IT WAS FROM A portable radio, instrument for picnics and holiday hours, that Vera Marriner learned of Anschluss.
For a second she scarcely took in the meaning of the news. The quiet British voice went on with the Reuter’s dispatch, and a moment later she sat up violently and searched about her on the blinding white sand for the source of the hateful words.
There it rested, just one of innumerable similar portable sets, this one under a bright beach umbrella at Montego Bay, Jamaica, in the British West Indies. The innocent, indifferent box went on tossing out into the yellow sunshine its black message of calamity.
Her heart contracted, as with a purely personal pain. She didn’t know Austria, as she had once known Germany, but she had heard so much of so many people there, from Jasper, from Ann Willis, that she could not feel impersonal now.
“So here he goes, this is it, this is the real beginning,” she thought. “All that about the Ruhr and the Rhineland was just winding up…but this…now he’s really begun scooping up great chunks of Europe into his Reich. Damn him, damn him—”
For a moment she wished she were at home, where she could talk this out with people who would be as angry as she. Yet she had come alone all this way south partly at least to escape the political and social nervousness of New York and the people she knew. Remembering that, she got to her feet and started up along the curve of beach, along the shining spread of blue water. Her mind worked over the vast implications of the news.
She was hailed half a dozen times, by people she had come to know in the three weeks since she had come down. Their voices, their words, showed they had not heard, or else had heard and already dismissed the news from their thoughts. That angered her, too.
She walked on more briskly. Her body was a dark, positive brown, already impervious to the stinging sun. In the flushed dark of her tanned face, the light, clear gray of her eyes was startling and compelling. Her warmly brown hair blew about, wavy and free, springing back from the ribbon tied about her head. She was small and slim; the brief white bathing suit gave her a long-legged look that made her seem taller than she was.
For all her regular features and gray eyes, she carried in her face somewhere a slightly foreign look, the look of Magyar or Slav or Central European. It was there in the deep socketing of the wide-set eyes, in the high cheekbones; it was in the rather large mouth and the quick mobility of her expression. She was no good at dissembling what she felt; she could not act a part with any skill whatever.
Now as she strode along, she was disturbed and she looked disturbed. She wondered what Jasper felt when he had heard the news from Europe. It must have held a special prod for him, and a special meaning. Everything now was translated into the vigorous language of his own purpose. That was inevitable, she knew. She could imagine the very words he was saying this moment up there in New York.
Before the quiet British voice with the Reuter’s dispatch had broken into her thoughts, she had been lying on the busy, bright beach, lazying through thoughts and memories as they came. If a vacation alone had any special merit to recommend it, it surely lay in the opportunity to think, to browse through her mind and her memories, as if she were browsing through some dim library open only to herself, where each book on every shelf was an autobiography of some phase of her own life. As she lay on the sand, thinking, this notion struck her; it pleased her and made her smile faintly.
One such volume in this secret library was titled Jasper and I; that was the latest, the most absorbing, though it was still unfinished and Volume II still unwritten. Another was named My Marriage and Divorce; that seemed to be bound in some meaningless gray, and was on the whole a dull, mediocre thing, rather than a tragic one. Another was My Childhood, and another, My Success Story—Don’t Make Me Laugh.
There were many other volumes there, some short, some very long, some seemed bound in flamboyant scarlet leathers and others in the prosy cloth of schoolbooks. But one volume was missing—the restless, heated discussions of politics among her friends at home always served as a reminder of the gap. Yet this book could not be there until she herself had formulated its contents. It could never be there until she herself knew what it was she really stood for, found the continuing pattern she could live by. As yet she couldn’t even catch up this ghostly volume with any title at all, so formless was it. But someday it would be there too, and it would be a blessed book, an unquenchable book.
Until it was there, she would have a nameless unrest and searching. Neither her marriage, nor her work, nor her love affair with Jasper had quieted the one and given answer to the other.
She envied the positive ones, the devout Catholics, the ecstatic Communists, the untroubled devotees of any “cause.” They no longer were a-search. They knew; they had their purpose. But one could not simply decide, cool intellectual decision, “I will become passionately involved in this or that movement; I will devote myself to the juvenile delinquency problem; or I will crusade for better conditions for Negroes; or I will immerse myself heart and soul in the labor movement…”
Jasper never seemed to be troubled so. His own ambitions, his own determination to own the most famous network on the world’s air, were the inner drive that propelled him onward through every obstacle, through every emotion. It made him unswerving; his enemies called him “ruthless.” Many people whom he himself would call “friends” privately thought him so, too.
She herself did not know what he was. He did things differently from other people, that was true. He was unlike any other man she had ever known. In big ways, in little ways. Take so small an instance as his seeing her off on this very trip.
