The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  He put them on and reeled theatrically.

  “My God, I can’t see a thing.”

  “That’s because your vision’s good.”

  “Twenty-fifteen. Better than perfect. I often wonder why they don’t make glasses for people who see too well. I mean, to see so clearly that it hurts—isn’t that a kind of impairment? A kind of … delusion?” He took the glasses off, wiped them with his shirttail, and returned them to me. “Well, I’ve enjoyed this little comedy of errors. I thank you for it.”

  “Shouldn’t I be thanking you?”

  “Why? Because I broke your glasses?”

  “No … Because you brought me back.”

  “Oh, it was the least I could do.” He walked to the door, turned the handle, and pivoted. “By the way, you wouldn’t care to have dinner with us tonight, would you? You and your wife?”

  His tone, to my ear, was noncommittal, and, wanting to sound noncommittal in kind, I said that it would depend on Julia. She might be too tired.

  “We’ll play it by ear then. Or eye, as the case may be. And now you know where to find me.”

  “At the other Francfort.”

  “This is the other Francfort. Or maybe they’re both the other Francfort. Well, goodbye.”

  We shook hands and he left. I stayed by the door until I could no longer hear his footsteps. Now that I was getting used to wearing glasses again, I was startled by how much the room resembled a seraglio. It wasn’t just the jars and pots on the vanity, it was Julia’s gowns, her negligees, her very smell—of cigarettes and face powder and Jicky by Guerlain. Yet Edward’s smell was there, too, astringent and canine. To put her off the scent, I threw open the window. The loose shutter had been secured, the pianist had given up for the time being. Down on the street an old woman sat on a stool, peeling potatoes.

  In the bathroom, I took off my clothes. What I saw in the mirror did not impress me: standard-issue Anglo-Saxon face, cheeks potatoish in their stolidity. But for the pomegranate-red nipples, the chest was as undifferentiated as a field. My belt had pressed a pinkish trail into the abdomen, as if a tractor had just passed over it … A Midwestern body. A Great Plain. And how varied, by comparison, was the landscape just of Edward’s face! The scar in particular fascinated me. Hadn’t he mentioned Heidelberg? Somewhere I’d read that at German universities the students engaged in sword fights as a rite of passage. Facial wounds were badges of honor, which they washed lovingly with rancid water. Was this, then, the story of Edward’s scar? Whatever it was, I wanted to read it. I wanted to read Edward.

  It was getting on for lunchtime. It occurred to me that I was ravenous, so I got dressed and went down to the hotel restaurant. On the way, I left my key at the front desk in case Julia should come back. Only a few tables were taken, for Lisbon is a town in which people eat late. I ordered an omelette. It arrived prepared in the Spanish style, with chunks of potato. I devoured it. Then I had a flan, three apricots, and a banana. Then I drank two garotos, those little Portuguese steamed coffees with milk, followed by two glasses of aguardente, which is the Portuguese equivalent of an eau-de-vie. Then I went back to the lobby. The key to our room was no longer on the peg. My stomach lurched. I reminded myself that I really had to eat more slowly. My digestion was not what it had once been.

  Not wanting to risk the elevator again, I walked the two flights of stairs to our floor. I knocked.

  “Who is it?” Julia called from the other side.

  “It’s me.”

  The door clicked open. She didn’t kiss me or even greet me. Instead she returned to the vanity, on the surface of which she dealt herself a hand of solitaire. From the ashtray she picked up a half-smoked cigarette; took a puff; put it down again.

  “When did you get back?” I said.

  “Twenty minutes ago,” she said.

  “And how was it?”

  “What?”

  “Your outing. Did you have a good time?”

  She turned and glared at me. “A good time? Are you joking? After riding miles and miles in a taxi to some godforsaken slum … And that filthy dog, with its disgusting breath … And then the hour’s wait in the broiling heat to see the vet, with that sample of its droppings steaming there between us … And you ask if I had a good time?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

  “But the worst part, the part that really got my goat—you know she’s English. I mean, she has an English passport. And so in Bordeaux they could have boarded that ship if they’d wanted to—the one Churchill sent over to rescue the marooned Brits. They could have boarded that ship, in which case they’d be in London right now. Today. But they didn’t. And why? Because of the dog.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes! That’s it! The only reason! They don’t have any great yen to go to New York. She told me that—New York or London, it’s all the same to them. They’re nomads, she says. Yet they gave up the chance to sail to England, they put themselves through the hideous ordeal of getting all those visas and crossing Spain and coming here, and all because if they went to England, the dog would have to be quarantined. A fifteen-year-old dog! What do you think of that?”

