tell him all about it. “Of course,” she ended, “I haven’t actually done a real fashion parade yet, and to tell you the truth I’m scared. I mean, it’s one thing doing it for Madame Elise, but quite another with all those smart women watching. Besides, the other mannequins are jealous. I can see it in their eyes. It’s because Madame Elise is paying so much attention to me and because a newcomer is replacing Barbara instead of one of them.” She sighed. “Still, there’s nothing I can do about that.” He nodded silently and she eagerly. “Now I can give you ten dollars each week until my debt is paid in full, with the proper interest of course.” She sighed happily, “Oh, Zev, you can’t imagine what it will mean to me, not being in debt. Soon I can begin to look for a new apartment, maybe move farther uptown, put Azaylee in a good school!”

He stared at the ten dollars on the table. In three more weeks she would have repaid her debt and a few weeks after that she would be gone, back to the world from which she came. He felt a tugging at his heart as if a great weight were dragging him down. Missie was going to
leave him. She was going to a carefree world full of light and laughter, a world he didn’t understand but where he knew she belonged.

“Zev?” Her eyes held a question and he stared back down at the ten dollars, the symbol of her freedom.

“You are not happy for me?” she asked, puzzled.

“I am happy for you,” he admitted, “but it means you will go away from here and I will never see you again.”

“But of course you will.” She took his hand across the table, gazing at him earnestly. “I looked forward all week to seeing you tonight, Zev. I wanted to share my good news with you. You and Rosa are my dearest friends.” She smiled tenderly. “I’ll never forget you, Zev Abramski, and ‘uptown’ is not a million miles away. We shall still keep our Sunday night dates here at the café. Why, they even save our table for us now, and they play my favorite songs.”

He knew she meant it, but he knew it was not the answer to his problem. The gap between Missie O’Bryan’s life and his own was immense. She was poor by circumstance, he was poor because he was born to it. She was educated, he was ignorant; she was tall, beautiful, any man would adore her; he had never been loved by anyone. And what was there to love in a young unattractive immigrant pawnbroker from Orchard Street?

Zev stared silently down at the sidewalk, seeming lost in his own thoughts as they walked back to Rivington Street. “Don’t worry so,” she whispered, touching his cheek tenderly as they said good night. “After all, I’m still here, aren’t I?” She kissed him lightly and ran into the apartment house. “See you next Sunday,” she called as she closed the door.

Zev waited until he saw the lamp go on in her room and then he walked slowly around the corner to Orchard Street. The shop door tinkled with the same sound he had been hearing for the last thirteen years, and for the first
time the bell didn’t sound like the ring of security. Instead it sounded like the knell of bondage.

He walked through to the small, dark, silent rooms he called home, turning up the gas lamps and noticing how worn and dreary everything was. There was no expression of a person in here, he thought, no one could tell it was Zev Abramski’s home. He was just an ignorant immigrant Jew plying a mean trade, and all his dreams of sharing his solitude, his reading, his music, were gone; they lived only in his head. It was all meaningless. Missie was a lady, and once she had repaid her debt he would have no place in her life.

After taking off his coat, he sat at the piano and ran his fingers tentatively across the keys, playing a Chopin etude. He had always thought of this piece as Missie’s music—soft, silken, gentle—but tonight he had seen another side of her. Suddenly he began to play a mazurka, a gay, dancing snatch of music that made him smile as he remembered her lovely face, so vivid with excitement. He might not be an artist, but he could paint his love in music.

Monday could not come soon enough for Missie. She was up at six, heating the kettles of water for the zinc hip bath and being as quiet as she could so as not to wake Azaylee, still sleeping the all-out slumber of the very young.

She paused by the sagging brass bed to look at her, promising silently that soon everything would change. They would have a proper apartment, she would go to a good school, there would be good food again, good clothes. Madame Elise would be their savior and she would do her very best to be a good mannequin.

“I don’t want a
good
mannequin,” Madame Elise told her angrily later that morning. “What I need for my clothes is a
great
mannequin, a wonder-girl, so
ravissante
, so alluring, and yet so ladylike that all those rich women will think they can be like that too if they buy Elise’s
dresses. Hold yourself taller, no, taller even than that … stretch your neck from your shoulders, stretch your spine from your waist, there, that’s better. You walk so beautifully, Verity. Just relax, let your pretty head droop forward a little on that so,
soooo
fragile neck, remember you are clothed in gossamer, you cannot possibly look earthly.
Please
, Verity!”

She sighed loudly. Missie heard smothered laughter in the background and knew the other girls were enjoying her humiliation as Madame put her through her paces for the hundredth time that morning.

“Try again,” Madame said loudly. “No, wait. Miranda, come here and show Verity what I mean.”

Beautiful blond Miranda loped elegantly across the salon, one hand on her hip, the other arm swinging, her hand outstretched. She stopped in front of Madame and Verity, one foot prettily in front of the other, the fingers of her beringed hand spread at her throat, eyes disdainfully half closed as if she scorned to look at them.

“You see,” Madame exclaimed triumphantly,
“that
is what I want. Exaggerate!
Viens
, Verity, try again.”

