The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (22 page)

Unceremoniously, the waiter dropped a basket of croissants onto our table. I bit into one. “These are stale,” I said. “They’re not even proper croissants. Only the French know how to make proper croissants. Italian ones are bad enough, and these are—Julia?”

But she was gone. Vanished. It was as if a portrait had run out of its frame.

I found her in the room, furiously rubbing lotion into her hands.

“What happened? Why did you leave?”

“It was her. Aunt Rosalie.”

“Where?”

“In the dining room. I don’t think she saw me. I think I got out in time. Go down and see if she’s still there.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise I’ll have to stay in the room all day.”

“All right. But Julia—how will I know her?”

“She was sitting two tables away from us. Alone. Wearing a cap—a sort of sailor cap.”

I returned downstairs. Sure enough, two tables from ours sat a woman in a sailor cap. She was not Aunt Rosalie. She was Georgina Kendall.

“Ahoy!” she called, waving with nautical gusto. “Eddie’s friend, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m so bad with faces, I wasn’t sure. Join me for coffee, won’t you? Was that your wife? She left in rather a hurry.”

“She wasn’t feeling well.”

“Too much absinthe, I’ll bet.” She winked. In the glare of the dining room I saw how spotted her skin was, like the endpapers of a book. “Now, I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m doing here, and I’ll tell you. We got thrown out of our hotel in Estoril. It was Lucy’s fault. That girl! She had too much champagne and tipped over a vase. One of those big Chinese vases. Ten to one it was a fake, but try convincing a hotel manager of that. Luckily, our driver took pity on us and brought us here. Not the Aviz, but, as I told Lucy, it’s only for a few days, until the
Manhattan
sails. She wanted to take the Clipper, but one has to draw the line somewhere. I’m not made of money! And what about you? Will you be sailing on the
Manhattan
?”

“Us? Yes.”

She leaned in confidentially. “You’ve heard, of course, that they’ve decided not to let foreigners on board. Such a lot of griping about that, though if you ask me, it’s the only way. Especially after what happened last month, when the
Manhattan
went to Genoa. The idea was the same as here, to pick up stranded Americans, only they didn’t bother to control the sales of the tickets, and foreigners bought them all up. Jews. A friend of mine was on board, she wrote to me about it. The ship was packed to the gills with ’em! They were camped out on the floor of the Palm Room, the Grand Salon, even the post office. So many babies, the laundry couldn’t cope with the diapers. Now, I hope you believe me when I tell you that I have all the sympathy in the world for those people—all the sympathy in the world—but when we reach the point where an American citizen can’t get his laundry done on an American ship … Well, the line has to be drawn somewhere, don’t you agree?”

“And how is your book going?”

“Oh, like a dream. You know, I really don’t understand what Eddie was carrying on about that night. All I can think is that he’s planning a book of his own and he’s mad that I’ve beat him to the punch. And are he and Violet sailing on the
Manhattan
, too?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Oh, good. We’ll have loads of fun, the five of us. The six of us. And really, you must admit”—here her voice downshifted into seriousness—“it’ll be a far more pleasant journey,
far
more pleasant, if it’s just our sort.”

The waiter arrived with coffee—which gave me the chance I had been looking for to make my excuses and return to the room.

Julia was standing by the window, peering out at the street.

“What took you so long? Was she there?”

“No. I mean, yes. But it wasn’t her. That’s why I was so long. I knew her. I’d met her with Edward.”

“Who?”

“That woman. The one who isn’t your aunt.”

“But it
was
my aunt. You must have been talking to the wrong person.”

“Julia, how many women in sailor caps do you think there are in that dining room?” I touched her on the shoulder and she flinched. “Really, darling, you shouldn’t be so nervous—”

“Stop it. It was her. I saw her.”

“I’m sure you think you saw her. But you were mistaken. It’s probably because you’re so nervous—”

“Don’t believe anything she tells you. Promise me you won’t. She’s a liar.”

“Julia—”

“My mother thinks she killed Uncle Edgar. Very convenient that he was buried at sea. It meant there couldn’t be an autopsy.”

“But I thought he died of a diabetic coma.”

