The Trespassers (53 page)

“That bastard Crown,” Grosvenor exploded quietly when he had heard the whole story. “So that explains his inhuman, insane lust for fame and power. I always knew there must be something queer there.”

Then Grosvenor’s face had taken on some sort of remote look, as if he were planning something. For an uneasy moment, Mandreth wished he had not confided in him. He exacted a second promise to keep it under the rose.

At the Stork Club that night, Timothy Grosvenor renewed acquaintance with one of the better-known tabloid columnists. He handed along the newest yarns from Hollywood and then said, “And this one is too messy to use exactly, but…”

By the middle of August Jasper Crown began to have the feeling that people were looking at him in some odd, speculative way. Not everybody, of course, not the clerks and stenographers, but the executives, the stockholders, the people who counted with him. One day he walked unexpectedly into Giles Craven’s office, and Frank Terson slashed a sentence off in the middle and actually stuttered for a moment or two. And one night he went into a bar for one of the solitary nightcaps he’d fallen into the way of taking, and he saw a newspaperman look at him and then look quickly away and say something to his companion. He’d noticed that kind of thing several times recently.

People always talked about him, he knew that, talked of his success as head of the company and also as one of the most famous news analysts on the air. But this was different. There was something silent and furtive about this, not the open admiration he had become used to.

He would shrug it off, but burrlike it clung, anyway. He wanted to ask somebody about it, but there was no one he trusted enough now to lay himself open to the charge of being nervy and oversensitive. There was no one he was really intimate with, anyhow. That little blonde he’d started with a couple of months ago, yes, that was intimacy in the clinical sense. But she was good for nothing except bed. He never talked to her about anything that mattered. Oh, the hell with it all; having a divorce decree set aside was unusual enough, so they were gossiping about that, and the hell with it.

Then one day during a business luncheon, it happened. Everybody had had a second round of drinks to loosen things up, for it promised to be a fairly boring session with a couple of out-of-town station owners who were signing on with JCN. With the second drink, somebody, told a limerick, and then the dirty stories started. Giles and Frank seemed to enjoy them, but Jasper prayed that the food would come soon, and let him end the “social” part of the meal.

“Well, there was this poor guy named Child,” one of the visitors started, after the preceding joke had earned its salacious laughter. He was grinning over it himself, and he slapped the table, to show that an uproarious one was coming. “And this guy, see, he’d been married fourteen years but couldn’t have any children. The poor bastard was as sterile as a piece of gauze.” Giles Craven kicked the speaker’s shin under the table. Jasper saw him do it.

Frank Terson leaned forward. “I think we’d better start the business talk now,” he said smoothly. “It’s getting on. Giles, why don’t you explain—”

Giles began to speak rapidly. He looked anxiously at Terson and then on off into space. Neither of them looked at Jasper.

He sat with them all throughout the luncheon, playing his part, saying his words. But within him a disease ate at his vitals. So
that
was what everybody was whispering. Somehow they had heard more than the bare facts the papers had printed, and they had built this out of it and were spreading it around with the savage glee that always went into any attack on great public figures. “Sterile as a piece of gauze—”

“But, Christ, it’s not even true now,” his mind shouted. “For ten years I thought it was true, and all that time it was a secret. Now it’s not true—it’s not—God damn it, I
can
have a child like any other man.”

But he could never prove that as long as he lived. Forever he would know that people around him were whispering to each other.

Without waiting for coffee, he made some rapid excuses about another appointment and left the table. Outside he began to walk, striding along in the bursting August heat. The city’s air washed heat into the very streets and buildings. But he did not know it, he did not feel it. He felt only the scabrous, diseased thing in his flesh and knew there was no surgery in the world that could rid him of it now. He would have to live with it forever.

He knew that she was in New York again. He wanted to find her, go and confront her, beat her with his rage for this betrayal to their past. But he could see how it would be, her inert body seated before him, her stubborn silence. He could even hear her voice saying, when she finally spoke, “But, Jas, it was the story of
my
life, too; I only told it to one or two people. It belongs to me, too.”

