The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “Bought it all for a song at the flea market,” he said.

  “Well done, Skiff.” Varian averted his gaze and fooled with the leather cross-strap of his own messenger bag; he felt, suddenly, as if he’d forgotten everything essential.

  “Is something bothering you, Tommie? Don’t you feel like going?”

  “I’m fine,” Varian said, though in fact he felt lightheaded; he had to lean the bike against the building and sit on the doorstep.

  Grant propped Gussie’s bike and sat beside him. “Want a smoke?”

  “No. Just a breath.”

  “What is it? Tell me.”

  “It’s nothing.” He breathed deeply, willing his carbonated dizziness to pass. All along the empty street, the cobbles glittered with sun; a shopkeeper was spraying down his piece of sidewalk, sending a bridge of water over the pavement. The light shattered into its pluribus of colors and arced over the street like a portal. They would walk through that portal toward the station. They would take the train to Miramas and ride to Arles, where he would try to see Breitscheid and Hilferding. Maybe he and Grant would visit the Roman amphitheater. Damn to hell this electricity in his spine. What was it Kirstein had said once at school? Save punishment for the guilty. He was committing no crime. He hadn’t stolen the concierge’s black Gitane, nor Gussie’s green Motobécane; he wasn’t even taking a break from his duties.

  He got to his feet. Grant took his cue, and they shouldered their bags and started toward the station, Varian squinting against the glare, Grant unflinching, the fineness of his profile like the stamp of a Roman coin. The shopkeeper tamed his iridescent arc so they could pass, and without a word they made their way through the quiet of the morning streets, through the hush that barely held back all the bristling activity of Marseille. They turned onto the boulevard Dugommier and traced a path toward the hill of stairs at the foot of the station. The Hôtel Splendide lay dormant in its shadow; as they passed, Varian checked and re-checked in his mind all the places where he’d hidden precious documents and lists: behind the mirror glass, inside the telephone mouthpiece, underneath a loose scrap of carpet near the head of the bed. His room was lousy with evidence, if anyone cared to look. Nothing to be done about it now.

  At last he and Grant climbed the stairs, hoisting the bikes, and reached the plane of the station. Once they passed through its glass doors and into its vaulted interior, Varian’s pulse slowed: he had entered the province of travel, a place he knew and loved. Grant seemed to relax too. He rested a hand on the seat of the Motobécane and laughed.

  “I’d have been willing to ride the ninety K, just to avoid another train,” he said.

  “Me too,” Varian said. “I’d ride it still, if I hadn’t promised Madame Balansard.”

  “We’d never make it, though,” Grant said. “Ninety K!”

  “I’m not saying we’d beat the train, but we could have ridden ninety miserable kilometers. And I could ride them faster than you, dear.”

  “Is that a fact?” Grant said. “We’ll see how fast you ride, dear.”

  And the game was on. They checked their bikes and bags and boarded a third-class car, not caring that the seats were hard, the glass murky with the exhalations of previous passengers; for the moment they were boys freed from school, no one to stop them from doing exactly what they wanted. Grant took from his messenger bag a thermos of espresso and a slender flask of whiskey. He placed a book on his knees for a bar counter, decanted an amber dram from flask to thermos, then drew out a tiny glass bottle of absinthe and added ten drops. The top of the thermos contained two nested silver cups; he divided his mix into them and offered one to Varian.

  “Ridiculous,” Varian said.

  “Is that a toast?”

  “Why not?”

  They touched their glasses and threw back the drinks. The coffee was expertly brewed, the whiskey smooth, the absinthe a hint of punishment. “Is there nothing you’re unprepared for?” Varian asked.

  Grant smiled, gratified, and the train, a co-conspirator, pulled out of the station. Somewhere in its trailing cars their bicycles awaited. For now the trip required nothing but for them to sit in the hard-backed seats and watch the city turn into countryside again. The sensation in Varian’s chest was one of wild liberation, not unlike the feeling of leaving Harvard for a boys’ weekend on the Cape, parentless, cash-rich, temporarily unburdened by classes. The restraints were off, at least the visible ones.

