What Disappears, page 24
The Martines paint chairs, tables, and even a piano designed by the young Pierre Fauconnet, who has devised completely novel ways to stain wood in colors that have never been seen on lumber before—an oxidizing bath of potassium bichromate to obtain a cherry color. Fuchsine for pink, and lead salts for gray. Following Monsieur Poiret’s general instructions for the design, the Martines paint lavish screens, panels, and murals, which he showcases throughout his house, both in the public and private rooms. Using their finest Kolinsky sable round brushes, they decorate the eau de cologne bottles, diffusers, and packaging for the perfumes of Rosine.
Every day is exciting, filled with a sense of satisfaction in working well and hard and learning new things—all sorts of new things. Naomi learns how to wriggle out of the grasp of men who, pretending to greet her, grab at her bottom while kissing her cheeks. There’s no remedy for the men who stare at the womanish chests of the girls who have jumped ahead of the others in the pace at which their bodies are changing. She has twice caught grown-up artists in romantic clinches with one of the older, tougher girls, who each time met her gaze with a brazen look of superiority. The monitress, with vague hints of disaster, ruin, and regret, has warned them all never to allow any man under their skirts, adding darkly that she should know. Naomi isn’t altogether sure what this means.
When she gets her period, she has the other Martines to turn to for advice and instructions about what to do—and sighs with relief that she hasn’t had to turn to her mother or Jeannette instead.
Mostly, Sonya hasn’t seemed to notice that her eldest is growing up, but treats her with the same, slightly distant tenderness that has worked well enough in keeping all three of her children functioning from day to day, each one playing her role and fulfilling her duties. Naomi knows that Jeannette, as far as help or guidance goes, is completely useless.
Sonya spends nearly all her waking hours filling the flood of orders for the fashion accessories desired by women rich enough to possess one or more of Paul Poiret’s dresses, coats, and gowns. The back room at her shop, as well as every available surface in Sonya’s bedroom, overflows with wooden hat-forms and Leghorn straw, aigrettes and plumes from the South American jungle, buckram and mousseline de soie, sparkly pailettes and silk rosettes, coq quills, Impeyan feathers, buckles, and beaver fur. None of her children will go into her room now because it makes them sneeze. Baila has a horror of the furry dead things. Finally, at Jeannette’s urgent request, Sonya moves everything downstairs to the shop. She works there late into the night, something she never would have been able to do before she and Jeannette moved in together.
On one of these nights, Jeannette instructs her nieces to sit, side by side at the kitchen table. “Here’s the thing,” she says after they’re all hunkered down, with uniformly glum expressions on their faces. “My indescribably stupid colleagues at the Opera Ballet have voted to go on strike.”
Olga’s eyes grow wide behind her glasses. It pains her to do so, but she swallows her antipathy. “To the barricades, ma tante! I will march with you.”
“Oh, don’t make me vomit! I would sooner cut off my feet than show up in a protest march with a gaggle of feminists and lesbians.”
Olga glares at her. Before she has time to formulate a comeback, Naomi pipes up, “Does that mean your pay will stop?”
“Well, at least,” says Jeannette, “someone seated here at this table has a brain in her head—and is, I might add, contributing to the cost of your feed.” She turns her gaze on Olga. “Which brings me to you, mademoiselle.”
Crossing her arms, Olga mutters, “What have I done now?”
“It’s not a matter of what you have done but what I want you to do.”
“Mama might have a say in it, whatever it is, when she gets home.”
“Ah, but she’s not home, Olga, is she?”
Naomi puts a protective arm around her sister’s shoulder and whispers into her ear, “Don’t react!”
Jeannette glares at both of them. How did she ever allow Paul to convince her this was a good idea?
“Perhaps,” says Olga, “you want me to put rouge on my lips and walk the streets to help pay for your champagne!”
This brings sharp, angry tears into Jeannette’s eyes. She rarely buys champagne! Standing taller, working hard to keep her voice even, she manages to smile at Olga. “I only thought how maybe you might want to try to go see someone at one of the newspapers. There might be an interest—you never know—in publishing one of your stories. Or essays. I don’t know what you call them.”
Olga’s face turns the color of beetroot. “My stories! How or why do you even know about my stories?”
Jeannette shrugs. “If you weren’t such a slob, I wouldn’t be forever needing to put your things away.”
“They’re my things, not yours. How dare you read my notebooks?” She’s crying now, which is rare for Olga. “How dare you?” she says in a much quieter voice, devoid of the pride and optimism that usually characterize everything Olga says. She feels, inside herself, a burning sense of shame. And then, wiping her eyes and taking a hard, deep breath through her nose, she says, “You’re right, Auntie.” Both Naomi and Baila look at her as if she’s lost her mind.
“She’s not right,” murmurs Baila. “She shouldn’t have spied on you.”
“Of course she shouldn’t have,” says Olga. “But she’s right that I should look for work—the sooner, the better. I’ll start today.”
“But you’re in school,” says Naomi, adding a little sulkily, “and you always win the top prizes.”
