The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  Claude Ballard appeared nightly in her dreams and regrets. Often, he was standing at the edge of a mountain lake, pants rolled up, his pale silvery feet immersed in the frigid water, a few trout moping through the stony green shallows nearby. Or he was standing behind his tripod on the suspended stage below the Palisades, hand-cranking his camera while a burning man dangled below a zeppelin. Her visions were animated with tigers and trains, with envelopes addressed to her in menacing cursive.

  * * *

  There was also the daily weight of Claude dimming away in Leo’s and Cora’s memories. At first, she spoke of him as a blood relation who, for complicated reasons, could no longer visit. By the end of the first year, their questions were less frequent, but also more direct. Green-eyed Cora, always ferreting out untruths, asked why he wasn’t coming if they were married, to which Sabine replied, We were never meant to be together. We married not for love, but so we could adopt you both.

  * * *

  Sabine often held the summer they’d all spent together in her mind, their little tourist camp above the Hudson, as one of the happiest times of her life. But it was also a falsehood, a house of paper and glass. She liked to imagine that she had unburdened him, once and for all, that he might have gone on to other more fortifying loves, perhaps a marriage with children of his own. Each night, though, she felt the truth of the matter uncoil in the pit of her stomach: it was she who had been unburdened. Ever since she’d run away on the train to Paris at thirteen, the audacity of leaving had always been her greatest exhilaration. The shedding of a skin. The lighting of new lamps. It was staying in one place—or returning home—that terrified her.

  * * *

  She went by the name Désirée Mouret, after a Zola character, and lived quietly with Leo, Cora, Helena, and a Catalan housemaid. Pavel stayed for months at a time but frequently traveled to give lectures or take up a residency with a theater somewhere. From April through the end of November each year, they lived in the mountainside town of Ordino, in a rambling stone house that had belonged to an Andorran baron. The wife had been murdered—or so the town legend went—and the baron fled with his children to France, leaving his furniture and belongings behind, right down to the sheet music and the chessboard inlaid with lapis butterfly wings.

  * * *

  They usually wintered in Barcelona, or sometimes in Greece or Corsica, where Pavel brought a well-paying international delegation of thespians and directors, followers who’d embraced his framework. Sabine never performed, but she sometimes joined them for their dramatic exercises and workshops, or offered up stories about the triumph of naturalism. You cannot make progress, she told them, until you embrace the indefinable ache. She signed autographs and they signed nondisclosure agreements. She told them she lived most of the year in the house of a murdered Andorran baroness, a detail they would never forget.

  * * *

  Andorra was a natural hideaway, a hermitage clamped onto a Pyrenean valley, wedged between Spain and France. In its own way, it was a nation of exiles, of people who had turned their backs on the world. A country smaller than Chicago, a principality governed jointly and absently by the president of France and His Serene Highness, the Archbishop of Urgell. A country with two postal systems, one French, one Spanish, and a flock of carrier pigeons that still flew mail out into the deep valleys blocked with snow during the long Pyrenean winters.

  * * *

  Andorrans had a reputation for being taciturn and secretive, a condition, Sabine thought, that came with their mountain hermitage. Their houses were made from dark native limestone, with roofs of blue slate. Many houses were windowless and they sealed the weather and the world out with big wooden shutters. Their secrecy also served a practical function, since they were also great smugglers of tobacco. Every family had an uncle or a cousin who, when he wasn’t tending the orchards or sheepfolds, led a mule or two along the Gran Valira river to a clandestine meeting place where he would sell untaxed tobacco or cigarettes to Spaniards and Frenchmen.

  * * *

  The six hundred people who lived in the capital, Andorra la Vella, and the hundred or so who lived around Ordino, all suspected she was in exile, the handsome vieja with her teenage children, but from what they couldn’t be sure. There was a Hungarian aristocrat and his wife who lived anonymously in the capital, as well as a washed-up British writer, so fleeing a former life was not unheard-of. It wasn’t until a merchant began to show novelty films above his store that she noticed the Andorrans staring at her through shop windows or along the stone footpaths. She braced herself for a Catholic backlash, for Catalan women in their mantillas turning her business away at the bakeries and greengrocers, but instead they offered her discounts and knowing looks. Secrets were a kind of currency among the five Andorran parishes, and now she was in their debt.

  * * *

  For Cora’s sixteenth birthday, in June 1915, Sabine decided to throw a party and invite the townspeople of Andorra la Vella and Ordino as a way of thanking them for their years of hospitality and discretion. Although Cora didn’t attend the local school—she and Leo were tutored by a polyglot Spanish nun and a retired French mathematics professor—word had passed down the valley that the pretty summering American girl was now of marriageable age. So the locals mistook the birthday girl for a debutante, and two hundred townspeople picked their way up the steep rocky path to the limestone house that overlooked the valley. They brought with them all manner of gifts and marital enticements—deeds of trust, sheep, chickens, bushels of barley and wheat, handmade figurines, Catalan embroidery.