  “What were you thinking of now?” Grant said.

  “Nothing. Just riding and looking.”

  “At what?”

  “Whatever’s out there. Provence. It’s not exactly what you’d expect, is it?” It was a deflection, but true nonetheless; there was a strangeness to the landscape that betrayed the idea Varian had held of Provence before he’d seen it. The grapevines and olive trees and rows of skyward-pointing cypresses presented themselves as expected, but often they appeared against hills furred with ugly gray-green scrub and toothed with great molars of limestone; often the ubiquitous lavender and almond gave way to low, hostile cactus, gnarled kermes oak, rusty lentisk, or wind-stunted pistachio. The sky was the washed-out blue-green of weatherbeaten copper; the few clouds overhead seemed wrung out and dry. Through the windows of the train fell a pale light that bleached the features of the passengers. The populace of France seemed disinclined to travel that weekend; the only other passengers in the third-class car were a pair of elderly priests in cassocks, semilunar glasses perched on the bridges of their noses as they read in silence, and across the aisle a corresponding pair of elderly women, sisters perhaps, though not the ecclesiastic kind. One of them held a wicker cage on her lap, inside of which lay the shadowy form of a doomed rabbit.

  The door at the head of the car opened and a conductor entered. He took tickets, fed them to his vampiric device, and returned them double-punched, drained of value. He nodded first to Grant, then to Varian, and moved on to the pair of sisters.

  Grant tucked his ticket into his hatband and looked out the window. He seemed to appreciate a private joke; his mouth curled minutely, an expression so fleeting and subtle as to be scarcely apprehensible.

  “What’s that about?” Varian said.

  “What’s what?”

  “You smiled.”

  Grant held his silver cup to the window light, catching a slipstream of reflection. “I believe I understand why he stayed,” he said. “The elder Grant, I mean. I think I begin to understand.”

  “Your father?” Varian was surprised to hear Grant mention him; was surprised to know he thought of him, though Varian himself had been thinking of him lately.

  “Yes, old Clayton. The pianist. The disappeared.”

  About Clayton Grant they’d almost never spoken. Varian had assembled the scant parts of Grant’s familial puzzle from a handful of conversations, generally undertaken with assistance from Uncle Scorch; a morning splash of whiskey and absinthe seemed hardly enough to elicit new revelations. But Grant drained the last drops of his spiked coffee and balanced the cup on his book.

  “A conductor enters a train car anywhere in America,” he said. “The year is 1940. He makes his way down the car to punch his passengers’ tickets. Among his passengers he comes across a pair of men, one Negro, one white, clearly in each other’s company.”

  “Anywhere?” Varian interrupted. “Doesn’t it matter whether we’re north or south of the Mason-Dixon line?”

  “Not at all,” Grant said. “That’s precisely my point. Anywhere in America, this conductor enters his car, punches tickets, gets to these men. One Negro, one white.”

  “Who are these two men, anyway? Two older guys? Two boys? College guys?”

  “Stop talking for a goddamn minute, will you?”

  “Sorry. It’s just, if you’re going to sketch the situation, I want to know what I’m looking at.”

&nb
sp; “Just be quiet and listen, Tom. He gets to these two men. Doesn’t matter if they’re old or young, fat or thin, handsome or ugly. This conductor might look at them only for a split second, but in that fraction of a second, what’s he thinking? What can he not stop himself from thinking, whether we’re up north or down south, whether the conductor’s daddy’s daddy wore the blue or the gray?”

  “You tell me,” Varian said. “What’s he thinking?”

  “What’s that white man doing with a Negro? That’s what.”

  “Whereas in France,” Varian said.

  “Whereas in France, the conductor might be thinking of anything. His dead grandmother. His next meal. He might be cursing the hole-puncher for going blunt again. But he’s not required—not by some great force beyond his control, older than memory—to look at those two together and think, What’s that white man doing with a Negro?”

