The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  “Maybe if you tried something abstract, you’d find it more interesting,” Alizée suggested.

  Louise barked a laugh so loud half the line in front of them turned around. “You’re a real hoot, Alizée. A real hoot. But for my money, I’ve got to go with what’s there, with what’s in front of me. That’s the only way people are going to understand what we’re trying to show them. Shapes and colors? Faces with eyes where the chin should be? Who the hell can figure that kind of thing out?”

  “Maybe it’s you who can’t figure it out,” Jack said to Louise as he walked toward them. He bowed. “Alizée. Louise. Gorky and I couldn’t help but hear you all the way at the front of the line, my dear Miss Bothwell.” He winked at Alizée, then turned back to Louise. “There’s no point in blathering on to Alizée. She’s French and doesn’t speak much English.”

  Louise narrowed her eyes. “She seemed to understand me just fine. We were having a very nice conversation about the differences between abstract and representational art, and I was explaining to her that if—”

  “I’m guessing it was you who was having a nice conversation with yourself,” Jack interrupted.

  “You’re just jealous, Pollock,” Louise retorted. “And when you get jealous you get nasty. I’ve got three pieces in the Whitney exhibit, and you can’t even get a gallery to show you or any of your lot. Just because you’re doing something different doesn’t mean you’re doing something good.”

  “Just because you’re doing something that pleases the old guard doesn’t mean you’re doing something good.” Jack said, then turned his back on her, ensuring he had the last word. He offered Alizée his arm.

  She hesitated for a moment, then took it. Although Louise had been nasty to him, Jack had been nasty first, and Alizée had been enjoying their conversation. She hated to be rude, but getting closer to the door was an advantage she couldn’t ignore. She couldn’t wait another day to send the wire. But she didn’t like the feel of Louise’s stare on her back.

  “She’s a lousy fake,” Jack was saying as he led her toward Gorky. “Standing in line with the riffraff. Ha! She’s got a father so rich he grew up with Roosevelt. Went to Groton Academy together.” He spit on the sidewalk. “Although according to her, he can’t stand the president now. Says he’s a warmonger.”

  Gorky took a step back to let them stand in front of him. “Hate that such a beautiful girl is such a bitch,” he muttered.

  “I hate that such a bitch is such a talented painter,” Jack replied.

  At first, she was surprised to hear that Jack, who was a harsh critic, considered Louise to be a first-rate painter, but she’d been around artists long enough to know that an odd personality was more often a prerequisite for talent than it was a disqualification.

  When she saw the flimsy airmail envelope in her mail slot, she assumed it was Tante’s response to her telegram. But it wasn’t. It was from Babette, dated six weeks earlier.

  22 February 1939

  Berlin

  Ma Ali,

  We are coming to you soon! We set sail on the thirteenth of May on the SS St. Louis and should be in America by fall. You will not believe how big Sophie is—and how beautiful, if I do say so myself. And wait until you meet my sweet Gabby! I know you will eat them both up. They are so delicious!

  We have tourist visas to enter Cuba and have been assured that most of the paperwork has been completed for our American visas so our wait there should not be more than four to five months. It will be so wonderful to see you again, my dear, dear, dear soeur-cousine. I cannot wait to go shopping together in New York City! I hope you have not slipped back into your bad American styles. But if you have, I will quickly cure you of that!

  You may think it strange that we are coming to America rather than just returning to France. It is because it is not safe in France or anywhere else on the continent. Hitler claims he is prophetic and that he foresees a world with no Jews. We believe he will do everything in his power to make his “prophecy” come true.

  Pierre and I have been kicked out of university and Sophie out of kindergarten. I know you have heard about Kristallnacht. One of our professors was beaten to death and two others sent to a labor camp. Our shul and the tailor shop around the corner were burned down, and the tailor, along with many other Jewish men, has disappeared. No one has returned.

