“SURE, ANN. You know I will.”
“That’s right. I was sure you would want to—even though you don’t know them,” she said. Her gruff voice had a matter-of-factness in it, but there was gratitude, too. So many people wriggled away from the strange responsibility of affidavits. She had been right to bank on Vee. “I think you won’t have much trouble over this one, anyway. This letter from Vederle, you keep it; it has all the dope, names and birthplaces and all.”
“I didn’t know they could take money out with them.”
“I don’t know about that part; but he writes here about the forty thousand Swiss francs he’s been piling up; I imagine that’s O.K., anyway, because it was never inside Austria.”
“You know—when your cable came,” Vee confessed, “I wondered for a minute whom you meant. I’d never seen their name spelled. I guess I expected it to be F-a-y-d-e-r-l-y, the way you say it.”
Ann had some notes and papers ready. It was the very day Vee had returned from her month’s holiday. Ann had driven out to the airport to meet her, suddenly a little guilty and uneasy at the days already lost. Vederle’s letter, written right after he had cabled, had arrived that morning. He had given it to a trusted friend of his to be mailed in London, so he had written freely. There was immediacy in every line of it. There might even be actual danger to him soon because he had always spoken out against the German Nazis. She hadn’t thought of actual physical danger.
At the airport, Ann was vaguely disappointed to see Vee descend from the plane, followed by Jasper Crown. They both looked so glowing dark, Vee’s a much deeper-laid tan, Jasper’s redder and newer. She wanted Vee to be alone; she felt a vague disapproval that she was not.
She drove them both back to town. The talk in the car was strange; Jasper kept pumping her as if she were his secretary.
“What about CBS and NBC?” he asked almost as soon as they were settled in the front seat. “They do a job on Vienna all week, or did they drop it after last Saturday?”
“A job on Vienna?” She was startled at the question.
“I heard some of it down there—but I wanted to get away from the whole thing—”
“Oh, it’s been terrific here all week, people hanging at their radios all day, news every hour or so, breaking into programs and—”
“Never mind,” he said brusquely. “I’ll get it all at the office. The day I left, I ordered them to keep a record of every word from Europe.”
He fell silent. For the rest of the trip, they fell into vacation talk, people, climate, generalities. Both Vee and Jas were vague about their being together and Ann asked nothing; it was even possible that they had been apart and met only in Miami on the way back. But she was too experienced to believe that, really.
At last they were alone, dropping Jasper at the hotel. She went along to Vee’s apartment, and over a midmorning breakfast, she explained about the Vederles. She was rewarded by Vee’s readiness—indeed, eagerness—to help, to become involved.
“Every time I ever heard of anybody doing affidavits,” Vee said, “I’ve thought there’s something I could do. Only I never was asked to do one.”
“This won’t be one of the maddening ones,” Ann said. “Like the ghastly thing I’m on for a girl named Trudi Bechler. She’s here, pregnant, and her husband is in Sachsenhausen, that’s one of the worst concentration camps, and she wakes up screaming every night, dreaming she’s right there while they torture him…”
“Oh, God.” Vee gripped her jaws together. “Why did they arrest him?”
“Nothing except being a Jew, and having a small lumber business they wanted. But the Vederles ought to be easy. They’re not Jews, and they’re not in business or anything the Nazis could steal, except, I suppose, whatever money they have in Austria. It should be easy all around.”
“Easy.” On the word, Vee’s voice dipped down for its lowest notes. Always when she was moved, her voice deepened so. “Easy. Oh, Ann. Sometimes I try to think how I’d feel if I suddenly had to go off, say, to Brazil or the Argentine, not just to visit, but for the rest of my life. Start all over among people who spoke another language, had different jokes and songs, and newspapers and menus—all those small things. I don’t think it’s easy to become a foreigner, ever.
Her voice edged off into silence; her eyes looked off into space. She was seeing what it could be like, the strange teeming wharf, the uncaring customs officials, the minutely different colors and gestures and facial expressions of the people in a new land. When one traveled for a short holiday, these new flavors and tones and sounds were caressing. But when one was a refugee, longing for home?