He walked on harder, faster. He couldn’t get away from the sick torture of it, of knowing that he wouldn’t ever have another chance.

Beth had guaranteed that; she would hang on until she died. He was a man who had always had every chance he wanted. But now, Jesus, now this ruthless woman had betrayed him.

Even in the morning, the late August heat lay over Paris in motionless weight. Vee had arrived late the night before from Amsterdam. From her shaded room at the Hôtel du Rhin, she could look down on the Place Vendôme and see sharp-edged lights and darks of shadow, announcing another day of cloudless glare. She wondered how comfortable the Vederles were at the Hotel Pérey. The Cité du Retiro was a pleasant inner square, tucked in off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but in this windless heat, it could not be turning out well for them.

Well, five days more, and they were all sailing. It was a long time since she had crossed on an eight-day boat, and it would be lazy and pleasant—if anything could ever again be really lazy and pleasant. Maybe this
was
just another boiling up in the war of nerves; maybe it would simmer away again as the other horrible brews had done. But with all Europe again mobilizing, with ten million men in uniform, with the arrogant deadline of September 2 on which Hitler demanded a “German solution” of the Polish question—yes, it would be good to be sailing for home.

This was her second stay of the month in Paris. She had been there for the fall fashion openings during the first eight days of August, as she had been for so many years. It was as though the outside world were scheming to bring her and the Vederles together, for during that week they had arrived from Switzerland. Franz’ first words at the station had been exultant. “Well, Vee, we crossed a border.” It had hit her hard. Merely to be free to move again, to cross borders and get on a boat and sail from a harbor! Before she could answer, Ilse raised her voice in a rocking singsong, “We got our vi-sas; we got our vi-sas.” Paul was excited, too. Only Christa seemed tired and quiet.

She took them off to tea with her, to be brought up to date. Their trip to Zurich for the final routine at the Consulate had gone smoothly. And once they had the priceless visas to show, it was a matter of hours only to get their French travel permits. One small hitch had developed—immediate passage of any kind on any boat was impossible. There never had been such an exodus. The first sailing they could get was on the twenty-fifth. Franz said, “Why don’t you sail a week earlier, Vee, and go with us? You told the Consul General a lie, otherwise.” And she had gone to the steamship office, where one man knew her very well, and had cajoled him into finding an inner cabin for her on the same ship.

They had spent two evenings together, before she had had to leave for Brussels and Amsterdam. They had been disappointing evenings. The gentle spirit that had threaded the hours at Ascona was no longer there. Christa half apologized; the children had worn them all out sight-seeing during the daylight hours. But it was more than her fatigue. Vee guessed that Franz felt it, too, though he tried hard to conceal it.

They were to lunch together today, and she telephoned their hotel to tell them she was back. By now they were probably counting the hours to the boat train.

But their luncheon date was canceled. “Christa is ill, Vee, one of those heavy summer colds. Just about a year ago, she had one and it was very stubborn. She’s in bed.”

She went to their hotel, in spite of Franz’ protests. In the small sitting room, she saw that Franz was worried. His face was still tan with the deep-laid color of many months of Swiss sun, but there were lines in it she had not seen before, and his eyes were grave. Their greetings were the rapid greetings of old friends. The children were out with a paid tourist guide. He wanted to keep them away from Christa’s bed and it was hard in small quarters.

“This stifling heat must make her even more uncomfortable,” Vee said.

“It is very disturbing to me, the way she is,” he said. “The cold is not too bad, her temperature is low. But—”

He shook his head several times.

“Please let me go in, Franz. I never catch things.”

Christa lay back on her pillows in the darkened room. She smiled apology to Vee, and said, “I am so much nuisance.” Vee was startled to see how ill she looked, her hands lax on the sheet covering her, her whole personality damped down.

“Summer colds can flatten you right out,” Vee said. “It’s too bad you’re missing Paris this way.”

The moment she spoke the words, they sounded false and banal in her own ears. Something had appeared for a moment in Christa’s eyes that carried a message she could not catch.

