by Luanne Rice
I have knots. Knots bind, don’t they? Bowlines, half hitches, granny knots, clove hitches, sheet bends, overhand knots, figure eights…I knew them all. At eleven I had learned to sail a Bluejay, and I would practice knots by the hour. I could make that boat fast to any dock you could find; I would practice tying knots for hours and hours with a length of clothesline. Even during the winter!
So, you have been here before? Wanda asks in an accent that suddenly, alarmingly, reminds me of Lily and Henk’s maid, Ilsa. I don’t feel so safe anymore. Perhaps my shoulders got tenser, because Wanda chops then with the edge of her hand.
Where, to Germany? I ask.
Yes. Or to this hotel.
This is my first time in the country. It is very lovely. (I say, although I have seen next to nothing of it, and I have a strange feeling of danger. But I was taught to always be polite to my host.)
I have lived here always.
But your English is so good!
Yes, good, but I learned it in school, not in America or England. The farthest I have been is to Spain. Once I went to the Costa del Sol.
Spain—I’ve never been there. We’re going to Italy later in the trip.
Quit talking now, Wanda says, chopping me again. You have too many knots.
That afternoon I sent a postcard to Lily and Henk. “Be sure to tell Ilsa that Germany has a lovely countryside,” I wrote, certain that Ilsa would read the message herself and save the Voorheeses the trouble.
I strolled through the festival, which stretched through the Cannstatter Meadows along the brownish Neckar River. There were booths attended by women wearing folk costumes, long floral-printed dresses with bodices that pushed their white bosoms up so that they spilled like beer froth over the fabric’s edge; stands that sold wurst (knockwurst, bockwurst, bratwurst) and lager; brass bands with schoolboys pumping great lungfuls of air into enormous tubas; games of chance and skill; flower vendors. Leaves on the trees had started to change from green to shades of brown and yellow. I found the scene oddly colorless.
A patch of grass beside the river was unoccupied, and I took it. Staring at my notebook for a few minutes, I tried to write to Sam. I told him about the plane ride, the festival, the mineral baths. How I had wished for him to be with me, warm and close in the bubbling water…
Absence does not make my heart grow fonder. It makes my brain grow more mazed, my heart grow more distant. I lose the strength of my confidence. Sitting by the Neckar, I listened to an oompah band play a polka and felt utterly melancholy. Jason hurried past with the bellhop, now apparently off duty: he had changed out of his uniform into a black turtleneck and tight black trousers. They looked avid, as if they were late for something. Jason would forget Terry in the stud garden. I would moon over Sam while staring at blank paper, but I was far from forgetting anything.
Jason claimed he did not sleep either of the two nights we stayed in Stuttgart. Between meetings with junior army wives, the St. Peter’s Mother’s Group, and the many factions of officers’ wives’ clubs, I steered clear of the mineral springs and read guidebooks in my room. I daydreamed about Together Forever and reread the script. Lying on one of my beds, all four pillows behind my head, I would keep my ears cocked for Jason. I wished he would drop by and talk to me. Now I was ready for a phone call from Margo and Sam, even one reading me the riot act. Why couldn’t the “Celebrity File” have been a few days late in reporting the latest romance? Why couldn’t Margo have exploded with righteous indignation now instead of then? Now I was prepared to calmly explain what had happened, to tell Sam that I loved him and that the press was just feeling its oats. Tell him calmly and with some amusement. That telephone call had ruined everything. All I could do now was hope that Emile Balfour would be kind and make me Anya.
Of all the places Jason and I visited on our whirlwind tour, Nuremberg was the oddest. I had strange nightmares and a sense of déjà vu the entire time we stayed there. Sliced in half by the Pegnitz River, Nuremberg has an evil, medieval air about it. Moated city, fairy-tale turrets, damsels in distress, Brothers Grimm, witch’s castle, gargoyles, Nazis. The city of Albrecht Dürer, it is also the city of Albert Speer. I felt instantly that I had been there before. I had dreamed of it or had seen it in picture books.
These streets: they echo with the sharp heels of storm troopers. The voices shouting, instructing, recruiting, demanding the citizens to unleash the final solution. Singing allegiance to Hitler. Der Führer. Outside the city is a mammoth stadium where they used to shout the word. Dragging, screaming, scraping, shouting, building, unleashing. Human evil. But there is something else.