  “Well—that they must really love that dog.”

  “Of course, I understand that for some women a dog can be a child substitute. Yet when you consider the circumstances—”

  “But Julia, it’s not as if their not going to England means that we could have. You know perfectly well we couldn’t. They wouldn’t have let us on board.”

  “So you insist. You wouldn’t even try. How do you know they wouldn’t have?”

  “They know the law as well as we do.”

  “Even if we’d offered the captain money?”

  “An English captain? Please.”

  Her game having reached a stalemate, she gathered up her cards. “It just seems so unfair, that they should pass up a chance I’d kill for. And for the most ridiculous of reasons.”

  “Ridiculous to you, maybe.”

  “I challenge you to find a single person in Lisbon who wouldn’t agree that not going to England for the sake of a fifteen-year-old dog is ridiculous.”

  I didn’t answer that. I opened the window, which she had closed.

  “This room is filthy,” I said. “It stinks.”

  “The maid hasn’t been. The maids here are worthless—all they do is make the bed and change the towels, and that only when they feel like it. They don’t even pick up your clothes.”

  “And you can’t pick up your own clothes?”

  “Why should I? Why should I? We’re only here for another week. Ten days at the outside. I despise this hotel. I despise this city.”

  “Yet just this morning you were going on about wanting to stay here.”

  “Oh, I’d rather stay here than go back to New York, if it comes to it. Not that I have any choice in the matter. It seems I’m my husband’s slave.”

  “You’re not my slave. You can do whatever the hell you want.”

  “So what are you suggesting, that I stay on my own?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “No, I think that is what you’re suggesting. And you know what? I think it’s a fine idea. In fact, I can’t see any reason not to start packing right away, especially since you seem to find my personal habits so intolerable.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Well, don’t you worry. Soon I’ll be gone and you can keep the room just as tidy as you like.”

  “Julia, please—”

  “Excuse me.” She stood, pushed me out of the way, took her suitcase from the armoire, and began throwing into it all the clothes that were strewn about the room, the pots and jars, the solitaire cards, even the underwear hanging over the bath, though it wasn’t yet dry.

  “Julia, this is madness. You can’t stay here on your own. How will you live?”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “But you don’t have papers. You can’t work without papers. And anyway, it’s not saf
e.”

  “It seems perfectly safe to me.”

  “For now, yes. But how long will that last? You’ve got to see, it could get terribly dangerous, even for us. Especially if we enter the war. In addition to which there’s the fact that you’re—”

  “What? Go on. Say it.”

  “All right. Jewish.”

  “And how are they supposed to find that out? It’s your name on the passport. Winters isn’t a Jewish name.”

  “Yes, but Julia, in Germany they’re making people prove they’re not Jewish. It could come to that here, too, if Portugal ends up on the other side. Please, darling.” I stopped her hand, with which she was rummaging in the armoire. “Please be realistic.”

  Whatever she was holding, she dropped. I let her hand go. She sat down on the edge of the bed and began to weep. “It’s not fair. When I went to Paris, I told my family I was never coming back to New York, and I meant it. And now they’ll have the chance they’ve been waiting for all these years—to laugh at me. To say ‘I told you so.’”

  “But you don’t even have to see them.”

  “Are you joking? They’ll be on the pier waiting for us. The minute we step off the gangplank, there they’ll be.”

  “But how will they know we’re coming?”

  “My mother will know. She knows everything I do.”

  I sat down next to her and put my arm around her hot, narrow shoulder blades. “I won’t let that happen,” I said. “I’ve told you from the beginning, Julia, I’ll take care of you. I’ll protect you. Why, we don’t even have to stay a single night in New York, if you want. We can take a taxi right from the pier to Grand Central. Catch the train to Chicago. Maybe visit my brother Harry—”

  “He’s never liked me. He disapproved of your marrying me.”

