The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel (7 page)

I think it frustrated my wife intensely that she could not just cast off her Jewishness as she had her New York life, or as she might a dress that had gone out of fashion. In this she resembled the many bourgeois French Jews who, because they regarded themselves as French first and Jewish second, made the mistake of assuming that France would regard them the same way. France did not, however—nor, for that matter, did our own United States. Later I learned that when Julia’s decorator, Jean, arrived in New York from Buenos Aires at the end of 1940, the immigration officer crossed out “French” on the passenger manifest and penciled in “Hebrew” above it. Thank God Julia never had to undergo such a thing. It would have been the death of her.

Rarely, if ever, did she speak of her relatives in Germany. I don’t know how much she knew about them. Given how close-knit her family was, I cannot believe that she had no awareness of them, or felt no concern about their plight. If she did, however, she never let on—I think because to speak of her relations in Germany would have been to acknowledge the Nazi threat in a way that might undercut her arguments for staying in Europe. It is really astounding to me, the human capacity for self-delusion, of which I myself am as guilty as anyone, and as much when what is at stake is something to be lost as something to be gained. And perhaps this capacity is a good thing, a necessary thing, a talent we must cultivate to survive—until the moment arrives when it kills us. In any case I knew my wife well, and so I knew that her silence during our conversation with the Fischbeins was a silence of attention and dread, and that merely to sit through that conversation without bolting or
screaming she had had to muster all the reserves of good manners that her governess had drilled into her in her youth, and that this effort had cost her.

And then Edward stretched his arms into the air, and said we should be going, and asked for the bill. In that manner typical of American men, we jousted over it. He won, which is indicative of how much he took me off guard, for in bill battles I am usually no slouch. “I’m taking you to a wonderful little restaurant I’ve discovered,” he said as we headed out across the Rossio. “It’s called Farta Brutos. Really, that’s what it’s called.”

“Does it mean what it sounds like it means?” I asked.

“A literal translation would be something like ‘well-satisfied brute,’” he said. “Think Bluto from
Popeye
.”

“The food isn’t exactly refined,” Iris said. “But oh, is it authentic!”

“That sounds lovely,” Julia said, in a voice that betrayed her distress. Gambrinus, the restaurant favored by the wealthiest refugees, was more to her taste. When we had gone there a few nights earlier, Cartier was at the next table.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” Edward said. “Myself, I have no patience for tourist traps.” Then he put his arm around Julia’s shoulders. She flinched. Their pace quickened, until they were about ten feet ahead of Iris and me. Nor could I race to catch up with them without abandoning Iris, who had charge of Daisy and was obliged to stop every few seconds while she sniffed at moist spots on the pavement.

“Your wife is so pretty,” Iris said. “So … petite. When I was a girl, I would have given anything to be that size. I shot up early, you see. By the time I was fifteen I was already five foot eleven. The girls at my school—souls of kindness, they were—called me Storky. To compensate, I developed a stoop, and now I have a permanent curvature of the spine to thank them for.”

“But that’s terrible.”

“Oh, there are worse things than a stoop. Besides, when I’m with Edward I don’t feel it so much. With other men—perhaps it’s that my self-consciousness makes them feel self-conscious. Emasculated. You, for instance.”

“Me? I don’t feel emasculated.”

“Then why haven’t you put your arm around me the way Edward has around Julia? Admit it. It’s because you find me daunting. Well, don’t worry. I don’t really want you to put your arm around me.”

“All right.”

“This whole business of couples switching partners when they walk—I find it tiresome. Look how he towers over her! I imagine he’s charming her. He has a way with women. Why, do you know what he said to me the first night we spent together? He said, ‘I’d like to paint you in the posture of Parmigianino’s
Madonna with the Long Neck
.’”

“Really.”

“I ask you, how could I resist him after that? No one had ever compared me to a painting before. So I married him.”

The gulf between Iris and me and Edward and Julia had now widened. Across the divide, Edward’s laughter tumbled. Julia was walking stiffly. What was he saying to her?

