The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (27 page)

“Please,” I said, and touched her shoulder—at which she jerked away. “Just hold on a minute. Let me see if I can do something.”

With that I went off, and found a steward who did not have a German accent, and got from him directions to the kennel. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”: this advice—from my grandmother, of all people—has served me in good stead throughout my business career. Certainly it did on this occasion. For as it turned out, the kennel master was a fellow Hoosier, a kindly old gent with a face like a blancmange, from whom I was able to obtain
in about five minutes the exception to the rule that the Frelengs could never have obtained for themselves in a million years. And this was simply because they were the sort that believes that the way to get results is to go over people’s heads. Yet I ask you, how many heads can you go over before you reach the head over which there are no other heads? Any salesman will tell you that in threatening to go over someone’s head, all you do is raise the price on yourself. What we lose in dignity we make up for in commission.

Ten minutes later it was done. “It’s all arranged,” I said to Edward. “You can keep her in the cabin.”

He smiled. “And how did you manage that?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. For I was in no mood to gloat, nor did I much care that my success had brought this glow of admiration to Edward’s eyes and, to Iris’s, this look of unalloyed hatred—as if, in doing her a kindness, I was thrusting the knife one last time into her back. After all, I was the last person in the world to whom she wanted to be beholden. The truth, in any case, was that I hadn’t done it for her, much less for Edward. I had done it for Daisy.

Iris turned away from me. “I’m going to the cabin,” she said to Edward.

“I’ll be along in a few minutes,” he replied.

Without even a nod, she left. Georgina had wandered over to the railing to watch for Lucy. For the first time since the castle, Edward and I were alone.

He came and stood close to me. “I told you that you were brave.”

“Brave? All I did was bribe an old man.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean the way you’ve conducted yourself these last few days.”

“I don’t see that I had many alternatives, other than to do myself in too.”

“But you’d never have done that. You said so.”

“So I did.”

“You know, in some ways I hold myself responsible for Julia’s death.”

“Why? As it turned out, it had nothing to do with you.”

“I realize that. But you see, she and I were so similar. And so I wonder if I should have recognized how desperate her situation was. Then I might have stopped her.”

“But Iris stopped you—and you only resented her for it … Anyway, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Julia didn’t like you. She said you were a know-it-all.”

“You see? She did understand me.”

“And she was dead-set on doing it—if you’ll pardon the pun. Do you know what the Elevator operator told us? That she dove. Head first. So that was one piece of advice from Iris she took to heart.”

A foghorn blew. “How many minutes until we sail?” Edward asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know what those foghorn signals mean.”

He edged closer. “Pete … I hope that—well, that it’s not all over between us. That we can be friends.” Now he was standing so close to me that I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Friends—an ambiguous word, I know …” And I thought, For the next week I’ll have a cabin to myself. At last we’ll have the chance to do what we’ve wanted from the beginning: to spend a whole night together—and not have to get up in the morning. Only now I wasn’t sure that I wanted to spend a whole night with Edward, much less sleep in with him. For the fact was, I was tired of sleeping in. I was ready to start waking up early.

I stepped away and looked at my watch. “I’d better be going,” I said.

“Of course … We’ll see you at dinner, I trust?”

“I don’t know. I’m tired. I might eat in my cabin.”

“Oh, don’t do that. Not the first night out.”

“We’ll see.”

“Pete … I hope … No, never mind.” Yet even as he said “never mind,” I knew that what he hoped was that I would ask him what he hoped. And I didn’t. Once he had told me that he didn’t fear the future, only the past. Whereas what I feared, I saw now, was the present, its endless prolongation, hour to hour, week to week, year to year. A landing stage, a holding pattern, a way station.

We shook hands then, and he left. I watched his broad back disappear from view. I never saw him again.

