The Trespassers (26 page)

So now she only said, “I do trust you, Jas. Don’t even talk about it—I don’t want to pry into it. It
is
your problem, and Beth’s.”

They stayed up late,, and every hour was of a special quality. Implicit in all their talk and their behavior was the admission that this was no longer “an affair.” Even when he talked of business, there was a new intimacy. He revealed the secret figures of everything, the costs and expenditures, the salaries he was paying already, the salaries he would pay.

And when they were in bed at last, that was different too. They said nothing about what they hoped. And each knew the other was hoping it.

For a long time after he fell asleep, Vee lay thinking, dreaming into the future. She had lain so before, but in her own house, where he was the “outsider,” and this reversal was strange and exciting. Waking together in the morning was strange, too. He woke to a full preoccupation with business matters and seemed already used to the novelty of having her in his room in the morning. This gave her a benevolent amusement, as though she knew things he did not know and could react in ways sharper than he had yet learned. She was contented just to be there, to watch him shave through the half-opened door of the bathroom, to learn that he turned the radio on almost as soon as he was awake.

When the telephone rang, she only half knew that a bell had rung somewhere. Her mind still drowsed through the secret half-ways of sleepiness.

“It’s for you, Vee,” Jasper announced. “Dora, I’d say.”

“Why, she didn’t know—”

“She seems to have made a lively guess.”

Dora apologized profusely for trying to reach her. But since it was a radiogram—

Vee listened intently.

“Read it again, Dora, will you? I want to copy it down.”

Long after she hung up, Vee lay back, staring at the words she had written.

Denied? But it wasn’t possible. Not now, not after all the care, all the requests and the prompt fulfilling of each of them. She held back open anger, because it would get in the way of thinking, yet something swept her blood in spite of herself.

Jas came in, looking his question. “It’s the Vederles; their visas were denied. I can’t see why.”

She handed over the written message. He read it thoughtfully, frowning.

“Didn’t they know you weren’t related—?”

“Of course, from the beginning. That Larry Meany, you know, the young lawyer Ann Willis sent me, he’s handled dozens of affidavits—”

“Better ring him up, hadn’t you?”

“Yes. I’ll get on this right off.”

He glanced at his watch, and she knew he was pressed for time against his first appointment. She swung up, hurried into her clothes. She reached Meany at his house, and shortly after she got to her office, he arrived. He was sympathetic with her irritated mood, but matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

“It will happen,” he said calmly. “Sometimes everything goes along on grease, sometimes nothing seems to be what they want.”

“But the time they’ve lost. Couldn’t the Consul or somebody have discovered this way back in April, when the affidavit first got there?”

“Sure, they could. But there are so many cases, you know. Try to be philosophical about it. It will straighten out.”

“Philosophical? Just imagine how the Vederles must—”

“I don’t let myself. I handle a lot of these, you know. I can’t let my imagination get going.”

She understood completely. He was right; if he expended orgies of emotion on each visa case, he would soon be used up. But
she
could not be so remote about it.

“I know. But I feel, well, somehow I’ve begun to feel as if they
were
part of my family or something. I’ve thought about them at odd times, and—well, never mind. What do I do now?”

“I’ll handle it for you. I’ll send up a new letter for you to sign.”

“No.”

He looked up in surprise.

“I mean, yes, of course, do everything you know ought to be done. But I’m going to get into this myself somehow—I’ve got to think.”

“Of course. I’ll prepare the usual second statement.”

“What’s the usual ‘second statement’?”

“Guarantee of a specific weekly amount to support them. You’d do that, I suppose?”

“Yes, of course. But didn’t the affidavit—”

“Sure. But some of the Consulates seem to like repetitions, details, new legal pledges, everything but the kitchen stove.”

“Well, put in the kitchen stove this time, will you?” She looked so vexed, he liked her for her very annoyance. She cared, all right.

“There must be something I can do myself,” she said. “Maybe write direct to the State Department.”

“That helps, sometimes,” he said, but his voice was cautious. “Sometimes pressure helps, sometimes it gets the consular back up.”

