Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

  Blanche searches the crowd, stands on tiptoe, weaves through it, looking for—

  “Lily!” She can’t stop herself, she rushes to Lily’s side, pushing her way through the other women with her shoulders, as her hands are still cuffed.

  “Lily!” Blanche is so relieved to see her alive that she forgets everything she’s been taught. Do not recognize a fellow member of the Resistance, if jailed. Never—ever—betray knowledge of one another.

  Blanche blows it. Just as she’d blown it yesterday, and she gasps, tries to stumble away, praying no one heard her. But then she hears her own name, uttered softly.

  “Blanche.” Lily’s face—it’s so pale, and Blanche expects to see hatred in her eyes, disappointment, disgust at her stupidity.

  Instead, she sees only a strange, startled softness, almost happiness. Almost as if Lily is glad to have been recognized. But no, it can’t be—but before Blanche can ask, a German voice booms out: “The Communist Lily Kharmanyoff!”

  Blanche watches as Lily is marched off, defiant, chin tilted up, hands behind her in cuffs—and a last, lingering look at Blanche. Who finally recognizes it, this look—of gratitude.

  Of love.

  And Blanche is left achingly alone, despite the fact that she’s surrounded by wailing women, surrounded by her own terror and guilt for what she’s done. To herself. To Lily. To Claude, who must surely be out of his mind by now.

  “Blanche Auzello!” And now it’s her turn to be marched off and thrown into another room, given a change of clothes—rough wool gown too big for her, enormous wooden clogs for shoes. All her other clothes, her jewelry—the gold cross, the chain snapped off her neck, it’s such a wisp of a thing, after all—are taken from her. But not her passport—she closes her eyes, remembering. It’s back at the Ritz.

  Will she need it here? Will it matter? There is no way of knowing. She can only wait and see.

  “Why am I here?” Although she knows very well why she’s there, she feels compelled to ask it into a void; there are no humans present, only impassive, soulless German faces.

  There is no answer.

  She’s thrown into a cell, all alone. There’s a pot. A cot. Three mice to keep her company.

  Night descends, she must have fallen asleep, for the next thing she knows a priest is being shown into her cell, and she is stunned. Stunned to realize that they still haven’t figured it out, these stupid Germans.

  They still have no idea she’s a Jew.

  So they must have her passport now—maybe Claude brought it? The realization fills her with hope for the first time since they knocked on her door at the Ritz.

  The Catholic priest—an old man, one of those priests who’s well fed and well pleased with himself—looks smugly superior as he calls her by her name and blesses her. But he looks with disgust at the mice and the pot, and he remains standing, obviously afraid to sit on her louse-ridden cot. Then he proceeds to ask questions.

  “Where are you from in America, my child?”

  “Cleveland.”

  “What church did you worship at there, if I may ask?”

  “Our Lady of Who-the-Hell knows. It’s been a long time, Father.”

  “I see. Do you want Communion? I’ll have to hear your confession first.”

  She shakes her head. “Sorry, Father, maybe you’re an OK guy. But maybe you’ll run to the Nazis and tell them everything you hear. I’ll take a raincheck.”

  He sighs, blesses her anyway, and leaves.

  For two more days she remains in the cell. Blanche almost convinces herself they’ve forgotten all about her, that they made a mistake, that they’ll change their minds and set her free to go back home—to Claude. She’s given brown mealy bread with worms in it; she spits it out. Gruel with worms in it; she spits it out. Soup with worms in it; she’s so hungry by then that she gobbles it but it’s no use. It comes right back up again and she has to sleep that night with a puddle of sick on the floor.

  At least it keeps the mice away.

  And then they come for her, the first time. The steel boots—she’s heard them walking up and down the hall day and night, but this time they stop at her cell, insert the key in the lock, prod her with rifles, and she walks, willingly, on her own two feet where they tell her to. Because now, they’ll set her free; they’ll tell her it was all a mistake; they’ll send for Claude, who will come for her.

  For she is Madame Auzello of the Ritz.

