The Trespassers (5 page)

The telephone roused her. She stretched out a hand, fumbled for the receiver.

The British voice in it said, “New York calling,” and her heart leaped. She sat up sharply, swung her legs through two lithe, concentric arcs to the floor. She was alive now, with an edged expectancy, its core in the eardrum under the telephone receiver.

“Yes, operator? Are you—”

“Is Miss Marriner there? Or Mrs. Stamford?” the operator said. “We have an overseas call—”

“Yes, speaking.”

“Go ahead, New York…”

“Vee, is that you?”

“Jas,
hello.
Oh, how nice, I—”

“You going to stay put awhile? I thought I might fly down.”

“Down, here? Oh, Jasper, I’d love it.” Her voice rose in frank, open delight. “When—”

“This place is a hellhole—drizzling sleet and fog. I’m bored with everything and everybody. I thought I’d fly down for a few days and have a swim.”

“The planes are so crowded. I just heard about the
Anschluss
and I called Pan—”

“The what? What did you say? I missed that.” The line began to fizz and sputter.

She laughed. He would think her quite mad, using expensive transatlantic time to—

“Never mind. I said the
Anschluss,
you know, Austria, but never mind that. I said the planes are awfully crowded.”

“God, don’t talk
Anschluss
to me. It woke the big boys up with a bang. CBS on the air every couple of hours from Vienna. It gets me so furious I want to get out of sight of a radio—”

“I didn’t get that, Jas. You what? I said I hope you can get here. The planes are so jammed.”

“Plenty of room southbound.” The connection suddenly cleared. “See if you can get me on the plane you’re coming back on, will you? I’ll be down tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow. Oh, Jas, that’s wonderful.”

“Sure. I’ll get the two o’clock today to Miami; and then the Clipper at seven-thirty tomorrow. Can you meet me at Kingston?”

“Yes. I’ll, oh, of course. I’ll get a car. You’ll be dead when you get here.”

“Not too dead to practically kill you. God, I’ve missed having you.”

“Hush, darling. The phone operators and the hotel—”

“Nuts. Do the limies good.”

After she hung up, she remained motionless for a long time, her hand still pressing the receiver hard into its hook. Vanished, forgotten, were the doubts and confusions about him. After all, she too had an expensive sheath over her life, yet she knew how honest were her own emotions. She couldn’t think out these riddles now, anyway.

Now she felt only exultant and young and flattered. Jas missed her, Jas wanted her, he was flying nearly two thousand miles overnight to come and be with her for a few days.

She started for her clothes closet. She passed the long mirror, stopped there, caught by her own image. She was still in the bathing suit: Jas had never seen her deep-tanned and creamy brown this way. He had never seen her in a bathing suit, so there would be a newness about it, a first-timeness. Quite deliberately, Vee stood there, trying to see herself with Jasper’s eyes, as he would be looking at her tomorrow.

Suddenly, instead of being just a cleverly designed suit, it was transformed into a provocative garment, weapon for seduction. He would notice the fine thinning down to whiteness where the cunningly designed shorts flared away from her brown legs; he would notice the blurry triangle of whiteness between her breasts where the top drew down into a dipped V.

She stood there before the mirror, subject and object at once in her trick of projection into his mood of tomorrow. Then she slipped out of the suit. Her own body looked newly strange to her, too. Even more than before, there was a first-timeness about it. Across her small tight hips and stomach and the high undercurve of her breasts lay a wide banding of her familiar white skin, delicate, untouched. The rest of her was, in contrast, violently, almost savagely, dark brown.

Staring at herself, slowly, lazily trying to see her body as he would be seeing it, she felt the slow, sultry rise of desire begin to drift through her own feelings. Even here was the trick of projection, for it was not so much desire, but the need for
his
desire, to which she would then inevitably respond.

