The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  “I almost lost my nerve,” Grant said. “I felt I was doing to him something no better than—than what I’d experienced all those years ago.”

  And now, Varian thought to himself, he’d have to do that to Eileen. To Eileen, whom he still loved. But to keep writing to her as if nothing had changed: Wasn’t it just as cruel, a deliberate obfuscation? He sat down on an ottoman and put his head into his hands.

  “I’m sure Eileen knows already,” he said. “How could she not?”

  Grant laid a hand on Varian’s shoulder. When he spoke, it was in the lowest of tones, in a voice that seemed to come almost from inside Varian’s head. “After all, Tommie,” he said. “Would you rather not write her? Do you want to go back, as if none of this had happened? If that’s what you want, how can I stop you?”

  Varian got to his feet and pulled Grant against him, feeling the rise and fall of his chest, the pulse at his throat, the rhythm of the blood that preserved his irreplaceable life. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I want.”

  Grant’s arm came around his waist and Varian held him, not caring that they might be seen through the lighted windows, not caring that Madame Nouguet might walk in at any moment to tend the fire. He held Grant against him as if to do anything else would kill them both.

  “I have to tell you something else,” Grant said into Varian’s ear. “If you want to hear it.”

  “Whatever you want to tell, I want to hear.”

  Now Grant took a step away and went to the fireplace again. He was a long moment looking down into the coals, twisting the nautilus cufflink at his wrist. “I’ve written to the dean of faculty,” he said, finally. “I sent the letter today.”

  Varian lifted his eyes to Grant’s. “You did what?”

  “I wrote to Herbert Hawkes at Columbia, to tell him what I am. I’ve told him I’m the grandson of a former slave, the son of a Negro entertainer, and that I’ve made false statements of my parentage on every legal document or application I’ve filled out for the last fifteen years. I’ve written that Harvard College doesn’t know I’m a Negro, nor does Yale. And that, in light of my lie, Yale may choose to revoke my degree, and Harvard to rescind my credits. I’ve stopped short of actually resigning. If I’m to be ejected from the college, it’ll have to be at the dean’s hands.”

  Varian stood in silence for a long moment. Then he said, “You don’t really believe Yale would revoke your degree.”

  “Why not? I matriculated under false pretenses.”

  “But that had nothing to do with your preparation for study. And you finished your degree like anyone else. Or, rather, not like anyone else. Brilliantly. And with honors.”

  “No honors matter, nothing matters, in light of that lie. That’s how I believe they’ll see it, anyway.”

  “And will you write to Yale, too? And Harvard? Would you strip yourself of everything?”

  “Only of what doesn’t rightfully belong to me.”

  “But you earned your degrees, Grant. And they should have admitted you anyway, black or white. Just as they should admit anyone who deserves it.”

  “A white man earned my degrees. And a white man’s been living my life ever since. I haven’t taught a single Negro student at Columbia, do you understand? Not one. Or at least not one who wears his blood openly. And I’ve lived ten minutes’ subway ride from my grandparents’ church, which moved to Harlem some time ago—yes, I went to see it, I stood outside on a Sunday—and I’ve never gone inside. Someone must know something about them, where they lived, whether they had other children. I’ve been too much of a coward to ask. One time, a boy of about twelve came up to me, looked like he’d been dared by his friends. Asked if I was a spy, just like you did at La Fémina.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said I was just that. A spy. And that boy called me a liar. He said if I was a spy, I’d never tell. And I said yes, he was right, I was a liar too.” He fingered his cufflink again, turning it in his sleeve, his eyes downcast. “These were my father’s,” he said, quietly. “I never told you that. He left them behind when he went to Europe. My mother saved them for me, God knows why. I sure didn’t want them when she first gave them to me. But I brought them here to France, thinking of him, and lately I’ve been wearing them. When I’m not losing them, that is.” He looked up at Varian for a moment, then lowered his gaze. “I suppose I want to feel like I have the right.”

  “So you’ve got to overturn everything? Steal from yourself what you deserve to have?”

