‘If it’s bothering you, Poppy,’ he said, a little testily, considering how many of his friends I was sending on vacation, ‘why don’t you have some of their work, as collateral. Paintings and so forth. I’m getting quite a collection myself. Frankl. Mellin. I’ve some interesting pastels by Vblescu. They’ll probably be worth something if one waits long enough. Why don’t you pick out a few pieces for yourself?’
This at least added a little interest to the project, but quite often I didn’t like what was being offered.
‘Heaven’s sakes, Mom,’ Sapphy said to me one day, ‘you don’t have to like it.’
We were looking at some small gloomy oils by Rinkelmann. I hated them.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. No sale. Mr Rinkelmann will have to find someone else to pay for his jaunt.’
‘A jaunt!’ she said. ‘It’s not a jaunt. He has to escape from oppression.’
I said, ‘Sapphire, I had to escape from oppression. I had to go to the Cunard office and buy our tickets and arrange for our trunks and all the while your grandma Jacoby and your great-aunt Fish were oppressing me, oppressing me, oppressing me. You are too young to understand.’
‘Mom,’ she said. ‘I do understand. And if you won’t buy Rinkelmann a ticket, I will.’
Of course, Sapphire was nowhere near coming into her money. But she threatened to sell her silver vanity set and her jade egg and whatever else it might take, so I relented and wrote another check. Rinkelmann then promptly disappeared. I don’t believe we ever heard of him again, but Humpy was right about one thing. Those little oils fetched quite a decent price eventually.
FORTY-FIVE
They said we were at war but nothing happened. We heard from Angelica that she was going for a driver in the army and I thought of dashing back to do the same myself, but Emerald cried and said she didn’t want to be an orphan. We stayed on.
One of the dividends of war was that Ma’s letters stopped appearing on my breakfast tray, reproaching me for staying away, giving me weekly reminders that Murray was still unaccounted for and probably lay dead and unmourned in some foreign hell-hole. Another was that everyone became rather gay while they still had the chance. Some of the juifs had their windows broken and were called unkind names, so I began the precaution of frequently making the sign of the cross whenever I was out and about. I had learned how to do it in England and I found it a very useful habit.
One day in the spring of 1940 Humpy took me to one side.
‘Poppy,’ he said, ‘I rather think it’s time you made a move. I think I’m going to insist.’
I said, ‘To New York?’
‘Of course to New York,’ he said, ‘while the going is good. It could be pretty bloody awful for you, if the Germans arrive.’
I’d never seen him look so worried.
I said, ‘I’ll leave if you do.’
‘But it’s rather different for me,’ he said.
I said, ‘How is it different? I’ve been in a war before, you know? I worked for the Red Cross. I can fly a bi-plane.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you have children. You must think of them. You’re also too old for war work, real war work. And well, to be perfectly blunt Poppy, you’re very obviously Jewish.’
Humpy was famously inexpert on the subject of female looks. I had once heard him praise Nancy Lord’s legs. Still, I knew he cared for me, and for my girls, and I began to wish we’d made a run for Kneilthorpe. He shook his head.
‘England’s done for,’ he said. ‘America’s the only hope. I may even join you there myself, if I can finish what I’ve started here. I must get papers for Lionel and René.’
Lionel was another of Humpy’s special young friends and René was Lionel’s brother. He played the cello and Sapphire had a crush on him.
I broke the news to Em and Sapphy.
I said, ‘We have to go to New York for the duration.’
They both kicked up. Emerald said she had to return to Kneilthorpe and rescue her ponies before the Germans ate them. Sapphire said it wasn’t decent for us to run away when so many other people couldn’t. This was an argument I never could follow.
I said, ‘We have to go on a train and then a flying boat, and it’ll be a great adventure because we may get bombed or shot down. And when we get to New York, who knows, Uncle Murray may be there.’
Every night I sent out thought waves to him. ‘Be there, you fool. Please be there.’ We drank a very good champagne that final evening, but Humpy was in a bad humor. He had decided to come with us as far as Lisbon, to see us safely aboard a clipper.