  Blanche is shoved into an office, where an officer sits at a desk, a file folder spread before him. A folder with a picture of Lily—looking startled, her hair whipping about her face, she’s younger in the photo, her hair longer—paper-clipped to the front of it.

  “So tell us, Madame Auzello. How is it that you, from the Ritz—we know your husband, he has been most civil to our officers staying there, quite helpful—got mixed up with this filthy Jew Communist whore Lily Kharmanyoff?”

  “What? I—I thought I was here because—”

  “Yes, yes, you did an impetuous thing at Maxim’s. We know all about that. But we are more interested in your relationship to this Jew whore, whom we’ve been looking for. How did you meet?”

  “We met on a boat. Long ago.” A lifetime ago. She’d been running away from Claude like a child, a willful child. Lily picked her out of a crowded bar, saw her sadness, saw her need—maybe saw something brave and true, as well—and came to her. They drank, Blanche remembers. They laughed. They even danced.

  “Why were you on the boat? Where was it coming from?”

  “From Morocco. To France. I’d taken a vacation. I was returning to the Ritz.”

  “Why was she on the boat?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have kept track of her activities, from Spain until the present. She is a Communist, a traitor, a murderer of Germans. Do you know how many she has killed?”

  Blanche shakes her head. No questions.

  “Thirteen. She has murdered thirteen of our soldiers.”

  Blanche wants to say, “Hooray.” She wants to say, “Only thirteen?” Blanche wants to say, “Good for her!” But she doesn’t dare.

  “So it is simple. Just say that Lily is a Jew and a member of the Resistance—yes, we know of your activities, but we will be generous toward you, and we will let you go. After all, you are the famous Madame Auzello. Your home has been our home these last few years. We don’t want to harm you—it would not be good publicity.”

  “I don’t know,” she replies, telling the truth for once. “She never told me. We’ve never discussed it.” And Blanche is grateful—so grateful—for that. Because here, in this prison, she understands that she is not quite the actress she once thought she was. What will she say, when the Nazis ask her if she’s a Jew?

  Blanche Rubenstein Auzello has no earthly idea. And so it’s fortunate that they don’t. This time.

  She’s returned to her cell, thinking that at least she got through it, it wasn’t that bad—not the horrors that Lily had described, that Robert had to endure—and so the worst is over, only to find that it’s just the beginning. The beginning of days alone. Days that turn seamlessly into nights when she is sick—a fever one day, dysentery the next, mysterious rashes that chafe against the rough wool of her garment. Cries echoing in the halls of this prison, all women; there are no men in this section, they are separated here at Fresnes. Occasional defiance, always cut short in mid-cry.

  How many days has she been here? She loses count. She tries to keep track by her menstrual cycle, which she can do nothing about but let the blood trickle down her legs. But it happens only once.

  Soon after the blood stops flowing, a soldier comes into her cell, matter-of-factly; she assumes he’s there to bring her back in for interrogation. Instead, he shuts the door behind him and starts unbuttoning his trousers, a smug grin on his face. She co
wers against the wall, she tries to scream but nothing comes out, she’s so weak she’s like a dry leaf in his hands, crumpling at his rough touch. It’s over quickly—she’s so brittle, the pain sears her vision, but thank God, he’s done almost as soon as he enters her.

  The whole time, she shuts her eyes so she can’t see his blue ones as he grimaces and grunts and sweats and pushes, as he does this ugly, invasive thing—as he rapes her. Goddammit, Blanche, don’t let them steal your words as well as your soul. If she doesn’t look, if she doesn’t retain a visual memory, then if she ever gets out of here maybe she’ll forget it ever happened. And if she forgets, she won’t have to tell Claude.

  Who, she knows, could not handle this. He’s not as strong as she is.

  Always, almost every day, the questioning. She’s hauled out, taken to some officer who looks over the same file with the same picture of Lily. Some days she’s accused of harboring fugitives—“Known Semites”—at the Ritz, shown photos of people she’s never seen before in her life. People like her. Other days, she’s falsely accused of murdering an officer, blowing up a bridge—it’s all right here, in her file.

