The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (26 page)

I didn’t read the article. Instead I put it away in the drawer where I kept all the other ephemera of my European past: the few photographs I had of Julia and the few letters Edward had written to me over the years; my copies of
Flight from France
and the Legrand novels; the issue of
Vogue
in which our apartment was featured; and then a miscellany of random objects, buttons and pencils and keys
and tie pins, the significance of which I could no longer recall, and that were somehow all the more poignant for their elusiveness. The book I had told my wife I wanted to write was to be an account of those few weeks I’d spent in Lisbon in the summer of 1940. For nearly a year I had been preparing myself to write it. I had virgin pads at the ready, sharpened pencils, a new portable typewriter. Yet until that evening, I hadn’t put down so much as a word. Now I see that it was Georgina’s article—not its contents so much as its sheer talismanic presence—that gave me the impetus to begin. For, starting on the evening that my wife presented it to me, I wrote steadily for six months, until I reached the chapter describing the visit I had made to the castle with Edward. And then I could not go on, though I didn’t know why. I put the manuscript away in the drawer with the old letters and photographs and books and buttons and so on … for six months. And then, just the other day, on impulse, I opened the drawer again and took out—not the manuscript, but the article: “Ten Rules the Novice Writer Should Follow.”

Georgina, I have you to thank for this work. It was the discovery that I had broken every one of your rules that impelled me to complete it.

To wit:

1. Never set scenes of dialogue in cafés. They provide insufficient business for the characters.
(But where did we spend all our time in Lisbon if not cafés?)

2. Never leave loose plot threads.
(But what of the way war tears stories into shreds?)

3. Never introduce a character whom you don’t plan to bring back later.
(I never did learn what became of the Fischbeins.)

4. Keep the competition in mind.
(Following a brief surge of popularity in the mid-forties, Xavier Legrand’s novels lapsed into desuetude.)

5. Remember that an unhappy ending is more likely to lead to big sales than a happy one.
(But my story did have a happy ending.)

6. Make sure that the motive for a character’s action is clear enough that a reader can explain it easily to a friend.
(I still don’t know why Julia killed herself.)

7. Don’t strain credulity.
(The majority of the crew members aboard the
Manhattan
were German-born, anti-Semitic, and supporters of the Axis. The ship’s newsletter could have been written by Ribbentrop himself.)

8. Never allow a first-person narrator to step outside his range of observation.
(Where does one draw the line between observation and dream?)

9. Don’t rely on coincidence.
(Who would have believed it, Georgina? You really were Aunt Rosalie.)

10. Never let facts get in the way.
(How the facts got in the way—that is the story I am trying to tell.)

Still, I suppose I am duty-bound to report what happened to everyone.

Three weeks after the
Manhattan
docked, Daisy died. Iris and Edward embarked on their lecture tour, but halfway through—in Terre Haute, I believe—Iris left him. Eventually she married a French-born jeweler and launched a literary career on her own. In this she has earned some distinction.

To this day, Edward lives—alone, so far as I am aware—on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I have no idea what he does or how he earns his keep.

Julia’s son—again, so far as I am aware—still believes himself to be his late mother’s nephew. He is a lawyer with an office on Wall Street. He is married. He has three children.

Edward and Iris’s daughter continues to reside in the Theosophist community that her grandmother founded. She is not feeble-minded. She is autistic. (When she was a small child, the syndrome had not yet been identified.)

Last year, Georgina Kendall published her fifty-seventh book. Salazar remains prime minister of Portugal.

Two months ago, in the window of a shop on Madison Avenue, I caught sight of the leather desk from our apartment in Paris. The asking price was four thousand dollars.

Exactly why so many Europeans showed up at Alcântara that day, when they knew perfectly well that they would never be let on board the ship, I could not fathom. Hope born out of desperation, I suppose. In any case, those of us with tickets had no choice but to push our way through the crowd that had massed on the dock, the men and women and children clustered amid piles of luggage that in a few hours they would just have to haul back to the station, or to the pensions at which they were putting up. Three porters led our group. Each carried four suitcases tied to the ends of a cord strung around his neck. More suitcases and trunks were piled on wooden carts, which they maneuvered with surprising agility, considering how encumbered they were and how much resistance they met. Without those porters, I don’t know that we ever would have made it aboard.

