“Zilberman?” Mary Jayne said. “What can you mean?”
Something came undone inside him then, the tightly bound knot that had kept him from seeing her as the woman he’d come to know over the past nine months: the woman he’d overheard making love with her gangster boyfriend too many times to count, the woman who’d chaired his dinner parties at Air Bel and orchestrated connections between stateless artists, who’d spent countless hours at the office working for the refugees, who’d made him laugh aloud at himself, who’d played the surrealists’ games unflinchingly, and who, more than anyone else in Marseille, had grasped what had been at stake for him and Grant. She knew; she would understand. For a dizzying moment he thought he would tell her everything, thought she might have some insight that could save him. But then he remembered the look on her face in the courtyard of their hotel in Pamiers, the tension in her carefully painted lips as she drank her morning coffee, the effortful calm of her expression above the paperlike pleats of her shirt. She had paid a steep price for Tobias Katznelson’s freedom. As much as he wanted to tell her everything, as much as he wanted what she might be able to give him, he could never reveal to her that Tobias had been a fraud.
“The details are unimportant,” he said, finally. “Grant was brutally dishonest, that’s what matters. He lied to me for months. When I found out, he left Air Bel. Tomorrow he leaves for the States.”
She turned toward the window; outside, there was a soft clattering, a rain of pigeons descending to the ledge below. “I can’t see him doing that. Lying to you, I mean. Are you—quite sure?”
“It’s finished, Mary Jayne. We’ve discussed it.”
A silence gathered and settled between them. Then she said, “What will you do now? When this is all done—your work here, I mean? Go home to New York, to Eileen, as though nothing happened?”
“I wrote to Eileen some weeks ago, before this business came to light. I was bluntly honest with her about Grant. That should satisfy you as to the state of my happiness.”
She shook her head. “You don’t deserve it.”
“Don’t I? What do I deserve? I deceived my wife for years, far longer than Grant deceived me—far longer, for that matter, than Killer deceived you. I deceived Eileen for twelve years, though I always believed I loved her. And I did, Emjay, truly I did! But I never stopped thinking of Grant all that time. And I got what I deserved, in the end. I got nothing better than I deserved.”
“I always wondered what would happen to you,” she said, almost to herself. “To the two of you—you and Grant—once you left Air Bel.”
“Now you don’t have to wonder.”
She put her arms around herself. The pigeons sent up their soft complaint from below. “I’m going down to Toulon for the weekend,” she said. “Then to Sanary-sur-Mer. I might go up to Cannes afterward, and then to Monaco for a while. Do you want to come along, at least for some of it? It sounds like you could use the distraction.”
“I wish I could. It’s precisely what I need. But my days are numbered here. I’m to be placed under house arrest if I don’t clear out in a week. I’ve been thinking I might go up to Vichy tomorrow and try to plead my case with someone there, try to get my deadline extended. Then I’ve got to come home to the office and set things in order.”
“Home,” she said, and smiled sadly. “Is that what you’re calling this place now?”
“That’s what it is,” he said.
* * *
________
Dearest V, began the letter from Eileen, the one he found waiting for him at the villa when he returned that night.
Dearest V, Dearest V.
How grateful I was for your letters of 4/19 & 4/24, which I received together in a bundle: double reading to go with my double martini at day’s end. I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through. The strain must be terrific. I do wish you’d come home, I wish it with all my heart, and I hope you’ll do so before you ruin your health. Frank Kingdon insists you return at once. He admits his error in sending Allen and won’t attempt to fill your post with someone who plans to run things by proxy. But he insists, you know—insists that I tell you, and dear V, I believe it too—that you’re not doing anyone any good by staying longer. Not the ERC, not the clients, not yourself. Certainly not me, for whatever that’s worth.
