The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “And so to bed,” said Varian. But he made no move in that direction either.

  For a long moment they stood at the center of the hotel lobby, eyes averted. Grant felt for his cigarettes as though he hadn’t smoked the last one half an hour ago.

  “Perhaps I’ll sit down here for a while and look at the day’s papers,” Grant said finally, indicating the white settees. “I couldn’t read a word on the train.”

  “Goodnight, then,” Varian said brusquely. “See you in the morning.” And he turned and went upstairs, so as not to be accused of lingering.

  * * *

  ________

  The night offered little in the way of sleep. Even if the bed had been soft and the sound of waves against shore muted, even if a cold wind hadn’t thrown the shutter against the wall again and again, he could scarcely have closed his eyes: too much uncertainty, too much residual tension after a long tense day. It was hardly a comfort to hear Katznelson snoring on the other side of the wall, nor to hear, finally, the door of that room open and close, and the water clanking through the pipes as Grant prepared for bed.

  How many years had it been, he wondered, since the word Pendragon had flashed across his cortex? He blushed now at the thought of those evening lectures, Varian declaiming to a group of like-dressed and like-minded young men, a collection that often included Grant. Though they both lived at Gore Hall that year, the Pendragon felt more like home; the place had the reputation of being kind to their kind, whereas on school property one had always to be careful. It was preferable to conduct one’s private business in a place where one didn’t have to worry about who was watching. And in those days, Varian wanted to be watched. Grant, unlike Lincoln Kirstein, who always preferred to be the center of attention, didn’t mind letting Varian occupy the spotlight; on the contrary, if all eyes were on Varian, then Grant himself would attract little notice.

  If there had ever been a time when Varian hadn’t known Grant’s secret, it had been so brief as to seem negligible. He’d known Grant was half-Negro in the same way he’d known that Grant’s sexual tendencies ran along the lines of Varian’s own. Perhaps the same faculty he’d honed in scanning for the latter also delivered information of the former; it was nothing you’d have known right away. Like a quarter of their classmates, Grant was Jewish. His dark hair and lion-colored skin might easily be attributed to that fact. His eyes were that surprising color, an earthy gray that reflected light. He was what he was; he was what he presented himself to be.

  Except, of course, that he wasn’t. Over their time together, the details had emerged: His family was from Philadelphia, his mother from a prominent Jewish family that believed in the education of its daughters. Celia Schiffman, while taking her degree at Barnard, had wandered down to the Tenderloin District and to Marshall’s Hotel, where the best black musicians congregated and played. That was where she’d met Grant’s father. About the elder Grant the younger rarely spoke, but Varian knew he’d been a pianist, and a formidable one. He’d been classically trained, but his passion was for ragtime; that was what he played in those late-night sessions at Marshall’s. He and Celia were married at City Hall, against her family’s strenuous objection, and Grant had been born a year and a half later. The Schiffmans, particularly proud among the proud Jews of Philadelphia, let slip to their friends that their daughter had married a goy, but never that the goy was a schvartze; perhaps they prayed he’d vanish from Celia’s life before the truth could emerge. And in fact, some time before Grant’s second birthday, Clayton Grant had gone to Europe with a vaudeville outfit and had chosen to remain.

  Celia moved home to her parents’ house in Philadelphia, and Grant had been raised there. No one spoke of his father. As a child, Grant had only the vaguest idea that Clayton was a Negro, and that he was never to bring it up. He knew, too, that his father had been a musician, and that he’d gone away to Europe and hadn’t returned. When Grant hit elementary school, he started telling people that his father had been killed in the war, a lie his mother slapped out of him when it reached her ears. The sacrifice of the war dead was not something to be taken lightly. But it might as well have been true; years passed, and no word came from Europe. Grant seemed to revert entirely to Celia’s possession. She raised him as though he had no race but her own, and no one at Grant’s mostly Jewish elementary school thought to question his whiteness. His looks were an unremarkable variation on a familiar theme.

