Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me Read online

  Her minks are made to order by our family furrier in the fur district on West Twenty-eighth Street. The family furrier is famous for being able to copy anything. You can bring Donald a Révillon ad and he copies the coat “line for line” at half what it goes for at Saks. The light in his showroom is ice blue. The couches are white damask, the wall-to-wall white plush. The place is freezing. The smell is dead animal. In what looks and feels like a fancy meat locker, Audrey trains her daughter in the art of pelt selection.

  Lesson one: Female skins are better than male skins.

  “They keep you just as warm as male skins but they weigh less,” she instructs. “You can walk around all day in a department store in female skins without having to take your coat off and carry it.”

  Audrey tests the skins, flailing them above her head like semaphores. From that she can tell what the mink ate, its sex, general health, how old it was when it died and if it lived in the wild or spent its grim life cramped in a cage. Once she has culled enough happy healthy female pelts, she raises each one individually up to her lips. She closes in as if she is about to kiss the fur but at the last moment blows on it instead. Blowing bends the hairs. She’s searching for a white one, one at least, proof the pelts are natural, not dyed. When she approves enough pelts to make a coat, Donald hooks them together on a metal ring that slips through holes where the mink’s eyes were in better days. They hang there like a lucky hunter’s bounty.

  Once Donald gets the nod, there are at least three fittings. First, the canvas. Initially, a fur coat is cut in canvas, not fur. Audrey tries the canvas on, swirls in it, bends in it, crouches, walks fast, raises each arm individually as if hailing a cab, puts her fist on her hip, which forces the canvas to bunch behind her hand. She mimes every movement she could possibly make once the coat is cut in fur. The coat must have enough “swing” to cocoon me on windy days when we lockstep down Riverside Drive. Depending on the success of the canvas, how close it is to what my mother envisions, if all goes well, the next fitting will be in mink.

  At the first actual mink fitting, Audrey has a million corrections. She poses on a white pedestal in front of a three-way mirror and confers with Donald, who works with a measuring tape around his neck and his sleeves rolled up. His assistant, a bent old man in a gray cotton jacket, wears a pincushion bracelet on his wrist.

  Depending on how well this fitting goes, Audrey selects her lining from giant swatch books. She studies her button options, decides whether she wants buttons at all—as opposed to frogs, passementerie, or hidden closures—then checks the font book. She considers various type styles for her “AMV” monogram and picks the color of the thread. The monogram can be embroidered on the lining of the coat, or it can be hidden in the pocket for security. If someone steals your coat, thinking it’s unmonogrammed, and you have to prove it’s yours, you can turn the pocket inside out and say, “Aha!”

  We are almost done. There is an interior-of-the-pocket discussion. Match the lining? Heavy satin? Velvet? It is a family tradition, when you are paying a lot for something—when you are paying cold cash as restaurant families do—to ask for a “gift.” Will a mink scarf be included in the price?

  In the best of all possible worlds, if everything is perfect, the third fitting is the last. But it never is. Another half-inch off the hem? A deeper cuff? An extra hook on the collar so it “frames” the face like a ruff? Audrey instructs Donald. Donald instructs the old man. Everyone in the showroom tells me how beautiful my mother is, how stunning she looks in her coat. They pat my head and say, “Someday, little girl, someday you will have a mink coat too.” In a glass bowl in the center of a coffee table, Donald keeps the candy of choice in places where children wait for mothers. Each butterscotch disk comes wrapped in murky yellow cellophane for daughters learning how to buy a mink.

  Elsa Schiaparelli has a mink too. She also has a ponyskin, opossum, antelope, black monkey, colobus monkey, nutria, civet, ermine, jaguar, chinchilla, rabbit, rooster feather, leopard and the occasional seal. She trims lingerie and bathing suits with mink and dyes fox to look like tortoiseshell. A favorite fur is Russian broadtail (fetal lambs with flat coiled hair also known as Swakara or Astrakhan or Karakul). Her bowling shoes are covered in ocelot. She wears a hat made out of the taxidermied face of a cheetah with jewels for eyes. She wears it with the cat’s nose centered over hers so her face is in his open mouth, as if Elsa Schiaparelli has been swallowed feet-first.