“I just meant it ought to be easy, officially, for you to get these affidavits,” Ann said after a moment. “It’s so frightfully hard when they’re in prison, or too poor to buy passage, or unknown and ill. The Vederles ought to be a cinch. Easy, that way.”
She handed over a mimeographed page of legal foolscap, covered on both sides with single-spaced typewriting. It was letterheaded DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, and bore an official seal, with the admonition to address official communications to The Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.
Vera glanced quickly down the long, formidably solid text, which was titled GENERAL INFORMATION REGARDING VISAS FOR IMMIGRANTS.
It seemed to be in eight parts, this general information, starting with the APPLICATION AT AMERICAN CONSULATE, going on to DOCUMENTS TO BE PRESENTED, which were “personal documents” and “evidences of support,” and “other documents,” then proceeding to PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION OF DOCUMENTS, NONQUOTA STATUS FOR CERTAIN RELATIVES OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN, FIRST PREFERENCE QUOTA STATUS, SECOND PREFERENCE STATUS, INFORMATION REGARDING THE STATUS OF A VISA CASE, and ending with a terse paragraph, headed REFUSAL OF VISA.
Vera read rapidly. Confusion grew in her mind at all the technicalities of language, of locution; uncertainty grew in her heart at the calm, bald officialdom behind those eight paragraphs.
She made a motion, asking patience and time from Ann, who sat watching her, and began again with the first paragraph:
“APPLICATION AT AMERICAN CONSULATE.
“An alien desiring to immigrate into the United States should communicate with the nearest American consular office…”
“An alien desiring—” The words brought to mind a news picture she had seen somewhere a few months ago, a picture probably smuggled out of Germany. It was of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, the old embassy, before the remodeling was begun on the old Blücher Palais on the Brandenburger Tor, and the Hermann Göring Strasse, and the Pariser Platz—“How,” Vera’s mind cross-examined her, “do you know these details of the new embassy and the very names of the streets bounding it? You’ve been paying more attention than you consciously knew—maybe you have realized all along that it was inevitable that you would get caught up in this awful human push…”
The news picture, though, was one of the old embassy building. There was a queue of people waiting for the doors to open in the morning. It was an orderly enough queue, like the line at a theater’s ticket window, or at the Yankee Stadium, or something happy and ordinary like that. Only, in this queue, the faces were not the same. These—the old woman, clearly weeping, a handkerchief pressed against her lips, the little boy behind her, clutching at her skirt, the young man towering above him, looking out at the world from snarling eyes; the old, the tired, the angry, and the resigned were all there in that extraordinary news picture.
Only the happy were missing. Not one face was gay, uplifted, expectant, or content.
Vee shook her head sharply to get the old picture out of the way of the smeary mimeographed writing. Once again she took her attention and pinned it to the instructions facing her.
“Don’t bother with all that,” Ann said. “It drowns you in technicalities. I’ll phone Larry Meany—he’s the lawyer I always use on affidavits. He’ll do the whole thing—you just sign some papers.”
Vera looked unbelieving.
“You mean it’s that simple? People’s lives—”
“It’s like everything else, Vee.” Ann shrugged. “Him who hath—”
Jasper Crown stared patiently at the man opposite him.
The man opposite him was an enemy, Jasper was thinking, though probably an unconscious one. The man opposite him, talking too eagerly, explaining too minutely, had been for some months now Jasper’s most active supporter and ally, had already been instrumental in raising a quarter million toward the new project. Instrumental. Not decisive. Nobody could wind up the thing with a prospective investor except Jasper himself; others could, at most, pave the way, prepare his entrance. Then the rest was up to him, Jasper, who had thought up what would in effect be the first global network.
Now, Jasper knew that the man opposite, this plump, slightly bald Timothy Grosvenor, was potentially, at least, an enemy. He would have to be destroyed. Jasper sat listening to him, staring at him patiently. Destroyed…
Destroyed merely in relation to the new project. The project was bigger than any other consideration. There was need, immediate and constantly growing need, for a radio network that wasn’t paralyzed by a lot of polite rules about handling the news. The next years, the next months even, would decide forever that radio and not day-old newspapers would tell the world its major news. The Austrian crisis had been the newest proof that radio was entering a new era. The press of the nation was tired, old, outmoded. The people gave it no heed, paid it no attention—witness the 1936 elections. The new, young, potent means of communication was not the linotype machine, not the printed picture, but the air wave, the radio dial, the human, urging voice.