He himself had telephoned to suggest driving her to the airport.
It had never occurred to her that he would break into one of his crowded days to see her off on a short holiday.
“Oh, Jas, how dear of you, when you’re so busy.”
“Well, it’s our first separation, isn’t it?” he asked.
But the next day, when he came for her, he strode into her apartment, elated, talkative, triumphant.
“It’s a red-letter day, today is,” he greeted her.
“Because I’m going away?”
“Because it was signed and delivered this morning. The station is mine—it’s been mine legally, officially, financially mine for three hours. It doesn’t belong to Grosvenor any more.”
“Jas, that’s grand, to have it settled at last.” She was glad for him, deeply glad. No wonder he was so high-spirited.
“God, if it were only the whole network as well. I’m going mad at the lost chances because I’m not ready. Here’s all hell going to break in Austria and what do they broadcast? Hitler and Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden yesterday—and CBS sends out a program called “Old Vienna.” Christ, one broadcast this whole month from Austria, and it turns out folk songs. God knows what NBC did.”
His strong voice now had scorn and hatred in it.
“If I were only ready—I’d be sending out news from Austria every couple of hours, not songs and music, but news, excitement, crisis. Radio’s coming to that, Vee—damn them if they beat me to it.”
“They won’t. There’s no reason to think—”
“The idea’s getting around. I’m the very one who’s constantly talking it up—talking to every new prospect about my plans for regular, daily news from London, Berlin, Paris. And every damn day for a year I’ve known somebody’s going straight back to the big boys, spilling my ideas, handing them right over—”
He broke off suddenly, shrugged. The intensity went out all over him, from his voice, his eyes, his muscles.
“Oh, the hell with them,” he said coldly. “They’ll take the idea and then muff it anyway, because they’ll be scared of its heat, the sweep of it. But I’ve got to hurry. I hurry in my sleep.”
She looked at her watch then.
“We’ve got to hurry now, or I’ll miss the plane.”
He looked suddenly apologetic.
“Vee, I’m no good, talking business now. With you going—” He looked to her for reassurance, found her face smiling. “You’re a darling to let me. Come on, not another word about it.”
But in his car, through the gray, unlovely drive to Newark Airport, the talk soon went back to the network, and stayed there. At the airport, there was a last-minute rush to check her tickets, weigh in her luggage. The passengers were already boarding the plane.
He took her to the gate. Then his face changed.
“Good-by, darling, I’ll miss you,” he said. “I’ll hate your being away.”
“I’ll miss you, too, Jas. But it’s not for so long.”
“If you get a new beau down there, I’ll come and tear his ears off.”
He leaned down to her, ignoring anybody who might see. He kissed her and then held her away from him a moment, staring at her, as if he were suddenly finding it too hard to part. For one moment she wished she were not going.
“Flight Fifteen, all aboard Flight Fifteen, Charleston, Jacksonville, Miami—”
He dropped his arms; she turned quickly away from him, went through the gate.
“If you meet any big shots down there,” his voice shouted after her, teasing, gay, “anybody from BBC, fix my deal for me, will you?”
She pretended she had not heard.
That was Jasper. The scene came back to her as she lay in the sand—no wonder she herself did not know what he was. And he was as contradictory in other ways.
He described himself as “a liberal,” spoke often of “the little people” and the injustice life ladled out to them—but his voice remained tranquil, his eyes cold. She always disliked the phrase itself, with its implication that the speaker was “big people”; from Jas, with his rich, privately furnished apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, his ambitions and “big deals,” it seemed only patronizing and false.
Yet he certainly seemed to resist and even hate the big and successful people. Though he dealt with them almost exclusively, he always was scornful of them, always ridiculed them.
She knew of his early days; Ann Willis had told her of them, with more amusement than sympathy, just after Ann had introduced them at a party. His father had started as a neighborhood plumber, had prospered enough to start a partnership with a small manufacturer of bathroom fixtures. They called the new business Crown Bathrooms, Inc., because they thought it sounded elegant.
“Old Crown was swept along on the Great Tide of the American Bathroom,” Ann had said, “and made mints—as well as toilets.”
When Jasper got to prep school, he had, even among those little boys of well-to-do families, too much money, too many sweaters, too much conceit. He showed off his belongings, and they were always better than anybody else’s, better ice skates, better tennis rackets, better everything. The other boys didn’t respond, and Jasper hated them for it. They hated him back, soon nicknamed him “Plumber Crown,” changed to “Terlet Crown,” and finally improved that to “Can Crown.” The name stuck. “Can” made up more vicious names for the others, but they never caught. Even at Princeton, where he was also unpopular and unsought, he was always “The Can.”
