La Vie, Part Deux

There were no other children in the apartment building where we lived in Paris. It strikes me as peculiar that I never noticed this as a child. This odd fact was lost upon me as an adult. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t lack playmates.
My mother’s dress-making shop occupied two rooms in the apartment. She was a talented seamstress with Coco Chanel ambitions, and she had a small staff of models and designers who worked for her part-time. Fittings were on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I would sit on the floor as her young models, often half-naked, tried on various apparels. I do remember that the models found my presence amusing and went out of their way to display breasts and butts. I didn’t know why this thrilled me, but it did.
My half-sisters, Isabelle and Florence, came to visit once a week but were a lot older than I and so uninterested in entertaining me. My mother had clients with children, and these women occasionally came for a fitting. My favorite playmate was Babette, the daughter of a couple with a de in their name, a sure sign of lost nobility. Babette, eight-years-old knew everything about everything. We would be on the floor and she’d point to a model. “Celle la,” she would nod, “her breasts are ridiculous. See how they hang?” She would sniff in disdain. “Papa would like her. Maman always says Papa likes cows.” Few things escaped her notice. “Et l’autre,” she’d nod in the direction of the other model, “she has a bottom like the back of a Renault. And huge feet! Why does your mother hire these women? When I’m older, I’ll be a model like Dovima or Suzy Parker. I’ll be famous and beautiful.”
The other person with whom I spent a lot of time was Louise, a stout woman from Quimper, in Bretagne. Louise could neither read nor write. She was one of the tens of thousands war widows left homeless when the hostilities ended. I don’t know how Louise got to Paris, or where my mother met her, but my parents did what countless families did: they took her in, in exchange for babysitting, cooking, cleaning and, on rare occasions, serving dinner to guests.
I remember that on Sundays, her day off, Louise would don the traditional Bretonne garb—a billowy black skirt since she was a widow, a starched white apron, wooden clogs which she wore with American-made socks, and a coiffe, an elaborate headdress made of lace and ribbons. Louise’s coiffe took a half-an-hour to arrange. She would then meet other women from her region, all wearing coiffes from their villages.
On occasion and with my mother’s permission, Louise would show me off to her friends. Outfitted in dark blue short-pantsed suit, I would follow Louise from one Breton bistro to another. In each, I would be given a thimbleful of home-made fruit liqueur so that by the end of the afternoon, I was as drunk as a small child could get. Louise called me her petit homme, her little man, and was inordinately proud that I never threw up. I was, she said, un vrai Breton.