In the small hallway outside the toilet stood my mother, waiting for her turn. “Isn’t this amazing?” she whispered. “Imagine, two nobodies from nowhere waiting to use the great Colette’s toilet.”
“Ma, I have to tell you that I’m feeling really upset. Being here with you isn’t good for me. I feel like a child.”
“You keep saying that, Rose. I don’t know how to make you feel better. You certainly don’t seem like a child to me. Your hair’s even turning gray, like your father’s.”
I thrust my hands deeper into my pockets. Smoke billowed around my face, and I tried to control the most ridiculous urge to shove my own mother.
“Perhaps you should check your dear Dr. Freud,” she said, “and see if he can help you.” And she entered the toilet and closed the door.
“Here, dear, here I am,” Colette directed from the other room.
Entering the room where Colette wrote melted away my anger. Although it was stuffy, she was sitting with a shimmering brown fur robe thrown over her legs, leaning back against the plump damask pillows. She had henna-colored hair and long, gray, luminous eyes that were surrounded by kohl and framed by thin arches of brows. Her full face was accented with a little chin and a mouth that was long and red. I knew that it was in this room, la petite chambre rouge, that she wrote. It was obvious why it had that name—the walls were covered with a deep, Pompeian red silk. Even the divan was upholstered in a shade of red, a deep carmine. On her desk were her collection of paperweights, a portable slanted writing table, a globe, a magnifying glass, a blue lamp, a jar with her fountain pens, and a Persian blue vase of yellow daffodils. Behind the desk were shelves set into an arched wall, holding books, the telephone, and framed butterflies, spread-eagled and lifeless. There was no clock to be seen.
Janet was sitting on the desk chair. She was wearing her trademark black tailored suit, this one a Chanel. Her monocle, used as an aid for her dark-brown eyes, dangled from a black ribbon around her neck. Her nose was too big for her face. Even though she was only forty-six years old, her bobbed hair was so white that it looked translucent. That evening Janet was suffering from kidney stones. She wasn’t happy or comfortable.
“Sit down wherever you like,” Colette said to me, “but careful of the cats. Now, tell us what you’ve been covering in this ridiculous world.” I liked her directness and began to describe my experiences in Berlin. The women appeared to be interested.
“There’s going to be war—a war that may even exceed the Great War,” I said in a firm voice, trying not to sound as if I were pontificating, and they nodded in agreement. I could feel my mature expertise returning to my brain. What a relief, I thought. I’m speaking like a grown-up.
“Do you really think there’s going to be a war?” my mother asked, walking into the room.
‘Oh, my dear Miriam,’ Janet said. ‘After you’ve been here for a while, and then look back, you’ll begin to understand the naïveté of Americans. Of course there’ll be a war–indeed, all of Europe’s balanced on a seesaw.’
“Before we get into a long discussion, or an argument, let’s eat,” Colette said. “I’m starved. And you,” she said, pointing at Janet, “you must not drink wine with your kidney stones. It’s what causes the pain.”
“Nonsense,” said Janet. “And after a day of watching that murderer, I need a drink. Let’s go.”
On the street, I walked behind the three women. They were all short. While my mother and Colette were rotund, both with bigger-than-normal feet, Janet was thin, with tiny feet that moved her body like a bird.
We walked to a bistro in the passage Choiseul. “This is the night,” Colette said, “that they serve a special cassoulet. But I have to be careful. I’m getting fat, because I like my food too much. The new oracle,” she complained, “is the bathroom scale.” She smiled. “So I don’t own one.”
We were hungry—and we were so animated by the trial that we talked with our mouths full of food, holding white napkins up, trying to be polite.
My mother took center stage. “Vosberg has an odd face,” she said. “Drawing him is difficult.”
“I think,” Janet said, “that he’s exceptionally handsome in the medieval way—his features are those of a Holbein etching, with an alert, inquiring, open, hungry eye, an aquiline nose, and a handsome and sensual mouth. I can see why a woman like Stella Mair would be attracted.”
