“Not quite unscathed. You’ve seen the scar.” The fine pale line that ran from his shoulder to his waist. “I’ll never know what did it,” he said. “Whatever it was, it sliced me like a razor blade. Took seventy-two silk stitches. My mother was beside herself. I thought she’d have to be hospitalized. In the end she pulled herself together and made me apply for a transfer to Yale.”
Varian shook his head. “You might have been killed.”
“That was precisely the point.”
Of course, of course, he’d been doing the same thing: hanging over the rail of the Sinaïa and looking at the sea, wishing for the courage to slip over the edge and be swallowed whole. What had stopped him? The thought that he might return to Cambridge and find that it had all been a bad dream. And then, of course, guiltily, there was Eileen. The memory of their cold damp encounter on the island had taken on a certain heat in his memory. That was the difference: he could still imagine a life in which she figured, a life not unlike the one she was trying to return him to now.
“A terrible thing happened after I came back,” Varian said. “A thing I haven’t thought about in years.” And what had made him think of it now? What compelled him to tell?
“Does it require a drink?” Grant asked. “I know I need one.”
They flagged the waiter and asked for Armagnac. When it came, Varian and Grant raised their glasses and drank.
“I’m not sure I can tell this story,” Varian said.
“I told mine,” Grant said.
“This one’s worse.”
Grant lifted his haze-colored eyes to Varian’s. They reminded him, Varian thought, of those mist-clouded paths through the woods down which you felt compelled to walk, though you knew there might be wolves and bears and God knew what else.
“All right, then,” Varian said, and told his story. He still remembered every detail, and would until the day he died: it had happened a couple of months after his return, after he’d had to accept and inhabit a new reality that did not include Grant. Everything else went on: his classes, the burning in his gut, the parties at Kirstein’s, the Hound and Horn, the flirtation with Eileen, which had progressed into something that resembled a courtship, or at least a pleasurable affair, insofar as he was capable of feeling pleasure. Nights at the symphony, dinners on the waterfront, wit- and gin-soaked parties at the homes of her Atlantic colleagues. Sometimes on a sunny afternoon, when he was done with class and she felt like shirking her editorial duties, they would take a country drive in the Packard.
This was one of those days, a mild November day still bright and gold, though the leaves had fallen and the air had the sharp dry scent of early winter. She had a fancy to go out to Walden Pond, where a year earlier she’d seen a magnificent owl. She could remember, she said, exactly where the nest was: in a forked elm at the far end of the pond, not fifty yards from where Thoreau had built his cabin. They drove out along the two-lane road that extended from the northwest corner of Cambridge. They passed through Arlington and Lexington, each with its tidy Main Street and its storybookish wood-framed houses set on hills, and into the forested countryside beyond. The yellow Packard had been a gift from Varian’s father. Massive, gleaming, polished weekly and kept full of gas by the boy at the garage where Varian stabled it, the car was like a land-bound yacht, every detail perfectly suited to its purpose, the whole package meant to communicate its owner’s power and privilege. The engine loved speed. Forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour were nothing to the Packard. At sixty-five the pistons would settle into a baritone hum and the wind would pass over the hood as silently as over an owl’s wing. Eileen adored riding at that speed. She rolled her window down to feel the wind, singing “Get Out and Get Under the Moon.” Frost needled the windscreen; the verges of the woods burned with fallen leaves.
At times, circumstances conspire to make us believe the lies we tell ourselves. Everything—the weather, the season, the fall of light—sets the stage for our play; we find ourselves, instead of acting, becoming the characters, moving into a reality in which we’re inseparable from our roles. Here he was, future husband of Eileen Avery Hughes, owner of this powerful machine, capable of mastering its eighty-one horses. And not only that: He had mastered Catullus. He had mastered Sophocles and Heraclitus and Diogenes, their various means for describing that accident of nature: human self-awareness, perception of a bafflingly complex world. He’d prepared himself, by looking backward, for a forward-looking life, one in which the baffling complexity would lay itself bare for his solving. He was full of his own power, full of it as if it were his blood.
