“Yeah,” Sasha said, taking another long sip of his drink. Charlie shifted positions on the green velvet banquette and explained that his director clients were always keen to find a gem in the rough, casually rattling off some of his clients, as if Sasha didn’t already know that he represented Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, and Tyrone Power, and directors such as George Stevens and Howard Hawks. Charlie raised his glass. “Welcome to town, kid.”
Their glasses clinked just as the blonde glided by their table. She deftly slipped her number into the front pocket of Charlie’s blazer and kept on walking.
He grinned. “Happens all the time.”
* * *
• • •
Charlie wore that same irresistible grin now as he turned his gaze toward his wife, Jean, in a strapless white dress, her honey-colored shoulders shrugging when she gestured to the coffee table overlaid with grapes, Swiss cheese, rye bread, and deviled eggs. “Sasha, have something to eat. I bought too much.”
Charlie took a puff of his cigar. “Enjoy it . . . Pretty soon we’ll be on rations like the Brits.”
“Do you think we should get involved?” Jean asked Sasha.
“Someone’s got to stop those dictators from destroying Europe, don’t you think?”
Jean shrugged her perfect shoulders. “Oh, I don’t know. Why should the burden always fall on us?”
Charlie yawned, staring up at the coffered ceiling. “I did read something troubling in the paper, about Hitler decreeing a law for a ‘New Europe’ or some such wild thing.”
Maybe, Sasha thought, the inveterate beauty of this place could lull someone into believing that the war wasn’t actually happening, or that it wouldn’t dare touch this paradise. A framed photograph of Jean serving coffee to actors backstage stood on the mantelpiece, next to another photograph of Charlie slinging an arm around Bing Crosby, both men laughing.
Jean’s melodious voice rang out, “Sasha, you’re miles away.”
He shook his head and smiled apologetically.
“Well, here’s a better question,” Jean said, drumming her elegant fingers on her knee. “How about a blind date with my cousin? She’s new in town.”
Sasha laughed and leaned back into the chaise. “Oh, I don’t know about that.” He was a disappointment to women. His large-featured face—the Roman nose and full mouth, the heavy dark eyebrows—lent him an air of seriousness, of intent, but really, half the time he found himself listening for a hint of a story idea, something he might use later for a script.
“She’s a bearcat, that cousin, believe you me,” Charlie said.
Sasha waved Charlie’s comment away; he never quite connected with anyone. On his last date, with a secretary from RKO, they’d gone to the Santa Anita Race Track in Pasadena. It was a long drive there and back, and he asked her question after question, about what Colorado was like, if she grew up with horses there, why she’d broken off her engagement to her high school sweetheart, and so on and so on. She answered blithely, barely stopping to catch her breath, until she turned to him before getting out of the car at the end of the date, her hand gently on his shoulder, and said, “I had a nice time, Sasha. But I know absolutely nothing about you.”
Momentarily jarred by her comment, he made some joke to dodge what she’d said, but the words stung. All his questions served as a kind of armor, a trained way of negotiating the world, ingrained in him since childhood. When people asked too many questions about why they’d left the old country, or who his father was, or how come they barely had any family to speak of, his mother would sidestep such probing with a witty remark, pointed enough to quiet them, or she’d deftly change the subject. But most of all, she deflected the questions that hit too close to home with questions for them, asking after their relatives, or if they liked the new yeshiva teacher, later telling Sasha that people loved to talk about themselves—they couldn’t help it. Always better, she said, to ask and listen, especially in a neighborhood such as this, bustling with nosy housewives. Even a whiff of gossip will get them salivating, she added scornfully. While Sasha watched his mother pepper the neighbors with questions, her tone breezy and unbothered, her eyes met his, and in them he read: Keep things close to the vest. That way they can’t hurt you. That way you are safe.
Jean nibbled on a grape and smiled gamely at Sasha. “So, my cousin, what do you think?”
Sasha smiled back, calmed by the late-afternoon light spilling into the room, and the sound of water continuously trickling from the stone fountain outside. He shook his head. “She sounds nice. But maybe another time.”