Driving in from Stuttgart, I asked the chauffeur to stop in front of the Holy Ghost Hospital. It has a Crucifixion Court. It gave me the shivers. I sat in the back seat, leaning forward, staring at the ornate building whose foundations reached into the riverbed, for several minutes before Jason told the driver to drive on.
“What is with you?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, but I did. My father had bombed Nuremberg during the war. Before he became a real estate man, before he married my mother, before he sired three daughters, he had been the navigator-bombardier of the Eighth Air Force’s lead plane. Perhaps this building, built in the fourteenth century, contained the ghosts who had inspired my father’s nights out. The real Blue Danube coursed just a few miles south. Wasn’t that significant?
My father trained for the Air Force with a bunch of college-age boys, fighting for their country, afraid of dying, afraid of killing Germans, wanting to kill Nazis. They were sent to England. Misty, green, proud England. Their base was on the Wash, north of London. They lived in a metal Nissen hut that was never free of dampness. They played cards and took leaves in London, where they stayed at the Mayfair, went riding in Hyde Park, got drunk in Piccadilly, saw shows at Covent Garden, kissed girls on Blackfriars Bridge. They flew missions over Germany and dropped bombs through the clouds on cities they could not see, cities that were only coordinates on their charts.
When the bombers flew into German airspace like a formation of Canada geese, my father’s plane would be at the point of the V. On one mission, he bombed Nuremberg. Sent the wounded, many of them not Nazis, to the Holy Ghost Hospital. My father was twenty-three. No wonder he would always find his way back to the Blue Danube. If you think in terms of pilgrimage, it begins to make some sense.
I thought about my father a lot in Nuremberg. I visualized him not as my father, not as a ghost, but as he had looked then: in his Air Force cap and brown leather bomber’s jacket (with the Eighth Air Force insignia and first lieutenant’s bars), his big grin and soft brown eyes smiling out of his skinny face, his protruding ears, his long Cavan nose.
Whenever I thought of Sam, whose letter hadn’t arrived, I would shake myself up and say how can you think of that when your father bombed this city. It became the perfect avoidance tactic.
I wished mightily for my father’s ghost to visit me. It didn’t. Instead I stood on the stage with Jason and talked about my soap opera father, Paul Grant.
DELILAH Oh, Beck…my father will never forgive this jail break. He believes so strongly in the justice system. He promised me I would be free on appeal. In some ways he is so…innocent.
BECK Delilah, darling. Darling. There wasn’t time to wait out an appeal. We knew about the prison uprising. Did you want to get caught in the crossfire? Don’t you imagine that Delilah Grant would make a first-rate hostage? Did you actually think that I would stand by and let that happen?
DELILAH (docile). No, I can’t imagine that…my strong love. You are so good to me. You’re risking everything…you know that?
BECK I know that. And your father will understand. Paul Grant is a good man. Soon we will clear your name and come out of hiding. Soon, my love.
Our audience cheered, and some wept. Every woman there had a father and had known, at one time or other, how it felt to disappoint him. Standing on that stage in Nuremberg, entertaining the troops’
wives with scenes from my soap opera, I was disappointing my father, James Cavan. He had once told me, Lily, and Margo that we should never visit Germany. Flying alongside the Concorde, he had avoided mentioning my stops in Germany. Of course he would never appear to me here.
By the time we reached Vicenza, Italy, our last stop before returning to Paris, I had stopped writing to Sam. Every time I thought about my movie audition, I broke out in shivers. Would I be good enough? Would I be able to improvise? I had learned improvisation, but would I remember how? I felt sure that I would remember if only I had graduated. Graduates can improvise, dropouts cannot. Graduates can pull situations out of hats and make them real. If you told Susan Russell to improvise, to act like a drunk mother whose children are home from boarding school for Christmas, she would give you gin and mistletoe. Emile Balfour would tell me to act like a nervous actress auditioning for her first movie role, and I would flop.