But radio, thus far, had been afraid of its own potentiality. The men at the top were such cautious men, always talking about being unbiased, about not editorializing, boasting of giving equal time to both sides of anything—even the side that would destroy free communication the moment it came to power. All the men who now controlled the forty or fifty million radios in the U.S.—controlled them by the simple expedient of running the broadcasting stations that fed them words, music, gags, news—that whole group of men were cautious, timidly maintaining the farce of impersonality.
His network would be different in every way the law would allow—JCN, the Jasper Crown Network. Every announcer would say, “Jasper Crown reporters have just learned…” or “Jasper Crown’s correspondents in the Far East, in London, in Berlin”—for Jasper Crown representatives would dot the news capitals of the world within a year. Money? Cost? Budget?
That kind of measuring and weighing was the unimaginative, fearful wariness of little men. It came from insecurity, the impulse to hedge, to take the small risk instead of the great one. Not for him, the small, tight vision.
For years he had dreamed of the day he would own his own radio chain. The difficulties were prodigious; there were, even, no unused wave lengths that could be licensed; there were official regulations of all kinds. Yet, one by one, he had found ways to get around all the obstacles. Deals with independent owners, short-wave deals with foreign companies, contracts and subcontracts. In spite of everything it could be done.
Now in a few months, the American part of the dream would materialize. One key station was already his. His own fifty-thousand-watt transmitter pierced the sky. Soon he would have another station, and then the affiliates would sign—he would be well on the way to the ultimate dream: one band of the globe-girdling ether earmarked Jasper Crown.
Ten million dollars’ capitalization. He had been that bold, setting forth to raise ten million dollars. And that would cover only the first steps—the purchase last month of Grosvenor’s Mid West station, one of the best-known independent stations in the land, the financing of a hundred deals within the U.S., a few deals abroad, the beginnings of the new kinds of programs.
Ten million dollars. The boldness of his concept, the boldness of his demands from investors, had been the most persuasive element in his success thus far. Nothing could defeat him now. Over half of it was raised. Soon there would be a band-wagon rush to subscribe, again the little minds, the wary minds, afraid now to be left out of a good thing. Nasty, such people. Still, they wanted to be used, so one used them.
Crown was a powerful-looking man. He was a man just over middle height, yet with so impressive a bulk of shoulder, chest, lean muscularity in every line of him, that he seemed big, commanding, even among much taller men.
His black hair was thick, defiant, springing impatiently away from his wide, oddly undomed forehead. This flat expanse over his eyes lifted in contour only at the marked protuberance of bone just above each black, finely arched eyebrow. His forehead forced the attention; the perceptive observer compared it to that of a strong, butting animal. It was a vigorous, handsome brow, though every description of it denied that.
Under it were dark-brown eyes that were as unusual. For they could look as cool, as impassive, as pale-blue eyes; could obliterate their intensity of pigmentation, their warmth and depth of physical color, by some overlay of level-staring coldness. Then his gaze had a quality that was at once dead and cruel.
Jasper Crown was thirty-five years old. He had a secret vanity about his youth, for his success was out of all proportion to it. He liked to remember that at thirty-four, when he had resigned as vice-president of the biggest radio company in the world, he had a sixty-thousand-a-year salary and stock (in his ex-company as well as in its chief rival) worth a million dollars. Talking to some Wall Street millionaire, old, paunchy, frightened of his own advancing age, Jasper was wise enough to refrain from hammering too hard at the youth equation. But always, inevitably, there came into the conversation the quiet mention of the vigor of idea, of execution, of command that one could expect from a man who had made good, practically and demonstrably made good in a harsh, competitive world, while he was still in his early thirties.