Jean stood up and lightly touched Sasha’s shoulder, and he inhaled her sharp gardenia perfume. “All right, but she won’t be free long. Please excuse me. I have a tennis match in half an hour.”
They watched her lithe frame cut through the room before she disappeared down the hallway.
Charlie sat up and swirled around his drink. “It’s tough.” He gave the empty hallway a hooded glance. Then they heard a door close. “She wants a child, and I don’t. We had a big blowout last night. She threw a crystal ashtray into my temple.” He turned his head to the side, and Sasha saw a long thin scrape nestled in a bruise.
Charlie emitted a dry laugh. “She thought I was dead when I fell back against the bed, blood on the carpet and all over her dress. By the time the ambulance came, I was having a drink and smoking a cigar, and it was a big hassle to convince everyone to go home.”
Sasha shook his head. “All that because you don’t want kids?”
“I’m at the point in my career where I can do whatever the hell I want. Travel, buy new cars, go to Vegas every weekend, you name it. But with a baby, that all goes out the window. You know what I mean?”
Sasha snapped off a few grapes. “I don’t know, Charlie. Wouldn’t it be easier to just do what she wants?”
He balanced his forearms on his muscular thighs. “She wants a lot of things. Like a darkroom in the back of the house so she can become a lenswoman, even though she knows I don’t want her to work. I don’t even want her to cook.”
Sasha didn’t see a problem with any of this, but in truth, he had no knowledge of marriage, so it was best just to keep quiet. And best, he thought, to not bring up his directing ambitions at the moment, when it was hard enough just to sell a script, let alone attach himself as a director with no experience.
Charlie shifted in his chair. “So. Cyclone. Columbia and Paramount passed.” He hesitated, seeing the disappointment on Sasha’s face, and then continued, “They don’t want to provoke Germany. A picture like that will be banned in most of Europe, and God knows how it will do here.”
“I think America is ready for a movie like this.”
“I don’t know if Hollywood is.” Charlie swirled the ice cubes around in his drink, staring into the amber liquid. “You know what Schaefer’s people said about it, over at RKO?”
“What?” Sasha asked, trying to stave off the sinking feeling that he wasn’t getting anywhere in this town.
“They said such an anti-German picture could be seen as advancing the Jewish agenda to intervene in the war. That it’s clannish.”
“Clannish?” Sasha rose up from his seat, but Charlie gestured for him to sit. “What’s happening over there isn’t just about the Jews. It’s about that sonofabitch toppling Western democracy, crushing all that we stand for. They’re bombing the hell out of England, and now in France . . .” Sasha trailed off.
“I know,” Charlie agreed. “I know. But listen, it’s not all bad. Warner’s liked Cyclone. I set a meeting for next week.”
“Okay. That’s something.”
The sound of Jean starting the car in the driveway distracted them for a moment. She tooted the horn three times before speeding away.
Charlie’s gaze drifted off for a moment. “She always does that.” Then he took off his glasses and gave Sasha a hard lo
ok. “And in the pitch meeting, don’t be a groyser tsuleyger. Got it?”
Sasha grinned at the phrase his mother used to say when he got too cocky. “Sure.”
Charlie shook his head and let out a disbelieving laugh.
Chapter 8
VERA
October 1940, En Route to Manhattan, New York
The golden light of early October fell over Lisbon, bathing the red-tiled roofs and whitewashed colonial buildings in a nostalgic tint. Or perhaps, Vera thought as the hulking steamer pulled away from the Portuguese coast, it was just the light of sadness.
When they arrived in Lisbon, German police teemed in the streets, while refugees flooded the cafés, the scent of panic pouring off of them like a fine vapor. Nazis motored down the wide boulevards that ran parallel to the sea, swastika flags rippling in the wind. “Lisbon is death,” Varian had warned them. “You must not stay even one day there.”
