* * *
Claude asked Martin to pause the projector as he moved just a few feet from the screen. The image fell out of focus, abstracted into a field of flinty specks and mercury-colored pinpoints, but there was no mistaking his own face transposed across the decades. Yes, he said, continue.
* * *
The German soldier, now clear on his stage business out on the field, dragged a lifeless French soldier and propped him against a barbed-wire entanglement, his woolen infantry jacket braiding with smoke. Then the camera, manned once more, came in for a jostling close-up: the Frenchman’s charred head thrown back, his face stricken, O-mouthed and incredulous. And then there was a wall of white static, a thousand soundless detonations as the film guttered into black.
21
The First Escape
Sabine on the night train. Not the woman but the girl at thirteen, running away a year after her mother’s suicide. The dream on the divan, on the wave of Tuberculinum, had conjured a girl in tears, singing to herself in a compartment while her dead mother ate coq au vin in the dining car. But the truth of that spring night was she’d sat in her school uniform, drumming her fingertips on her calfskin valise, not scouring with shame at leaving her younger brother and sister and grief-addled father, but filling with exhilaration.
* * *
She’d told the conductor she was visiting a sick aunt in Paris, a missionary who’d contracted typhoid in the tropics. He punched her ticket and brought her hot chocolate in a tin mug to console her, told her to watch out for pickpockets in the Paris station and streets. To reassure the conductor, she told him her uncle was sending his carriage from the château because she had never seen Paris and this seemed like the most exuberant form of wealth she could imagine. She drank her hot chocolate, flushing with the audacity and meticulousness of her escape—the squirreling away of money, the suitcase she’d left packed in a granary on the way to school, the hunk of cheese and bread she’d wrapped as provisions in waxed paper.
* * *
She arrived in the city on the rim of a new workday, in the midst of Haussmann’s final opus. After years of construction, the medieval town was still being plundered and reborn, the kinked alleyways widened into streets, the streets into boulevards, a work crew on every corner. Parisians ignored it all on their way to work—the little Arcadian woodlands shimmering from vacant lots, the dredging of cesspools and graveling of sinkholes, the zincing of roofs and whitewashing of shutters. The chalk-colored stone facades and blue awnings and wrought-iron balconies. The public pissoirs where rings of frock-coated men stood urinating into metal wedges. The imported shade of a thousand chestnut and linden trees hauled in from the countryside.
* * *
The pedestrians looked unfazed by all this beauty and rubble, Sabine thought, accepted it as plainly as street names and seasons. An emperor was bludgeoning the present to build them an airy future, blasting daylight into the brickwork ravines. Her valise banged against her knees as she walked along, neck craned, the tide of the city and its people pulling her along.
* * *
For a week she went by the name Wilhelmina, worked in a tannery during the day and mimed or sang for strangers on street corners in the evenings. She lived in a narrow room above a tobacconist, in a Montmartre cul-de-sac that had not yet been quarried for the Grand Project. Her clothes and hair smelled of pipe smoke, her hands of tallow. Her head throbbed from exhaustion when she performed each night, pushing her pretty voice up from her stomach and into her nose, unthreading it the way her mother had taught her.
* * *
When she mimed, she liked to mimic posh female pedestrians bustling along to the opera or vaudeville houses, tickets in hand, cinching their gloves self-importantly. A Burgundy girl up on her arches, promenading and preening like a countess—this always got a laugh from those ringed around her. A scattering of centimes into her open valise, where she also kept her makeup and props. Each night she introduced something new into her act: an argument between two hand puppets, a fright wig, an impression, a tambourine.
* * *
She noticed the way the boys and men looked at her in Paris. It was not like the sidling glances of her classmates or the offhanded affections from men old enough to be her father back in Burgundy. It was unabashed and cunning, a narrowing through a gun sight. She felt it wherever she went, along the planking of the serpentine alleyways in Montmartre, from behind the smoky windows of a chandler or a cooper, but also along the broad promenades, through the aqueous lens of a monocle.
* * *
Something new and unnamable hovered about her, an aura in a gas lamp, and she saw it in their lustful calculating eyes and heard it in their cajoling voices. A few of the men started small talk when they dropped money into her suitcase, guessing that she was much older than thirteen. They all liked the sound of her name, Wilhelmina, the Germanic force of that initial V sound, of their front teeth grazing their lower lips.
* * *
A vision of a Paris life seemed within her grasp. She’d heard of girls, not much older than her, living in the dormitories above Le Bon Marché on rue de Sèvres. She could imagine herself into a future where she was a shopgirl during the day, selling bolts of ribbon and silk and crinoline, and a performer at night, an actress dressed in primrose and claret, offering up electrifying speeches to sobbing theatergoers. The affectionate public would give her playful nicknames—la cloche (the bell), le moineau (the sparrow)—and fill her dressing room with flowers. There was never a husband in her imaginings, just a circle of admirers and benefactors, and the sisterhood above the department store, the girls from the provinces who had the wrong accents and were all running away from something. It was Sabine, in this vision, who negotiated with store management and asked for an increase in wages. Even here, she would admit years later, she’d cast herself as the heroine and rescuer.
