The Two Hotel Francforts

by David Leavitt

  Then I felt something wet on my cheek. I opened my eyes. Daisy had climbed onto my lap. She was licking my face.

  “Oh, Daisy,” I said, stroking her neck. “When all is said and done, you’re the one I’ll miss most of all.”

  “She’s the one we’ll all miss most of all,” Edward said.

  Everywhere

  Chapter 25

  In the spring of 1941, two books set in Lisbon were published: Xavier Legrand’s Inspector Voss at the Hotel Francfort and Georgina Kendall’s Flight from France. I appear in both of them, though it is unlikely that you would recognize me. In the first, I am “Mr. Hand,” an American salesman on his way back home after several years living in France. In the second, I am “Bill,” the husband of the author’s niece “Alice,” whom she has not seen for many years.

  Inspector Voss at the Hotel Francfort opens with the following, I think rather clever, paragraph:

  “At the British Bar in Lisbon, on a June afternoon in 1940, two gentlemen, one American and one English, were playing cards. Their names were Hand and Foote. Both, as it happened, were salesmen—the former of cutlery, the latter of vacuum cleaners.”

  Two pages on, Hand wins the hand. Foote accuses him of cheating. An altercation ensues, at the end of which they are asked to leave the bar. The next morning, Hand is found hanging from the ceiling of his room at the Hotel Francfort, while Foote has disappeared from Lisbon, a fact that—combined with the coincidence of their names—leads the novel’s narrator, Fred Gentry of the American consulate, to suspect that they are spies. In the hope of exposing an espionage ring and thereby furthering his career, Gentry asks the famous Inspector Voss of the Paris sûreté—in Lisbon because his name has appeared on a Gestapo hit list—if he will assist in the investigation. Voss is reluctant, but he agrees when Gentry hints that the fate of his American visa hinges on his cooperation. The two now proceed to delve into the lives of Hand and Foote—and the deeper they delve, the more the evidence confounds them. Among other things, they find a diary written apparently in code; a dog-eared copy of Clarissa (“the last book you would expect a cutlery salesman to be reading”); a letter from a Fräulein Lipschitz offering Hand money to marry her and take her with him to New York; and some solitaire cards, one of which, the Queen of Diamonds, has a folded-back corner. But none of the pieces fit. The resolution of one mystery only opens up another. Most resist resolution altogether. “When everything might mean something else,” Gentry remarks near the end, “how can one know if anything means anything?”

  I take it for granted that Edward was responsible for that line. I also take it for granted that he was responsible for the solution to the crime, which, in the last pages, Inspector Voss reveals with stunning sangfroid. Hand and Foote are not spies. Instead they are exactly what they appear to be: salesmen. Not only that, the murder is exactly what it appears to be. Angry because Hand cheated him at cards, Foote strangled Hand—then tried to make the killing look like a suicide. In the end it is Gentry himself who is exposed as a fool: “Everything I thought I had discovered—the codebook, the book code, the letter, the card with the folded corner—was dust on a dry road, churned up by my own impatient feet.” Nonetheless, he remains true to his word and obtains a visa for Inspector Voss, who, as the novel ends, is standing on the deck of the Excambion, watching the Portuguese coastline recede and wondering what the future holds—for him and for Europe …

  Rather than offer a summary of Georgina’s “memoir,” which is unsummarizable, I think I will just copy out the pertinent chapter:

  “Since leaving Paris, I had got used to running into the most unlikely people in the most unlikely places. I had seen the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg eating a sandwich whilst sitting cross-legged on a railway siding in Vilar Formoso and I had seen Elsa Schiaparelli washing her hair in the WC on the Sud Express. I had seen Julien Green praying in the old Cathedral in Lisbon and I had seen Madeleine Carroll pumping petrol in Spain. Old friends and new popped up again and again—now at the Portuguese consulate in Bayonne, now at the customs house in Fuentes d’Oñoro, now at the craps table in Estoril. Yet of all of them, the one I was most surprised to see was a niece of mine from New York with whom I had not spoken in many years. To protect what little remains of her reputation, I shall call her Alice.

  “She was the youngest daughter of my first husband’s sister, a girl of great beauty, but raised in the most old-fashioned household imaginable. Long before her birth, her parents had mapped out her future for her—that she would marry an eligible young man and bear him children. Yet from when she was a tiny child, it was evident that Alice had other intentions. It was evident in all she did: in the way she tore the bows from her hair and refused to eat her soup, in her preference for roughhousing with her brothers to playing dolls with her sisters, in her proud carriage and penchant for talking back. Even more distressing than these traits, for her mother, was the fondness the child showed toward me, that young lady of dubious provenance whom her brother had, in her view, shown such poor judgment in marrying! Nor was I indifferent to this niece who doted on my every word. On the contrary, I saw in Alice many aspects of myself at that age, and determined to provide for her what was never provided for me: the encouragement of an adult who truly understood her!