What happened next—that, I suppose, is the story Georgina would tell me to tell: how on the spur of the moment, I asked a steward to gather together my luggage; how without looking over my shoulder, I descended the gangplank of the
Manhattan
; how I returned to the Hotel Francfort, and knocked on the door to room 111, and offered Dr. Gray not just my car but my services as a driver … And then how, for the next two years, with the Grays as my partners and Marseille as my base, I ferried refugees over the Pyrenees, in my faithful Buick, in the middle of the night … until the Germans occupied the unoccupied zone and we had to flee, once again, to Lisbon. But I’m not going to tell that story, because it’s already been told many times, and anyway I didn’t do anything that someone else couldn’t have done. Besides, I despise books in which all the interest lies in the fame of the people the narrator runs into, or serves, or saves. Leave that crap to Georgina. I don’t have the patience for it anymore.

What I do want to write about is this: what the Grays’ room
looked like that afternoon, with the curtains filtering the late-afternoon sunlight so that it softened the harsh geometry of the floor. On the dressing table, bottles of gin and vermouth, not jars of unguents and creams, were ranged. Where solitaire cards should have been spread, newspapers rested in neat piles. Quietly Cornelia—she now insisted that I call her Cornelia—did a crossword. “Why don’t you take off your shoes and lie down?” she said, and I said that, yes, that sounded like a good idea; and I did lie down, atop that bed that she shared with her husband, and fell more deeply asleep than I had in weeks, waking only around six in the evening to realize that the
Manhattan
was now at sea. Then I looked up at Cornelia, and she was still sitting in the chair in front of the dressing table, doing her crossword, and for an instant it was as if the future were casting its shadow over the present, or a train had arrived at its destination, though it hadn’t yet left; and in that moment, I swear, I could see everything that was going to happen next: that in my future there would be more infidelity, another marriage broken up, though not my own; and I regretted that Julia, with the intuition of the betrayed, should have seen what was coming even before I did. And I wished that her last weeks on earth could have been happier ones.

“How are you feeling?” Cornelia said.

“Better, thanks.” I sat up, touched my feet to the floor. “Oh, I forgot to tell you—when I took the taxi here, something funny happened. I said ‘Hotel Francfort,’ and the driver took me to the Francfort Hotel.”

“What? I thought this was the Francfort Hotel.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Know what?” My wife has always been a woman who dislikes not knowing things. And so I told her what Edward had told me the morning I met him, the story of how the hotels had come to have the same name—but I told it as if I had come upon it all firsthand,
as if he had played no part in any of it, not even the witticism that he attributed to the refugees themselves, though in fact I had never heard it out of any mouth but his: “Just think, here we are fleeing the Germans, and we end up at a hotel called Francfort!”

In researching
The Two Hotel Francforts
, I drew on many sources and benefited from the help of many friends, scholars, and experts. In particular I am indebted to Mitchell Owens, Irene Flunser Pimentel, and the late Sally Broido for their generosity of wisdom and knowledge. I am also indebted to Jill Ciment and Mark Mitchell for their astute readings of the manuscript.

Some of the scholarly works that I read—and learned much from—were Hanna Diamond’s
Fleeing Hitler: France 1940
(Oxford University Press, 2007); Ghanda diFiglia’s
Roots and Visions: The First Fifty Years of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
(UUSC, 1990); Neill Lochery’s
Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–1945
(PublicAffairs, 2011); Jeffrey Mehlman’s
Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940–1944
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Ellen W. Sapega’s
Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal
(Penn State University Press, 2008); Frederic Spotts’s
The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation
(Yale University Press, 2008); Susan Elisabeth Subak’s
Rescue and Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis
(University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Ronald Weber’s
The Lisbon Route: Entry and Escape in Nazi Europe
(Ivan R. Dee, 2011); and, most important, Irene Flunser Pimentel’s
Judeus em Portugal durante a Il Guerra Mundial
(A Esfera dos Livros, 2006).

