The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [120]
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