* * *
In the span of a week, she’d become expert at navigating the city. She knew where to buy bread and soup, where to wash her clothes, but she didn’t know how to decline a man’s unwanted invitations. Her mother had taught her to simply look away, to smile politely and look for a nearby distraction, but she’d never told her what to do when an older gentleman offers to buy you dinner and you’re starving, repeats his invitation and stands over you while you pack up a valise of silk scarves and puppets.
—I have daughters not much younger than you, mademoiselle, back in Lyon. Let me buy you a brasserie plate. This is the third time I’ve watched you this week. Wonderful, splendid. You are destined for great things, ma petite poupée.
* * *
And so she followed this pot-bellied father into the soupy fug of a brasserie, the light braiding through the pipe smoke, the smell of mutton and onions already in her hair. She accepted a plate of sausages, ate enough cheese and bread and wine to make up for the days of hunger, for the time she’d briefly fainted at the tannery, when she’d found her arms waxed up to the elbows in tallow. The gentleman from Lyon prattled and sang little ditties that came to mind, helped her on with her shawl when it was time to retire, insisted on walking her back to her accommodations.
* * *
And it was here that her earliest vision of Paris was snatched from her grasp, the Bon Marché and the dormitory above it, the street theater and patriotic songs she belted for strangers, when he grabbed her from behind as she crept up the iron stairs behind the tobacconist. She’d been warned not to make a racket by her landlord, a man who seemed to rise for work in the middle of the night, and somehow this stayed with her, an admonition against noise after dark, as the Lyonnaise put his arms all around her, squeezing her rib cage and whispering ma petite poupée into her neck and ears.
* * *
A molten river flooded down her spine. She told him to stop, tried to break free and elbow him in the stomach, but his grip only tightened as it encircled her breasts. Her legs, especially her calves, were sinewy and strong from so many years of mashing Gamay grap
es, so when she brought her ankle up behind her, piston-like, it gave a sharp jolt and she heard a long coil of air run out of him as he fell back onto the iron stairs.
* * *
She turned to see him reaching for a handhold in the air as he fell, his twill frockcoat flapping out like the wings of a bat. Lights and commotion came from the apartments up above as she hurried down the stairs and crouched to see whether he was still breathing. Blood crowned slowly around his head, but his eyes were still open. He blinked up at her wordlessly as the tobacconist landlord appeared at the top of the stairs, peering down and calling out with a lantern in one hand.
* * *
Then she was running into the snaking alleyways, wending her way toward the train station, her valise bashing at her knees, the city swallowed by night. During her arrival, the construction had been a sign of new beginnings, the broadening streets a new horizon, but now she tripped on a mason’s pail of mortar, on a quarryman’s sledgehammer, almost fell headfirst into a roped-off mound of gypsum.
* * *
She was battered and bruised by the time she made it to the station and bought a ticket back to Burgundy. Hands shaking, out of breath, she waited the three hours until departure time at the far end of the platform, sitting on her valise, her scarf around her head and shoulders. Something ragged coursed through her, and at first she thought it was the lingering terror of the man’s arms squeezing her breath out, his voice sparking down her spine. She’d run aground, retreated from her own great future. In the train compartment she would sing to cheer herself up, blinking back tears, her reflection ghosting in the night of the windowpanes, the valise on her lap. All those years later, the shame came back to her on the shores of a homeopathic remedy, not for running away but for returning home.
22
War Correspondents
As a borough, Brooklyn was now a graveyard in Hal’s mind. His brothers had fled to Boston, where they both worked as projectionists, and there was bound to be at least one Myrtle Avenue poolroom or tavern bounty on his head. Before Alroy Healy took over the Bender Bijoux to reclaim some of his debts, Hal had managed to remove some posters and fixtures from the lobby and a single opera chair—1A—from the auditorium. He hauled them over to the small apartment they all shared in Queens, put the red plush chair in the cramped sitting room, facing the window above the street. At night, when they came home from a day shooting advertisements for cruise ship companies or the opening of a new skyscraper, they all stared at 1A by the window, but none of them would sit in it.
* * *
For Hal, it was a piece of salvage, a reminder that no one would see their epic production. If he’d toed the line with Edison’s copyrights, if Claude hadn’t created a vampiric widow who seduced audiences but also drew their wrath, if Sabine Montrose hadn’t opened the mailbags … It made him heartsick every time he looked at the chair, running the gearwheels of their ruin afresh. For Claude, 1A was occupied by a nameless moviegoer. Depending on his mood, he felt the invisible presence of a terrified woman who sits in the dark with her fingers laced across her eyes, or the clerk who hums too loudly with the music, or the country uncle who clucks and shakes his head, murmuring idiots up at the projection booth. It had always been impossible, Claude thought, to appease the fearful and the oblivious and the scornful with the same passage of music and celluloid.
* * *
It was Chip who finally sat in the chair and broke the spell. He plunked down one evening, a plate of spaghetti in his lap, looking out over the busy street with his mouth full. When he felt them both staring at him in disbelief, he shrugged, said, I don’t believe in curses, twirled his fork into his noodles. Besides, I can see into the piano showroom across the way when I sit here. It’s the night polishers I like to watch, the way they buff all that lacquered wood with a cloth in each hand. Look at the frenzied bastards … Best seat in the house!
