The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “I think it’s marvelous,” a large woman boomed. “An extraordinary accomplishment in both form and statement.”

  Alizée recognized the speaker as the friend who’d come with Mrs. Roosevelt to the WPA show. “Thank you, Hick,” she said, pleased that she was able to pluck the name out of nowhere.

  Hick beamed. “I love how the objects start as one thing on one side and end up as something altogether different on the other.”

  “I still want to know what the story is,” the cabinet secretary insisted.

  “It’s about the SS St. Louis,” Alizée explained. “The ship full of refugees that was denied—”

  “So you think we should take all of them in?” Natalie demanded. “Even if it’s a prelude to war? To thousands of American boys getting killed?”

  “It’s not a prelude to war,” Alizée said. “And it’s not swapping some lives for others. These are innocent people, families, running from Hitler and being sent right back to him . . .” She began to choke up. “And . . . and if we don’t help them, they’re the ones who are going to get killed.”

  “Only the Jews,” someone murmured.

  The small group went completely silent, although it wasn’t clear if the comment was just a statement of fact or if it was, indeed, anti-Semitic.

  “There’s no reason for that kind of talk,” Natalie said. “I may not agree with either the style or the message of this painting, but we live in a country where religious persecution is never acceptable.”

  Alizée couldn’t help wondering if maybe they didn’t.

  30

  DANIELLE, 2015

  Grand-mère died in her sleep. The family was shocked, then sad, then relieved. “She didn’t have any quality of life,” my mother pointed out. “I lost my mother a long time ago,” my aunt Susan declared. “It’s exactly the way I’d want to go,” we all told each other. But when I moved beyond the platitudes, I was surprisingly bereft.

  I guess it was partly because of that last time she spoke to me about Alizée, how many of the things she said turned out to be true: Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, apple pie, Turned, Eleanor Roosevelt. She did have a quality of life. She wasn’t lost a long time ago. She was as present as I was. And now she wasn’t. I’d been planning on visiting her again, telling her about the Pollock-Krasner House and the op-ed and the newspaper photo. I’d been looking forward to a possible reaction, maybe a few more nuggets of information. But I’d never got around to going. The lesson was not lost on me.

  As absurd as it seems, given our single conversation, it appeared I’d been viewing Grand-mère as my partner in this quest to answer the mysteries surrounding Alizée and the squares, imagining we were coconspirators in a great adventure. Which was ridiculous. This adventure had always been mine alone. Still, I couldn’t shake the notion that Grand had been cheering me on, and I felt guilty that I hadn’t been able to follow through, that I’d let her down.

  A week after Grand-mère’s funeral I got a call from my mother. She sounded odd: slightly giddy, which was unlike her, yet guarded, which was very much like her. “I have something I think you’re going to want to see,” she said, then paused theatrically.

  “What is it?” I was far from sure I wanted to see whatever this was.

  “I’ve been going through Grand-mère’s storage unit.” Heavy sigh. “It seems that maybe I was wrong about a few things . . .”

  Now this was intriguing.

  She wouldn’t tell me any more over the phone, so I jumped on a train and was at her house in a little over an hour. She handed me a letter written in a cramped but exacting script.

  12 April 1944

  New York City

  Ma petite soeur,

  Although I have no idea where to mail this letter, I am writing it anyway and will give it to you when I see you, along with any others I write. This way you will be able to follow my search, and we will be able to laugh together at all my false turns. But first I suppose you want to know about the strange journey that has brought me here.

  I have written some of this to you before, but I have no idea if you received the letters. So please bear with me. After Oncle was sent to Drancy, I went to check on him and was arrested myself. I escaped and have spent the past four years getting to America, most of it on foot. I walked across France, climbed the Pyrenees into Spain, and then made my way into Portugal.

  I hid in the hold of a ship in Lisbon, which took me to Cuba. I was planning to go to Argentina or the Dominican Republic, but an opportunity arose and I was able to slip into the United States and get to New York. You do not want to hear the details nor do I wish to write them down.

  I found your friends Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock in New York, and they told me you have been missing for almost as long as I have been traveling to you. I do not understand how a person in America can just disappear, and although they cannot either, they have convinced me it is true.

  I went to the Bloom Sanatorium and saw the papers with your diagnosis, which I know has to be wrong—except for the depersonalization that you suffered after Maman and Papa died. I am sorry to hear it has returned, but that does not change the foolishness of the rest. Just because you stay up all night painting and then sleep for a day to recover, to me, this does not mean you suffer from mania and melancholia. It is just how you unleash your creativity. Americans do not understand that artists are different from ordinary people. That this does not make them insane. This is what makes them artists.

  I also do not understand why you left the sanatorium after only two days. If that is what you did. I did not like the nurse I spoke with and am not certain she was telling me the truth. She acted strangely and would not say anything more than was on the papers. I am going to return to the sanatorium when a doctor is on duty. Maybe he will be more forthcoming.

  I also went to Cambridge to see if you had gone there, but found nothing. Lee told me Mrs. Roosevelt tried to help find you, so I went to Washington, DC, to speak with her but was not able to get an appointment. I am at a loss as to what to do next.

