“My grandparents were here in 1945,” I told her. “Looking for Alizée. If it’s really her in these articles they would’ve found out about it.”
“You’re talking a different world, Dan. What would they know about something written in a newspaper five years earlier?” Click. Click. “And if—Holy shit!”
“What? What?”
Silence.
“Holy shit what?” I demanded.
“There’s an op-ed here from the Washington Times-Herald, June 1940, written by Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh . . .”
I stopped breathing.
“And it looks like it’s all about your aunt.”
24
WASHINGTON TIMES-HERALD
OPINION-EDITORIAL, JULY 1, 1940
Mrs. Roosevelt’s Painting
by
Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy,
Court of St. James, Great Britain
&
Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh,
United States Army Air Corps
It has come to our attention that a painting recently purchased by Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt promotes American involvement in the European War, a position in direct conflict with the best interests of our country and the desires of the majority of Americans.
Said painting, Turned, is the work of a Jewish French artist called Alizée Benoit, who is an active member of Americans for No Limits, a communist organization that recently rioted in New York in protest against visa quotas that have been federal law for decades.
Miss Benoit’s painting is in concert with these ideas, sending a clear message that if we do not welcome all the European refugees, each and every one will perish. This is complete nonsense, and this we cannot do. For once we allow foreign ships to unload their human cargo, we are allied with those nations.
America must not be drawn into the European Conflict because that is what the French, the British and the Jews desire. We are not attacking the Jewish, French or the British people, all races we admire. We are saying that the leaders of these races, for reasons that are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, wish to involve us in their war.
We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. Nor can we allow Mrs. Roosevelt to stoke the natural kindheartedness and sympathies of the American public to the same disastrous end. No outside influence can solve the problems of European nations or bring them lasting peace. They must work out their destiny, as we must work out ours.
We believe Mrs. Roosevelt should return said painting to Miss Benoit posthaste. Now is not the time for the First Lady of the United States to stake claim to a position in opposition to the welfare and safety of her countrymen.
Nor is it appropriate for her to use her position to impose her will on a people who did not elect her. She may be the wife of the President, but she is just like every other woman who has neither the knowledge nor the aptitude to take her husband’s chair at the office or his hammer at the construction site.
Or to put it another way: Is the cause of a communist French Jew worth the life of your son?
25
ELEANOR
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Eleanor had invited Alizée to lunch at the Pavillon, the new French restaurant owned by the manager of the French pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. She thought the stylish atmosphere and familiar food might cushion her news about Turned, but from the way Alizée was playing with her coq au vin, she guessed she’d thought wrong.
“It’s not important,” Alizée replied. “All I care is that you liked it. That you bought my painting. That’s enough for me.”
“Well, it’s not enough for me.”
Alizée put her fork down. “You’d think they’d be embarrassed to admit they believe these things. Let alone put it in a major newspaper.”
“One would think.” Eleanor sighed. It had been a disastrous week for the administration on many fronts: from the Washington Times-Herald op-ed, to Britain’s sinking French ships to keep them out of Hitler’s hands, to Wendell Willkie’s warning to the American people that if Franklin were elected president in November rather than himself, “you can count on our men being on transports for Europe six months from now.” And after all this, Franklin was still stubbornly insisting that although he was running for a historic third term against tough opposition, given current international events, it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to actively campaign for office.
“I so much wanted Turned to be seen,” Eleanor said, “but Kennedy and Lindbergh have tied my hands for the moment. Exactly as they intended.”
“Powerful men get what they want.”
Eleanor was saddened to hear Alizée’s cynicism, but what the girl said was true. “Politics is a nasty game, my dear. Clearly someone on either my staff or the president’s leaked the information. No one else knew about it.” She frowned. “And Franklin worries about spies coming in on the ships! That Fifth Column nonsense. What we have to worry about are spies in our own house.”
“Do you think that’s true? The idea that some refugees are German spies. Or is it just a way to keep more people out?”
Eleanor didn’t want to get into this discussion because that was exactly what she believed. “I’ve made some inquiries about your family, and although I don’t have anything specific to tell you yet, there are possibilities.”
“Possibilities?” The girl’s face lit up.
“Remember I told you about that congressman who’s trying to get Jews out of Europe? Well, this is not to be discussed, but I have it on good authority he’s not just trying, that he and an envoy have rescued close to a hundred Jews from Poland.”
“And brought them here?”
Eleanor hesitated. She’d debated telling Alizée about Lyndon Johnson’s activities, for if they became known, this brave young man would be thrown out of Congress and possibly into jail. But she felt that after the Kennedy-Lindbergh fiasco, it was important for the girl to know that there were good people fighting along with her.
“Apparently,” Eleanor said, “he’s buying passports and fake visas in Cuba and Mexico, some South American countries, too. I’ve been told they’re using both ships and planes to smuggle the refugees into Texas and then setting them up with lives there. The Galveston area mostly. Remarkable. He’s taking quite a chance.”
“What about France?”
