Eden sat up very straight, and was silent, peering at Marjorie. When he spoke again his voice had a new strained timbre. “In case you have any lingering doubts that I’m stark mad, let me ask you this, isn’t the Messiah going to be a Jew? Even the Christians are waiting for a second coming of their Savior. He came to them the first time as a Jew. Why should it be different the second time? He wouldn’t be self-conscious about having a Jewish name, I should imagine, like my great-grandfather. Aren’t the times full of signs of a new era coming?”
Eden lit a fresh cigar, and the yellow flare of the match filled his face with leaping shadows. In the taut silence Marjorie stared at him with a feeling not far from eerie horror, as the thought came to her that he really was more than a little mad.
He startled her by saying, “No, I’m not exactly sane, and if you want further proof of it I’ll tell you one more thing. For three years I’ve had the unshakable conviction that my remaining destiny in life was to save one child, or its forefather, I’m not sure which, from destruction by Hitler—furthermore, that the death of Emily, and everything else that’s happened to me, was part of the process necessary to forge the queer instrument to do that queer job. You don’t have to tell me it’s a systematic fantasy, I could write up my own case history impeccably. However, there was once an Arab stevedore who had a systematic fantasy that he was destined to start a great religion, and now a respectable part of the human race believes in Mohammed. Sometimes these systematic fantasies stamp themselves on events, and change the very nature of what’s true and what’s false.
“But take the thing in its worst light. Let’s say I’m nutty as a fruitcake—that destiny is a primitive delusion, that nothing exists but chance. All the same in my nutty way, don’t you think I’m doing some good? Hitler’s going into the wholesale skeleton-manufacturing business in a year or so, you know. Jewish skeletons. Nothing can stop it. At least I’m cutting down the number of skeletons. Especially the little skeletons. The little skeletons with small soft bones. And entirely by accident, isn’t it more than possible that I actually will rescue some great benefactor of mankind? They’ve got the genes for it, these Jewish children, haven’t they? Unless I pull them out, along with their paralyzed parents, there’s nothing in sight for them but to manure the German ground.”
He leaned close to her. The cigar glowed bright red. She could see the gleam of his eyes, and the wrinkling furrow of his scar. “Now I’ll tell you one thing more. I have a feeling that I’ve already done it, already rescued him. That’s the strangest part of it. I’ve had it more and more strongly for the past six months. It comes and goes and then comes again more strongly. I feel I’ve already gotten him out. I don’t know who he was or when I did it, but I do have this irrefutable sense of an accomplished mission. I can’t pay any attention to it because obviously, on a rational basis, it’s just my horrible fear of this whole filthy business converted into a notion that would free me from having to go back into Germany any more. It’s exactly like hysterical blindness in a soldier. All the same, that’s what I meant when I told you back on the Queen Mary that I’m coming to the end of the novel.
“I’ve never told all this to anybody else, Margie, and I don’t know why I’ve unloaded it on you. If I’d told this crowd I work with, they’d have stopped using me long ago. You’re probably thinking right now how you can get me quietly committed. Well? What do you think? Do you feel like jumping out and swimming for the shore? Don’t, I’m quite harmless.”
Marjorie looked at Eden wordlessly for a long time, her breast heaving, her mind in a tumult. There was so much she wanted to say; but no sentences would form. She felt helpless, trivial, baffled and, at the same time, thrilled in her deepest soul.
She did the best she could. With a single sinuous movement, she slid across the seat to him, twined her arms around him, and kissed him. She tried to tell him with her arms, with her body, with her silent mouth, that he must not go to Stuttgart the next day, and that if she could keep him from going she would.
There was a flicker of response in Eden’s kiss; then a stronger response; then it faded and he was cold. He said in a low tone, holding her gently, his cheek resting against hers, “Okay, Marjorie. Okay.”