Ignoring her sisters, Olga says to her aunt, “Really, I can’t thank you enough for saying what you’ve said. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Jeannette says nothing, but only looks hard at Olga, trying to penetrate whatever game the child is playing now. She has no doubt that Olga is hatching some plan that’s bound to have unpleasant consequences. Half the time, she thinks she really would be better off if Olga ran away from home. She also knows that if the running away were ascribed to anything Jeannette did or said, there would be no forgiveness from Sonya—and Jeannette would be torn away not only from her sister but also from Baila, who is shaping up so well as a dancer and doing Jeannette so much credit as her teacher.
“Run along then, all of you—you’ve given me a headache again!”
It’s a Sunday and everyone in the household is still asleep when Olga wakes, before dawn, to light the stove. With the stealth of an intruder, she puts on the warm clothes she set out the night before, after her mother had gone to bed and Jeannette had returned home from the theater, taken off her makeup, had a glass of something, and passed out in her room.
When the winter sun glazes the rooftops across the way in red, Olga opens the door as quietly as she can, slips into the cold hallway, and down the stairs to the street entrance, to rue Saint-Sulpice.
She pauses, for a moment, looking out from the doorway onto the street, remembering the floods of two years before, remembering how the streets of Paris were transformed into a network of waterways, carrying everything to the Seine—eventually, to the sea.
Olga has read many descriptions, in both poetry and prose, of the sea. If she’d been born a boy, she thinks, she would make her way down to Le Havre or Honfleur—or perhaps all the way south to Marseilles—and sign on as a cabin boy on some tall ship headed for places unknown. She would work by day, doing whatever chores cabin boys are assigned to do—and by night she’d write by candlelight below decks. If words ever failed her, she would climb up into the rigging to be closer to the stars, close enough to find whatever words she was searching for.
The parti-colored cobblestones are slick with morning dew, glazed with ice in the frigid air. If she were a boy instead of a girl, she would be set for a much longer journey than her zigzag walk along the rue de Babylone toward the banks of the Seine. Ah, she could, perhaps, find a tall ship on the river—or, at least, a barge that would take her northwest to the English Channel. There would be no limit then to the ships she could find—nor the destinations to which they could take her. She wonders how old one must be to get a job on that new British ship she’s read so much about—the so-called Queen of the Ocean: the Titanic. If only Olga were taller, she might be able to lie successfully about her age and be part of its maiden voyage.
She knows that she will never grow tired of walking and dreaming along the pathways above the river, even though, this February morning, the wind is so brisk and the air so very cold. She walks faster, wishing there were a way to walk fast enough to sneak herself across that invisible border—away from all the petty and humiliating limits imposed on her, into the free and boundless territory of adulthood.
When she reaches the Avenue Anatole France, she sees more people than she expected to find at this hour. But, then, she’s rarely abroad this early on a Sunday.
At first she thinks the people must be hurrying to church. But then she notices that most of the thirty or so men on the sidewalk are hauling cameras and other bulky tools of photography—and she realizes that they must be members of the press. There are some women, too, and there is an unusually large number of policemen. Everyone is well bundled up against the cold, all of them hurrying, like she, to reach the Champ du Mars before the bells of Paris strike eight o’clock.
Olga can see the daring Franz Reichelt in her mind’s eye, as he was depicted, the day before, in le Petit Journal —his broad forehead and handsome face. His lavish handlebar mustache. The fiercely determined look in his eyes as he stretched out his arms to show off the wingspan of his vêtement-de-parachute—the garment he’s invented to save the lives of aviators when something goes wrong mid-flight. The flying tailor, the newspaper called him.
Olga read his boast and studied his photograph. A dressmaker, like Monsieur Poiret, although at a far earlier stage of his career. Like her mother. Another aspiring immigrant tailor from Middle Europe—he, from Austria—trying to find success in Paris. To find a way to make his work stand out among all the other couturiers of the capital of fashion. Lured by the 10,000-franc prize being offered by the Aéro-Club de France for the fabrication and demonstration of a wearable parachute that works.
Olga had thought, from that first day when she’d read about him, what a good match he’d be for Sonya. A brave man, like Olga’s late father. Clearly a forward-thinking man. Someone Olga wouldn’t at all mind calling Papa.
Reichelt has done several tests already, from lower heights than the one he now proposes—in one case, breaking his leg. Here, thinks Olga, is a man with the determination and perhaps the desperation to risk his life, in public, to accomplish something extraordinary.
Would she risk her life to accomplish something extraordinary? She thinks about the wide world and all the opportunity there might be, if she can only find it, for a girl with brains and courage too.
An area beneath the Eiffel Tower has been roped off, so that no one will be harmed by Reichelt when he touches down. Police are patrolling the perimeter. Olga gets as close as she can, finding places where she can slip through the gaps between the woolen overcoats and curtained tripods of all those who have come to observe and record.
She has an unobstructed view looking up—but is too short to see anything straight in front of her. She hears Franz Reichelt’s German-inflected voice, ringing out clear and confident—and sees only his cap as he waves it above his head. The crowd cheers in response to whatever he’s just said. Olga is able to make out the words, Vous allez voir!—“You will see!”