All this lovely, lazy drift of passion had been, for so long now, far away, unthought of, unremembered, as though she had been anesthetized into a completely sexless, unaware creature. Yet here it was, shameless, stirring within her. Men never thought about the hidden thoughts of women, never suspected perhaps that women too had these darkly developing, secretly mobilizing sexualities. There was a kind of endless conspiracy to ascribe a fairy-princess innocence and chastity to a woman’s thoughts, in the hours when she was alone at least. But it wasn’t true.

This
was true, this awakening foggy drift through her whole being, merely because she knew that within twenty-four hours, Jasper would be seeing her naked and new in this unaccustomed patchwork of brown and white. She knew him so well. Knew that this strangeness would—

She grinned cheerfully to herself in the mirror.

“Wicked little bitch,” she said in a low voice, to her image. “And in the well-behaved British Empire, too.”

“Not too tired to practically kill you.” His voice, urgent, sadistic, answered her in her mind. She knew how it would be, the rising tumult, the insistence of him, his delight in her own responsiveness.
This
they had, without conflict, without skepticism and shifting ground. And with a tenacity that each recognized and neither ever spoke of. They never spoke of love, either, or of the future. Or marriage.

Once, in the first days after they had met, he had told her that he was, technically, married, though he and his wife had lived apart for about two years. He had shrugged then, and added, “You have to work at marriage, or work at work.”

She had told him as casually about her marriage and divorce. Of the long, slow pain afterward, she said nothing.

Swiftly now she went on to her dressing. She watched herself periodically in the long mirror, but now the game was over. Now her glances were the usual, practical checking up of clothes, hair, make-up. She looked like a girl in her middle twenties, she knew that quite calmly and surely. Men often called her beautiful; she knew that she was not. She took one final look at herself, dressed now in a lemony yellow shirt and flat-backed slacks of bitter dark green. And all at once, her glance into the mirror changed again. Now she saw, not with Jasper’s tomorrow-eyes, not with her own practical checking-up-eyes, but with the perceptive eyes of her own humanity. She saw the past that lay in that face in the mirror—saw the lips that had trembled with grief too often, the eyes that had filled with anguish too often. Her throat knotted and she turned away.

“People always look at faces so blindly,” she thought. “They never see the hell underneath the lipstick.”

She telephoned the taxi service. Five pounds for a car for the day. She ordered it for seven-thirty in the morning. It was nearly a six-hour trip over the mountains. They would spend one night in Kingston.

She telephoned the local beauty parlor. She got an appointment for shampoo, set, and manicure for five that afternoon.

She telephoned the desk.

“A Mr. Jasper Crown will arrive day after tomorrow. Give him a room and bath on the seaside, please. One with a balcony if possible. No, transportation from Kingston’s all arranged.”

She telephoned Pan American in Kingston.

“You have a passenger due in tomorrow from Miami,” she said. “Mr. Jasper Crown. Yes. Will you see if you can get him on the twentieth return flight, please. C-r-o-w-n. He’s head of Jasper Crown Broadcasting; see what you can do.”

Snobbery. Vulgarity. Use of big names to impress “the little people.” Jasper himself did it, quietly, but did it, all the time. Suddenly her doubts swept back across her, like a tide of dirtied water in a busy harbor. But she refused to let it come at her again.

She looked at her watch. In an hour he would be starting for Newark Airport. It would be drizzly, cold, and the plane would rise above the fog, skim in a few minutes over Camden, over Philadelphia, rise above the clouds and keep thrumming southward…

Planes all over the world, she thought, carrying lovers to rendezvous, their eyes watching the wide skies, their impatient hearts imagining the coming meeting with the one desired woman, waiting hundreds, thousands of miles away—trains rushing through the day or night, crossing borders, climbing mountains, dipping into green valleys, and on them, among the businessmen and lawyers and legislators, at least some men and women bound for love, for the dear face at the station, the shouted hellos—great ships sliding slowly away from their berths, getting under way slowly, picking up speed, and on them, too, their human cargo of expectancy, the daydreaming of being home again, happy, awaited, secure again…

She found some strange beauty in the picture of all the shining rails and the seven seas and the air lanes of the earth carrying happy, eager people to far-off meetings with others who counted the hours until they should come.

