Nothing So Strange (17 page)

Brad went on with the quiet preparation of his case, needing no spur to
effort, yet at the outset (he told me) despising unutterably the task of
reducing a complicated and beautiful mathematical concept to the terms of a
legal brief. (He used the word “beautiful” without embarrassment.) Presently,
however, this touch of intellectual fastidiousness left him, or was submerged
in sheer anxiety about Pauli; and though I had all along guessed that Brad
loved her very deeply, I had not been prepared for the emotion, quite
frantic, that he began to show. I found a task for myself in calming him into
a mood in which he could sit up till midnight, working against time, and
then, with the help of a drug, get a few hours of heavy sleep. Several times
he stayed in my room all night, and once Bauer arrived in the morning to find
him asleep on my bed. I neither knew nor cared what anyone thought, till
Bauer hinted that hotel gossip might be an adversely complicating factor that
we should do well to avoid. So we did, after that.

When at last the notes were finished I typed them out, performing Pauli’s
job with only two fingers. Then I took the script to Bauer’s apartment. He
gave it cautious approval, but seemed distraught by the return of tension in
the streets; all of any lull was over. We talked for a while; then I went
back to my hotel and found Brad prudently gone. I took several sleeping pills
myself and did not wake till nearly noon the next day, March the twelfth.

That was the day on which Hitler’s troops crossed the frontiers into
Austria.

The marching, the swastikas, the tanks and armored cars,
the hysteria of a
city applauding the pageant of its own extinction, all were described at the
time by eyewitnesses; it is history now, not ten years old, but already in a
former world. I wrote articles that sought to convey what I thought I should
have felt had not my mind been obsessed with a personal projection of the
issue; but perhaps the obsession was really a prism through which I saw the
thing more and not less clearly. And I was wryly amused to note that my
waiter at the hotel, a decent timid fellow, became stanchly Nazi
overnight—the pluperfect type, Bauer called him—one of those who
knew now they
had
been Nazi all along.

Brad watched the crowds from my hotel window, saw them progress from
ecstasy through intoxication to hang-over, though his own private nightmare
was so intense that I doubt if he realized fully what was happening. We were
not far from the head office of the German Tourist organization, where a huge
portrait of Hitler stimulated the crowds to especial fervor; day and night
this did not cease, but grew more malevolent in its outcome; soon began the
attacks on Jews, and those also progressed from roughhouse bullying to acts
of quieter but more sinister sadism. Bauer had now little hope, either for
Pauli or for himself. He had heard that Framm’s death was expected
momentarily, and he thought the new regime might well feel that a
disciplinary example must be made. He even wondered whether, for her sake, he
ought to turn the case over to some lawyer in better standing, but he had no
success in finding one, and was too loyal to quit for personal reasons of his
own. The sole chance lay now in some possible international angle; the Nazis
might conceivably wish to placate American opinion. Were there not strings to
be pulled through Washington or the Embassy? Was not my father an American of
wealth and influence?

I said I had already written to him in Paris, but so far had had no
reply.

“Maybe your letter didn’t reach him. I happened to hear the other day that
he’s in Linz.”

“
Linz
? What would he be doing there?”

Bauer shrugged, and I don’t know any certain answer to this day. Nor have
I much idea how Bauer knew he was in Linz. I found out later that the lawyer
was a member of an anti-Nazi group which, after the
Anschluss
, went
underground; I imagine that the movements of a man like my father could have
been the subject of secret information. There are those who say that my
father backed Hitler, but I don’t believe he did with any consistency,
certainly not with any conviction after his trip to Germany in 1935; I would
think it more probable that he fumbled around, as he had done with Lenin
during the N.E.P. period, and as he did with Roosevelt during the early days
of the New Deal, hoping that by some sleight-of-brain he could make himself a
power behind any sort of throne. He never could. He had a shrewd sense that
the world had passed into different hands, and he wished to touch them with
his own, the old dead Midas touch of an earlier age. Somebody once said that
in the twilight of capitalism my father stalked around like a frustrated
ghost, wondering whom he should haunt.

“Why don’t you go to see him?” Bauer urged. “Take Brad with you and see if
you can get him to do anything.”

So happened the curious visit to Linz. We left Vienna by a
slow train that
traveled all night and should have reached our destination in the early
morning. But frequently we were held up in sidings while a procession of
troop trains passed; half sleeping in the compartment we heard shouts and
cheers that still celebrated the bloodless conquest. We reached Linz several
hours late in pouring rain. Bauer had said that the likeliest hotel for my
father to be staying at would be one called the Kaiserhof, facing the Danube
near the quays where the river boats put in. We went there, clattering over
the cobbled streets in an old droshky, since all motor vehicles had been
commandeered. The town looked dreary in the rain, and even the newly arrived
German soldiers had dropped their spirits to match the gray skies. There was
a general feeling of anticlimax.

We found the hotel in a state of utter disorganization; a line of German
officers waited at the desk, making demands for meals, beds, and other
accommodations which the staff met with a head-on courtesy that had already
become mere nervous obsequiousness. While Brad was trying to push his way
through and make inquiries, I had wandered across the hall to the dining-room
entrance; and across that room, at a table next to the windows overlooking
the rain-swept river, my father was having breakfast with a woman.

I went back for Brad, and we then entered together. My father gave us a
courteous greeting, but he was naturally surprised, not having known I was
even in Austria. He introduced his companion, a Madame Larousse, who spoke
fairly good English with a French accent and was rather charming. Then he
asked us to breakfast with him, but as they had almost finished their meal I
said no, only coffee. We chatted about the weather and everyday topics (not
politics, of course) for a while, and Madame Larousse joined in with an
evident desire to be pleasant to my father’s daughter and to a man whom she
doubtless took to be my father’s daughter’s future husband; then she
tactfully said she had letters to write and left us.