“We only have
her
word for that. Hers and the ship doctor’s—and God knows they can’t be trusted … And to think that she actually had the nerve to come back to New York every winter, and take a suite at the St. Regis—the St. Regis, of all places!—and throw tea parties. Of course, we always refused her invitations. Well, I went once. Just out of curiosity. And God, what a disappointment that was. I’d expected her at least to be glamorous. Instead of which, here was this lumpy little thing in Dior. And she couldn’t even see that she was being snubbed. That was the irony of it. She thought she was having her cake and eating it too, that she could live it up in France and come home and be welcomed with open arms.”

“How sad.”

“And then, after we moved to Paris, she started sending me these letters, insisting I should visit her in Cannes, repeating all that nonsense about how we were just alike, how I was the daughter she’d never had. Once she even showed up at our apartment, the way she used to show up at my mother’s.”

“Really? When was this?”

“Six, seven years ago. I didn’t want to tell you. I had the maid say I was out. But I could hear their conversation. Rosalie didn’t believe it for a second—she knew I was there. Which must have just sharpened her determination to find me. To show me up.”

“But Julia, isn’t it possible she doesn’t want to show you up? That she’s just looking for—I don’t know—a kindred spirit?”

“Oh, God!” Julia turned away. “Thank you for confirming my worst fears. Thank you for confirming that my own husband thinks what everyone else in my family does. That I’m just like her.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to me. I’m saying that when you look at it objectively, the circumstances of your lives do bear a certain surface similarity—”

“And therefore we’re the same on the inside? Is that it? Two peas
in a pod? And now we’re going to arrive in New York on the same ship. When we get off, she’ll be clinging to me … Oh, I can’t bear it.”

“But Julia, none of this is going to happen. Please, darling, none of this is even real. That woman you saw in the dining room isn’t your aunt. Your aunt’s not here. Look, shall I take you downstairs and introduce you to her so that you can see for yourself?”

“No! God, no … All these years I thought I was free, but it was a lie. Paris was only a reprieve, a stay of execution. I’ll never be free.”

“Julia—”

She held up her hand. “Please. Stop talking.”

“But you don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“I don’t need to. Whatever you say will be wrong. It always is. Even when you think you’re saying the right thing. Especially when you think you’re saying the right thing.”

Suddenly she was very quiet.

“Lie down,” I said. “Maybe you should take a pill.”

“I don’t want one.”

“It’ll calm you.” I fetched the Seconals from the bathroom, shook one onto my palm, and handed it to her. She swallowed it. I closed the shutters and laid her atop the coverlet. “Just rest,” I said, removing the tiny shoes from her feet. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see about selling the car.”

This wasn’t true. I was going to the Suiça. I was going to look for Edward.

As I was crossing the lobby, Senhor Costa waved me over to his desk. He was holding the telephone, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. “Sir, for you. Madame Freleng.”

“
Madame
Freleng?”

He nodded. I took the phone.

“Pete, is that you? It’s Iris. Look, are you alone? Is Julia there?”

“No.”

“Good, because I need to talk to you privately. First of all, how is she?”

“How is she? How should she be?”

“That’s why I’m calling. The way you were behaving last night—it was very … well, worrisome. Perhaps you don’t see it so clearly, just how close to the edge she is. Edward’s terribly upset about it.”

“Edward is?”

“He was up all night. And so I’m calling to ask you, please, to be gentler with her.”

“I want to speak to Edward. Pass me to Edward.”

“I can’t. He’s out. But it was he who asked me to call. I’m sure you don’t believe that. I’m sure you think this is some machination on my part, some scheme, but it isn’t. I am genuinely afraid for Julia’s life, Pete. We both are.”

Right then Georgina came out of the dining room. Her cap was askew on her head. Halfway to the elevator, she stopped in her tracks and began rooting through her pocketbook. Perhaps she was looking for her key.

“Anything Edward has to tell me, he can tell me himself,” I said to Iris and hung up the phone—at which Senhor Costa, in that time-honored manner of eavesdroppers, got very busy with his ledger.

“Sir,” he called as I was heading for the door.

“Yes?”

“As you may know, the
Manhattan
is to sail in a few days.”

“Yes.”

“May I assume that you and your wife—”

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps we could speak of settling the bill—not right at this moment—”

“Of course. If you get it ready, I’ll pick it up when I get back.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Whatever Georgina was trying to find in her pocketbook she still hadn’t found. I walked right past her, through the revolving door and into the bright morning. A few pigeons smudged the sky. Otherwise it was blamelessly blue. And I thought: She is afraid of me. Iris. She is more afraid of me than I am of her.

