It was 1939, shortly after the declaration of war. I was beginning the second stage of my childhood, which would end, as you will see, with the 1945 armistice. Tetanus, I said to myself—and I kissed Bertie, who came bounding up.
Every day during those war years I wrote letters. Letters kept me in touch.
Once Jenna returned to England, I was often alone, left with Mattie or one of the other servants, or with what became a series of governesses; Constance would be at work, or would be making one of her brief impetuous visits to friends out of state, and I would stay behind in that aerie of an apartment, sometimes doing lessons, more often reading or writing letters with Bertie lying at my feet.
I wrote long blotchy epistles: I wrote to Great-Aunt Maud, to my uncles, to my godfather Wexton, to Jenna; twice a week, without fail, I wrote to my friend Franz-Jacob.
My family were generous: I received bulky, regular replies. Every morning Constance would bring my letters in and lay them beside my breakfast plate, like a present. Every afternoon, on our way out to walk Bertie, we would mail my letters in the smart brass box in the lobby. It was from these letters that I learned the most about the war.
Aunt Maud, still too ill to write herself, dictating to a newly hired secretary, told me about dogfights over London, barrage balloons in Hyde Park, and the (very rude) things she would have said to Von Ribbentrop, had she the opportunity. Steenie wrote from Conrad Vickers’s new villa on Capri, then from Switzerland, where he remained (“a cheerful coward,” he said) for the duration of the war. Uncle Freddie told me about enrolling in the Fire Service, and writing his detective novels during the Blitz. Wexton, whose work was of a more secretive nature (involving coding and decoding, I think), stuck to uncontroversial subjects: He wrote a lot about rationing.
“He’s a spy,” Constance said, reading one of these letters. I could tell, even then, she disliked Wexton.
Jenna, who had been left some money by my parents, had gone to work as a housekeeper for a retired clergyman in the North of England. Her husband had not gone with her—but this did not surprise me. Even at Winterscombe they never spoke; I used to forget they were ever married.
Constance, when I once mentioned this, was brisk.
“Jack Hennessy?” she said. “That horrible man? She’s well rid of him. He was a bully and he drank. He hit her, you know, once too hard and once too often! He gave her a black eye. You had just been born—that was when Jenna moved back into the house.” She frowned. “Your mother kept Hennessy on. I can’t think why. I suppose she felt sorry for him.”
I was writing a reply to Jenna when she said this. I dropped my pen in astonishment. It was a good ten minutes before I was calm enough to continue. Hennessy the boiler-stoker was a bully. He drank. My Jenna had once had a black eye. Men could hit women. A whole world tilted on its axis, wobbled and realigned. I passed on this riveting discovery about Jenna and her husband to my aunt Maud in my very next letter. Her response was immediate.
“No, I did not know about Jenna,” Maud wrote. “And had I known, it would not have been discussed. I abhor gossip! Such matters, Victoria, are beyond the pale. They are not part of polite conversation. And, since their source was your godmother, they are to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Your godmother was always most inventive with her stories….”
Fond though I was of Aunt Maud, I did not believe her. She was an avid gossip, for one thing—so that part of her letter was untrue. I dismissed the rest. I liked, and believed, Constance’s stories.
Constance, by then, had become my ally. In many ways she used to behave as if she and I were the same age, two children ganging up in a conspiracy against those spoilsports, the grown-ups. “Now,” she would say, “I’m going to park you at the office with Prudie. She is all bark and no bite—don’t let her boss you.” Or she would return to the apartment, where one of the ill-starred, short-stay governesses would be attempting to teach me.
“Lessons over for the day,” Constance would cry, and whisk me away for lunch in a grand restaurant or a drive into the country to a house she was decorating. She was firmly against schools, dismissive of learning, snapped her fingers to all imposed discipline. One of the better governesses, a stern Bostonian who made me quake, was dismissed for the large wart on her chin. Another, a tutor, male this time, young and good-looking, seemed greatly in favor and looked set to endure—but he, too, was fired in due course, although I liked him.