  * * *

  The Hungarian aristocrats and the British writer also came, though they kept their distance from each other. Technically, their nations were at war, though the bloody battles named after rivers and woods seemed like abstractions up in the mountains. Andorra, despite not having an army, had also declared war on Germany as a show of allegiance with its parent nations. Sabine sometimes forgot the war was raging to the north, but now she remembered as she saw the Hungarians avoiding the Englishman out on the veranda. They stood at opposite ends of the ironwork railing, looking off into the valley as a cool afternoon breeze blew through the surrounding larches and cypress trees. Cora, looking mortified in a silk frock a local seamstress had made for her, stood over by the cake and punch table, politely accepting sacks of grain and sheaths of tobacco. A sheepherder’s boy presented her with a baby chick cupped between two hands and she blushed as the crowd cooed.

  * * *

  Leo, a fourteen-year-old who liked to find the logical flaws in adult arguments, who spent his days with stamps, insects, detective novels, and crosswords and his nights with a telescope, stood talking to the British writer, a man named Reginald Bellows. Sabine watched them from across the room, noticed something solicitous in the way Bellows tilted his head and leaned in whenever Leo was talking. She remembered that the writer only ever introduced himself as Bellows, as if to suggest a chummy boarding school upbringing.

  * * *

  When the candles were blown out, and the birthday songs were sung in three languages, Sabine took two pieces of cake over to the Hungarians and chatted with them for a few minutes. They were polite, a little stiff, the husband mustached and wolfish in his charcoal woolen suit and the wife all in white, dressed as if for a wedding. Then she took two pieces of cake over to Leo and Reginald Bellows, interrupting whatever interrogation was unfolding. The writer took the piece of cake and cut into it with a fork. He spoke between bites.

  —I’m surprised you invited the Hungarians.

  Sabine licked a flake of icing from her thumb.

  —Mr. Bellows, I was rather hoping the war wouldn’t make its way above three thousand feet.

  They all looked over at the Hungarian couple standing off to one side, silently eating their cake.

  —What were you boys talking about?

  Leo, his mouth full of cake, said:

  —The Huns and our life back in America.
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  —Don’t call them that.

  Bellows shifted onto the balls of his feet, clearing his throat.

  —I’m surprised you have any affection for the Germans, Madame Mouret, given the predicament in France.

  —I like to think of myself as a humanist, not a nationalist.

  —Tell that to the Belgians.

  —Leo, would you mind helping your sister gather up her gifts? She looks exhausted, poor thing. We’ll make some toasts in just a minute.

  They both watched Leo cross the veranda with his cake plate in hand. Sabine saw the way the girls looked at him and decided, in that moment, that he needed a haircut and that they would spend the summer in Corsica.

  * * *

  After a silence, Reginald Bellows said:

  —Zola, isn’t it?

  —What’s that?

  —Désirée Mouret is an obscure character in The Fortune of the Rougons, that insufferable twenty-volume novel project he slaved away on.

  —It’s not a crime to be named after a character from literature.

  —Of course not. But I would have thought, now that your films have surfaced here in town, that you’d go back to your birth name.

  * * *

  She felt her breath quicken, then she looked into his face—gin-blossomed and wary, his brashness a kind of compensation. She saw the peevish, fretful boy of his youth, perhaps not bullied in the Anglican boarding school where he learned to masturbate and read Byron, but certainly shunned as an outsider, the boy who quoted Latin proverbs at precisely the wrong moment. She felt into his atmosphere, the little weather front swirling about him.

  —Is it true that you once wrote novels?

  —Guilty as charged. Emphasis on once.

  He morselled another bite of cake into his small mouth. She watched him chew, rabbit-like, marveling at the thinness of his lips. She had never trusted a man with a stingy mouth.

  —But I have also written essays and journalism over the years. I still write the odd piece that I send to an editor in London.

  —It must get lonely, being so far from the literary scene.

  —Oh, I prefer it. Far from the hoi polloi …

  There was a long silence between them.

  —Do you get lonely up here, Miss Montrose?

  She felt her reply strike the air like a sulfur match.

  —If that is flirtation, Mr. Bellows, you might direct it at me instead of at your cake plate.

  She watched him redden, saw a glimmer of anger water his eyes.

  —It was merely a question, he said, swallowing.

  —Well, all the same, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrogate Leo, or egg him on with nonsense about the pillaging Huns. We came here for privacy, just like you. I hope you enjoy your cake. Please take some home with you. Life can be hard when one lives alone.

  * * *

  As Sabine walked away, she heard the clinking of glassware and realized that Reginald Bellows was now tapping a spoon on a champagne flute. It took her another long moment to realize that he intended on proposing a toast before all two hundred of her guests. Incredulous, she watched him stand on a chair so that he could be better seen.

  * * *

  He moistened his thin mouth, stared into the eye of his champagne flute, then brought his regard obliquely out into the audience.

  —Compadres, mis amigos, I thought I’d raise a glass to our birthday girl, the fetching Cora, who will no doubt be kept in grain and livestock forever after.

  A quiet chuckle. A few low-set translations for the older Catalans.

