Those Who Are Saved

by Alexis Landau

  “And how,” Vera asked, “do you treat these disorders?”

  “We prescribe antidepressants, tranquilizers, barbiturates . . .” His voice trailed off, and he impatiently waved one liver-spotted hand through the air. “But we’ve never entirely cured anyone of the nightmares or the hypermnesia.” He attempted a kindly smile. “It’s still early days. Now,” he said, frowning down at his notepad, “if you could explain the trouble, in more detail.”

  Vera could tell that Max was nervous as he began to speak. He had high hopes for this doctor, as if a doctor could fix her somehow and shake out the grief. The clock on his desk sedately ticked as she half listened to Max explain their attempts to find out more about the massacre, but it was challenging. They scoured reports and newspapers for more details: Was it only the town itself, or did the Germans also target the surrounding farms and hamlets? Were there any survivors even though the initial report claimed there were none?

  Finding out more about what happened at Oradour had grown into Vera’s obsession, a solitary one, while Max retreated into his work. He had just been assigned as the head composer for Music for Millions, a film with June Allyson and Harry Davenport, that the studio expected to win the Academy Award, which he said would secure him an extension on his contract, adding another five to seven years.

  Vera resented and also understood why he worked so much, envying him for having something real to disappear into, when she had only shreds of news, theories and statistics, unsubstantiated reports. Her job at the EFF temporarily relieved her from this searing uncertainty, the dullness of the work blunting her senses, until she returned home to her real life, and then the pain came blazing back. The moment Max woke up, he dashed to the shower, after which he gulped down his coffee with still wet hair and, smelling of soap and starch, grabbed his pockets to check for keys and cigarettes, planting a perfunctory kiss on Vera’s cheek seconds before the car door slammed and he roared away to the studio, waving as he went. She sensed his fear that if he lingered too long, she might burst into tears, which she hadn’t done in weeks, but nonetheless, he sprinted from the house as if it were on fire.

  One of their worst fights happened unexpectedly, when she was pulling on her stockings, and he called from the hallway, “See you later on,” as if by not being dressed quite yet, she had intentionally stalled him.

  He tugged at his collar. “Vera, I’ve got to—”

  “You’re doing it again.” She now had on her stockings and was zipping up the back of her skirt.

  “What?”

  Pale light filtered into the hallway.

  He stood on the landing, his jaw tensing.

  “You’re doing that.” Vera pursed her lips, waiting for him to confess, but he just stood there. “Your performance of being so very rushed and short on time, when we both know you don’t actually have to be at the office until nine.” She said this crisply and cleanly. No weepiness or intimation that things would turn tearful.

  “But you know that I have to—”

  She cut him short. “It’s not as if I’m trying to drag you down into the morass of my suffering at any given moment.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, even for you,” he said, attempting to lighten the mood.

  She fixed him with a stare. Underneath his congenial expression, she saw that her observation disturbed him. Her heart accelerated, and she relished the leap in her blood, readying herself for a fight. He tried to embrace her, to make it up, but his warm pity repulsed her and she pushed him away. He staggered into the wall, and for a moment, it all seemed oddly comic: his overly wounded expression, her exaggerated malevolence. Two actors in a play.

  * * *

  • • •

  Taking out a cigarette, she still felt the sting of that recent argument, and wondered if this was the sort of thing one talked about in analysis. When she drew deeply on the cigarette, the familiar burn in the back of her throat brought her brief satisfaction, before she noticed Max’s amiable expression and she felt a renewed anger with how oddly inflexible he had grown about the details of the massacre, reluctant to consider alternative theories.

  Dr. Bettelheim cleared his throat after Max finished explaining that Paris had only just been liberated, and the war still raged in the rest of France. “But you see, Vera is obsessed with finding out more information, and yet we can’t—there simply isn’t enough access and the reports are spotty, and frankly, at this point, we’re dogs chasing after our own tails.”

