Then suddenly, after weeks of debate, she made up her mind. She wasn’t sure what persuaded her. She hadn’t awakened sweat-soaked and heart-constricted from another nightmare. She hadn’t even given the letter much thought that day. Her mind had been on Vivi. After months of agonizing that all of her friends had got it and she never would—another aftereffect of her early deprivations, Charlotte thought—her daughter had finally got her period. She was the last of the group, but at least she was once more part of it.
Charlotte got out of bed, went to her desk, and brought back stationery and a pen. After all the weeks of torment, the letter was surprisingly easy to write. She told the rabbi that she and her daughter owed their survival to Dr. Julian Bauer.
As she folded the sheet of stationery and put it in the envelope, she thought again about the rabbi’s assumption that she was Jewish. That was when the line came to her. She didn’t know where she’d read it. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe Vivi had brought it home, another result of her religious awakening. He who saves one life saves the world. As far as she knew, no condition stipulated the life had to be of any particular denomination.
Only after she’d mailed the letter the next morning did she begin to wonder if what she’d written was true. Had he really saved their lives? Plenty of people had survived the Occupation without compromises. Maybe not as many as claimed purity once it was over, but enough. Maybe she and Vivi would have been just fine without him. Thinner, sicker, but alive. And what about the night of the raid? Had the gendarmes and the Wehrmacht soldiers been on such a rampage that they would have taken in anyone they came across? Her papers had been genuine. The forgery had come only when Julian had written juif on the form. But accuracy wasn’t the point. She had written out of gratitude. No, that was only partly true. She had written out of love. Now that it no longer mattered, she could admit it.
* * *
The day after she posted the letter to Colombia, she was rifling through her own mail on the small table in the foyer when the door to Hannah and Horace’s part of the house opened and a man in a topcoat came out. Horace, in his wheelchair, lingered on the other side of the doorway. The man nodded to her as he put on his hat, then turned back to Horace. She scooped up the pile of mail and magazines and started up the stairs.
“Just think about it, old buddy,” the man said.
“Nothing to think about,” Horace answered.
“You know,” she heard the man say as she turned the first-floor landing to climb to the second, “this isn’t just about your opinion. It’s bigger, much bigger.”
She had to smile at that. She’d never met a would-be author who didn’t believe his book would change the world. Poor Horace. The man had called him “old buddy,” a term of camaraderie left from the war. And the man had come not to the office but to Horace’s home. Rejecting books from strangers wasn’t the sadistic pleasure writers believed, but turning down the work of an old friend was real pain.
She let herself into the apartment. Vivi was sitting at the small dining table in her usual studying position, her elbow on the table, her chin on her hand, one leg folded beneath her.
“What’s cooking?” Charlotte asked. She’d picked up the phrase from Vivi. What’s cooking, she and her friends asked one another. Chicken, you wanna neck? they answered. Bacon, you wanna strip? But Vivi surprised her. She straightened from her book and held a thin sheaf of two or three papers out to Charlotte.
“A-plus,” she said, in case her mother couldn’t read the red mark on the top of the front page.
“Congratulations.”
“Miss Connelly says I’m a born writer.”
“Oh, no.”
Vivi frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I’m joking, sweetheart. I spend my life working with writers. They’re either horribly abused, which is not something I want for you, or horribly abusive, which is not something I want you to become. What’s the essay on?”
There was a time when Vivi wouldn’t have turned in a paper without running it past Charlotte, but those days were rapidly dwindling if not gone forever. Charlotte was of two minds about that. Vivi is standing on her own two intellectual feet. Hurrah for her. Vivi doesn’t need me anymore. Finis for me. It was everyday proof of the old adage that a parent-child relationship is the only love affair that has to end in a breakup to turn out well.
“The House of Mirth. I was the only one in the class who picked up on the anti-Semitism.”
Oh, no, Charlotte thought, not again.
“I don’t mean they didn’t know Rosedale was Jewish,” Vivi went on. “Wharton calls him a Jew or says he has Jewish traits a couple of times.”
“I know.”
“I know you know, Mom, but you could tell everybody else in the class was afraid to mention it. You should have seen them when Miss Connelly read my essay. Eleanor Hathaway looked as if she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. Her and her grandmother both.”
Charlotte started to say that the book was written half a century ago, that you had to see Wharton in the context of her time, that she wished Vivi would stop looking for trouble, but caught herself. Maybe looking for trouble wasn’t so dangerous if trouble was likely to find you anyway.
“You are one courageous kid, Vivienne Gabrielle Foret.”
She grinned. “I take after my mother.”
“Who says?”
“Me. And Aunt Hannah.”
“Hannah said I’m courageous?”
“She said you must have been brave to get both of us through those years in Paris, then come here and make a whole new life. She said you must have been one tough cookie to pull that off.”
Charlotte smiled. “That sounds more like it.”