He felt the tires shudder and knew he was going too fast, but he kept his foot on the accelerator. He could feel the power of the car through the sole of his foot, feel the beautiful communication between himself and the motor: he was an injector of power, a feeder of fuel, an initiator of the minute explosions that blurred into the engine’s purr. In fact he closed his eyes for a moment, an instant, just long enough to shut himself within that power for a few heartbeats, to let the car extend its force into his body, to feel it almost as an externalized organ, a great, beating, pulsing, roaring heart. That was the moment it began, the strange sensation of lifting, of floating across the pavement. Oil, ice, both: he would never know. He swallowed a fine spike of fear, and then he was gripping the wheel, gripping it too hard, pulling the tires sideways slightly, just enough to make the car skate across the dividing line, toward the black shape of an oncoming Ford. The black Ford dodged toward the shoulder to avoid the Packard. Then, from the other side of the road, a dull clap of impact and the shriek and pull of rubber.
Eileen did not scream. She would never have screamed at a moment like that. Hands braced against the dash, she breathed out hard and said, “Stop the car, stop the car!” He pulled to the side of the road. In an instant she was out and running to see what had happened. Varian followed. Across the road, the black Ford sat still on the gravel shoulder. In it was a woman sitting behind the wheel with her hand over her mouth; she was making a noise, a series of soft Oh’s almost inaudible through the glass. Beyond the car, on the ground, lay the curled form of a man.
Eileen knelt in the long grass beside the man, a day laborer dressed in denim and woolens. No trace of blood on his face or clothes. Eyes closed, mouth slightly open. Beside him lay his tin lunch pail, crushed flat. Eileen lifted a hand and extended it over the man as if she were determining where or how to touch him to bring him back to life. And then, as if by some miracle, the man opened his eyes, raised himself onto an elbow, braced a palm against the grass. He blinked, rubbed gravel from his sparse red beard, squinted at Eileen and Varian, and got to his knees, then to his feet, holding the crushed lunch pail, seeming not to notice anything amiss about it. He glanced from Varian to Eileen as if they were distant relatives whose names he had forgotten. His forehead compressed itself into three inquisitive lines.
“Are you all right?” Eileen asked. “You took quite a blow.”
The man fixed his eyes on Eileen and gave a vague smile. Then he shook his head as if to clear it of a bad dream. Holding the crushed lunch pail, he took an unsteady step through the long grass. He took another and another, until he’d attained the gravel shoulder. For twenty yards, as Varian and Eileen watched in silence, the man put one foot in front of another and did not falter. The door of the black Ford opened and the woman who’d been driving it climbed out, watching in amazement.
“Look at him,” she said. “There he goes. Look at him. He’s all right, praise God.” Her mouth trembled, and she covered it with a thin-boned hand.
And then, as if he’d been shot by a silent gun, the man went down heavy and limp into the roadside leaves. He went down and did not get up again. He lived for another five days before, in the acute injury ward of Arlington Hospital, he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died.
Grant now sat looking at Varian from across the table.
“And then?” he said. “What did you do then? What happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Varian said. “I called my father. I told him what had happened. He said nothing for a long time, and then he said he’d call his lawyer.”
“And what did you do?”
“I let him call his lawyer. The lawyer did his job. Eventually I had to pay a fine. A ticket. Misdemeanor reckless operation of a motor vehicle. The other driver, the one who’d hit the man, was found to have been driving with a cracked axle and a pair of front tires worn down to the canvas. She lost her license and avoided jail time by paying a hundred dollars. The boy’s family was in Ireland. There wasn’t much they could do. I lost a lot of sleep over it, a lot. I thought about going to the judge and arguing my own guilt. I thought I deserved to be put away, though Eileen believed me to be innocent. But of course I didn’t want to go to jail. I didn’t want to be guilty of a crime. I wanted to go back to the lecture hall and the seminar room and Widener. In the end, that was what it came down to. If I’d gone to prison, I would have lost any chance to have the life I’d imagined. I wanted to prove to Eileen that I was the kind of man who could make a problem like this, a problem of mortal magnitude, go away. That I came from a family rich and well connected enough. That I had enough strength of mind—that was how I thought of it—to bear the complication of what had happened without allowing my life to fall to pieces. And it turns out that was what she wanted, too.”
