Manhattan Monologues (12 page)

"God forbid," he murmured.

But she heard him. "Do you want another war?" she cried, in a suddenly harsh tone. When he didn't answer, she turned to me, or perhaps I should say she turned
on
me. "As if one wasn't enough for him! One that cost Britain and France the flower of their youth and from which they've never recovered! Another war will finish them. Don't you agree with me, Tony?"

I stammered something about a man's not always having the choice, but she hardly heard me. If I wasn't an instant ally, I was an instant foe. She was older looking and more strident. The years had not improved her. She turned back to her principal target.

"So you don't care whether this house, with its priceless things, is blown to smithereens? Is that it, Arthur? Is that what it means to you, after all our work together?"

His tone was cautious. "I suppose there are things in life, my dear, that are more important than bric-à-brac."

"Bric-à-brac!"

"Well, art then, even the greatest art. Even Leonardo. Even the
View of Delft,
assuming we had it. Could you weigh it against liberty? Against freedom from a bloody despot?"

"Of course I could! Our job is not to fight for abstract ideas. It is to see that the beauty of the world is not destroyed. What is the liberty of one generation compared to the great monuments of art? Chartres has stood there for seven hundred years under despotism and democracies and is still there to inspire people with the reassurance of beauty!"

I supposed that the years Leopoldine had spent putting together a great collection had generated a certain passion for her creation—that was understandable, particularly in a woman of her capability and intelligence—but I couldn't rid myself of the notion that her animation was in fact caused by her husband's deviation from the tight union of spirits she had hoped to foster with her abbey plan.

"Darling," he said placatingly, "a war, if it comes, is not going to destroy all the chateaux in France. If, even at the worst, the Germans should overrun this part of the country, their army would probably take over the abbey for officers' quarters and treat it very well. And if America stays out of the war, they probably wouldn't occupy it at all."

I did not much admire this speech, but I could certainly see that the poor man was hard pressed. Leopoldine did appear somewhat mollified.

"Well, if you can promise me that," she said.

"Oh, my dear one, I can promise you nothing."

"But can you promise me you'll do everything in your power to save the abbey?"

"I can certainly promise you that," I'm afraid he said.

The war came, and devastated Europe, and in due course pulled America in. I did not have to experience my childhood nightmare of the trenches; I served more comfortably in the navy, where, if you were not sunk—and I had the good fortune not to be—you at least escaped mud and rats. I had no news from Arthur except that he and his wife had elected to remain in France even after the German occupation. When the Axis declared war on us, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I had to assume that they had either been interned as enemy aliens or placed under house arrest in their beloved abbey. But on a leave to New York in the winter of 1943,I heard a different and distressing tale from Mother.

"I know how much you admired Arthur and how bad you will feel at what I have to tell you, but you're bound to hear it sooner or later, and you may as well get it from me. Henri de Villac, whose mother, you will remember, was an American and a great friend of my mother's, is over here, representing the Free French. He told me that the Slocums have been shockingly cozy with the German military from the very start of the occupation, entertaining high officers at the abbey and getting all kinds of dispensations. And that after we entered the war, a number of German officers were quartered at the abbey, not as conquerors but as welcome houseguests. The Slocums' new Boche pals saw to it that they got all the supplies they needed to make a jolly house party."

I felt too sick to make any comment, but at last I offered one. "I'm sure it was all
her
doing and just Arthur's weakness. She's a hard one to get around, once she's made her mind up. I suppose he couldn't bear to see her uncomfortable. To him she was always perfect."

"Oh, I don't in the least question her bitchiness. But you can't let Arthur off the hook quite that easily. You must remember that he always felt the first war had been a mistake. If we shouldn't have fought the Huns then, why fight them now? Let us at least save our bric-à-brac and pictures by kissing their asses!"

The war seemed to have brought out an unseemly coarseness in Mother, but what was I to say to it? I couldn't but remember what Arthur had told me about the folly of the first war.

