The Trespassers (48 page)

Ann read it. The swine, the prodigious swine. She had said that to his face in the hospital corridor. She had told him she was one of his enemies.

Yet for a moment, she wavered. She could probably dissuade Beth if she really wanted to stop her from this attempt. She needed time to think, to decide what it would mean to Beth, for instance, if she tried and failed. And if she tried and succeeded.

“You wouldn’t get anything out of having it set aside, though, would you, Beth? What good would it really do you? You’d never go back to him, anyway.”

Beth’s voice rose, shriller than she had ever heard it. There was nothing colorless in it now.

“No, maybe it wouldn’t do any
good.
But he always did everything he ever wanted to me. He can’t trick and trap me into
this,
and get away whole. If I can smash this divorce up, I’d wait then—and get it when I want it. I hate this divorce—I always hated it. If there’s any way to undo it—”

Ann remained silent. Yes, it might be Beth, after all. Someday, she had predicted on that first terrible night when Vee had told her, sometime, somebody he had let down or double-crossed would have the guts to hit back.

But she had never thought of Beth. She had forgotten the terrible strength in these passive, implacable women.

Far away in the valley, the train’s whistle sounded. On the small station platform at Locarno on the last day of May, Franz and Christa waited in an extraordinary impatience. They had driven over from Ascona half an hour too early.

“It will be so queer to see her at last,” Christa said for the tenth time. “If only my English were better.” She leaned forward to peer down the shining rails.

He also looked out to see if the train had rounded the long, slow bend, but he made no answer. After a year of the daily English lessons, it rankled in her that she was not as apt a pupil in the new language as the children.

“Maybe she will stay longer than just two days,” he said. “If she hasn’t made too tight a schedule for starting the work part of her trip.

“We’d better see how she likes us first.”

“Yes. There’s the train now.”

They both fell silent. Until the moment they had opened her cable and found, not another message about visas or motive letters or affidavits, but the astounding news that she was soon arriving in Europe, they had neither of them dreamed of meeting her except on that still distant day when they should land in New York.

It was a thrilling moment. Often they had speculated about how it would be to see her and speak to her at last. They had wondered whether they would be drawn to each other in the flesh as they had been, increasingly, in their feelings. They admitted freely that they wanted their strange relationship to move on unharmed when it finally shifted from the plane of the written word and the printed cable.

Franz looked forward to her visit for a private reason besides. It would be a stimulant for Christa to welcome and know this woman whom she already trusted and admired. Indeed, to be candid about it, this visit would be for them all a blessed break in the monotony of this last waiting.

Weeks ago, when Vera Stamford had sent them a copy of the Washington letter explaining the last-straw “May, June, maybe much later,” and had sent with it her own forthright, human plea to stretch their patience until the new quota year began on July first—he had recognized at once that she was implying that there was exactly nothing more to be done
except
wait. But he had known, too, how formidable the load of time would be for the weeks that remained. Particularly for Christa.

There had been no further plea that they stay on in Switzerland. But some part of her spirit had gone into hiding. She was spinning a cocoon for herself to dwell in. And its name was Ascona.

The train was slowing to its stop.

“There she is, Franz. At the end; that must be she.”

Christa started up the platform, and in two long strides, he was abreast of her. He was pleased to hear the excited note in her voice; with some amusement he noted that his pulse had quickened. Far ahead on the platform he saw a slim, small figure.

“Oh, she’s beautiful, Franz. She looks quite beautiful. She looks so young, too.”

Yes, it was she. She had stopped, and was looking about her. He saw her eyes turn toward them. She smiled.

Vee saw the tall, striding man, the blonde woman, coming toward her. She broke into a little run and came toward them. How
nice
they are, she thought, how—

“You are Vera Stamford,” Franz said. His voice was husky.

“And you’re Dr. Vederle—and you’re Mrs. Vederle.” Her own voice was strange in her ears, as she put out her hands to both of them at once.