“And then?”
“And then, I don’t know. Time passed. We never talked about it. It sort of—went away, I guess, though that’s not really accurate.” Varian tilted the Armagnac glass in his fingers, sank his thumbs into the depression at its base. Through the windows of the restaurant they could see a man lighting a gas lamp in the courtyard. “You see,” Varian said, looking Grant in the eyes again, following that forest path into who knew where, “I like to think of myself as occupying a position of moral superiority, but in fact I’ve been inhabiting a series of rather comfortable lies. And that one—the lie of my innocence in the death of that young man—is hardly the chief one.”
Grant shook his head. “Now, Varian,” he said.
Varian lowered his voice, though at that moment he hardly cared who might hear him. “I lied to Eileen. I did. I pretended what I’d felt for you was a kind of schoolboy folly, a puerile passion. She knew I was—that I sought out friends downtown, but she thought it was a harmless perversion, even somehow attractive. Titillatingly risqué. A mark of culture. The province of artists and writers. She’d come of age in the twenties, remember, and was raised by a bluestocking mother who let her bob her hair and wear trousers and become an editor at a nationally recognized magazine, with no admonition against appearing as intelligent as she really was. As for our arrangement, as she called it—she was allowed to take liberties too, with whomever she liked, though she didn’t often exercise the privilege—it was really a way of rendering my situation harmless. We both wanted to think it was harmless. And she wants to believe that still. I’ve mentioned you in a number of letters now, and still she’s never asked about you. She must want to believe it’s nothing, or maybe that it’ll just go away. But she’s scared. I know it, Grant. She’s been trying to get me home, even trying to turn them against me in New York. Trying to get someone sent to replace me.”
“Well,” Grant said, almost inaudibly. The noises of the restaurant—silverware, glass, conversation—made a kind of veil around them. “Well,” he said. “And what do you want?”
“I want to stay and do my work.”
“Then stay and do it, Varian. Tomorrow, perhaps, we’ll go to Vernet and see what can be done about Tobias. Then you’ve got to get back to Marseille.” And he raised his hand for the check, and an instant later he was paying it. Then they were rising together like Chagallian brides, rising from their chairs, making their way through the walrus song and the china clink of the restaurant, toward the doors through which Mary Jayne had disappeared with the commandant.
20
Camp du Vernet
By the time he woke the next morning—naked and warm in Grant’s bed, the down coverlet a shell against the chill—Grant had gotten up and bathed and dressed, and was sitting at the desk with a newspaper, one long leg crossed over the other.
Varian sat up in bed. “What time is it?”
“A quarter to nine,” Grant said. “I’ve been downstairs already.”
“Any sign of Mary Jayne?”
“None.”
Varian got up and dressed, then went to his own room and bathed and shaved and dressed again. Mary Jayne was a late riser; she might not appear before eleven. But he and Grant must go down and wait for her, for whatever news she might deliver. They met in the restaurant and sat over cups of the café national, which, Varian noted with some surprise, had ceased to seem offensive, so distant a memory was the genuine article. The newspaper narrated a failed plot by the vice-premier, Pierre Laval, to oust Pétain and set up a government of his own; Laval had envisioned ruling from Paris, under the Nazi flag, and leading a grand charge against Great Britain. Reichsführer Hitler had expressed his approval of Pétain’s decision to remove Laval, calling Pétain a more apt collaborator. The article induced a headache by the time Varian had reached the end of the first column.
