The Muralist: A Novel

by B. A. Shapiro

  He knelt at the side of the couch so his eyes were level with hers. “Montage is a great painting. An important breakthrough, and yes, it does need to be seen, just not right now. You’re a major talent, and that’s why you have to take care of yourself. For you, for me, but also for the world.” His eyes sparkled with unshed tears as he wiped hers away with his hand. “I know you want to do something to help, and I love you for that. I know this means a lot to you, but you need to help yourself before you can help anyone else.”

  She had failed. Completely. In every possible way. Let everyone down. Not a heroine. What little energy she had began to seep out of her. Leaving her limp and confused. So tired. Deep down in the blood tired. Her eyes closed.

  “Please, Zée,” he begged. “Let me bring you to Bloom. Just for a little while. You’ll rest, you’ll get stronger, better, and then when you come back we’ll figure out a way to help your family. All the other refugees.”

  Buzzing. Familiar buzzing. Like from before. But when? In a dream or real life? No more talking. Please, no more talking. He had to leave. Let her go. She had to get to France. She had a ticket.

  “We can still use Montage,” Mark persisted. “Put the squares back together. Show it the right way. In the right place.”

  She had to stop the buzzing. She needed it to be quiet. She needed silence.

  “They’ll take good care of you,” he murmured as if he were soothing a frightened child. “Help you get your thoughts straight, your strength back.”

  He’d never let her leave here without him. Never let her be on her own. He’d keep her from going to France unless, unless . . . She wracked her mind. There had to be a way. But she couldn’t reach it.

  “It’s going to be good,” Mark soothed. “It’ll be good for you to have some time off. With no demands, no pressure. No one pushing you. So good, so very, very good.”

  Quiet. Quiet. Quiet. She had to think. Think.

  “I’ll take you there today. And when you come back, after all that rest and time to yourself, we’ll be happy. We’ll do great work together. After you get a good rest.”

  Bloom.

  “Please, Zée . . .”

  He would take her there. Leave her there. She’d be free of the buzzing. Free of the police. Free of Mark.

  “For me?” he begged.

  She nodded, then fell into a deep sleep.

  When Mark told Bill what had happened, Bill offered to pay the hospital fees, so Mark borrowed his friend Norm Gould’s truck and drove Alizée to Bloom that very afternoon. He was afraid she’d change her mind if they didn’t go immediately.

  He kept shooting glances at her as he navigated the barren hills pimpled with stalks of skeletal trees. The sky spit sleet, and the roads were treacherous, but it was the pale, silent girl in the seat next to him who terrified him. He’d watched her rapid-fire changes in just the past few hours: the childish avoidance strategies, the bravado, the distortions of reality, the confusion, the paranoia. And then, suddenly, acquiescence. He didn’t have any idea what might be next.

  Lee had told him that when she went to the warehouse that morning, she’d found Light in America in shreds. During the night, maybe at the same time Alizée’s building was burning, someone had broken into the warehouse and slashed the mural into hundreds and hundreds of narrow strips. Nothing else had been touched.

  Light in America must have been mistaken for Montage, and Louise Bothwell was lucky he was too concerned with Alizée to contend with her at the moment. But contend he would. He didn’t mention any of this to Alizée. If she found out she had indeed been targeted, she’d feel vindicated and refuse to go to Bloom. And targeted or not, she clearly needed help.

  For the moment, she was calm, but it was most likely a wafer-thin veneer. She stared straight ahead, her eyes focused on the road, hardly blinking. Mute. But her breathing was even, and she didn’t appear distressed. He hoped it would last until he got her safely to the sanatorium.

  And it did. Strangely so. When they pulled into the circle in front of the palatial building, Alizée looked at it with little interest. He helped her out of the car and, an arm around her shoulders, guided her into the spacious rotunda. Again, she appeared indifferent, and he steered her toward a desk at the back of the chamber where a receptionist sat.

  He explained that he’d called earlier, that they were expected, and she escorted them to a small room whose walls could barely contain a metal desk and two chairs. “Please take a seat,” she said. ”Someone will be with you shortly.”

