Grant sat in one of the low armchairs. “Well?”
No preamble was necessary or possible. “I’ve been a fool, Grant. A terrible fool.” He took the chair beside Grant’s; to be this close, a hand’s breadth away, was both relief and torture. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can hardly look at you. I can hardly speak.”
“You look awful, Tom. You look like you’ve been ill.”
“I’ve been traveling for twenty-eight hours. I feel near-dead now.”
“Have a drink, at least,” Grant said, and went to a sideboard. He opened a panel to reveal a row of gleaming glasses, and behind them a few bottles. “I’m afraid I’m out of ice. It’ll have to be neat.”
“I don’t want a drink,” Varian said. Then, without warning, his throat closed and his diaphragm spasmed, and he put his head down on his knees and cried. He didn’t care that Grant was watching; he wanted him to see. He wanted Grant to come to him and put a hand on his shoulder. But Grant stood at the sideboard and made drinks. After a moment, he brought them over and set one on the table.
“Drink,” he said. “It’s what the doctor ordered.”
Varian drew the back of his hand across his eyes, then picked up the glass and took a burning swallow. “God,” he said. “I was awful to you, awful. And all along it was Gregor who’d lied. I couldn’t see it.”
Grant took a sip from his own glass. “Well, that makes two of us.”
“Everything was hopeless after you left. Vichy wanted me out. The consulate would have nothing to do with me. I went on the run, just playing for time, up and down those towns along the coast—Cannes, Toulon, Sanary-sur-Mer—I nearly killed myself, trying to escape. Nearly threw myself off a cliff.”
“Trying to escape what?”
“Myself, what else? Who I was, how I’d failed, what I’d done to you and Eileen.”
Grant shook his head, his eyes steady on Varian’s. “You’ve succeeded at your work, I hope you understand. Succeeded beyond anyone’s imagining. And as for Eileen, if you think she went into your marriage an innocent, you’re mistaken. She can’t have been entirely surprised by your letter.”
“So I’ve merely confirmed her ill opinion of me, you’re saying.”
“You’ve confirmed what she knew all along. That you were living in a state of half-truth.”
“And how am I supposed to face her now?”
“Just go and talk to her, that’s all.”
“And tell her what? I don’t know what my life is now. What I did to you, the things I said—I don’t know how you can forgive any of it.”
Grant took a long drink, rested his glass on his knee, turned it in a contemplative circle. “I’ve had some time to think about it myself,” he said. “I went over and over what you might have thought, what you might have felt. You hated to lose Zilberman, I know. You felt responsible for what happened. Under the circumstances, you couldn’t conceive of him as a liar. And I didn’t want to think of Gregor that way, either. I didn’t want to believe he’d duped me, or used me. Not even to save his son.”
“If we’d only talked about it for a minute, you and I—if I hadn’t just assigned you all the blame—”
Grant nodded. “You should have had more faith in me. That’s true. But I know why you didn’t. I haven’t always been honest.”
Varian shook his head. “You never hid anything from me. Except yourself, I suppose, in this apartment all those years.” He couldn’t sit still any longer; he got to his feet, went to the piano, touched a sheaf of music on the stand: O Welt, ich muss dich lassen. Grant had played this piece for him on the black Steinway at Gore. Brahms’s final composition, written when he knew he was dying: a personal requiem, a farewell to the world. He remembered the procession of major chords that shaded into stranger and stranger minor harmonies, then disharmonies: a protest against sensemaking, a reminder that not every dissonance could, or should, be resolved.
“I’ve been a terrible coward,” he said, finally. “That’s what I came to, once I had time to think.”
“You were afraid,” Grant said. “There’s no shame in that. You’d have been a fool not to be. You should still be afraid. I am.” He went to the piano and stood beside Varian—not touching him, but close enough that Varian could feel the warmth of his body along his own. Even that, the line of warmth, seemed unreal and undeserved.
“I have to leave this place,” Grant said. “This apartment. Now that I don’t belong to the university. They gave me six weeks.”
“Oh, Grant.”
“I wish I could say it felt like a liberation, going before that committee. But I was terrified. Hearing their verdict, their censure—it felt like being sentenced to death.”
