“If you find it so intolerable here, perhaps you should return to Europe,” Vera said, leveling her gaze at him.
“I can’t,” he snapped.
“I’m sure Gringoire and Candide would welcome you back with open arms.” These were right-wing magazines for which he had written many editorials and reviews.
Paul gestured to his wife, who was trying to light a cigarette with a faltering lighter. “She’s a Jew.”
He thrust out his chin, expecting Vera to challenge him or concede it was true, they couldn’t go back, but she only felt a hot shame flood through her because of the way he had said “she’s a Jew,” as though it were a category outside of human, hated and stateless, a fate he now shared.
Paul’s wife finally lit the cigarette, and Max, as he often did, rescued the moment. “Well, I greatly admire Roosevelt, I’ll tell you that much.”
They all raised their glasses.
* * *
• • •
After their little crowd dispersed, Leon lumbered toward Kurt Weill and his wife, Lotte, who had been a brunette in Germany but, Elsa whispered to Vera, looked much better as a blonde. Renee, a French dermatologist from Paris, was smoking on the couch with Lotte. Renee’s son had attended the same nursery school as Lucie, Ecole Jean Dolent. Vera wondered if he had escaped with his mother.
Max clasped both of Kurt’s hands in his, his body lurching forward, unable to contain his enthusiasm at encountering a fellow musician. Among his colleagues, he appeared to expand and inflate, feeding off their shared energy.
Kurt said they felt safe and happy now that they were finally here in America.
Vera looked at the women in silken gowns, willowy figures in peach and pearl gray and silvery white, jealous of how languidly they moved around the room, as though they hadn’t just arrived here, bedraggled and exhausted by the long sea crossing. Perhaps these women had come over months ago, with many dresses to choose from, given their air of relaxed luxury, whereas Vera wore her single formal dress. Max had bought it for her yesterday at Bergdorf Goodman, but it was an extravagant purchase and they both felt guilty about it. Running her palm along the velvet, she felt strange and at odds with herself, thrown off by Paul’s comment about his wife. He now rested his forearm on the fireplace mantel, talking with the hostess as though he didn’t have a care in the world.
Through the large windows, a yellow moon hung over the dark Hudson.
Elsa instantly became enamored with Renee, discovering that they had fled south on the same road that Vera and Elsa had traveled when they escaped Gurs. Renee began to recount the terrible ordeal of fleeing Paris, and Vera recalled a garden party Renee had last spring, the grass wet from a recent rain, dabs of black caviar on sour cream couched in endive, and then Max accidentally tipped a glass of red wine onto her paneled dress, the light beige silk instantly ruined and then the comic attempts to fix it by pouring massive amounts of salt onto her lap, all of them laughing about it. Elsa sat close to Renee now on the settee as Renee described, with birdlike intensity, that she had left her mother-in-law behind, on the side of the road, because she had to carry her son to the nearest hospital. He’d been injured by a bomb blast. Her husband had apparently gone missing at that point, but they later found each other. Parts of her story were swallowed up by the big band music streaming from the phonograph, but from what Vera could infer, Renee had no idea what had happened to her mother-in-law.
Wishing she could disappear into the wallpaper, Vera drained the last drops of champagne from her glass.
“Lost in the tropics?”
Vera immediately detected a German accent, tidy and curt, beneath the English.
“Sorry?” she asked, for though she’d heard him, she didn’t know what to say. It seemed easier to smile and appear confused.
The German, dressed meticulously in navy trousers and an ironed shirt with a silk bow tie the same port-wine shade as her dress, looked at her expectantly, and she realized he was one of the men Elsa and Leon had embraced when they all first walked into the apartment, making exclamations in German about the happy coincidence of finding him here, followed by his sarcastic retort that every intellectual between Budapest and Paris eventually ended up in this apartment.
