He lifted his hands and put them on her hips. For years she’d sat in meetings and across desks and in other venues and noticed his hands. The palms were wide and the fingers thick and strong from years of propelling him through the world. They weren’t graceful or beautiful, not a pianist’s or surgeon’s, but they were admirable. They were also strangely gentle. She’d seen him break pencils in frustration and wrestle impatiently with those wheels, but except once when she’d watched him paging through a valuable first edition of The Red Badge of Courage, she’d never seen them so delicate of touch. No, not seen them delicate of touch, felt them.
Then slowly, with the slightest pressure, he turned her until she was standing sideways to him and drew her onto his lap so they were sitting at right angles. His arm went around her waist. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She folded them in her lap. She unfolded them. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. She put her hands back in her lap. With his free hand, he took one of her arms and placed it around his neck.
“Pretend we’re dancing,” he said, then gripped the wheel with his free hand and propelled them out of the office and into the maze of secretaries’ desks running up and down the common area. He hooked right around one desk, left around another, took his hand from around her waist to grab the other wheel to keep them on course, then put his arm around her again and headed straight and fast down the middle aisle. At the end, he spun around and raced up the side, narrowly missing chairs and desk corners and wastebaskets, propelling them faster and faster. He swerved in another sharp turn, almost toppling the chair, and let go of her again to regain control. “Watch out,” she shouted.
“No backseat driving,” he shouted back.
The euphoria in his voice was contagious, and heartbreaking. That this passed as abandon …
He whizzed down the hall, into Carl Covington’s office, around his desk once, a second time. Beyond the darkened windows, the crown of the Chrysler Building sped by in a phantasmagoric blur of streaking light. The sight made her giddy. She clung to his neck. His arm tightened around her waist.
Then they were out in the hall, turning left, then left again, into Faith Silver’s office. The photographs of women in long slinky thirties dresses and cloche hats, and men in bow ties and sardonic smiles, and groups sitting around a table mugging for the camera went by so fast they might have been a moving picture.
They sped into Bill Quarrels’s cubicle, around his desk, out again, down the hall to the copyediting department, in and out of the four desks there, down the hall, and into the sales manager’s office. Every now and then he took his arm from her waist to keep the chair on course, but his hand always found its way back.
“Watch out,” she shrieked again as he nearly collided with a bookcase.
“Relax, you’re with the Stirling Moss of the wheelchair set,” he practically sang, and again she was struck by the desperation beneath the joy.
They raced across the open space in front of the elevators, past the receptionist’s desk, down the hall, and back into his office.
He stopped. His breathing sawed the sudden silence. Her own was almost as sharp. He had an excuse. He’d been propelling the chair. She’d been doing nothing but holding on for dear life. She started to stand. His arm tightened around her waist again. They sat that way for a moment, waiting. She could feel his eyes on her face. Her own were focused on the window, the Chrysler Building again, but from a different perspective, and steady, not a blur but a luminous tiara burning in the night. It struck her that until now the passionate moments of her life had all played out in the shadows of war and fear. She turned her face to him.
He tasted of scotch. Or maybe that was her own tongue. She twisted more toward him. He took his other hand off the wheel and held her. It should have been awkward there in that chair, but it wasn’t. It was the most natural thing in the world.
She’d never be sure what stopped her. There was no deus ex machina, at least not a real one. No cleaning woman came through the door. Hannah didn’t come by to collect her husband. The phone didn’t even ring. The deus ex machina was in her head. How could she lecture her daughter about moral compasses when her own was so unboxed?
Somehow she managed to pull away. He tried to hold on to her for a moment longer, then let her go. She stood and began smoothing her skirt. He sat watching her. She turned away. She didn’t want him to see her face. She had a feeling it was giving away everything that was racing through her mind. It shouldn’t have happened. She would not let it happen again. In any event, it didn’t mean anything. The sentences kept chasing after one another, and she didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until he answered her.
“It didn’t mean anything,” she said.
“Don’t you believe it,” he answered.
Eleven
Charlotte let herself into the apartment, then stopped when she saw the framed photograph on the mantel. It must be another hallucination. Or else a picture of someone who looked like him. She crossed the room, picked up the frame, and brought it closer. It wasn’t a hallucination or someone who looked like him. It was Laurent.
She felt Vivi standing behind her in the archway between the hall and living room but didn’t turn, not yet. She wasn’t ready to face how the photograph had got there. She just wanted to go on looking at him.
He was so young. It came as a shock. She was older now than he’d been then. She was older now than he’d ever be.
The rest was rushing back, too. She’d remembered the thick lashes and beautifully shaped brows, she’d even remembered the nose that was a little too short, but she’d forgotten the mouth that gave him away. It could curve in pleasure at some joke or absurdity, or open easily to let out the laughter, or curl with disdain. And it was soft. She remembered that, too. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
Vivi crossed the room and put her arm around her mother’s waist. “I didn’t mean to make you cry, Mom. I thought you’d be glad.”
“I am glad,” she said, and wiped her eyes again. “But where on earth did you get it?”