That dismissal caused an angry scene. From the other end of the apartment I heard raised voices, then the slam of a door. Constance shrugged off the reasons for his dismissal: She said she didn’t like his taste in neckties; she said he was unimaginative; she said he was a bore.
Constance and I against the diktats of the rest of the world, the adult, responsible, dreary world—that was the scenario. What child would choose Latin verbs when the alternative was blinis and caviar at the Russian Tea Room? Where was the point in struggling with that detested algebra, when I could go with Constance to the Aladdin’s cave of her Fifty-seventh Street showrooms? Constance dazzled me with her anarchy.
But she was also my ally in a different way—a way that increased my enchantment. Although Constance would sometimes behave as if she were my age and we were children together, she could also behave as if I were her age and we were both adults. From the very first, when I joined her at work she consulted me—and she appeared to listen to my opinions. “Which yellow, do you think?” she would say, holding up two pieces of material. I would select one, on blind instinct, and Constance would nod approvingly.
“Good,” she would say. “You have an eye. Good.”
I had never been greatly praised before for any aptitude, and I was flattered. I was also flattered that when I confided in Constance, she always listened. If I asked a question, she gave a direct answer, as if I were not a child but a woman.
My aunt Maud did not seem to like her? That was easily understandable: My aunt Maud had once been in love with the man who became Constance’s husband. What was his name? Why, Montague Stern. Where was he now? They never saw each other, but Constance believed he lived alone, in Connecticut. Why had they parted? Because he had wanted children and Constance could not have them. Had she prayed for one? Yes, she had, in her own way: She had willed herself one—and here that child was now with her godmother.
At the time, these explanations were only half understood. Even so, I accepted them. They reassured me. They told me I was wanted.
Since Constance told me so much, I told her much in return. I opened my heart to her. Within a very short time of my arriving in New York, I told her one of my most important stories. I explained about my great friend Franz-Jacob—and it was in this respect, the search for Franz, that Constance became, above all, my ally.
Franz-Jacob, as you know, never wrote to me. At first, as the weeks went by, I blamed the mails. I was writing to the orphanage my mother had helped to fund; I began to believe it was not the fault of the mails, that I must have the wrong address. But even if my letters did not reach him, that still did not explain Franz-Jacob’s silence. How could he promise—and then not write?
Distance is of no object between the hearts of friends. I would think of the ship, and the quay, Franz-Jacob’s gold box of Viennese chocolates. I still kept that box! I began to be afraid. I thought: Franz-Jacob is ill.
Constance was very kind about this. I had already told her the story of Franz many times. She never became impatient when I told it again. I told her about his ability at mathematics, about his sad European eyes, about his family. I told her about that strange and terrible day when Franz-Jacob, with his magical powers, had smelled blood, and war, in a wood.
I described the way we had stood, pale and shivering in the clearing, listening to the greyhounds crash through the undergrowth. And Constance, listening to this story, would become pale too.
“That place,” she said, the first time I told her. She put her arms around me. “Oh, Victoria. We must find him.
”
It became our joint campaign. I badgered Freddie and Aunt Maud to intercede, to question the orphanage. When these efforts produced no conclusive news, Constance telephoned the orphanage authorities herself. It was a fiery conversation, followed by an even more fiery letter, concocted with Miss Marpruder at the office. Constance and Prudie between them composed such imperious paragraphs, such insolent reproaches, such an assault on the inadequacies of bureaucracies, that at last we made a breakthrough.
We were passed on to another organization, in London, that dealt with evacuees. For several weeks we were buoyed up in the belief that Franz-Jacob had been moved, as so many children were, to the countryside, away from the bombing. Then came the news: Franz-Jacob was not an evacuee. Two months before the declaration of war, at his parents’ request, he had returned to Germany.
I remember Constance’s face as she showed me the letter, the quiet and gentle way in which she spoke. I was nine by then; all I understood was that if Franz-Jacob had returned home, it was dangerous. Very dangerous: I could tell that from the sadness in Constance’s eyes, from her refusal—for once—to be frank. I knew what that expression meant on an adult’s face; I had seen it before. It meant there was something bad here from which I had to be shielded. I became, for the first time, truly afraid.