  I was so despondent that Lee gave me one of your paintings as a gift to try to cheer me up. She said it is the only piece of your work that is left. As with so many things I am discovering, I cannot believe this is the type of work you are doing now. It is so different from your paintings in France. But Lee assured me she watched you paint it.

  I did not want to take the painting as it reminds me that we are both very different people than we were when you left for America in 1937. But she told me you would be very happy to see it, so it is now in my rucksack and I will give it to you along with this letter when we are together once again. I have decided to return to France and search for you there. It will be nice to see your big, lopsided smile.

  Ton frère qui t’aime,

  Henri

  Stunned, I looked up at my mother, who nodded. Grand-père had never mentioned any of this to anyone, nor had Grand-mère, who surely must have known the story. He’d been arrested and escaped from a prison camp? Walked across Europe at the height of the war? Stowed away on a boat to Cuba? Gone to Bloom and read the same papers I had? It broke my heart that he wrote letters to the sister he never found.

  We had a good cry, and then my mother said, “There’s something else.”

  She handed me an unframed painting depicting abstracted barn animals under a blazing sun. It was a two-by-two-foot square with red undertones and a tantalizing emergent quality. The colors were fierce and energetic, and there was a piece of newsprint in the right corner. I began to cry again.

  31

  ALIZÉE, 1940

  The Rose, a saloon on the corner of Lafayette and Bleecker, was small, dark, and mostly empty, except for a half-dozen men lined up along the bar speaking with strong Italian accents. It was four thirty in the afternoon, and they were clearly laborers just off their shifts. Gideon had recommended it as an out-of-the-way spot to meet Hiram Bingham. It was a step up from the last place Alizée had been to with G
ideon but not by much. Hiram ordered two beers while she grabbed a table as far from the bar as possible.

  Hiram was a good-looking man, with high cheekbones and thick, curly hair. His unease and twitchiness were apparent. He sat down, took off his hat and twirled it around on his finger. He lit a cigarette, glanced around. When he saw that neither the men at the bar nor the bartender were paying any attention to them, he slipped her an envelope from inside his coat.

  Alizée pulled a single sheet of paper from its casing. This was it. What they’d been waiting for.

  “It’s a duplicate,” Hiram told her. “I’ve got the original. I’ll give it to you after you’ve contacted Mrs. Roosevelt and set up a safe way to get it to her.”

  She read it quickly and shook her head. “This can’t be real. No one would put something like this into words. On official stationery. I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe it.” He crushed his cigarette into the ashtray and immediately lit another. “I worked in Long’s office for over three years. And I’ve seen worse. He violates the law with impunity—thinks he’s above the rules. Even Congress and the president’s. He’s a completely immoral man. Fixated on his career and his hatreds.”

  “How do you know someone didn’t just write this to get you in trouble? Or ANL?”

  “I got it from a friend I trust, and I can assure you Long wrote this himself. The bastard.”

  “But—”

  “I tried to get my hands on one of the wires he sent to consulates in Europe ordering them to stop granting visas to Jews. Can you believe it? Written orders. Completely illegal and against FDR’s policies. Unfortunately there were none to be had. Long knows what he’s doing. It was only because of a slipup that I was able to get my hands on this.”

  “Consulates in Europe?” she croaked. “Which consulates?”

  “I know he was in contact with consuls in Lisbon, Zurich, and Marseilles, and I’m sure—”

  “Marseilles,” she repeated, stunned. “And Antwerp? Antwerp, too?”

  Hiram looked at her for a long moment. “You have family in Belgium,” he said. It was not a question.

  “And France.” She heard her words as if from inside a long tunnel, far away, distorted, not connected to her. “My family, all of them, are over there.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and his eyes told her how sorry he was. How bad it was.

  She dug her fingernails into her arm. Pressed them deep, but she felt nothing.

  “This memo could change things,” Hiram added quickly. “Make a huge difference. When FDR sees it, realizes that Long’s directly disobeying his orders, disavowing the oath he took to uphold the laws of the land, well, he’ll have to get rid of him. How could he not? It’s outright insubordination. And I’m thinking a federal crime.”

  She reread the contents.

  UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF STATE

  INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

  CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET

  FROM: Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary of State for Visa Division

  TO: James Dunn, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs; Adolf Berle Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs

  RE: The Matter of European Refugees

  DATE: June 12, 1940

  We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.

  Top Secret. The Matter of European Refugees. Long was sitting in his big office, writing his secret memos with impunity. Killing thousands with his administrative devices and then going home to play with his children. Killing Babette and the babies. Oncle and Tante and Alain and Henri. Killing her.

  She looked down and saw tiny crescents of blood welling up on her arm. “I’ll write Mrs. Roosevelt as soon as I get home.”

  She worded the letter so it would be clear to the First Lady she had something of great consequence to bring to the president’s attention, but she didn’t get into specifics, which she and Gideon decided was the safest way. They also decided not to involve her committee. The fewer potential tongues, the better.