“She said something else.”
“I’m waiting.”
“She said she wishes you’d get married again.”
“I bet she does.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Only that married women always want to marry off unmarried women.”
“She was only being nice.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t.”
“No, but your tone did.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. She was being nice.”
* * *
Every week the publicity department of G&F circulated to the editorial, advertising, and sales departments a folder of clippings of reviews of the house’s books and interviews with their authors that had appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country. Occasionally an editor underlined a sentence or two raving about one of his or her books. Once an editor—no one knew who, but they all had their suspicions—underlined several lines that trashed someone else’s book. Editors themselves were never mentioned in the reviews, but on rare occasions they won an accolade from a grateful, or toadying, writer in an interview. No one had ever called attention to any of those references until now. Charlotte sat rereading the underlined passage in an interview with the author of The Red Trapeze. The book wouldn’t be out for months, but Henry Garrick, the one-man publicity machine, was impatient for fame.
The interviewer said she’d heard that a dozen publishing houses had turned down the book because of its frank depictions of sex and war. “Thirteen to be exact,” the author corrected her. “Horace Field was the only publisher with the guts to take it on. A guy who killed hundreds of Japs singlehandedly isn’t afraid of a couple of milksops in judges’ robes.”
She wondered who’d underlined the comment. Her guess was Bill Quarrels. She turned out to be right, though she didn’t find that out until later that day. He stepped into her cubicle, folded his big body into one of the chairs on the other side of her desk, and stretched out his legs to barricade her in place.
“Did you see that interview with Garrick?”
“A waste of hard-to-get real estate. The publicity doesn’t do any good if the books aren’t in the stores to buy.”
“Forget sales, ma petite French adding machine.”
“I
like books to earn out, if that’s what you mean. As for the rest, I am five feet seven inches tall, an American citizen, and definitely not yours.”
“A guy can dream. I’m talking about the part I underlined. About killing hundreds of Japs singlehandedly.”
Only a man who had never witnessed bloodshed could be so in thrall to it. Then she remembered the roundups and amended the thought. Only those who had never witnessed it or were drunk on it.
“Who knew,” he went on, “that poor guy in the wheelchair got there by being a hero.”
Horace wasn’t a poor guy any more than she fit Bill’s earlier description, but she wasn’t going to argue the point.
“That’s not the way he tells it.” As soon as the words were out she knew she should have kept her mouth shut about that, too.
He leaned forward eagerly. “He told you about it?”
“Only to deny it.”
“I knew the story was too good to be true.” He sprawled back in the chair. “All the same, you have to admit, like Garrick says in the interview, he had the balls to publish the book.”
“Actually, he said guts.”
His grin was more leer than smile. “Yeah, that’s what they wrote, but you know what Garrick really said.”
* * *
This time the man came to Horace’s office rather than the house. And this time Horace introduced her.
It was close to six, but unlike on the night Horace had taken her for a ride, the office wasn’t empty. Faith Silver was on her way to the ladies’ room, to put on a face, she told Charlotte as she passed her cubicle. She was meeting an agent for a drink. The assistant to the advertising manager was hunched over his typewriter, squinting through the smoke from his cigarette as he banged out catalogue copy for the next list. The cigarette, Charlotte suspected, made him feel like the reporter he hoped someday to be. Horace was in his office with the man she’d seen coming out of his part of the house a week earlier. She stopped in the doorway when she saw him.
“I’m sorry, I’ll come back later.”
“No, come in,” Horace said. “We’re finished.”
“Not me,” the man said as he stood. “I’m nowhere near finished. Not on this subject.”
Horace introduced them.
“Would you believe,” the man whose name was Art Kaplan said, “there was a time when me and this guy”—he jerked a thumb in Horace’s direction—“were thick as thieves.”
“Foxholes have that effect on people,” Horace said.
“Only we lost touch after the war,” the man went on. “Then I saw that piece about him in Newsweek. I wasn’t sure it was the same Horace Field. I figured it probably was. The woods are full of Fields”—he paused to let the joke sink in—“but how many are named Horace? Still, I couldn’t be sure until I read the other piece, the interview with that author. Then I was positive.”
“He knew I was the Horace Field who’d be likely to publish a pornographic novel,” Horace said to Charlotte, then turned to the man. “Which incidentally this is not.”
“I knew you were the guy who killed hundreds of Japs singlehandedly.”
“He’s seen too many war movies,” Horace said. “No one kills hundreds of Japs singlehandedly, Art. You know that.”
“He can deny it all he wants,” the man countered, “but the Jewish War Vets of America know the truth. That’s why I’m here,” he explained to Charlotte, then turned back to Horace. “This isn’t just your medal, old buddy. It belongs to them. It belongs to all of us.” He faced Charlotte again. “More than half a million Jews served in the war. Guess how many got the Congressional Medal.”