I heard no more about the Slocums until the end of the war in Europe, which occurred while I was on temporary shore duty in London. A new British friend in my Grosvenor Square office, a liaison officer from their Intelligence, hearing me one day at lunch speak of my prewar visit to the abbey in Normandy, volunteered an interesting item.

"I'm afraid your friends were the worst kind of Nazi sympathizers. They got out of France, you know, right before the liberation of Paris. Just as well for them, too."

"No, I didn't know."

"With the help of some grateful German high-ups, no doubt. They went to Málaga."

"Where they still are?"

"Presumably. There are no charges against them. At least from us. Having been friendly to the Boches is not a crime so long as you didn't actively help them. But Mrs. Slocum had better stay out of France for a while. If she doesn't want to have her lovely head shaved. Or is it a wig?"

"No, it isn't."

"And there's another interesting side to the story. While they were wining and dining the Boches, their butler, one Gaston Robert, picked up some clues from the convivial chatter at the groaning board which he relayed to the Resistance and helped us to get a jump on the Jerries at the tussle at Bligny-sur-Oise."

I could have hugged him. For then I
knew
, but I thought it better to bide my time.

I was not able to go to Málaga until the end of the war in the Pacific. Discharged from the navy, I arranged for a short holiday in Spain before coming home, and I had no time to lose if I was to see Arthur, as word had reached me from Mother that he was dying of pancreatic cancer.

"It's probably as well," she wrote me, "because they could never again show their faces in France or America."

The villa in Málaga, on a hilltop with a fine view of the sea, large and white and airy, was evidence that Polly's dividends were still flowing in. She received me coolly, looking older and careworn, and asked no questions about my family or Cedarhurst.

"Arthur will be glad to see you," she said, in a noncommittal tone. "He spends his time in bed looking out the window. He hardly talks to me. We all have to meet our end in our own way, I suppose. He's not in much pain, fortunately. But that may come."

I found him pale and haggard, seeming resigned, almost indifferent to illness, to Spain and to me. On this first visit I chatted about my career in the navy, and he listened, politely but with little concern. When I left to go back to my hotel, I asked whether I could call again the next day, and he nodded.

But the following morning my attack was direct.

"I want to talk about your butler at the abbey, about Gaston Robert," I began bluntly. "I don't believe that he got the information that he fed to the Resistance merely by listening as he served at table. I believe he had help."

Arthur gazed at me in mild astonishment. "My dear boy, what on earth do you know about Gaston?"

"I know what British Intelligence knows. That he supplied the Resistance with some valuable tips picked up from German officers at the abbey."

"And you suppose that I assisted him?"

"I do."

"But, Tony, surely you know what people say about Leopoldine and me?"

I noted that he did not use her nickname, and I read a meaning into it. "Yes, but I don't believe a word of it. Certainly about you. That a veteran of the first war would have behaved that way is unthinkable. I remember what you used to say about keeping things to yourself. About the vulgarity of communication. Are you keeping your heroism to yourself? Please, Arthur, if you tell no one else, tell me! That's what I have come to Málaga for."

He was interested now. "If I'd been working with Gaston, why wouldn't the Resistance and British Intelligence have known it?"

"That's what I can't figure out. Did Gaston want all the glory for himself? I did discover that he was a rabid communist, and I speculated that he may not have wanted a bloated American capitalist to share in the birth of a new France. But then I wondered why you wouldn't have exposed his failing to give you any credit for his glory. If not for your sake, for your wife's."

Arthur nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. "Is this really that important to you, my friend?"

"Oh, yes!"

"And will you promise not to reveal what I say?"

"I promise. Unless you authorize me."

"Which I never shall. In the brief time that awaits me. Very well. I'll do it for you and for your ears alone. Because you do seem to care. And in memory of our marsh rambles." A small smile and a considerable pause followed before he resumed. "You were right about Gaston's communism. He didn't want his fellow Reds to know that he had an American goldbug as his partner. I believe he has ambitions of becoming a commissar in a Marxist Gaul and needs the glory of his wartime work for himself alone. And he's jealous, too. You were right about our partnership; I was very much the senior partner. Gaston would have had nothing without me; he wasn't very smart. But he had Resistance connections, which I needed, and he promised absolute secrecy as to his source, which was all-important to me, as my utility depended entirely on the Germans' trusting me. That was vital, and I knew that even the Resistance made slips. Sometimes fatal ones."