“Damn the consular back. They’re government people, aren’t they? Civil servants and all that?”

“Yep, that’s what they are. They also are—some of them—tight little, mean little major-domos, so jealous of their importance—”

“Well, I’ll think twice before I do anything.” He left her still struggling with a bafflement she had not known before. She wanted to act herself, but she did not know in the slightest how to begin.

She buzzed for Miss Benson.

“Please let me have all the copies of the Vederle stuff, will you, Benny? It’s gone wrong somewhere.”

“Yes, Miss Marriner.”

She walked out briskly, the perfect secretary, bent on perfect service to her employer. Within her, Benny’s heart seethed with sudden outrage.

“This damn refugee stuff,” she thought. “As if I didn’t have enough to do with my regular work. It’s all right for her to do all the big gestures of saving souls, but it’s me who does the extra work. Photostat this, write the bank, call up the brokers—”

She came back a moment later with two Manila folders.

“I brought the Tupchik one, too, Miss Marriner,” she said decorously. “I thought you might want to check something there.”

Miss Benson sat down at Vee’s desk, pencil and notebook docile, attentive. Vee began to read. “Never mind, I’ll not want you for a bit,” she said in a moment, and was glad when the girl left. She was getting angrier within her, and she needed secrecy for anger.

The affidavit. It was three months since she had read and signed it. Rereading it grated her nerves. It was so tediously careful about every detail, so overflowing with minutiae. She remembered that she had forgiven its redundancies because it overlooked nothing. Nothing except the possibility of a mean little, nasty little major-domo.

“That deponent hereby assumes full responsibility for Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle, Christa Vederle, arid their two infant children, Paul Vederle and Ilse Vederle, the would-be immigrants, and promises and guarantees that Dr. Franz Wilhelm Vederle, Christa Vederle, and their two infant children, Paul Vederle and Ilse Vederle, will never become a burden or a public charge upon the United States of America, or upon any city, county, or municipality thereof.”

There it was, word for word. What, in God’s name, could be more thoroughgoing a promise, more binding a pledge?

She picked up a pencil, began to draft a letter. She addressed it to “Visa Division, The Department of State, Washington, Sirs,” and then once again sat baffled and uncertain. Was it wise to ignore what Larry Meany had just said and write, anyway? It would relieve her feelings enormously, but would it help the Vederles? If she wrote Washington, she would be “going above Zurich’s head.” In the business world, the one positive result from such tactics was resentment and enmity from the head that had been gone over.

After a bit, she pushed a pencil heavily through the words she had written. Then she telephoned Ann Willis. Ann too was cautious. It was too soon to appeal to Washington. Wait and see if the new guarantee letter didn’t do the trick. Better not antagonize Zurich.

In the end she contented herself with a cable to Franz Vederle:

RUSHING NEW GUARANTEE. DELAY UPSETS ME TERRIBLY ALSO.

She looked at her desk calendar. July 6; July would be nearly gone before this new material could be in the hands of the Consulate there. July would not be an easy, happy month for the Vederles.

She wished that she were going abroad on a summer buying trip, as she had for so many years. If she were in Europe now, she would go to Zurich, meet them, perhaps go to the Consulate itself with them. Who knew but that an appearance of an American citizen with them might be the one small thing that would make up the consular mind?

She sighed over the daydream as she gave it up. She herself had told the Boss that this year she could not, should not, leave the store long enough for the usual trip abroad. The buyers, of course, were going; her own trips were not really essential any more. Mr. Ralsey had urged her to go; almost ordered her to go, but she had argued him out of it. The true reason, and she knew it without expressing it even to herself, was that now she could not bring herself to leave Jasper for the two months these buying trips took. Just now, with this new glory of hazard before them, to lose two months was an unendurable thought.

Two months? Perhaps by the end of that time It would have happened. They would marry at once, then, she would leave the store and the whole drive of Business, a Career, a Life of Her Own—leave it all forever behind her and have instead a husband and a baby. “Mine eyes have seen the Glory…”

The words climbed up from somewhere. She smiled at herself as she heard them singing themselves in her mind. She smiled, but the longing, the wanting, in her was so sharp that her breath caught.