  “That was ages ago. He’s missed us.”

  “I wouldn’t be comfortable there. I’m not comfortable anywhere except Europe. When we set sail from New York, I swore I’d be buried here—you remember—and I meant it.”

  “And you will be, Julia. You will.” She glanced up at me. “Oh, I don’t mean it like that. What I mean is, when the war’s over, we’ll come back. We’ll start up where we left off. Because as the crow flies, New York’s not really far, is it? Literally as the crow flies, now that there are these Clipper flights.”

  “I wish there were no flights at all. No ships, no flying boats, no way to get across the Atlantic.”

  I kissed her cheek. “That’s how you feel today,” I said. “Trust me, once we’ve put these last weeks behind us, things will look brighter.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She got up then. She went into the bathroom. I could hear water running in the sink.

  “Oh, I meant to ask you,” I said through the half-open door, “what did you think of her—aside from the dog?”

  “Who? Iris? She’s mad—but then again, those people usually are.”

  “Those people?”

  “Writers. Didn’t he tell you? They’re Xavier Legrand. You know, the detective novels. They wrote the first one as a lark and then, just to see, sent it to a publisher in the States. They pretended that the author was a neighbor of theirs, a retired French police commissioner, and that they were his translators. Well, for the first three books they managed to fool everybody, but then a French publisher started sniffing around, wanting to bring out the originals. Which of course was out of the question, since there were no originals—the books were written in English—so they had to make a clean breast of it. But no one seemed to mind, and now it’s an open secret that Xavier Legrand is really this expatriate couple. They’ve done quite well, too. Not that they need the money.”

  “They’ve got money?”

  “Of course, she didn’t say so. Those sort of people never say so—and yet it’s the way they don’t say so that tells you.”

  She came out drying her face. That we were not “that sort of people”; that I had to work; that without my job we couldn’t have afforded to live in France—it had always been a sore point for her. My background is solidly middle class—my father ran a smelting works—which made me, in many ways, an improbable match for her. What she really needed was a man like Edward, a man with money to burn, money he didn’t have to earn. Yet when I met her, there was no such man in the offing, or at least none who was willing to give her what she was holding out for, which was an apartment in Paris. I don’t mean to poor-mouth. We lived more than comfortably, Julia and I. Never once in the course of our marriage did I have to deny her anything she wanted. But we weren’t rich. Almost everything I earned, we spent. What savings we had were in francs, which in the wake of the German takeover had lost most of their value. Indeed, had it not been for the three hundred-dollar bills (a gift from my brother Harry) that, in a moment of cautionary foresight, I had stowed away in my sock drawer, I don’t know how we would have survived in Lisbon. Probably Julia would have had to sell her jewelry.

  Eventually she sat down again at the vanity. She reshuffled her cards.

  “He asked if we’d like to have dinner with them tonight,” I said after a moment. “Edward, I mean.”

  “Oh? And what did you tell him?”

  “That it would depend on you. On whether you felt up to it.” I took a breath, let a few seconds pass. “What do you think?”

  “Why not? One has to eat.”

  “You mean you’ll go?”

  “Why do you sound surprised? Whatever else you might say about them, they’re not bores. And what’s the alternative? Another dreary dinner here at the hotel? No, thanks.”

  “All right, I’ll call them to let them know we’re on. Or better yet, I’ll drop by their hotel and leave a note. Yes, it might be better to leave a note.”

  “What do you think I should wear?”

  “Why not go out and buy yourself a new dress?”

  “In Lisbon? Please.” But I could tell from her tone that she was entertaining the possibility.

  “Well, I’m off,” I said. “I’ll be back in half an hour or so. Also”—I was now standing in the doorway—“do bear in mind, darling, that England’s not a safe bet. After all, there’s rationing. Any day, bombs could start dropping.”

  “And any day U-boats could land off Long Island,” Julia said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Any day U-boats could land off Long Island.”

  Chapter 4

  Had you met Julia that summer, the summer of 1940, you would probably have thought her a sedate woman, elegant and underfed and austere. She was forty-three but looked thirty-five, with taut pale skin and bobbed brown hair and huge eyes like those of a nocturnal marsupial. She dressed conservatively. Lanvin or Chanel, not Schiaparelli. Tweed or cotton or black silk, not sea-foam green chiffon. Nothing about her appearance suggested eroticism or pique or vulnerability. But she was full of surprises.