“That’s a perfect description,” my mother said, “and—”
“Wait,” Janet said, holding up her hand with its ever-present cigarette. “I have more to say about our Miss Stella.”
I felt my stomach flop and watched my mother’s stoic face. I realized that the other two women had no idea about our family connection to Stella.
“You see,” Janet said, “I know a girl here in Paris who knew her—had known her since she was a child in Philadelphia. My friend works at the American Express office. She said that Stella Mair was a grabby little American. Still, I do have to admit that it was an awful thing to go out to tea with a new foreign beau and have him strangle her.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “Stella made friends easily. That doesn’t mean she was loose. It simply means that she was an honest-to-goodness American girl. Anyway, she came from Brooklyn, not Philadelphia.”
“Oh, you’re right, R.B.,” Janet said sarcastically. “Sure. My friend must have given me information about the wrong woman.”
No one at the table challenged her, and I was afraid of embarrassing myself.
I changed the subject. “Vosberg is emblematic of our time. He represents our anxieties. Our anxieties for our daughters—our anxieties for France. He’s indeed a treacherous man.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
We had finished—run out of things to say—full of cassoulet and tipsy on red wine. And Janet had turned gray with pain.
“You see, dear, it’s the wine,” said Colette.
“I must go,” Janet said, “I don’t feel well. See you all tomorrow.”
“The poor woman,” my mother said after she left. “She—”
And Colette interrupted. “She’s stubborn, stubborn as an ass!”
That night Czecho-Slovakia ceased to exist. I heard from the reporters in my office that the Czechs were so surprised by the sudden occupation that the only resistance they put up was to throw snowballs at Hitler’s troops. But I found it hard to find humor in the Czech story. As I walked home from the office, I noticed a waning of human energy and activity. People appeared to slink among the shadows. Noisy conversations and laughter were missing. There was an eerie silence in the air. It was obvious that people were preoccupied with despair for Europe, for their own lives. France was dying. And I was preoccupied with wondering what I was doing in France at all. Stella was dead. This I knew. Leon was still alive—so far as I knew.
I was brimming with both boredom and longing. I had no social life. Each evening Pete and I arrived at the newspaper office with only enough time to file our story. After that, Pete would go home to his family, and I would eat at a bistro, sometimes with a colleague, but most often alone. I wasn’t bathing enough; I didn’t have the time. My clothes needed to be washed. When I had been with my mother at Colette’s apartment, I could tell by her grimace that she thought I smelled. Wine, cigarettes, and coffee, along with hard salami, cheese, and bread, were the staples of my culinary life.
My political and humanitarian views were being relentlessly challenged. I had come from a family of contrasts. Mother was the one who owned and used the shotgun; my father wouldn’t touch it. I’ve always stood somewhere in between—the worst place to be. It left me adrift in a roiling sea of opinions. My father had believed that capital punishment was wrong, but I knew that my mother was rooting for Vosberg’s demise. Again, I was caught in between. Then I thought about Leon and his parents, and my entire tough-girl belief system came tumbling down. I chose
my father’s side.
The next day in court made me furious. I watched Vosberg sit quietly and elegantly, his knees crossed, his face erased of feelings. I felt a repugnance so visceral that I had to hold onto both sides of my seat to prevent myself from leaping forward and punching him in the face. Fortunately, the judge called an early recess for lunch. I was relieved to get away from such ugliness—relieved to go outside into the fresh air.
I looked around for my mother and found her with her new pals—along with Madame Sand. “Come,” Colette said to the group, “let’s go have lunch. Everyone,” she said, “please meet Aurora Sand.”
“Oh, Miss Manon, it’s so good to see you again,” Madame Sand said enthusiastically. I could see that everyone, especially my mother, was impressed.
We walked rather slowly, because of Colette’s bad feet, to a café across the street from the court. With great ceremony we were led to a large table at the window.
