by Peter Golden
“What can’t you stand, Elana?”
Loud enough to attract the attention of the families around them, she replied, “The cages. The animals in the cages. I can’t stand it!”
Theodor placed his hand on his wife’s shoulder to calm her, but she burst into tears and hurried back toward the gate. Julian looked at his father.
“Mother will be fine. She needs her nap. Let’s go for Kaffee und Kuchen.”
At the Romanisches Café, Theodor had coffee and a cherry streusel tart, and Julian a glass of milk and a slice of Black Forest cake. His father stared at the table as he ate and drank.
“What’s wrong with Mother?” Julian asked, and it was then, as Theodor raised his head, that Julian saw the tears running down into his beard.
“I wish—” his father said. “I wish I knew.”
Now, as Julian turned over on the bed and his own tears wet the pillowcase, he knew that his sorrow had another cause, perhaps a deeper one than the loss of his mother. When Julian started working for Abe as a teenager, he’d daydreamed of a better future when he would be rich and married with children of his own, and he and his parents would get together and love each other as families are supposed to. For the Roses, that future was permanently out of reach, and letting go of his daydream was as difficult for Julian as reconciling himself to the fact that his mother was gone.
“Bye, Mama,” Julian said, and his voice sounded strange in the empty room.
In Nuremberg, Julian attempted to put Abe’s advice into practice by dating a British translator. She was pleasant company, but he hoped that Kendall would show up to photograph the trials. She never did, and the closest Julian got to her was reading her latest book, Here & There, which alternated between her photos of the dead and nearly dead at the Ohrdruf concentration camp, and pictures, originally published in newspapers, of lynchings across the South. The captions were the only text: the layout was the message—that is, until the final chapter, which covered the short life of Derrick Larkin along with Kendall’s photos of his death.
The reviews Julian saw were terrible. The critic in the London Observer declared that it was manipulative of Miss Wakefield to equate the sporadic tragedies of lynching with assembly-line slaughter; and the critic in the Herald Tribune opined that Here & There was not a view of the war that Americans deserved and recommended the more rounded vision in photographer Margaret Bourke-White’s Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly. Julian was tempted to write Kendall that he had liked her book, but in the acknowledgments she had thanked Simon Foxe for assembling the newspaper photographs, and Julian assumed that she was involved with him.
Julian remained in Germany through the fall and a round of executions. In his dreams, the dead asked him if he hadn’t earned a place on the scaffold. He refused to answer.
Returning to South Orange didn’t cure Julian’s insomnia, but his exhaustion churned itself into a shopping mania, which was how he became one of the largest holders of undeveloped land in New Jersey.
“You’re worse than a gold digger with a charge account,” Eddie said.
“I’m gonna build those garden apartments, and you’re getting a piece.”
“I ain’t got the scratch.”
“The feds’ll chase Abe till he keels over or they throw him in prison. I’d like to keep you around.”
“I’m grateful for you cutting me in. But boyo, are you all right?”
“No.”
“Fiona’s got girlfriends. You could try a date.”
“I have business in Florida, and I’m going to see my father.”
In Miami Beach, Julian arranged to sell his hotel. He hated being there without Kendall, and with the Beach a popular tourist destination again, he would earn a nice buck on the sale. After meeting with the Realtor, Julian called Theodor. He hadn’t spoken to him since Nuremberg. They had exchanged two letters, Julian asking how his father was getting along and recounting the bizarre experience of listening to Nazi killers explain their innocence; and Theodor replying that he was adjusting to living without Elana and scrawling a quote from the writer, Mary Shelley, across the top of both letters: “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.”
“How are you?” Julian said, when Theodor answered.
“Gut, danke.” Julian thought that his father must be through the worst of his grief because he was speaking to him in German.
Julian asked if he wanted to have dinner. “Ich bin beschäftigt,” Theodor said, and explained that he was writing a series of lectures on Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise that he had been invited to deliver at Morehouse College in Atlanta next week.
Julian told himself that he shouldn’t be surprised—or hurt—that Theodor claimed he was too busy to meet him, but he was. They said good-bye, and Julian mixed a double martini, with no olives to distract him, and halfway to the bottom of the glass, he recalled standing in the kitchen with his mother, helping her stuff a chicken with apples and walnuts, and Elana looked up from the pan and spoke to the wall over the stove: “If your father’s writing and has an audience to admire him, he doesn’t need me any more than my parents did,” and before Julian could comfort her, Elana went back to work on the chicken.
The phone rang, and Julian hoped that his father had changed his mind, but it was his secretary. There were several messages, she said, nothing pressing. A General Donovan had called to see if Julian wanted to have lunch. Wild Bill was back at his Wall Street law firm, and Julian figured he was trolling for clients, so he asked his secretary to give him the number, his feelings of rejection mollified by the fact that somebody wanted to eat with him.