He said, ‘I feel it’s what Reggie would have wanted.’ But even after it was all agreed, he seemed to be arguing within himself. I believe it was about ‘unfinished business’ as he called it, but as I told him many many times, he had been as generous with his time as I had with my money and one could not be expected to solve all the problems of the world and his wife.
He was carrying just one small bag, and grew quite impatient when I told him I’d had our trunks sent ahead to the railroad station.
‘Trunks!’ he cried. ‘Didn’t I say most particularly to travel light?’
But we were traveling light. Eight pieces between us didn’t even begin to accommodate our needs. I had had to leave a full-length leopard and two foxes in the care of the Athenée, and photo frames and shoe trees and a thousand other useful things.
I said, ‘I’ll be back next year.’
The concierge said, ‘Bien sûr, madame’, but I dare say I was no sooner out of the door than he was dipping his grubby hands into my boxes. I never saw any of those things again.
The Gare d’Austerlitz was hell. The whole city seemed to be there and it was impossible to find anyone who could be sent for luggage or information. We were pushed and squeezed by every class of person and if we had not had Humpy with us I doubt we ever would have found our train. The great glass vault was filled with steam and a thousand echoes of uncouth voices and doors slamming and whistles blowing. Humpy and I were forced to shout at each other.
I said, ‘Where are our seats?’
‘Better climb aboard,’ he yelled.
I said, ‘We do have seats?’
‘Not as such,’ he yelled back. ‘Just climb aboard.’
I said, ‘But who can we send to find our trunks?’
He began to climb down out of the doorway.
‘Poppy!’ he said. ‘Bugger the trunks. Get onto the bloody train.’
Then something happened.
The train began to move. Humpy grasped my arm and I turned to grasp Sapphire’s, but she wasn’t there. She had been right by my side, but suddenly she was gone and where she should have been there were only crude types determined to push me to one side.
‘Sapphy!’ I yelled at Humpy. He was preparing to jump down. Then we both heard Em. She was behind him, trapped in the corridor with strangers and unfortunates.
‘Mommy!’ she cried. ‘Don’t leave me!’
I don’t know who pulled Humpy back inside. I only know there was nothing I could do. I watched the train slide away with Humpy looking for me, open-mouthed, and Emerald, hidden from view. They were gone without me. Our luggage was lost. And so was Sapphire.
I wept, but no one came to my assistance. People thought only of themselves that night, and I have made it a rule to avoid railroad stations ever since.
I waited beneath the clock. It seemed to me Sapphire might know that’s where people meet at railroad stations. But I grew fatigued from peering into the crowds searching for her face and then, from one moment to the next, the champagne cleared away from my mind and I had a series of alarming thoughts. First, that she might not be in the station. She might have climbed aboard that train by a different door and found her way safely to Humpy and Em. Or, that she had not found her way to them. That she had been lured into a couchette by some villain and robbed of her citrine necklace. In either case I was the one left behind to face the Germans.
A
lternatively, she might have run away deliberately. It might be her plan to disobey me and cause inconvenience. If I ever found her, I decided, I would send her directly to Buenos Aires. It was high time Gilbert Catchings experienced the burdens of parenthood.
There were no taxis to be had. I began to walk, but by the time I reached Pantheon I had to take off my shoes and carry them. No one gave me a second look, a lone woman in a good suit, walking in her stocking feet. That was when I knew something crazy was happening to Paris. And every painful step I took reminded me of another night when I had walked till my stockings were full of holes. The night my Pa didn’t come home on the Carpathia.
Every house in rue Vavin had its eyes closed. No one answered at Humpy’s door though I knew he was allowing people to stay there, and the old place, where Gil and I had once enjoyed happy times, was dark and shuttered, too.
I huddled on the step, too tired to walk any further, and yet wide awake. I was homeless. I suppose the sky began to lighten at about four.