“Whatever has become of Lucy?” Georgina asked. “I hope that stupid girl hasn’t forgotten what time we sail.”

“I’m sure she’ll be along,” Edward said. He held Daisy in his
arms. Through clouded eyes, she gazed over his shoulder at the city she was leaving forever, her expression impassive, as if not even the stench of all those close-packed bodies was enough to stimulate her curiosity. And this from a dog whose entire life had been devoted to the most vigilant attention! For over the course of the previous few days, the senescence Daisy had warded off for years seemed to have ambushed her, and with a suddenness that would have been terrifying had fear not been one of the many forces it had blunted. How much she understood—how much she had ever understood—was a mystery. But I think she understood more than Edward and Iris gave her credit for.

Nearer to the ship, the crowd grew denser. I thought I caught a glimpse of Messalina’s face. Then it was gone. We kept pushing, until at last we reached the rope barrier that the police had erected. A hundred feet on, the
Manhattan
’s hull loomed, black and gleaming like a whale’s skin.

“It was two years ago that I last sailed on the
Manhattan
,” Georgina said, as if into a tape recorder. “Not a bad ship, though if you ask me, the Colonial American theme is laid on rather thick. Those murals in the dining room! Frightful.” She handed her passport to the inspector, who waved her through. He waved us all through—except for Iris, since her passport was British and the inspector wanted proof that she and Edward were married, which led to a long argument that Edward eventually won by asking the inspector if he made it his habit to carry his marriage certificate in his pocket. “The scrutiny to which our English friend was subjected eliminated any doubts I harbored about the seriousness of my government’s policy,” Georgina said into her interior tape recorder, leading me to reflect that one of the easier things about her company was that she didn’t really care if you listened to her or not. Since Julia’s suicide, she had attached herself to us with an avidity that was all the more
puzzling for its apparent guilelessness. Every morning at breakfast, there she was at my table. Every evening at dinner, there she was at the restaurant. We never invited her. She just showed up. Nor did we really mind her garrulous presence, since it relieved us of the necessity to talk to one another … Entirely on her own initiative, and in her capacity as Julia’s aunt, Georgina had taken charge of the business side of the suicide, dealing efficiently with the police and the consulate and the various other governmental bodies by which my poor wife’s death had to be certified, notarized, validated, verified, and generally officialized. Thanks to her, this process, which might have dragged on for months, was wrapped up in forty-eight hours.

A strange listlessness marked our last days in Lisbon, as if, after weeks of swimming against the current, we had suddenly been dropped into one of those warm saltwater pools that speckle the Portuguese coast, and to which invalids repair for therapeutic purposes. What was this city to us, after all? A landing stage, a holding pattern, a way station. All we had done here was wait. At first we had fought the waiting. Then we had gotten used to it. And now it was coming to an end—and I didn’t want it to. Each morning I woke wishing for bad weather, a storm—anything that might delay the
Manhattan
’s departure. For with Julia’s death, the tension had drained out of the days, leaving behind a malaise that was almost pleasant. No longer did I feel any urge to reach under the table to touch Edward’s leg, though curiously he was forever reaching under the table to touch mine, kneading my knee with a relentless and clumsy persistence that elicited in me only weariness and numbness. Nor did Iris stare daggers at him when his hand disappeared under the table. Instead she sat slack-jawed, her chin in her hand, listening as Georgina went on about everything under the sun, since now no subject was verboten—not Julia’s early life, not the child she had
had before she met me, not even the mystery of the suicide itself, which in Georgina’s view was no mystery at all. “My niece couldn’t bear the thought of your finding out she’d lied to you about the boy,” she said in the matter-of-fact voice of a detective wrapping up a case. “That was why she was so adamant about not going back to New York—because in New York you might run into someone who’d let something slip.” At the time, I didn’t have the wherewithal to do more than absorb this theory. Since then, I have thought about it quite a bit, and come to the conclusion that it doesn’t hold water. For Julia knew me better than anyone in the world—and so she would have known that, upon learning that she had a son, I would not have threatened to divorce her or kill her. Rather, I would have taken her in my arms, wiped away her tears, perhaps encouraged her to seek the boy out, to try to establish some sort of relations with him—which, for her, would have been far more terrible than any threat. For so long as an ocean separated Julia from her child, her guilt was just barely endurable. But if she were to find herself in a position to hear news, see pictures—God forbid be introduced to him—some unsuspected maternal impulse might arise in her, and her own remorse would flay her alive.