Perhaps that habit of hating rich schoolboys and college mates had carried him as a man to a dark, neurotic hatred of his successful friends and wealthy bosses. Hate—and its impulse for some devious revenge—had it, by obscure routes, finally veered him to “the little people”?
Her own beginnings had been so different from his.
Without her knowing it, with incomparable grace and speed, her mind now put aside the intangible volume marked Jasper and I and opened another much older book, its pages half hazed over with time and forgetting.
She rarely thought back to her childhood in any consecutive line. When she dipped into it, she found it mostly a happy time, with little money but with no sting of privation either. She was born in 1906, in Baldwin, Long Island. Her father was a chemist, and worked in a large chemical plant in near-by Freeport. Peter Marriner was a brilliant chemist, he might have gone to the top in his profession, but he was always preaching to the men wherever he worked, organizing them into unions, and his employers always called him a troublemaker and said he would never be “management material.” At home, the excitement of his rebellious political ideas always mingled a brew of aliveness in the house.
He was an American citizen and had been since 1893 or so, yet he still spoke with a faint accent that betrayed his foreign birth. He had been born in Prague; originally his name was Marhyunar. He had come to America in 1888, a boy still in his teens, had come because he believed so in America and loved the idea of being free to develop as he wanted, instead of being shoved into the army, doomed later to live the struggling restaurant-keeping life his parents had always lived.
Somebody in the steerage coming over, or perhaps it was some official at Ellis Island, had told him how to spell Marhyunar in English, the way it sounded, and he thought that was a sensible thing to do. Once here he had gone right to night school, and later to night classes at Pratt Institute, and finally won his degree as a graduate chemist.
It was during his second year at night school that he fell in love. All the pupils adored and admired Miss Castle, their young, pretty teacher. She was interested in all of them in return. But the fiery young Peter flung himself into his work with such hunger and insistence that she was more aware of him than of anyone else in all that eager class of “Advanced English for Foreigners.”
Mary Castle was to him the essence of America. She looked so American, she gestured and spoke in such an American way. One evening they left the school building together and he asked her to stop in for coffee at a small café. Then he asked her about her being so American, and she laughed.
Before the nineteenth century her mother’s family had come over from England. Even then they were all mixed up of a dozen different bloods. There had been some Irish ancestors, and two Welshmen and one Spanish Jew, and heaven knew what besides. Her father’s family had been mostly thrifty Scotch in Europe and once here had quickly become even thriftier New Englanders. Since then each family had intertwined with other bloods, so that the mixture grew rich with such ingredients as Pennsylvania Dutch and New Orleans French and a great deal of plain Middle West or New England American.
By the time she, Mary Castle, sat in a small, poor restaurant having coffee with Peter Marriner, her family lines were all intermingled, blended into a good average American family that reached back into this country’s life for six or seven generations. There were some farmers, and some businessmen, a handful of ministers and many teachers, and now she herself a teacher, helping foreigners to become Americans.
Peter Marriner proceeded to fling himself into her life with as much fiery insistence as he had into her English class. In three months they married.
David was born a year later, and then fifteen years went by before their next baby came. They named her Vera, after the grandmother in Prague.
Until she was twelve, Vera lived the enchanted life of a little girl pampered and loved by a big brother and adoring him in return. David was her personal hero, to imitate and worship. Then he married and she was alone in the house with her parents, who were in their middle forties and seemed unreliably old and removed from games and fun. Soon she entered high school; she made new friends and was happy once again, though when she was nearly fifteen the miserable fights started with Pop, about her dream of going away to college instead of to training school for teachers. David came into that fight too, on her side, though there was that terrible day—but no use going into that any more. She won a state scholarship and then had to delay for a year to earn some money. But at last she went off to Cornell. Again she made friends, won her numerals on all the girls’ teams, went to dances, and had the joyful sense of being liked and wanted.
After college, she had begun to look for a job. It was in 1926, and like some of her classmates, she went the rounds of the big department stores in New York. She worked at Macy’s for two years and did very well, first as salesgirl and then as assistant buyer in the Accessory Department—purses, costume jewelry, neckwear, and the like.
She met Ned Stamford on a vacation at Nantucket. (The volume with its fading pages closed and the slim gray one opened in its place.) Ned was a broker, well dressed, an incredibly good dancer and tennis player. He was fun to be with, and he fell in love with her in three days. For the next year he proposed marriage almost every time he saw her, and Vee always said she didn’t want to get married to anybody, not now, not yet. She couldn’t hurt him by confessing she had always dreamed love would be a crazy, beautiful tempest in her heart, and that this was not.