We were on our way to the Santa Justa Elevator, which, though it was located within spitting distance of our hotel and was considered one of Lisbon’s great attractions, neither Julia nor I had yet ridden—yet another of the many things we hadn’t done in our week in the city that the Frelengs, in their seventy-two hours, had. The first time I saw the Elevator, I thought it was a medieval tower. It had a crenellated roof. It even appeared to lean—an illusion, I soon learned, brought about by the city’s sheer verticality, the way the old buildings list, clinging to their perches. Almost nothing in
Lisbon is level, yet the hills are steep, which explains the necessity of the so-called
elevadores
, most of which are actually funiculars, shooting like arteries through the veining of narrow streets that crawl up the hillsides. In fact, the Santa Justa Elevator is the only one of these that is an elevator proper. The metal sheath through which its cars ascend soars up 150 feet in the air. “It will come as no surprise,” Edward said when our little group had recoalesced, “that the architect who built it studied with Eiffel.”

“Speaking of Eiffel,” Iris said, “did you hear what happened when Hitler marched on Paris? He wanted to ride the elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower, but the operators cut the electrical cords.”

“Good for them,” I said.

“And he only stayed one night. I suppose Paris was too rich for his taste.”

We stepped into the foremost of the cars. It was paneled in polished oak and had been manufactured, a brass plaque informed us, by R. Waygood & Co., Engineers of London. “Further evidence of the enduring bond between England and Portugal,” Edward said, pirouetting to escape the tangle of Daisy’s leash. “The oldest unbroken alliance in Europe—which is probably the only reason they’re letting the British through to Lisbon instead of sending them off into
résidence forcée
.”

“And the Americans?” Julia said.

“America’s neutral, so no harm, no foul.”

“Speaking of England”—
speaking of
, I had discovered, was one of Iris’s favorite locutions, since it allowed her to change subject at will—“did you hear that the Duke of Kent is in town? He’s to be the guest of honor at the inauguration of Salazar’s Exposition, where there will also be delegations from France
and
Germany.”

“Leave it to Salazar to get those three eating out of the same trough,” Edward said.

“Something else we haven’t been to,” I said. “The Exposition.”

“The Exposition of the Portuguese World,” Edward said, adopting his tour-guide voice, “celebrating the nation’s double centenary—Portugal having been founded in 1140 and attained liberation from Spain in 1640.”

“I’ve heard it’s splendid,” Julia said. “They say an entire Angolan village has been shipped over for the occasion.”

“Isn’t that horrible?” Iris said. “Those poor people, on display behind ropes. Like animals at a zoo.” She glanced at Daisy, who had gone to sleep on the elevator floor. “Anyway, as I was saying, it’s because the Duke of Kent’s in town that the Duke of Windsor isn’t. He and the Duchess have to cool their heels in Madrid until George leaves. They’re furious about it, but there’s nothing they can do, since it would be a breach of protocol for the brothers to be in the same country.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I eavesdrop. It’s part of our method. I pick up the gossip, out of which I forge a plot. Then Eddie collects the facts so we can be sure it’s accurate.”

“What was it Oscar Wilde said?” Edward said. “‘Anyone can write accurately.’”

“‘Anyone can
play
accurately.’ He was talking about the piano.”

“What my wife is saying is that she’s the brains of the operation, while I do the drudge work. Make sure she’s got her facts straight, which she usually hasn’t. Correct her spelling, which is usually egregious.”

“So you’re writing a novel set in Lisbon?” Julia said. “How interesting. I wonder if we’ll end up being characters in it.”

“Don’t put ideas in her head,” Edward said.

“The premise—still very rough—is a suicide in a Lisbon hotel,” Iris said. “An
apparent
suicide. I got the idea because that was how
we got our room. You see, we’d been shown the door at a dozen other places, and so when we tried the Francfort, it was a shot in the dark. And then, to our astonishment, the manager told us that just that morning a room had become available, its previous occupant—these were his exact words—‘having had to leave suddenly in the night.’ Now I ask you, how likely is it that anyone, at this moment in time, would leave a Lisbon hotel suddenly in the night?”

“She spent a whole day scouring the room for evidence,” Edward said. “Cracks in the ceiling in case he’d hung himself. Blood on the tiles.”

“Did you find any?” Julia asked.

“Alas, no,” Iris said. “But what do facts matter?”