  But it always comes back to Lily.

  “Tell us. Tell us Lily Kharmanyoff is a Jew. So you can go home.”

  There are times when they turn charming, her captors; when they offer Blanche a seat, tea, a pastry—not full of worms—that she devours like an animal, ashamed but too ravenous to stop herself. They laugh and ask her, genuinely interested, about her famous friends at the Ritz—they are particularly fascinated by “the writer Hemingway”—and she understands that they’re trying to break her by reminding her of all she’s missing, all she might never see again. They’re reminding her that a goddamned pastry is all it takes to humiliate herself in front of them. Those interviews are actually the cruelest for they bring back to her the memories of before, when she’d been charmed by von Dincklage, been concerned about Friedrich, tried to cheer Astrid up with a new hat. When she’d thought these specimens were human beings, deserving of laughter, deserving of her good cheer.

  In all this time, Blanche is never accused of any of the crimes against them that she actually committed, never confronted with the truth of any of the lies she’s told and she knows, then, that they aren’t very bright, these Germans. But intelligence isn’t required when you have evil on your side.

  “I can sentence you to death any time I want,” Blanche is reminded frequently, always by a German whose words try to lure her into betrayal. “All I need is the suspicion of truth. Tell me, this Lily. She is a Jew, right? A Russian Jew spy? A Jew whore?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Blanche repeats. Sometimes a spark will ignite, a spark she thought was extinguished forever, and she’ll throw her head back and spit out words from another person, another Blanche. She’ll tell them the food is rotten, that the hospitality is certainly nothing like the Ritz. She’ll relish her defiance, but it never lasts long, it can’t. Not here.

  Sometimes she’ll torment herself, lying alone at night, trying to shut out the sounds—she’s not the only woman the soldiers rape. The door to a cell opening, closing, grunts, moans, silence, the door opening again. And really, what else are she and her fellow prisoners there for, if not for their pleasure? Pleasure in torturing, in punishing, in breaking, in raping. But how they can do it when the prisoners look like skeletons, when their hair falls out in clumps that the mice take away to use for nests, when their bowels are water and lice crawl all over them—Blanche has no idea.

  Lying on her cot amid this terrible nightmare, Blanche further punishes herself with thoughts of the Ritz.

  She’ll recall the bathroom in their suite, larger than this cell, ten times as large as this cell. The tubs of the Ritz are big enough to hold an army; she remembers how Claude told her the story about King Edward VII getting stuck in the bathtub, and so his good friend Cèsar Ritz ripped out all the tubs and installed more accommodating ones, fit for a king.

  She’ll remember the ease of picking up a phone and having anything brought to her, no matter the time of day. She’ll recall when those things would delight, fulfill—a time when a new dress would make her dance around for days. Or a new bracelet. Or a particularly elaborate bouquet of flowers. When things mattered—when her life was filled only with things that she hoarded, saved.

  Before she started saving people.

  “So maybe now you will see me at the Ritz. I’ll live there—with you,” Lily said that last day, and Blanche had thought she’d saved her, too. But Claude, he wouldn’t have liked that—no matter where they begin, her thoughts always end with Claude.

  This man. Her man. Who had roared like a lion in the face of J’Ali. Who had made her believe she was a prize worth fighting for. Who’d made it so easy for her—a life at the Ritz!—to forget where she came from.

  Who had hurt her, but Blanche can’t remember, anymore, why she’d ever been so angry with him. What is sex, after all? Nothing, compared to love. And he does love Blanche. After that last night together, she is sure of it.

  Sometimes Claude gets a startled expression on his face when he looks at her, then he becomes stern, as if he’s embarrassed by his feelings, as if nothing in his prim and proper little life could ever have prepared him for her.

  As nothing could have prepared her for him. She sees him clearly now, in a way she could not until war first wedged them even further apart, then patched them back together. She sees his intellect, his surprising passion, always revealed when she least expects it. His sense of duty. His love of his country. His bravery, these past years, in keeping the Nazis happy while undermining them right beneath their noses.