He would see the old eyes of the Wall Streeter flinch a little, flinch, from the envy of Jasper’s own youngness, flinch from the suddenly evoked contrast with the Wall Streeter’s approaching or arrived oldness. Jasper always veered quickly to a less difficult or painful theme. But the effect was achieved. The Wall Streeter was remembering that he too, as a young man of the mid-thirties, had been at his most daring, his most productive, his most sure-touched. Whether his personal history would check out on that recollection or not, Jasper knew that every one of these rich and powerful old men had some hidden fantasy that that was the way he had been. Envy, mourning over one’s lost youth, might bring a momentary hatred of the young, vital Jasper, but with it was a stronger faith in his project, in his proposals, for there was the nostalgic self-identification through memory with a young and able and bold man.
And that was all that mattered now to Jasper. Faith, belief from men with money—to be delicately, shrewdly nurtured along toward the investment point during many a talk, many a discussion, first in the formality of their offices, then in the more personal and always reassuring atmosphere of Jasper’s apartment, or at one of his clubs.
Personal, intimate equations of life mattered too, yes, but on a lesser, remoter plane. Two years ago he had moved into virtual bachelorhood. He dined occasionally with Beth, sent her flowers on anniversaries. But he knew that he would never go back to her, emotionally or physically. He simply could not bond himself to the steady, time-filling demands of the usual marriage. There was the other reason, too.
He knew she was still resentful that he had moved out. But she was, at least, apparently adjusted to it. She no longer said things about the uselessness of beating against his will. She no longer told him, in her quiet, brownish voice, that she felt an implacable thing in him, and that she knew it was his need for fame and power.
He knew what she meant. But he himself phrased it differently. He thought of it as a principle of the deepest humanity, the desire to make the world a better, finer, freer place. To be effective in that desire one needed a voice, an audience. The most convincing and brilliant talk to a small group of stragglers around a soapbox would achieve nothing. For him, he had to fight largely, noticeably.
The two estimates of the implacable thing in Jasper Crown were both true. The two overlapped, interwove, intermarried. If you responded to him, trusted him, you called the thing by one set of names; if you disliked him, mistrusted him, you used the other set. It was fairly easy to make a case for either.
Now, staring silently with cold brown eyes at Timothy Grosvenor, the implacable thing drove him on to his decision.
Grosvenor was a Westerner by birth, the son of a well-to-do Nevada lawyer with stock in silver mines and a large divorce practice as well. Timothy had gone into radio in the early days and managed quite a success on his own. There was something hearty in his plump and ruddy face that people responded to, though Crown himself was irritated by it. But he admitted that Tim had worked hard, incessantly, to raise money, to produce ideas. He had been effective, more so than half the cohorts and supporters of the new project. Crown had felt sure of his loyalties; so sure that he had encouraged Tim virtually to retire from the active management of his own station, until the time came when the newly formed company bought it. The purchase deal was generous—Tim and his stockholders were delighted with it. It was clear that this was the greatest opportunity for Tim himself. He was to be Executive Vice-President of the new Jasper Crown Network.
In early March had come the first trouble.
Mandreth, Drake, and Niles, Investments, was considering an investment of five hundred thousand dollars. Jacques Mandreth had written Tim a letter in which he spoke of “your venture,” “your plans,” “your company,” “your personal assurance.” It was clearly an almost-dotted-line letter. With pleasure and a gleam of triumph, Tim had turned it over to Jasper, watched his face as he read.
“Swell, Tim. Oh, good boy. This is the business, all right,” Jasper had said immediately. Already, though, as he spoke the warm words, the question was forming in his mind.
“It’s the plan for splitting the foreign coverage, I think, Jas,” Tim said with satisfaction, “that got to him. He could see that—he could imagine Ford or Du Pont or General Foods paying millions to ‘own’ London, say.”
“That’s the honey of an idea, Tim.”
“Old Jacques sat there, almost rubbing his hands. ‘You mean you’re going to have regular sponsored news programs from all over Europe every single day?’ That took a while to sink in.”
“Sure, it always staggers them. They can’t see ahead.”
“But that was only the first part. The real thing that got them was the splitting up. ‘And you mean you’re going to split up those programs and sell sponsorship of all the news for a year, let’s say, out of Berlin?’ He kept asking that over and over.” Grosvenor slapped his knee with delight.