  She doesn’t wear a ring in Audrey’s sense of the word. If she had an engagement ring, she got rid of it when she divorced her only husband, Count Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor. Instead, she invents a three-part diamond pinky ring, the last joint covering the fingertip like a thimble.

  Some of her jewelry is real, some of it is “paste.” She likes big jewelry, lots of it. Pearls, up to four strands, a gold-and-emerald bib, an armload of her favorite chunky bracelets, clips. She invents a giant rhinestone she calls the Aurora Borealis. Depending on how light hits it, deep facets turn blue, green or Shocking Pink and sometimes all three at once. She sets them in gold or silver and makes them into bracelets, earrings and extraordinarily beautiful necklaces that vary from simple to wildly baroque. She mixes real with fake, making no distinction between the beauty of both.

  Audrey does not approve of costume jewelry. She wears a diamond circle pin my father gave her and a watch with a leather strap. When she goes out in the evening, she takes her Lucien Piccard watch with its pearl, ruby and sapphire bracelet out of the vault. She will lend it to me one night for a blind date at the Playboy Club with Barry Goldwater’s nephew. I will forget it on the sink in the ladies’ room when I wash my hands and she will shake her head, nothing more, when I tell her. “That Patty,” I hear her laughing on the phone. “I’m thrilled she hasn’t lost her nose.”

  Someday comes. When I graduate from college Audrey says, “It’s time for a mink.” She takes me to Donald. Again I get to study how to flail and blow on fur. At the second fitting, when it’s time to pick the monogram, I opt for a classic script and ask Donald to have it read:

  For Patty

  Love, Mom

  Donald does it wrong. The monogram reads:

  To Patty

  Love, Mom

  but although there is a world of difference between “For” and “To,” “To” being a dedication so it makes no sense and “For” being a gift, I don’t make a fuss.

  I feel like a Valkyrie in my mink, or like Moondog, like I should be standing on Sixth Avenue with a spear. But when it’s pricking cold in New York, when the wind bites like needles, I’m grateful. My mother is still keeping me warm. Audrey never gives something to one daughter without giving it to the other so my sister has a mink too. She wears hers less than I do. Jo Ann lives in Coral Gables.

  Schiaparelli in the jaws of a cheetah. (illustration credit 3.1)

  Schiaparelli asked Meret Oppenheim to make her a bracelet out of fur. When Picasso saw it he said, “One can make anything out of fur!” Oppenheim then created Object using Chinese gazelle. André Breton renamed it Le Déjeuner en fourrure after Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. (illustration credit 3.2)

  Elsa Schiaparelli wore these to bowl. (illustration credit 3.4)

  Schiaparelli, in a box jacket and matching hat of civet, arriving in New York at the onset of World War II. (illustration credit 3.5)

  My New York grandmother, Polly Morgen, in a mink and matching toque à la Schiaparelli. (illustration credit 3.6)

  Audrey, in a big mink, takes her girls to Rockefeller Center.

  The monogram on the coat my mother bought me.

  It was supposed to read “For Patty,” not “To Patty.” (illustration credit 3.8)

  Louis Thomas Hardin, aka “Moondog,” was a blind American composer, poet and inventor of musical instruments. He hung out on West Fifty-sixth Street wearing his interpretation of the Norse God Odin. Moondog’s music influenced Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Three albums and fifty singles are available on iTune
s. (illustration credit 3.9)

  chapter four

  Something in Common

  I have never quite understood my father’s relations with my mother or how they happened to have two children in ten years.

  —Elsa Schiaparelli

  Nobody needs to know how old you are. It’s nobody’s beeswax.