That’s what Olga would like to say to everyone who thinks that girls should busy themselves with ribbons and ruffles—and toe-shoes! You will see! Her desire to achieve something great in the world is all bollixed up with her desire for vindication in a world that seems set up to thwart her.
Why shouldn’t a girl aspire to heroism as great as that of any man? Marie Curie, after all, was awarded a second Nobel Prize, the year before. The time for women has finally arrived—and yet there’s no guidebook to follow and there are precious few beacons to light the way. For thousands of years, women have been disenfranchised, treated like chattel, and denied education, opportunity, and even legal status, since the dawn of civilization. It is the duty, Olga tells herself, of every girl to study the ways of courageous men and co-opt them. Perhaps for the first time since Eve bit into that apple, the female sex is poised to take its rightful place, not below but alongside the world’s bravest and most accomplished men.
The cheers of the crowd are punctuated by impassioned pleas from a few bystanders, begging Monsieur Reichelt to reconsider his folly. And then he comes into view on the inner stairway of the great tower, very bulky but still handsome in his garment as he climbs, followed by two fellows who, unlike the intrepid tailor, walk haltingly, putting two feet on every step and looking down before progressing further. One of them is carrying what looks like a café table and the other is carrying a three-legged stool.
Higher and higher, step by step, the three of them climb, all the way to the first windblown platform, fifty-seven meters—over seventeen stories—above the ground.
When they reach the top, Reichelt waves his hat again—and, again, the crowd cheers, and Olga cheers along with them. He shakes hands with both his friends, ceremoniously, one after the other, after they’ve constructed the even higher platform of the stool placed upon the table. It looks like they’re trying to talk him out of what he’s about to do.
A policeman standing near Olga says, “It was supposed to be tested with a dummy. That’s what the prefect said.”
“It will be tested by a dummy,” another policeman replies.
The photographers all have their cameras pointed upwards.
Dismissing the arguments of his friends, Reichelt steps first up onto the table and then up onto the stool at its center. The crowd lets out a collective gasp. The tailor pulls his cap down lower on his head, then waves again at the people below. All of them wave back at him.
And then he turns so that he’s facing the river. He checks the apparatus of his parachute—a button here, a cord there—before raising himself to his full height, his head held tall. He’s in profile for Olga. The upper edges of his garment are flapping in the wind. From his breast pocket, he takes out a little book—could it be a book of poetry? He tears a leaf from it and then drops the piece of paper and watches its course as the wind blows it gently, slowly, to the ground.
Now that it’s clear that Reichelt intends to proceed, the crowd has grown so silent that the only sound Olga can hear is the wind from the river and, far beneath that, inside her, the beating of her heart.
Reichelt unfurls his brown silken wings and then closes them again when they flap in the wind, compromising his balance as he stands there. Then he lifts his cap in another salute.
What does he see, Olga wants to know, from where he’s standing? What can Franz Reichelt see, as he’s standing there—hesitating, so high above the Earth—that no one else can see? From such a height, can one see the future? Can one see, and finally understand, the past?
Without even being conscious that she was doing so, Olga began counting from the moment that the tailor seemed poised to jump. She counts in rhythm to her own heartbeat.
It is as if both time and sound have stopped—as if cotton wool has been stuffed inside the world’s ears. Olga hears her heartbeat, nothing more.
He balances. He waits. He looks all around at the world below him. Perhaps at the world beyond. Olga has counted to forty-five when, suddenly, with a slight lift of his chin, Franz Reichelt opens his wings in all their voluminous glory. Looking like a giant bat, the morning light shining through the fabric of his wings, he crouches then leaps off the stool, launching himself, just like he launched that page from his book, into the empty air.
Instantly, the entire garment folds up around him like the petals of a flower closing as darkness falls—and he falls. He doesn’t float. He plummets like a stone.
Olga’s mouth forms a scream but no sound comes out. Franz Reichelt’s fall lasts for five miserly seconds before he strikes the ground with the full force of his manly frame, crushed in an instant. Clearly dead. As dead as the puppet dancers in Petrushka before they were brought to life by the magician.
But there is no magician who can bring Franz Reichelt to life again, bloodied, arms and legs akimbo in the crater formed by the impact of his fall. Olga turns from the sight of it, sobbing with a sorrow that she knows is much deeper than any feelings she might have conceived for this mad daredevil. Feelings as old as her own deepest sorrow.
She remembers, in some crazy, wordless reconstruction, a feeling that she knows is a memory of the murdered father she barely had a chance to know. She is sobbing, hitting her forehead with her fists, as distressed as if it were she herself who had caused Franz Reichelt to fail.
Part V
Paris
1913
Once again, Jeannette assembles her nieces at the kitchen table in their new apartment, which—despite Paul’s promises that all will be well—has been eating up most of their income. She stands at the sink, her arms folded. “My fiancé has informed me,” she says, addressing Olga, “that the editor of Le Matin has divorced his Jewish wife and married his pregnant mistress, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. They are now in need of a mother’s helper.”