  The only good to come out of this madness is that the Nazis have decided they want all the Jews out of Germany as soon as possible. Hence, their willingness to let us go to Cuba—that and the hefty sum we paid. You must get visas for the rest of the family as soon as possible. Hitler is not a man who likes to be wrong, and his ambitions are as grandiose as he believes himself to be.

  I do not tell you these things to upset you but so you will understand what we are up against. But do not despair, because I do not. I see this as an opportunity to finish our studies in one of the great American universities and for our whole family to be in a place that is safe. I just hope many others will follow in our footsteps.

  You and I will be able to talk and talk and talk and then laugh and laugh and laugh as we have always done! It will be so much fun to be together again. I cannot wait to see your beautiful face smiling at us from the dock in New York City. I also cannot wait to give you a big hug!

  Je t’embrasse,

  Babette

  Ali. No one but Babette called her Ali. This tore at her almost as much Babette’s tinny cheerfulness.

  Americans for No Limits held its meetings in the cramped offices of PM, a newspaper that combined the magazine features of Life and Time with the editorial assertions, in this case left-leaning, and timeliness of a daily. Gideon Kannel, the man who ran things, sat on a desk, his feet barely brushing the floor. He was built like a jockey but was a math professor at NYU.

  He had an academic air that reminded Alizée a little of Oncle, but the idea of Oncle leading a political group was patently absurd. Her uncle was an unassuming man, although rumor had it that Gideon had been also. Up until the Germans killed his parents, destroyed their home and kosher butcher shop during Kristallnacht, and took his three young brothers away. Babette’s letter made this so much more real.

  Although it was cold and rainy outside, the room was sweltering, filled with the odor of damp wool and too many bodies in too small a space. Alizée pulled at the collar of her blouse to expose more of her neck and hoped the meeting would be quick so she could discuss the visa problem with Gideon before she passed out from heat prostration.

  Gideon’s message was loud and strong: Hitler was going to conquer all of Europe, his mission was to kill off anyone who wasn’t Aryan, and if the United States didn’t intercede, a mass slaughter would occur in which millions would die. Her stomach went hollow.

  “I’ve written a draft of the ‘Defend America by Standing with Our Allies’ letter,” Gideon was saying. “It’s what we agreed to last time: a warning of the danger to both Europeans and Americans if we don’t step in and help them fight Hitler.” He looked around the room. “We’ve got enough money to send out about two hundred letters. We just need volunteers to write or type them up. Who’s got a few extra hours this week?”

  She didn’t want the United States to go to war. She wanted the State Department to authorize more visas, not send American boys, including Mark and Jack, off to fight thousands of miles away. She didn’t raise her hand.

  Gideon wrote the names on his pad and then moved on to urge everyone to participate in the next protest rally, planned for Thanksgiving weekend. It was to be similar to the one they’d staged last month at the New York offices of the America First Committee, an isolationist organization working tirelessly to keep immigration quotas low. This sounded better, and she made a note of the date and time.

  The last item on the agenda was one Gideon was very excited about. “If we’re to be successful, I believe we’ve got to hit the isolationist powers that be in the heart.” He stood. “Bring them to their knees before they can do any more
damage. These men are pressuring Roosevelt and demanding he stay out of Europe’s business. Claiming that helping the refugees is akin to going to war. They must be silenced!”

  She realized that if she said out loud what she’d just been thinking about not wanting American boys to take up guns, everyone here would consider her an isolationist. The enemy.

  “I know we’ve never done anything like this before,” Gideon held up his hands, “and I’m not talking about hurting anyone. Physically, that is. These may be influential men with formidable friends, but they’re also the kind of men who do what they want, when they want, and they’re sure to have lots of skeletons in their closets. Sure to have greased a palm, told a lie, misrepresented themselves, maybe worse. And that’s what we go after. We’ll discredit them and undermine their ability to manipulate the president. We can’t let them help Hitler destroy the European people!”

  Henri. Oncle, Tante, and Alain.