  Mark looked pointedly from the receptionist to Alizée. “As quickly as possible would be best.”

  She nodded and made sure the door was securely latched behind her.

  Alizée sat with her hands folded on her lap, as if at a station waiting for a train. Mark wondered if this was yet another explosion, the reverse of the others, turned inward instead of outward.

  A matronly nurse in a uniform stretched tightly across her large bosom bustled into the room. She introduced herself as Mrs. Delahanty, knelt next to Alizée’s chair, and waited for Alizée to make reluctant eye contact. “We’re going to take good care of you, Miss Benoit,” she said in a respectful yet soothing voice. “You did a brave thing, coming here, and I promise we’ll help you get better.”

  Alizée smiled slightly at the nurse, the first smile Mark had seen in days. He felt a stab of jealousy that this stranger had a greater capacity to reach Alizée than he did.

  Still kneeling, Mrs. Delahanty leaned across the desk and slid a piece of paper, along with a pen, in front of Alizée. “This says that you’re voluntarily committing yourself to Bloom Sanatorium for a period of three months. Although by law we can’t require this for a voluntary commitment, we ask that you remain here for that entire time, accept our treatment protocol, and”—she glanced at Mark—“have no visitors until the three months is up.”

  “What?” Mark exploded. “That’s unacceptable. She needs to see me before that. I’m her fiancé.”

  “Do you agree to these conditions?” she asked Alizée.

  “But I can leave earlier if I want to,” Alizée said, for a moment sounding like her old self.

  “As I said before, you may.” The nurse brushed back a curl that had fallen in Alizée’s eye. “But we don’t recommend it. We’ve found that it’s best for our patients to stay with us for the full three months—if not longer.” Mrs. Delahanty checked the calendar on the wall behind her. “That will be until the end of March. Are you willing to give it a try?”

  Alizée took the pen and signed her name.

  At first Mark was filled with relief, but then he noticed the gleam in Alizée’s eye. She looked pleased with herself, a completely inappropriate response to the circumstances. He tried to console himself with the thought that this confirmed his decision to bring her here. But it didn’t make him feel any better.

  49

  DANIELLE, 2015

  I’m not sure how long I sat on that bench at Mémorial de la Shoah, but it was quite a while. When I’d cried my last tear, a good-sized mass of damp tissues was nested in my palm. I found a trash can and made my way back to the courtyard. I needed to know who had survived and who hadn’t. I needed to know if Alizée was on the list. I took a deep breath and searched out Benoit on the Wall of Names.

  There was Émile, Monsieur Benoit Émile né(e) le 07/12/1863 à Marseille déporté(e) par le convoi n 64 le 07/12/1943 à Auschwitz.

  There was Rosalie, Madame Benoit Rosalie né(e) le 06/05/1869 à Saint Avold déporté(e) par le convoi n 64 le 31/07/44 à Auschwitz.

  There was Adrian, Edouard, Jean, Chantal, Martel, Alain, Joseph, Rivka, Estella, and Arnold. Edouard and Chantal were born in Arles, he in 1896, she in 1900. Alain, also of Arles, born 1926. Edouard was deported in 1942, Chantal and Alain in 1944, all three on convoys headed for Auschwitz.

  These must be Alizée’s aunt and uncle, her cousin. My aunt and uncle, my cousin. A corkscrew of pain twisted inside me, and I pres
sed my hands to the carved letters, as if the letters were the people, my people. I wanted to touch them, to hold them, to let them know that something of them still survived. My DNA ached, and a sob ripped from my chest.

  As I’d expected, both feared and hoped, there was no Alizée.

  I didn’t want to go to Drancy. My visit to the Holocaust Memorial the day before had been crushing, to say the least, and I wasn’t looking forward to that kind of experience again. But Alizée’s uncle had been imprisoned there, Grand-père, too. Perhaps Chantal and Alain, at least for a short time. So I had to go. Maybe I’d find more there than a few tragic lines carved into marble.