“I’m putting feelers out, but as I’m sure you can imagine, this is delicate business. And I can in no way be directly—or indirectly—involved.” Eleanor didn’t want to get Alizée’s hopes up, but she also wanted to give her hope; it was a difficult balance. “If that comes to nothing there’s another possible, but also challenging, option. I’m working with a number of refugee agencies to find people with spotless paperwork who want visas. Once we have all the documentation in hand, we plan to use every means to expedite the applications to the State Department. I’ve put all your names on the list.”
“You did? You’d actually do that for us?” Alizée lowered her eyes, but Eleanor caught the flash of tears. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“My pleasure, I’m sure.” There was a good chance Breckinridge Long and his fascist cronies would reject the majority of the visas, almost definitely the uncle’s application. And although this might give her the ammunition she needed to convince Franklin that Long had purposely created a system that denied entry to almost all foreign nationals, especially if they were Jewish, it wouldn’t do much to help Alizée’s family.
“There are no guarantees,” Eleanor cautioned, “but this should put your family in a more favorable position.”
Alizée cleared her throat, looked a bit stricken. “You’ve been so wonderful to us, so truly wonderful, that I—”
Eleanor waved her thanks away. “Really, my dear, there’s no need.”
“That’s not it. Although I’m so grateful, so very grateful. It’s . . . it’s just that I have another favor to ask.” Alizée raised her chin, looked into Eleanor’s eyes and spoke quickly. “If I had something I needed to get to you, a letter for you to bring to the president, is there a way I could do that? Without anyone knowing?”
Eleanor had been involved in politics long enough to expect the unexpected, but Alizée’s question threw her off balance. What could the child possibly need to get to Franklin? Something that no one else could see?
“It’s about the refugees.” Alizée lowered her voice. “It might be a way for the president to help them.”
This seemed highly unlikely, but one look at the girl’s face made it clear that whatever it was, it was crucially important to her. Eleanor prided herself on her strong instincts, so she took out a piece of paper and scribbled down the information. “Make sure to include your name and return address on the envelope and address it to Malvina Thompson, my secretary, not to me. I’ll have her look out for it.”
26
DANIELLE, 2015
I hadn’t dated since my divorce over two years ago, and I didn’t plan to anytime soon. Gun shy, they call it. I had a core group of friends—embarrassingly similar to the cadres on the Seinfeld and Friends reruns we often spent Saturday nights watching together—and I was fine with that.
I’d met Sam in college, and against my mother’s advice, we married right after I graduated. The first year was great—mostly because of the constant sex—the second less so, and the last two were pure torture. I would have ended it sooner, but it took me that long to get up the nerve to hand my mother yet another I-told-you-so moment. When I finally confessed, she was surprisingly kind. That’s what I mean about having my back in the tough times.
One night the group planned to meet up at a bar in Brooklyn, but then it turned out that Nguyen, my Christie’s buddy, was recruited at the last minute to attend a fund-raiser for the Grey Art Gallery, NYU’s art museum. A stand-in for Anatoly, whose wife was in the hospital having a baby. He begged me to come with him, promising I would be out of there by ten and off to Brooklyn before anything got going at the bar. I felt sorry for him, so I agreed.
It was a full-plated, place-carded, sit-down dinner, and I was squeezed between a middle-aged professor of military history and an elderly donor wearing way too much makeup. The heat was turned up too high, and her foundation was starting to streak. I was starting to seriously regret my largess.
Nguyen was at the far end of the table, and I tried to catch his eye—maybe I could get rushed to the hospital for heatstroke—but his dinner companions were apparently as boring as mine, and he was completely focused on the wine. I decided to do the same.
A couple of glasses later, I was feeling much more loquacious and turned to the professor. I would have needed more than a couple glasses to turn to the donor. “So,” I said, “military history, huh?”
He tried to hide a smile at my pathetic opening gambit but gamely played along. “Not too popular these days, but I like it.”
“What do you like about it?” I asked in my best cocktail-party voice.
“War.”
I gaped at him.
“Killing, especially,” he continued. “And many of the attendant atrocities: burning down villages, torture, rape.”
I was starting to think I should have talked to the donor.
“Twentieth century is my specialty. Some of the best wars happened then.”
It finally occurred to me that he was kidding, and I laughed for far longer than the comment warranted. It was clearly the wine, but the guy was also funny. Nguyen lifted his glass at me from his side of the table.
The professor grinned and reached out his hand. “Charlie Nolan. Had you going there for a few.”
“Dani Abrams,” I said trying to gather myself. “You sure did.”
“When you dedicate your life to a subject women hate, you have to come up with some kind of shield. It’s either that or succumb to dinner-party ridicule and poor student evaluations.”
I lifted my glass. “I’m sure you get neither.”
“And what’s your connection to our esteemed university?” he asked in his own best cocktail-party voice.
“None. I’m here on a date.” My usual cover to ensure I’d never have to go on one.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Charlie said, then turned to wink at a handsome woman across the table. “But I’m sure my wife won’t be.”
