All three of the puppets’ expressions are as unmoving as if they really were made of wood and paint and cloth instead of flesh. And yet, when the magician comes at each one of them, playing his little flute, their feet begin to twitch in keeping with their individual characters. With their lifeless heads lolled forward or cocked to one side, their limp arms and hands dangling, their feet and then their legs begin to dance, unable to resist the magician’s silvery tones.

  And then, to their horror, Naomi and Olga see Baila walking forward on the stage, as if in a trance—as if she, too, has been enchanted by the music, her head cocked and her eyes half-closed as she follows the flute’s bewitching melody. The magician shoots a fierce look at her as, chastened, she hurries back into the crowd.

  No one else on stage reveals that this was anything other than part of the choreography. Both Naomi and Olga know there was no such solo moment assigned to their sister. Both of them burn with shame for her. Both steal a look at Monsieur Blum, who doesn’t seem to have realized that anything has gone wrong.

  The movements of Petrushka’s legs and feet are extravagant and clumsy. The ballerina in her toe-shoes dances in the air with vapid precision, while the Moor leaps and swaggers in two dimensions. All three of them seem to be alive only from the waist-down. All three of them are at the mercy of their master.

  This is the moment, Olga thinks, when the magic of theater takes over, blotting out every other reality. She wants to figure out a way to hold herself apart, so that she can come to analyze the phenomenon—when it works and when it doesn’t. Why it works and why it doesn’t. To become a connoisseur of this magic and the magicians who make it happen, to write about them and know that readers will hang on her every word. Perhaps to create that magic herself.

  And yet it’s impossible to hold herself aloof from the spell that’s being woven on the stage. She forgets where she is, and who she is. She forgets that both Baila and her aunt are up there.

  Olga’s hearing and heart are commandeered by Igor Stravinsky’s music, so unlike anything she’s ever heard before, a fabric of sound composed of scintillating pieces of joy and pain melted together. As the ballet unfolds, her eyes and imagination are taken hostage by Petrushka’s wild longing—his hopeless longing—to win the love of the empty-headed, faithless ballerina.

  What fools people are when they’re in love, Olga finds herself thinking at the end, blinking back tears.

  Baila, there among the other extras hired for the production—hand-in-hand with all of them for the curtain call—is pushed forward by the children standing on either side of her. The audience breaks into laughter. Stumbling slightly, Baila looks as if she might cry. But then, with dignity—and, her sisters are forced to admit, with grace and charm—she curtseys, just as Jeannette has taught her to do.

  They can see her changing, right there before their eyes, as the sound of applause sifts down on her like a shower of gold. They watch, amazed, as Baila takes two steps backwards, with pointed toes, to assume her place in the line again.

  The demi-soloists enter from the wings, each of them still dancing in character as they assemble in a second line just in front of the extras. Maître Blum is one of the first to rise to his feet, applauding hysterically. He shouts himself hoarse when Jeannette—along with the other dancing girl, the organ-grinder, and the man with the bear—takes her little bow.

  Part IV

  Paris

  1912

  Sonya has sat up late at the kitchen table, which is the apartment’s only dining table, awaiting her sister’s return from the theater.

  “It’s all arranged,” Jeannette announces as she walks in the door. Her feet are killing her, but she’s happy, at least, that her nieces are already in bed. The last thing Jeannette wants is another argument with Olga. “A shop for you in the sixth arrondissement, in a pretty building on rue Saint Sulpice—with a ten-room apartment above. Space enough for some privacy and a proper practice room.”

  “You are completely mad,” Sonya says. “How could I—how could we—ever afford such lodgings? And what kind of shop are you talking about?”

  “Accessories. Those chichis you specialized in making for him. He’s decided to set you up—as part of his empire, of course—in your own shop.”

  Jeannette, still wearing her sweaty dance togs under a raincoat, has brought home a still-warm bag of beignets. She’s on a campaign to help Sonya gain back some of the weight she lost during her illness.

  “Shouldn’t you change out of those clothes, into something warmer?”