T
HE SIXTH OF
J
ULY
that year was a sunny day in the Western Hemisphere. Sunshine had greeted Franz Vederle as he came numbly out of the American Consulate in Zurich, sunshine slanted across the telephone in a New York apartment while a maid read her mistress a radiogram, sunshine lay warm and yellow over the old streets and trees of Evian in the east of France.

There, in the luxurious Hotel Royal on that sunny afternoon, a meeting called three months before at last quieted and came to order.

For two days, since the Fourth of July, the delegates to that meeting had been arriving, in twos and threes and half dozens. They had come from Argentina and Australia, from Belgium and Bolivia and Brazil, from Canada, Chile, and Colombia, from Costa Rica and Cuba. They had come from Denmark and the Dominican Republic, from Ecuador and Eire, and from France itself, the civilized host to all the others. They had come from small Guatemala and Haiti and Honduras, from Mexico and the Netherlands, from Nicaragua and Norway, from Panama, Paraguay, and Peru, from Sweden and Switzerland and Uruguay. And they had come from the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

There were others who had come to Evian that week, drawn there by this conference. Officials of the League of Nations were there, specialists in matters of immigration, resettlement, and colonization were there. William Shirer and Vincent Sheean, John Elliott of the
New York. Herald Tribune
and Clarence K. Streit of
The New York Times,
slow-speaking old Robert Dell of
The Manchester Guardian,
these were there—and also an accredited correspondent of the Nazi press of Germany. From magazines and newspapers, from Reuter’s and the A.P. and the U.P., from radio networks, men had come to the famous resort town on the French shore of Lake Geneva, and waited now for this decent meeting to begin.

Some of the exiled themselves were there, German, Austrian, and Italian. And more than forty different refugee relief organizations in America, France, and England had sent their own representatives, men and women who were already sad experts in the baffling hazards and heartbreak of their tasks.

A gavel rose and fell. To outward appearances this was like the beginning of a thousand other conventions, the room crowded to the walls with seated delegates, the main members seated at long tables, their notes and papers ready to their hands, goblets of water still untouched in front of them, ash trays waiting for use. But never before in man’s long history had so many of the nations of the world come voluntarily together for no other purpose but this one of dignity and kindness—to help the driven, to provide welcome for the lost and lonely.

As the low, quiet voice of the first speaker reached out into the room, many hearts beat harder, many eyes lighted with belief. Here it was at last, this concerted answer to the Haters and the Hunters.

It was Myron C. Taylor speaking, American chairman of the conference. He spoke of the new phenomenon of “human dumping.” “Millions of people today are actually or potentially without a country,” he said.

“The problem is no longer one of private concern,” the quiet voice went on. “It is a problem for intergovernmental deliberation. If the present currents of migration are permitted to push anarchically upon receiving states and if some governments are to continue to toss large sections of their population lightly upon a distressed and unprepared world, then there is catastrophic human suffering ahead…”

“While…our ultimate objective should be to establish an organization which would concern itself with
all
refugees, wherever governmental intolerance shall have created a refugee problem—”

At this point, at this first statement of a far-flung and generous concept, some of Mr. Taylor’s listeners moved uneasily. Some of the British delegates glanced at each other, met the eyes of some of the French delegates, and hastily looked away. Those briefly meeting eyes clouded over with sudden wariness. But they cleared again as the calm voice finished out the sentence.

“—we may find that we shall be obliged on this occasion to focus our immediate attention upon the most pressing problem of political refugees, from Germany, including Austria…who desire to emigrate by reason of the treatment to which they are subjected on account of their political opinions, religious beliefs, or racial origins…”

He called for a permanent organization, with permanent collaboration from all member governments, with regular meetings at London, with a secretariat for administrative work. He proposed that ways be found to provide proper papers for refugees, who could not obtain visas and passports, he proposed that governments enter each other’s confidence completely on all facts and figures of their immigration problems. The United States would now admit the full quota of 27,370 Germans and Austrians each year.