  “Elsewhere I have told the story of how I came to Europe, that fatal voyage across the Atlantic for what I imagined would be a stay of six months—and turned out to be a stay of thirty years. I have not until now spoken of the effect that the news of my imminent departure had upon little Alice. To say that it propelled her into a condition of anguish would be an understatement. Distraught, she came to me and begged me to bring her along. As patiently as I could, I explained why this could not be, no matter how much I might wish it. And still she would not be placated—not until she had extracted from me a promise that I would arrange for her to visit me on her next school holiday. Together, I assured her, we would tour the great capitals, see the sights of Europe. Alas, little did we know what fate had in store for us—first my husband’s untimely demise, and then the war …

  “I can but imagine in what a condition of grief the discovery, a few months later, that our separation was to be prolonged, perhaps indefinitely, left my poor niece; the many tears of woe that she must have shed, even as her mother shed tears of joy. For there is no doubt that my sister-in-law, upon learning that—for a few years, at least—her child was to be freed from my malignant influence, could hardly contain her glee. Now, she must have thought, she would have her turn! At last she would set the girl on the proper course from which I had diverted her! Of course, what she failed to count on was the very thing on which all mothers, including my own, fail to count—namely, a resolute female’s determination to have her own way.

  “All through those years of the war, Alice and I remained in touch. In my letters to her I wrote of my busy life in Cannes and the war work I was doing. In hers she described her childish hopes, the French nobleman who, in her dreams, came trotting up to her on his white horse and swept her off her feet, to live with him happily ever after in his fairyland castle en France. And in these innocent fancies—unwisely, as it turned out—I encouraged her. For often it is from such girlish whimsies that the ambitions of bold women—journalists and writers and artistes—are stirred into being. Luckily I still had accounts at all the New York shops, and so was able, even from abroad, to keep Alice supplied with petits cadeaux: hats and gloves and all of Colette’s Claudine novels in translation and a charming little set of Patience cards in an alligator-skin box …

  “At last the war drew to its end. At the first opportunity, I sailed to New York, where to my dismay I discovered that, in my absence, Alice had grown into a young lady of great charm but little sense. For it seemed that, at her mother’s urging, she had foolishly gone ahead and married the ‘suitable’ young man selected for her. Now, let me make it clear that there was absolutely nothing wrong with this young man—other than that he was deadly dull! If anyth
ing, the poor fellow appeared rather shell-shocked to have on his hands such a temperamental bride, when he had expected a girl like her sisters, drearily domestic creatures all. That said, he was a gallant, and willing to do what he could to win his wife’s love. My own advice to Alice was to make the best of her lot. As I reminded her, my own first husband, her uncle—he, too, had begun life as a rather dull young man, and look what I had made of him! Under a clever woman’s tutelage, even the least promising male can have a great career. Patience and cultivation are all that is required. But alas, patience was not one of my niece’s virtues.

  “From there, I am sorry to report, things only went downhill. Through trusted friends I learned that, far from heeding my counsel, Alice had flouted it. Casting her husband aside, she had entered into an affair with a Frenchman of noble birth but ignoble character, whose reputation for idleness and vice had yet to follow him across the Atlantic. As soon as I heard this grim report, I summoned Alice to my suite and warned her in no uncertain terms that she was making a grave error, that she must end the affair at once or risk being engulfed in scandal. But she would hear none of it. For she was in love, she declared, and intended shortly to leave her dull husband, marry the wastrel, and return with him to Paris, there to commence the grand vie for which, since her childhood, she had believed herself destined …

  “O illusions! I wish I could have done something for Alice—but it was too late. Willfulness, when not tempered by intelligence, is a force that it is beyond the capacities of even the most persuasive woman to suppress. No sooner had she left my suite than Alice hied herself to her lover’s rooms, where she threw herself at his feet and declared her undying love for him. Now, if you are a French nobleman with a bad reputation at home, it is one thing to amuse yourself with a pretty young American girl, another to be pounced upon by a vixen determined to trap you in matrimony. And so this jeune homme did what any jeune homme in such circumstances would do: contriving a specious family emergency, he hopped aboard the first boat sailing out of New York Harbor. Only once he was safely back in France did he write to inform poor Alice that, being already engaged to a wealthy girl of the merchant classes whose family wished to buy their way into the aristocracy, he could not marry her, now or ever. To make matters worse, Alice had lately discovered she was ‘in the family way.’ Nor was her dull husband so dull as not to realize that the child could not be his own. Enraged, he demanded a divorce.

  “And so the waves of scandal broke over my niece—and oh, how I felt for my poor sister-in-law at that moment! Yet when I paid a call on her to offer my companionship and to assure her of my eagerness to help her in any way I could, far from accepting my proffered sympathy, she pointed the finger of blame at me! Yes, I was responsible for Alice’s rash actions! I had put ‘ideas in her head’! Such an unjust accusation, coming from such a stupid creature, neither surprised nor shocked me, for by then I was already inured to that vilification that is the inevitable lot of any truly independent-minded woman. No, what really disappointed me was the discovery that Alice herself had taken up her mother’s line, joining the legion of slanderers now accusing me of having led her astray. Insult I can tolerate with equanimity. Disloyalty wounds me to the quick.