  The town is northeast of Paris, outside the périphérique, the beltway surrounding the city. I thought about taking a taxi, but even with Grand’s money, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The bellman directed me to an RER station called Châtelet–Les Halles, promising a commuter train would get me there in less than a half hour. Disappointingly fast. I climbed into a car, hoping for traffic, perhaps an accident—in which no one was hurt—but in the way these things happen, because I didn’t want to get there, we arrived in what felt like a nanosecond. The good news was that I had to take a bus to reach the museum.

  Unfortunately, the bus was waiting and that trip was also quick. After a short drive through a series of nondescript streets lined by nondescript buildings, we pulled up to the memorial, which appeared to be an apartment building. Excessively nondescript. I double-checked with the driver, who assured me I was in the right place and pointed to three sculptures atop a small rise to the side of the building. Apparently the camp had been an apartment complex before it became a deportation center and now was an apartment complex again. That creeped me out.

  I climbed toward the sculptures, behind which steps led down to a forty-foot section of railroad track and a lone boxcar. The central sculpture was a carving of intertwined people, embodying both suffering and dignity; the outer sculptures symbolized the doors of death. After all the emotion of the day before, this left me strangely cold. I walked down the steps and along the shortened piece of track, stopping before the boxcar. Two signs were painted on it: chevaux 8 and Hommes 40. Eight horses. Forty men. Except that a flyer explained that this car regularly carried groups of four hundred to the camps in Poland and Germany.

  Inside the boxcar was a small museum. Very small. A smattering of photographs, a few texts, inexpertly matted and taped to freestanding walls. No specific information on the individuals who’d come through here, who died here, or who died on the next lap of the journey. Oncle Edouard, Tante Chantal, Cousin Alain. But for a split-second decision and a bit of luck, Grand-père. Four hundred people in this tiny space? The walls squeezed in on me, the low ceiling dropped. I rushed outside.

  In front of me was a street so commonplace that if it weren’t for the signs I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as French. Small stores and houses, working-class people living their everyday lives just as they do all over the Western world. I turned my back on the boxcar and crossed over to the ordinary, stepping into the present, hoping to put the past behind me.

  But that wasn’t possible. As I walked I found myself wondering when I looked into the creased face of an elderly woman if she’d lived in Drancy then. If she’d condoned what was happening in her hometown. Stood by and said nothing. Maybe even helped.

  I headed toward the bus stop, passing tired shops and empty storefronts, kicking small stones on the crumbling sidewalk, the late afternoon shadows flitting like lost wraiths, ghosts walking along with me. In the streets. In the museum. In the boxcar. Permanent specters caught in a netherworld of apathy and cruelty. There would be no closure for them, none for Alizée, none for me.

  The Benoits had been murdered at Auschwitz, and Alizée had disappeared, as they say, without a trace. All that was left of her life were two paintings and a handful of mismatched canvas squares. It was all so unbearably sad.

  The weight of all I’d seen pressed down on me, like the roof of the boxcar, stealing my breath. I had my meeting with Jordan tomorrow, but if he didn’t have anything on the squares there was no point in staying. I had no stomach for sightseeing. I wanted to go home.

  50

  MARK & LEE, 1941

  It had been a difficult three months for Mark. He spent January drinking heavily. February was consumed by fear that taking Alizée to Bloom had been a horrible mistake—and drinking more heavily. Much of March was lost to this continuing fog of self-reproach, partially caused by, and resulting in, drinking even more heavily.

  But that was all behind him now. He’d gone cold turkey a week ago, been to the barber, and bought a new shirt. He was on his way to Bloom to see Alizée, hopeful he would be bringing her home with him this very afternoon, that by tomorrow they’d finally be able to start their life together.

  As he drove out of the city and into the hills, it struck him that this trip was a complete turnaround from the last time he’d traveled these roads, the catatonic Alizée at his side. Then, the weather, which had been cold, dark, and hissing sleet, had mirrored their disheartened state. Today, the red fuzz of leaves ready to unfurl softened the edges of the tree branches, promising more forgiving days ahead.

  Although the hospital refused to provide patient information over the telephone, Mark was guardedly optimistic that Alizée would be well enough to be discharged. She’d been worn down by work and worry—not to mention the fire—and twelve weeks away from these pressures were sure to have built up her strength. That along with three balanced meals a day and lots of sleep. It wasn’t as if she had an actual disease. Just a little breakdown in the face of extreme strain.