  “Alea iacta est. The die’s cast. It can’t be undone, even if I wanted it to be.”

  There was a bright chime of shattering glass from outside, and the kitchen door banged open; in came the surrealists, windblown and laughing, crowding toward the fire. They held out their cold hands and relieved Grant of the poker, trying to stir more heat out of the coals. Breton poured another round of drinks and Mary Jayne sat at the harpsichord, which she only dared play when she was thoroughly liquefied. Raising one hand like a conductor, she launched the group into a Broadway tune: “Sometimes I’m Happy, Sometimes I’m Blue.” No one seemed to take note of the charged silence between Grant and Varian. The party, carried by its own energy, flowed onward into the night, and the surrealists filled the salon of the Villa Air Bel with drunken song.

  Varian waited until he could slip away unnoticed, then climbed the stairs alone to lie in bed in the dark. By now Grant had taken Mary Jayne’s place at the instrument, and might play for hours. That experience—listening to Grant’s playing through an open window, hearing others carried along by what he produced—was hardly a new one. How many nights had he lain in bed at Gore Hall, tracking the sound of Grant’s hands on the keys as he played the compact black Steinway downstairs, gift of the Hon. Henry Fitzwillam Calldwyn and Mrs. Abigail Calldwyn, in the sitting room that faced the back lawn and the Charles? Grant, tied by his ten digits to the keyboard, was, for those few moments, a certainty. As long as the music went on, Varian could locate in his mind the burning center of his universe, the point from which all matter and energy emanated; and as long as that was true, he could lie in bed and find a state of rest. He thought at times that there must be something wrong with him, some lobe of his brain that had misdeveloped in his mother’s womb, or had grown awry under her disordered care. How could it serve his organism, how could it aid his survival, to experience this particular fixation, this linking of all his well-being to a single other?

  But that was how we recognized love, he thought: It made the exception. It was the case that broke the paradigm, the burning anomaly. In its light we failed at first to recognize ourselves, then saw ourselves clearly for the first time. It revealed our boundaries to be mutable; it forced us to shout yes when we’d spent our lives saying no. For Grant, for this one person on earth, he could imagine doing the unthinkable: living outside of what the world prescribed, even if they looked at him the way they looked at men like him, even if they called him all the worst names: invert, faggot, abomination. For Grant, only for him, he would walk forward into the fate that followed the casting of the die. And he would share the terrible weight of truth-telling. Tomorrow morning he would go to his writing table, fill his pen, take paper from the drawer, and write Dear Eileen, because I love you, I must say a difficult thing. He would do it. He had to do it; otherwise his life was forfeit. He closed his eyes to await the end of the music, the sound of Grant’s footsteps on the stairs.

  29

  Impediments

  He mailed the letter, the one that would spell the end of his marriage, on the day the Bretons and Serges departed for Martinique. Later he would remember the moment he’d sent it—the particular postbox on the corner of the Canebière closest to the office, a corner shaded by a tree with featherlike leaves, one that grew everywhere in Marseille, immune to the mistral, the soot, the salt, the general rhythm of life in that restless city. He held t
he words in his hand, he laid them on the lip of the box, he tipped them in. And then the letter was gone, irretrievable.

  At the dock on the bassin d’Arenc he found his clients waiting beside their considerable pile of luggage while porters removed it, bag by bag, onto the ship. The Serges, père et fils, argued companionably about the translation of a passage from Moby-Dick; Madame Breton occupied Aube with a cardboard jumping jack. Danny and Theo stood holding Peterkin, who was to accompany the Bretons on their journey. They had decided he would be safer with his aunt in Westchester County than here in France, and had secured his visa three days earlier. Theo tucked an extra handkerchief into Peterkin’s pocket, her expression desperately stoic, but Danny wept openly into Peterkin’s dark curls. Breton stood a little apart at the edge of the dock, looking, perhaps for the first time since Varian had known him, ill at ease. He had confessed to Varian some time ago his dislike of travel on the open ocean, the terror he felt when the land receded and the planet reminded one of its dominion by water. Then there were the U-boats, invisible beneath the surface, intimate with the routes of all the transatlantic ships. Varian had assured him that a U-boat strike on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle was vanishingly unlikely, that the Germans would prefer to spend their precious ammunition elsewhere. But now Breton held a trembling cigarette to his lips and smoked it at twice his usual rate, his eyes fixed on the black-green water of the bay.