  Had his grandparents’ relation to Grant been different—had they met their returning daughter with fury or smug vindication instead of sympathy and dismay, and treated her offspring as a stranger instead of as a child of their own blood—he might have wondered more actively about his father’s people. But they treated him as their own, and he had a happy childhood under his grandparents’ roof. Instead of quashing his early musical talent because of its connection to his father, they nurtured it, engaging a certain young Mr. Weatherstone who had studied at the Royal Academy in London and had a talent for teaching young prodigies. They sent him to a prestigious Philadelphia preparatory school, one of the few that welcomed Jews, and they secured for him all the things—the dancing lessons and fine clothes and pine-shaded summer camps and gadgety toys—that came to other privileged young Jewish Philadelphians as a matter of course. They taught him, through persistent love, to see himself as inherently valuable.

  If Celia sometimes resented in her son a cast of eye or tilt of mouth that resembled his father’s, if she sometimes found it impossible to fix young Grant’s collar and tie his tie without being struck by the paralyzing memory of doing the same for Clayton, she didn’t let him know it, or not often. In receipt of her undivided attention, Grant was a happy child who returned happiness to his family. While Varian had spent his childhood either quitting or getting kicked out of schools, Grant had spent his becoming class president, winning statewide piano performance awards, and earning citizenship medals. No one had a more thoroughly decorated Boy Scout sash. And no one, Varian was certain, would have borne the burden of his merits with more demurrals, more natural grace.

  It had been a surprise to almost everyone—to Grant’s teachers, his mother, his grandparents, and his friends, if not to Mr. Weatherstone, who had continued as his piano teacher and musical mentor through Grant’s junior high and high school years—when, early in his senior year, Grant had decided not to pursue a degree in music, and chose instead to seek admission to Harvard. He would not be persuaded to reconsider. He’d seen a flaw in his own ability, he told his family, one that would keep him from becoming a solo performer; any other musical fate wasn’t to be borne. He couldn’t tell them, of course, that the flaw was located elsewhere than in his talent and preparation. Not in a million years could he reveal that he’d repaid his grandparents’ generosity and his mother’s sacrifices by falling in love with his mentor.

  It began, as Grant had told Varian all those years ago, with a kind of dawning physical awareness—a sense of Mr. Weatherstone, who had been a presence in Grant’s life long enough to render him as invisible as the furniture, coming slowly into focus; he smelled, Grant discovered, of sandalwood and mint; his hands on the keys were not just agile, but slender and strong. Grant had read enough of English literature to know that falling in love with one’s piano teacher was a terrible cliché; he was no better than an incidental character in an Austen novel. But that was what he’d done. For months he existed in a state of horrified, trembling anticipation—of what, he could scarcely imagine. Then one afternoon there was a declaration, followed by a conflagration. It seemed Grant had not been alone in a sense of dawning physical awareness.

  He recalled to Varian the feeling of leaving Mr. Weatherstone’s apartment after that first encounter, feeling as though a terrible distance had opened up between his former and present lives. He watched a new self, Impostor Grant, perfectly imitating what the old self had done. Now he’s walking his bike to the gate. Now he
’s unlatching the gate. Now he turns the bike toward his house, where his grandmother will be making Friday-night dinner. Now he straddles the bike. At home, Grant felt he might as well have been wearing a sign announcing what had happened. How could his family fail to notice? But to them, Impostor Grant was simply Grant, and life, unbelievably, went on.

  At first it seemed to Grant that his ardor was specific to Charles Weatherstone. He could no sooner imagine touching another man than he could a woman. But Mr. Weatherstone, somewhat melancholically, assured Grant that it wasn’t the case, that Mr. Weatherstone was simply a convenient conduit for a tendency Grant would soon find to be general. And it was true. Grant may have been in love with his mentor, but he was also, he soon discovered, a man who loved men. And that was where his self-acceptance ended. When he ran from music, he was running from that problem; when he sent away for the Harvard application, wrote his essays, and sat for the entrance exam, it was in flight from who he’d discovered—in fact, had always known—himself to be.

