You gentlemen are trying to recruit me.
Not recruit in so many words.
Ham-fisted way of doing it.
We would like you to provide us with information.
On the Marshes, to be specific.
Specificity is important, to be sure.
To be sure.
Nathalie drew on the cigarette, held it, again sprayed the men with smoke, and smiled. No, I cannot do what you so kindly request. Not possibly.
Can’t?
Listen, gentlemen, the Marshes are my employers. One has a sense of loyalty and duty to the people who allow one to put food in the mouths of one’s children, children who have, you must remember, experienced the trauma of losing their father and their fatherland. One is beholden to keep the secrets of one’s lady’s boudoir and one’s master’s study.
Gentle, slightly mocking ripple of laughter from the agents.
Quite apart from such abstractions, Mrs. Marsh is a distant cousin of mine, although you would not guess as much the way she treats me and my boys. Never mind I have a proper education and she is nothing but a farm girl who failed to finish high school because she had to come to Hollywood to be in the pictures. Schwab’s Pharmacy. Casting couch shenanigans. Chorus girl promoted to starlet overnight. Don’t think, gentlemen, it had anything to do with talent.
Agent Leopold nudged Agent Loeb’s knee with his own. Agent Loeb blinked at Agent Leopold and then turned back to Nathalie.
You are an educated woman, Mrs. Gebhart.
After a fashion, yes. The daughter of a general is often more worldly than other women. I had the benefit of my father’s library and his conversation at the dinner table.
Why choose to work as a maid?
When you could, one might think, find much more—
When you could find more gainful employment, said Agent Leopold. Appropriate to your station.
Unless you were trying—
Unless you wanted a comfortable life but also wished—
Unless you hoped to keep a low profile.
I think you underestimate the difficulty of being an immigrant single mother in America, said Nathalie.
But you could call yourself Nathalie Anderson and talk as you talk now and pursue just about any job a woman might wish to do. You yourself could be in front of the camera, if you did something a little different with your hair.
Unless you wanted—
Unless it was imperative that you keep a low profile.
Go on, Nathalie said, convince me.
Agent Loeb leaned across to Agent Leopold and cupped his hand around his partner’s ear. Agent Leopold turned his head, positioning his lips against Agent Loeb’s ear. Cupping of hand. Whispering that was inaudible from a distance greater than one foot. The two men looked at each other, locking eyes, then parted, moving to opposite ends of the davenport.
Before joining the Abwehr you were Chef Oberaufseherin at Ravensbrück, said Agent Leopold.
And your name was not Nathalie, said Agent Loeb.
It was Charlotte Becker. When you immigrated to America you neglected to mention your birth name or your senior position—
Neglected even to mention that you had spent time at Ravensbrück.
Which gives us grounds to deport you.
Fiction, Nathalie said, her voice low. I was never in my life at Ravensbrück.
We have witnesses who say otherwise. Witnesses who have hair-raising, I mean truly spine-chilling things to report about the behavior and activities of Chef Oberaufseherin Charlotte Becker, who is wanted, who somehow managed to escape after the end of the war. Would you like us to turn you over to the West German authorities?
Or perhaps to the state of Israel, Mrs. Gebhart?
Israel is too busy with Arabs to care about someone like me.
Are you in the mood to test the Israelis’ degree of interest?
I hear our Israeli friends are extremely interested in anyone who might have been a camp officer and has thus far managed by deception and dissimulation to avoid capture and trial.
That’s what I hear, too.
They are interested in anyone who might be of even the remotest significance. Especially when there are eye witnesses.
Eye witnesses who can pick someone’s photograph out of a book and say with certainty—
More than one eye witness, I should like to mention—
More than a dozen eye witnesses, in point of fact—
I heard two score eye witnesses and then some, Agent Leopold, and all of them providing a positive identification and corroborating testimony of the most detailed variety.
Would you like to risk the interest of Israel on those terms, Mrs. Gebhart?