  Vera shook her head, almost afraid to speak because she didn’t trust herself. She might start screaming. Taking a deep breath, she began slowly, her voice shaking, “But what Max seems intent on ignoring is that, for example, it was recently reported that a boy survived the massacre by hiding in his family’s attic before fleeing into the forest. For some reason, he had not attended school that day, just as Lucie wouldn’t have, which is why he was able to hide and flee. The same thing could have happened to Lucie. She could still be alive.”

  “It’s highly improbable,” Max said gently. He exchanged a knowing look with the doctor.

  Vera snapped, “It isn’t highly improbable.”

  “Well,” the doctor interjected, leaning forward, his wrinkled hands spreading over his knees, “even if Lucie hasn’t died in that particular massacre, from what we’ve heard about the roundups and camps, you must be prepared to discover the worst.”

  “I am prepared,” Vera said, but her voice sounded small and tight.

  “In the meantime, you mustn’t stop living,” Dr. Bettelheim added.

  Vera glanced at the clock again. Only a half hour had passed. The whole point of this visit was for the doctor to confirm what Max had already pleaded with her to consider many times, but in his pleading, he grew prodding and intrusive, flickering around her like an agitated moth.

  The doctor gestured for her to say more.

  Vera drew her knees tightly together and hugged herself, as if to stay warm, even though it was stuffy inside the office, the afternoon sun heating up the cream carpet and the leather sofa to the point of discomfort. “I understand that I can’t do anything from here. That it’s useless to torture myself over reports and details that keep changing every day—” She broke off, refusing to tear up in front of this doctor, who surely wanted her to because that’s what people did in places like these. As though crying would open some secret door to health when it only made her feel overly self-conscious, the sole focus of his keen bright gaze.

  Max passed her a handkerchief. She balled the silk into her fist.

  “She wants to go back to France, to Oradour, as soon as it’s possible,” Max interjected. He struck a match to light a cigarette and then sank back into the couch. Taking a long drag, he added, “I don’t think she should go back there, into all that death.”

  Vera bristled at his scolding tone, the same tone one might take with a child who has misbehaved. As he stoically brought the cigarette to his lips, a cool arrogance radiated from him.

  “I understand Vera’s reasons for wanting to witness the place of death. It speaks to our need for closure, for a sense of an ending. Without this, it’s very difficult to move forward.” Dr. Bettelheim gave Vera an uneasy glance. “Which leads us to my next point.”

  Max leaned over the marble coffee table, ashing into a shallow amber dish.

  Dr. Bettelheim clasped his hands together, almost as if he wanted to celebrate something. “You must try for another child. It is the only way forward, the only way to inject meaning into your life again. Otherwise, this interminable waiting, this uncertainty, will continue to hold you in its grip.”

  * * *

  • • •

  They walked out of the office’s sequestered calm into the garish sun, the passing cars and lunch-hour foot traffic disorienting. Vera sought shade under a restaurant awning, leaning into the cool brick. Max faced her, hi
s hands resting on her shoulders, and he started to say how relieved he was to hear the doctor’s diagnosis. It was something he had been hoping for because now they had a chance to begin again.

  She started to shake, avoiding his eager gaze.

  He forced a smile. “We have some guidance now, a real expert opinion.”

  She finally looked at him, trying to find the Max she had loved, the Max who used to sing to Lucie before bed, and make paper dolls on the living room floor, and hold Lucie high above the waves at Sanary. In the shade of an umbrella, set back from the shore, she had watched, quietly nervous each time a new wave broke and relieved each time Max held her up above the surf.

  Pressing her back into the wall, she gestured to the space between them. “I don’t want to be a mother again. I can’t be anything to anyone again. Do you understand?”

  He stumbled back and said that it was too easy to give up, and he wasn’t going to give up. “It’s not that you can’t, Vera. You just don’t want to.”

  Then he turned away, walking into the shimmering concrete, ignoring the people passing by who openly stared at them, wondering why she was sobbing, crushing her hat in her hands, and why he seemed disgusted by such a display of grief.