All her college friends were marrying, their babies were beginning to arrive. Her steady procession of days at the store, going “into the market” on Seventh Avenue, discussing merchandise with the advertising department—all this was exciting in some ways, but never truly important to anything inside her. Like every other girl she knew, except some bent on a “career,” she wanted a husband, a home, a baby.
The spring of 1929 came and Ned was planning to go abroad for a three-month swing around France, England, Italy. He pressed her to marry him and make it a honeymoon; he talked about finding a pretty place to live and starting a family…
They married that June. She quit her job without a thought, and they honeymooned all summer in Europe. If there was nothing storybook in the amount of her happiness, there was also nothing problem-play in the amount of her disappointment at what marriage turned out to be.
It was a pleasant way to live; one always had a companion, the days were full of swimming and tennis and long cool drinks at dusk, the nights new with intimate, lovely things like nakedness without embarrassment, and making love and laughing and talking afterward. Maybe when they were back in New York, and settled in their own home, she would discover more fully about love and the mystery of happiness.
Waiting for them in New York were the fall and winter of the stock-market crash. Ned was worried, restless; he felt that it would be folly to have a child with his income slithering away. They rarely had an evening at home, unless some of their friends came to spend it with them. Ned never read books, he contented himself with magazines and newspapers. He hated it when she suggested going to any music; he was fond of the theater, but they couldn’t afford to go very often now. The market would go up a bit and his spirits with it. But then both would slump once more. His earnings fell off more sharply; they could not meet their bills.
One day, without telling Ned of her plan, she went to Macy’s to ask for her job back, but they refused. The handsome new building for Ralsey’s was just completed on Fifth Avenue, and though Vee had little experience in the world of such expensive merchandise, she boldly applied there for the job of Head Buyer of Accessories. In relation to how other Fifth Avenue stores were faring during the depression, Ralsey’s was a quick success. And among the most successful departments were those run by the young Miss Marriner.
She seemed now to have a flare, a certainty about every decision, that she had never suspected in her first job. Quite unintentionally she began to design, offhandedly making a suggestion one day to a big manufacturer of purses, only to discover that he took it seriously, tried it, had a new success in his line. She was pleased with her job, and yet she always withheld some secret inner spirit from it. Each evening, she went home eagerly. Perhaps Ned would be happier tonight.
And then, in 1931, came the end of her marriage. Ned had been distrait for many weeks, staying downtown often for dinner, making out-of-town trips “to try to get into some other line of work.” When he finally told her that he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce, part of her shock, part of her bitterness lay in the double discovery that he could have been a liar; the other part that she could have been the naïve dupe of a liar.
But she knew, intellectually knew, that she was relieved to be done with the mediocrity of her marriage. Even the breaking up was mediocre, the shabby lies, the loving telegrams sent her from Washington or Boston, all the while he had been traveling with his new love. But this was intellectual acceptance only; emotionally there was an apparently endless time lag of shock, of the pain of sudden aloneness, the need for some real substance in her life. She turned to her work with new intensity, not out of ambition, but because it was a shield against thinking.
She was twenty-five. Before too long, her emotions did catch up with her mental estimate of the divorce, and the next year was more a drab sadness than a positive unhappiness over this failure. She began to see many people again; when she was twenty-eight she found a love affair that was sparkling and delicate, with little depth but with equally little capacity to hurt her. But as year followed year, she knew emptiness and fear, and her deepening security at the store did little to allay either.
And then last September she had met Jasper Crown.
From the moment they met, she found a vital, explosive interest she had never known. Instantly he seemed to mobilize his powers to attract her and instantly she responded. At the end of the first week they had spent five evenings together, and she knew there was something strong and perhaps cruel in him that could one day smash at her. She kept herself wary, protected.
During the whole week, he never courted her. He talked incessantly of himself and his radio project, how he had, after college, bought stock in the two most promising radio companies and gone to work in that infant field himself. He had prospered in the same fantastic way that radio itself had in the twelve years since then, and now he was ready to start on his own. He did not court her, but his driving talk of himself and his needs was a direct assault upon her. On the last evening of that, week, they went to bed together and she knew that at last she had found a relationship which might be a thousand things but would never be flabby and pale.
The next six months carved new patterns for her, patterns of a complexity that bewildered her. He was a man of shifting moods, of a dozen contradictory facets. When she left New York for this Jamaican vacation, she left almost as one seeking refuge—from him as well as from the nervous city. But even here, on this heat-glazed beach nearly two thousand miles away, he could hold her, puzzle her with doubts and confusions.
Into her thinking and remembering came the voice of the portable radio on the sand.