He now gestured to the palm-treed wallpaper with his cigar, enveloping them in a cloud of blue smoke. “Dreadful.” He deftly spirited away her empty glass and replaced it with a new one, ice cold to the touch. Her dress, backless and all velvet folds, fell in a low-slung loop that rested in a heap at the base of her spine, and she noticed him noticing this.
He introduced himself as Otto Beckmann. When she said her name, he added, “Of course. You recently arrived from France with Leon and Elsa. They often spoke of you. And Max.”
“We were all in Sanary-sur-Mer, but then we had to leave, like everyone else. It happened very quickly.”
He nodded. “I was thinking of going there too, but in the end, I thought it better to come here.” He paused. “Are you and Max joining Leon and Elsa in Los Angeles?”
“Yes,” she said regretfully.
“You could get work out there, as an actress,” he teased. “You’re certainly beautiful enough.”
Vera blushed. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’ll do out there.” Then she took a sip, the ebullient bubbles dissolving in her mouth.
He asked what she did before the war, and she said she was a writer, but as she explained this, she felt embarrassment wash over her, because now those historical novels about ill-fated love affairs seemed insignificant. Trifles not worth mentioning. And the writing itself often fell into a lyrical haze, which came easily to her, too easily, coating over the raw emotions of the characters with a shiny patina, making it all so smooth and digestible. Yes, maybe Paul had been right. She shouldn’t write like that anymore. How could she, after what had happened to her, to Europe, to everyone? The problem was, she didn’t know how to write without the crutch of beauty. And hadn’t beauty lulled everyone into the kind of passivity that made possible what was happening in Europe right now?
Vera stared into Otto’s arctic blue eyes. “It all seems like a long time ago, writing those books.”
He stubbed out his cigar in a nearby ashtray. “It’s true, we’re living in a different world now. But you can always write.”
From across the room, Max chatted with Heinrich Mann and his wife, Nelly, on the couch, her plump breasts cascading out of a low-cut dress. The music picked up, drowning out conversations.
Vera touched her pearl earring, the weight of it heavy on her earlobe, having already noted the dark line of paint beneath Otto’s fingernails, which explained his arrogant way of looking, as if he could already envision how this scene should appear on canvas: heavy black lines outlining female forms, distorted faces grimacing, mordantly laughing at nothing but their own inanity. He might even paint himself into the foreground, a lone figure glowering at the viewer. Then she realized that this painting she imagined had hung in the living room of Elsa’s house in Sanary. Yes, it was by the famous German expressionist painter Otto Beckmann, entitled Paris Society. She had always loved it and now she knew this man had painted it.
“I know your work. Elsa owned one of your paintings.”
He smiled, his ironic edge softening for a moment, and he explained that he had been in New York for three years already. “First, I lost my teaching post in Berlin, and then, the day after that, they featured my work in the Entartete Kunst, the Degenerate Art Exhibit. A week later, I left Germany forever. According to the Nazis, the Jewish racial spirit of filth and depravity infused my work. And I’m not even Jewish.” Seeing the expression on her face, he added, “I have nothing against the Jews. I’m a target, same as they are. One of my closest friends was a Jew. We fought in the Great War together.”
“What happened to him?” Vera asked.
Otto paused, his gaze reflective. “He
went to Argentina. Or maybe it was Venezuela.”
She felt a chill even though the room was warm, static catching on her gown, the fire crackling behind the grate.
Otto joked, “And here I am too, swept up in this exodus.” He gestured with the tip of his newly lit cigar at Leon and Max, who spoke to a man in an ill-fitting suit.
Vera smiled at him. “We’re stuck with each other.” Then she sat down next to him on the couch. He sipped a glass of cognac, asking where she was staying, and when she said the Wyndham, he groaned. “Oh, God, no. I’m at the St. Moritz. Same crowd. Can’t stand it.”
“Why don’t you leave then?”
Otto placed his drink on the marble coffee table. “I am leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“The same place as you.”