  “What are you thinking?” Varian asked him.

  “Merely, Monsieur Fry, that there’s no purer embodiment of surrealism than the departure from land onto a borderless plane of water. One sails over the bodies of millions of creatures, many of them unknown to man—even over mountains uncharted, mountains higher than the highest peaks in Tibet—entirely without consciousness, without the slightest knowledge of their existence. One might, for example, while sitting in the ship’s dining room and eating iced pineapple, sail over a great underwater current propelling a fleet of leviathans and their children, thousands of tons of oily flesh moving invisibly and inaudibly along that unbound underwater river like giant corpuscles through the bloodstream of the world.”

  “André, what will I do without you? Who will say such things to me once you’re gone?”

  “No one, I’m sure. And you’ll be all the better for it, my dear.” He put a hand on Varian’s arm and drew something from his pocket, a small English translation of Catullus, from which, as he showed Varian, he’d excised a series of words with a razor blade. On the book’s foreleaf he’d pasted the cutout words into a poem:

  LITTLE OH MY TOO LITTLE THANKS

  FOR THIS ALL WHICH GIVING ME

  YOU KEPT ONLY YOUR WINGS YOUR WIT

  AND A NAME OTHERS SHALL SING

  Varian thumbed the pasted words, those pale rectangles against the green endpapers. “André,” he said. “You’ve no idea what you’ve really given me, these past months.”

  “I’ve given you a terrible headache. And now I shall remove myself and all these other jesters. Let us hope we don’t die en route. But if we do, dear Monsieur Fry, please kill yourself and join us in the afterlife! I know we’ll have a grand time there.”

  “I’ll be sure to, André.”

  And then a deep-throated whistle blew from the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, and the porters removed the last of the bags, and finally the great man and his great wife and their impatient child, her hair dressed in looped braids with cherry-colored ribbons, and young Peterkin, distracted from his parents’ grief by the presence of the mountainous ship, climbed the gangway with their friends. Varian watched until they’d reached the deck, and then took off his hat and waved it. Beside him, Danny and Theo shouted their farewells to Peterkin, who sat contentedly in Breton’s arms. Varian found he couldn’t look at them directly, couldn’t witness the grief in Danny’s eyes or the horrific struggle in Theo’s. They intended to stay until the ship sailed, to be close to their boy until the last. But they insisted Varian return to work, so he turned and walked back to the office as though this were any ordinary day. As though the core—the coeur—of the Villa Air Bel had not just been surgically excised, as though he had not just mailed his wife the letter that would end his life with her, as though he could imagine what would happen the next minute, the next hour, the next day.

  * * *

  ________

  And now a delicate business must be conducted, perhaps the most delicate of his time in Marseille: he had to arrange a British escort for Tobias, and a place for him on one of the merchant ships that had been carrying the decommissioned Brits to North Africa. Back at the office, where Lena’s desk stood silent and bare, and the few surrealist drawings on the wall now seemed melancholy relics, Varian penned a note to Captain Archibald Murchie, the officer responsible for getting the British Expeditionary Force off the continent. He invited the captain to meet him for lunch at the office, to discuss matters important to them both. When, after an hour, no reply arrived, he tried telephoning, but no one answered. Finally Varian sent Gussie over on his bicycle to investigate. Twenty minutes later Gussie returned, flushed and huffing, saying that the secretary had refused to admit him. Varian telephoned again; this time the secretary answered, but when Varian demanded to speak to Murchie, she hung up without another word. What game was this? What had he done to give offense? He picked up the phone and called Bingham.

  “What’s the news?” Bingham said. “The Bretons and Serges get off all right?”