* * *
• • •
The SS Excalibur buffeted the open sea, and the rough pounding waves drove everyone into their cabins during those first few days. The constant motion and the incessant ocean air, that mix of saltiness with pungent fish, made Vera’s stomach churn and clench. She clamored for the tiny bathroom, vomiting into the toilet. Afterward, doused in sweat, she lay there, the cool tiles calming against her cheek. At first, when Max came into the cabin and only saw her legs stretched out on the floor, he gasped, thinking she had collapsed, or worse, only to find her peacefully resting, forehead pressed into her folded-over hands, the dry dark as quiet as a crypt.
Vera wondered if he feared she had killed herself. Various friends and acquaintances had done it, suspecting that a terror much worse than death awaited them. Last month, Walter Benjamin had overdosed on morphine tablets when he found out he would be sent back over the Spanish border into France. Walter had taken their exact route over the Pyrenees, but on that day, the Spanish police proved less forgiving. The poet Walter Hasenclever killed himself in the des Milles internment camp when the Germans overtook it. Apparently, he’d used barbiturates. And the playwright Ernst Toller had hung himself in his New York hotel room by the silk cord of his robe after learning that his brother and sister had been sent to a concentration camp.
When Vera sat up, blood rushed to her head, and she gave Max a weak smile.
No, she could never do it.
Not as long as Lucie was alive.
* * *
• • •
Vera often smoked with Elsa after breakfast along the balustrade of the ship. On the upper deck, their fellow travelers, the fabulously boring bourgeoisie of continental Europe, as Elsa called them, reclined in chaises, bundled and wrapped in fur-trimmed blankets, gazing up at the slow-moving clouds, as if the ship were a floating hospital where they took the cure for exile. Everyone discussed the weather and what types of foods to expect in America. They muttered “peanut butter” and “Jell-O” in devastated tones. Many of them, including Vera, read 1001 Words in English, which they found comical and puzzling. She was still on the A’s, repeating certain words under her breath as she walked laps around the deck: “able,” “accelerate,” “accentuate,” “accommodate.”
Elsa found the passengers’ languorous comfort distasteful, insinuating that other refugees, who were less wealthy and famous but objectively stronger, should have been saved from burning Europe.
Then she would cock her head and listen to the squabbling Eastern European Jews traveling down below, in third class. Elsa leaned over the railing, straining to see their exaggerated gestures. The caftan-clad Jews relentlessly cajoled, accused, and chastised one another, a never-ending cycle of human interaction that excited Elsa. Her eyes lit up, watching them, but Vera looked away, stung with shame for having believed she was different from them. She used to cling to the idea that she and Max, and all the other Jews they knew and associated with, were nothing like these newly arrived Jews from the east whom everyone mocked—undesirables, Juifs. Vera even used to avoid the overly Jewish sections of Paris, the Marais and Belleville, averting her eyes from the pious men with their payos, sputtering Yiddish. She had actually felt embarrassed for those poor Jews, in clothing from the last century, as if they still waded through the decrepit streets of Vilna, refusing to assimilate.
And yet here she was with them, on the same ship, all hurtling toward an uncertain future, and it struck Vera with painful clarity that it didn’t matter if she could travel first class, or that her daughter had been accepted into the most prestigious lycée in Paris, or that she had won the Prix Goncourt for her first novel, or that her husband wrote symphonies for the Paris Opera.
In the eyes of the enemy, they were all Juifs.
There were no exceptions.
* * *
• • •
Sometimes, before dinner, Max accompanied her on the upper deck. He lit her cigarette, and if she seemed especially lost in thought, he recited her favorite Akhmatova poem to cheer her, the one about Tsarskoye Selo, the gardens in St. Petersburg, where Vera had lived as a little girl.
She rested her head on Max’s tweed shoulder. The poem brought her back to Morskaya Street, where she and her father always used to walk, stopping to admire the window of Fabergé featuring a row of golden enamel eggs patterned with emerald leaves and ruby petals, blood red, and tiny yellow diamonds dotting the egg’s circumference. Her father whispered into her ear that the emperor gave the empress one of these eggs each anniversary of their betrothal. Now, as she watched the white-capped waves carry her away from France, the overlapping pain of two exiles pierced her.