“California?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 10
VERA
December 1940, Los Angeles, California
A gypsy woman once foretold that she would escape the sting of sorrow if she lived near the sea. She’d read Vera’s fortune at one of those Parisian parties with masked people laughing on balconies, the beaded curtain demarcating the little room where the gypsy sat on a heap of pillows, the garnet lampshade’s glow bathing them in premonition. Of course, it was all for show, the gypsy a prop, an attraction to enliven the evening.
Vera thought of her now, staring out at the purple-smudged dawn through the bedroom window, the thick white and brown limbs of the eucalyptus trees, the blue jays clustering on a bush before dispersing.
When the sun came up, it singed the brown mountains gold.
But her heart, tight and fragile, wobbled in her chest like a glass orb. With still no word from Agnes, Vera willed a letter to come. Michel Toch had suggested that Vera and Max use his address as a forwarding one, until they were settled in Los Angeles, but even now, after a month had passed, no letter arrived. Every morning, they read the newspaper in Michel’s breakfast nook, the ticking of an ornate grandfather clock the only discernible sound, hoping that reading the paper cover to cover would somehow bring them closer to understanding what was really happening over there, to Lucie, but the headlines only made Vera more fretful: “New Warsaw Ghetto Completed” and “United States Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, Stands against American Entry into War.” And those unbelievable pictures of the Coventry Cathedral reduced to rubble. Right next to this, an article detailed Hitler’s decree for a “New Europe,” heralding that soon, Europe would be “Judenfrei.”
* * *
• • •
Elsa and Leon found a Spanish villa nestled in the hills of the Pacific Palisades overlooking the sea, and they tried to convince Vera and Max to live up there too. But with no schools, hospitals, or grocery stores nearby, such a place would be unsuitable for Lucie, once they brought her here. Vera explained this in Michel’s kitchen, where they were temporarily staying while looking for a house to rent. It was Sunday. Max prepared miniature mustard cheese sandwiches, even though, he muttered, the cheese tasted like wax paper, before skewering each one with a toothpick, the ends of which were wrapped in blue-green cellophane reminding Vera of a children’s party.
“And with the petrol rations, how will you get anywhere?” Vera wondered. “The house is so far away from everything.”
“Oh, I won’t have to drive much,” Elsa said with a wry smile. “I walk down to the water, there’s a little grocery there, and I hike my way back up.”
Leon threw up his hands in mock surrender. “All the windows are broken, the backyard is entirely overgrown, and the basement is knee deep in mice and lizards, but we bought it for nine thousand dollars.”
Elsa turned to Vera and whispered, “He just sold his latest book to Martin Secker in London, so he’s feeling flush.”
“The last one in the Josephus trilogy?”
“No, The Lautensack Brothers.”
Of course, Vera thought, he’s working on two manuscripts simultaneously, managing to sell one that she didn’t even know he was writing, causing her to feel oddly betrayed, as if they had purposefully kept it secret until they could flash around news of the sale with artificial nonchalance.
“There’s not a scrap of furniture. We’ll have to sleep in the backyard until the house is habitable,” Leon added, swiping one of the cheese sandwiches off the platter and popping it into his mouth. “In sleeping bags.”
“A Persian prince lives in one of the neighboring villas,” Elsa said. “At least that’s what the agent said. It can’t be entirely wild up there.”
“The landscape reminds me of Tuscany,” Leon rejoined, chewing pensively on the sandwich. “That’s why we took it so quickly.” And then he reminisced about their sojourn throughout Italy when they were young and first married; they backpacked, and he wrote his manuscripts while she prepared the food and tent, arranging all the details so he could focus on his work.
“Clearly, nothing has changed,” Elsa said, giving him a peck on the cheek before pouring coffee into each porcelain cup.
* * *
• • •
After another week of searching, Max and Vera found a house to rent on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica Canyon, a quaint English-style cottage with avocado trees and azaleas in the garden and rooms with slanted ceilings and views of the sea, for eighty dollars a month.
