The Trespassers (31 page)

He shook his head, to clear it of irrelevancies.

“The divorce again?” Beth asked.

“Look here, Beth, we’ve got to get together on it this time. Last time you said you’d think it all over again. Have you?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I told you I would. I told you that the first time you asked me. That was the first week of July. I told you again that morning you came over.”

“Well, but I mean, when? I told you I wouldn’t rush you. But the lawyers have worked out everything now and I can’t see any sense in not winding it up.”

“You always want everything wound up, Jas.”

He started a gesture of impatience, but caught it before she could see it. He must not get her worked up into an argument, a scene, tears.

“I guess I do,” he said ruefully. “But this is a little tense for both of us, isn’t it, just waiting around to start?”

“I suppose I ought to feel anxious to get it over, too.”

“But you don’t? Oh, Beth, it’s like an operation. It’s—”

She smiled. Her lips scarcely widened, her face remained inert.

“That’s what everybody says to me. Ann said it just the other day. But—some people are afraid of operations.”

“Ann? Ann who?”

“Willis. You know I still see her and Fred.”

“Oh, her. Yes, I forgot about her.” A question darted in his mind, but it was unthinkable that he should ask it.

“She’s awfully good for me, Jas. I know you never liked them much, but I’ve been seeing a lot of her.” She smiled, a sly smile. “She doesn’t like you so much either.”

“It’s all right with me. I suppose she spends a lot of time discussing what a heel I’ve been to you.” He still hadn’t asked it.

Beth’s face did not change.

“Not any more. When we first separated, she did. But for the last year or so she just won’t mention your name.”

He drew a deeper breath. He had not asked it, but Beth had answered it.

“I’m glad you’re friends,” he said with unexpected warmth. “She’s a hell of a nice woman in a lot of ways.”

There was a pause. Talking with Beth always used to be this way. The talk had to be pushed, shoved along constantly, or it came to full stops. She seemed always ready to fall silent.

“Well, to get back. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about the operation. It’s a stupid cliché, anyway. But, really, Beth, you know you’re going to do it, you said so, and it’s not very—very—well, it’s not conducive to your peace of mind to let it hang fire this way.”

“Jas, don’t pretend you’re thinking of my peace of mind. You never did and you’re not now. You told me I needn’t hurry, didn’t you?”

“Sure, but—”

“Well, it’s easier for me not to. I can’t bear the idea of being a ‘divorcée’—I hate the very word. It—it sounds so discarded. I’d rather go on this way as long as I can. I’m used to this now. It isn’t so”—her voice broke, but she controlled it at once—“horrible as it used to be.”

A knob of anger rose in his throat. He wanted to shake her loose from this quiet, stubborn something which sounded so acquiescent and yet balked every wish he expressed. There was a terrible strength about this kind of passive woman. It was the untouchable strength of inertia.

“You’d get used to the other, sooner than you think,” he said. “Beth, truly it would be better for you to, to be free really, to be able to marry somebody who’d be right for you.” The anger was gone, the voice and manner of sympathy engendered the feeling in him. He went to her, sat down beside her, and put his hand on her arm. “I wasn’t right for you—God knows whether I’d ever be right for anybody. There’s something so damn awful inside me when I get the feeling of ‘belonging’ to a person.”

She looked at him and saw that his eyes were intense. She knew he was being honest; she remembered that after their first quarrels he would often take the blame, would often loathe himself with the same energy he put into everything else he ever did.

“You’re trying to get me to start for Reno right away,” she said. The very words mocked at her own hopes. For over two years she had dreamed that she would fall in love first, want the divorce for herself, go to Reno knowing that at the end there would be happiness to return to. But it hadn’t happened that way.

He said nothing. He must not press her. He had never really pressed her about the precise time. But the whole summer had gone and she still was here. The legal arrangements had all been drawn, and she was still here.

“I’ve thought that perhaps some friend of mine would be going West,” she said, half contrite and half defiant, “or maybe this winter to Florida. If I didn’t have to go alone, it would be easier. And since you said there wasn’t any specific—”

She broke off, looked at him closely.