“This is—
es ist wunderbar
,” Christa said, and the excitement of this meeting was in her voice, too.

“For the last hour I thought, ‘What if we don’t recognize each other on the platform?’ ” Vee said, laughing. “I should have sent you a picture of me.”

“We would have known you,” he said, and his voice still struck at her with the warm, deep notes in it. She looked up at him, saw the dark, alive eyes, the candid face welcoming, her, liking her. She looked at Christa, at her delicate coloring, the shy smile, and she was stirred at the ready affection they each let her see.

They collected her bags then, and took her off in the small car they had hired for her visit. An awkwardness fell upon them for the first moments of the drive, but that did not dismay her. She had thought that it must be so, until they had had a little time.

“Paul and Ilse were furious that we would not let them come, too,” Dr. Vederle said. “They are so excited as puppies.”

“Yes, they have—that whole day, they ask, the train to go to,” Christa said.

Vee did not catch all of what she said, for the accent was heavy and difficult. “They’re handsome children,” she said. “That snapshot you sent of them was my only idea of what any of you looked like.”

All through the drive, dots of silence followed each spurt of talk, but it was a silence filled with their immediate response to each other. Vee was enchanted by the flowery countryside; she was going to be at ease and happy here with these two people. Talking with Mrs. Vederle would be hard at first; the barrier of language would stand between them. But Dr. Vederle—in spite of the almost perfect letters he wrote, she had never dreamed he would speak English this way. There was a faint accent, yes; the letter
s
buzzed a bit with the
z
sound and he stretched out some vowels. But otherwise—

“I wrote you that I know only a little German,” she said impulsively. “I’m so glad I don’t have to try.”

“I—but not I—I do not speak so well English as Franz and the children,” Christa said.

“You will, when you get to America, you’ll see,” Vee said. As she had done with Bronya, at the beginning, she put a little space of time around each word.

“When we get to America,” Dr. Vederle said. “This family knows those words better than the Ten Commandments.” He chuckled a little, but Vee did not laugh.

The house was charming, a flat-roofed cottage of rough cement, set on a rounded knoll at the edge of the lake. An outside staircase of rough stone bricks climbed up one side; the garden about it bloomed with roses and neat flower beds.

“I work in garden—all that time,” Christa said. “Like to home.”

The children stood side by side, primly waiting for their descent from the car. Paul was bigger than she had expected; he would be tall and distinguished and handsome, one day, she thought, like his father. Ilse looked like Christa; she was a picture child in the starched pinafore dress she wore.

Even the children’s voices held the special note that said this was a great occasion. Only after the first polite greetings were over did they subside into more ordinary tones.

“I know all about you,” Paul said shyly. “My father and mother always talk how you work visas in America.”

Dr. Vederle laughed aloud.

“Mrs. Stamford does other things besides get visas for us, Paul.”

“You’re just as our family,” Ilse said, nodding. “That’s what
I
know.”

“You see what we say here about you,” Dr. Vederle said, and Vee knew he was pleased at the inadvertent testimony.

The faint constraint wore away with the afternoon. By evening, the children treated her like any grownup, pleasant enough but inevitably of another category. Paul asked a dozen questions about the
Normandie,
and about the exact height of the buildings in New York. Ilse managed to seat herself next her always, tucking her small body close, on the porch settee or inside on the sofa, in a wordless friendship. The physical closeness caught Vee’s mind back to the buried thoughts about wanting a child. But she banished the thoughts in stern refusal.

Later, when the children were asleep, the three of them sat together talking until it was quite late. There was still the formality of the “Mrs. Stamford,” and from Vee the absence of any direct address by name. But apart from that, there went from one to the other of them the quick, sure intimacy of people who had lived through something arduous together until they had won. They retraced the successive steps they had each taken, and as Franz pointed to particular moments that were the high spots of his anger or despair, Vee repaid his confidences with a similar recital of her own feelings as this or that cable or letter came.