* * *
* * *
PART V
* * *
* * *
Chapter 39
PARIS
MAY 19, 1947
Music was floating up from the Seine, and the afternoon light shining on the couples jitterbugging below was as thick and golden as custard. The quartet had set up on a barge moored against the quay, and from where Julian stood above the stone stairway that led down to the river, he saw Otis at the piano, hammering out “Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie,” bouncing around on the bench like a puppet with a madman yanking his strings. The drummer and bassist couldn’t keep up with him, and the saxophonist arched so far backward as he wailed that it seemed his spine would snap. The dancers were white and Negro: ex-GIs in their khakis and Parisian girls in their vivid scarves, all of them gyrating with the exaggerated gestures of mimes, only faster, neckties swinging, skirts flouncing up and offering glimpses of thighs and lingerie, the giddy music transforming the ancient stones of the quay into the floor of the Savoy Ballroom.
At last, Julian saw Kendall under the linden trees. He couldn’t see her face because she was photographing the dancers. Her hair, still long, was tied behind her in a radiant wave. The music stopped, and the dancers clapped. Kendall lowered her camera. She was so beautiful it hurt to look at her. Going down the stairway, he concluded that showing up in Paris wasn’t the wisest move he’d ever made. To suppress his nervousness, Julian gazed out at the Seine.
“Jules! My man!”
Otis had seen him on the stairs, and when Julian reached the quay, Otis threw his arms around him. “Man,” Otis said, standing back and checking out Julian’s suit and wing tips. “We’re gonna have to frenchify your rags. Make you dans le vent.”
“I’m thirty-three. That’s not young enough to be ‘with it.’ ”
“It’s about style, baby, not time,” Otis said, patting his purple beret. “How you and Eddie makin’ it?”
“We saw Art Tatum at the Downbeat and we say he’s got nothing on you.”
Otis chuckled. “Didn’t know you boys gone deaf. What you doing in the City of Lights?”
“Yes, to what do we owe this pleasure?”
It was Kendall’s voice, behind him, and to Julian it was as poignant as hearing an old love song. He turned. She was thinner, there were lines around her eye
s, and the satchel she’d carried since college was on her shoulder. Julian hadn’t seen her since December 11, 1941, yet now, with her close enough to touch, he froze, and Kendall appeared equally flustered.
“Kiss already,” Otis said. “My break’s about done.”
They kissed on the lips. Julian would’ve been happy to let it go on for an hour or two, but Kendall pulled away, saying, “I have to get over to Deux Magots.”
Julian couldn’t tell whether Kendall was announcing that she had a date or suggesting that he come along. Otis settled it: “Go with her, Jules. I’ll catch up later.”
Kendall said, “You hate the Magots.”
“Yeah, but I love you two.”
As they climbed the stairway, Julian heard the quartet break into “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and he imagined dancing with Kendall, holding her hand, feeling her against him.
She said, “Mama wrote me about your mother. She was really broken up about losing her. I’m so sorry, Julian.”
“Thanks.” Across the Seine Julian could see the Louvre, a dull gold in the shadows. He said, “Why does Otis hate that café?”
“It’s a hangout for Sartre and les existentialists, and Otis says they’ll talk you stupid and don’t care none for the Lord.”
On the ship over to France, Julian had slogged through Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. It was fatter than the French-English dictionary he had to consult so frequently that a steward, a kindly older fellow from Avignon, offered to help translate. Julian tipped him for the offer and plodded on by himself, deciding that because the book was written in Nazi-occupied Paris, it was understandable that Sartre had declared man useless and existence nauseating. Still, his views struck Julian as nothing but nihilism spiffed up for a night on the town. Not that Julian believed God would get him out of any fix he was dumb enough to get himself into. Yet he was a great believer in being angry at God. For the war, the dead women and children especially, and for every horror he had to remember.
Kendall said, “You didn’t tell Otis why you’re here.”
“To open a boîte de nuit.”
“A nightclub?” she replied, as if he were joking. “Like Bogart in Casablanca?”
“Bogie’s was for gambling. Mine’s for music.”
“And that’s why you’re in Paris? For this nightclub?”
“And for this.” Julian took her grandfather’s Hamilton wristwatch from his pants pocket. “You told me to bring it back it you. When we were outside Crossroad Bar-B-Q.”
Kendall glanced down at the watch and sighed, a sound with more confusion in it than resignation. “I’ve been thinking about Grandpa Ezekiel lately.”
Julian wanted her to say that she had been thinking about him, which seemed so childish, he was chagrined that the thought had popped into his head.
“The crystal broke,” he said. “I had to replace it.”
Kendall ran a finger over the crystal and looked at Julian, studying him as if she were about to snap his picture, trying to discern the meaning embedded in the image.
Then she fastened the watch to her wrist and pecked Julian on the cheek.
Chapter 40
Salut, Kendall! Rejoignez-nous.”
The man who stood on the terrace of Les Deux Magots beckoning Kendall to join him and his companions had thinning blond hair and a cockeyed stare behind horn-rimmed glasses. He had spotted Kendall as she and Julian had come up Rue Bonaparte, then passed the people milling around the cobbled plaza of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, among the few sights that Julian remembered from his year in Paris as a child. He’d gone by the church with his father, who commented that the bones of the philosopher René Descartes were entombed inside while his skull was interred elsewhere, an illustration, Theodor said, of Descartes’s belief in the separation of mind and body. It was the one time that Julian could recall his father laughing.