When she began to walk, she had no plan beyond finding some relief for her feelings. For almost an hour, she kept on walking. Except for the war in Spain, no foreign news had ever roused her so sharply. Only in the last three or four years had she begun to stir deeply to politics in any world sense; sometimes she thought that her father’s constant tirades had set up a barricade in her mind against too much emotional involvement in “world problems.” But the barricade had been crumbling…
Finally she made her way back to the hotel. It was still early. She would get into tennis things and find a game, with the “pro” if necessary; she did not want the amenities of beach life just yet.
At the desk, she stopped.
“If I should decide”—she began, hesitating—“if I should suddenly want to go back to New York—my return’s for the twentieth—how much notice should I give to get a seat to Miami?”
“I called Pan American this morning, Miss Mariner, for another guest; they’re booked solid for two weeks.”
“Oh.”
In her room, she kicked off her beach clogs in some obscure irritation. Then, without changing from her bathing suit, she lay down on the bed. It was, after all, too sultry for tennis. Presently it would rain, one of the quick tropic rains that came up so suddenly down here and were, as suddenly, gone, leaving the earth relaxed and at peace. She stared at the slatted windows, their shades drawn against the dazzling morning, and drifted off into a heavyhearted haze of sleep.
The telephone roused her. She stretched out a hand, fumbled for the receiver.
The British voice in it said, “New York calling,” and her heart leaped. She sat up sharply, swung her legs through two lithe, concentric arcs to the floor. She was alive now, with an edged expectancy, its core in the eardrum under the telephone receiver.
“Yes, operator? Are you—”
“Is Miss Marriner there? Or Mrs. Stamford?” the operator said. “We have an overseas call—”
“Yes, speaking.”
“Go ahead, New York…”
“Vee, is that you?”
“Jas, hello. Oh, how nice, I—”
“You going to stay put awhile? I thought I might fly down.”
“Down, here? Oh, Jasper, I’d love it.” Her voice rose in frank, open delight. “When—”
“This place is a hellhole—drizzling sleet and fog. I’m bored with everything and everybody. I thought I’d fly down for a few days and have a swim.”
“The planes are so crowded. I just heard about the Anschluss and I called Pan—”
“The what? What did you say? I missed that.” The line began to fizz and sputter.
She laughed. He would think her quite mad, using expensive transatlantic time to—
“Never mind. I said the Anschluss, you know, Austria, but never mind that. I said the planes are awfully crowded.”
“God, don’t talk Anschluss to me. It woke the big boys up with a bang. CBS on the air every couple of hours from Vienna. It gets me so furious I want to get out of sight of a radio—”
“I didn’t get that, Jas. You what? I said I hope you can get here. The planes are so jammed.”
“Plenty of room southbound.” The connection suddenly cleared. “See if you can get me on the plane you’re coming back on, will you? I’ll be down tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow. Oh, Jas, that’s wonderful.”
“Sure. I’ll get the two o’clock today to Miami; and then the Clipper at seven-thirty tomorrow. Can you meet me at Kingston?”
“Yes. I’ll, oh, of course. I’ll get a car. You’ll be dead when you get here.”
“Not too dead to practically kill you. God, I’ve missed having you.”
“Hush, darling. The phone operators and the hotel—”
“Nuts. Do the limies good.”
After she hung up, she remained motionless for a long time, her hand still pressing the receiver hard into its hook. Vanished, forgotten, were the doubts and confusions about him. After all, she too had an expensive sheath over her life, yet she knew how honest were her own emotions. She couldn’t think out these riddles now, anyway.
Now she felt only exultant and young and flattered. Jas missed her, Jas wanted her, he was flying nearly two thousand miles overnight to come and be with her for a few days.
She started for her clothes closet. She passed the long mirror, stopped there, caught by her own image. She was still in the bathing suit: Jas had never seen her deep-tanned and creamy brown this way. He had never seen her in a bathing suit, so there would be a newness about it, a first-timeness. Quite deliberately, Vee stood there, trying to see herself with Jasper’s eyes, as he would be looking at her tomorrow.
Suddenly, instead of being just a cleverly designed suit, it was transformed into a provocative garment, weapon for seduction. He would notice the fine thinning down to whiteness where the cunningly designed shorts flared away from her brown legs; he would notice the blurry triangle of whiteness between her breasts where the top drew down into a dipped V.
She stood there before the mirror, subject and object at once in her trick of projection into his mood of tomorrow. Then she slipped out of the suit. Her own body looked newly strange to her, too. Even more than before, there was a first-timeness about it. Across her small tight hips and stomach and the high undercurve of her breasts lay a wide banding of her familiar white skin, delicate, untouched. The rest of her was, in contrast, violently, almost savagely, dark brown.