“Christa has no love for Paris,” Franz put in quickly.

“I know not French,” Christa said. “It is hard, always to be—
without
.”

Franz asked Vee about her trip, then, and they talked of other things. A few moments later, he took her back into the sitting room.

“Franz, what is it? She seems so unhappy. She—”

“This is so strange to you, Vee. But for so long I have watched her through one stage after another of a fear you could not understand. First, leaving Vienna—that was terrible for both of us of course, but for her in a special way. Then Zurich, where she first felt people’s distaste for refugees; a hundred small things told her of it every day, and she shrank from always being the foreigner, the queer one.”

“I know—”

“I took her to Ascona partly because I knew there was there a large group of Austrians. It worked—for a while I was reassured. But then she wished we might stay there—it was a pseudo-home there. I began to wonder how she would stand leaving ‘home’ a second time.”

“Yes, I can see. Couldn’t you make her understand that it—”

He shook his head. “To her I can never be an analyst, only a husband. But I tried, as her husband. It would do some good for a while. But with such deep insecurity—if you press too much, it covers itself and goes—more underground. Then we came here. This is the worst.”

“Is it just that she doesn’t speak French and feels outside everything?”

“How many foreign tourists come here cheerfully without a word of the language? No, she uses that only as one more symbol. And the crowd of refugees here, everywhere one sees them—they are too painful to her; it’s that more than the language. I am really worried, I can barely wait for that boat.”

She sat silent. Now she wanted to comfort him, to tell him that she knew he was sick at heart, but she sat silent. He began to walk up and down slowly. She did not know whether to leave him or whether he wanted her to stay. It had dragged out so long, their journey from their old life to the new one they would one day build again. Depletion—she knew well its limp enervation. Poor Christa.

From the other room, Christa was calling. Franz went in. When he came out a few moments later, he looked cheered.

“She feels the heat so,” he said, “it gave her an idea. I think it is a good one. She wonders why we don’t go now to Le Havre, to wait for the sailing there. It’s on the Channel, it would surely be cooler.”

“Oh, Franz, that
is
a good idea. Will you do it?”

“I told her if her temperature drops to normal, we’ll go at once. I will start the room maid on the packing. Perhaps tomorrow morning we can go.”

She telephoned for news after dinner that evening. Christa was more comfortable; she and the children were already asleep. He had made all arrangements and they were leaving in the morning.

“Can you—would you like, perhaps, to come over?” he asked. “I do not like to leave the hotel. But there is a small lounge; we could talk?”

“Oh, I’d like to, I really would. I—maybe I’m getting homesick, but I’ve been sort of—well, never mind.”

In the small, dim lounge, they sat talking until midnight. For the most part they talked impersonally, for the towering subject of the possible war dwarfed every other. But Vee found herself so absorbed, so responsive to everything he said that she found every moment personal and compelling. Once he said, “And America—can anybody really believe she’ll stand by, forever isolated and indifferent to—” He broke off, remembering something. He reached into his inside pocket and drew out his passport. He opened it to the page that bore his American visa and held it out to her. She took it, not understanding. He pointed to the seal, deeply embossed in the page.

“You know, once I sat in the Consulate at Zurich and tried to decipher that seal,” he said. A remembering look came into his eyes, and his lips smiled as he spoke. “The eagle, the spreading wings, the striped shield, all that I could make out. I could see that in one claw the eagle holds an olive branch. But I simply could not decide what he holds in the other.”

She looked closely at the seal. She must have seen it a hundred times, but she had never paid any attention to it at all.

“I remember the fantastic notion even crossed my mind that it looked like the Fascist bundle of faggots in Italy. I laughed at myself and gave up.”

She held the page closer, but the light was too dim for details.

“But the moment I looked at it on the page there, stamped clear and deep,” he went on, his voice intent and excited now, “then I knew what it was your eagle holds to balance off the olive branch of peace. They’re arrows, Vee, a sheaf of arrows, to
fight
with.”