The Witness Tree

by Brendan Howley

  They sat in silence as the train thundered on, westward toward Buffalo and the run-up to the Great Lakes and the Midwest’s wide-open spaces.

  “Here’s the guts of it, Ellie,” Allen said finally. “The intelligence game gets in your blood. You live in a different way, underneath the skin of everyday life, where the secrets are.”

  “You know Washington …” Eleanor left the rest unsaid.

  “Forget it. The State Department hasn’t got a plugged nickel for political intelligence, here or overseas. The readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal know more about what’s going on in Germany or Soviet Russia than State. You’d be amazed. And don’t even talk to me about the military.”

  The snifters arrived. “A toast, then. To spies everywhere, my brother included.”

  “To spies everywhere. And ex-spies. Me included.”

  But Allen was looking over her shoulder again: enter Monsignor Sommer. Above his dog collar his face wore a hiker’s tan, shiny and brown as a fresh-minted penny. He held a hefty stack of documents. A working dinner with the padre-banker, Eleanor thought as she caught the name on the file tab in Sommer’s fine cursive.

  Cloaking, she glimpsed as Sommer took her hand, client memorandum / John Foster Dulles. A good thick file, Eleanor noted, and sown from top to bottom with the strips of yellow paper the cleric-banker used for bookmarks. A good thick file.

  Misha Resnikoff’s personal archive

  From the desk of James Kronthal

  SS Kungsholm

  April 16 1937

  Dear Misha

  Good to hear from you. I’m still rowing—you? Your letter reached me in Stockholm—talk about ships in the night! Am just returning to New York myself. As a matter of fact I do know Foster Dulles from my family’s business in Germany and in any case Eleanor went to Bryn Mawr—and I know plenty of that crowd. I’ll do what I can to set something up for you. And I could intro you to Garbo—she’s two decks up, with the VIPs …

  Jim

  ACT THREE

  Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.

  CHARLES LAMB

  XXII

  NEW YORK

  AUGUST 1938

  The auction house sweltered in the shimmering heat trickling in from Fifty-seventh Street through the open transoms of Lorber and Sons. Beneath a high tin ceiling, a crowd of art lovers pressed close to the austere rows of Old Dutch Masters paintings and drawings. Eleanor dabbed the back of her neck with her handkerchief and nudged her glasses back into place on her slippery nose. The drawings were behind glass, cool in repose beneath the gleaming smoothness. One particular piece held her, a graceful line drawing, white pastel pencil on red chalk, beautifully done, opal and dark and rich red.

  Eleanor, Sophie, and Grace escorted Grace’s formidable mother, who also considered the drawing at length, Lorber catalog in hand. Mrs. Whyte, a great wintry beauty in her day, resembled the doomed Russian empress Alexandra. Barely five feet tall, her slim swimmer’s body now bent with age, she suffered no fools, and bore a flinty view of males in general, having been spectacularly deceived by several, notably the errant ex-husband who “helped give the world Grace.”

  “Why, I do like that one, Grace,” Mrs. Whyte said in her precise Philadelphia accent. “That background—I cannot divine it.”

  “The catalog says it’s Christ and Mary Magdalene,” Grace said.

  Eleanor, who was closest, read the tiny note pinned to the wall below the drawing. “It’s chalk and pastel, Mrs. Whyte. Red chalk on dark blue rag paper, says here.”

  “It’s a treat, isn’t it, this? Lovely light, very fast work. Yes, indeed,” she observed, leaning in closer, her hawklike reflection filling the glass.

  A tall, crisp gentleman in white shirt and suspenders approached, his linen trousers rustling in the heat. “May I be of assistance, ma’am? I can see you’re a fellow enthusiast.”

  Mrs. Whyte gave him a once-over, replying after a frosty pause: “And you are?”

  “James Kronthal. I’m a graduate student at Yale in art history—I’m in no way connected with the auction or these drawings, ma’am. However, I do know a little about Rembrandt drawings, if I may.”

  Mrs. Whyte didn’t offer her hand. Eleanor gathered she knew a tout when she’d spotted one. “Own any of these, do you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do have a small chalk drawing,” Kronthal replied politely. “I love the light. Like this one.”

  “What did you pay for it?”