Staring at herself, slowly, lazily trying to see her body as he would be seeing it, she felt the slow, sultry rise of desire begin to drift through her own feelings. Even here was the trick of projection, for it was not so much desire, but the need for his desire, to which she would then inevitably respond.
All this lovely, lazy drift of passion had been, for so long now, far away, unthought of, unremembered, as though she had been anesthetized into a completely sexless, unaware creature. Yet here it was, shameless, stirring within her. Men never thought about the hidden thoughts of women, never suspected perhaps that women too had these darkly developing, secretly mobilizing sexualities. There was a kind of endless conspiracy to ascribe a fairy-princess innocence and chastity to a woman’s thoughts, in the hours when she was alone at least. But it wasn’t true.
This was true, this awakening foggy drift through her whole being, merely because she knew that within twenty-four hours, Jasper would be seeing her naked and new in this unaccustomed patchwork of brown and white. She knew him so well. Knew that this strangeness would—
She grinned cheerfully to herself in the mirror.
“Wicked little bitch,” she said in a low voice, to her image. “And in the well-behaved British Empire, too.”
“Not too tired to practically kill you.” His voice, urgent, sadistic, answered her in her mind. She knew how it would be, the rising tumult, the insistence of him, his delight in her own responsiveness. This they had, without conflict, without skepticism and shifting ground. And with a tenacity that each recognized and neither ever spoke of. They never spoke of love, either, or of the future. Or marriage.
Once, in the first days after they had met, he had told her that he was, technically, married, though he and his wife had lived apart for about two years. He had shrugged then, and added, “You have to work at marriage, or work at work.”
She had told him as casually about her marriage and divorce. Of the long, slow pain afterward, she said nothing.
Swiftly now she went on to her dressing. She watched herself periodically in the long mirror, but now the game was over. Now her glances were the usual, practical checking up of clothes, hair, make-up. She looked like a girl in her middle twenties, she knew that quite calmly and surely. Men often called her beautiful; she knew that she was not. She took one final look at herself, dressed now in a lemony yellow shirt and flat-backed slacks of bitter dark green. And all at once, her glance into the mirror changed again. Now she saw, not with Jasper’s tomorrow-eyes, not with her own practical checking-up-eyes, but with the perceptive eyes of her own humanity. She saw the past that lay in that face in the mirror—saw the lips that had trembled with grief too often, the eyes that had filled with anguish too often. Her throat knotted and she turned away.
“People always look at faces so blindly,” she thought. “They never see the hell underneath the lipstick.”
She telephoned the taxi service. Five pounds for a car for the day. She ordered it for seven-thirty in the morning. It was nearly a six-hour trip over the mountains. They would spend one night in Kingston.
She telephoned the local beauty parlor. She got an appointment for shampoo, set, and manicure for five that afternoon.
She telephoned the desk.
“A Mr. Jasper Crown will arrive day after tomorrow. Give him a room and bath on the seaside, please. One with a balcony if possible. No, transportation from Kingston’s all arranged.”
She telephoned Pan American in Kingston.
“You have a passenger due in tomorrow from Miami,” she said. “Mr. Jasper Crown. Yes. Will you see if you can get him on the twentieth return flight, please. C-r-o-w-n. He’s head of Jasper Crown Broadcasting; see what you can do.”
Snobbery. Vulgarity. Use of big names to impress “the little people.” Jasper himself did it, quietly, but did it, all the time. Suddenly her doubts swept back across her, like a tide of dirtied water in a busy harbor. But she refused to let it come at her again.
She looked at her watch. In an hour he would be starting for Newark Airport. It would be drizzly, cold, and the plane would rise above the fog, skim in a few minutes over Camden, over Philadelphia, rise above the clouds and keep thrumming southward…
Planes all over the world, she thought, carrying lovers to rendezvous, their eyes watching the wide skies, their impatient hearts imagining the coming meeting with the one desired woman, waiting hundreds, thousands of miles away—trains rushing through the day or night, crossing borders, climbing mountains, dipping into green valleys, and on them, among the businessmen and lawyers and legislators, at least some men and women bound for love, for the dear face at the station, the shouted hellos—great ships sliding slowly away from their berths, getting under way slowly, picking up speed, and on them, too, their human cargo of expectancy, the daydreaming of being home again, happy, awaited, secure again…
She found some strange beauty in the picture of all the shining rails and the seven seas and the air lanes of the earth carrying happy, eager people to far-off meetings with others who counted the hours until they should come.
Ann Willis signed for the radiogram, and knew precisely what would be in it. Ever since the eleventh, she had wondered about the Vederles.