“Jas, it isn’t because you want to marry somebody else? You said it wasn’t—”

“You asked me if I wanted to marry, and I said, ‘You know how I feel about marriage—and especially if you can’t have children.’ That’s what I say now.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Look, Beth, I don’t want to imply that I’ll never marry, either.”

“No, I understand that.”

Again a silence fell between them. Jasper glanced at his watch. He went to the window and looked at the sky. It was clear and hot; it would be bumpy in the plane. If he had a few minutes at the airport, he would phone Vee. No, it would be better to let some time pass. He could call her from Cleveland, after the mess there was cleared up and he felt better inside about everything. Premature efforts at conciliation blew up in your face nearly every time.

“I have to leave for the airport, Beth,” he said as he turned back to her. “Don’t wait for Florida. That’s next winter and you’ll just be brooding about it that much longer. It’s hard for me too, with everything about the network driving me crazy, anyway.”

She nodded. Her thin scarlet mouth trembled for the first time.

“It would be the best, to pack my bags and get the next train,” she said slowly. “I know that, with my head.” .

“I’m sorry—about us,” he said. His eyes told her he meant it. For that moment he meant it.

“I know. Well, Jas, I’ll try to get my nerve up soon.”

He left, with that. In the cab, on the way to the airport, he felt the anger knob up again. Showdown, indeed. He was, when you analyzed it, precisely where he had been after every other talk with Beth this summer. Which was nowhere. She would go when she finally decided to go. There was something implacable and unbeatable about a passive woman.

He could force her, he could make her go at once. The one thing he did not want to do was to dominate and browbeat her into going. She could drive him to just that. Drive him through her very inertia. And then, having driven him, she would forever after brand him as cruel, brutish about other people’s reactions. Oh, Christ, that was always the way.

You finally acted in self-defense, in self-protection—and then it was
you
who were ruthless.

“For God’s sake, step on it,” he rasped to the taxi driver. “You want me to miss my plane?”

“Take it easy, bud. I’m doin’ fifty now.”

F
RANZ’ SECRET
rubbed at his nerves. In all the long years of their marriage, he had never had a personal secret from Christa, and he felt distaste for the burden of it. But he did not waver about keeping it.

She knew everything else. He read her his letters to Ramsey-Smithe, to Cresselin, to colleagues in Belgium and Holland, and then as their answers came, he read those, translating loosely so that the nuances of discouragement did not come through too clearly. But there was no way to conceal the fact that permanent settlement in Europe looked impossible for them.

Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe replied at once, eager to help, and personally angry and ashamed over the medical situation in England. He wrote that during the very week of the Evian meeting, the British Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hare, was waited on by groups from the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Surgeons, making official protests against allowing in any more refugee physicians or surgeons. A few days later, in the House of Commons, the strongest demands for such restrictions were made again; the press quoted certain leading doctors as threatening to organize a national “stay in” strike of English doctors unless the doors were completely barred and at once. Since 1933, England had extended permission to 137 German physicians to practice there, and since
Anschluss
to 50 Austrian doctors as well. That was enough. German doctors, Austrian doctors, any outside doctors, had different standards, different methods, different fees.

But Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe was investigating the chances for him in other parts of the Empire and in the Commonwealth. As soon as he had something definite to report, he would write or, better yet, telephone, for he could well imagine the position his good and able colleague now found himself in. The most likely suggestion he had yet heard was in the Union of South Africa. Would Johannesburg appeal at all? Might it not do as a steppingstone, anyway? If they were to go there and it turned out they didn’t like it after a bit, they could apply for American visas from there.

Everything in Franz rejected the suggestion, but he was grateful for the concern behind it. Cresselin’s letters and all the others told of new bars going up in every country for all professional men; the letters varied only in the degree of warmth with which they offered help in spite of the difficulties. After two or three exchanges, some sixth sense told Franz that in all the world he had found only two people who were really persisting in their drive to help them. One was Vera M. Stamford, on the other side of the Atlantic; on this side was Mr. Hewlett Ramsey-Smithe. And from each of the Englishman’s frequent letters, one idea kept emerging. Their best hope lay in South Africa.