  —Audrey Volk

  Where she was born isn’t there anymore. West 179th Street was razed sixty years ago. There’s no trekking uptown to pay homage to the site. Where Audrey Elaine Volk (née Morgen) was born there’s a two-story twelve-lane highway. It links the George Washington Bridge via the Henry Hudson Parkway to I-95 and points east. Less than a mile long, the Trans-Manhattan Expressway bisects the borough at its narrowest point. A bus terminal was built on top of the highway. Then four high-rises on top of the bus terminal. West 179th Street isn’t a street. But that’s where, at the height of Washington Heights, the highest point in the city, 265 feet above sea level, she is born—my mother—at home, in a two-bedroom apartment in a four-story building on a death-defying hill famous for breakneck sledding, harebrained bicycle stunts, roller-skating daredevils, boxcar certifiables and tragic black-ice tailspins culminating in the frozen estuary of the Hudson. My mother is born there on that steep street at home in her mother’s bedroom. Assisted by a local doctor, Polly Ann Morgen (née Lieban) gives birth to her second child. In attendance are her sisters, Gertie and Ruthie, who drape white sheets from the ceiling to sterilize the room.

  Her husband doesn’t want this baby.

  “I need you in the store,” Herman says.

  This is true. Polly works magic at Morgen’s Cafe. Customers love her. She makes them feel welcome. She’s primed to like you. If she doesn’t know your name, it’s “darling.” Her face lights up when you breeze through the door. Not so Herman Morgen, cool appraiser of human foibles. He sees right through you. He’s got your number, whether you have a number or not.

  “Would I lie to you, Polly?”

  Is he asking her to “fall” down the stairs? Not the Hanger Man again. What if this time he punctures her bladder? Mildred’s has to be professionally emptied twice a week. What if she got an infection like Ida?

  “With God as my witness, the last thing we need is another Bobby,” Herman says.

  Bobby. He gets into fistfights with boys who wear eyeglasses. He shows up at assembly in a fake mustache. He mows down old Mr. Rosenheim in the hallway with his bicycle and gets suspended from school for putting a dead mouse in his teacher’s lunch bag. Polly has to bribe the principal with turkey sandwiches not to banish him from school. If you told Bobby the pudding had to cool first, he burned his tongue. Coming home from the restaurant, Herman is greeted with a litany—Bobby crashed into the end table and broke your sister’s vase, Bobby threw his Brussels sprouts out the window, Bobby rode the back of the ice truck. Herman explodes. He whips off his belt. Polly cries while Bobby’s beaten. Then the next day, the cycle repeats: Polly tattles, Herman whips, Polly weeps. But she loves her boy. She doesn’t want him to be an only child. She’s one of five.

  “Darling, you don’t want Bobby to have a brother or sister? You want him to be all alone in the world?”

  She’s too smart to disagree with her husband flat-out. “Bobby is in school until three every day,” she continues. “Velma is here with nothing to do. She can watch the baby. I’ll be back in the store before you know it.”

  “You don’t have to go to the Hanger Man,” Herman says. “Faye knows a real doctor in Washington.”

  Was there a time when Herman Morgen was softer? Postcards secretly passed to Polly before they were married are filled with tenderness. One from 1917 is prophetic. The top half shows a beautiful young couple kissing, backlit by the moon. The bottom half shows them in bed, newly ugly, with a squawking baby between them. Printed on the top it says, “Nothing shall ever come between us.” And on the back Herman wrote: “Dear Polly, Lets trust to god nothing shall come between us in many a moon. Love and kisses from Herman.” It was said he sank in a chair and cried when a telegram arrived saying his mother, Anna, had died.

  On an icy morning in January, Herman leaves for work. When he comes home in the evening, Polly is swaddling a newborn.

  “It’s a girl, darling.” She folds back the receiving blanket. “Did you ever?”

  She places the baby in his arms. He looks at his daughter. Her beauty astonishes him. “Never.”

  “Never?”

  “Never!”

  He has a daughter, a beautiful daughter, a beautiful perfect daughter, perfect beyond anything he could have imagined, perfectly round, perfectly symmetrical, with golden curls and fat cheeks. And she’s his, the most beautiful baby girl in the world.

  “Do you like the name ‘Audrey,’ darling?” Polly says. “After your mother?”

  Herman throws on his overcoat and races to Broadway.

  “I’ll take everything,” he tells the florist.

  Their room is transformed into an arbor. At the foot of the bed, Herman kneels and clasps his hands: “Forgive me, please God, for not wanting my Audrey.”