It was, in many cases, the books mentioned above that led me to the primary sources—memoirs, diaries, articles, letters, and novels—from which I gleaned much of what I know about Lisbon in the summer of 1940. These included Jack Alexander’s “The Nazi Offensive in Lisbon” (
The Saturday Evening Post
, March 6, 1943); Eugene Bagger’s
For the Heathen Are Wrong
(Little, Brown, 1941) (like Edward and Iris Freleng, Bagger and his wife traveled to New York via Lisbon in the company of an elderly wire fox terrier; their book is also the source for the story of the woman trapped on the International Bridge); Suzanne Blum’s
Vivre sans la patrie: 1940–1945
(Plon, 1975) (though Blum was in Lisbon at the same time as the Duchess of Windsor, with whom her life would become inextricably and scandalously bound, they did not meet there); Ronald Bodley’s
Flight into Portugal
(Jarrolds, 1941); Sylvain Bromberger’s “Memoirs of a 1940 Family Flight from Antwerp, Belgium” (
Portuguese Studies Review
, Volume 4, Issue 1, 1995); Suzanne Chantal’s
Dieu ne dort pas
(Plon, 1946); Alfred Döblin’s
Destiny’s Journey: Flight from the Nazis
(Paragon House, 1992); Rupert Downing’s
If I Laugh
(Harrap, 1943); Julien Green’s
La fin d’un monde: Juin 1940
(Editions du Seuil, 1992) (it is to Jean-Michel Frank that Green attributes the bon mot with which this novel concludes); Peggy Guggenheim’s
Out of This Century
(Dial Press, 1946); A. J. Liebling’s
World War II Writings
(Library of America, 2008); Harvey Klemmer’s “Lisbon—Gateway to Warring Europe” (
National Geographic
, August 1941); Lucie Matuzewitz’s
Le cactus et l’ombrelle
(Guy Authier, 1977); Alice-Leone Moats’s
No Passport for Paris
(Putnam, 1945); Lars Moen’s
Under the Iron Heel
(Lippincott, 1941); Hugh Muir’s
European Junction
(Harrap, 1942); Polly Peabody’s
Occupied Territory
(Cresset, 1941); Denis de Rougemont’s
Journal d’une époque: 1926–1946
(Gallimard, 1968) (Rougemont is the source for the joke about the Four Aces carrying ex-Europeans into exile); Maurice Sachs’s
The Hunt
(Stein and Day, 1965); Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry’s
Wartime Writings: 1939–1944
(Harcourt, 1986); Elsa Schiaparelli’s
Shocking Life
(Dent, 1954); Joseph Shadur’s
A Drive to Survival: Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal 1940
(Kenneth Schoan, 1999); Sir Edward Spears’s
Assignment to Catastrophe
(A. A. Wyn, 1954 and 1955); Tom Treanor’s “Lisbon Fiddles …” (
Vogue
, October 1940) and “What Comes After War,” a series of dispatches filed for the
Los Angeles Times
in August and September 1940; and Alexander Werth’s
The Last Days of Paris
(Hamish Hamilton, 1940).

I am grateful to the University of Florida for providing me with a sabbatical leave and research support during the writing of this novel; to Michael Fishwick and Anton Mueller of Bloomsbury; to Jin Auh, Tracy Bohan, Jacqueline Ko, and Andrew Wylie of the Wylie Agency; to Jamie Fisher for giving me the line about the water bug landing on a lake; to Will Palmer for his excellent editing; and to the staffs of the Biblioteca Central de Marinha (Lisbon), the Bibliothéque National de France, the Condé Nast Library, the Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa, the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the University of Florida, in particular the extraordinary John Van Hook.

Unlike Pete Winters, I have occasionally, in these pages, followed Georgina Kendall’s advice and ignored facts that interfered with the story. For instance, it is not certain that in 1940 there were as yet peacocks roaming the grounds of the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon. For this and any other betrayals of history, local color, and common sense, I take full credit and blame.

David Leavitt’s books include the story collection
Family Dancing
(finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award) and the novels
The Lost Language of Cranes
,
While England Sleeps
(finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award),
The Body of Jonah Boyd
, and
The Indian Clerk
(finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). He is also the author of two nonfiction works,
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
and
Florence, A Delicate Case
. His writing has appeared in the
New Yorker
, the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
,
Harper’s
,
Vogue
, and
The Paris Review
, among other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary magazine
Subtropics
.