“Mike… Mike, you’re not very well, don’t you know that? You must know it. Don’t go back. Not tomorrow. Wait a while, wait till you feel a little better—till you know some more. I’ll stay in Zurich with you, if that makes any difference—”
He sat up, took her hand, and held it to his face for a moment. He moved away from her, resting an arm along the back of the seat. “There’s something that needs doing right away. It’s not at all dangerous, but I’m the one to do it, as it happens. It needs the free and easy American again. Take my word for it, my nerves are better than they’ve ever been. It’s the truth, Margie. You’ve seen me as I’ve been for years, not at a low point or crisis, not in the least. I am what you saw on the ship, that’s all. Most people can’t stand me, you know, I’m a jagged, panicky, supercilious, mean-tempered son of a bitch. Yet you like me. I know it, and it’s given me some new red corpuscles. But don’t try to come any closer, darling Marjorie, I’m pretty used up, excellent for what I’m doing, good for nothing else—”
“Mike, listen—”
“It’s exactly so. I’m doing what I’m doing not because I’m a hero, and don’t go making me one in your mind, whatever you do. It takes a displaced neurotic of the worst kind, a walking ghost with no roots in the real world, to do it—”
“There are millions of neurotics not doing anything like it, Mike—”
“I know that. Therapy for me takes the form of excessively tense action, it’s a known pattern, and that’s what makes me useful. If I find enough wild ridiculous things like this to do, I may live to be ninety-seven, in which case I hope we’ll be doddering old friends some day, but if I’m really coming to the end of the novel, Margie, nothing you or I can do will add a page to it. I’ll be run over by a trolley car in Zurich tomorrow, if nothing else—”
“For God’s sake don’t talk that way any more, Mike, I’ll start crying. It’s such damned horrible nonsense, these premonitions—”
“I daresay. Don’t cry, dear Marjorie, whatever you do.” He took her hand, pressed it briefly to his cheek, and dropped it. “Noel is okay. I’m sure you can tame him. Really sure.”
“All right.”
“I’ll look for you next time I’m in the States. I hope I’ll be obliged to buy you a wedding present.”
“Thanks, Mike.” She could hardly bring the words out of her constricted throat.
He rested his hands lightly on her shoulders, and looked earnestly into her face. “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been…. I’ve never felt the force of that overworked old jingle until now. You’re a little darling, Maud Muller, a perfect darling. I’ve never seen prettier blue eyes or softer brown hair. Your smile, in case Noel’s never mentioned it, is pure warm radiance. It just happens that I have this date in Stuttgart tomorrow, that’s all. You’ll have to excuse me, Marjorie…. You might kiss me once more, for good luck. Then we’re off to deliver you to Noel.”
A minute or two later the boat was foaming full speed across the dark lake to the lamplit shore.
Chapter 45. NOEL FOUND
Arriving back in Paris, Marjorie wondered whether the sun ever shone in that much-praised city. It was a cold drizzly afternoon, and Paris seemed a cold drizzly place, endlessly flat and gray, and full of dripping statues. The Arch of Triumph and the Eiffel Tower, looming out of blue mist as she drove past them in a taxicab, gave her no thrill; but the taxi did. The driver, a slumped old man, possibly eighty-seven or so, in a dirty black coat and a dirtier black cap, with a drooping big yellow-stained mustache, four or five yellow teeth, and rheumy yellow eyes, drove through the thick honking traffic with the abandon of a drunken duke. He had the unnerving habit, whenever the taxi seemed to be careening toward a collision, of drop
ping to the floor of the cab and twisting the wheel sharply, then bobbing up to see where he was, and how he was doing. In this fashion he mounted the sidewalk several times. Marjorie would gladly have gotten out of the cab, but in her paralysis all French left her, including the word for “stop.” She arrived at the Mozart Hotel covered with perspiration, and hating Paris. The desk clerk, a fat man with hooded eyes, leered politely at her, welcoming her back, and asked in oily English whether she wanted a double bed. It was obvious that he considered her a travelling American whore, and was wondering whether he could afford the price of a night with her. The room he gave her had a yellowing cracked bath with only a trickle of rusty hot water, but the other furnishings, especially the brass bedstead, looked so medieval that the bath by contrast seemed to clang and shriek of modern times.
