What a contrast to the divided city of Berlin. When she’d been there in August, Berlin had been visibly recovering from the huge destruction wreaked by the Allies during the war. Buenos Aires had avoided the war altogether, like all of mainland United States, but with these magnificent mansions and wide, well-kempt avenues, this city was more like a dream of Paris than New York.
The wardrobe department was lodged on the second floor of another genteel stone building with decorative flower finials over the windows. The door at the end of the dark hallway led to a huge open room with sunlight cutting yellow squares on the hardwood floors and racks of clothing. A sewing machine whirred invisibly nearby. Between the headless mannequins and shelving with metal bins for accessories, Pagan could see that the opposite wall was covered in mirrors.
“Hello?” she called out, brushing past a rack of black jackets. Tony Perry’s name was scrawled on big yellow tags attached to each one. “Madge?”
“Pagan, honey!” a woman’s scratchy voice called from somewhere to her right. “Over here!”
Pagan spotted a column of smoke trailing up near the ceiling and wound her way between ball gowns, shelves of hats and rows of linen trousers toward it. “They’ve buried you alive, Madge. I’m here to save you.”
She rounded a trestle of frilly yellow skirts to find Madge Popandreau, wardrobe mistress for Two to Tango, seated at a huge black sewing machine. She had her eternal cigarette clutched between narrow, red-lipstick-smeared lips, her sharp black eyes following the line of white tulle as she threaded it under the bobbing needle. Madge had frizzy unnaturally black hair pulled back in a giant bun, square, deft hands and an eagle gaze that could spot the head of a pin on a sequin-covered dress.
“I’m just finishing up your petticoat for the big rumba number. Throw on that black suit for me in the meantime, will you, sweetie? Mind the pins.” She jerked her head toward a rack of clothes with tags that bore Pagan’s name. “Rada!”
“Coming.” The voice was gloomy and Russian. A lanky young woman with a leonine mane of dark blond hair emerged between racks of fur coats. “Hello,” she said to Pagan in the same sad tone. “I will help you with the clothes.”
“You wearing a girdle, honey?” Madge asked, still sewing, and didn’t wait for a reply. “If she’s not, get her one, will you, Rada?”
Rada nodded and scanned Pagan’s hips as she took off her trench coat. “No girdle today?”
“I’d rather jiggle like Jell-O,” said Pagan.
Rada nodded mournfully, as if Pagan had announced a sudden death, slid the tape measure from around her neck and whipped it around Pagan’s hips. “A full-body one is required for this suit.” She shook her head. “It is very tight.”
“I don’t need to breathe,” Pagan said as she slipped off her sneakers and unbuttoned her jeans. Near-nudity was the norm in wardrobe. Rada turned, and pulled a black sheath of elastane and straps off its hanger attached to the suit.
Pagan wiggled and wrestled her way into it, adjusting the bra straps, as Rada slipped the silky wool suit off its hanger. The pencil skirt was tight as hell at the waist—Rada hadn’t been kidding—and it clenched tighter still as it slid down her hips.
“I know you’re all about the A-line Dior these days, honey,” Madge said. “You like to be able to move, maybe have a snack, like a real-life person. But this director, Victor, he didn’t want you looking human and told me to make it as close-fitting as possible. I said okay, since you don’t have to dance in it.”
Victor sounded like a treat. Pagan hadn’t met him yet, and was dreading it more each day. “I might need to walk,” she said, squeezing her feet into the four-inch black heels that went with the suit. “I don’t think I could sit down in this.”
“We’ll get you a slant board,” Rada said.
The dreaded slant board, a simple contraption that allowed actresses to recline on a wooden board that could be leaned back at an angle to take the weight off your feet.
“Those things make me feel like I’m about to be buried at sea,” she said.
“Before you die, this director wants to see every twitch of your derriere. It’s a part of his ‘vision,’” Madge said tartly.
“Twitching, but not jiggling,” Pagan said, eyeing her clearly outlined rear end in the mirror. “So he likes ’em fake.”
“We are here to create illusion,” Rada said, her sorrowful voice lending the sentence an unexpected profundity. “Reality is of no importance.”
“Film’s an illusion, honey,” Madge said tartly. “Might as well make it pretty.”
“It’s not how we feel that’s important,” said Pagan, reciting the old, sarcastic Hollywood line. Madge joined her in saying the next part of it: “It’s how we look.”
Madge moved expertly from sewing tulle to repinning the black suit, pegging the skirt hem a shade narrower to emphasize the curve of Pagan’s hips. She had to take mincing little steps in it. Good thing she hadn’t had to run around in this boa constrictor the night the wall went up in East Berlin.
But then good girls didn’t do things. They liked being hobbled in tight skirts and heels so they could have things done for them, and to them. But heaven forbid they climb scaffolding or crash through a barricade manned by armed members of East Germany’s most feared soldiers.
Or damned well walk normally.
Not that she, Pagan, would ever do such things. Bless you, no. She was nothing but a silly teenage girl, and the most you could expect out of her was to make faces at a camera.
Before her adventure in Berlin she’d thought that way about herself, too, if she thought about herself at all. But then she’d ended up on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall the night it went up, with people she cared about in danger. Desperation had forced her to realize that people’s condescending expectations could be used against them. She’d pretended to be exactly what the leaders of East Germany thought she was so she could escape and get Thomas and his family to safety.
Give most people exactly what they expected and they never bothered to look deeper.
She’d thought she could pretend to be the sort of girl who wore a suit she could barely move in, for the sake of this sad little movie. But it was challenging these days to act like a shallow little dimwit.
On screen, sure. But in real life? Now that she knew a bit better who she was, the facade was becoming difficult to maintain.
Madge and Rada wrestled her out of the mummifying black suit and replaced it with the foofiest big-skirted ball gown Pagan had ever worn.
“I knew it,” she said, flicking the ruched trimming that wound around her torso. She was a fish caught in a very fancy net. “I know Daisy’s a small-town girl, but...”
“The director wanted frills,” Madge said flatly. “So he gets frills.”
“And I get chills,” Pagan said, swaying the hooped skirt to and fro. “Fit’s great, but I’m going to knock over every piece of furniture I walk past.”
“Can you waltz in it?” Madge asked, her lips moving around the cigarette lodged in her mouth.
“If Scarlett O’Hara can do it, so can I.” Pagan did a tentative one-two-three around the sewing machine. The skirt swung like a large white gauzy bell. “I could signal ships at sea with this thing.”
“Pearls,” ordered Madge.
Rada draped a multistrand pearl necklace with a large rhinestone clasp around Pagan’s bare shoulders.
“It’s like Breakfast at Tiffany’s set in the Civil War,” Pagan said.