“From someone who’d been at the Sorbonne with him. With my … dad.” Again she pronounced the word tentatively. “It was Aunt Hannah’s idea. When I told her I didn’t even have a picture of him, she said there had to be a way to get one. So we started talking about where he’d gone to school and stuff like that. Then she remembered a colleague she’d corresponded with about some psychiatric study. He’d gone to the Sorbonne, too. So she wrote to him, and he wrote back and said he’d never known Laurent Foret himself. He’d been older. But he knew someone who he thought had been a friend of Dad’s.” She was getting more comfortable with the word. “So Aunt Hannah and I wrote to the friend, and he wrote back and said he’d known Dad well, they’d even tried to start a student magazine together. That’s why he had a picture of him behind a desk. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Amazing,” Charlotte agreed. “Who is this friend?”
“Somebody called Jean Bouchard. He said he never met you. He knew about you, because Dad talked about you, but he’d never met you. Isn’t this amazing?” she said again. “Aunt Hannah said the world isn’t as big as people think.”
“Apparently.”
Vivi took the photograph from her mother, and they went on staring at it together.
“He was handsome,” Vivi said.
“That he was.”
“And I think I do have his eyebrows.”
“And lashes.”
“He looks nice.”
“Oh, sweetheart, he was. He really was.”
Vivi glanced sideways at her mother. “I bet he’d never scold me.” She was kidding, but only partly.
“Of course not. He’d be the perfect parent. Not like the one you’re stuck with.”
“I’m not so stuck,” Vivi said, and put the photograph back on the mantel. “It can stay there for now. Though I suppose we’ll have to let it out of the apartment to have a copy made. Then you can put that here o
r in your room or wherever. But this one goes on my dresser. Just like Pru McCabe’s father is on her dresser. So everyone can see it when they come to my room. Alice is going to be so jealous. Her father is fat and bald. I mean, Mr. Benson is nice and all that, but he’s not handsome. He’s not like my dad.”
* * *
Charlotte couldn’t decide whether to thank Hannah for helping Vivi find the photograph or tell her to mind her own damn business. In the end she thanked her. She even went downstairs to do it. A note or phone call seemed too chilly.
Horace answered the door. She couldn’t make up her mind how she felt about that either. They’d seen each other at work, but neither of them had mentioned the ride through the empty office. Fortunately—did she really think it was fortunate?—Hannah came up behind him before either of them could say anything.
Hannah invited her in, but she said she had only a minute. The cassoulet left over from the weekend was already in the oven. She just wanted to thank her for helping Vivi track down the photograph. “She’s thrilled.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t think of doing it yourself.”
“I did. I wrote to a few friends. But after the bombing—”
“I thought Paris was spared bombing.”
“There was some. Mostly it was street battles and looting and chaos. Pretty much the same end results. No one I wrote to had anything.”
“That was tactful,” Horace said after Charlotte had gone back upstairs.
“Helping Vivi get the photograph?”
“Contradicting Charlotte about the bombing of Paris.”
“From what I’ve read, there wasn’t much.”
“How much is enough?”
“All right, that was tactless of me, but I don’t believe she wrote to friends at all. I don’t believe she lifted a finger to find a photograph.”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s not fair to Vivi,” she insisted. “It’s sad enough she never knew her father. She deserves at least some idea of him.”
“Whether she does or doesn’t is none of our business,” he said as he started toward his study.
She followed him. “I disagree. I cannot stand by and watch a child suffer. Maybe the match was a mistake—people must have been rushing into marriage before the war over there just as they were here—but she has no right to visit her bitterness on Vivi.”
He stopped and rotated the chair to face her. “Maybe she’s not bitter. Maybe it has nothing to do with her late husband. Maybe she just doesn’t want to dredge up old memories. It wasn’t a pretty time.”
She stood staring at him. He managed to hold her glance. He knew what was coming.
“That is what we call projection,” she said.
“Save your instruction in analytic terminology for Federman. That’s what I call respecting privacy.”
* * *
Charlotte had a copy made of the photograph. Now Laurent stood on her dresser as well as Vivi’s. Vivi said good night to the picture faithfully. Charlotte didn’t exactly avoid it. Sometimes she found herself apologizing to it silently. I did it for Vivi, she explained. She could swear the lip in the photograph curled.
Once she walked into Vivi’s room to say good night and found Vivi sitting on the end of her bed staring at it. “I like this one, but it would have been nice to have one from the army, too. In his uniform.”
“Like Pru McCabe’s father?”
Vivi shrugged.
“I prefer this,” Charlotte said. “He was never a militarist.”
Vivi stood and started unbuttoning her school uniform. “Did you know Uncle Horace was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor?”
Charlotte, who had started out of the room, turned back. “What?”
“Aunt Hannah told me when we were writing letters to get the picture. I was telling her about Pru McCabe’s father, and she said Uncle Horace defended a bunker and killed lots of Japanese all by himself. That was how he was wounded. It was in something called the Battle of Buna. After it, his company commander recommended him for the medal, but he didn’t get it.”