“How are you going to get your detective to Lisbon?” I asked.

“He’s Jewish. He’ll come to Lisbon for the same reason we did.”

“You’re Jewish?”

“I’m not. Eddie is.”

“Julia knows that,” Edward said. “In fact, we’ve just been talking about it. Our grandmothers come from the same part of Bavaria. We think we might be cousins.”

Julia frowned. Now I understood why she had been so stiff when Edward had his arm around her.

All through this conversation, the elevator’s conductor—an old man in an ill-fitting uniform—had been standing on the curb, smoking. Now he stubbed out his cigarette and got into the car with us. We were the only passengers. Nonetheless he waited until nine o’clock precisely—church bells confirmed the hour—to close the gate and switch on the motor. The elevator creaked, purred, and began its ascent.

There is a feeling that you get, or at least that I get, when an elevator lifts off: a queasiness, almost a weightlessness, as if the ground has dropped away under your feet; a feeling, now that I think about
it, not unlike that of passing through a revolving door. If the women hadn’t been there, I would have put my hand on Edward’s shoulder. But the women were there, and so I had only the woodwork to steady myself against as, outside the glass, the roof of our own Hotel Francfort sank below the dusk sky and a pair of ladies’ underpants, unloosed from a clothesline, billowed before drifting down toward the street.

Then we were at the top. We got out. To our left, a narrow spiral staircase rose.

“View finest at sunset,” Edward said. “Let’s go.”

He picked Daisy up and headed up the stairs. Iris and Julia followed. I took up the rear so I could catch Julia if she got dizzy.

The first thought I had when we got to the roof was that the railings were entirely too low to keep someone from falling.

The second was that I had never in my life seen such a view.

“Isn’t it extraordinary?” Edward said, coming to stand next to me. “Three hundred and sixty degrees. Look, there are the castle ramparts. You couldn’t see them when you didn’t have your glasses, Pete. And the river—it might be wider than the Mississippi. And there’s the Rossio. It’s only from up here that you really get the nautical effect—how the waves seem to roll.”

“Please, Eddie,” Iris said, “you’re making me queasy.” She had her hand on her stomach.

“My poor wife suffers from vertigo
and
seasickness,” Edward said.

“It’s true,” Iris said. “That’s why, of all the methods of committing suicide, jumping is the hardest for me to imagine. The courage it must take—”

“It was how Jean’s father killed himself,” Julia said.

“Who?” Iris said.

“Jean. Our decorator. His father jumped out the window of their
apartment on Avenue Mozart. This was in 1915. He was German, you see, and though he’d lived in France for years, he’d never bothered to change his citizenship. And so when the war came, he was declared an enemy alien, though he had two sons fighting on the front. Fighting for France. And then within a month of each other the sons were killed. So he jumped out the window.” She said all of this matter-of-factly.

“You never told me this,” I said.

“I only thought of it now because of what you just said”—she looked at Iris—“that you wondered how anyone could muster the courage. Well, he did.”

As if she was suddenly cold, Julia rubbed her bare arms.

“I’m sure it says a lot about a person, the way he’d choose to kill himself,” Edward said. “If it was up to me, I’d put a pistol in my mouth. Spectacular yet painless. How about you, Pete?”

“Me? I wouldn’t. I’ve never even thought about it.”

“Oh, come on. You must have. Everyone has.”

I shook my head.

“It’s true,” Julia said. “He is hopelessly committed to life.” Her tone was almost bitter.

I turned toward the river. Even though it had been years since I left the Midwest, coasts still humbled and appalled me. The first time I saw the Atlantic, I was twenty. I wanted to run screaming. I’m told people from the Northeast feel the same thing when they step off a train in Kansas or Nebraska for the first time. The endlessness of the plains, the vastness of the sky—it’s a kind of horror to them.

Then something strange happened. Pigeons began circling the Elevator. Without warning, one of them dove at Edward’s head. He ducked, and Daisy suddenly leaped up, barking and lunging. “Whoa, steady girl,” Edward said, scooping her up into his arms. Yet she didn’t stop barking. She didn’t stop lunging.

“What on earth has got into her?” Iris said.

“It’s these pigeons,” Edward said. “I told you, they’re infernal.”