At ten o’clock the restaurant door swung open and in came Mary Jayne, dressed in a caramel-colored herringbone suit with nacreous buttons. A froth of white pleats spilled from her collar; her shoes reflected the restaurant’s polished brass. Her hair was sleek and neatly curled, her makeup a paler version of the previous night’s. On her lips, a carefully composed smile. Grant rose to pull out a chair for her, and she winced as she lowered herself into it. Her mouth trembled slightly as she reached for the menu. Varian and Grant sat in silence, trying to read her.
“Well, gentlemen,” she said, in a low, taut-strung tone.
“Well,” Varian said.
She raised her eyes to them, and the look there was terrible: injured, triumphant, raw. “If the commandant’s a man of his word,” she said, “we’ll be on the train with your protégé by nightfall.” She lowered her eyes and made a subtle amendment to her white pleats.
“Mary Jayne,” Grant said, covering her hand with his own. “Are you all right?”
She shifted in her seat. A muscle contracted at the corner of her mouth. “I achieved my goal,” she said. “That was what I wanted. The commandant—” She paused and drew a long breath. “The commandant’s tastes weren’t particularly surprising.”
“Mary Jayne. I’m asking you. Are you all right?”
“As long as we get out of here with that boy, I’ll be fine,” she said, studying the menu.
Varian put his hands together as if in prayer, resting his chin on his thumbs. He had led her into all this, had made her do whatever it was she’d done. He’d known she still felt contrite about Feuchtwanger, he’d known she wanted to prove she wasn’t a dilettante. He’d asked for her help, knowing she was vulnerable. “Mary Jayne,” he said. “Do you need anything? A doctor, or—?”
Mary Jayne shook her head twice, briskly. Whatever price Ormond had extracted, they weren’t going to discuss it. “The commandant said he’d like to reexamine Tobias’s file,” she went on in the same carefully controlled tone. “Then he’ll meet with the lieutenant who oversees his section. He suggested we pay the camp a visit around noon. We’re to present this at the gate.” She drew a white card from the breast pocket of her suit and tossed it onto the table; it bore the commandant’s name, rank, and posting.
Grant picked up the card. “Mary Jayne. I don’t know what to say.”
Mary Jayne shrugged. “No need to say anything,” she said. When the waiter came, she ordered breakfast in a reasonable facsimile of her ordinary voice; when her tea and toast arrived, she made all the motions of pouring and sweetening and spreading. If she left the toast untouch
ed, if she looked abstractedly at the newspaper without seeming to read what was printed there, it was clear they were not to comment upon any of it. And when, after a time, she got up to leave, they both rose with her wordlessly, letting her pass between them like a queen parting pawns.
* * *
________
They approached the camp on foot, a long walk in the raw cold wind. This was not the mild coastal winter they’d grown accustomed to in Marseille; icy clouds lay in broken planes across the milk-blue mountains, and low stunted trees shook their skeletal arms at the sky. The wildlife had all migrated or gone underground, or nearly all: a few talkative crows followed the travelers’ progress along the ill-paved road. Ice had gathered where the pavement was fractured, and rocks of various sizes had rolled down the hillside to litter the roadway. For a time the travelers walked shoulder to shoulder, but a series of passing military vehicles kept edging them to the side. Finally they fell into single file, Grant ahead, Mary Jayne in the middle, Varian last. They said little on the road. Mary Jayne walked slowly, as if every step pained her. Varian had tried to convince her to stay behind, but she insisted that her presence was essential. She continued uncomplaining in the bitter cold, and when they reached the giant rolls of barbed wire that surrounded the camp, she threw her head back, adjusted the angle of her hat, and said, “Here we are.”
Before them rose a three-layered fence the length of a city block, crowned and intertwined with barbed wire. At its corners were squat brick guard towers, and through the chain link they could see rows of tin-roofed barracks arrayed on a broad expanse of frozen mud. They walked toward a low tin-sided guardhouse; at its apex, a plume of smoke rose from a zinc chimney, its stem painted white, its funnel red with white dots, like a fairy-tale mushroom. Whose idea of a joke was that? As they approached, the guardhouse discharged a broad-shouldered, square-headed guard in military uniform.
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