  As the application forms revealed, the admissions board was interested in each aspiring Harvardian’s parentage. It was part of what they called “character,” by which measure, Grant understood, they hoped to control the composition of their entering classes. There were plenty of Jewish guys he knew who’d gone to Harvard; his religion cost him little worry. But there was no chance he’d tell the truth about his father’s race, or what had become of him. Certainly there were Negro students at Harvard, but they were a kind of brilliant pinfeather in Harvard’s cap, a tiny ornamentation that established the university’s enlightened state. Harvard educated these students the way a U.S. president might cultivate a highly public relationship with the leader of a small foreign nation whose country he’d once invaded and ravaged. Negro students were rare. Grant, who did not consider himself Negro and couldn’t see any reason to bear the attendant disadvantages, didn’t want to take the risk of being one too many. Instead he neatly fabricated a father, a William Grant who’d been educated not at Oxford or Cambridge (he feared the admissions committee might too easily check his lie there) but at the Sorbonne. William Grant had been, according to young Elliott, a gifted paleobotanist, French on his mother’s side and English on his father’s, who had met Elliott’s mother during a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia. Dr. Grant, or Papa, as young Grant referred to him in the application, had died of influenza on a research trip to Peru. With a kind of burning rectitude—his father had abandoned him after all, and now he’d found a way to use that abandonment to his advantage, in a sense—Grant signed the application, affirming that all the information within it was true and correct.

  Harvard College could scarcely have responded to the catalogue of young Grant’s achievements, and to the wildly enthusiastic letters of his high school teachers, with anything but the ardent wish that he join the incoming class of 1931. And so he packed his bags, certain that when he left Philadelphia he would leave behind that unnatural and troubling desire, the one that must remain unnamed and that had taken his musical career—indeed, all his pleasure in music, from the simple feeling of his fingers on the moiréed ivory, to the delight he felt in mastering a difficult sonata, and, perhaps most problematically, his idea of what he might be in the world when he grew up—thoroughly and painfully away from him.

  But not long after his arrival, he learned that Harvard was fertile ground for men like him, that there were secret clubs, parties, covert and overt relationships, liaisons between faculty and students, hidden corners of campus, of town, of Boston at large, where one might encounter, at a certain time of night, like-minded Harvard men. Some of these had fallen into the habit at boarding school and were loath to give it up; others, like Grant, found themselves inductees into a society they hadn’t known existed. Still others, like Kirstein, had always understood themselves to be members of a third sex, their natures immutable as the stars. It was a society with its own rules, its own passkeys; it had its own dark history. Everyone knew about, though no one really discussed, the time, not so many years ago, when the university had convened a secret court to seek out and punish students, tutors, faculty, and even unaffiliated men in the community who had “gotten gay” with each other at parties, gone about the dormitories dressed in women’s clothing, and turned up at certain Boston gathering places for men who favored men: the Lighted Lamp, the Golden Rooster, the Green Shutters, and, most notoriously, Café Dreyfus, gold-curlicued and velvet-curtained, in a luxurious hotel on Beacon Hill. Some of the men had been expelled. Two had committed suicide. After the deaths, an article had appeared in the Boston American that described the court’s interrogations in a darkened room, a curtain stuffed into the crack of the door so no one outside could hear what was taking place within. Tattered copies of the article existed in the possession of the society’s members, and men passed them around as a reminder. But the fact that so little had been written about that event—and the fact that the university seemed to have submarined all records of it—suggested that the episode was a shame to Harvard itself, unlikely to recur. It would have been untrue to say that men who preferred men were at their ease at Harvard, that they didn’t fear being discovered and punished. But they considered themselves inevitable, and their sense was that the school could do nothing but agree, however much it might officially loathe them. It was at one of those parties, laced with acts of the kind that the secret court had condemned as “faggotty” and “queer,” that Grant had run across Varian—literally run across him, as Varian and a few others lay unclad on a raft of mattresses while other young men trod barefoot on their bodies. Not long after that came the evenings at the Pendragon, and the editorial meetings of the Hound and Horn, and everything that had followed, including, eventually, the sudden absence of Grant from Varian’s life.