  Chapter 24

  SASHA

  December 31, 1944, Los Angeles, California

  Sitting across from him, her elbows resting uneasily on the white tablecloth, Sasha’s date looked everywhere but his face. She shifted in her velvet evening gown, with the puffed sleeves and high neckline, her hair swept up into an elaborately coiled design, a maze of auburn and gold. From the curtained stage, Dinah Shore’s deep voice filled the microphone, singing “Speak Low.” His friend Dex had set him up for New Year’s with Helen, who worked for the naval auxiliary core and was a friend of Dex’s girl, but he didn’t know her at all. She looked just as uncomfortable as he was, having a first date on New Year’s, a night burdened by heightened expectations.

  They sat far back from the stage, gazing into a sea of close round tables. Little lamps illuminated laughing faces, with mink stoles thrown over bare shoulders, and he wondered if he should have taken her to the Cocoanut Grove instead. But here at the Mocambo, the damn parrots, cockatoos, and seagulls cawed to the music, causing a racket, their feathers aggressively fanning up in their glass cages that lined the walls—an odd attraction of this place.

  When he complimented her dress, she passed him a fleeting smile, but then the ambient ephemera took over again: the swirl of waiters, cigarette girls, and festive balloons that crowded the low-ceilinged ballroom. A bottle of chilled champagne balanced in the ice bucket, and Sasha realized he’d already drunk most of it, while she’d barely sipped hers.

  She realigned the cutlery while the waiter took their order, her nails shiny red against the silver.

  He leaned over his plate. “Is everything all right?”

  She produced another polite smile.

  Some friends were supposed to meet up with them here, and he found himself hoping they’d come sooner, especially Dex, who now served in the coast guard after his ship, the Yorktown got torpedoed in the South Pacific. He was on the half that didn’t blow up.

  Hunched over the silverware, she whispered, “I just don’t like New Year’s.”

  “Wanna get out of here?”

  “Oh, no. It’s lovely.”

  Her retreat into stiff formality made him clumsy. Reaching for her hand again, he tipped over a champagne glass, bubbly liquid cascading over the tablecloth. When he signaled for the waiter, his elbow knocked the salt and pepper shakers to the floor, and at the sight of spilled salt, he swiftly picked up the shaker and tossed more over his shoulder.

  It was something his mother always did, to ward off bad luck.

  He tried again. “You sure? I mean, if you want to leave, we can leave. It’s for show, this place. The crowd, photographers, the people.”

  The band started prepping for the next set. He was about to tell her that whatever it was, they’d order another bottle of champagne and wait for a slow song, but then he thought about the shoot starting next week, adrenaline coursing through him, and at the same time, he revisited some preliminary scenes for The In-Between Man, a welcome distraction to the mounting pressure. Sasha still couldn’t believe shooting for Clementine would start in ten days. Jesus, he thought, that was soon. Too soon.

  The overhead chandeliers dimmed, accentuating the glow of the table lamp. The first day of shooting loomed, and they only had fourteen days to shoot the entire movie, with only so much daylight for the scenes in Griffith Park. Sasha worried that Lambert might stick him with a bad cameraman, but at least Lambert couldn’t push his mistress for the lead anymore; by a stroke of luck, Charlie had somehow twisted Mayer’s arm to get him to release Hedy Lamarr temporarily from her contract to do this little film.

  He willed himself to feel as excited as Charlie was about the movie, but he couldn’t stop mulling over all the little details that might go wrong on set. Things he couldn’t foresee because he’d never done this before, and Charlie’s half-joking advice about skipping lunch to stay on schedule didn’t help much. He also worried that Hedy, who was such a big star, would sense his insecurity, like an animal smelling fear, and if the rest of the crew got a whiff of this, he’d be finished.

  His date stared down at her charm bracelet and tugged at the miniature ballet slipper.

  “You wanna dance?” he asked.