  Grace slipped between them. “Forgive my mother, Mr. Kronthal. She’s an enthusiastic shopper, as art lovers go. Grace Dunlop, how do you do? This is my friend Eleanor Dulles, of the Watertown Dulleses, and her daughter, Sophie Charlotte. And my mother, Sarah Louise Whyte, of the Boston Whytes, lately of Philadelphia.”

  “James Kronthal, Philadelphia, late of Frankfurt, Germany, where I help run the family bank.”

  “A pleasure, I’m sure, Mr. Kronthal,” Grace replied, laughing, “to know someone intimately acquainted with a bank.”

  “Never you mind, Grace.” Mrs. Whyte continued where she’d left off: “What did you pay, Mr. Kronthal?” She paused. “That a German name?”

  “It is, ma’am, but we’re a Philadelphia family now. I paid six hundred marks, at an auction in Germany some time ago.”

  “What’s that in dollars?” Mrs. Whyte demanded, staring up at the much-taller Kronthal.

  “These days, about one hundred and seventy-five dollars. More or less. A fair price, but not a bargain. There are quite a few Rembrandt copies around, you see. You have to be careful. In my spare time I’ve bought and sold a few, as favors to friends and relations.”

  Something about this satisfied Mrs. Whyte. “What do you make of this one? I rather like it.”

  “It’s a very pretty little picture indeed, Mrs. Whyte.” Kronthal moved closer to the drawing as he spoke, paying his respects before consulting its description. “The catalogue raisonné refers to the last two owners. To my mind they are both reputable collectors. But it is for sale.”

  “Perhaps they need the cash,” Mrs. Whyte said, looking very hard at the drawing.

  “That’s entirely possible, Mrs. Whyte,” Kronthal replied. “May I make a suggestion?”

  Little Sophie tugged at Eleanor’s sleeve. “Mommy, Mommy … skater, there!”

  “Yes, dear. Certainly. Excuse us,” Eleanor said, leading Sophie through the throng of art lovers to a row of cool white statues standing against the far wall.

  “You may make your suggestion, Mr. Kronthal. No guarantee I’ll follow your advice. I’ve some horse sense and we’ve just met.”

  “Mother,” Grace suggested, “he’s only trying to help.”

  Mrs. Whyte gave her daughter the benefit of a dazzlingly insincere smile. “Grace, dear, help Eleanor show Sophie the statues, would you? I’m trying to buy a picture here.”

  Eleanor’s Washington confrontation with the unfortunate Neimanns had a silver lining—the revival of her Bryn Mawr friendship with Marta Bravo de Urquía. Marta, Bryn Mawr ’17, a sculpted Argentine brunette and heiress to a now-shattered Buenos Aires meatpacking fortune, had managed to string a series of visas together, reaching the oasis of New York with her husband, Gunter, a slim fellow with a fine profile and goatee.

  Gunter studied the other café goers in the tiny Lorber bar with a dispassionate boulevardier’s eye. The Neimanns were Eleanor’s guests at the auction, their first breath of New York culture after she’d arranged their hotel. In his heyday, Gunter, nephew of Solomon and Beate, was one of the most respected economists in Central Europe. In the Germany he’d just fled via Argentina, as both a Jew and an eminent socialist, Neimann was a marked man twice over. Marta had already moved into the auction goers, a remarkable beauty even amongst the Manhattan elite.

  “Marta is keen to buy something,” Gunter was saying, “but there are adjustments, you know? So different, America. A madhouse of new things—perhaps I am too old for your country. I look forward to Switzerland, on
ce our visas are in order. So again, I say thank you, darling Eleanor.” Neimann embraced her, his cheek scented with bay rum. Behind his spectacles the eyes were mocking, melancholy. “Perhaps we shall see Allen here?”

  “No, he’s stuck in an arms conference in Washington, Gunter.”

  Somewhere near, a waiter dropped a glass. Neimann flinched, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. “Perhaps better to learn elsewhere about this manhattan cocktail, I think.”

  “It’s only the bar of an auction house, Gunter,” Eleanor warned. “We’ll see about an American beer, all right?”

  “Coffee, I think. About this American beer I know,” Neimann said, making a philosophical tipping motion with his open palm. “Moment. I must see for Marta.” He worked his formal way through the auction goers, New Yorkers and out-of-towners milling about most un-Teutonically, Gunter’s first taste of American casualness.

  Eleanor and the Neimanns had wandered the Rembrandt oils with Sophie in tow while Mrs. Whyte towed Kronthal around the Dutchman’s sketchworks. The Neimanns had now resigned themselves to paper cups full of Nescafé at a small table near the bar. Eleanor joined them, Sophie on her lap.