Jasper nodded, smiled. He listened to every word. But he was thinking, too.
“They couldn’t visualize my idea at all, Jas. Just because it’s different,” the happy, chubby man went on. “The idea that maybe an international crisis might ‘belong’ to just one advertiser on the newest network—”
Jasper listened. He seemed to be all listening. But the question. was prowling around his mind, like some furtive marauder.
“Let’s see the whole file on Mandreth sometime, will you, Tim?” he finally said. So casually he said it, so easily, in his deep, throaty voice, with all the pleasant, well-bred deference to a colleague and partner. “I ought to get up to date on Mandreth.”
Tim had nodded his promise, and then had been out of town almost constantly since giving it. Jasper himself was gone when he returned to New York, gone, his secretary merely said, “for a few days’ rest down south.” He had returned only that morning and Timothy had pleaded for an immediate meeting. The documents for purchase of stock by Mandreth were being drawn. They would be signed tomorrow or the next day. Jasper agreed that there was no time to be lost.
The complete file of Timothy’s correspondence with Mandreth now lay on Jasper’s desk. Idly he glanced through it, as they talked. Only when he came to the most recent exchange of letters did Jasper fall into silence and give his whole mind to reading.
Phrase after phrase leaped out to him from the laconic lines of typewriting. He reached for a pencil, in an impulse to underline each one, then thought better of it, and sat drumming a tiny tap-tap-tap accompaniment on the desk. Tap-tap-tap; tick-tick-tick.
“I have given my most pointed attention to your proposal,” was one such phrase of Timothy’s. “I can assure you without hesitation that you will always have the opportunity, indeed the right, to…” “My plan is simple here…” “You will be glad to hear, I hope, of an idea I am developing…”
As he read, Jasper Crown felt something tighten and square off in his mind, his feelings. His suspicion had been intuitive, but now it was documented. Why, this fat, pink Tim Grosvenor was getting ahead of himself. The file itself showed the gradual abandonment of the tone of his early letters—they had carefully and consistently related every idea, every suggestion, every implication of the future to Crown himself. “Mr. Crown’s plans are…” “I talked with Jasper Crown at length since yesterday, and his decision is…” “Jasper Crown is in Washington, so I shall have to wait until Friday to answer…”
Those phrases had discreetly salted all the early correspondence. Then they had begun to fall away. A sentimentalist might feel that it was a natural transition, since Timothy Grosvenor had been seeing Mandreth so constantly that it was inevitable he should wish to stand more and more on his own. A sentimentalist would yield to Timothy the innocence of his human wish to appear on an equal footing with Jasper Crown.
But sentimentalists were hateful, frightened little men, afraid of seeming bold and hard. They were guileless, trusting everybody’s goodness until they were trapped by enemies who wanted to emasculate them. Then they whined, too late, that they had been betrayed by their friends.
“Look here, Tim,” Crown said finally. “This won’t do. These letters reveal bad things.”
“Wha—why, how do you mean, Jas?”
“They show me clearly—you’ll deny it, but it’s too clear—that you resent having me the real head of this company. You’re trying already—oh, unconsciously of course—to wrest control from me. The dates on these letters show you’ve been trying it for quite a while. I didn’t suspect it.”
“Why, you’re mad. I—”
Timothy sprang to his feet, his features working in sudden outrage. Crown remained motionless, except for the tiny tap-tap-tap of the pencil point.
“I said it was unconscious,” Crown said quietly. “But I can’t run risks, even with your unconscious. I’ve seen too many companies wrecked on disloyalty.”
“Disloyalty? Disloy—” His voice rose shrill and oddly helpless. “I’ve worked like a dog, day and night, on this—I’ve stayed here in New York for weeks on end—haven’t seen my family or home—I’ve sold you my station, because I—”
“Because you recognized that this could make a great public figure of you, Tim, and a millionaire to boot.”