  Over a week passed, and there was no response. It didn’t make sense that Mrs. Roosevelt hadn’t had a few moments to get back to her. Clearly, she was an extremely busy woman, but she knew it was about the refugees and she’d told her secretary to watch for it. So Alizée figured it had been lost in the mail and wrote another one, putting her name and return address on both the front and the back of the envelope.

  After two more weeks, there still was no reply, so she met Gideon at the Rose. The same line of Italian men sat at the bar, and they settled in with their backs to them.

  “Still nothing,” she said before he could ask. “The only thing that makes any sense is for me to go to Washington and give it to her in person.”

  “We can’t sit on this any longer.” He didn’t look happy.

  “Do you think your contacts could get me in to see this Miss Thompson, the secretary? I’m sure I can get it to Mrs. Roos—to her from there.”

  Gideon looked nervously around the bar. “Do you know for sure that she’s in Washington?”

  “She told me at Val-Kill she was planning to do a lot of campaign—” Alizée caught herself again. “Traveling. During the late summer and fall. But there must be an official schedule. You can get a hold of that, right?”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I do.”

  She stood on the platform wearing a nondescript gray skirt and a slightly faded blouse, carrying a small suitcase with nothing in it. No scarves, no costume jewelry, no French chic. She tried to look as nonchalant as possible, as if taking a train to Washington to give the First Lady a stolen memo to bring down an assistant secretary of state was an everyday occurrence.

  After the long wait, it had all fallen quickly into place, and she was still spinning from the suddenness, the realness, of it. When Gideon got access to Mrs. Roosevelt’s schedule, it turned out that today was the only day the First Lady was going to be in Washington until late September. Hiram gave her the original memo, and she once again met Gideon at the Rose. Same empty tables, same Italian workingmen. Same bad beer.

  Gideon handed her a round-trip train ticket and cab fare. “This isn’t like pretending to be a reporter.”

  She put the papers in her pocketbook. For the first time in ages, she wasn’t anxious or afraid. She felt strong, ready.

  “The consequences if it doesn’t go well could be, well, they could be . . .” He ran his hands through what little hair he had. “It’s dangerous.”

  “It’s worth the risk.” All of the rumors you hear are true. Even the ones you cannot believe.

  “These men are fierce and as passionate about their beliefs as we are about ours. They’ll do whatever’s necessary to get what they want—and they can do it with impunity.”

  “If you’re trying to be encouraging, it’s not working.”

  “I’m trying to impress the seriousness of this on you. If you get caught who knows what might happen.”

  “What might happen—what will happen—is that we’re going to get Long out of the State Department.”

  “If you’d rather,” Gideon offered, “we can have someone else carry it to Washington.”

  “Because I’m a girl? Absolutely not. I’m the one who got the damn memo in the first place. I’m the one who knows Mrs. Roosevelt, and I’m the one who has the best chance of getting it to her. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.”

  Gideon didn’t contradict her, but the furrow had grown deeper in his brow.

  Now she waited for the 5:30 B&O, restless energy jangling inside every nerve. The trip took roughly six hours, with at least a dozen stops between Grand Central and Union Station. She willed herself not to look around. To act normal.r />
  The train was scheduled to arrive a little before noon, and she would take a taxi directly to the White House. There she would speak with Mrs. Roosevelt’s secretary, Miss Malvina Thompson, and hopefully to Mrs. Roosevelt. Then she would hand over the memo and return home on the 4:15. It was simple and clear-cut, as the best plans were, and Gideon had oiled a few wheels, probably also some palms, to make it run smoothly. What a day it was going to be.

  The train screeched into the station full of noise and smoke, like a living being, filling the gaping space with its massiveness. There was a frenzy of porters and passengers and luggage. Everyone surged toward the doors and up the metal steps, ignoring the conductors’ admonishments to wait until those disembarking had made it off the train.

  Alizée raced forward with the crowd. She had to get on. Had to be on her way. She couldn’t be left behind. No waiting politely while others claimed all the seats. So much depended on the success of her trip. Much more than on anyone else’s, she was certain. She pushed her way into a car, threw her pocketbook and suitcase on a seat, grabbed on to the overhead rack to steady herself, drew a deep breath.

  As the aisles began to clear, the hubbub subsided and she regained her composure. She couldn’t allow herself to get so easily undone. There was much more ahead. As she lifted her almost weightless suitcase to the overhead rack, a boy in his teens, dark-haired and smiling, offered his assistance.

  “No thank you,” she said, afraid that if he felt how light it was he might get suspicious. She should have packed some clothes to weigh it down.

  But he wouldn’t take no for an answer and yanked the suitcase from her hands. Before she could respond, he grabbed her pocketbook from the seat and began to shove his way toward the front of the car.

  Alizée lunged for her belongings, but he was too quick. In barely a second, he was striding down the aisle, her suitcase in one hand, her pocketbook in the other. “Thief!” she cried. ”Stop! Someone stop him!”

  She elbowed a businessman out of her way and seized the back of the boy’s jacket. He wrenched himself from her grasp. Then a large woman at the front of the car stood up and faced him, legs apart and arms crossed over her ample chest. There was nowhere for him to go. He dropped the bags.