I don’t recall, in those last days, feeling much in the way of grief over Julia’s death. I really don’t recall feeling much in the way of anything—except self-reproach. For she had told me, time and again, that she would sooner die than return to New York—and I had never taken her at her word. Yet was even her word sufficient explanation? I don’t believe you can ever really explain a suicide. Had Julia done it to hurt me or her family? To spare herself humiliation? To bring an end to unendurable pain? Or was she taking, to borrow Xavier Legrand’s title, “the noble way out,” removing herself from the picture for my sake, or for her son’s? I still don’t know. Nor, in those last days in Lisbon, was I in any condition to reflect.
There was too much to do. Among other things, the hotel bill still had to be paid. To raise the cash, I sold some of Julia’s jewelry. I didn’t sell the car. I had an idea that I might give it to Dr. Gray and her husband. But the one time I ran into Dr. Gray, in the lobby of the Francfort, she yanked me aside and interrogated me about my own condition with such an intensity of concern that I didn’t even have the chance to broach the subject of the car. “You must take care of yourself,” she said, holding my hand in hers. “Are you remembering to eat? Try not to drink if you can. The relief will only be temporary and you’ll feel worse afterward. The same with the Seconal. Flush it down the toilet.”

“How funny. I’d completely forgotten about the Seconal.”

“Forgive me for asking, but did she leave a note? Your wife?”

I shook my head. “She never said a word. If anything, that last day she was unusually quiet.”

“Then there was nothing you could have done. Her mind was made up.” Dr. Gray squeezed my hand. “Well, if you need anything, you know where to find me. Room 111. Any hour of the night or day.”

As soon as we crossed the rope barrier, the temperature dropped five degrees. The concrete was no longer so hard under my feet. It made me remember Edward’s story about the walk into Portugal from Spain, how the rain stopped the instant he and Iris stepped over the frontier. And just as, at that instant, Spain and all its privations seemed to evaporate, so now the crowd behind us, its fear and frustration, seemed to recede into some impossibly remote distance. Silently our little group processed up the gangplank, at the top of which the purser awaited us with a clipboard. His German accent was unmistakable.

“The kennel is on B deck,” he said to Edward as he checked off our names on the manifest.

“What?” Edward said. “Oh, you mean Daisy? That’s all right, we’d just as soon keep her in the cabin with us.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but ship regulations require all dogs to be housed in the kennel.”

“But she’s fifteen years old,” Iris said. “She’s never been in a kennel in her life. Surely you can make an exception.”

“No exceptions will be made, Madame.”

“But that’s outrageous! I won’t accept it!” As if to prove her point, Iris grabbed Daisy out of Edward’s arms and clutched her to her breast. “I can’t believe that on an American ship, an American citizen can’t keep his dog in his own cabin. I want to speak to the captain. And I’d like your name, sir.”

“You may speak to the captain if you wish. But he will tell you the same.”

“I’m not about to be told what to do by a German—”

“I am an American citizen, Madame. Unlike you.”

Georgina pulled us aside. “I’ve just been speaking to that lady over there—she understands German—and she tells me the whole crew is German. Well, German-born. She says she overheard some of the stewards talking just now, and one of them was saying that in a year we’d be watching the Führer march down Fifth Avenue in a ticker-tape parade. Can you believe it?”

“I don’t care what anyone says,” Iris said. “I haven’t abandoned Daisy yet and I’m not about to abandon her now. If it comes to it,
I’ll
sleep in the kennel.”