  “Not coffee as we know it,” Gunter observed, “eh, liebchen?”

  Marta delicately moved a wooden stick in her cup. “I’ve had worse, dear. Strong coffee you get from the Italians here. The rest of America, they drink this watery stuff.”

  “You were saying about the four-year plan?” Eleanor prompted.

  “Madness!” Gunter barked, blinking behind his spectacles. “The army cannot spend all the money! Autobahn here, autobahn there—it is no economy, not real products for real prices. And soon the inflation! But Herr und Frau Schmidt cannot see this.”

  Eleanor nodded her agreement.

  “The regulations! Incredible. The Nazis send auditors to a Fabrik. If they find one error, one small error in the accounts: one million marks. This is the fine. No one complains. All are sick with the terror or blind or Nazi themselves, Agenten.”

  Marta put her hand over her husband’s. “You know from Aunt Beate and Uncle Solomon—there’s almost nothing left of public life for us Jews, Ellie. The shops, the universities, the courts, the hospitals, all banned. Even the garment business, Judenrein. You can’t buy a decent dress unless you have your own privat Jude, a Jewish designer the Party women use. It’s crazy. Want an apartment? Denounce a Jew. Or blackmail him. Or have him beaten. Completely, completely criminal.”

  “I can’t believe it’s become so awful so fast,” Eleanor said.

  Gunter snatched a handful of air and closed his fist around it. “Terror, my dear Eleanor, requires a certain tempo. Everything must be done quickly, with violence, before people can think.” He banged the table. “And the radio, on always. Always the radio. You know what the German businessmen call themselves now?” Neimann demanded, his voice peaking. “Weisse-Juden: the white Jews. They know they are next.” He stared at Eleanor, his spoon sinking into his cold coffee. “That, I tell you as an economist, is the state of affairs in the Third Reich.”

  Gunter did not speak again for the balance of the auction, a once-made man calculating how much he’d lost, wrapped in an exile’s silence.

  The Lorber auctioneer drew breath for the finale, his face glistening in the heat. “Further bids to $920? Going twice! Sold! Lot 441, ‘Haarlem field from the south,’ a sketch in oils, sold to number 236, the lady in the fourth row, for $915. That is the last of the Rembrandt oil sketches, ladies and gentlemen, and a good time to take a short break. Coffee and canapés in the south gallery hallway. Three-fifteen sharp for the oils.”

  “Well done, Mrs. Whyte,” Kronthal enthused over the buzz of conversation. “At a very good price, too.”

  “Lovely lines, I must say,” Marta added. “It’s most attractive.”

  “I’m much obliged for your assistance, Mr. Kronthal,” Mrs. Whyte said. “Come, let’s take a close look.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kronthal,” Grace interposed. “You’re very kind.”

  Kronthal gave Grace a wink over Mrs. Whyte’s head. “Always a pleasure to see a fine lady happy, Miss Dunlop.” And he led a very pleased Mrs. Whyte away to the frames expert, a round little man in a toupee holding court for a platoon of lady art enthusiasts near the gallery doorway.

  “Well, that was easy,” Grace said to Eleanor. “Thank God for our new friend. Last art auction Mother went to, she brought the house down when she didn’t care for the manners of one of her competitors for a rather good Louis Quinze chair.”

  “Your mother is utterly charming, Grace,” Marta said. “I think she’s wonderful. Ellie, we must go. Gunter has to appear at the Swiss consulate this afternoon for our visas.”

  Eleanor replied with a goodbye kiss. “Auf Wiedersehen, dear Neimanns,” chimed Grace as Marta led the silent Gunter away, Frau Neimann’s sinuous departure causing more than a few husbands to gaze wistfully.

  “Did you enjoy yourself, Sophie, darling?” Eleanor asked.

  “Yes,” Sophie replied, “the bang with the hammer, Mommy.”

  “Grace! Come!” Mrs. Whyte hove at them from across the auction floor, waggling her striped parasol aloft.

  “Just a moment, Ellie,” Grace stage-whispered. “I’ve an idea: we can walk to the Russian Tea Room, recover from all the excitement. I need some fresh air.”

  “Grace! Come!” Mrs. Whyte repeated. Grace went. Eleanor and Sophie bought five ices from the buffet while Grace fenced with the redoubtable Mrs. Whyte in the cloakroom.