“Oh, Skiff. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m so sorry.”
“Better than staying and lying. Better than never teaching a Negro student.”
“And what are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Grant said, and lowered his eyes. “Your friend Breton had an idea, actually. We’ve been seeing each other regularly, he and Jacqueline and I—we’ve had a kind of forlorn supper club, the three of us. I told them what happened at Columbia, and he suggested I go to see Alvin Johnson at the New School. See what he had to say about it.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. Had lunch with him last week, in fact. And he suggested I consider doing what any self-respecting scholar would do after being thrown out by Columbia.”
“What’s that?”
“Move downtown and teach at his joint. They’re all going there. All the refugees. Not just the ones from uptown.”
“He offered you a job, Grant?”
“More or less. But he’s not interested in my teaching nineteenth-century English poetry. He wants me to consider lecturing on what we saw in France. What happened to your clients. What’s happening to European art as we know it.”
Varian stood silent for a moment. “Leave your field,” he said. “That’s what he’s suggesting.”
“Something like that.”
“Would you, Skiff?”
Grant thumbed the edge of the music, then turned to look through the window at the building opposite, a Gothic apartment tower crowned by a wisp of cloud. “My heart hasn’t been in my studies for a while now,” he said. “Not since the war started. And if I’m at the New School, I could stay in New York.”
“No leafy university town?”
“Not yet. Maybe someday.” He turned his eyes away from the window, from the view that would soon be his no longer. “What about you, Tom? What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” Varian said. “Show up on the doorstep of the ERC. Work for the refugees. Raise money. Write about what happened. What do I care for any of that, though, unless I know you’ll forgive me?”
Grant moved closer, his hand a centimeter from Varian’s hand. “I forgave you some time ago,” he said. “Back in Marseille. We could have had one more bath at the Beauvau, if only you hadn’t been such a fool.” He smiled, but when he raised his eyes to Varian’s his look was clear and penetrating. “That doesn’t solve anything, though. You know it doesn’t. A lot of things are going to change for me now. Where I can live, where I can work, who’s willing to claim me as a friend. It goes on and on. For you, too, if you decide to live as what you are. I don’t know how far you’ve gone in considering it—how things would change. Some of it won’t be too pretty. It’ll be hard on us, like nothing else has been before.” He lowered his gaze to the music, to the brilliant brief eighth notes set against lower, darker chords.
He was right, Varian thought. A lot of things were going to change, and not only between the two of them. A greater change was at hand. He and Grant had seen its effects already. They’d traveled through broken Spain, had walked through the barbed-wire gates of Vernet, had felt the earth beneath Marse
ille concussed by bombs. They had seen a man end his own life. They had seen those drawings from the Flight Portfolio: the burning woman holding a child skeleton by the hand; the killed fish bleeding Hebrew from its gills. They had seen Chagall’s tallis-shrouded Christ grieving, his stricken angels rising. And as they stood here now in Grant’s apartment, this quiet nest where all was calm and clean, it went on still: the Wehrmacht surged into Russia, the French bombed the British, Japan pushed its spines deeper into China. Whether or not the war reached American soil, whatever the final count of the dead, they had all already lost. They’d lost, at least, a world in which that war had not been fought. What emerged from the ashes might or might not be recognizable. What he had to do now, the only thing he could do, was to hold on to the sole certainty in his life. Of course there would be a cost. He didn’t know what it would be—not really, not entirely—but how could it compare to what they’d lost already?
“Well, Tom,” Grant said, and sighed. “As before, it rests with you.”
Varian touched his own shirt cuff and found the silver nautilus. “You left this at Air Bel,” he said, turning it in his fingers, sliding it free of his sleeve.
“Look at that,” Grant said, quietly. “Little old shell. I thought it was gone for good.” He took it and slipped it into his own sleeve, then raised his eyes to Varian’s. “I’m late for dinner,” he said. “As usual. I suppose I’d better go.”
“Let’s not go anywhere just yet,” Varian said, and closed his hand over Grant’s hand.