Or do you in fact prefer ‘Frau Becker’?
Nathalie interlaced her fingers and rested her hands in her lap.
What information do you want?
Agent Loeb smiled. Thin lips. Fine jaw. Adam’s apple smooth and brown and ovoid as an unshelled pecan bobbing in a vat of caramel.
We want to know whether the Marshes are Reds. About the husband, John Horatio Marsh, we have a pretty fair idea. It’s the wife who remains opaque.
Carefully covered tracks. A little like you, Mrs. Gebhart.
Nathalie finished her cigarette and ground the butt in a cutglass ashtray.
Call it a family trait, she said, and stood to show them out.
June 6, 1950
4
Despite accepting John as a friend, I knew little of his domestic life beyond the rumors that Mary made every decision, or that before their marriage, which predated my arrival in Los Angeles, John was a happier, wilder man with less compromised politics. We had spent significant time in each other’s company, making half a dozen films together during my time at the studio, and yet John remained essentially mysterious to me. Even before you and I met, Myles, I was rarely invited to his house and always assumed this was because Mary did not like me and John was afraid to oppose her. I mention this because when I set out with John that morning, leaving the soundstage once again to help him look for Mary, I was mindful of the limits of our friendship. Other than revealing the nature of my relationship with you, I had rarely shared intimacies with John. Perhaps he guessed the kind of family I came from, the privileged childhood I had spent in Manhattan, the circles in which I moved at Cornell, but I was never conscious of speaking about myself in that way. The substance of our exchanges was primarily cinematic and narrative. We lived our friendship as an ongoing rumination on the films we liked, the films we would ourselves have wished to make, and those that we dismissed or despised. Over the course of a conversation we could speak entirely cinematically, using Un Chien Andalou or Man with a Movie Camera as shorthand for a certain style, commending the comic genius of His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story while feeling impatient with the romantic melodrama of Casablanca, admiring the visual artistry and narrative framing of Double Indemnity while decrying the bowdlerization of The Lost Weekend or comparing the histrionics of Joan Crawford’s performance in Mildred Pierce with the histrionics of Edward G. Robinson’s performance in Scarlet Street, wishing that we had a film industry in America that would allow us to make work as naturalistic as Bicycle Thieves or dreaming that every extant print of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House might be burned. Because we could fill hours talking this way it became possible never to speak about ourselves except in this way. For me it was neither intellectually nor emotionally nourishing, even though much could be expressed in a coded, submerged way: for me to tell John I admired an experimental film called Fireworks was to admit of my access to a side of Los Angeles life I assumed remained foreign to him, to admit of the pleasures I took in that film’s celebration of the male body, to admit that my taste would always be less conventional than his, but also to admit of the dueling forces of fear and hope accompanying my desire, fear that my desiring gaze would be met with physical violence, hope that my desiring gaze would be reciprocated and that in a moment of union with so
me other man the two of us might become, together, content with each other. I doubt that John understood half of this. For him, to reveal that his greatest professional aspiration was to make a film as strange and beautiful as Hitchcock’s Spellbound suggested more about him than such personal information as he finally shared with me that morning in 1950.
While walking alongside him (perhaps you will say I was following, that I was no longer in command of my own decisions, deranged by anxiety over telling you what I was still keeping secret, even avoiding you in order to forestall that moment of catastrophic confession), I felt as though the disguise John had been wearing for so many years began to slip away and at last the real man was standing beside me.
Until then he had never told me he’d had an older brother who died young, or a sister shut up in an institution, or parents who had never been to see even one of his films, or that his and Mary’s housekeeper was a shirt-tale cousin who fled Germany after the war, or that Mary’s brother sent a telegram every month asking for money to keep the family farm in Oklahoma out of the hands of the banks. A life’s worth of information came spluttering out of John in the space of a few hours and by the end of the day I was certain I would never speak to him again.