She bathed with some difficulty, stretching the brownish puddle of hot water a long way. It was a pleasure to be able to choose fresh attire from her steamer trunk; she was very bored with the clothes she had been wearing over and over in Switzerland. But the black wool suit, specifically bought with a hundred and ten precious dollars at Hattie Carnegie’s for her first encounter with Noel, needed pressing. She doubtfully rang for the maid, and was astonished at the speed with which a smiling young woman in a gray smock appeared; was delighted at the girl’s swift comprehension of the problem, indicated by her seizing the suit and pantomiming a pressing job; was enchanted by the reappearance of the girl in half an hour with the suit perfectly pressed. The girl also brought her, unasked, a pot of hot chocolate with flaky little rolls and butter. Marjorie began to like Paris better. She tried a couple of times to telephone Noel, but only became hopelessly snarled up with gibbering operators. She dressed with great care in the black suit, with a dusty-pink blouse, white gloves, black straw hat with a single pink rose, and black nose veil. Well pleased with the image in the mirror after a cold-blooded appraisal, she sailed out to run Noel down.
Eventually she found the Rue des Sts. Pères, a crooked narrow street in a shabby neighborhood, meandering uphill between overhanging houses. She was going from door to door, looking for the number Mike Eden had given her, when she saw Noel.
Hatless, in his old tan topcoat, carrying a bulky brown paper bag in each arm, he came up the steep sidewalk, his head tilted in the old way, whistling. He walked right by her; a stalk of celery and the legs of a chicken tied with cord protruded from one bag, and the neck of a wine bottle from the other. When he was a few feet past her he stopped and turned around, peering incredulously. With an impulse of mischief she brushed the veil up on her hat. “Hello, Noel.”
“Jesus Christ, is it you?”
“Have I changed that much? It’s me.”
He bounded toward her. “Gad, and me with my arms full! Well, you’ll just have to do the hugging and kissing, then, there’s no help for it. Come on, hug hard.”
He bent sideways, and she hugged his neck and kissed his cheek. “Well, that’s all right for on the street,” he said. “Ye gods, let me look at you. You know this is hair-raising, it’s absolutely weird? If I wasn’t thinking of you at the very second I saw you, may the devil come right up out of that sewer and drag me to hell. Christ, you’re twice as beautiful as you ever were, d’you know? You’re a woman, that’s what—Say, what in God’s name are you doing in Paris, right in front of my house? I swear there’s something spooky about this. Are you real? Are you just a mass of ravishing ectoplasm?”
Marjorie laughed. “Am I really in front of your house? The way they number them in Paris, I don’t know how anybody ever locates anybody—”
“How the devil did you find out where I live? I’ve kept it from you every way I could. Bless you for breaking through, anyway—Marjorie, my only darling, you can’t, you can’t begin to imagine how glad I am to see you. I never really knew how glad I’d be until this moment, but—Well, hell’s bells, let’s not stand jawing on the street, let’s go upstairs, slay a calf, broach a hogshead of mead—” As he talked he led her to the next house, and pushed open the door with his back. “Come on. Two flights up. No elevator, you’re in Paris.”
Marjorie stood at the doorway, looking at photographs in a glass display case facing the street. “Isn’t that André Gide?”
“Yes, my landlady’s a photographer. Her studio is on the first floor. Come along, she’s shot all the intellectual glamor boys in town, you can look at the rogues’ gallery she’s got any time you want to.” He put one of the paper bags on the floor, fished a key out of his pocket, and opened the inner door. She was glad to see that he still had his hair. It was blown about in great disorder, but it was there. She had had ugly nightmares of him bald as an egg. He said, “Follow me, it’s simplest. Don’t break your neck on these stairs. The dim light is strictly Parisian. You have to develop owls’ eyes to get around in French hallways. Also a mountaineer’s legs and lungs. Did you ever see such steep steps? If it had two rails instead of one it would be a ladder—a winding ladder—”
Marjorie paused for breath on the first landing. In letters of silver on the dingy door—the entire stairway was dingy, it smelled of dust, old carpets, and garlicky food, and the walls were grimy yellow—the name Gerda Oberman arched over a modernistic sketch of a camera in red. Noel yodelled down the stair well at her. “Caught in a crevasse? Shall I send out a St. Bernard?”