“Why not, if he killed so many Japanese singlehandedly?” There was an undercurrent of skepticism in her voice. She was suspicious of heroism, even Horace’s heroism.
“Because he’s a Jew.”
Charlotte shook her head. “You have got to stop seeing everything through the prism of religion. You’re getting as bad as Eleanor Hathaway’s grandmother.”
“I don’t see everything, but this does have to do with religion. Aunt Hannah says it’s a well-known fact. She says Jews don’t get the Congressional Medal of Honor. Neither do Negroes. No matter how brave they were. She said she read an article where they questioned some general about it. You know what he said? ‘A Jew or a Negro for the Congressional Medal of Honor? Don’t make me laugh.’”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, or read.”
“But Uncle Horace is proof. His commanding officer recommended him, and a group wants him to fight for it, but he refuses.”
“Now you’re talking. Horace’s refusing to fight to get a medal sounds like the first true part of the story.”
* * *
Charlotte had no intention of mentioning the Medal of Honor to Horace. You didn’t go around asking a man about his war experience, even if you had taken a ride on his lap. But firm resolutions are funny things. The more determined you are not to say something, the more likely you are to blurt it out. The phenomenon reminded her of an anecdote she’d read in a biography of J. P. Morgan. A woman who had invited Morgan to tea told her young daughter again and again that under no circumstances was she to mention Morgan’s grotesque nose or even look at it. Morgan suffered from rhinophyma. The girl was scrupulous, until her mother poured the tea and handed it to her to serve the great financier. “Do you take one lump or two in your nose, Mr. Morgan?” she asked. That was the way Charlotte felt in the back of Horace’s car that night.
He’d offered her a ride home. This time she didn’t refuse. It was snowing. And what did it matter what people thought? They probably already thought a great deal. Neither of them had mentioned that nighttime ride through the office, but their behavior had changed. In front of others, they’d become circumspect. He called her Charlotte, not General, or Charles with a French accent, or Charlie. They were careful not to exchange glances, as they used to, when Carl Covington said something particularly pompous or Faith Silver retold another anecdote about the time she’d lunched at the Round Table. There was no more accidental running over Bill Quarrels’s foot, though a few days earlier when Bill had come into her cubicle on some pretext and sprawled in the chair on the other side of her desk as if he were there for the duration, Horace had wheeled by and told him he was still waiting for those sales figures.
Their behavior when they were alone had changed, too. They’d become uneasy; no, not uneasy, overly attuned, as if an accidental touch of fingers could set off sparks. Fortunately, there was plenty of room for them to keep a distance in the back of that big black Cadillac. She even put her handbag and briefcase between them on the seat as they sat waiting for the chauffeur to fold the chair Horace had swung himself out of, put it in the trunk, and come around to get behind the wheel. If the delay struck her as awkward, it must have been agony for Horace. She remembered him careening through the office that night. He wasn’t meant to be sitting in the back of a stately hearse while someone else did the driving. He should be tooling around town and speeding over country roads in a nifty little Triumph or a fire-engine-red Austin-Healey. The image broke her heart. And she didn’t even care about automobiles.
As the driver pulled away from the curb and inched into the traffic, slowed and snarled by the snow, she asked how the campaign for The Red Trapeze was going.
“I was right. The times are changing, thank you, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley, and various Tropics of. We’re not likely to have trouble after all, or rather just enough talk about possible trouble to boost sales. The
author helped. After the piece ran in Newsweek, he lined up a slew of what are known as leading literary figures to sign a letter to the Times. Wait till you see it. It’s quite a list. Maybe the book isn’t fiction after all. Maybe he really has slept with half the literary establishment, of both sexes. The letter swears that the novel is art with an upper-case A and preventing publication of it would be a crime against humanity. The kicker is a line about how Flaubert and Joyce are revered today, but no one remembers the philistines who tried to silence them.”
“If Henry Garrick ever gives up writing books, you ought to hire him as publicity director.”
She saw his smile flicker in the snow-muffled light from the streetlamps. “My thought exactly.”
She could have sworn his hand moved toward her on the seat. She rearranged the barricade of her handbag and briefcase between them.
A taxi swerved in front of the car. A horn sounded. The windshield wipers thumped back and forth. The silence between them grew longer. Conversation had never been a problem before that nighttime ride.
“How’s Vivi?” he asked finally.
“You know those antennae you said I didn’t have? The lack of which meant I wasn’t preparing her for the world. She’s growing an impressive set of her own. The other night I got a lecture on various slights to Jews. Honors they don’t get. Medals—” She stopped.
He turned to look at her in the eerie light. “Why do I get the feeling Hannah has something to do with this?”
“Not really. Anyway, I was just nattering on about Vivi’s antennae. In answer to your question of how she is. Forget I mentioned it.”
“But you did.”
“It’s not really the antennae you meant. She was talking about prejudice in general. Against Jews. Against Negroes. Against Eskimos for all I know.”
“Let’s forget the Eskimos. Against Jews and Negroes? Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Hannah started in on that cockamamie story about the Congressional Medal of Honor again?”
Paris Never Leaves You Page 13