We returned to Mary’s suite and once again found Mozelle by herself, this time reading a book on the sofa, still stiff and uncomfortable in that lacy white cap, cuffs and collar, the prim leather ankle boots and white apron. For months I had allowed myself to believe she was an actress playing a succession of bit parts: comical, indomitable, mute and put-upon, back-talking, but forever in the same costume. All that time I had failed to see her or understand that she was forced to wear the demeaning outfit in order to serve Mary’s notion of Mozelle’s position, or perhaps her own.
It’s still just me, Mr. Marsh. You’ve missed her again.
Do you know where she went this time?
Mozelle put her book face down on the sofa. Said she was going for a walk to clear her head.
I know what that means. She’s gone out to the jungle. Mary always goes to the backlot when she needs to cool off. We’ll find her there, he said, turning to me with a look in his eye that made me want to run back to you, Myles.
But the backlot is huge, I said, picturing the fake country roads crisscrossing the studio’s eucalyptus forest, paths meandering around artificial bodies of water, the old world and new world and imagined worlds jostling cheek-by-jowl and reinvented over the course of a single day, one morning’s Siberian train station becoming a small-town Connecticut railway platform by mid-afternoon. As a place to disappear it was second to none. We should just get back to the set. Can’t you shoot around Mary until she returns?
John crossed his arms over his chest. His face was turning red again. She’s in every set-up, Desmond. I can’t stand around waiting for her to come back. And then he turned and pointed angrily at Mozelle. You might have phoned to let me know she’d left. His voice was so inflated with rage that both Mozelle and I jumped, and then, as if realizing he had been too abrupt, John opened the door, walked out into the hall, and tramped down the stairs.
Although he liked to think of himself as progressive, I had often seen John act highhanded with black waiters or push past black extras on the lot in ways I was sure he would not have done if those people had been white. I knew I had my own failings, too. Even in reflecting on John’s behavior, I could only summon waiters and maids and extras, bellhops and laborers and fry cooks. I could not say how he would have acted towards Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston or Paul Robeson, or for that matter Cab Calloway or Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge, nor can I say why I feel unsettled by the hope that he would have treated them as equals. Perhaps because I know that he would not have, or that he would have performed a belief in their equality that he did not actually hold. And although the experiences are distinct and not directly comparable, I also feared that when he treated me as an equal that was no more than performance of a belief he could discard when it became too burdensome. A man of no conviction, or a man who wanted to please, never to appear foe to anyone, such a person cannot be trusted, I finally understand. There is evil in the world and when faced with it we must say no, I cannot allow this to pass, but too often John Marsh failed to do that.
I’m sorry, I said, turning to Mozelle as she picked up her book. It’s an awful mess.
She looked over the top of the page she was reading but did not raise her head. I could see the title, Annie Allen, but did not know what it was about.
Good book?
Not for someone like you.
I would have thought a book could be for anyone with the patience and interest to read it.
Mozelle clapped the book shut and sighed. I’ve seen your pictures, Mr. Frank. When you bother to put black people in your stories they always wear a uniform. Part of the problem is that you see us as an undifferentiated mass. Nothing but a parade of repetitions with no individual who might stand out from the crowd and be her own person.
I’m sorry if that’s true.
Don’t doubt it.
Okay, I won’t. You’d think we might do better in America, but I guess not.
Mozelle threw back her head and laughed. You still believe in American exceptionalism, Mr. Frank? I gave you too much credit. America is just another outpost of European empire. No more exceptional than the others that have brought people from across the world into their borders and then torn themselves apart, dancing and drinking through the decades of their fall. We are in the first hours of the next age of decadence, another Weimar, and after the decadence, fascism.
That’s a grim view for a free country.
A truly free country would have been a land in which all were free and equal from the first heartbeat of its foundation, Mr. Frank.
In that we don’t disagree.