  Varian had grieved and recovered. And now Grant slept in a hotel room not twenty feet away, at his lover’s side, also apparently recovered. Had they emerged from a shared nightmare, or was this a new one? What would happen if they both made it back to Marseille? Here in France, so many things had fallen into the territory of the uncertain. The outline of his life, once as firm as if inked, had become obscured. Ostensibly he was a writer, an editor, a husband; but he wasn’t writing, he’d abandoned his editorial position, and he was half a world away from Eileen. He was a rescue worker who didn’t know how to rescue, a detective who didn’t know what to look for or where. He was a maker of lists, which meant by definition that he was an excluder; he was the dreaded Fate, Atropos, holding the abhorred shears. He was a man, God help him, just a man, with a bad gut and a red-wine headache; he was a man who had stayed up all night in a bed in Cerbère, under the shadow of the Pyrenees. And there he lay awake into the dawn, listening to the lap and luff of the sea on the ash-blue shore.

  * * *

  ________

  They met in the lobby at nine that morning and walked up the hill to the train station, trading complaints about the hotel mattresses and the gruff elevator operator, of whom Golo Mann did a frowning, finger-wagging imitation. Among them only Grant seemed well rested; the red-wine hangover had spared him, if the clarity of his eyes and the lightness of his step were any indication. There was no trace of rancor, as far as Varian could see, between Grant and Katznelson. On the way to the station they walked with their shoulders nearly touching, and when Grant made a joke in German, Katznelson laughed.

  At the station café, the travelers drank wartime coffee and read the newspaper. Le Monde reported that Herschel Grynszpan, the young Jewish man who’d shot a German diplomat in Paris two years earlier, had been sentenced to twenty years in prison. Varian had raised funds in New York for the boy’s legal defense; the news of his sentencing seemed a bad omen. The refugees waited in silence as Leon Ball disappeared into the stationmaster’s office. When he emerged ten minutes later, he was holding their passports, though his expression was as grim as it had been the day before.

  “It�
��s a no-go,” he said. “The higher-ups from Vichy are still here. They’re watching our guy’s every move. No chance he can wave you through today, though he says he wants to.” He distributed the passports to the refugees.

  “I knew it,” Werfel said, his head in his hands. “This was all a mistake, a terrible mistake.”

  “But what does it mean?” Heinrich Mann demanded. “We can’t stay now. The commissaire had our passports overnight. Vichy knows we’re here. If we don’t go now, we’re simply asking to be arrested.”

  “But we can’t go, don’t you see?” Werfel said.

  “At least not by train,” said Golo. “But there are other ways.”

  Ball handed some francs around the table. “Everyone have another coffee on me. I’m going to have a word with our fearless leader.” He rose, and Varian followed him out of the station café and into the street, where a passing shower had slicked the cobblestones and brought up a smell of damp clay.

  “Cigarette?” Ball asked.

  Varian shook his head. “I’ve quit.”

  “Take one anyway. It’ll buck you up.”

  He did, and Ball lit it.

  “It’s a blasted shame,” Ball said. “Those Vichy officers hanging around.”

  “What does the commissaire think we should do?”

  “He says we’ve got to try today. End of story.”

  They both glanced up at the hill above the town, a bent knee of the Pyrenees; sand-colored hiking paths threaded the olives and oaks. The sun was bright and hot in a cloudless sky. Somewhere over the ridge of the hill lay the French border post; farther along, the Spanish one.