About Skiff Grant, of whom you spoke so balefully: Can you imagine I’d begrudge you the renewal of a friendship with your college chum, one who was so dear to you and who disappeared for so long? “You must have sensed the threat of what I felt for him from our earliest days. Once we married you must have feared it like a disease in remission.” Cue the direful strings! How could I fear any more from Mr. Grant than if he were your brother? “When I return,” you write, “you will find me irreparably changed.” And how could I find you otherwise, after all you’ve experienced? I’ve adored you always for what you are, but I saw in you long ago the seed of greatness (not to wax operatic myself)—I saw it when you were a mere sophomore in Harvard Yard. Now it’s germinated, exceeding even your wife’s imagining. Of course you have changed: You have become a hero! And not just to me. As to the nature of your relationship with old Skiff: I can well imagine how your time in France may have occasioned a loss of perspective, a falling-away of context. Once you’ve returned, I think you’ll quickly see what a spun-sugar castle it all was. I can’t blame you in the least; extreme circumstances beget all manner of nonsensical thought.
So no further blithering about old Skiff. No further confessions, no further apologies: none of it is necessary. I must confess, in fact, that your letter put me at ease. I’d been hearing all manner of salacious whispers from your refugee friends who’ve made it to New York, Walter Mehring and Lena and some others. Hence my earlier pathetic letter. But now I know what they saw, what appeared so outré: you, merely waxing nostalgic with your old friend, whom you’d have been as wrong to brush off as you would be to abandon your wife of some 10 years, mother of your future small Fry, your faithful & impatient
Eileen
He lay in Breton’s bed, reading and rereading. This letter, these three paragraphs scrawled in her elegant and unruly hand—what they represented above all was an astonishing demonstration of will. He hadn’t been at all unclear in his own letter. He had confirmed beyond the slightest doubt, no room whatever for ambiguity, the worst of what she must have gleaned from Lena or Mehring or whoever else might have talked. And she knew what Grant had been to him; there could be no doubt of that. There could be only one way to read her letter: She was offering an olive branch, suggesting that all was forgiven as long as he never mentioned it again, as long as he pretended it was all a delusion, a spun-sugar castle. As long as he promised not to make it tell upon her life, not to make her bear the shame of having a husband who was a homosexual, and, worse, who had felt compelled to leave her for another man. She was proposing to wipe the slate clean, suggesting they might simply pretend it had never happened. He would, of course, have to give up all contact with Grant once he returned; she didn’t have to say it. She held the moral advantage on all fronts, and she knew the power of her claim upon him. As wrong to brush off as you would be to abandon—
She knew, of course, what she was dealing with; she’d seen it all those years ago. Now she was playing her most valuable cards. How gratified she would be, he thought, to learn that he had been deceived, that Grant could no longer pose a threat to her.
He let the letter fall from the coverlet onto the rug. On his lap was Le faune de marbre; he fingered the cover, the marbled endpapers, the pages with their deep-printed French type, and turned to the page that haunted him, a poem called in French Depuis cinquant ans, about a woman abandoned in her echoing house, and the man tormented by the thought of her. In blunt pencil, on an index card, he had translated it from memory. He reread it now, pausing over the merciless last lines: And with his bound heart a
nd his young eyes bent / And blind, he feels her presence like shed scent, / Holding him, body and life, within its snare.
38
The Coast of France
On the day of Grant’s departure, a day when Varian could concentrate on nothing but the distant sound of trains, every whistle seemed to announce his own execution. At the office that morning he thought a hundred times of running to the station, buying a ticket for Lisbon, boarding the train that would carry Grant away. But then, he reminded himself, he couldn’t abandon the Centre Américain; nor could he have gone anywhere if he’d wanted to. He didn’t even have his own passport. He had been forced to hand it over to Hugh Fullerton some time ago, on the basis that the consul wanted to have it validated for travel west. So his morning was a torture of immobility and inaction; all he could do was sit at his desk and read the Times’s grim account of Hitler’s campaign in Russia. The Luftwaffe had decimated some eight hundred tanks, he read, the front rank of a Soviet counterattack near Smolensk; the Second Panzer Group had just crossed the Dnieper, and was preparing to enter the city. The aim was to win control of the road to Moscow. All of it would have seemed blindingly foolish, he knew, had the Wehrmacht not managed to shut down all of Russia’s defenses thus far; he’d begun to suspect that Hitler’s armies had reserves deeper than anyone had imagined. And if Hitler took the Soviet Union, if he managed to overrun not only Europe but Asia, what then? An engulfing gray cloud would settle over half the world, from Siberia all the way to Norway, from Novaya Zembla down to Africa. Now, from the direction of the Gare St. Charles, came another train whistle: this must be the one, the herald of the end of all he cared about in the world. He needed a drink. He needed a slow infusion of opium, a quick and total effacement, oblivion.