“A liar and a flirt. A deadly combination.”
“And here we are at my specialty again.”
“Twentieth-century death.”
“To make things even worse, my particular area of interest is World War II. A premier death machine if ever there was one.”
A World War II expert. Ever since I found the op-ed and deduced the squares were pieces of a larger mural, I’d been preoccupied with the idea that Alizée’s disappearance was due to her politics. Granted, I had trouble believing she’d been an agitator, but it did fan the fire of my conspiracy theories. Maybe Bloom Sanatorium was involved in a cover-up. Maybe Joe Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh were in on it.
If Turned had been her first effort, then the squares could have been a later attempt to use a painting to raise political awareness. On a much larger scale, perhaps on a much larger stage. Could the mural have been the source of the trouble? Was this why she’d been forced to cut it up? Not that I knew she’d cut it up. Not that I knew there’d ever been a mural.
Could she have escaped from Bloom to protect herself from her tormentors, forged the discharge papers to hide her getaway? She could have gone anywhere, but what if she went to France as Grand had told me?
I turned to Charlie. “Can I ask you a weird question?”
“Shoot,” he said with a straight face.
“Would, ah, would it have been possible for an American, a Jew, to go to Europe—to France, say—in late 1940 or early ’41?”
“Probably wouldn’t want to. Most people were desperate to go the other way. Especially Jews.” He shrugged. “Planes and ships were still traveling then, probably without many tourists aboard. But I suppose, theoretically, one could have. If said person had a lot of money.”
I didn’t know much about Alizée’s finances, but I was pretty certain she didn’t fall into the having-a-lot-of-money category. “And if one didn’t?”
Charlie grinned at me, clearly enjoying this absurd conversation. “Then one would need friends in high places.”
“Would it have been possible for a regular person to be friends with Eleanor Roosevelt?”
“You’ve got an awful lot of would-it-be-possibles,” he said, but his voice was encouraging.
“Like now, it wouldn’t happen. Michelle Obama couldn’t just go out and find an unknown artist and invite her to dinner.”
“Well, she could if she wanted to.”
“You know what I mean,” I said, feeling foolish.
“It was different then. It wasn’t as much of a celebrity culture. The media as we know it didn’t exist. Just newspapers and radio. No Internet. No CNN. No twenty-four/seven. So yes, Eleanor would’ve been able to come and go a lot more easily than a First Lady now. And she would’ve been able to take an unknown under her wing. Which apparently she did quite often. She was a great lover of all those lost causes.”
“You know the isolationists, right? Joe Kennedy, Charles Lindbergh, the America First Committee?”
“Think I’ve heard of them,” he said slowly, rubbing a thumb and forefinger back and forth along his chin where there was no beard, his eyes bright. “Yes, yes, I’m pretty sure that I have. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t they the guys who didn’t want Roosevelt to get into the war? Did everything they could to stop him. That was them, right? The guys you’re talking about.”
I pulled a face. “I heard they were getting pretty desperate in 1941. Before Pearl Harbor.”
“Think I’ve heard that some
where, too,” he deadpanned.
“How desperate do you think they were?”
“I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
“This is going to sound crazy . . .” As if this entire tête-à-tête didn’t sound crazy. “But if there had been someone, say someone who really pissed them off, an American, someone who wanted us to enter the war, wanted, let’s say, to help European refugees get into the US. Jews. Maybe got into some trouble over it . . .”
“Still confused.”
“Okay.” I sat up in my chair. “There’s this family rumor—actually, it’s more than a rumor—that a great-aunt of mine, a Jew and an American, got into that kind of trouble trying to get her brother and some cousins out of France before the war started. Then she disappeared. From New York. Like poof. No one saw her go. No one ever saw her again. Late 1940. Early ’41.”
“And you think Lindbergh did it?”
“No, no, of course not,” I said. “But I did find an op-ed that Lindbergh and Joe Kennedy wrote together about a painting of my aunt’s that Eleanor Roosevelt bought. They thought it was incendiary.”
“Incendiary,” Charlie said, rubbing his hands together. “Now you’re talking my language.”
“And I found a newspaper photo that shows her being arrested at some kind of pro-refugee riot.”
“She disappeared right after that?”
I thought back to the photo: June 1940. “About five, six months later.”
“Probably not that then,” he said. “Where was she the last time she was seen?”
I hadn’t wanted to get into that part. “A mental institution,” I admitted.
He raised his eyebrows. “Seems a lot more likely you’ll find your answer there.”
27
ALIZÉE, 1940
1 July 1940
Arles
Ma douce nièce,
Oncle has not returned and now Henri is gone, too. We have had no word from Babette. Alain and I are leaving Arles first thing in the morning. One of Oncle’s friends from university, Gaston Begnaud, is bringing us to his brother’s farm outside of Antibes near Juan-les-Pins where we should be safe. I will send you the exact address when we arrive so you will be able to contact us when you get the visas. People are still getting out, but the situation is growing desperate and we must work fast.
The Muralist: A Novel Page 15