“I have no idea.”
“She’s not interested, Art.”
“Two,” the man answered. “Two men out of more than half a million. If that’s not anti-Semitism, what is?”
“Remember what I told you about hypersensitivity,” Horace said to Charlotte. “This is exhibit A.”
“Hypersensitivity, my foot. A general went on the record. ‘A Jew getting the Congressional Medal of Honor,’ he said. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’”
“Actually, he said a Jew or a Negro.” They both turned to look at her. “Don’t ask me where I read that.”
“Anyway,” the man went on, “it’s time to start adding to the list. But we can’t do it without this guy.” He jerked his thumb in Horace’s direction again.
“They figure,” Horace said to Charlotte, “if Chips from the K-9 Corps can get a Distinguished Service Cross for taking out a German machine gun nest, why not put Field up for the Congressional Medal?” He turned to Kaplan. “But be careful, Art. When Chips met Eisenhower, he nipped Ike’s hand. If you got me up there, you never know whom I might take a bite of.”
“Do you believe this guy?” Kaplan asked Charlotte.
“Charlotte believes me.” Horace made a show of looking at his watch. “She also wants to get out of here. As do I. Come on, Art, I’ll show you where the elevator is.”
“I know where the elevator is. I came up in it. But you’re not getting rid of me that easily, old buddy. I shall return.”
“You and MacArthur,” he said as Art Kaplan left the office, then turned to Charlotte. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“That’s what I tell Vivi,” she reassured him, though she was beginning to believe this.
“The Jewish War Veterans of America need a live body for display purposes. Though a dead one would be even more effective. Nothing tears at the heartstrings like getting killed for your country. But barring a dead body, they’ll settle for a live specimen. The point is they need a name, a face, a record they can inflate. And if he happens to be in a wheelchair, so much the better.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
“Besides, I don’t believe in awards.”
“How about the Pulitzer, or better yet the Nobel?”
“Okay, I don’t believe in awards for killing people.”
“Is there any choice in war?”
“There are always choices of one kind or another. You know that, Charlie.”
* * *
This wasn’t the first time she’d witnessed one of his late-night excursions into the yard. Funny, he never made them during daylight hours. At least, she’d never observed him then. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen by her or any of the neighbors in the adjacent brownstones. Or perhaps whatever drove him around and around that walled-in scrap of land came out only under the cloak of darkness.
She stood in the window of her bedroom watching him. Down one side of the handkerchief-sized garden, freed now from its winter wrapping, beginning to green with spring, across the bottom, and up the other side. She lost sight of him as he made his way along the path closest to the house; then he came into view again, hurling himself down the side. Even from this distance, she could see that his hands gripped and spun the wheels as if he wanted to strangle them. When he hooked around the far corner, gravel sprayed. Once again, he was a hot-rodder in a wheelchair, but this was no joyride. She knew she shouldn’t go on watching him. She wasn’t a voyeur. She’d never watch people in the privacy of sex. Why was she spying on him in the intimacy of his suffering? But she couldn’t drag herself away. She wished he’d stop. She wished she could race down the four flights and out the door and hurl herself into his path to stop him.
Halfway up one side of the garden for the fifth or sixth or tenth time, he did stop. He grabbed the wheels to halt the motion and sat looking up at the house. He was looking straight at her window.
She stepped back. The light was out in the bedroom, but the glow from the living room probably backlit her silhouette. She should have thought of that. She took another step back, but went on standing there, looking down at him.
He lifted one hand from the wheel and waved. She stepped closer to the window. He made a motion to open it. She did.
“Come on down,” he called quietly. “The weather’s fine. But bring a coat. April is the cruelest month.”
&
nbsp; She hesitated for a moment, but only a moment, then nodded and closed the window.
He was waiting for her at the back door. “Take a walk with me. I’d offer a ride, but the occasion doesn’t call for celebration.” He started down one side of the garden, but more slowly now, as if this really were an evening outing rather than an attempt to exorcise demons.
She fell in step beside him. “Why doesn’t it call for celebration? Is The Red Trapeze turning out to be a problem after all?”
“Not in the way you mean.”
They turned the corner. This time the gravel crunched rather than flew under his wheels. It made a similar sound beneath her shoes.
“Then how?”
They turned the other corner and started up the parallel path toward the house.
“Henry Garrick just can’t stop giving interviews.”
“I know. He’ll have spent all the publicity before the book’s even out.”
“It’s a bit more than that.”
“The business about your having guts?”
They took another turn around the garden before he answered. “There’s a line from a movie that came out right after the war. You were still in Europe. The Best Years of Our Lives.”
“‘Why can’t they leave a guy alone?’”
His head swiveled to her in the darkness. “How did you know?”
“It was still playing when I got here. Someone told me it would be a good introduction to life in America. Hannah, come to think of it.”
Paris Never Leaves You Page 17
