An Infinity of Mirrors (2 page)

“Seven.”

He looked at his watch. “Seven thirty-five. Your father has had his chance.”

“Oh! There he is. Papa!” The sound made no impression in the maelstrom. Paule took von Rhode by the hand and plunged into the crowd, moving in the general direction of her father, greeting people steadily as she crossed the room but holding to a course which was several points northwest of her father and in the precise direction of the main exit. He was chatting with three awe-struck Italian beauties, but she concentrated on making him look up at her, and when he did she yelled jovially, “Franz! Set to!” and he gleamed with delight. Paule pulled von Rhode through to the top of the main staircase and grinned at him. “If I had interrupted my father on his night off, as he stood there trying to decide which of those three gorgeous women he would choose, he would have wept,” she said.

“I'm very glad you didn't interrupt him.”

“Shouldn't a military attaché be in uniform?”

“It's a long story. What does ‘Franz! Set to!' mean?”

“It's a family joke. It's Papa's favorite line from all his plays.” As they stood close to each other she saw that they were the right height.

“It comes from a perfectly awful play Papa did in London about ten years ago. He was an eighteenth-century fop who had a manservant named Franz to do everything unpleasant for him. He fought Papa's duels, he was bled for him when Papa was ill, he even got married for him, and whenever Papa needed help he would yell, ‘Franz! Set to!'”

Paule and Veelee dined lingeringly at Voisin, in the rue St. Honoré, on asparagus, gigot and white beans, cheese, coffee and Calvados, all joined together by Meursault and Julienas. Early in the meal they shifted from French to German and never left it. They lunched together twice that week and dined three times. They saw Yonnel's
Hamlet
at the Comédie, partly to see Yonnel but also to hear Madeleine Renaud sing Ophelia's song in her extraordinarily primitive voice. They had tea every afternoon at Ixe-Madeleine, Sherry, or Chez Ragueneau; they went on a picnic; they rode on the Bateau Mouche. They talked to each other and listened, they looked and they touched, and they fell in love. At night Paule would lie on her stomach, her chin on her pillow, and stare gravely over the west of the city, trying without success to teach herself to understand what was happening. She lived with her father in the flat where she had been born, which covered the entire seventh floor of a large building on the Cours Albert I and viewed the Seine at a point where the river took care to be at its most elegant. Her father had bought the flat to celebrate his first marriage, to Paule's mother, on June 8, 1909. Paule was born on October 13, 1910. Her mother left them forever on February 21, 1916. Her father blamed his first divorce on mixed marriages, inasmuch as Paule's mother had had nothing to do with the theatre. She was the daughter of a colonial planter in the East, her people had been statesmen, and her brother was a concert pianist of the least theatrical sort. Thereafter, with the exception of the stunning vaudeville contortionist, Nicole Pasquet, Bernheim had always married within the theatre, the opera, or the cinema, avoiding dancers because he believed they were interested only in beefsteaks when away from their work, and abjuring civilians.

Paule took tremendous pride in her father. He was a Commander of the Legion of Honor. His prowess as artist, lover, duelist, patriot, wit, gambler, impresario, horseman, husband, feeder, rager, and fashion plate was constantly in the world press. Since her tenth birthday Paule had been in charge of the leather-bound books which held the yellowing daily history of her father's life. Together father and daughter had pored over the books each day when he was not appearing at a matinee performance, so that she would be able to interpret each item precisely in a balanced and exact manner when the time came to write his official biography. Because of the newspaper clippings, she had been taught English, German, Spanish, and Italian; with French, these were the languages of the box-office countries. No one—with the possible exception of her father—understood better than Paule how lucky they were because of his genius, his presence, and his charm.