Franz began, reluctantly still, to consider it. “A steppingstone to America”—a far-flung one, but perhaps the surest, after all. He forced himself to adjust his point of view about the pattern of their future, to see it with this new detour in it. Casually, he introduced the subject of South Africa in talks with the children and Christa; as he awakened their interest, he even found some genuine curiosity stirring in his own mind. Cape Town, Johannesburg, that great unknown stretch of world—it might be.

One night in early August, Ramsey-Smithe telephoned from London. His voice was quiet, yet urgent with news. He had at last uncovered a specific possibility. A German physician, Dr. Otto Huebchen, had emigrated from Berlin to Cape Town some six years ago. He did not know this Huebchen personally, but one of his London colleagues did, and through him he could write at once and tell Huebchen of Vederle’s record and reputation. He would also tell him to expect a letter from Franz himself with necessary personal data about his family and so on. Should he do so?

“How kind of you to try so for us,” Franz said. Then he hesitated. “You know, technically I am still trying with the American Consulate,” he said, lowering his voice although Christa was upstairs. “Just last week I submitted some new material there. But that complication I wrote you of, about the quota of my wife—it makes me certain there is
some
reason they will never give us—”

“Look here, Vederle, that’s all the more reason for investigating this other. Second string to the bow. Shall I write him, then? I’m told he has important connections with the government in Cape Town and can get quick action for permits for you. There’s no quota system at all. After you’ve been there on entry permits for five years, you apply for citizenship.”

“Do write him, then, please do,” Franz said. “I shall also write at once. The mails are slow, are they not?”

‘Twenty-one days, that’s the devil of it.”

“We’re getting used to delays like that. It’s splendid of you.”

“Nonsense. This Huebchen quite recently wrote my friend that the university has a post open for a psychoanalyst, also that there’s plenty of need for therapy. He even asked to suggest somebody first-rate.”

“Why, it seems like a ready-made miracle in the instant we need one.”

“Fine. Then I’ll have a go at it. Nothing lost trying.”

That very evening Franz wrote to Dr. Huebchen. He wrote frankly, and in full detail. Three weeks later, a cabled reply came from Cape Town. The tone of it astonished him.

ARRANGING WITH GOVERNMENT AND UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS. WILL INFORM IMMEDIATELY ON COMPLETION OF DETAILS. WRITING. HUEBCHEN.

He brushed aside the uneasy feeling the cable aroused. In a way, Ramsey-Smithe had vouched for Dr. Otto Huebchen. Some friend he himself trusted had surely guaranteed his reliability. Perhaps in the comparatively new, uncrowded worlds of Cape Town and Johannesburg, things did move this swiftly and easily.

He sighed in some deep disappointment.

When he showed the cable to Christa, she only said, “It always moves fast at the beginning.” He could say nothing to that, and suggested that they go at once to the British Consulate in Zurich and enter applications there for entry permits.

“Of course,” Christa said. She smiled this time. “Why don’t we go to the French Consulate too, and the Chinese?”

Things were comparatively simple at the British Consulate. Forms to fill out, questions to answer, yes, many of them, as one would expect. But on affidavits, on pledges of support, on photostats and quota reservations—the process struck them both as being downright casual, though they well knew that it was not.

When they came out on the street again, Christa seemed almost cheerful. Franz tried to match his feelings to her own. But the sigh of disappointment seemed still to be escaping from his heart. South Africa, yes, there was work to be done there, it was a great and fine country, many millions loved it and honored it. But America…

Day after day had gone by, all summer, with no further word from the American Consulate. Week after week and no word.

At the end of July, he had received Vera Stamford’s new guarantees of specific weekly support for a term of three years. In the meantime, he had obtained a written statement from his bank, had even procured photostats of the deposit and withdrawal pages of the bankbook itself. When he had them all together, he sent them, together with his own request for a review of his case. He asked for some further ruling about the Hungarian quota, offering as his “only excuse for this request, the fact that I am told of comparable cases where the American Consulates in Vienna or Berlin included all members of a family, regardless of birthplace, under the country’s quota of the head of the family.” He polished each phrase of it until it shone with polite deference.