Christa said little. From time to time, Franz would turn to her and speak in German, and she would nod rapidly and gratefully for being saved from the difficulty of trying to follow everything. But she seemed pleased and interested throughout the evening; Franz noticed how she watched every gesture Vee made, how she studied the lovely, vivid face with its deep-socketed gray eyes, its fine modeling. Christa had said, “She’s beautiful, she’s quite beautiful.” Franz knew what she meant; this was not an orthodox prettiness, no, but there was an immediate striking appeal that had made Christa say it. He remembered the day a year ago when he had amused himself by trying to visualize her from the cool, official data in her affidavit, and he smiled.

“Have you a Steinway piano?” he suddenly said. His eyes gleamed with a kind of mischief.

“Yes, but that’s a funny question. Why?”

“Once I tried to imagine about you, and how you looked, short or tall, thin or fat, and also what you liked; I thought you might have a Bechstein, but then I changed the brand to a Steinway. Do you like music?”

“I love it,” she said. She was pleased that he should have tried to visualize her. She looked toward the piano.

“Franz plays it so—so wonderful,” Christa said. “You will admire.” She looked questioningly at Franz, but he shook his head.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “It is more interesting to talk now.”

The talk went, inevitably, to the news, to Hitler’s livid attacks on the British “encirclement” policy, to his recent renouncing of the naval accord treaty with Britain and the 1934 Nazi pact with Poland. They talked of the Italians in Albania, and of the increasing stridency of Hitler’s demands for the return of Danzig and a road through the Corridor to East Prussia. And they talked of war. Not whether or not there would be a war, as Vee reported so many people in Paris, and before that in New York, were still talking. But only of when it would start. In the fall? Sooner than that?

It brought them even closer. Vee knew the special fear these two must have, to be stranded without a country, without citizenship if war came before…

“It is not so easy,” Franz said slowly, and with a trace of the huskiness she had heard on the station platform, “to know how to say ‘thank you’ to you.”

“Oh, don’t say—please, it would make me feel—” She looked at each of them in turn and they all fell silent.

Suddenly she wished she could tell them what unsuspected role they had played for her—but one could never speak out about such things. Someday perhaps, back home, long after they had settled there, then if they were friends and close enough, then she might try to make them see it the other way round.

“But just the same,” he said, as if he were finishing a sentence, “if we do get to America in time, it will”—his dark eyes sought hers—“it will be you who has saved us.”

She made no answer. She could not.

In bed that night, under the bright moonlit squares of the windows, Vee lay waiting for sleep. She had stopped hearing their voices from the room across the small hall. The night was still, the air fragrant with a strange, tropical sweetness. And though she could not sleep, though her mind still carried her sometimes across the ocean, back to New York, back to Jasper, she lay for the most part in peace. “The world
is
round,” she thought quizzically. “You come to a frightful precipice and you think it’s the end of everything. But then you find that the world goes on from there. There aren’t any edges.”

This meeting with the Vederles had balm and solace in it. It held reaffirmation and hope for her. For fourteen years, their love had lasted; it was obvious they loved each other still. Through good years and bad, it had endured; it was steadfast, it was reliable. Here was this man, brilliant and renowned, yet apparently free of that excess of self-emphasis that was a prime characteristic of all the success worshipers. He had strength, but it was for others o use as well as for himself. He had force and it was for something bigger than ambition. She had sensed it in his letters. Now she knew.

There were other such men in the world. One day she might find—She broke off the thought abruptly. Patience, she counseled herself; it takes time. You don’t fall in love every minute, you don’t find happiness at every turn. But this meeting with them today was a strong stimulant to hoping. Someday she would meet a man who had the kind of clear quality that was so apparent when it was really there. It comforted her, strangely, even to be able to hope happiness again.

She fell asleep soon, her hand curled under her cheek. When she awoke, it was to a mixture of sunlight, the good smell of coffee, subdued voices drifting up from downstairs. She dressed quickly and ran down, eager to be with them again.