Author’s Note
At the age of twenty-two, writes the French diplomat Stéphane Hessel in his 2011 autobiography, The Power of Indignation, “I fell into the arms of a young American.” This was in the South of France, sometime after the Nazis had taken Paris; the object of Hessel’s affection was Varian Fry. (Hessel had sought Fry’s aid on behalf of his father and brother, who were interned in the concentration camp at Les Milles.) “Whenever he could spare some time from his fundamental task—a task being handled by a brave team among which I had many friends—he would take me with him to visit this Provence he knew very little about and which fascinated him. Over the course of our nights in hotels, I quickly understood that his inclination toward me had a sexual dimension to it, something I had aroused from the depth of the great affection he inspired in me…”*1
Autobiographies, memoirs—those recent or distant reimaginings of personal experience—portray the past through a veil of memory, or perhaps of protective discretion. A novelist, free to extrapolate, may draw the veil aside. In these pages I’ve portrayed a real history—Varian Fry’s heroic lifesaving mission in France—alongside an imagined one, his relationship with the entirely fictional Elliott Grant. Drawing upon Fry’s friendship with Stéphane Hessel, and upon his earlier relationship with Lincoln Kirstein at Harvard, I envisioned what might have happened in the interstices between the events Fry describes in his memoir, Surrender on Demand. That book, published in 1945, does not detail the sexual or romantic nature of Fry’s close friendships with men; at the time, such revelations would have been beyond scandalous. But the historical record indicates that he had those relationships, and that he thought actively about his inclinations; he participated, for example, in Alfred Kinsey’s project, providing Kinsey with detailed accounts of his experiences; and he kept an article by Kinsey that suggested that attraction between men was far more common than generally acknowledged—that “the picture is one of endless intergradation between every combination of homosexuality and heterosexuality.”*2 Andy Marino, in his biography A Quiet American: The Secret War of Varian Fry, seeks to draw a connection between his subject’s sexuality and his work: “The skills Fry had developed to cope with and express his ‘deviance’ from the norm over the years may have stood him in good stead for the illicit and secret activities he took to so naturally and performed so extraordinarily well in France.”*3 I believe that the truth is perhaps more complicated: that Varian Fry’s perception of his own difference, and his need to hide it, sensitized him to the plight of others who were persecuted and made to fear for their lives. I envision Varian Fry as a brave and brilliant person whose sexuality happened to resist easy categorization. My hope is that he’ll be celebrated that way in the twenty-first century and beyond.
I’m indebted to Marino for his exhaustive research and his vivid portrayal of life in wartime Marseille. Also supremely helpful were Lincoln Kirstein’s memoir, Mosaic; Martin Duberman’s The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein; Douglass Shand-Tucci’s The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture; and Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996.
I had the good fortune to spend a year researching this novel at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where, shortly before I arrived in 2013, Fry’s student records were unsealed, granting researchers access to his college application, records of every place he lived at Harvard, letters from his parents and professors, official transcripts, copies of job application letters, and much else. Two miraculous research assistants, Victoria Baena and Anna Hagen—editor and fiction editor of the Harvard Advocate, respectively—helped me sift through documents, compile a timeline of Fry’s experiences in France, and profile the artists and writers he saved. Judith Vichniac, the Institute’s longtime director and champion, offered invaluable research advice. My brilliant colleague Lewis Hyde created a writer’s group among the fellows, a community of generous and insightful readers.
I’m deeply grateful to the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where I studied Rosemary Sullivan’s Villa Air-Bel, Sheila Eisenberg’s A Hero of Our Own: The Story of Varian Fry, Mary Jayne Gold’s Crossroads Marseille, 1940, Sybil Gordon Kantor’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, copies of the Hound and Horn, and Varian Fry’s own writing for The Living Age and The New Republic. Librarian Alice Hudson of the maps collection pulled together a series of detailed renderings of Marseille and its environs from 1938 to 1942. The library’s photograph collection provided dozens of images of the artists Fry saved, and the fine arts collection allowed a deep immersion in their work. (It was there that I first saw images from the real Flight Portfolio, a collection of lithographs Fry assembled in 1965 to help raise money for the organization he had founded; Chagall, Lam, Lipchitz, and Masson, among others, all contributed work.) My colleagues at the Cullman Center, as well as Jean Strouse, its director, were crucial to this novel’s earliest development.