It was a relief when Madame left for a consultation with one of her out-of-town clients at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The fitter told Missie she charged them a thousand dollars just to advise them on what colors to wear and what fabrics and styles would suit them best. “And then they come here and buy everything she has suggested,” she told Missie with a laugh. “But you’ve got to hand it to Madame, those women leave the salon looking better than they’ve ever looked in their lives. Madame always says that’s one of her secrets. The husbands are so pleased they don’t mind paying up.”

Missie touched the soft folds of her violet chiffon dress encrusted with tiny silver beads; it was beautiful and felt light as a breeze against her leaden limbs. She stared despairingly in the mirror, drooping with tiredness. The dress was sleeveless, cut in a deep V front and back,
sashed around its low waist with a tasseled silver rope. The skirt was daringly short, cut to midcalf and draped over the hips with a floating panel at one side. She knew she should look like Ariel in it, but right now all she felt like was Puck.

“Can’t turn an ugly duckling into a swan, can you?” Minerve’s voice said mockingly behind her.

“And you can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear,” Minette said with a giggle.

Tall, raven-haired Minerve strode toward her menacingly. “That’s my job you’ve taken,” she whispered threateningly, “but don’t think I’m going to let you get away with it. I’ll have you out of here before you know it.”

Then she said loudly, “I’m having lunch with Alphonse today. That’s the Duke di Monteciccio to you,” she added for Missie’s benefit, sweeping through the door.

The fitter sighed. “And she thinks she’s already the duchess,” she muttered. “It would be good riddance if she did get married and leave, she’s a real trouble causer. Better watch out for her, darlin’, or she’ll steal your silk stockings, your job—and your boyfriend.”

Missie decided Minerve was the least of her problems; the first was to learn how to stand like an Elise mannequin instead of the way that came naturally.

She practiced all afternoon at the mirror, stretching taller the way Madame had told her and drooping her neck forward until it threatened to break. She placed one foot in front of the other, copying Miranda, jutting her hip and clutching her throat, but all she looked like was a terrified silent movie heroine. And she sashayed up and down the salon bestowing haughty glares on an invisible audience of snobbish society women until her feet and her head ached.

“It’s no good,” she told Rosa despairingly later that night, “I just can’t seem to do it right and I feel such a fool, mincing along the way Miranda does. Nobody walks
like that, Rosa, so why should a mannequin, just because she’s showing off the clothes?”

“Then why not do it your own way, instead of copying them?” Rosa suggested. “Do whatever feels natural to you, Missie. I’m sure it will work.”

“I don’t know.” Missie sighed doubtfully. “Madame told me this is the way they do it in Paris, and I suppose she knows best. Anyway it’s too late now, tomorrow is the big preview fashion parade. Oh, Rosa, I’m so scared. What if I make a mess of it? What if she fires me?”

Her face had lost all its happy glow. It looked white and pinched again, and Rosa couldn’t bear it. “Of course it’ll be all right,” she reassured her. “You will look just beautiful and Madame Elise will sell all her dresses and you will marry a millionaire. After all”—she laughed—“that’s the way you told me it would happen, didn’t you?”

Missie laughed too, only she wondered why it suddenly sounded so hollow, as if she didn’t really believe it anymore.

At the dress rehearsal the next morning, a small orchestra ran through tunes from the latest Broadway shows while workmen hammered the final nails into a wooden platform that had sprung up overnight down the center of the room. Hundreds of little spindly gold chairs were being carried up the stairs and cleaners were polishing chandeliers and windows. Soon a purple velvet carpet covered the platform and lilac chiffon drapes surmounted by Madame Elise’s signature coronet disguised the entrance to the dressing room from which the girls would emerge.

Inside the dressing room was pandemonium, with fitters making last-minute adjustments while the girls complained their feet ached, sitting impatiently in front of the mirror while the hairdresser tried to make up his mind what to do with them.

When it came to Verity’s turn, Madame warned him not to cut her hair. “But just here at the front,” he protested,
“a slight wave over the forehead, a few tendrils at the sides….”

“Eh bien
, a few tendrils is enough,” she agreed. “I want it as glossy as a horse chestnut, long, straight and silky. We can put it in a chignon when necessary.”

Dresses, shoes, hats, and complete ensembles were lined up with the proper accessories ready on shelves: gloves, furs, shoes, matching silk stockings, and the yards of the enormous
faux
pearls Madame had decreed should be worn by everybody this season, even those who could afford the real thing.

At three o’clock the great double doors to the salon were thrown open and Elise hurried to greet her guests. Verity stole a look at the audience rapidly filling the rows of little gilt chairs. The guest list read like a list of New York’s elite four hundred, and to her surprise there were men as well as women, standing in the back, talking together and every now and then casting a discreet glance at the women. They were all dressed so smartly anyway she wondered why they needed anything new. But that was the lure of Madame Elise. None of them could afford to be seen in last year’s fashion—only the latest would do.

She turned back to the dressing room, glancing at the clock. Ten minutes to go. Her stomach churned and she bit her lip nervously as she sat in front of the mirror while the stylist powdered her face and dusted her cheekbones with rouge, pursing her lips while she applied the Violette Elise lip rouge. “I feel like an actress,” she murmured.

“And that’s just what you are,” the stylist replied. She looked at her in the mirror and smiled. “My, you look beautiful,” she said.

Missie crossed her fingers, hoping she was right. One thing she knew, she didn’t look a bit like Missie O’Bryan from Rivington Street.