It took a while to order. Everyone had questions, especially Colette. How was the veal cooked? When was it purchased from the butcher? Was the butcher in Paris? What was his name? My mother and I smiled at each other over the silliness of the inquisition, but the others took it quite seriously.
Out of the blue, as if our being together was the continuation from another meal, Janet said, “I think Vosberg’s homosexual.”
“Ah,” everyone said in unison.
“When he said in his earlier testimony,” she continued, “‘I was close to her on the sofa,’ the American press assumed there was sex. But he used the word ‘allongé,’ which means to stretch out, as on a sofa—in French, the word has no erotic significance at all. And the police definitely stated that the autopsy showed that there was no intercourse. I understand, thanks to R.B.’s correction, that she wasn’t a stay-out-all-night kind of girl. And it’s obvious that her respectable Jewish aunt would have never expected Stella to be impolite.”
I caught myself feeling piqued at Janet for having to identify Clara as “Jewish.” “Excuse me, but what does being Jewish have to do with it?” I asked. “Would you say ‘Christian’ if her aunt had been Christian? I don’t think so.”
For a pregnant moment the women were uncomfortable. Janet turned pink with either rage or embarrassment. I could sense that they were all thinking about how to escape the discomfort I had created.
“I agree with what Janet said earlier about Vosberg,” said Colette. “He’s unusual for a murderer. He’s a romantic. He loves flowers and was even cultivating roses at his villa. And he’s certainly handsome!”
I knew I was outgunned and folded my hands on my lap, deciding to be quiet.
“Madame Sand,” my mother asked, “what did you think of Vosberg’s handwriting? Can you tell if he’s homosexual or not?”
“No, I can’t tell his sexual persuasion,” Madame Sand said. “But I can say he’s a sociopath, and I don’t put homosexuality in that category. His handwriting shows that he has no moral sense of the value of life. He looks for immediate gratification and doesn’t concern himself with the aftermath.”
“I wonder,” I asked Madame Sand, “why they’ve redefined the word ‘sociopath’ to mean ‘psychopath’?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know, Rose,” my mother said in a withering voice, before Madame Sand could answer. “You know a lot about Freud.” Her nastiness made me want to crawl away and hide.
“It’s astonishing,” Janet said, changing the subject, “that someone so intelligent could be so ruthless and cold. How do we reconcile his good looks with his evil nature? How—Oh, God, we’ve got to go! We’re late.”
“The check,” Colette demanded, snapping her fingers.
The next day in court was more interesting. First, there was a discussion of the gun that Vosberg had used to shoot at the police when he was captured. Gun experts were called. At one point, each member of the jury held the gun—and each and every one of them looked down its barrel.
Then Vosberg was asked why Stella had her passport and all her money in her handbag. “We were planning to elope,” he said. “She was going to telephone her aunt to tell her. And—” and he held up his hand, as if he were in school asking permission from a teacher. “I have something more to say.” He stood. Vosberg put his hands in his pockets and looked down at his shoes. The courtroom was silent. We were all suspended, waiting.
“I admit it,” he whispered. “I killed her. I couldn’t help it.”
“No!” his two lawyers yelled simultaneously.
“No!” Moro-Giafferi boomed again. “Remove that statement from the record. He’s crazy, can’t you see?”
The courtroom was in chaos. People were yelling at the judge, at the lawyers, at Vosberg. Everyone had an opinion.
I turned to Pete. “I don’t understand. Why’s everyone so upset?”
“In America,” he said, “if you confess to a crime, the next legal proceeding is the sentencing. Essentially, the trial’s over. But here in France, if you confess to murder, the sentence is pretty much automatic. It’s death, unless you can prove insanity.
‘However, if you don’t confess, and leave it to the court, there’s always a possibility that you’ll be given a life sentence in prison or an insane asylum. By confessing, he’s undoubtedly killing himself.’