These were only a few of the things which helped to endow Paule with her sense of great good fortune at having been born a Jew. Each Friday night, from six to six-thirty, while he drank a half-bottle of Moët, her father would polish her pride with rich fabrics from Jewish history. “It is important that you remember, my love, that it was the Jews who rejected the Romans. We fought them in three wars and beat them in two, and when it was all over they offered us citizenship. You see? And when I say wars I mean wars, not battles. We had Hadrian so rattled that he sent a general named Severus all the way from the British front with thirty-five thousand troops, and we tore them apart. And, believe me, not only because they were tired from traveling. Hadrian knew which general to send. That Severus was a very dirty fighter. He burned everything we had and he murdered every noncombatant in his path. They won. They didn't win fairly, but they won. They were the biggest empire in the world and we were so small we couldn't have filled the opera house, but they offered us citizenship and—never forget this, Paule—we turned it down.”

Or he would say, “The origins of anti-Semitism are forgotten now, darling girl, but after we gave Saul of Tarsus the basic material from the life of one of our rabbis, Christianity spread across the world. As a matter of fact, by the twelfth century the Jews were the only non-Christians left in the known world and the Church was taking very good care of us because it had wistful hopes about converting us. And it was extremely important to them. After all, they would have a harder time proclaiming Christ's divinity if his own people disclaimed him, wouldn't they? But naturally we wouldn't convert, so to prevent us from infecting the faithful we were excluded from the feudal system until, in a brash decree in 1215, Pope Innocent II instituted the yellow badge. It was then the great sprint toward ritual murder began.”

More vividly than her own mother, Paule remembered her father's second wife, Evelyn Weissman, one of the great stars of the French theatre. Her presence was so electric that Paule's father had had to dismiss her as a wife, although he kept her as a mistress for three and a half years after the divorce; he was obsessed with the idea that she was more interested in her own electricity than in home-making. Paule was nine at the time of the second divorce. She was a lovely child, tall for her age, and even the caustic realism of her birthday portrait by Felix Valloton, the Swiss, could not conceal the fact that she was exquisitely female with long plaited hair and huge purple eyes which savored the viewer from a long, finely boned face.

All of Bernheim's wives had been kind and loving to her, although some not as convincingly as others. Dame Maria van Slyke, the film star and her father's fourth wife, had been Paule's favorite. Marichu Senegale, the third wife, an Algerian opera star, had been the least sympathetic. She had wept endlessly and in such a strange key after she had gained ninety-one pounds, causing Bernheim to come home less and less frequently. The one thing all wives brought to Paule was information about her father's mistresses, in the hope that Paule would trade information or even come to sympathize more with them than with her father. A man as intensely artistic as Paul-Alain Bernheim had to have mistresses while he had wives; it was a matter of station, nationality, profession, and health. He kept a small apartment on the Avenue Gabriel but he always made it a practice to begin new liaisons at the Hôtel de la Gouache, at Versailles, always in the same three-room apartment. One bedchamber was for the candidate, the other for himself. The furniture in the large room which separated the bedchambers was removed, except for one table which held a gramophone.

Bernheim's custom was to make love from nine in the morning until noon; to lunch from one o'clock until three; to sleep until six in the evening; then to alternate from the lady's bed to his for love-making until ten o'clock in the evening, at which time a light snack and a magnum of champagne was served in the lady's room. After that they would tango to the gramophone records from eleven until three o'clock in the morning. This regimen required his greatest concentration, and he would be unmindful of complaints from other clients of the hotel. At three o'clock they would retire to their separate rooms to sleep until nine the next morning, when the happy schedule would begin all over again until the lady tired. Twice, despite the enormous sums he had spent at the Hôtel de la Gouache, the management permitted a bird to awaken him at an ungodly hour; on both occasions he had had the bird shot.

Paul-Alain Bernheim was dedicated to everything in life, but most of all to pretty women. If a woman was pretty he had to know her better. His method was direct. On the first day he would send a basket of flowers. On the second day he would send baskets of flowers every hour on the hour; florists had dueled over securing or retaining his account. If on the third day there was no response to the dozens of messages concealed beneath the blooms, he would send a fiacre filled with flowers. Then that night he would bribe his way into the woman's house; crouching on the carpet outside her bedroom, he would scratch at the door until elemental curiosity forced her to leave her bed and open it.