Constance shielded me—but she could not shield me forever. Certain facts became inescapable. Eight when the war began, I was fourteen when the war finally ended. Franz-Jacob was a Jew.
I knew then why he never wrote. I knew what had happened to Jews in his homeland.
I mailed my last letter to him on V-E day. I had continued to write, into a void, throughout the war years, and Constance, who must have known those letters would never be read, understood and respected my need. When that last letter had dropped into its box, her eyes filled with tears.
It was I who comforted her. I said, “It’s all right, Constance. It’s the last letter. I understand now. I know he’s dead.”
A stupid English girl: ein dummes englische Mädchen. It had taken six years for me to catch up with him, six years to understand that on a hot prewar afternoon, in the woods at Winterscombe, it was his own death Franz-Jacob had sensed.
A coded message, six years later understood: one last flash of Morse. I wished I had been quicker. I wished I had understood then, but at least I understood now.
The understanding, I felt, was our final pact. Across loss, and death, I clasped hands with Franz-Jacob. Distance—even that last distance—was of no object between the hearts of friends. Dear Franz, I wrote solemnly in that last letter, I shall always remember you. I shall think of you every day for the rest of my life.
Oddly enough (fifteen-year-old girls may be sincere, but their most heartfelt promises get forgotten in the rush of life) I kept my word to Franz-Jacob. I never forgot him, nor that private promise to a lost boy.
But it was a private promise. I did not tell Constance, then or later. I kept it to myself.
It was because of Franz, I think, that I first took an interest in Rosa Gerhard, also of German parentage, also—by conversion—a Jew. In such ways, perhaps, the dead continue to influence the lives of those who survive them.
I first heard Rosa’s name when I was twelve or thirteen years old and the war was continuing.
That day I had been whisked away by Constance from the man who would prove to be the last of my teachers. This man, a lugubrious White Russian émigré, down on his luck in New York, was one of Constance’s lame-dog friends. Constance made a specialty of relics, and her weekly parties were always leavened by imperious, impecunious aristocrats whose influence was long extinct: Serbian grand dukes, now on their uppers; impoverished marchesas; the Grafin von this, the Duquesa de that. History stalked Constance’s parties; you could hear its anguish in the anteroom.
The Russian who tutored me was named Igor; his nature was indolent, his technique hit-or-miss. In a burst of enthusiasm, his first week, he taught me many vital things: how to distinguish sevruga from beluga, how to curtsey when I met a Russian grand duchess. I learned the name of the headwaiter in the best prerevolutionary restaurant in Moscow (a restaurant blown up some fifteen years before). I learned that Igor loathed the Bolsheviks.
This was a first burst; by the second week (I could tell) Igor was losing interest. Occasionally, rousing himself from his ruminative melancholy, he would read to me in Russian. When he realized I did not understand a word, Igor was mortally offended; he considered it bad manners, I think. He switched to French, winced at my plodding replies, and gave up. He suggested, with a wave of languid exasperation, that I should read.
Read I did; that was how we passed our lessons. I, liking to read anyway, would sit with Bertie in a corner with a book; Igor, liking to dream, would sit in another, sipping vodka. This arrangement suited us both. There was only one problem: Constance’s apartment, so opulent in every other respect, was not well endowed with books.
“You’re like your father, you see,” Constance said one day. “Acland was always reading, reading. Victoria, what happened to all his books? They are yours now. Think of that library, at Winterscombe—”
“I imagine they were packed up, Constance,” I said. “When the army moved in. Daddy’s books, and Mummy’s. My grandparents’ books too. They’ll be in the attics, I expect.”
“I shall send for them!” Constance was roused. “Prudie shall write to those doddering trustees. I shall insist!”
The books took months to arrive by sea mail, and during those months Constance made a shrine for them. Her apartment was large; one room was made over for a library. Constance designed the room herself, right down to the smallest detail. I was not allowed to look.