The judge banged his gavel over and over again. The lawyers huddled together.
At last, order was restored.
“Continue, Mr. Vosberg,” the judge demanded.
Vosberg’s hands gripped the railing. He directed his confession to Judge Levi.
“She wanted to make love,” Vosberg said quietly. “She was giddy and playful and pushed me down on the bed and began to unbutton my pants. I couldn’t have sex with her—there’s something wrong with me.”
“Speak up so the jury can hear you,” the judge demanded.
“She sneered at me—she taunted me,” he shouted. “She called me a stupid eunuch. She humiliated me.
“And I couldn’t resist getting her money. I needed the money. I always needed money. And I knew she was Jewish and that Jews are wealthy.” And like some poor waif, Vosberg threw himself back into his chair and wept.
I wanted to scream at him. His feeling sorry for himself disgusted me.
I couldn’t imagine what Stella had been thinking. This was a part of her that I had seen only once—the time she returned from her first night with Vosberg and I slapped her. Yet it surprised me to hear that she had taunted him. Truly, I didn’t believe him. I agreed with Moro-Giafferi. Vosberg was insane.
Court was adjourned. Pete and I met up for a drink with the Manchester Guardian reporter, Clyde Thomas. Clyde was a frog-eyed man who walked with a limp. We always seemed to be covering the same stories. We were discussing the case. And then Clyde started to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“When they were passing that gun around,” Clyde said, “all I could think about was R.B. and her growing up in the mountains of Nevada. You were squirming with laughter,” he said to me, “but so was one of the cartoonists. Do you know her? Is she American?”
“No, I don’t know her, but I did almost lose my self-control. It was hilarious! Where I come from, it’s considered an act of stupidity to look down a gun barrel. Only greenhorns would do such a thing, to the glee of old-timers.”
In some respects the trial had turned into a comedy. Many of the women who came to the courthouse each day wore white hats. They were called “Vosberg’s girls,” and they were restless. That afternoon, Vosberg was led into the courtroom, and there was a collective and conspicuous sigh. From one of the back stalls a woman screamed, “We love you, dear Ernst!” The police headed for the gallery. There was much commotion. The culprit was taken by the arm—the other “girls” gave out a united shriek—and before you could blink, a policeman had the infatuated woman outside the courtroom doors.
During this time, Vosberg had his face buried in his hands. There was no more smiling at his “girls.” When he finally straightened up, his face was red and blotchy and his eyes were bloodshot. Vosberg had begun the trial neat and trim, and in control of his feelings. Now he looked as if he had been crying himself to sleep.
A few minutes into the day’s judicial proceedings, Vosberg slowly stood and dramatically grasped the rail before him. Looking directly at Judge Levi he began to speak with a breaking voice, wetting his lips. “I am ready to die for my crimes. I ask you to try to understand me. I am guilty. I offer you everything I can—my life. But please, do not deny me a last request. I am of the Catholic faith and beg to be forgiven.” And he sank into his chair and wept.
The prosecutor rose and bellowed, “How dare you ask forgiveness! In the end you are nothing but a vulgar assassin.”
That same day, Hitler sutured three countries to the Reich. ‘Don’t be so gloomy, Rose,’ my mother said as we walked to the Métro. ‘You’re simmering in your own kettle of bad news. Don’t you think that if you could step back, you’d see the brighter side of your life?’
I didn’t know how to respond. My mother was living in a fantasy world. She was so self-involved that she couldn’t bear the idea that even a war could disrupt her plans. And, of course, she couldn’t be aware of my sorrow and anxiety about her—much less be sympathetic.
I was beginning to suspect that my mother was truly happy. Certainly, she wasn’t grieving for my father. She seldom mentioned him. And I was embarrassed by her obvious sensuality. I had observed men flirting with her while she coyly flicked her eyelashes and demurely looked down. I found it all bewildering. My mother was being transformed before my eyes and rather than being happy for her, I rued her pleasure.
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