  “We’ll go through their records, everything they’ve ever written or said. Newspaper articles, interviews, speeches, memoranda. Nothing in these men’s lives is above scrutiny. We’ll talk to their enemies, their colleagues, old girlfriends, do whatever we can until we get the goods we need to bring them down.” He raised his arms in the air. “First and foremost are Charles Lindbergh and Joseph Kennedy!”

  Shouts of agreement. Lindbergh and Kennedy were two of the most visible isolationists in the country, giving speeches and writing op-ed pieces, meeting with influential politicians. They were both high-ranking members of America First Committee, known anti-Semites who weren’t shy about voicing this opinion. There was no doubt in Alizée’s mind that everyone in the room hated them with a passion. And she supposed she did, too.

  “There’s another man, not nearly as well known, but he’s been more effective at keeping European refugees from our shores than any other individual. He’s turned away ships. Sent people—families running from occupied countries in fear for their lives—back to places where they no longer have a home, where they face bigotry, starvation, and almost certain death.”

  Babette. The little girls.

  “As many of you know, his name is Breckinridge Long, the assistant secretary of state who controls all American visas. He flips his finger at the laws that allocate hundreds of thousands of visas each year. In direct defiance of official US policy and the president’s wishes, he restricts visas beyond what makes any sense, refusing to authorize any to even the most qualified!”

  Breckinridge Long. The man Mr. Fleishman said was responsible for limiting ERC’s access to visas, the one who could, who would, consign her family to the Nazis.

  “He’s purposely leaving thousands of visas unclaimed,” Gideon continued. “It’s apparent to anyone who takes the time to notice that he’s more interested in keeping immigrants out of the country than helping get them in. We must get him fired!”

  Alizée sprang up from her seat. “Long must be stopped!” she cried. Embarrassed, she quickly sat down.

  Gideon smiled at her. “Thank you, Miss . . . ?”

  “Benoit. Alizée Benoit.”

  “Well, Miss Alizée Benoit, how would you like to be the first to sign up for the Discredit Long Committee?”

  8

  ALIZÉE & LEE

  Alizée wanted to tear up the drawing paper on the table in front of her. Into many, many small pieces. Or at least throw it to the ground and storm out of the classroom. It wasn’t working. Merde and merde and more merde. She was more than familiar with the concept of using color and shape to create motion and the illusion of multiple dimensions. She’d done it before. Many times. But somehow, with this piece, it wasn’t translating to her gut. And if it wasn’t getting to her gut, it wasn’t getting to the paper. She was overthinking, and that always meant bad work.

  The class was drawing from a nude model, overlaying and pasting cut-up pieces of tissue paper to create an abstraction of the voluptuous woman, reducing the actual figure to pure emotion and volume. Or that was what they were supposed to be doing. She was reducing the actual figure to complete merde.

  Alizée glanced around the room to check where Hans was. Heading her way. He was going to trash her and her work into the scrap heap where they both belonged. She was used to criticism—and liked to think she took it well—but Hans could be tough, actually cruel at times, and she hated that he was usually right.

  Saturday morning classes at the Hofmann School of Fine Art were held in the basement of a West Ninth Street building. Although the light wasn’t great, Alizée liked it because the boiler was down here, and it was one of the only times during the cold months she got warm on a weekend. Lee was working next to her, and they shared a forlorn glance. Obviously, Lee was having problems with the assignment, too.

  Alizée scrutinized the rectangles and triangles she’d cut out of brightly colored tissue paper. Maybe they were too neat. She moved them around to make it messier, but that just muddied up the image. She bit her lip, felt Hans coming closer. Merde and merde and more merde. Then she saw it. Tear up the tissue paper, not the drawing paper. She began to rip and paste.

  Lee watched Alizée working next to her. Completely absorbed. Alizée worked like Jack and Mark. With a directed passion that blocked out everything else, that took her from the external world and transformed her into the painting. Or maybe it transformed the painting into her.