The day came for the unveiling. Igor, Bertie, and I were proudly led to a resplendent room. All four walls, floor to ceiling, were lined with books.
I was very touched that Constance should go to such trouble, such expense. Even Igor pronounced himself impressed. We walked from shelf to shelf. Igor patted the Shakespeares. I stroked the long flank of Sir Walter Scott. Then, gradually, I began to realize something odd. The arrangement of titles was careful, yet their disposition strange. All my mother’s books were on the right of the room, all my father’s on the left. The same authors had been divided: A literary apartheid had been imposed.
I made no comment. I did not want to offend Constance. Igor, whose sense of self-preservation was strong, said nothing either. Constance left us. Books to the right of me, books to the left of me: my lesson began.
It was in this curious room that I worked every day—if to read novels can be described as work—and it was from this curious room that Constance whisked me away on the day I first heard of Rosa Gerhard.
That day, I was reading Persuasion; I might have liked to go on reading Persuasion, but Constance’s demands, however capricious, were always obeyed. I was ferried down to Constance’s showrooms on Fifty-seventh Street. I was consulted on the color of a piece of silk, and then forgotten. This happened. Every so often Miss Marpruder would look up; she would jangle her beads, give me a wink, a jaunty wave. Telephones shrilled, Constance prowled: I liked being there, to watch, to learn, to listen.
The assistant nearest me, an elegant, impressive woman, was the one who took Rosa Gerhard’s call.
“Oh,” she said, “Mrs. Gerhard.” And a silence fell.
Everyone stopped to eavesdrop. Glances were exchanged. The assistant, I noticed, held the receiver some three inches from her ear. Her part of the conversation was minimal. Squawks and wails issued from the earpiece. When the receiver was at last replaced, Constance counted out loud—to ten.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “The yellow bedroom?”
“No, Miss Shawcross. Worse. She’s moving. She’s bought another house.”
The assistant lit a cigarette as she said this. She inserted it in a holder. Her hand shook as she did so. Rosa Gerhard, I was to learn, affected people like this.
“Is that the
seventh?”
“No, Miss Shawcross. The eighth.” She shuddered. “I could try to get rid of her.”
“Get rid of her? You can’t get rid of her. Rosa Gerhard is a fact of life. You might as well try and put a hurricane in a Hoover. I will deal with her.”
“Shall I get her on the line, Miss Shawcross? She said—”
“I think you’ll find that won’t be necessary.” Constance gave a tight smile. “Wait. About another twenty seconds, I should say.”
We waited. Twenty seconds ticked by; a secretary gave a nervous laugh. Thirty seconds passed; a telephone shrilled. Constance picked it up. She held it at arm’s length. A shriek could be heard.
“Ah, Rosa …” Constance said, when a minute had passed. “It is you? How lovely to hear from you at last …”
Rosa Gerhard was like Thanksgiving: She came ’round once a year. Rosa was in pursuit of the perfect house; she found it, every year. I could have ticked off the years of my childhood, house by house: 1942, 1943, 1944. Rosa was on her eighth, her ninth, her tenth perfect environment. When she reached the tenth, I remember, we opened a case of champagne.
I thought Mrs. Gerhard was a mystery. I thought there were a number of mysteries in Constance’s life, and—unlike Mrs. Gerhard—not all of them concerned her professional life. If Rosa Gerhard was so impossible, why didn’t Constance simply refuse to work with her? Why did she not steer her toward another decorator—the famous Sister Parish, for instance? I said this, one day, to Miss Marpruder, who had taken me home to her apartment. I lived in hope that Prudie would one day explain. I used to look forward to these visits to Prudie’s home, as—years before—I looked forward at Winterscombe to my uncle Steenie’s visits. Any minute now, I would think, and there will be a revelation.
Now, Prudie gave a sigh. She fiddled with the telephone. She adjusted its lace mat.
“I think she amuses your godmother, honey. I think that’s it.”
“But Mrs. Gerhard makes her mad, Prudie. And every time she gets mad at her, she says she’ll never speak to her again. And then she does.”