I wanted the part so badly, I walked the streets of Vicenza pretending to be an Italian banker, the wife of a colonel in the 509th Airborne Infantry, a miner in San Francisco for the gold rush. I wanted to prepare myself for the moment when Emile would say, “Roll ’em!” What harm had been done by that crazy night at Palace? None. I wanted to become his next star. I lay awake in the hotel hoping for it. Voices carried up from the Piazza dei Signori, and I imagined them talking about me. I stared at the white plaster walls, wishing to be adored. I would see my name in reviews and on movie marquees. Wherever I went.
But then my mind would drift to Sam, to our nights on the promontory at Watch Hill when meteors streaked through the black sky and bioluminescent seaweed flashed in the tidal pools, with Sam holding my hand and our toes gripping the salty rocks. We had kissed a lot. We had talked endlessly, and our conversations played themselves for me in my mind. About our families, about New York, about acting and oceanography. I thought of his slim back, his messy black hair, the way his fingers felt on my shoulder. The smell of his skin. The pillowcase I had brought to Europe to remind me of his scent was now as bland as old laundry.
Sam Chamberlain. I thought with wry, detached regret how sad it was that our time together had been so brief. We hadn’t had time to forge a strong relationship. We had not really fallen in love; it had been mere romance. It had been the romance of the sea, of September, of the rocks, of the foghorns. Margo the matchmaker: her rare roast beef had been for naught. I lay awake in Vicenza, thinking of how things drift away. My father, literally, was ash, drifting in the sea. My mother, as usual, was drifting in her own watercolored world. Lily had married Henk, and she was drifting toward motherhood. Margo would drift away after she married Matt. And Sam had drifted away as abruptly as he had arrived. The ebb tide was swifter than the flood. One by one, the people I loved would all leave. But if I became a big star, at least I would be adored. You saw how they followed Emile Balfour, I told myself; you saw how they stared at him as if they knew him. They love you as Delilah, but that was different. That was limited. Lonely women, American women, who tuned in daily. I wanted to be adored worldwide. Lying in bed, I thought of my faceless public adoring me, replacing Sam. He had probably already given me up. I thought that, but I lay awake, watching the headlights of passing cars arc across my ceiling and hoped hoped hoped. Hoped that everything I feared would not be true.
Chapter 15
Lights, camera, action. Three men slouch in easy chairs, smoking cigarettes, watching the stage, which is only a floor cleared of furniture, with lights trained on it from above. Portable metal spotlights clipped onto heating pipes. One camera records everything. My auburn hair brushes my white throat and the shoulders of my black leotard as I swing my head. I smile at the men, then I smile into the camera.
“Her lines are exquisite,” one man, the American, is saying.
I am a ship, a yacht, a white sloop slicing the waves off Napatree Point.
“Okay. We are rolling. Una, how do you feel?” Emile Balfour asks, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. I see it disperse in the bright light.
“Great. Just fine.”
“Turn your face to the left, there,” he says. “Now to the right. You ready to talk?”
“Yes.”
“Go ahead.”
I take a deep breath.
“Just say whatever comes into your mind.”
Whatever? Another deep breath. Okay, whatever. “Zoon, zoon, cuddle and croon,” I say, remembering one of Lily’s favorite nursery rhymes, and then I think of Hecate and the three weird sisters. “‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.’” The battle. Battle scars. I think of Nuremberg. I am a young mother, a secret Jew. No one knows. I’m coming home from the market; my bag is heavy with fresh milk, eggs, and crackers. Some bittersweet chocolate given to me at the Resistance meeting. Those Resistance members always seem to have contraband. I cannot wait to give it to my children, little Eric and Susie. But my house is gone. There is a gap where it stood this morning. Plumes of smoke rise from the rubble, and flames lick the timbers. A siren wails. Neighbors hurry toward me, take my bag, push me down on the curb. They press my head to my knees; I am going to faint. All the while I am saying, “Eric…Susie.” I am in a trance and tears run down my face.
“Good. Whatever that is, it is good,” the American calls.
I had forgotten them, my panel of judges. Not forgotten, but transcended. Here I am, improvising like a graduate. The American said it was good. But now my concentration is shot. I can’t think of Nuremberg anymore. I’d better come up with something else.
“Tell me, what does your husband do, Mrs. Spock?” Emile Balfour asks. The other men giggle.