  He couldn’t wait to see her, to touch her, to kiss her, and when he pulled into the circular drive in front of the sanatorium, he was elated. All winter, everything had been so bleak, but now as the warm rays of early spring sun tickled his shoulders, he felt renewed along with the grass and trees. He sauntered up to the desk in the rotunda and smiled at the receptionist, who had the look of an old nun who’d witnessed too much in her years. “I’m here to see Alizée Benoit,” he announced.

  She nodded crisply and ran the back end of her pencil down a list of names, frowned, and did it again. She looked over the narrow rims of her glasses at him. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think that will be possible. Her name isn’t on today’s register.”

  “That can’t be right.” Mark waved his hand, indicating the room thronging with people in street clothes. “It’s visiting day, right?”

  “Yes,” the receptionist said carefully. “But not all patients are cleared for visitors.”

  A knot began to take hold in his stomach. “Please check again. She’s been here for three months, and I was told that after that time I’d be able to see her.”

  She did as he asked, but he could tell she wasn’t actually reading the names. “She’s not on here, and I don’t have any more information for you.”

  “Is there someone else I can speak to?” He drew himself up to his full height, aware his size could be intimidating, especially to a diminutive older woman. “Someone with more information?”

  The receptionist was unfazed. She shrugged and told him she would get Miss Horning, the head nurse.

  Mark paced the rotunda. It was some kind of mistake, a clerical error easily made in a place with hundreds of patients. It was nothing. It would be cleared up. But as the minutes dragged on, his apprehension grew. He rubbed his sweaty hands together and glared at the patients, some in pajamas and slippers, crisscrossing the marble floor chatting with or ignoring their loved ones. Why did they get to be together? Why wasn’t he with his loved one?

  An efficient-looking nurse bustled into the room and introduced herself as Miss Horning. “You are Mr. Rothko?” she asked. When he nodded, she said, “Please come to my office and I’ll see about your patient.”

  “Why isn’t her name on the list? Alizée Benoit. I was told she could have visitors after three months. She came here
December 18.”

  “Frankly, I have no idea,” Miss Horning said. “I can’t tell you anything until I review her files. She’s not one of my patients.”

  Mark grudgingly followed her into an office so fastidiously neat that it made him even more uncomfortable than he already was.

  “Benoit, you say?” she asked as she opened a file drawer. “B-e-n . . . ?”

  “O-i-t.”

  Miss Horning pulled out a file, scanned it, then closed it. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rothko, but she’s gone.”

  “Gone?” It felt as if every bone in his body had turned into icy liquid. He forced himself to remain upright as his brain attempted to grapple with what he was hearing. It couldn’t be, not his Alizée. “She’s . . . she’s dead?” he whispered.

  “No, no,” Miss Horning said quickly. “She’s not dead. She’s just not here.”

  Now he was completely confused. “Not here?”

  “She signed herself out two days after she was admitted.”

  “The last time I talked to him was on Monday,” Lee told the group nursing their beers at the Jumble Shop. It was Thursday. “Has anyone seen him since then?”

  “I went back to the apartment a couple of days ago to get some clothes,” Phil said. “He was passed out. Lots of whiskey bottles and beer cans. The place smelled like a garbage dump and didn’t look much better. Neither did he.”

  “This isn’t exactly what we signed on for,” Grant groused. “I can’t stay with Doris much longer. She threatened to stick a knife in me yesterday.” Doris was his sister. She had three kids, a husband in the navy and a two-room apartment.

  Ever since he’d returned from Bloom without Alizée, Mark had been flying into rages at no apparent provocation and then, just as abruptly, spending days ensconced on the couch in his apartment, sometimes sleeping for twenty hours at a stretch, other times staring dully at the ceiling for similar amounts of time. He’d threatened both Phil and Grant and had punched Phil in the face when he asked for a swig of his whiskey. It got so bad that Phil and Grant temporarily moved in with family because they were afraid of him but couldn’t bring themselves to kick him out.