  “I see,” Varian said. “And that’s why Clayton Grant stayed.”

  “In a nutshell,” the younger Grant said. “Or so I imagine.”

  “I suppose I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

  “You wouldn’t have noticed the difference in the way that man looked at us,” Grant said. “To you it would have been just as in the States.”

  “But then,” Varian said, proceeding with some caution, because now they had reached the edge of a subject scarcely discussed, “would there have been a difference? Wouldn’t he see us as two white men, just as anyone would in the States?”

  “Well, maybe the difference is in my mind, then. In our case, at least. In the States, I have to think of myself as one thing or the other. My daddy’s a Negro, so I’m a Negro too. Either that, or someone who’s pretending to be white. In France, though, I’m a man first. Do you see?”

  “Ah, yes. Or at least you were, under the old liberté-égalité model.”

  “I’m not talking about Vichy. I’m talking about Free France.”

  “I see,” Varian said. “So then”—and he looked at Grant in the flat blue light of the Provençal sky and drew a subtle conclusion: Grant wasn’t passing here in France. It wasn’t as if he was trying not to, or doing anything different. He just wasn’t. They were just two men together on a train, Elliott Grant and Varian Fry. “I see,” he said again. And then he fell silent for a few moments, thinking. “It’s an odd thing,” he said finally. “I know Negroes come to Europe and stay. There’s a long tradition of it. But insofar as I thought about it, I suppose I thought your father stayed for a different reason.”

  Grant tilted his head at Varian; it might have been news to him that Varian would have considered his father at all. “What reason?”

  Varian hesitated. Could he go on? He and Grant behaved here in France as if they’d returned to the intimacy they’d shared at Harvard. But the truth was slightly different. He didn’t know the boundaries of their current relationship and was afraid to overstep them. Grant looked at him now in a penetrating manner, as if trying to read what was written on the back wall of his mind.

  Varian cleared his throat softly. “I thought your father stayed because he was, well—of a different sort.”

  “A different sort?”

  “You know. Quaint,” Varian clarified, using their private slang, a hemi-Chaucerian term. He had always thought so; it seemed the only explanation.

  Grant stared at him in wonderment. “My father? Quaint?”

  Varian shrugged, the blood rushing to his face. He would have mimed nonchalance if he hadn’t known what a terrible actor he was. Grant, for his part, seemed caught in an inward struggle. A disturbance moved over his features like wind over water. Silent, he stared out the window at an endless orchard, the same row of almond trees again and again ad infinitum. His slim hand lay on the cover of the book as if he were about to take an oath.

  “Strange,” he said. “I never thought of that. Not one time.”

  They sat in silence a moment longer, then Grant gave a short, sharp laugh. The sound caught the attention of the priests and the elderly Provençales, who exchanged a glance across the aisle: how rude those young men were.

  “You could be right,” Grant said. “And I never thought of it.”

  Outside, the rows of trees began to slow their relentless whipping-past. The train was drawing near Miramas. The buildings of the medieval town hung on a bluff over the Etang de Berre, blocky and ungraceful, suggestive of hard-edged, unequivocal lives. The surrounding land was neither farm nor field, neither grazing-ground nor vineyard, just land, the crust of the earth, acres upon acres of cracked dirt that seemed to radiate an insistent and animate consciousness. To get off the train with their bicycles, to venture out into that void, suddenly seemed to Varian a fool’s move. There was a German word for what he feared: Waldeinsamkeit. He’d read it in a book, maybe even one of Thomas Mann’s, now that he thought about it. The fear was as much spiritual as embodied. But when the train pulled into the station—a squat beige block with a post office at one end and a dust-glazed café at the other—Grant got to his feet, clearly unafraid, and Varian followed him off the train.