* * *
For four years, they lived above a greengrocer, made filmstrips of wax museum openings and civic ribbon cuttings. Hal prospected for the work, Claude manned the camera, and the closest Chip came to a stunt was sliding down a banister in a tuxedo to promote a new luxury ocean liner. Mostly, he hauled the equipment and made props. With whatever money they could save, they each plotted their own escapes and comebacks. Chip and Hal saved to move out to Hollywood, and Claude kept a firm of private investigators on retainer to locate Sabine and the children. Early on, the firm had checked steamer passenger logs, wired Sabine’s acquaintances in Paris, and spoken with the superintendent of the upstate tuberculosis sanitarium, but there was no trace of them. They sent letters to acquaintances of Pavel and Helena, but nobody responded. As her legal husband, Claude was able to check for withdrawals from the bank account he shared with Sabine, where the monthly deposits were made from the widow’s estate. He imagined there would be a paper trail, a dotted line of withdrawal locations, but not a penny had been touched.
On the basis of his adopted, albeit missing, children, Claude was granted American citizenship after taking night classes in civics and English grammar. Although he had to technically renounce his allegiance to all foreign governments, they let him keep his French passport even after he acquired an American one. He was free to leave the United States and return, to search the ends of the earth for Sabine and the children, but he couldn’t think where to begin.
* * *
He pictured Leo, now thirteen, and Cora, fifteen, living in a thatched-roof house up on stilts in French Polynesia, or in equatorial Africa, living in some kind of expatriate compound and sleeping under mosquito netting. Whatever deprivations he conjured for them, it was impossible to extend the same to Sabine. She hated insects and the heat too much to have taken up a new life in the tropics. There were two tiny islands, French protectorates off the coast of Newfoundland, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and he tried to imagine them there until he read about their blustery winters and the fishermen who spoke a coarsened and obscure dialect of French. They might have had gendarmes and francs, but Sabine could never live on some rocky outpost like that. His mind kept gravitating to distant francophone countries and territories, to places far enough away and small enough that no one would trouble her. Wherever she was, he saw her in disguise, changing her name, growing old and anonymous. He imagined her exile with such detail that it became his own, setting him adrift in the middle of a crowded room or street.
* * *
He’d carried want for so long that he wasn’t prepared for loss. It ate at his insides, coiled around his dreams, swung through the ticking orbits of his fob watch. At night, he surrendered to the melancholy that had been ebbing through him all day and lay in bed to contemplate the losses of his life. Everything seemed to flow back to the attic bedroom and the fever, to the swooning boy on the brink. The past and the present were connected the way his father said mushrooms were, fungi and spores conspiring with messages below the dirt, so in his mind, he tried to pluck himself from the fever, get up onto his feet, and stagger out through the bedroom door to go sit by his mother, who was dying of smallpox in the next room. But the boy lying in the closed attic bedroom wouldn’t budge. He tried to remember murmurs through the wall, imagined that perhaps her last words were German, since they were also her first, or that she had called out his name. Somehow, if he could hear her voice, he was certain it held a message for him. Then he pictured the moment the painting at the foot of his bed—a girl sleeping in a forest—stippled out of focus, the instant the fever warped the luminous corneal oceans that lapped over his eyeballs. He wanted to believe that she had died in the same moment he’d lost his perfect vision.
* * *
All his losses seemed to roost and burrow together at night. In the smears of street light from his window, his narrow bed in Queens sagged into his childhood bed in Alsace. It was the same person sighing through the same lungs. He thought the boy’s thoughts, swam through his feelings, and the boy, in turn, was somehow prescient of his own future burdens. Sometimes Cla
ude thought of himself as the abandoned husband and father as he floated his whys and wheres into the hazy cosmos above his head. Other times, when the melancholy softened, he traced Sabine’s flight back to his own decision to make her a beautiful monster. In doing so, he’d turned the world against her, and therefore against himself. He wondered whether, in that closed room up in the attic, half a lifetime ago, he’d been the one to close the door to keep his mother’s unraveling voice at bay. Sorrow, he thought now, had always been waiting for him on the other side of that door.
* * *
In August 1914, Hal Bender saw their chance at redemption. Like his other big ideas—a moviemaking glassworks above the Palisades, the Bender Bijoux with its Model B cinématographe and cake emporium—it came to him all at once and fully formed, an epiphany that felt religious in its power.
* * *
He didn’t tell Claude or Chip that he’d made an appointment with the Belgian consul after hearing him interviewed on the radio, that he’d taken his only remaining tailored suit out of its garment bag, polished his Italian brogues, and gone into Manhattan like the old days of wooing bankers and magnates to finance a film. There was no flip chart or projector this time, because the proposition was so simple that it didn’t need to be conjured on butcher paper or celluloid: Bender & Ballard would donate 80 percent of ticket sales to the Belgian Red Cross in return for unfettered access to film the German invasion anywhere inside the country.
The Electric Hotel Page 27