  “Come on, Sonya! Act excited, please! Your own shop, close by the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Just a five-minute walk from the Luxembourg Gardens. And—he said you’d care about this—wonderful light.”

  “But it will be his shop, won’t it? Am I to be on his payroll, once again? The entire idea is distasteful to me.”

  “You won’t be an employee—he’s assured me of as much. He’s financing the project, and he’ll take a cut of the profits. But, really, he’s doing this because he has finally recognized the debt he owes us.”

  Sonya looks closely at her sister’s face, which is so often different from day to day, depending on whether she’s wearing makeup and how hard and long she’s been working, and how much she drank the night before. Every day since returning from the brink of death, Sonya sees and understands something new about her twin. Most of what she previously imagined has fallen away, to be replaced by actual qualities—and faults—illuminated by Jeannette’s words and behavior.

  Jeannette has been treating Sonya like her own private miracle—she’s like a proud mother who’s just produced a newborn. For Sonya, Jeannette’s doting attitude is a welcome change from her unequivocal hostility at the start. But being patronized in this way is also a little uncomfortable for her. She wishes she and her twin could simply find a place of balance between them, where each of them could feel powerful in her own right, while remaining aligned.

  Sonya shakes her head. “How can you trust Poiret? How can I ever trust him? Do you think he’d go to such trouble and expense if he didn’t imagine some advantage for himself? Perhaps he thinks we’ll both make ourselves available to him. He’d like that, I’m sure.”

  “Aren’t you the cynic. There’s great selfishness in Paul Poiret. But there’s also good in him—or maybe it’s just guilt. He was shaken to the core by your near-death and the destruction he realized he’d caused by keeping us apart. He wants to make amends.”

  “In my experience of him, he has wanted, above all else, to guard his place as the premier couturier of Paris—as well as to guard his profits.”

  “As to that,” says Jeannette, “he no doubt sees you, and your skills, as just one more way to build his empire. He even has a new idea involving your eldest—and her skills.”

  “Naomi? Is he to set her up in a shop as well?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s something to do with working-class girls who are good at art. A workshop of some kind, all having to do with home décor or some such thing. You’ll have to get him to explain it to you.”

  Sonya peeks into the greasy paper bag. “Um,” she says, extracting a beignet and taking a bite. “There’s still tea in the pot.”

  “I’ll get it—don’t get up.”

  “You’re going to make me fat, Jeannette—and then no one will be able to guess we’re twins.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping!” Jeannette raises one of her penciled eyebrows in that way she has of expressing so much with the greatest economy of motion.

  Sonya wants to keep her twin close to her—and also despairs of making it work. The way Jeannette treats the children has become increasingly intolerable. It’s always and exclusively Baila, Baila, Baila. Baila’s ballet lessons, Baila’s musical education, Baila’s bloody turnout. Whisking Baila off to concerts and rehearsals, leaving the rest of them at home. Baila is becoming a spoiled brat. Jeannette takes almost no interest at all in Naomi—and she really seems to hate Olga, for some unfathomable reason.

  Jeannette had a stagehand from the Opera install a small ballet barre in her bedroom for Baila’s lessons—at what price, Sonya continues to wonder, never daring to ask. Jeannette treats Baila like a piece of clay she hopes to squeeze, pinch, and prod until she becomes the kind of ballerina Jeannette herself never managed to be.

  Naomi confided that she and Olga are in the habit of gauging their aunt’s mood by the haste or care with which she’s put on her makeup. Watch out! one or the other of them will whisper. She has her witchy eyebrows on today!

  

  It has been the great redemption of Naomi’s life, getting this opportunity to sketch and paint six days a week at the light-filled atelier created expressly for the Martines inside the Poiret mansion at 107 faubourg Saint Honoré.