  There was a downside to this. Something Lee saw in Jack and Mark also. The three shared an intensity, almost an otherworldliness. It was as if a high-pitched vibration pulsed inside them, creating a scary kind of energy that drove them to brilliance but also seemed to drive them a bit mad. She often envied them their focus, their ability to completely separate from their surroundings, but she wasn’t sure she’d trade places if she could.

  Because there was the sadness, too. Alizée tried to vanquish this with jokes and brash confidence, but Lee sensed her friend’s cockiness was often no more than a veneer. While Mark sank into deep depressions and Jack into alcohol, Alizée kept moving, pushing, as if through sheer force of will she could keep the wolves at bay. Watching her perform could be heartrending, particularly because Alizée wasn’t one to confide. And Lee was certain there were things that needed to be said.

  Lee leaned in and examined her friend’s work. Although everyone else was using scissors to cut rectangles, parallelograms, and triangles from tissue paper, Alizée had ripped hers into tattered abstracted shapes. She was covering her original pencil drawing of the model with the jagged forms, obliterating her sketch. The different shapes and hues quivered as the ragged pieces lay against each other, their juxtaposition causing the warmer reds and oranges to pop out while the cooler blues and purples receded, creating the pulsating push and pull Hans wanted.

  But Alizée had gone beyond the assignment, for the model was still there, simultaneously present and absent, positive and negative—push and pull in multiple dimensions. You felt the great, yet imperfect, mother figure, the hugeness of her both in space and human consequence. And yet Lee sensed a longing, a deep loneliness within her. Perhaps grief over a lost child? Lee glanced up just as Alizée brushed a tear from her cheek. There was no doubt: Alizée and her painting were one. Both of them filled with melancholy.

  Damn, the girl was good, which was clear to everyone but Alizée. This was partially due to the fact that no artist was capable of accurately assessing her own work—it was never as good or as bad as you thought it was—and partially due to the fact that Hans gave Alizée such a hard time.

  Not that he didn’t give everyone a hard time. Like now, he was ranting at Grant McNeil, who sometimes worked as his class monitor. “Too academic,” he cried, waving Grant’s drawing in the air to show the other students. “We must get away from all this Renaissance nonsense.” He slapped the paper back on Grant’s board. “You’ve just clothed the naked image sitting in front of us. You’ve done nothing to make her speak beyond her own anatomy!”

  Grant looked deflated, and th
e rest of the class turned away, each hoping that Hans would decide to critique someone else next. Hans stood behind Alizée, watching her working with her shapes. She was unaware he was there, so lost was she within the woman under her fingers. Lee guessed Alizée hadn’t even heard Hans’s tirade against Grant and steeled herself against another one directed at Alizée, although it was hard to imagine what fault he would find.

  Hans grabbed the paper from Alizée’s hands. “Not enough,” he said. “Not nearly enough.”

  Alizée jumped, startled back into the room. She looked at him as if she didn’t know who he was.

  “Like this.” Hans took a razor-edged ruler from a shelf, laid it down widthwise about a third of the way from the bottom of Alizée’s picture, and ripped the paper in two, truncating the abstracted mother figure just below the swell of her hips.

  Lee gasped, as did the rest of the students, horrified that he would so cavalierly destroy another artist’s work in such a public way. Only Alizée remained silent, stone-faced, her eyes glued to her picture.

  Hans took the bottom third and placed it against the left edge of the larger piece, thighs and legs at the end of the reaching arms, inducing both uneasiness and the picture’s authority. “Now it’s more dynamic,” he declared. “Notice how it moves against the picture plane.” He held the two pieces up. “Look at it now. The old way was to always work from the center. From the middle. As if that is the only heart a painting can have.”

  Alizée took her torn picture from Hans. “The heart, the heart . . .” she mumbled as she began to shift the two parts around to create different images. She grabbed Hans’s ruler, placed it diagonally across the larger piece and ripped it in two. Then she did it again and again until there were a dozen geometrical shapes. Without a word, she bent over the colorful pieces of tissue paper and began moving them. In seconds, she was once again oblivious to anyone else in the room.