  From that day on Audrey is the prettiest and the smartest. If she gets below an A on a test, the teacher is anti-Semitic. If she loses the spelling bee, the winner’s word was easier. Bobby’s wife would later explain: “When Audrey was born, Herman wouldn’t let go of her because of what he had said. Your grandfather worshipped Audrey.”

  Elsa Schiaparelli is born at home too. But unlike the Morgens, the Schiaparellis are aristocrats. They can trace their lineage back to Napoleon. Celestino Schiaparelli is a friend of King Victor Emmanuel II. Both of them are serious collectors of ancient gold coins and they trade.

  An Egyptologist and expert in Sanskrit and Persian, Professore Schiaparelli is appointed by the king to head the Lincei Library, in the Palazzo Corsini, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture in Rome. It is 1875. The position comes with a sprawling family apartment right there, where four hundred years earlier Michelangelo was a dinner guest.

  Celestino consults his personal library to find the perfect name for a son. He pores over illuminated manuscripts—Homer, Aesop, the Books of Saints, Pizarro’s conquests, Scheherazade, the medieval Book of Hours, the Zodiac, Arab poets, priceless Sanskrit texts. He consults the Koran and the Thousand and One Nights. Signora Maria Luisa Schiaparelli is expecting again. His exquisite daughter, Beatrice, is ten years old. Professore Schiaparelli is certain this time it will be a boy.

  The baby arrives on September 10, 1890. It is a girl.

  Ten days later, the Schiaparellis traverse the Via della Lungara and walk north along the Tiber toward Saint Peter’s. After fifteen minutes, they make a left and begin the cobblestone approach to the basilica. Beautiful Beatrice, who is said to resemble the Vatican’s Pallas Athena, keeps pace beside the sturdy German wet nurse cradling her new sister. Together the family climbs the steps of the cathedral. They proceed through the center door, passing the Pontifical Swiss Guards rigid in their red, yellow and blue uniforms and armed with rapiers and flamberges.

  A priest waits by the baptismal font. Halfway up the left aisle, the Schiaparellis pause by what remains of the bronze foot on the statue of Saint Peter. The toes have worn off from countless kisses.

  “Io ti battenzo…” The priest begins the service. Suddenly he stops. “Mi scusi,” he says. “A proposito, qual’è il nome della bambina?”

  Maria Luisa and Celestino look at each other. No one has thought to find a name for a girl.

  There is an awkward silence. The wet nurse steps forward:

  “Elsa,” she says, naming the baby after herself.

  The baby is christened Elsa Luisa Maria Schiaparelli. It is a name Elsa Schiaparelli loathes. She will call being named Elsa her “first disappointment.” She will insist everyone—her daughter, her grandchildren, friends, clients, her employees, her lovers—call her “Schiap.”

  Audrey and Cecil are expecting their second child to be a boy too.
They don’t have a name for me either.

  “Victoria,” Cecil says. “Victoria Volk.”

  “Patricia,” Audrey counters from her hospital bed. “Patricia Gay Volk.”

  “Victoria,” Cecil persists. “Vicki Volk.”

  Audrey is exhausted. She sinks back into her pillows. “Name her anything you want, Cecil. Name her Mary Jane for all I care.”

  He does.

  I’m twelve when I come across the first birth certificate in a box in a storage closet. It reads Mary Jane Volk and she was born on my birthday. I find it the year Elvis Presley records Carl Perkins’s hit “Blue Suede Shoes.” My mother laughs but I’m convinced. Like Elvis, I have a dead twin.

  Visionary postcard Herman Morgen gave to his fiancée. (illustration credit 4.1)

  The Palazzo Corsini, home of the Lincei Library and birthplace of Elsa Maria Luisa Schiaparelli.

  Statue of the Pallas Athena, aka Athena, in the Vatican. (illustration credit 4.3)

  The statue of St. Peter in the Vatican and his foot, worn smooth from countless kisses. (illustration credit 4.4)

  First birth certificate. (illustration credit 4.5)

  Second birth certificate.

  chapter five

  Gambling

  Taking a risk without anticipating the consequences? Grandiose. There’s no other word for it.