“Coming,” Marjorie said.
The door on the next landing opened directly into a living room, very large and almost square, with cheap scatter rugs on the bare dark-varnished floor, and a glossy black grand piano by the windows, incongruously new and expensive-looking amid the drab worn furniture. The light from the windows was a dreary blue-gray. Noel flicked a switch as Marjorie came in, and a chandelier in the middle of the ceiling lit up, a monstrosity of orange and blue stained glass. “Here we are. Sit down for a minute and let me get rid of this junk, then we’ll have a drink. Okay? Can you stand scotch and water without ice? My landlady doesn’t believe in Frigidaires. We have a big old lump of ice, I can chip some—”
“Scotch and water is fine. I’ve about lost the taste for ice.”
“I won’t be a second.”
“Take your time.”
He paused at the French doors that opened into a dining room. He made a comic gesture with the two brown bags. “I can’t get over how superb you look. And how glad I am to see you. I wish to hell you’d come a week later, that’s all, seeing you’ve waited this long.”
“Why? Why a week later?”
“Well, we’ll talk in a minute.”
There was a framed picture of a blond woman on the piano; Noel came back in a minute or so and caught her studying it. He still had his coat on and he was carrying two brown drinks. “Here you are. What do you think of my landlady?”
“Is this Gerda Oberman?”
“Yes. Gertie, as I call her when I want to annoy her. Real Boche, isn’t she?”
“I think she’s quite good-looking.”
“I guess so. She used to be a model before she moved over behind the camera. That’s a skillful picture, it minimizes her exceedingly Neanderthal jaw. Be with you in three minutes. Drink up, there’s gallons of scotch.” He went into a dark hallway on the right.
“Okay,” he said, returning in a few minutes in a different jacket, shirt, and tie, with his hair combed, carrying an almost empty drink. “First of all, let’s clear up a few mysteries. Where did you get my address? There isn’t a person in the States who knows it except Ferdie Platt, and I know you didn’t get it from him.”
Marjorie, in a corner of a lumpy black leather sofa, toyed with her drink. “What difference does it make? I was determined to find you and I’ve done it. That’s all.”
“Well, it’s an incredible bit of sleuthing. You belong with the FBI. Freshen your drink?”
“Not just yet. Do you know a man named Mike Eden?”
He was slouching down into a chair, but he sat up at this. “Mike? Sure I know Mike. Why?”
“I
met him on the Queen Mary coming over. He gave me your address.”
“What? I haven’t seen Mike Eden since last summer. I’ve moved four times since then.”
“Well, he got me your address, all the same.”
“I’ll be damned.”
They looked at each other, Marjorie smiling slightly, Noel seeming puzzled and a bit wary. She could see now what the illness had done to him. He had lost a little hair in front; perhaps that was why he was wearing it excessively long and full. On the left side, under the hair, a trace of pink scalp showed. The golden color seemed faded too, a bit ashy. Strangely, the effect was to make him appear not older but younger. He had rather the air now of a dissipated college boy. The clothes, his old brown tweed jacket and gray flannels, with a stringy maroon knitted tie, and white shirt with button-down collar, accentuated the undergraduate look. He was thinner; the flannels hung on the long bones of his thighs. He had a fresh red-brown sunburn, and the skin of his face seemed to be pulled forward tightly by his curving jaw.
What really surprised Marjorie was his apparently unchanged attraction for her. She had felt a stinging thrill at her first glimpse of him on the street; and now the old tug stirred potently in her, sharpened, if anything, by a touch of pity. “Noel, you don’t look as well as you should.”
“As well as I should? Darling, I must look like the Black Death to you. I can only say you should have seen me eight months ago. Or rather I’m glad you didn’t, you’d never have recovered from the sight. I nearly died, you know.”
“Wally said he’d heard you got sick in Africa—”
“Sick? I all but tore the flesh from my bones with my own nails. I caught some horrible fever in Casablanca—they say you get it from bedbug bites, anyway it’s hell on earth, you break out in a murderous itching rash—I lay in the charity ward of a Catholic hospital for two weeks, up to my neck in warm starch baths, delirious half the time—”