The Manuscripts and Archives Division at Columbia University’s Butler Library holds a twenty-seven-box archive of Varian Fry’s correspondence and other documents related to his time in Marseille. I’m grateful to the librarians who facilitated my study of those documents, and to James Fry, Varian Fry’s son, who allows writers and researchers the right to reprint excerpts from Fry’s letters, telegrams, and ephemera. Fry’s last living colleague, Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus at Bard College and author of a soon-to-be-published memoir, patiently answered my questions and provided unparalleled insight into the workings of the Centre Américain de Secours.
It would be impossible to give a full accounting of the online resources that aided the writing of this book, but I’d particularly like to mention http://www.varianfry.org, where any researcher can find a rich repository of information gathered by the writer and documentary filmmaker Pierre Sauvage, who has been working for more than twenty years on a film about Fry. For a virtual tour of the Villa Air Bel, see http://villaairbel1940.fr/.
I’m also deeply grateful to Allyson Hobbs, director of African and African American Studies at Stanford, for her beautifully written and researched A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. She deftly illuminates the stories of men and women who wrestled with the question of passing, among them Nella Larsen, whose 1929 novel, Passing, was instrumental to the writing of this one.
Now
here in any of these marvelous resources will you find reference to the Katznelson family or to Lev Zilberman, who are my inventions. What you will find is a great deal more information about Fry’s experience than I could have included here, most notably the contributions of his associates Charlie Fawcett and Marcel Verzeanu, tireless savers of lives. Nor does this novel, ending where it does, address the life Varian Fry lived after 1941: he separated from Eileen Fry not long after his return to the States, though they remained close friends until her death from cancer eight years later. In 1949 he met Annette Riley, a professor of philosophy at Vassar College, and they married in 1950. Together they had two children, James and Sylvia, though their marriage was beset by emotional difficulty on Fry’s side; he struggled with what seems to have been manic depression. They eventually divorced, though they attempted a reconciliation—warmly desired on both sides—in the months that followed. Fry taught high school Latin until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage at fifty-nine. During his lifetime he received little recognition for his work, though the French government awarded him the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1967, thanks in part to the efforts of his friend Stéphane Hessel. In 1991, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council presented Fry with the Eisenhower Liberation Medal, and in 1994 he became the first American to be honored by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.” The legacy of Fry’s mission continues through the lifesaving work of the International Rescue Committee, to which a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated in perpetuity. See https://www.rescue.org/ to learn how you can help.
I’m profoundly grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for a 2014–15 literature fellowship; also to Scott Adkins and the Brooklyn Writers Space, where most of the writing of this book took place. For their marvelous editing help and encouragement, I’m indebted to my first readers and dear friends Nell Freudenberger, Andrew Sean Greer, and Brian Seibert. My siblings, Amy and Daniel Orringer, were beacons through this journey. My grandmother Irene Tibor was unstinting in her love and encouragement, as were my parents. (My father, Dr. Carl Orringer, is responsible for everything I know about pericarditis.) Martha Eugene was a source of constant warmth and care. Carole Brelet, Nathan Guetta, Sophie Peresson, and Johanna Wenderoth provided generous help with French and German translation. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman offered their wisdom and support, and created a miniature colony so I could finish a draft. I’m thankful, too, for the friendship and insight of Cathy Park Hong, Amanda Stern, Amy Waldman, Idra Novey, Jennifer Vanderbes, Monica Ferrell, Tara Gallagher, Meghan O’Rourke, Katie Kitamura, and Monica Youn; also for the tireless reassurance provided by Jonathan Lethem, Amy Barrett, and Sarah Manguso. Manguso’s elegant meditation on mortality and impermanence, Ongoingness, is the source of my line about the brevity of our lives and the way they continue in others. (No wonder Varian can’t remember where he came across the idea; Ongoingness was published some seventy-five years after his time in Marseille.) And special thanks to my friend Elliott Grant, the source of Elliott Grant’s name.
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