They would not stay there. She was so sure of that. She simply could not imagine Dr. Vederle staying on smugly safe, when the Nazis began hunting down Freud and Anna Freud and every scientist and every independent researcher and thinker.
CAN YOU SPEEDILY ARRANGE AFFIDAVITS FOR MYSELF, WIFE CHRISTA, PAUL, ELEVEN, ILSE, FIVE? SAILING SOON AS ARRANGED. WRITING DETAILS. DEEPEST THANKS. VEDERLE.
She went to the telephone at once and called Larry Meany, the young lawyer she always used on affidavit cases. This was such an old routine by now. He listened attentively, paused only a moment when she ended.
“Sorry, Mrs. Willis, I’m pretty sure not any more for you for quite a while,” he said. “You know this came up last time. You’ve signed already for—”
“Eighteen people so far—seven affidavits,” she said. “But if I can afford more, I can’t see—”
“Well, they’re getting stricter, you know, about the financial guarantees.”
“But these people will be bringing some money, I’m sure—and he’s a world-famous analyst, he’ll have no trouble here.”
She had a gruff, mannish voice, but now she consciously softened it, as if she were pleading with him to do her a most personal favor. He remained firm. Ann Willis was used to getting her own way on most things; she had often been told she was bossy and aggressive. But this time she could not budge him.
“Perhaps you’d better ask someone else to go on these?” he finally suggested, and she knew there was finality in it.
She thought of Vera Marriner at once.
Vee would say “yes.” You knew so definitely which people you could count on in this affidavit business. Dr. Vederle knew he could count on her, Ann Willis, and he was right. He couldn’t know about her affidavits for the Asches, the Rosenthalers, old Frau Doche, and the rest. But he knew that somehow affidavits would be forthcoming.
Vee was due back on the twentieth. There was nothing she could do about it from Montego Bay. Still, it might save time later to give her a few days of warning so she could think it over.
She had known Vee for over eight years. Now they were on an upward swing in their long relationship. Ever since Vee’s divorce, this upward swing had continued; they had come closer together, mysteriously, slowly, without violating the boundaries of a sound, adult friendship, avoiding the maudlin confidences of so many women. When they talked about their own problems of marriage or divorce, they stayed off the whining he-said, I-said plateau, talked rather of the large confusions, the fundamental perplexities of married life and its changing emotional timbres, its seemingly inevitable onslaught of conflict…
In Ann’s own marriage, the change, the conflict, the confusion had finally become unbearable. She quarreled with Fred, she cried, the days dragged by in a meaningless procession of some nameless unhappiness that seemed to be without proportionate cause.
Even then she would probably not have acted except for Jill. At seven, Jill was a tense, nervous child; she often screamed out in nightmare, she threatened to run away, she was disliked at school. And Ann felt obscurely that the constant wire-sprung tension between herself and Fred must be responsible. But how to gentle it, neither of them seemed to know.
In 1933, she was vacationing in Europe, was visiting Vienna, and sought out Dr. Vederle. On her first visit, she told him, in an agony of embarrassment, that she didn’t believe in psychoanalysis, and he had merely nodded and said, “That does not matter; it is not a faith cure. Besides, you are correct to be skeptical; it does not always succeed.”
“Neither does surgery or medicine,” she had replied instantly, defending what she had just been attacking. Again he had merely nodded.
She trusted him. Integrity was in his face, in his very suggestion that there were excellent analysts right in New York, where the long process would be easier, less expensive for her. She said it was better here. She needed distance, separation from Fred, freedom from the emotional noose that always seemed to be drawing tighter about them both. She wanted to save her marriage, to save her own future, save her little girl.
For three years, she had been Dr. Vederle’s patient, coming home only for the four summer months. During the last year, she had taken Jill with her, and in that short time, Jill had changed too, into an easier, more comfortable little girl. Even at the end, Ann did not know precisely why the changes had come about within her, but she only knew she was happier, calmer with people, with Jill and with Fred. Often she had wished there were some real way she could repay Dr. Vederle. But she had never dreamed that the day might come when she might do it.
The others, yes, the Asches, the Rosenthalers—since 1934 she had helped many of her old friends in Germany. Secretly, she enjoyed doing it. Her friends said, “Ann’s being wonderful about affidavits for a lot of refugees,” and she was pleased. She had enough cynicism about herself to be, also, amused at her new role of chic, well-dressed savior.
Affidavits were interesting. Some sailed right through; others became challenges to your own persistence. With Jill growing up, and Fred off so often to the Coast on his big legal work for one of the large moving-picture companies, it was good to have new interests coming into your life. She was forty years old—“with a matronly figure and a mannish voice,” she thought to herself and smiled wryly. She might as well be busy with things and keep from drooping boredom. Anyway, she did the affidavits, from whatever motive. That’s what mattered.