Instead he received a summons from Hugh Fullerton at the consulate. Like a sleepwalker he took the tram from the Canebière toward the southern edge of town; in a sun-shot nightmare he climbed the familiar drive, its double row of lindens making hushed excuses in the rising wind. Fullerton met him at his office door and invited him in, with no pretense of civility. In the vast high-ceilinged office, he commanded Varian to sit in a deep leather chair before the desk. On the blotter was a crisp-edged dossier, the American cousin of the one that had met him at du Porzic’s office. From its interior Fullerton withdrew Varian’s passport and handed it across the desk without a word. Varian discovered, when he opened it, that it had in fact been validated—for westbound travel only, of course—and contained, as if by magic, French exit visas and Spanish and Portuguese transit visas.
“Oh, Hugh, you shouldn’t have,” Varian said, not caring now whether or not he offended, wishing only for Fullerton to hear all the bitterness he felt. He could not have tabulated, there was no way to compute, the number of lives he might have saved if Fullerton had been his ally. “It’s no easy matter to get all those passes. I should know.”
“Our message to you should be clear,” Fullerton said. “You’re to leave the country at once.”
“Captain du Porzic implied that I’d have time to arrange my affairs.”
“There’s no affair of yours that merits arranging,” Fullerton said, his narrow, dour face drawn into its severest expression. “What ought to concern you now is preserving your freedom and your life. You’re suspected not only of breaking French law, but of fomenting communist activity in that country villa of yours. We won’t have anything to do with you if Vichy arrests you, or if the Gestapo chooses to lay its hands on you.”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
“Take my advice, then. Get out of France post haste. You’ve got a wife at home. Don’t make a widow of her.”
“I’ll thank you not to talk about my wife,” Varian said, getting to his feet. “Nor to presume you know anything about my private affairs.”
Fullerton narrowed his eyes. “In fact, we know more about your private affairs than you may realize. You’re lucky to have the chance to resign. Your organization would have every right to cast you from your post in sheer disgust. The way you’ve comported yourself here in France is an embarrassment to us all. Even Mrs. Roosevelt has withdrawn her support.”
“She has yet to inform me of that reversal.”
“Likely she would consider it beneath her dignity.”
“You’ve no right to insult me.”
“Nor have you any to remain in my office a moment longer. I have officially washed my hands of you.”
“Your hands are bloodstained, Hugh. There’s no washing them.”
“Get out,” Fullerton said, rising to his feet. “Get out, or I’ll call security.”
“Call them,” Varian said, his pulse reaching a desperate pitch. “Do what you want. I’ll say what I’ve come to say to you.”
But at that moment Fullerton picked up the phone, and in an eyeblink the tall French-fluent guard had appeared and laid his hand on Varian’s arm. He led Varian from Fullerton’s office with surprising gentleness, and escorted him not just to the door but halfway down the drive. Once they’d reached that spot, he bent to Varian’s ear.
“There’s a rising resistance,” he said. “I understand that some in your office—Rosenberg and Gemähling—I understand they’re in touch with cells of objectors.” He pushed a square of paper into Varian’s pocket. “If I can help, let them come to me. I have access to certain documents. Information.”
“Thank you,” Varian said, his throat tight with adrenaline. He resented the sensation of being drawn back from the brink; there had been a wild liberation in the feeling that he had nothing left to lose. “I’ll pass that along, Mr.—”
“Never mind the name, sir,” the guard said.
“All right. Thank you.”
The guard nodded and released him, and he started down the drive toward the station; it was time to pack his things. But not for home, not yet: he was headed to Vichy.