“Sure. Yes, sure, that too. But you can’t ascribe all—”
“I’m not ascribing. I’m just putting two and two together. And I say—” He paused. He laid down the pencil. He looked at Tim and his eyes were motionless, stripped of all warmth. Not even anger flickered in their flat, dead quiet. “And I say I cannot and will not have any associate who’s in conflict about whether his first loyalty is to his own interests or to mine. We’d better call it quits now.”
There was anger in the other’s eyes; rage in them, in his clamped jaws, his hand clenching on the edge of the desk. Tim leaned forward; when he spoke his voice strangled with shock and fury.
“Why, you wouldn’t dare to give me the brush-off now. Mandreth would—why, if I explained to him, he’d withdraw his whole—there’d be a stink all over the Street—”
“Mandreth wouldn’t do one damn thing, Tim.” Crown stared at him patiently. “He’s in this now, for his own interests, not for the love of Tim. Go and try it. The papers will be signed, anyway.”
For one moment there was silence, as their glances held firm to each other.
“You—you bastard,” Tim shouted. “You double-crossing bastard. You bought my station—you’ve signed a year’s contract with me—”
“You’ll get a year’s salary. I never break a contract. I simply know I cannot and will not have an active associate—”
“You never break a contract, don’t you! Why you—you—I sold you my station only because—”
Jasper reached for a cigarette.
“You sold it—you and your stockholders—because I offered you the biggest dough you and they had ever seen. I acted in perfectly good faith.”
Timothy Grosvenor began to laugh. It was ugly. “Good faith. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus. Good faith.”
Jasper Crown’s face did not change.
“And after acting in good faith,” he said deliberately, “I began very slowly to discover what you’ve been doing since”—he picked up the file of letters, riffled through them patiently, competently—“since about the first of the year. Today for the first time I checked back on my hunch. I see I was dead right. So I protect myself at once.”
For long seconds there was bleak and dying silence between them. Then Timothy Grosvenor turned and left the room. Behind the softly, carefully closed door, Jasper shrugged. It was unpleasant. But only the network mattered. In war, only the result mattered. This was a war. A war with the companies that owned the field, a war with the ones in power.
He lit the cigarette. There was something deeply, primitively good about spotting an enemy and having the guts to kill him.
It was always pleasant to return to the office from a vacation, Vera Marriner was thinking, but today, her first day back after a month’s holiday, wasn’t running true to the usual lazy, talkative pattern.
Since twelve, when she had got in, she had been shoving aside everything but the new problem Ann had handed her during the morning. She didn’t suppose there was this much rush about it, but she wanted to get it under way before she got snowed under by the daily routine.
In a few moments now Larry Meany would be here, at her office. He was lunching uptown; he phoned to suggest coming there instead of asking her down to 120 Wall Street. He sounded very pleasant.
She liked his face, when she saw him. He was young and blond, not yet thirty, and his topcoat was slightly shabby. She liked the sure way he shook hands, smiled. She liked the direct, frank look of surprised appraisal he gave the entire office, as though its size and obvious rank impressed him.
“I’ve never done an affidavit,” Vee began after a moment. “Mrs. Willis said you’d ask me a lot of personal questions.”
“Yes. They’re routine. Confidential too, except for the State Department. Nothing worse than your income-tax statement.”
He started with the Vederles, the name, the age, the birthplace of each. Vera kept consulting Vederle’s letter to Ann. It was all there. Meany made rapid notes as she answered his questions, and she saw his pencil pause uncertainly for a moment when she told him that Christa Vederle was not born in Austria but in Budapest.
“In 1903, Budapest was Austria-Hungary.”
“Why, does that mean anything?” she asked.
“No.” The slight hesitation of pencil and voice vanished. “Oh, no. She goes under the same quota as her husband. Now let’s get on to you.”
He jotted down his rapid notes on the vital statistics she gave him.
“That’s that,” he said. “Now—your income?”
“The bigger it is, the better for the Vederles?”
“Sure.”
“Twenty thousand,” Vera said.
“That ought to satisfy the Visa Department, all right,” he said to his notebook. “That’s salary and dividends and all income?”
“No. Just my salary here.”
His busy pencil stopped. He smiled.