  We had met … but here is the thing: I can’t for the life of me remember exactly where we met, only that the occasion was a reception following some sort of public lecture or recital or poetry reading. For in New York, in the twenties, public lectures and recitals and poetry readings were largely the province of the restless and the lost—both unions of which I was a card-carrying member. I was then twenty-five and working at an Oldsmobile dealership on Broadway, a job I had acquired through my brother Harry, who, though two years my junior, was already rising through the ranks at General Motors. Like many youngest children, Harry considered it his duty to take care of his elder siblings, both of whom he regarded as wastrels. Well, our brother George—he really was a wastrel. He still is. I was merely aimless. Following my graduation from Wabash, I had moved back in with our parents, whose marriage was on the skids. My father had another woman, and my mother knew it. Most nights she drank herself into a stupor at the kitchen table. One afternoon my father summoned me into his study and said, “It doesn’t matter if you hate me so long as you take care of your mother.” As if that wasn’t guaranteed to drive me out of the house! S
o I wrote to Harry, who arranged the job for me in New York. I think he understood that it would do me a world of good to get out of Indianapolis and start earning my own money. As for our mother, well, he took on that duty, too. Youngest children are like that. It was a sacrifice for which, in later years, he would take every opportunity to punish me.

  And so I found myself in New York, selling cars, and in fact being somewhere other than Indianapolis did do me a world of good, and in fact it was a great thing to discover that I had the capacity to earn my own money. Yet I was still aimless, I had few friends, which was why, most evenings, I would go to the aforementioned public lectures and recitals and poetry readings. And at one of these I met Julia, who was also a regular at such events, but for different reasons. Though from a wealthy family, she had very little cash at her disposal. She lived with her widowed mother, who kept her on a tight leash.

  Some background here. Julia’s people were Bavarian Jews. Her maiden name was Loewi. Back in the 1850s, her grandfather and two of his brothers had emigrated from Fürth to New York, where they founded a fabric-covered-button manufactory. From fabric-covered buttons they moved into hops, from hops into commodities. In New York, I have since learned, the German Jews go to great lengths to distance themselves from their Yiddish-speaking cousins, most of whom arrived in the early part of the century, in flight from poverty and pogroms. Well, by then the German Jews—Julia’s Jews, if you will—were well established. On Central Park West they had their own Fifth Avenue. They even had their own club, the Harmonie Club, right smack-dab in the heart of Manhattan and, more tellingly, right across the street from the Metropolitan Club, its gentile twin, from which it differed only in its conspicuous lack of Christmas decorations in December. A Polish Jew had about as much chance of getting into the Harmonie Club as any Jew had of getting into the Metropolitan Club—and this was understood to be in the order of things. For how else was an immigrant population to prove its entrenchment but by exercising the power to exclude? As a girl, Julia attended German Jewish cotillions. Her brothers rowed in German Jewish regattas on the Hudson. And though there were always other cotillions, other regattas, from which they were barred, and knew themselves to be barred, nonetheless their cotillions, their regattas were reported right alongside these others on the society page of the New York Times. Examples of rebellion or anomaly in the family history were rare. One of Julia’s uncles, a lawyer just out of Harvard, shot himself in the head in his office on a winter morning in 1903. It was assumed that he was a secret homosexual. Another settled in Haiti, tried to organize a coup against President Hyppolite, and was summarily deported, after which he devoted most of the rest of his life to lawsuits against the U.S. government. Finally there was Aunt Rosalie. Before the war, she and her husband, Uncle Edgar, had sailed to France. They were en route to Vienna, where Edgar, who suffered from diabetes, was to consult a specialist, but halfway across the Atlantic he fell into a coma and died. He was buried at sea. Subsequently it was assumed that Rosalie would return home in mourning. Instead she took a villa in Cannes and married a Swedish tennis instructor. Given the course Julia’s life was to take, you might think she would have looked upon her aunt with admiration, but in fact she despised and feared her. Well, perhaps we all despise and fear those relations whose existence proves that we are not, as we would like to believe, originals.