  “Yes. But now I’ve got another problem.”

  Bingham laughed. “Never a moment’s rest for you, is there?”

  “Nor for you, Harry, thanks to me. I want to know what’s going on with Archibald Murchie. I can’t get a note to him, or get him to take a call. His secretary’s pretending he’s not in. Do you think he’s in some kind of trouble? I’ve half a mind to call Robinet at the Préfecture, but I thought I’d try you first.”

  “Well, you won’t have much luck at the Préfecture,” Bingham said. “Our man Robinet has just been packed off to Rabat.”

  “No!”

  “There’s a new chef de police now, hadn’t you heard?”

  He hadn’t. But Harry told him now: The new chief, Maurice Anne Marie de Rodellec du Porzic, was an old aristocrat so staunch in his anti-Semitism that he’d recently been elevated to overseer of the Bouches du Rhône. He had pledged une collaboration d’amitié with Vichy; he’d professed his own commitment to the New France and to the Maréchal. It was no wonder he’d thrown Robinet out.

  “So now what?” Varian said. “You haven’t heard anything about Murchie yourself?”

  “Nothing. But I think I know why he won’t receive you. The Deuxième Bureau has been all over his operation lately, and they’re pretty sharp-eyed for a bunch of collaborationist idiots. If they catch you helping the British Expeditionary Force get off the continent, they’ll bring you up on charges of treason. Or just shoot you on sight.”

  “All right, Harry. I get it. But I need Murchie’s help. It’s about our friend at Columbia. His son.”

  There was a long silence on the line. “Let me give Murchie a call,” Bingham said. “I’ll propose drinks tonight. If he agrees, you’ll go in my stead.”

  “Thanks. But look—it can’t be at our usual joint. It’s got to be the Coquille de Noix, all right? Vinciléoni can’t know what we’re planning.”

  “Listen, Varian.” An inhale, another silence. “I don’t know exactly what you’re going to ask of Murchie, but I think he’s right to try to disentangle you. Treason’s a guillotinable offense. And Vinciléoni won’t take kindly to deception, if he finds you out. You’ve got more work to do here, a lot more. I don’t want you taking unnecessary risks.”

  “Sure. But how do you know which ones are necessary?”

  Bingham laughed. “I’m the wrong man to ask.”

  “That’s why we’re comrades in this, Harry. We take
them all.”

  “I see your point. But I’m not joking here. Choose wisely.”

  He waited all day for news, but none came; then, just as he was putting on his overcoat to return to Air Bel, a messenger arrived with a hastily scrawled note on a piece of lined paper. Coquille 1800h, it read, in Harry Bingham’s familiar upright hand.

  * * *

  ________

  At the bar, Varian waited at a high round table in a corner. He hadn’t eaten anything since dinner the night before; his head felt light and hollow. He wondered how much longer they could all survive on what they’d been able to scrounge or buy or scavenge. The restaurants in town scarcely had more than the kitchen at Air Bel. That morning, before he’d left for the docks with the Bretons and Serges, he’d found himself standing before the fountain, wondering whether Madame Nouguet would be willing to bread and fry the goldfish.

  Moments later, Archibald Murchie himself appeared at the door and threaded his way through the small high tables. He was tall, red-haired, with an equine nose and pale-fringed eyes; when he saw Varian in place of Bingham, his expression shaded toward panic.

  “Fry,” he said. “This won’t do.”

  “Forgive me, Captain. I have to speak to you. Harry agreed to help.”

  “Bingham knows better than that. He knows what’s at stake.”

  “I don’t care about the risk. We’ve already got our necks on the line for your men. But this is something else, Captain. My own business, in a way. And it’s a matter of dire importance.”

  Murchie shook his head. “I suppose I’d better have a drink, then,” he said. “What’ll you have?”

  “Wine,” Varian said. “It’s the closest thing they have to food.” He had not the least desire to drink, but when their waiter set the glass before him, the fragrant Bordeaux presented itself as a compelling substitute for dinner.