  They were playing Count Basie’s “Rusty Dusty Blues,” the sax rich and voluptuous. He took her onto the dance floor and felt her body adhere to his, submitting to the music and to the other bodies spinning and dipping around them, half-closed lids and closely held hips, women’s powdered cheeks resting on silk lapels.

  Sasha held her velvet back, feeling it shift beneath his palm. Her hair smelled of apricots, and when he glanced down, she had assumed the same dreamy expression as the other women, as if they had all agreed to swoon and be swayed by the music and the men.

  He dipped her, the tendons in her throat tensing, and the effort of holding her like that caused a quick bright pain to spread over his shoulder for a few moments. She peeled back up, a flush tinting her cheeks, and he forced a smile, not wanting to draw attention to his wound.

  She was about to say something when the set ended and everyone erupted into applause. The dance floor thinned and couples retired to their tables. The elaborate sound of a gong signaled that only ten more minutes remained of the old year.

  As he took her by the elbow, turning toward their table, a woman seated on a curved banquette near the far end of the stage gave him pause. Her broad bony shoulders drew together when she leaned forward, allowing a man to light her cigarette. For an instant, the flame illuminated her features: dark, almond-shaped eyes, an elongated nose and sharp cheekbones, her face composed of competing angles that failed to create the symmetry of conventional beauty. Rolling waves of dark hair fell around her shoulders, diamonds glinting in her ears. She was a mirage of light and shadow, encased in a violet gown the color of a bruise.

  Faintly aware of his date heading back to the table where they would sit in mild silence for the rest of the year, he maneuvered toward the woman’s table, straining to decipher the mix of French, German, and English that they spoke. He wondered about the man who sat next to her. He looked older, with tired, small eyes. Sasha’s heart lifted at the thought that he could be her brother or uncle. Now she spoke to the other woman, who wore a silk turban and a long coral necklace. The man noticed Sasha staring and said, “Happy New Year!” with a congenial smile, because it was New Year’s Eve and everyone wanted to feel brotherly and forget about the war, at least for one night. Sasha tried to smile, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her. A palpable sadness encased her while the other man poured her more champagne, and the turbaned woman told a joke that held no interest. She existed in another realm, causing her to appear di
sembodied, not entirely here.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dex and his girlfriend, Ruth, were waiting for them at the table when they got back. He had his arm thrown over Ruth’s shoulders, and she told them some convoluted story about the party they’d been to before this, at a club on the beach where she was a member.

  “Oh, it was dull.” Dex sighed.

  Ruth punched him in the arm and smiled at Helen. “You always say that about my friends.”

  The countdown started. People blew into their miniature golden paper horns and drummed their palms against the tables. The birds were getting restless, cawing irritably in their cages. Silver balloons, held overhead by a net, would soon shower down on them. Everyone wore those pointed little hats, tilted at an angle, plumed and glittery. Helen put one on and took a bite out of her dark chocolate cake, the prongs of the fork lingering in her mouth. On stage, a voluptuous Betty Grable look-alike motioned to an oversized clock they had wheeled out, indicating only seven minutes remained, her lovely arms imitating the slow-moving minute hand.

  “Hey,” Sasha said over the noise, “I gotta hit the head.”

  Helen grabbed onto his wrist, staring up at him imploringly. “Don’t miss it!”

  “Course not,” Sasha said, getting up. He threaded his way through the crowd, trying not to stare directly at the woman’s table, which was to the left of the stage, but out of the corner of his eye, he realized she wasn’t there with the rest of them. His eyes roved through the tightly packed room, straining to see around columns and checking the bar.

  Running out of time, he took stock of the dance floor. She wasn’t there. Again, his gaze traveled back to her table, and he noticed that the two men and the turbaned woman were craning their necks in the direction of the exit, a plate of untouched profiteroles before them. He ran toward the exit, squeezing between chairs and nearly upsetting a tray of champagne cocktails a waiter balanced overhead.