* * *
________
He left the next morning at dawn, bringing with him two days’ worth of clothes, a book of Yeats, his validated passport, and a draft of an article for the Times, which he meant to complete in Vichy if he could find a typewriter. The atmosphere in town was as strange as it had been since the town’s debut as the seat of government: Pétain’s banner flew everywhere, tricolor bunting hung in limp loops from every streetlight, and ubiquitous signs advertised the salutary qualities of the famous baths, which were themselves gray and crumbling and unsanitary looking, and infused the air with the smell of eggs. In a café across from the Thermes des Dômes he drank alkaline water and ate a hard brown biscuit; this was his only fortification before he made his assault on the Ministry of the Interior. In that fortress of a building, once a gendarmerie, he succeeded in meeting with three French officials, all of them unfailingly polite, none willing or able to contravene de Rodellec du Porzic’s authority. From the third official, a tiny lark-voiced man in rimless glasses, he learned that he would not be permitted to stay the night in Vichy.
“Not stay?” Varian said. “Why on earth not?”
“You are a suspected communist,” the man said, consulting another dossier stuffed with complaints and labeled with Varian’s name.
He had to wonder how many there were in France, these damning dossiers; it was strangely gratifying to know how objectionable he had become. “Can’t you bend that order?” Varian said. “I have work to do here.”
“Pas du tout,” the man said in his flutelike alto. “Nor will you be permitted in the environs. Your consulate has given you a passport validated for travel west. We must advise you to use it at once.”
In disgust he went to the American Embassy, where he made his plea to a series of undersecretaries and secretaries until a frosted and stenciled door opened to produce Woodruff Wallner, third consular officer. Wallner, tanned and hale, had a comic-book hero’s blunt jaw and a fatherly, welcoming frown; he sported a pink po
cket square and a tweed jacket of the same provenance as Varian’s own, a detail that produced an illogical float of hope in Varian’s chest. Wallner’s secretary delivered a tray of cut-crystal glasses and a decanter of Virginia whiskey that must have predated Prohibition. From a polished box on the desktop Wallner offered Varian a cigar, clipping and lighting it for him with expert ease. He listened, brow creased and hands laced, nodding frequently as Varian told his story and made his plea for protection. He listened so attentively, and answered in a tone of such jovial bonhomie—of course, old boy! Of course, old man! Do tell, do tell—that it took some time for Varian to understand that Wallner was dismissing him as loony-bin material—telling him, in essence, to go to hell.
At the American news bureau, where he went in the hopes of finishing his piece for the Times, a sympathetic foreign correspondent—Edwin Sprague, an old acquaintance from his days at The Living Age—advised him that the safest way to buy time in France would be to stay out of Marseille. If he could prolong his absence until his transit visas expired, so much the better.
Varian looked down at his suitcase, packed with two days’ clothes, and then up into Sprague’s small, flint-colored eyes. “Go on the run?” he said.
“Surely it’s occurred to you,” Sprague said. “You’re known as something of an authority on subterranean living.”
“You’re thinking of my clients, not me.”
“Well, didn’t you learn anything from them?”
“I learned where to find edible snails and how to throw a dinner party sans vêtements.”
“Sounds like you’ve been having more fun than I have,” Sprague said. “I wouldn’t let them kick me out if I could help it.”
* * *
________
All right, he thought, walking back toward the station; all right. He was still allowed to purchase railway tickets; let him get them while he could. If travel could gain him time in France, let him travel. Perhaps new sights would be a balm. That was what he needed, he thought as he approached the ticket window: a balm, or perhaps a bomb. Relief or obliteration. He bought a ticket to Toulon and rode a sweltering train hundreds of kilometers south, arriving at a godforsaken hour between midnight and dawn; there he checked into a hotel on the beach, thinking he might run into Mary Jayne at some casino table or other. As he arranged his few things in the room, its rattan furniture and decorative bowls of shells more suggestive of Miami than of the Riviera, he wondered idly, and with mild self-loathing, what it might be like to sleep with Mary Jayne in the high sheer-curtained bed. At the casino the next night he was disappointed not to find her bent over the roulette table, her deep-grooved golden back emerging from the black cowl of her evening gown; he considered trying to seduce the profligate blond divorcée at his right, or, more appealingly, her young Romanian lover. But he spent that night and the next alone, turning disconsolately, engaging in unsuccessful onanism in the too-hard, too-wide bed.
The Flight Portfolio Page 59