This country’s founders couldn’t see true freedom when it smacked them in the face. Instead they trampled all over a land with history that was illegible to the likes of them because it did not build palaces and temples and cathedrals out of stone or paint its art on the woven fabric of plant fibers sealed with glue rendered from rabbit gut. Nothing but a nation of the unequal led by people who think they are prophets, that’s what this country has always been. Most white people in America want everyone, black and white alike, to think black people are no more than day players in the motion picture of this nation’s unremarkable history. And you, even you, when you write your stories, you only think a black person is good for menace or service. Write me and I’ll end up the same, the woman in service who menaces you.
So what’s the solution?
For you? I don’t know. For myself, I believe black people must seize their liberty. Demand to sit at the same tables, use the same benches and water fountains. And if you won’t give us equality when we ask nicely, then maybe the time will come to fight. Don’t look so surprised. There are many others who think as I do. It will be rebellion in the name of equality. A second civil war to create the nation of liberty and justice for all that white people already claim exists. I suppose you think I’m being uppity.
I wouldn’t have said so.
No? That surprises me. You should pay more attention to your politics.
They are never far from my mind, believe me.
I guess that’s something at least.
Desmond! John shouted from downstairs.
You better get going. See if you can’t track down his second-rate Veronica Lake. And then Mozelle raised a hand, shooing me out of the room with a single twitch of her fingers.
As I settled next to John on the trolley that ran between the soundstages and the backlot, I failed to call him on his rudeness to Mozelle, just as I failed on other occasions to mention slights I had witnessed, remaining silent for the sake of friendship (what a mistake in John’s case), or simply because I lacked the courage in a particular moment to stand up for what I knew to be right.
That morning I was too preoccupied by my own concerns even
to challenge him when he gave me a look of wild impatience and barked, I’ll show them I’m loyal, goddammit! It was unclear whether he was speaking to me or himself, or even to some phantom interlocutor. When the trolley braked at a stop sign John raised his hands, shouting, Stop the Reds!
A young woman passing on foot cheered while two older men on the trolley glanced anxiously over their shoulders.
Stop it, John, you’re scaring the Trotskyists.
I thought you were a Trot.
I’m far too inclined to dissent.
You’re too inclined to a lot of things.
If you mean my own sex, I don’t see that’s a weakness.
Which is not a popular position, or a legal one.
True enough. There was a story in the paper recently. I committed the headline to memory: ‘Congress Hears 5000 Perverts Infest Capital’. Think about the language: Perverts Infest Capital. By perverts the headline writer could only mean homosexuals. If you read the story, you would discover that this tasty bit of information came in testimony from an officer of the vice squad, who went so far as to claim that three-quarters of these perverts actually work for the government. By my reckoning that makes 3,750 homosexuals employed by the United States Government in Washington, D.C. alone. Now if that is actually the case, then why isn’t this a much happier and more enlightened country? Just how many government employees can there be? What proportion do those notional 3,750 constitute? Anyway, that’s beside the point. The officer of the vice squad was testifying before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee bent on eliminating homosexuals from the ranks of government employment, and no doubt from any employment anywhere if most of them had their way. According to those senators, we – homosexuals that is – are security risks. Don’t they know that we’re better at keeping secrets than anyone? Our whole lives are secret. The State Department has already fired ninety-one homosexuals, which the article elects to describe as ‘sex perverts’.
As if there are other kinds.
Oh but there are, John! Religious perverts, for instance. Apostates! It was the Victorians who perverted ‘pervert’ into a sexual category. The point is, these senators and vice squad officers believe homosexuals are all potentially disloyal. They think that because we have turned away from the opposite sex we can be made to turn our political loyalty – as if finding that you love the same sex were in fact a turn and not just the way a person is born. If they can’t hound us out of our jobs and into hiding for our politics, they’ll crucify us because we love the wrong sex. Have you seen the treatment that’s been circulating? John shook his head. It wouldn’t have come across your desk. An underground project, a fable, the sort of film that even if it were made would never be processed because the lab technicians would burn it for obscenity. An experimental message picture based on Gogol’s The Nose and set in Washington, D.C.
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