At seven I limped to Lilas for coffee and there I received several great kindnesses from Nub the Armenian waiter. He gave me a pair of sturdy English laced shoes intended for a man, an omelette, and a suggestion where I might find Sapphire.
‘The boy,’ he said, ‘the one she likes. He lives up in Rosiers with the rest of his kind.’
I had never heard of such a place. Nub drew me a map on a napkin.
‘Better get her back quick,’ he said. And he made a gesture, cutting across his throat with the edge of his hand.
I made slow progress, with my poor sore feet slipping about inside Nub’s shoes, and I feared I was too late anyway. My baby, whom I had never really gotten to know, was probably lying in some thieves’ den with her throat cut. Then, on the Pont Marie, I saw her coming toward me. It was the almond green of her dress I recognized first. She was walking fast, not looking where she was going. I had to call out her name three times before she heard me, then saw me, then came running into my arms.
‘I couldn’t find him, Mom,’ was all she would say. ‘I couldn’t find him anywhere.’
I took her to a little place in Saint-Germain and fed her on bread and café au lait until she seemed more disposed to listen to me.
I said, ‘Do you realize what trouble you’ve caused? Humpy and Emerald have gone without us and I’ve spent the night on some stranger’s front stoop, and our luggage is entirely lost.’
‘I didn’t ask you to come looking for me,’ she said. ‘You could have gone. You could have taken care of your luggage and left me to take care of myself.’
‘Some day,’ I said, ‘you will have a daughter of your own. Then you’ll know why I came looking for you.’
That stopped her in her self-pitying tracks.
‘And thank goodness for Humpy,’ I said. ‘Otherwise poor Em would have been all alone on that train. Did you ever think of that? And who is this boy? Do we know his people?’
‘Listen to yourself,’ she said. ‘You sound like Grandma Jacoby.’
I said, ‘Nub at the Lilas says they’re dangerous types.’
‘What!’ she said. ‘Nub said that? He did not. He knows René.’
She was in love with René, Humpy’s boy who played the cello. Sixteen years old, and she believed she had met the love of her life.
I said, ‘But Sapphy …’
I thought René was probably one of Humpy’s funny crowd. The kind that never fell in love with girls.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she said. ‘He’s a Jew. But I don’t care. I love him. I’m going to stay with him till this beastly war’s finished. I’ll be a Jew too.’
I always found that word oddly shocking in English. In French it just rustled silkily off the tongue.
I looked at her, my wilder skinnier junior. She had nothing of Gil about her, except her height. Even her eyes had darkened to match mine. I judged this was not the moment to do anything but persuade her onto a train.
I said, ‘You know, Humpy may have got them papers, for America. For René and for Lionel. I know he was determined to do it. And wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if René got to New York and you were stuck here with the Hun?’
She said, ‘But I don’t think Humpy did get them papers. I think they’ve been taken away somewhere.’
‘Well then,’ I said, ‘you’ll have to wait for him until we’ve won the war. You’ll have to take your love somewhere safe and guard it patiently. If it’s true love, it’ll endure.’
I had read a number of novelettes recommended by Angelica, so I knew the gist of what to say.
Sapphy said, ‘It is true love. And you don’t mind about the Jewish side of things?’
‘How could I?’ I said.
Not telling the truth is not at all the same as lying.
On rue Monge I managed to obtain a taxi by stepping into its path.
‘I want to look one more time,’ Sapphy said. ‘It won’t take long.’
‘Sapphire,’ I said, ‘you’re grown-up now, and grown-ups have duties. We have to rescue your little sister.’
‘Half-sister,’ she said quietly, as we neared the Gare d’Austerlitz.
FORTY-SIX
We caught up with Humpy and Emerald nearly three weeks later at the Plaza Hotel in Lisbon.
‘I was almost resigned to fatherhood,’ Humpy said. ‘With a bereft waif in a foreign land.’
There had never been anything waif-like about Em. She eyed me warily.
‘What took you so long?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you get on the train? I could have been left all alone and not known where to get off or anything.’