"But
now
, Arthur! Surely now it can be told!"

"Gaston has another hold on me, my friend. A shameful one, I fear. He has let me know, through his slave of a wife, who came to the abbey shortly before we left France, that if I claimed any share in his spying on the Boches, he would publish proof of the collaboration with them of a person close to me. A collaboration that might easily be classified as criminal by a France freed at last from the grip of her ancient enemy."

We did not have to name Leopoldine. I could only stare at the floor. When I looked up, Arthur's eyes were closed; he wanted to rest. Then the nurse came in, and I had to depart. I took no leave of my hostess.

***

I did not see Arthur again. I was told at the door the next morning that he had lost consciousness, and ten days later he was dead.

Arthur's wife returned to France, after the resentments of wartime had somewhat simmered down, and reoccupied the abbey After she had given it and its treasures to France as a
monument historique
, reserving for herself only a life estate, her social position was much improved, although there was always a certain odor attached to her name. She continued to buy objects d'art for the abbey and became renowned for her sharp eye and expertise. The younger generation, often bored with the past, took delight in her wit and lavish parties.

I shall release this memoir when I hear of Leopoldine's demise, and I have given my instructions to my executor, should I die before her, as to how to make it known. Arthur's secret will not have gone to the grave with him.

I have often speculated as to why Leopoldine went as far as she did in her collaboration with the Germans. I have a dreadful suspicion that she may have discovered by chance, or guessed, that Arthur was communicating with the Resistance. Surely he would never have told her, partly for security reasons and partly to keep her out of it in case the Germans discovered him. But to her it may have been a repetition of his old severance from her ties, not unlike his walk on the marshes, and by dragging him down into the fetid embrace of a shared collaboration she would have joined him to herself forever. He would not share his heroic act with her, so she would make him share her shame. Perhaps not, but she was capable of it, and I will remember that at Málaga he never once referred to her as Polly.

M
Y EXEMPTION
from military service in the Second World War, on account of a limping and slightly shrunken left leg, the relict of a childhood bout with polio, has sorely intensified my lifelong sense of my greater exemption from all manly activities, and as I sit at my desk, as a tax lawyer in the Wall Street firm of Haight and Dorr, now deserted by a good half of its clerks and younger partners summoned to battle, I feel acutely the relative powerlessness of the written word, once my sole tool in the struggle of life.

I went into law originally, some eight years ago, because in college I had proved myself a third-rate poet and a worse spinner of short stories, and hoped to make a better use of words in briefs and arguments. I was an only child whose mother had died young in the flu epidemic of 1918 and whose grief-stricken father, a free-lance accountant with too few accounts, had somehow managed, in the teeth of the Great Depression, to put me through college and law school at New York University before he too expired. I hope it was of some consolation to the poor man, who gallantly tried to hide his obvious dismay at my poor physical condition, that my law school grades were the highest and that on graduation I was chosen as a clerk by a United States Supreme Court justice. For these goals I had toiled night and day and sacrificed such social life as might otherwise have come my way. Yet solitary as my academic life was, it still brought me Nora, my ex-wife, then an NYU undergraduate whom I had met as we were eating our sandwich lunches on the same bench in Washington Square.

I can see now what I should have seen from the beginning: that Nora, a small, pale, plain, raven-haired and intense young woman, was the type who would take people up violently and then put them down with equal violence when their opinions or acts have ceased to jive with her own. I should also have seen that there was little in my physical appearance to arouse her libido. Why, then, did she marry me? For it was she who proposed the match, not I, one day on that same bench. The answer is obvious enough. On her graduation, in the same spring as mine, no job, or even the distant prospect of one, awaited her. She faced a bleak future in Manhattan, living with an ailing mother almost as poor as herself, while through me she could visualize the excitement of Washington in the tumultuous days of the New Deal! It was an easy choice—for her.