Edward was not at the Suiça when I got there. However, he had left me a note with the maître d’. In it he proposed that instead of meeting at the British Bar, as we usually did, we meet at the entrance to the castle. This was clear on the other side of Lisbon from the British Bar—which made me wonder if he was trying deliberately to steer us clear of Señora Inés’s place. And why had he left the note at the Suiça, where there was the chance I might not get it, instead of the Francfort?

Most of that day I walked. Every half hour or so, I would pass by the Suiça on the off chance that Edward might show up, but he never did. Then I would return to the Francfort to check on Julia, but she was still asleep. Then I would go out again. It occurred to me that since arriving in Lisbon I had hardly spent a minute by myself. I had always had one or the other of them to guide me. Now, in their absence, I found myself noticing things I hadn’t before. For instance, the cars. Along with the usual assortment of Citroëns and
Fiats, their lawnmower engines sputtering, there were Studebakers, Chevrolets, Cadillacs. Most of them were new or newish. Doubtless some had been purchased—for a song, as they say—from refugees like me. And of course, I had told Julia that I would try to sell the car this morning, and of course I was not trying to sell the car … As I walked, I thrust my hands into my pockets. I fondled the keys. I squeezed them. They left red welts on my palm, an acrid metallic smell on my fingers. They had worn a hole in my pocket through which, now and then, centavo coins spilled. And still I could no more imagine not having them there than I could imagine not wearing a watch, not wearing a tie.

An idea came to me. What if I didn’t sell the car? What if, instead, Edward and I got our wives aboard the
Manhattan
, settled them in their cabins, and snuck off? Then we could drive … anywhere. If it came to it, we could stay in Portugal. For somehow Portugal with Edward was not the dire and dismal prospect that it was with Julia. Instead it was an adventure. Why, if we wanted, we could offer our services to our government, become the spies for whom, I felt sure, we were already mistaken. And though it was true that Julia would suffer, at least for the duration of the crossing she would have Iris to console her. With any luck, she might even have a shipboard romance, arrive in New York engaged to a diplomat or a journalist … a better man than me. Now that I have had more experience of infidelity, I can identify the particular delusion into which, that afternoon, I was falling—the delusion that if the spouse you are betraying also has an affair, your own betrayal will somehow be canceled out in the exchange. And yes, such things do happen, especially among the French. Only we were not French. Nor was Julia the sort of wife to go off and find herself another man, either to make me jealous or to satisfy herself … None of which stopped me from spending the rest of that long day playing with my plan;
tipping it up into the air and bouncing it off the end of my nose; clapping my flippers as an unseen audience applauded, an unseen circus master threw a fish for me to catch in my mouth and swallow whole …

Then something happened.

It was around two in the afternoon. I was returning to the Francfort to change clothes before meeting Edward. As I neared the Elevator, two boys ran past me. They might have been eight or nine. They were trailing lottery tickets like the tails of kites. That, however, was not what caught my attention. What caught my attention was that each boy was wearing one shoe. So far as I could see, the shoes belonged to the same pair. One boy was wearing the left, the other the right.

They tumbled across the street in the direction of the line that had formed at the entrance to the Elevator. Probably they intended to try to sell their tickets to the men and women in the line, but before they could get there, they were stopped by two police officers. In those years, the Lisbon police wore helmets like those of London bobbies, which gave them a deceptively benign look. An argument ensued. At first I assumed that it was about the lottery tickets. Then I saw that the officers were pointing at the boys’ feet. They were shouting. Nearby, the elevator operator stood in his usual spot, smoking, presumably awaiting the exact minute when his schedule would permit him to open his doors. Suddenly one of the officers laughed and in the same instant slapped the boy wearing the left shoe hard across the face. The boy cried out. The officer slapped him again, harder. The boy fell to his knees. The other boy broke into a run, but the second officer caught him by the collar. He held him up in the air, as a mother dog does her puppy. The boy’s one shoe fell off. His legs were like sticks, his feet smaller than Julia’s. After a moment, the elevator operator looked at his watch, stubbed
out his cigarette, and pulled open the gate. Silently the good citizens in the line filed through.