“Career women are wonderful,” he offered pleasantly. But it touched off an anger spot in her. “Career woman” was such a stupid, obvious badge, thrust upon any woman who worked for a living—and did well at it. Not the countless women and girls who slaved eight hours a day for twenty to thirty dollars a week—they were simply people who had to work. But let one of them do well in that same eight hours—
“I don’t work because I’m mad about a Career,” she said quietly. “But since I don’t take alimony, I have to support myself.” The moment she said it, she was surprised that she had needed to refute him. He looked up quickly.
“Rebuke,” he said, “if you think I need it. I didn’t mean to write an editorial about career women. I admire them—or people like you, anyway.”
“Sure. Skip it. I’m sorry if I sounded—anything.”
The unexpected small clash bothered him. He sat silent, thinking, then gave up his search for the right thing to say.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “what with your salary and the Swiss francs, there won’t be any trouble on this case.”
“Good. That’s what Mrs. Willis said.”
“I’ll draw up the affidavits. You sign them before a notary. Then you send the original to Vienna. Dr. Vederle will take it to our Consul there.”
“Is that all?” The simplicity of it again seemed incredible.
“Not quite. Will you make some notes now?”
Vera stretched out her hand to the side of the table. A concealed buzzer sounded softly, and instantly a lanky, leggy girl came in with a notebook opened and held by a rubber band.
“You must have met by now. Miss Benson, Mr. Meany,” Vera introduced. They both nodded, with the overbriskness of embarrassment. “Benny, take down some instructions from Mr. Meany, will you?”
Larry Meany dictated directly to the secretary.
“Miss Marriner must get a letter from her bank, saying she’s had an account there for so many years, that it’s sizable, that they think highly of her financial responsibility.”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to dig out income-tax vouchers. All of them paid during 1937.”
“Just Federal?” Vera asked.
“Federal and state. There’ll be seven altogether—that is if you paid in installments.” Miss Benson nodded. “Four Federal and three state. Then you paste those upon a big sheet and get two sets of photostats made. Got that?”
Miss Benson nodded again.
“Then you send one photostat of the seven checks, the letter from the bank, the affidavit original—send all that to Dr. Vederle.”
“Oh, thanks; that seems simple, even yet,” Vera said. She smiled at him confidently, and the secretary left the room.
“Just a couple of things more,” Meany said. “How long have you been here?”
“Since 1930—that’s eight years.”
“I’ll have to be rather specific about your exact position here. Can you tell me something about what your work is?”
In her years at Ralsey’s, Vera Marriner had developed as the store had grown. She was still responsible for the accessory departments, though each one had its own head buyer now, and she served more as head stylist or merchandise manager for the staff of buyers in the group. She planned special “promotions” of a new color or fabric or style, and often set trends by following some instinctive sense of what new fashion would appeal to most women. She was also charged with management duties as well; many matters of store policy on labor relations had become a special domain for her, because Mr. Ralsey felt that the employees liked and trusted her.
Meany’s question was not easy to answer, but she did it as rapidly and simply as she could. This time he listened to her without showing any reaction to what she said.
“Right, I think I get it,” he remarked when she ended. “And you’d be willing to support the Vederle family for three years. I mean, you’d be willing to sign an affidavit that you would? I’m sure it will be a nominal pledge—”
“That’s what Mrs. Willis kept pointing out,” Vera said, her voice tinged with heat. “Nominal? I’d really be glad to. People who could shut up and stay there—I think they must be terrific people—”
She broke off suddenly.
“I didn’t mean to make a speech,” she added, and looked at him, as if asking him not to smile at her naïve ardor. He wasn’t smiling. He was looking at her as if she and the office and the income and the things she had just said simply did not belong together.
“You’re swell,” he said, and rose to go. “I’ll get this stuff ready for you, as soon as possible. They’re always worried on the other side, no matter how you hurry over here.”
He was gone, and Vera walked to one of the windows looking over New York to the south. The sun was beginning to go down and the long, slanting light shone behind and between all the reaching, thrusting buildings. To the right, the Hudson gleamed its way to the Battery and the open sea beyond. Soon the four Vederles would be on a liner coming toward this city, this lovely, silly, mixed-up city, with its thousand devious moods and values.