Vee would be different about it. Vee probably would never mention it to anyone. She would go through the boring details and red tape without self-conscious approval of what she was doing, but merely because somebody needed help and she would want to give that help.
Swiftly she wrote a cable to Montego Bay:
ON RETURN HOME HOPE YOU’LL UNDERTAKE AFFIDAVITS FOR VEDERLE. MY LAWYER JUST BLACKBALLED ME. LOVE. ANN.
And another, to Vienna:
OF COURSE. WRITING. WILLIS.
Dr. Vederle would know that everything was under way. As soon as she had seen Vee, and got her consent, she would write him and explain why it was not herself but the stranger, Vera Marriner, who would be responsible for the first step in the Vederles’ long journey to freedom.
There they were, the Vederles separated by an ocean from Ann Willis, Ann separated by ocean and great sea from Vera Marriner. And bridging those oceans already was the thin, fine filament of human need and human response.
In France, in England, in the Low Countries, in South America, in nearly every land were people undertaking this new responsibility, this new kinship with the ones in flight. The foreign consulates in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia were flooded by the mounting tide of requests, pleas, cries for help. The quota lists of every foreign land were filling, quota numbers were pledged, often for months, sometimes for years in advance.
Each new political crisis was like a depth bomb released into the bottomless seas of humanity, exploding disaster in a widening circle of life. And it was the foreign consulates that were the small, inadequate lifeboats to which the stricken rushed for possible rescue.
In Vienna, the American Consulate was besieged on the first day after Anschluss, and every day thereafter.
Dr. Vederle stopped by on the ninth day. There was danger in the very act of entering; he could not know whether he would be observed by some member of the Gestapo. The new Nazi rulers must not suspect that he was arranging a permanent exit from Austria. There was as yet nothing in Austria comparable to Italy’s devilish law of 1926 which made a crime of “abusive emigration.” But surely any such voluntary departure as he planned, an exit of protest and disgust, would measure on the Nazi yardstick as treason to the new glory.
Yet the risk must be run. Perhaps he could put in reservations for quota numbers even before the affidavits arrived.
It was a calm and sunny afternoon, the twentieth of March. Walking toward the American Consulate, Franz Vederle’s spirits unaccountably rose. The moist, hopeful feel of spring lay softly over the streets, birds sang, free and untroubled, in the blossoming trees, the heart lifted in response to the season. The letter was on its way, the heavyhearted decision had been made and well made, and what lay ahead for him and his family, change, adjustment, a new start in an unknown land, would be handled as it developed, bit by bit.
Inside the consulate crowded the distraught, the desperate. Snatches of conversation came to him, questions asked and answered, eager voices, faltering voices.
“You have your birth certificate with you?”
“Yes, yes, here.”
“Passport pictures? Four for each person.”
“Yes, oh, of course.”
“The fee for each visa is fifty-two schillings.” “Have you received your affidavits from America?” “Have you arranged your passage?”
Dr. Vederle looked at the faces about him. Some were old, wrinkled, with the thin lips tightly indrawn of the aged and toothless; some were young, vital faces, eyes strong and clear; there were the alert faces here of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, the simple, uncomplicated faces of farmers, the fresh, delicate faces of young business girls, the tearstained faces of old women.
Dr. Vederle looked at them all, trying to guess, trying to fathom in those faces the hundred secret emotions, the thousand fears.
He started toward one of the clerks who seemed to be looking directly at him, but the clerk called out a name, and an old man, who reminded him of Johann Webber, started eagerly from the bench where he had been huddled.
A crisp official motioned Vederle to be seated at the back of the crowded benches. There were a hundred people ahead of him. He waited half an hour, saw how slowly the turns came for those before him. It would be hours before he could be taken. Anger nipped at him. Better to come back in the morning before the doors opened.
He went out again into the sunny afternoon.
He looked up into the serene sky. It mocked the agitated scene behind him. There should be more propriety in nature—a tortured sky, jagged through by lightning, shocked by thundercracks, should canopy Austria these perilous days. He smiled at his own naïveté. The sky, he thought, was often serene over the bloodiest battlefields human hate could devise.
“God protect Austria.”
(At that very moment, half a world away from the untroubled skies above Vienna, a silver Clipper was taking off from the enameled blue waters of the Caribbean, at Kingston, Jamaica. With an exultant crescendo of its own sure power, the plane lifted into the thin light of earliest morning. Its starboard wing spread out toward the low hills and the tall mountain line beyond them to the east; its port wing spread out toward the incessant seas to the west; its four glinting, unseeable propellers cut their sure circles into the north.)