  —But birthdays are also an occasion to remember history and the forces that have brought us here. Had it not been for your distant peasant ancestors from the County of Urgell, who fled the rampaging Moors as they devoured Iberia, we wouldn’t be standing in this beguiling spot. From the very beginning, Andorra has been a place to hide.

  He looked at Sabine, then over at the Hungarian couple.

  —But the world is shrinking, and it’s getting harder and harder to outrun history, whether it’s personal history or history with a capital H. So as we raise a glass to Cora, let us also raise a glass to her mother, the very talented and famous actress, Sabine Montrose, and to our Hungarian aristocrats, the Count Bethlen and his wife, who, if I’m not mistaken, had ancestors fighting off the Bavarians at the same time your Catalans were fighting the Muslims. How times have changed! Now the Bavarians and Hungarians are fighting on a united German front … but that is another matter. Here’s to Cora, and to history, and to the mountain valley that allows us all to hide!

  * * *

  Sabine refused to raise her glass but she watched the townspeople dutifully acknowledge the toast. She took in the room and noticed that the Hungarians had already fled. She saw the tops of their graying heads as they picked their way delicately down the steep path that led from the house.

  EXILE IN EUROPE’S HIGHEST CAPITAL

  By Reginald Bellows, Special Correspondent

  By now many of us know the story of Sabine Montrose and her rise to fame. A Burgundy farm girl who made a name for herself in the Paris theater scene and beyond, Montrose also went on to star in cinematic roles, including her scandalizing bathtub nude scene. Then, in 1910, under the direction of Claude Ballard, she starred in the doomed film The Electric Hotel. Not seen in this country, the film was pulled from distribution following a series of electrifying lawsuits and entreaties from the inventor and tycoon Thomas Edison. While we are left to wonder about what moral hazards sauntered across the screen in said film, we can now rest in the certainty of what happened to the actress herself.

  For more than five years, Sabine Montrose has lived a secluded life with her two adopted children in Europe, spending her summers in the remote and tiny country of Andorra, a principality shared by Spain and France. Going by the name of Désirée Mouret, an obscure character from an ill-fated Zola novel series, Sabine Montrose lives an eccentric, decadent lifestyle. In the evenings, she can be seen drinking cocktails in a cochineal dress on the blue slate veranda of her Ordino house overlooking the valley, a manor that once belonged to an Andorran baron. She imports luxury goods brought in by mule train, everything from silk to caviar to champagne. She is rumored to have a bathtub made from pure copper, manufactured by the same French firm who installed the torch for the Statue of Liberty. Her adoptive charges, American by birth, are tutored by professors and overeducated nuns and taken to various portside villas during the long Pyrenean winter, lest they fall in with the local peasants. While Montrose is still technically married to Claude Ballard, all evidence suggests they are now estranged.

  Further down the valley, in the capital of Andorra la Vella, a Hungarian aristocrat and his wife hide from history. Count Bethlen was driven out of Budapest after his political alliances shifted with the monarchy. Among his business interests back in his homeland is a munitions factory that sold its wares to both German and French parties. Now confiscated by the Austro-Hungarian war machine, the factory is producing thousands of shells a day that pummel British and French trenches along the Belgian and Normandy coastlines.

  Such are the vagaries of the rich and exiled in a nation that was founded as a hiding spot from invading Muslims …

  28

  The Blackout

  A storm swept through Los Angeles a month before Martin’s exhibition of The Electric Hotel. The clouds darkened and flashed over the Hollywood Hills, causing blackouts across the city. They sat together in Claude’s kitchenette drinking tea, the table lamp flickering. Claude was telling Martin about the ravages of Belgium as he watched the capillaries of lightning travel along the base of the clouds. He remembered the Boche balloons in the skies above Flanders from half a century ago, the way they resembled enormous gray brains.

  * * *

  Sometimes, out in the street, when he was on his route to photograph the rug sellers in Little Armenia, or the goateed man who sat with a typewriter writing poems for strangers on Vine Street, he looked sk
yward and saw a commercial blimp. His throat went dry as he craned up, and for a moment he didn’t see the Goodyear or Budweiser lettering and he was convinced that this floating specter had been dogging him for decades, his life somehow tethered to it. The lights flickered again in his kitchenette.

  —Maybe memory is just electricity passing through us. Old voltage in the joints, he said.

  * * *

  Martin had brought over some photocopies of old newspaper articles he’d uncovered at the university library. Claude pressed the one about Sabine’s exile in Andorra to the window, staring into the crosshatching of microfiche lines.

  —Are you surprised this is where she ended up?

  —Nobody vanishes into thin air forever.

  —You already knew about Andorra?

  Claude looked at their doubles in the darkening windowpane.

  —I often wonder about what happened to Leo and Cora …

  —Did they keep their own last names? I can do some research.

  —I think so, yes, Harlow.

  * * *

  Martin moved the other articles across the table. One was Hal Bender’s obituary from the early 1950s. After running a studio for decades, he retired, left his studio to his son, spent his twilight years restoring a sailboat, and published a memoir entitled The Brooklyn Lumières. Martin pulled a copy of the book from his rucksack and placed it on the table.