  Monsieur Poiret has personally attended to every detail of this latest expansion of his fashion empire, which bears the name of his second-born child. He engaged a professional art teacher, the wife of the avant-garde painter, Paul Sérusier, to instruct his stable of twelve-year-old designers. He handpicked his girls by canvassing the local public schools and asking about any female students there who showed particular interest or talent in the visual arts. He specifically wanted girls from working-class families—girls who hadn’t yet had conventional prejudices about beauty instilled in them by well-meaning parents or teachers. He wanted them old enough to acquire skills—but still young enough to imbue their designs with a child’s freshness and delight in the wonders of the natural world.

  It was to be expected that the Martines were beset and sometimes overwhelmed by all the changes and challenges faced by every child who has ever hovered at the edge of adolescence. And yet they thrived.

  Paul has the satisfaction of seeing how well his investment is paying off, every time he goes upstairs and walks around the room, from easel to easel. Every day validates his conviction about the great untapped aesthetic resource to be found in the working classes.

  After only a few short months, the girls have absorbed the rules and principles Madame Sérusier has pressed upon them. They’ve already become adept at mixing colors and using several different kinds of paint on a wide variety of surfaces, which they now know how to prepare. With few exceptions, swiftly punished, they respect the rules about caring for the expensive paints and brushes provided for them by Maison Poiret. Their fingers are stained and they wreck their clothes—but given who they are, this is not a great concern.

  Naomi has become known among them as a well-mannered girl who works hard. She has tried to steer clear of the cliques as well as the overheated friendships that inevitably form among the Martines, many of whom are fairly scrappy girls.

  With her own sisters’ needs and complaints to deal with, Naomi wants nothing more than to focus on the thrill of seeing her paintings transformed into objects of decorative art. It had been her own idea, after all, even though Monsieur Poiret never explicitly acknowledged that she was the one who’d planted the thought in his head, that sad day in the rain-sodden Bois de Boulogne.

  The thrill of having such a job—and even getting a small daily wage for it, as well as lunch and delicious snacks in the late afternoon—has never worn off for Naomi. Such are the stresses and strains at home that she looks forward to going to work every day. Olga and their aunt are always at each other’s throats when they’re at home together, which isn’t very often but is always unpleasant for everyone.

  Monsieur Poiret takes pains to seem impartial. But it’s clear that he has his favorites among the Martines—and that Naomi is one of them. She keeps wondering why Sonya doesn’t seem particularly happy about this—and why her mother questions her so closely, from time to time, about how Monsieur Poiret comports himself around her.

  Naomi, for her part, has no complaints.

  After half a year, during one of Poiret’s inspections of the workshop—in the late afternoon of a particularly harrowing day, when three of the girls had gotten into a fight that resulted in spilled paint, torn clothes, and pulled-out hair—Madame Sérusier confronts her boss with a demand. Fifteen girls, she announces, are too many for her to instruct and supervise all at once. Each of the Martines has her own talents as well as her own deficits of knowledge and craft, to say nothing of bad habits and the tendency shared by all girls of that age to push the limits of acceptable behavior. It’s simply impossible for her, as a conscientious teacher, to nurture them adequately on her own. A second teacher was needed—another well-trained pedagogue, like herself, who was also conversant with the best and brightest artists of Paris. She has a friend in mind, if Monsieur Poiret will be so kind as to heed her recommendation.

  Monsieur Poiret listens politely to all she says. And then he kisses her hand—which makes everyone giggle, because Madame Sérusier is far from being either young or even remotely pretty. He tells her how delighted he’s been with everything she’s done for the Martines—and that he will have a solution for her the following afternoon.

  Madame Sérusier is positively serene the next morning, confident that relief is at hand. She’s unusually lavish in her praise—and gives the girls an extra-long break for their afternoon goûter, on the condition that they all clean up their workstations, and have their best work on display, on time for Monsieur Poiret’s promised visit.

  And then he appears before them. With ceremony, after a short speech praising Madame Sérusier’s virtues, he presents her with a bottle of perfume, “as a souvenir of her time with the Martines.” He has chosen for her La Chemise de Rosine, a fresh and innocent scent that comes with a nightgown in a gorgeous box the girls themselves had decorated with their designs.