  They reclaimed their bicycles on the platform, then retired to the café. The establishment had once been stocked by an ambitious pâtissier; evidence remained in the form of tiny hand-lettered signs advertising chouquettes, canelés de Bordeaux, chaussons aux pommes, pain aux raisins, millefeuille, and Paris-Brest. The names alone were enough to make Varian faint with desire. But the pastry pans were empty of everything, even of crumbs. The war had devoured every bit.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a nice Paris-Brest,” Grant said, and Varian smiled. The two blunt wafers that accompanied the coffee were tooth-threateningly hard, but they melted into a mild grainmeal when dunked. They ate and drank what they could. Grant checked the tires and Varian retraced the route. Then they shouldered their packs and set off on the downhill slope toward the nature preserve. They wouldn’t stop until noon, when they would have lunch somewhere in the Coussouls de Crau; in their bags were hunks of hard bread and precious cheese. They would ride an old road that traced a diagonal line across the alluvial plain, connecting Arles with the modern world.

  It was a rocky ride through town and into the countryside, but once they reached the main road the way was mercifully flat, the paved surface smooth. A good thing, too, because the seat of Varian’s bicycle, a hard narrow beak of leather and rubber, cut his gluteals viciously. But he hardly cared. The smooth speed of the ride was sheer pleasure. It had been years since he’d ridden a bike through open countryside; he and Eileen had done it once just after they’d been married, rented bikes and ridden up along the Hudson to the Old Croton Aqueduct, which had carried water to the city in the nineteenth century, when private indoor plumbing still seemed a miracle. Dear Eileen, he imagined writing. What would you think to see me riding out into the countryside with Elliott Grant, far from Marseille and my work? What would you say if you knew that what I was doing today wasn’t saving lives or bringing me closer to the time when I might return to you? What would you say to the fact that my continuing on here in Marseille takes on greater import, greater urgency, each time I read your letters calling me home? Don’t imagine I don’t miss you. I miss you this moment as I remember you in your blue cycling trousers, the curve of your back in a red-and-white-striped jersey as you rode ahead of me. Your eyes as you threw a glance over your shoulder. Where did you think I might go? Did you imagine I’d take some side turn, or, more likely, fail to pedal fast enough to keep up? I remember we rode all the way past the old monastery, through Spuyten Duyvil, up along the widening basin of the Hudson, to that little park halfway, where you threw your bike down in the grass and ran to the water’s edge, holding your hair up to cool your neck. You washed your face in the river and stood with your hips angled northward, one hand shading your eyes, squinting into the distance as if to forespy our progress. And I thought to myself: our marriage is like a h
ouse full of great clean rooms smelling of furniture polish and laundry soap, of fine old books, of green things just pulled from the garden, of rising bread. And sometimes that is just what I want. And then there are other times.

  Ahead of him Grant did not turn back, but Varian knew him to be acutely aware of being watched. With his cycling jersey he wore a red scarf wrapped twice around his neck, the ends whipping like a cat tease. He kept up a powerful pace. When the road sloped downward, he sat upright on his bicycle seat and took his hands off the handlebars, letting his speed keep him steady; he pedaled with hands on hips like a circus unicyclist, then stretched his arms to the side as if to balance on a tightrope. Or he would lean forward and grip the handlebars, angling into the sun and wind. Like Eileen riding the road toward the Croton Aqueduct, he looked, above all, brilliantly alive. Where had Varian read that line about the brevity of our lives and the way they continued in others, energy flashing from body to body as if into temporary and interchangeable containers, flashing and flashing into new ones as time rolled forward forever? The progression, the continuation, was the point; the vessels didn’t matter. He felt it to be true, he knew it as clearly as he’d known anything.

  But the vessels had to matter, he reminded himself; of course they mattered. His work was predicated on the particularity of the vessels, on the relative worth of the energy that flashed into one body or another. Chagall, painting in his house at Gordes, was an irreplaceable treasure. So was Mann, so was Werfel, so was Feuchtwanger, damn him to hell; so was Walter Benjamin, dead in Spain; so were Breitscheid and Hilferding, so was Max Ernst, so were the others on his list: André Breton, Jacques Lipchitz, and all the others waiting to be found. So was the boy genius, Grant’s young Tobias. They had to matter more than others, those men and women; they had to be brighter manifestations of light.