  A truce ensued and Grace returned, much amused. “Well, will wonders ever cease, Eleanor Dulles. Mother and Mr. Kronthal think we should go to a nightclub down in Greenwich Village. A friend of Mr. Kronthal’s runs the place and it’s apparently quite an adventure. Look, Bert’s at a rally tonight across the river and Mother’s never been to such a place. Let’s all go.”

  “That sounds like a hoot. Why not? Sophie, do you still want to have a visit with Ruthie Shipley?”

  Sophie skipped and shouted: “Oh, yes, tree house at Ruthie’s house!”

  A wave of overheated auction goers pressed toward the street door.

  “Our new friend can’t remember the name of the place, but tell the cabbie Seventh Avenue South,” Grace said, “off Waverly Place. Used to be a speakeasy called the Golden Triangle—jazz, alcohol, and perdition, Ellie! Quarter to eight, darling!”

  Just before eight, Eleanor arrived at the nondescript wooden doorway of a Greenwich Village basement joint, eyeing the pitched wooden stairs down to the cellar. Hazarding those, she entered bedlam—what the Parisians call a boîte, she thought to herself. She took in the dimly lit claustrophobic room, all fire-engine red: red carpet, red walls, rickety third-hand wooden chairs, and a string of odd paintings that jarred the eye. A man in a bad suit and an open-necked shirt leapt to his feet and began shouting, inspiring a fractured argument with a clearly inebriated woman about the future of the female working class.

  Beyond this slanging match, Eleanor spotted Mrs. Whyte, Kronthal, and Grace seated on a tired banquette facing one side of the stage, grinning at the proceedings. Onstage, a black pianist and a young white cornet player readied themselves to play, ignoring the catcalls and the shouted poetry.

  The pianist produced a fragment of a melody, then stopped working the upright’s battered keys, waiting for the horn player to stop pacing the tiny stage. With a shake of his head the piano player laid down a thumping stride line which seated the bar stool poet. The horn player joined in, barely audible over the howls of mock applause for the abashed poet.

  Eleanor, grinning now herself, took a seat next to Kronthal. “Glad you found the place,” he called as she bent close to hear.

  “What is it I’ve found, actually?”

  “It’s the Village’s hot spot these days. Called the Vanguard,” Kronthal said, beaming at the chaos of the place: several men were arguing loudly at the bar about Henry Ford, and a pair of large women in high heels had paired
off at the far end of the room, teaching one another, improbably, how to belly dance to the jazz.

  “They do this every night?” Eleanor asked.

  “Sometimes there’s cabaret.”

  “As if this weren’t,” Eleanor called out.

  Kronthal laughed. “I’ve ordered us a round of manhattans.” A short man in a gray suit had a box of liquor beneath his table and a cocktail mix kit in the open suitcase on the chair next to him. He waited with the patience of a shoeshine man, smoking as he watched the musicians. “That’s about all that guy over there makes. They don’t have a liquor license,” Kronthal observed, “so we improvise.”

  “That’s fine. Whatever you’re having.” Eleanor was thrilled with the place; she was fascinated by the curly-haired young horn player working his way through the chorus of Gershwin’s “Love Walked In,” breaking out of the melody and improvising, stumbling with an idea right at the end of his solo but winning a good round of applause.

  The young pianist then cut his colleague dead, working up two beautiful choruses, fresh and full, like nothing Eleanor had ever heard before, and brought the ballad home with an innocent flourish. The horn player leant shyly over the tiny microphone and offered their thanks before he stepped down and passed Eleanor’s table on his way to the door.

  “Say, I know that fellow. Just a second.” Kronthal jumped up and followed him. The pianist stayed onstage, playing a fast tune Eleanor hadn’t heard, a jarring, powerful blues that quieted the place entirely.

  “That’s wonderful piano playing that colored boy’s doing,” Mrs. Whyte said. She hummed along, captivated. “That’s Artie Shaw. Beautiful.”

  “Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks, Ellie. Grand, isn’t it?” Grace said, swirling her manhattan with a pearl hat pin.

  “Never seen anything like it.”

  The pianist let his melody drift into the tiny club, into a mesmerized silence. Grace nudged Eleanor. “Who’s Jim’s new friend?” Eleanor could barely make out the horn player sitting with Jim in the dark and the smoke and the red light.