  Madame makes a valiant effort to hide her hurt and surprise when it becomes evident to her that Poiret is not only ignoring her recommendations, but has seen, as he puts it, the wisdom of allowing her to resign. There are some scattered, mean-spirited comments—but most of the girls, Naomi included, feel sorry for the teacher who has, after all, given them so much.

  Poiret begins putting his new plans into effect even before Madame Sérusier has had time to clear her belongings out of the teacher’s corner. He mentions that he’s engaged a monitress to oversee the girls, at the same moment that a tough-looking eighteen-year-old Bretonne walks in. Everyone recognizes her as someone who’s been working in the kitchen. She has brought a bit of knitting with her.

  And so the girls are left largely on their own to create their designs. What teacher did these natural painters need, after all, apart from exposure to the glories of Nature and the occasional outing to one of the city’s great repositories of art?

  Poiret continues to take a keen interest in their daily production. Whenever it seems to him that their designs have become a bit dull, or they themselves are a bit cranky, he arranges a field-trip for them. He himself often comes along to the museums, public gardens, and choice spots in the countryside he’s chosen. They walk or travel by train, depending on the distance. Sometimes, for a smaller group—which is always keenly aware of the privilege—they travel in his Renault Torpedo, which his chauffeur keeps in a constant state of high luster.

  What better way to fill the imaginations of these young artists with the glories of color and form than with visits to the aquarium or one of the hot-houses of Paris, where the most exotic flowers bloom? The zoo is an unending source of inspiration and delight, with its many species of birds and sensuous felines—with their feathers and fur presenting so many possibilities for the artful repetition of patterns.

  He finds inspiration in the girls’ excitement—experiencing, side by side with them, the novelty of their observations in even the simplest places of Paris. The open markets, where many of the girls see vegetables and fruits they’ve never seen before. Where even the fish and shellfish are arranged by Parisian merchants in the most cunning patterns, contrived by generations of fishmongers to entice the eyes and appetite of passersby.

  Often, on these outings, Poiret orders up some delicacy to be delivered to the employee kitchen in time for lunch. After his artisans have dined and rested, all of them retire to their canvases and sketchbooks with their heads as filled with color as a prism exposed to sunlight.

  There’s so much of beauty in the world, ripe for interpretation by the nimble fingers of these girls. The vision of an artichoke is reborn as a miracle of geometric design. The woodblock print of a poppy, with one hirsute stem blooming and others about to burst, serves as the print for curtains or cushions. Swallows in flight, starfish and coral, rocks and seashells can be stolen by the eyes out of their natural habitat and captured forever, to give joy and delight over and over again, imprinted on everyday objects, long after the living things are dead and gone.

  The girls themselves are surprised by the beauty of their designs when they see them transferred to cloth or porcelain, right alongside the work of the grown-up artists befriended and championed by Monsieur Poiret—the handsome Raoul Dufy and Père Matisse, who is such a master of color. And their favorite, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, who will sometimes sit for hours in their workshop, entertaining them with his imitations of people they know, telling jokes and lending a general atmosphere of joy.

  Monsieur Poiret sends half a dozen girls to Sèvres for a week to study the decoration of porcelain—and another group, including Naomi, to the workshop on Boulevard de Clichy to help Monsieur Dufy print fabrics based on their watercolors. The girls vie with each other for the bonuses paid when one of their designs is chosen by a wallpaper manufacturer brought to the atelier—or picked out by the buyer for an upholsterer or draper. Or chosen by Poiret himself for one of the evening cloaks to be worn by the richest and most beautiful women in the world.

  Try as he might, he can’t find a suitable establishment to weave the rugs he wants designed by the Martines. And so he buys some looms and brings in a Turk who teaches them how to make all different sorts of knots. The haute laine rugs they produce with their own hands are so beautiful and so luxurious that he organizes an exhibit of them at his Galerie Barbazanges. There’s no keeping up with the orders that pour in.