“That’s Sartre,” Kendall said. “The woman next to him is his soul mate, Simone de Beauvoir.”
Kendall had to bend so Sartre could do the cheek-to-cheek kiss with her, but as he altered the Gallic ritual, copping a cheap feel by rubbing his hands along the sides of her black silk jacket, Julian noticed Simone, in a white shirt and a tie the same riveting sapphire as her eyes, glowering at Sartre.
Kendall introduced Julian to everyone as mon cher ami—my dear friend. That was a start, Julian thought. To demonstrate that he wasn’t a boorish American, Julian bowed slightly and, with his best French accent that still mangled the nasal vowels even though he’d spent eighteen months in France during the war, Julian said, “Bonsoir, je suis très heureux de faire votre connaissance.” Despite his saying good evening and that he was very happy to make their acquaintance, no one—not the publisher, Christian; nor the poet, Jacques; nor the novelist, essayist, and playwright, Samuel; nor Sarte nor Beauvoir appeared pleased to meet him. The first three men were too deep in conversation, and the two soul mates were glaring at each other.
Julian and Kendall sat, but before he could order, a waiter brought Kendall a bottle of muscadet and two glasses, and poured the wine for her to taste, and when she nodded her approval, he filled her glass and one for Julian.
“Merci, Albert,” she said to the waiter.
“You’re a regular?” Julian said.
“Sort of. I’m usually at La Palette. I’ll take you there”—she laughed, clearly skeptical—“if you’re not too busy with your boîte de nuit.” She raised her glass. “To your nightclub.”
The wine was cold and crisp and dry. Christian, the publisher, asked Kendall about some of her photographs, and they began to talk, and then she entered the conversation with the others, except for Beauvoir, who was in a tête-à-tête with a slender, sloe-eyed beauty. The table was like a stage in a theater-in-the-round, and men and women, most of them in their twenties, sat or stood close by their older heroes, drinking wine and smoking sharp-smelling Gauloises, the men in dark berets and sport coats that hadn’t been new before the war, the women in snug sweaters, short skirts, and colorful scarves.
Julian felt ignored by Kendall and thought that the chatter at the café would be as tedious as the babbling of the bohemians in the Village. He did find it comical that he kept hearing the term absurd spoken with the utmost solemnity—why be so solemn if everything was pointless? Yet he admired the young Parisians. They had either scrambled to survive the Occupation or fought with the Résistance against the Nazis and the Milice—the brutal French militia created by the Vichy government, the official French government established after Hitler had conquered France in 1940. Julian could only guess at the suffering these young men and women had endured, the loved ones who had been shot in the streets or tortured in the internment camps or sent to Auschwitz. And now, on top of that suffering, were the shortages. Fuel was scarce: on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Julian saw more bicycles than cars. Bread was rationed—a calamity, because the crusty baguettes were central to life in France—black-market prices for food were astronomical, and jobs were impossible to find.
Nonetheless, here they were, these spiffy Parisians, discussing philosophy, literature, art, and politics as if words could cure grief and quiet growling stomachs. Julian listened, not for meaning but for the delight of hearing native French speakers, which for him was like listening to Dizzy Gillespie and his bent trumpet brightening the air with starbursts of bebop.
The waiter replenished Kendall’s wine: it was her third glass.
Julian was hungry, and he ordered twenty-five grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a dozen bottles of wine. Albert, eyes bugging, said, “Pardon, monsieur?”
Albert’s hearing improved when Julian handed him a couple of hundred-dollar bills—almost twenty-four thousand francs, with France devaluing its postwar currency. Smirking, Kendall said, “The rich Americans take Paris.”
“I hate to eat alone. Besides, these kids won’t be insulted. From what they’re saying, they’re all Communists.”
The Communists had f
ought the Nazis, and these efforts, along with the shortages and their support for the beleaguered workers of France, had made the Parti Communiste Français a power in politics.
Kendall smiled at Julian with some of the warmth that he remembered. When the sandwiches and wine were brought, the young people hesitated, their expressions stuck between suspicious and resentful. Julian did a quick-and-dirty translation of Karl Marx into French and more or less proclaimed, “ ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ ”
That did the trick. They started to eat and drink. So did Sartre and his pals, save for Beauvoir, who was whispering with the girl, who seemed more beautiful the longer you looked at her, and Kendall, who was talking to the publisher again. On the boulevard, couples strolled in the spring evening, and the lights were on in the cafés with the red geraniums in the window boxes above the terraces.
“Café life’s the nuts, ain’t it?” Otis had come up behind Julian and sat next to him.
“Not bad,” Julian said, pouring Otis some wine. “And it’s good to see you recovered. Eddie says you wrote him you were wounded.”
“Burns on my legs. When Patton sent us to Vic-sur-Seille. Now I can do two things. Play the piano and drive a tank while folks try to blow me up.” Otis sipped the muscadet. “Surprised to see you, Jules.”
“I’m opening a jazz club.”
Otis grinned. “In Paris?”
“That funny?”
“No, baby. Paris swings.”