She felt like the city itself for a moment. She too had a thousand shifting moods and values, overlaid, intermeshed. But now one mood stood apart from all the others, clear and independent and unshakable. There was something good about coming to the side of a human being who was fighting evil—coming freely and voluntarily and gladly to his side and helping him to fight. It sent a warm, alive surge of happiness through you. It oriented you better to the world you lived in and would have to, before the next decade was done, fight for. Yes, there was something good in all this, something deeply and primitively good in recognizing an ally and helping him.
Four days later, at breakfast, Vee read the morning papers with their load of nervous, crisis-laden news. Her eyes fell on a different kind of headline, and at once they lit with an odd, personal gratification.
That very day, she read, on the twenty-fourth of March, less than a fortnight after Anschluss, invitations were going forth from President Roosevelt himself to twenty South American republics and nine European countries. The President was asking if each “would be willing to co-operate in setting up a special committee for the purpose of facilitating the emigration from Austria and presumably from Germany of political refugees.”
As she read, her heart swelled with a nameless relief and pride. This was the kind of thing free men could do. This was good, generous, human stuff. It was especially fine that the United States should be originating it.
A few weeks ago, this newspaper story would have been impersonal, distant. Now it touched her as personally as a good letter from a friend. It was valiant news, it made her happy.
The Vederles wouldn’t benefit by this conference—their need would be over before the meeting began. But there must be hundreds of thousands of other Vederle families who would read or hear that America was moving to help them. And those who read or heard the news would feel the pulse of renewed hope beat hard in their veins.
Listen, hopeful ones. Do you know the laws, do you know the quota laws, the visa laws? Do you know the quota-control officials who cannot, who may not, let the besieged Consulate give you the quick document that may save your life? For under the quota there is not room for people of your nationality in the three million square miles of the United States. Not now, perhaps in a few months, but now the quota is full, the quota is full.
Did you know about the quota laws, you Austrian suicides who killed yourselves in those first days and weeks after Anschluss? There were eight hundred of you every day, day after day, killed by your own hope-abandoned hands. The British journalists told us, the American journalists told us; Gedye of the Times and Shirer and Fodor, Mowrer, John Elliott, they told us how eight hundred of you each day and terror-crowded night killed yourselves rather than face a brutal tomorrow.
But perhaps the pulse of renewed hope beats hard in you fleeing ones, your faces turned toward Switzerland as the nearest place of respite, you who travel by foot, by car, by plane, by train? You there, you, traveling on skis through the forbidding and beautiful mountain passes of the Alps—you, wading the shallow reaches of the Upper Rhine—you crowding like hungry, tired beasts into the impromptu shelters at Saint Gall and Diepldsau—does it comfort you to know that in far-off Washington President Roosevelt has today moved to set up a great international committee to help you?
Hurry, hurry, let men of good will meet, decide, ratify. Let the doors of decent nations be thrown wide, let the padlocks and chains of quota numbers and immigration laws be burned through with the acetylene flame of compassion. But hurry, hurry.
There was need for hurry in that springtime of 1938. Most of you migrating ones had yet to learn the stony face of the immigration laws in each possible host country. The United States, for instance? The huge, sprawling land of promise settled by earlier migrants from persecution or poverty?
Yes, the United States will welcome you.
Will welcome if you please, sir, 27,370 from Germany and Austria; that is the quota for a year. Will welcome 2874 Czechs, 6524 Poles, 869 Hungarians, 100 from the Free City of Danzig, 252 from Spain…these are the quotas for any fiscal year, even this year.
It was as if the great, heaving breakers of the ocean were to burst and crash against a three-inch channel through mighty rock.
Those who were denied turned elsewhere, changed plans, sought every consulate of every land. And these were only the first, the prompt ones. Behind them were the uncounted others who would soon follow in this seeking of permission to live, if not on this soil, then on that, or that other.
But France, England, Portugal, Belgium—all countries had their immigration laws, had their decreed quota of welcome to the ones in flight. Everywhere the tale was told in the same sad syllables—the quota is full, the quota is full.