Turning to Max, Vera caught the tail end of a conversation about the merits of South America. “Why would you live in icy New York when you could easily immigrate to Buenos Aires?” an older woman exclaimed.
* * *
• • •
At first, Vera and Max decided that they would wait out the war in New York. After all, it was closer to France than California, and they knew many others who had settled there, nestling into an established community of exiles. But Michel Toch, Max’s professor at the Mannheim conservatory, whom he had looked up to ever since his student days, bitterly complained in a letter to Max that there was no money in New York for composers. When Hitler came to power in ’33, Michel immediately fled, first to Paris and then to London. In the late thirties, he immigrated to New York and taught at the New School before finally going to Hollywood, which he now claimed was the only place to go. Michel promised to help Max get a job scoring for one of the studios, or at least, he wrote, secure a foothold. He had recently composed the score for Heidi, and Max often said that Michel was flush with opportunities, the money steadily pouring in from various channels. But everyone knew of other composers who fared less well, and the shadowy figure of Nikolai Petrovitch, a fellow émigré, hovered on the outskirts of these blazing success stories. Once, Petrovitch had composed symphonies for the Vienna State Opera; he now tuned pianos for a living, traveling door-to-door with his black leather box full of tools. At least, Vera thought, Max had been able to transfer a quarter of their savings into an account in Canada before leaving Paris, at the recommendation of a banker friend who warned assets might be frozen.
Leon stated that all that mattered to him was his library, no matter where he ended up. “I lost my first one in Berlin, the second one in Sanary, and now I’m adrift, with no books to speak of.”
Vera considered her own mazelike library, divided between Sanary and Paris. She couldn’t think without her books. The collection reflected the inner workings of her mind, past obsessions, future ones, all accessible with one tour among the spines, her fingertips tracing the titles as if gliding along piano keys, each book, each writer emitting a certain note that, when pressed, revealed a close, breathing universe.
But even without a library, she should still be able to write. And yet she wasn’t sure she could do it. She had left her typewriter
along with her manuscript in Sanary, and now debated whether to rewrite it from memory. But the story, about an older woman mourning her sons, set in the French countryside during World War I, felt trite and pointless. Even the various details swirling around her that she might have taken note of and formed into a narrative refused to congeal. For example, an Italian countess who insisted on feeding her Pomeranians caviar for breakfast, and the young waiter who didn’t know what to do with her endless demands, glancing desperately around for someone to intervene. Or the man and woman who clearly were carrying on an affair, only ever meeting when the deck was deserted, after everyone had gone in to dinner; after the soup was served, Vera watched the woman enter the dining room first, her eyes radiant, her neck inflamed from the man’s stubble, and settle down next to her husband with practiced nonchalance. Vera observed their respective husband and wife eating lunch or reading the paper, and a dull pang of disenchantment overcame her, wondering if they knew, or didn’t know, and what did it matter anyway, given the state of things? But she couldn’t bring herself to construct a narrative from these observations. In the past, she could have conveyed, in a biting short story, the main idea: the man and woman only wanted to hold each other, freely and openly, but if given such freedom, their desire would evaporate, as swiftly as when the emergent noonday sun dissipated the morning mist.
* * *
• • •
During the weeklong sea voyage, Leon worked feverishly on his Josephus trilogy, and she wrote nothing, did nothing, except anticipate that stab of self-loathing every time Elsa mentioned Leon’s progress. And her seasickness hadn’t subsided, which wasn’t helped by the fact that all night, when everyone else slept, she obsessively thought of Lucie, wondering if Agnes had received the note and knew they had immigrated to America, or if she still thought they were interned at Gurs. Even though they had made it over the Pyrenees and onto one of the very last ships, bombs and roiling storms could still undo them. And once they got to America, then what? Max reassured her that a network of European contacts and friends would help them find a place to live in Los Angeles, suitable for Lucie, near a good school, in a nice neighborhood. And he already had meetings set up at the studios, which were apparently willing to hire European composers for their music departments.
Those Who Are Saved Page 7
