Danielle Steel - Zoya

The construction at the store was going unbelievably well, and by July it looked as though they would be open in September. They celebrated their anniversary at a rented house on Long Island that year, two days after Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific. Nicholas was fascinated by her, and he told Simon secretly that one day he wanted to learn how to fly. Charles Lindbergh was his childhood hero. He had been equally fascinated by the Hindenburg , the dirigible that had exploded over New Jersey in early May. Fortunately, when he had tried to convince Zoya and Simon to travel to Europe on it, Zoya had been leery of it, and they had wanted to travel by ship anyway, in memory of their crossing the year before on the Queen Mary .

“Well, Mrs. Hirsch, what do you think of it?” Simon stood in the shoe department of the women's floor in her new store in early September. “Is it everything you wanted it to be?”

Tears filled her eyes as she looked around her in silent wonder. Elsie de Wolfe had created an atmosphere of beauty and elegance in pale gray silk with pink marble floors. There were soft lights, and vast arrangements of silk flowers on beautiful Louis XV tables. “It looks like a palace!”

“Nothing less than you deserve, my love.” He kissed her and that night they celebrated with champagne. The shop was to open the following week with a glittering party attended by the cream of New York.

Zoya had bought her own dress for the opening at Axelle's. “This will be good for business! I might just have to say in my next ad that Countess Zoya shops here!” The two women had become fast friends, and they both knew now that nothing would change that.

Zoya and Simon had labored long and hard over the name for her store, and finally with a gleam in his eye Simon had chuckled. “I've got it!”

“So do I,” Zoya smiled proudly, “Hirsch and Co.”

“No,” he groaned at the sound of the unromantic name. “I don't know why I didn't think of it before. ‘Countess Zoya’!” It seemed too showy to her, but finally he had convinced her. It was what people wanted, to touch the mystery of the aristocracy, to have a title even if it meant buying one, or in this case, buying the clothes that a countess had selected for them. The items in the columns were endless about “Countess Zoya,” and for the first time in years, Zoya went to the parties she was invited to. She was introduced as Countess Zoya, and her husband, Mr. Hirsch, but everywhere the socialites and the debs flocked around her. And she always looked exquisite in the simple gowns she wore, from Chanel or Madame Grds, or Lanvin. People could hardly wait to see the store, and women were convinced that they would emerge looking just like Zoya.

“You've done it, my friend,” Simon whispered the night of her opening, the place was packed with every important name in New York. Axelle herself had sent her a tree six feet high of tiny white philanopsis orchids. Bonne chance, mon amie, Affectueusement, Axelle. the card had read as Zoya regarded it with tears in her eyes, and looked adoringly at Simon.

“It was all your idea.”

“It's our dream.” He smiled, in a sense, it was then-baby. Even her children were there, Sasha in a beautiful white lace dress, that looked demure and was something the Tsar's children might have worn, or Zoya herself as a child, which was why she had bought it for her in Paris. And Nicholas, looking incredibly handsome at sixteen in his first dinner jacket and the studs Simon had given him, tiny sapphires set in white gold with a rim of diamonds around them. They were a handsome family as photographers snapped pictures of everyone, and Zoya posed again and again with the glittering women who were to become her clients.

And from that day on, the store was never empty. Women arrived in Cadillacs and Pierce-Arrows and Rollses. An occasional Packard or Lincoln drew up to the door, and Henry Ford came himself to buy a fur coat for his wife. Zoya had planned to sell only a few of them, she wanted most of the coats to be Simon's. But Barbara Hutton ordered an ermine wrap, and Mrs. Astor a full-length sable. The fate of Countess Zoya was sealed by the end of the year, and the sales at Christmastime were staggering. Even the men's department on the handsomely decorated second floor did well. The men did their shopping in wood-paneled rooms with handsome fireplaces, as their women spent their fortunes downstairs in the gray silk dressing rooms. It was everything Zoya had dreamed of and more, and on Park Avenue the Hirsches toasted each other happily with champagne on New Year's Eve.

“To us!” Zoya lifted her glass, wearing a black velvet evening gown, made for her by Dior.

But Simon only smiled as he lifted his glass again. “To Countess Zoya!”

CHAPTER

42

By the end of the following year, Zoya had to open another floor, and Simon's purchase of the building had proven to be prophetic. The men's department moved upstairs, and on the second floor, she sold her furs and most exclusive gowns, and there was a tiny boutique for her clients’ children. Little girls were now being ushered in to buy party dresses and their first evening gowns. She even sold christening gowns, most of them French, and all of them as lovely as those she had seen as a child in Imperial Russia.

Her own daughter loved to come to the store, and pick out new dresses whenever she wanted, but Zoya curbed her finally. She seemed to have an insatiable appetite for expensive clothes, and Zoya didn't want her to overindulge it.

“Why not?” Sasha pouted angrily the first time Zoya told her she couldn't go shopping on a whim.

“Because you have lots of pretty things in your closet already, and you outgrow some of them before you even have a chance to wear them.” She was tall and lanky at thirteen, as Natalya had been. She was already almost a head taller than her mother. And Nicholas towered above them both at seventeen. He was in his last year of school before going to Princeton.

“I wish I could go into business now, like you,” he had said admiringly to Simon more than once. Simon had been good to all three of them, and Nicholas adored him.

“You will one day, son. Don't be in such a big hurry. If I'd had the chance to go to college like you, I would have loved it.”

“It seems like a waste of time sometimes,” Nicholas confessed, but he knew that his mother expected him to go to Princeton. And it wasn't too far from home, he was planning to come into the city whenever possible. He had a busy social life, but he also managed to do well in school, unlike his sister. She was a beauty at thirteen, and she looked easily five years older than she was as she slinked around the room, in the dresses Zoya still bought her.

“That's too babyish!” she complained, eyeing the evening gowns at the store. She could hardly wait until she was old enough to wear them.

And when Simon offered to take her to the new Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , she was highly insulted.

“I'm not a baby anymore!”

“Then don't act like one,” Nicholas taunted. But she wanted to dance the samba and the conga instead, as Simon and Zoya did when they went to El Morocco. Nicholas wanted to go with them too, but Zoya insisted that he was too young. Instead, Simon took them all to “21,” and they talked seriously about what was happening to the Jews in Europe. Simon was deeply worried about what Hitler was doing by the end of 1938 and he felt certain there was going to be a war. But no one else in New York seemed to be worried about it. They were going to parties and receptions and balls, and the dresses were flying out of Zoya's store. She was even thinking of opening another floor, but it seemed too soon. She was afraid business might slack off, but Simon only laughed at her worries.