The good news was that there was an agreeably gay crowd staying in town. The bad news was that they were all there for the same reason we were. Waiting for seats on a clipper. I sent Humpy to the ticket office with a bribe immediately, but he said it made no difference. For a man who promised to open doors for escaping artists he had surprisingly little spine in such situations. I believe this came of his never having had proper money. It has been my experience that money always makes the difference.
We ordered rum cocktails and waited for the girls to come down to dinner.
I said, ‘It was about the boy René. She believes she’s in love.’
‘Oh God!’ he said.
I said, ‘She’s only a baby. And now she’s quite obsessed with the idea that Germans are going to shoot him and he has to be rescued. She’s quite determined to play the heroine. I can’t tell you what a strain it’s been, Humpy, watching her every minute. I still wouldn’t put it beyond her to jump on a train back to Paris.’
‘She certainly mustn’t do that,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to be done for René and Lionel now.’
I said, ‘Well, don’t tell Sapphire that. I only succeeded in bringing her here by telling her those people were certain to turn up in New York. I told her you’d arranged papers for them.’
He groaned.
‘God, Poppy,’ he said. ‘It’s bad enough I’ve run out on things there. I hope you’re not asking me to fib as well.’
I said, ‘Damn and blast it, Humpy, why did you allow her to get so attached to this person? She doesn’t just have a pash on him. She’s decided she’s going to be Jewish too, like René.’
He raised an eyebrow.
I said, ‘She doesn’t know. We just don’t really bother with that kind of thing. Gil wasn’t Jewish. But if she knew, if she thought for one moment … I’d have lost her completely. I’d never have dragged her away from Paris.’
‘Gracious,’ he said. ‘What a muddle.’
I said, ‘It’s not a muddle at all, Humpy. It’s very simple. You mustn’t say anything. When all this has blown over I’ll explain things to her, but right now she mustn’t suspect a thing.’
We allowed the girls one cocktail each before we went out for a fine seafood dinner and I forced the conversation along at a furious pace so as not to allow Sapphire any opportunity for questions or reproa
ches. I talked until I was exhausted, and then Humpy failed to notice my signals that he should take over, and a dangerous silence occurred.
‘Uncle Humpy,’ she began, ‘when do you suppose René will get to America? We’re going to be married, you know?’
Humpy choked a little.
‘Hard to say,’ he said. ‘Hard to know even when we’ll be there.’
‘I was so afraid he’d been taken away,’ she said. ‘The whole building was empty.’
She turned to Emerald.
‘René’s Jewish,’ she said, ‘but Mom doesn’t mind. So when we get married, I shall become Jewish, too. It won’t affect you, though.’
She gazed down at the debris of her lobster and Emerald looked at her, at first with the blandest of expressions. Then she began to shake. First she shook silently, then tears spilled down her cheeks and she began to make ugly whooping noises. Finally she fell sideways off her chair. All this on one rum cocktail. Her voice floated up while she was still on the floor.
‘I shall become Jewish, too.’ She had Sapphire’s expression exactly.
‘You twit, Sapph. You’re already Jewish. You ninny. You utter, utter ninny.’
I spoke sharply to Emerald. Better, I felt, to focus on the disgrace of her falling down drunk than to allow her any kind of victory over poor Sapphy. Humpy was no help. I believe he found something amusing in the scene himself.
Em climbed back into her seat, watching Sapphire, looking for more trouble.
‘Aren’t we, Mommy?’ she challenged me. ‘Aren’t we Jewish as can be?’
‘Jewish, Jewish, Jewish,’ she chanted to herself. I had a mind to slap her, right there and then, but Humpy placed a restraining hand on mine and called for the check.
‘Perhaps you and Sapphy should head back,’ he said. ‘You must be tired. Em and I might go for cake.’
Emerald said, ‘Sapphy’s not tired, are you Sapphy? She wants to go for cake, too, and hear all about being Jewish.’
The Unfortunates Page 26