But there were still so many practicalities to arrange. Everyone said they would need a car, but Vera had no idea how to procure one. They would also need a housekeeper, once Max secured a contract at a studio.
“How else will you entertain?” Salka Viertel asked as she strode through the newly painted rooms, rubbing her arms up and down as though the recently vacated house, without even a rug to cover the hardwood floors, or a throw pillow to brighten the faded couch, made her shiver. She had moved here from Vienna with her husband, a playwright, before the war, and assumed the queenly position of connecting those who needed help with those who could dispense it. She was the epicenter of émigré life in Los Angeles, and her house on Mabery Road, a two-minute stroll from Vera and Max’s, was brimming with recent arrivals from Europe, many of whom were desperate for work. Everyone knew Salka, and knowing her brought you closer to knowing everyone else, from picture people, such as Garbo and Chaplin, to famous musicians, such as Stravinsky and Korngold, along with a host of aspiring artists whom she nurtured and included in her Sunday salons.
“I know a very nice Dutch woman,” Salka announced, glancing up into the corners of the living room, which glistened with spiderwebs, “who used to be a pediatrician in Rotterdam. Hilde Assendorp. She’s looking for housework. The two of you will get on well.”
* * *
• • •
Michel gave Vera and Max a few of the old lawn chairs from his property so they could at least sit in their garden and take a coffee, just as in Sanary, Max joked. The house itself came with furniture, even if it was overly ornate and belonged to the last century, all dark wood and crushed-velvet chaises, but none of that mattered to Vera. She walked through the dusty rooms, tearing off sheets from wingback chairs and pulling the heavy floral curtains aside to let in the light, and glimpsed the sea through the dusty windows. She could smell the salt in the wood, and the clean pine scent of the trees surrounding the garden, and when she closed her eyes and listened closely, she heard the tide rolling in and out.
The next morning, while she was still in her dressing gown, Michel rang the bell. They thought he had come with more lawn furniture, whispering to each other about how they would politely decline the offer, but when they opened the door, he held up a letter, his lined face jubilant, his gold-rimmed glasses catching the morning sun.
“I think you’ve been waiting for this one,” he said, handing Vera the envelope.
The first thing she checked was the postmark date: September 9. Three months ago. She broke into a sw
eat, trying to open the envelope with her fingers. Fearing tearing the letter, she waited while Max frantically looked for the letter knife, finally finding it in a kitchen drawer, and then, with the utmost care, she slit it open.
He now hovered next to her, and they glanced at each other with a mixture of fear and hope, so palpable she could almost taste it, before she unfolded the letter.
They read it quickly, racing through the humdrum descriptions of farm life, scanning for any hint of bad news, but there was none. Lucie was healthy, it had been a very good harvest, they had canned fruits and vegetables for the winter. We must exist in the quietest corner of France, and we thank God for blessing us with such calm. I will write again soon. Sending love and prayers.
Vera fell into Max’s arms, crying out of relief, and Michel hugged them both, and after a few minutes they were all cautiously laughing and shaking their heads, embarrassed by their fears and making vague admonishments that there was no use in overreacting, the war would end, normalcy would return, and in the meantime, look at this glorious summer day in the middle of December.
* * *
• • •
A few weeks later, Vera walked along the same esplanade where they had stopped their first day in Los Angeles, which she had learned was called Palisades Park. She passed the twisted Monterey cypresses that barely elevated themselves aboveground, as if the earth had an abnormally strong gravitational downward pull on their branches, causing the trees to grow horizontally, flat-topped by the strong winds. What kind of tree is this that cannot grow upward as nearly all trees do, she thought, touching its thick rough bark.
Old-fashioned orchestral music floated over from the pier. She clutched Agnes’s letter, folded in her coat pocket, as though by her carrying it around, Lucie would sense Vera’s protection. That night, she had read it over and over again, repeating certain lines to Max, imploring him to confirm it was a good letter and Lucie really was safe, even though the letter stated this plainly.
Those Who Are Saved Page 9