The waiter brought more coffee and when he too had gone I told my father
briefly all that had happened. He had seen in the papers about the attempted
assassination (that was what he called it, and I suppose it was that, though
somehow the description startled me), but he had missed the name of the
arrested woman, and the rest of our story was news indeed. “Well?” he said
unhappily, when I paused.

I murmured something about his using influence, pulling strings, and so
on.

“Where do you think I have influence any more? They don’t listen to me in
Washington. Might even do the woman more harm than good if I put in a
word…. It’s a political crime, the way they’d see it. You couldn’t get them
to believe all that stuff about mathematics. And if they did, where’s the
angle? She’s not an American citizen.”

“But married to one.”

“I don’t think that would mean a thing.”

Brad said heavily: “We just thought it was worth making the trip to see
you about it, sir.” I had never heard him call my father “sir” before, and it
sounded less a sign of respect than of antagonism. “Since apparently it
wasn’t, we’d better be getting back to Vienna—there’s perhaps something
we can do there on our own.”

My father bowed slightly. “I hope so. I do indeed.”

“Brad,” I said, “go out and wait for me in the lobby. I’ll join you in a
minute.”

“Okay.” He nodded to my father and walked away. Then I said: “Excuse him
for being brusque. He’s going through a terrible strain.”

“Naturally. I understand that…. He’s grown into quite a fellow…. A
sort of you-be-damned look in his eyes … different from the way he was in
London….”

My father’s detached appreciation of an attitude that had been slightly
insulting was typical of him; but at that particular moment it irritated me.
I said: “He has that look now, maybe, but it’s not normal in him.”

“But he’s acquired poise … he’s more sure of himself…. I think he’s
developing very well.”

And at any other time this too might have pleased me, but not now. “Isn’t
there anything at all you can do for his wife?”

“Not a thing, I’m afraid.”

“Of course you can’t
promise
… but won’t you give it a try? There
might be other places besides Washington where you could put in a word.”

He checked me over with his glance, then replied: “I can’t think of any,
at the moment.”

“Father…. I hate to put the matter to you personally … but you know,
in a sort of way, you were in this business at the beginning—I mean you
recommended Brad to go to Vienna and you had him meet Framm at our house….
I know that doesn’t make you in any way responsible, but surely it gives you
an interest … an extra interest….”

“I don’t have to have an extra interest. I’d help him willingly if I
could. You ought to know that.”

“Then you will if you can—is
that
a promise?”

“Certainly, but I don’t see how … at present. If anything should occur
to me….”

“And it might! You’ll try to think of something?”

“Yes, yes, of course.” I kissed him and he went on, a little pathetically:
“You and I don’t see as much of each other as we used. You go roaming all
over the Continent looking for trouble….” He pinched my ear in the almost
standardized mood of a father pretending to have all the standardized
fatherly virtues.

“So do you,” I said.

“No, not
looking
for it … just
finding
it.” He dropped the
pose and his voice also; when he spoke again it was in an almost petulant
undertone. “I don’t really
like
these people. Even when they do the
right thing they do it the wrong way. And they won’t
listen
——”

Whether he had any special reason for saying so on that rainy March
morning in the city of Linz I have often wondered but have never been able to
determine exactly.

I rejoined Brad and we took the next train back to Vienna. I told him my
father had promised to think the matter over, and that with even such a
limited result the trip could not be called a waste of time. But he was too
dejected to respond much, and most of the journey we dozed against the
cushions. It continued to rain and at Vienna was still raining. We went to my
hotel and telephoned Bauer’s office and home, but he was away from both. It
was almost dinnertime by then, and we had had no food all day, but neither of
us was hungry. We were served a rather bad meal in the hotel dining room,
which was crowded with German officers. Then Brad said he would go back to
his apartment and get some sleep. I walked with him to the corner of the
Opern-Ring, where he usually took a tram. On the way he said suddenly: “Who
was that woman your father was having breakfast with?”

“I got the name as Larousse—Madame Larousse. French, from her
accent. I never heard of her before.”

“Do you think your father’s living with her?”

I was startled by his asking the question rather than by the question

itself; after a second or so I answered: “I shouldn’t wonder. She looked
nice.”

I noticed that a tram passed by which he could easily have caught.

He said: “Not, of course, that it’s any of my business.”

“It isn’t really, is it? Or mine either…. To tell you the truth, I know
very little of his private affairs. He and my mother haven’t seemed to be
getting along lately….”

“They haven’t?”

“Oh well, how do I know? Perhaps they have, when they’ve been together.
But they’ve been so often separated.”

“They didn’t have to be. She used to go with him everywhere.”

“She got tired of gadding about, I suppose. Or else she likes a different
kind of gadding about … maybe that’s it…. I’ve often thought they weren’t
very well suited.”

“I used to think that too, in London.”

We waited for the next tram in silence, but I could see that his mood was
changed, and it struck me as odd that such a matter should be capable of
lifting him out of dejection into something like a controlled excitement. The
tram came up and I said “There you are—run for it!”—because I
didn’t want him to continue the conversation.

Towards the end of March Bauer had news that the date of
the trial was
postponed and that in the meantime Pauli had been removed to a prison outside
Vienna. He had no idea where, and could not find out; nor did he think they
would allow him to visit her again. Brad was still unable to obtain
permission to visit her at all. The new regime was getting into its stride
and Bauer was utterly downcast; he no longer hoped for a fair trial, or that
he would be given a free hand as counsel for the defense—many of the
normal rights of lawyers in dealing with clients had already been suspended.
He wasn’t even certain he might not be arrested himself.

Then one morning the telephone rang and I heard my father’s voice. He was
at the Bristol, he said, and could Brad and I see him as soon as
convenient?