  It’s not his fault that it was so easy for Blanche to live down to his expectations for her, when her life lacked meaning and purpose. And it’s not her fault that it was so easy for Claude to live down to her expectations for him—a typically chauvinistic Frenchman—as well. Because truly, they had no idea what to do with each other after such a startling beginning, except to paint each other with the broadest of strokes, to revert to a type—and to allow the Ritz to seduce and distract them both. So that it was easy, at times, to forget that they might actually need to rely on, to trust in—to love—each other.

  Lying in her cell, alone, terrified, there is only one thing that is clear to Blanche now.

  If she is allowed to live, she will never leave Claude again.

  Marie-Louise Ritz, in the touching belief that she can ease Claude’s mind, has taken to inviting him up to her suite every evening. She worries about him returning to his rooms, where he will be alone. So she invites him to hers; Claude accepts, polite to a fault even now, and they have tea. Although she thoughtfully provides something stronger for him.

  And she tells him stories.

  Stories about the old days. The present is too terrible to contemplate, so she takes refuge, more and more, in her past. She recounts stories about Marcel Proust and the cork-lined bedroom in his flat; how he asked to be taken to the Ritz before he died and, since he couldn’t, how he asked for one last beer from the bar and it was on its way to him—of course, the Ritz takes care of its own—when he expired.

  Stories about her husband, César Ritz himself, and her belief that overwork killed him. She sometimes tells anecdotes about her younger son, the one she lost; but only stories about him as a child, and not as the troubled young man who took his own life, according to Frank Meier.

  Stories about herself as a young bride, not accustomed to anything so grand as the Ritz, but even then, in her husband’s fevered eyes, she could see it taking shape. Stories about how they got the financing together—she still cannot say the word “Rothschild” without wrinkling her nose in distaste—and her delight in traipsing all over the world procuring the fabulous antiques, paintings, tapestries, furniture with which she furnished it.

  And Claude sees it through h
er eyes; this grand hotel, this shrine, this Taj Mahal—it is, at its simplest, a woman’s home. And Claude wonders that they never really have had a real home to themselves, Blanche and he; that they’ve been so content living like itinerants—spoiled, yes, but itinerants nonetheless.

  If they’d had a house of their own, the same bed every night, one address instead of two—if she’d had the work of running a home herself, cooking, cleaning, arranging, to keep her occupied—would she be here with him still, his Blanche? Would he have been able to keep her safe somewhere else—anywhere else—but the Ritz? Once, it had seemed the most sheltering place in the world; once, it had received more of his time, his energy—yes, even his love—than did his wife.

  But after that last night, when Blanche told him what she’d done for him, and for Paris—for France itself; when he had seen her, finally, as others—Lily, Pearl—had seen her, brave, not selfish; giving, not merely taking—Claude cannot look at the Ritz in the same way. It has become yet another casualty of the war; the scene of his last tender words with a wife he was only just discovering, before the Germans took her. As they are taking everyone.

  If they don’t leave first.

  “Claude, I’d like a word,” Frank Meier says to him one day—all the days have begun to blur, since Blanche is gone; Claude, who was the master of any calendar—the master of time itself, corralling it, organizing it, parceling it out in appropriate increments—suddenly has trouble remembering what day of the week it is.

  He doesn’t sleep much at night. He stares and stares at the empty pillow beside him, and tortures himself with visions of what she must be going through. If she is still alive.

  In all Claude’s years at the Ritz, Frank and he have had very few actual conversations. He is such the king of his domain, Claude has left him to it. Beyond ordering alcohol, seeing to it that stemware is regularly replaced, linens repaired or bought, fresh lemons and limes in abundance (these last only a memory now; Claude hasn’t been able to procure any citrus in months, to the Germans’ displeasure). Claude rarely spends time in the bar, himself. Blanche spends enough time there for them both. And he does not think it wise to be seen drinking with the guests; they—and his staff—would think less of correct, responsible Monsieur Auzello.