  “A few days later, wiser and sadder, I returned to France. Of Alice’s subsequent fate I learned only secondhand, from trusted friends in New York. No sooner had her condition become visible than she was hustled off to the countryside, to one of those institutions where, for a dear price, dear girls such as Alice are unburdened of their unwanted cargo with maximum discretion. Meanwhile in New York, one of her sisters began going about with a pillow stuffed under her skirt. When the infant, a boy, was born, passing it off as the son of its aunt proved relatively easy, especially since Alice herself had no wish to lay claim to or even know the child, much less to publicize its origins. For a few years after her divorce, she cast about aimlessly, until at last she met a gullible if well-intentioned young man, a clerk, who fell in love with her and took her off to Paris, where until the second war she led some simulacrum of that life she had dreamed of since childhood.

  “During the years that followed, only a few hundred miles separated me from my niece. Even so, I never once saw or spoke to her, though on numerous occasions she attempted to revive our old intimacy, sending me letters that I did not answer, or, when I was in Paris, leaving me messages at my hotel, which I did not return. This was not cruelty on my part so much as self-preservation. Much as I might wish the best for Alice, I could not tolerate her … My mistake, I see now, was to think that she had the goods to lead the life I longed for her to lead—that exciting life of the aviatrix, the brave lady lawyer, the saloniste—when really, like her mother, she was mediocrity through and through. In my own eagerness to nurture a young version of myself, I had given Alice more credit than she deserved.

  “And then, in Lisbon, I stumbled upon her. It was at the very end of my sojourn there. Having had our fill of Estoril, Lucy and I had decamped to town, to the Hotel Berlino. One afternoon as I was crossing the lobby, I happened to observe two ladies in the early autumn of their lives sitting together near the bar. One I recognized immediately as Fleur, that scribbler of inconsequential murder novels whom I had befriended, along with her husband and petit chien, on the Sud Express. The face of the other was in shadow. While Fleur talked, this other played patience. Spurred on by that curiosity that is the writer’s prerogative and bane, I took a step closer—and saw that the set of cards with which this game of patience was being played resided in an alligator-skin box. Could it be? Yes! The woman laying those cards out on the table was none other than Alice!

  “I crept a few steps closer. Though time had stolen much of her freshness, as well as the charm that only hope for the future can keep alive, there was no mistaking that face that I had once cherished with maternal fondness. And at the realization that through all these long years, impatient Alice had held on to those patience cards, that gift I had sent her so casually, my heart skipped a beat. On impulse I spoke her name. She turned. I opened my arms to her—at which she uttered a little cry, leapt to her feet (in the process upending the table), and ran off up the stairs. ‘Alice,’ I cried again—at which Fleur, too, leapt up. On the carpet, along with glasses and cigarette ends, the little cards lay scattered. No words passed between Fleur and me. Instead, as if by instinct, we got on our knees and began gathering up the cards. Now, of course, I wonder why we chose to busy ourselves with this trifling task rather than chase after Alice. Was it because we both understood that the cards could be collected—as her wits never could be?

  “Shortly thereafter Alice’s husband, Bill, appeared on the scene. I had met him, too—with Fleur’s husband, by coincidence. We explained to him quickly what had transpired, at which he expressed confusion: how could I be his wife’s aunt, he asked, given my name?

  “Not being inclined, right then, to share the elaborate tale of how I had come to acquire my nom de plume, I informed him that his wife had gone upstairs in something of a rush, and handed him the alligator-skin box, into which I had stuffed the cards willy-nilly … He took it from me, thanked me, and hurried off.

  “Fleur and I talked for a few moments. Though she pressed me for details of my relations with Alice, however, I refused to divulge any but the most superficial information. (The first thing a scribbler learns is never to trust a member of his own tribe!) Subsequently she went off, looking vexed and bewildered. Lucy came down.

  “‘Whatever is the matter?’ she asked when she saw my crestfallen expression.

  “I merely shook my head. ‘A face from the past,’ I said. ‘Just another face from the past.’

  “The next evening I returned from dinner to hear the news that a young lady, also a guest at my hotel, had thrown herself off the roof of the Santa Justa Elevator. I did not need to ask her name. I already knew.”

  Chapter 26

  I am not, I gather, a very good storyteller. At least that would be the prognosis
of Georgina Kendall. A few years ago, while sifting through the old magazines that inevitably pile up in every doctor’s waiting room, my wife came upon an issue of Good Housekeeping in which there appeared an article by Georgina entitled “Ten Rules the Novice Writer Should Follow.” Being of an accommodating nature, and knowing that, since my retirement from Ford, I had been contemplating writing a book of my own, my wife clipped the article and gave it to me. If she recognized the author’s name, or realized the role that she had played in my life, she didn’t say—though of course not saying so would be just like her.

  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.”