“Mah husband?” I ask in a southern drawl, letting my hand dangle in front of my breast. I pat my hair, adjust my collar, let my hands flutter. “Whah, he’s a scab. Crosses picket lines all day long. No matter where you got a strike, you just call Ralston, and he’ll take the job.”
“A scab?” Emile asks one of the men.
“Let her go on,” the American says, laughing. “So he’s a scab. What about you? You work?”
“Yes, I promote birth control.” Where did that come from? I feel myself get hot.
“But you have kids, right?”
“Kids? Do I have kids? Honey, you must be joking. I am one of the leaders of the movement. I practice what I preach. No kids. No kids whatsoever.”
“No, but you like to get laid, right?”
“Well, of course. Of course. I am a natural woman. Nat—”
“Okay, take it to Italy, babe,” the American says. “Do it for Emile. He’s a little fuzzy on the Alabama stuff. You’re on the boot. In Rome or somewhere.”
Italian. I could do an Italian voice. In New York I had an Italian friend who worked for the Metropolitan Opera. She wished to sing, but she worked in the wardrobe, preparing costumes for the divas. She always had a threaded needle stuck through her lapel. During her free time she sculpted in pink clay. She had had several exhibits in SoHo, and she was terribly imperious.
I screw up my face and slash the air with my hand. “Why do you copy Picasso, Gauguin? You must learn to be o-reeginal.”
“But I want to be an artiste,” Emile says, falsetto. He slouches low in his vinyl seat.
“This is not art. Now…to sculpt in pink clay. That is art. That is o-reeginal. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do.”
(Impatient wave.) “He doesn’t understand.”
“Tell me, Angela…” Emile pauses while the other men giggle. “Are you in love?”
I bow my head, covering my face with one hand. I come up smiling shyly. “Oh, yes. He is a sailor. He is away for many months, and then I meet him at the wharf. We cry together.” I roll my r’s when I say “cry.” “I bring him to my house where I cook him pancakes because he is so sick of fish.”
“Okay, Una. Break now.”
The camera stops whirring. I blink my eyes as I step
out of the bright light. The men remain low in their chairs. A full ashtray sits before them on the low table. They look at me, waiting for me to speak. Finally Emile rises and shakes my hand.
“Thank you. Now we must wait to see you on film.”
“That’s it?”
Everyone laughs. The man who has not spoken stands and kisses both my cheeks. “What, did you think we would say, ‘Hey, you’ve got the job’?”
I scowl, but I turn it into a smile. Of course I did, you pompous French creep. “No,” I say. “I just wondered what you thought.”
“But that is highly subjective,” Emile says, his forehead creasing with amusement. He brings the tiniest nub of a burning cigarette to his lips with a gold toothpick. “We have not had a chance to get together and discuss it. Perhaps I loved you, but Jean hated you. You must give me the chance to say, ‘But why did you hate her? You must love her because she has the spark, the life…’ You know?”
I nod my head so loosely it flaps. My expression says, “Oh, I am so naive!” It makes all three men laugh. Emile steps a bit closer. He stares directly into my eyes. “Later?” I say.
“At the Crillon.”
Although it was just one and a half weeks since we had left Paris, the city seemed colder, more autumnal, full of the rasping sound of leaves blowing down the avenues. At the flower market, where I had sat to write a letter to Sam, I saw bunches of colored leaves and dry grasses instead of the brilliant summer flowers. Autumn is my favorite season; it renews me. But that week I felt tired, as if I might be coming down with the flu.
To reward us for such a successful publicity tour, Chance Schutz had insisted that Jason and I spend three days in Paris, compliments of him and Billy. It was another example of Chance’s boundless generosity. He believed in rewarding people for work well done. Our work was finished; I had expected to pay myself for the time I spent auditioning, and Jason had no reason at all to stay in Paris. But we accepted. My new room at Hôtel de Crillon faced the Place de la Concorde; traffic flowed past on the avenue, but no sound penetrated the sealed windows. I tried to open them, the way I had my windows overlooking the interior courtyard, but apparently guests were not to be subjected to street noises. I sat in my Louis XVI chair and rummaged through the desk for stationery. When I found it, I closed the drawer without taking any out.