“For God's sake, what is it?” one whispered harshly, “who are you? my God, Bernheim! Are you crazy, Bernheim, my husband will kill you, your flowers have already driven him out of his mind why are you here you will ruin my marriage, Bernheim, for God's sake leave, leave now before there is blood!”

Using his stage voice which could break an electric light bulb at thirty feet, he would answer, “Why have you not telephoned me?”

“Ssssshhhh! My God, telephone you, I hardly know you! My God you must be totally insane, Bernheim, please, please go before he wakes up and turns into a raging tiger—no, oh no, stop that, Bernheim, no.”

He was relentless with such women because they had pretended to ignore him and forced ultimate methods. He would reply, “If you do not want me, I prefer a scandal. I demand to see your husband now. I must have you. Let him run me through, but I must have you.”

He was not young when he did these things, because it took some years of experience to develop such pragmatic psychology, but his own wives told Paule that the women always appeared the next morning at eight-thirty
A.M.
at the Hôtel de la Gouache, ready for duty.

On the Friday evening that she was twenty-two, the evening before Paule's life changed forever and a new age began, as on every other Friday evening before, in the third year of his sixth wife, Paule listened intently to her father saying, “The Jews, my dearest, understood the abstract concept of freedom before anyone. Until we evolved this, man was so captured by all of his humanized gods that it was impossible for him to be free. Our one God, an abstract, gives us freedom to do as we will. Our God is not for this Jew or against that Jew. When the time comes, our God is always free to ask for an accounting, for actions good or bad. When Martin Luther turned his back on Rome he made a profound change in the Christian religion by changing man-God relationships to almost the sort of relationship we Jews have with our God. In fact, Martin Luther invited the Jews to become Protestants with him, because he saw that there was no longer any separating chasm between Judaism and Christianity.” As her father talked on he gave Paule one more small reason for her serenity. The more human the world became, the higher her adoration soared.

Two

From the time of her father's second divorce Paule—who did not think of herself as being gallant—had developed a most gallant and simple basis for refusing to recognize that she might ever be unhappy. She knew that if her father would permit her to stay with him—if it did not come into his head, in some rage, to send her away to the Hôtel Meurice with the others—there could be nothing which might upset her calm or prevent her joy. All during her adolescence, she had been certain that she would never leave her father willingly, and she resigned herself to the fact that she could never marry unless her husband would agree to come and live with them at Cours Albert I. As the young men came to call, as she fell in and out of love, as she reached twenty and passed it, nothing happened to change this resolve. The frequency of her father's divorces, each one emphasizing his loyalty to her, only strengthened the conviction.

As the thought of the meaning of Veelee grew on her, it grew with her dismay. She loved Veelee: that was immutable and it bore with it other requirements. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the German Army. Because of the army he had not had a permanent, fixed residence since the age of nine. She could not imagine the German High Command ordering him ino a perpetual billet at Cours Albert I. Putting her father aside while she thought about this business of loving Veelee, she began to understand that Veelee was to all others as a planet is to motes. But she could not leave her father. He had never left her in all of the times he had smashed his life to start all over again; he loved her and he was loyal to her and he needed her. But the thrilling fact of Veelee was stored in her memory to be examined minutely when she lay on her bed staring out into the night. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen, and his virile good looks were the equal of her father's. They were both the same tree-sized men, very straight, craggy in some places, gnarled in others, and they could both sing off-key exquisitely and with intense devotion.

Paule arranged to have Veelee call at Cours Albert I at all sorts of odd hours, but for any number of reasons her father was never there. It was spring; he was engaged in rehearsals, in a new love affair, in a divorce, in the purchase of cuff links, and in a lawsuit which he hoped would lead to a duel. She was determined not to have to
tell
her father about Veelee. They must meet. Her father must see and weigh and judge, then know as she knew about Veelee. She pronounced his name in the French way with a hint of song at the end of the world; she couldn't say it any other way, and he told her he had written to his sisters in Berlin to say his name was no longer Willi, for Wilhelm, but Vee
lee
.