Ann Willis signed for the radiogram, and knew precisely what would be in it. Ever since the eleventh, she had wondered about the Vederles.

They would not stay there. She was so sure of that. She simply could not imagine Dr. Vederle staying on smugly safe, when the Nazis began hunting down Freud and Anna Freud and every scientist and every independent researcher and thinker.

CAN YOU SPEEDILY ARRANGE AFFIDAVITS FOR MYSELF, WIFE CHRISTA, PAUL, ELEVEN, ILSE, FIVE? SAILING SOON AS ARRANGED. WRITING DETAILS. DEEPEST THANKS. VEDERLE.

She went to the telephone at once and called Larry Meany, the young lawyer she always used on affidavit cases. This was such an old routine by now. He listened attentively, paused only a moment when she ended.

“Sorry, Mrs. Willis, I’m pretty sure not any more for you for quite a while,” he said. “You know this came up last time. You’ve signed already for—”

“Eighteen people so far—seven affidavits,” she said. “But if I can afford more, I can’t see—”

“Well, they’re getting stricter, you know, about the financial guarantees.”

“But these people will be bringing some money, I’m sure—and he’s a world-famous analyst, he’ll have no trouble here.”

She had a gruff, mannish voice, but now she consciously softened it, as if she were pleading with him to do her a most personal favor. He remained firm. Ann Willis was used to getting her own way on most things; she had often been told she was bossy and aggressive. But this time she could not budge him.

“Perhaps you’d better ask someone else to go on these?” he finally suggested, and she knew there was finality in it.

She thought of Vera Marriner at once.

Vee would say “yes.” You knew so definitely which people you could count on in this affidavit business. Dr. Vederle knew he could count on her, Ann Willis, and he was right. He couldn’t know about her affidavits for the Asches, the Rosenthalers, old Frau Doche, and the rest. But he knew that somehow affidavits would be forthcoming.

Vee was due back on the twentieth. There was nothing she could do about it from Montego Bay. Still, it might save time later to give her a few days of warning so she could think it over.

She had known Vee for over eight years. Now they were on an upward swing in their long relationship. Ever since Vee’s divorce, this upward swing had continued; they had come closer together, mysteriously, slowly, without violating the boundaries of a sound, adult friendship, avoiding the maudlin confidences of so many women. When they talked about their own problems of marriage or divorce, they stayed off the whining he-said, I-said plateau, talked rather of the large confusions, the fundamental perplexities of married life and its changing emotional timbres, its seemingly inevitable onslaught of conflict…

In Ann’s own marriage, the change, the conflict, the confusion had finally become unbearable. She quarreled with Fred, she cried, the days dragged by in a meaningless procession of some nameless unhappiness that seemed to be without proportionate cause.

Even then she would probably not have acted except for Jill. At seven, Jill was a tense, nervous child; she often screamed out in nightmare, she threatened to run away, she was disliked at school. And Ann felt obscurely that the constant wire-sprung tension between herself and Fred must be responsible. But how to gentle it, neither of them seemed to know.

In 1933, she was vacationing in Europe, was visiting Vienna, and sought out Dr. Vederle. On her first visit, she told him, in an agony of embarrassment, that she didn’t believe in psychoanalysis, and he had merely nodded and said, “That does not matter; it is not a faith cure. Besides, you are correct to be skeptical; it does not always succeed.”

“Neither does surgery or medicine,” she had replied instantly, defending what she had just been attacking. Again he had merely nodded.

She trusted him. Integrity was in his face, in his very suggestion that there were excellent analysts right in New York, where the long process would be easier, less expensive for her. She said it was better here. She needed distance, separation from Fred, freedom from the emotional noose that always seemed to be drawing tighter about them both. She wanted to save her marriage, to save her own future, save her little girl.

For three years, she had been Dr. Vederle’s patient, coming home only for the four summer months. During the last year, she had taken Jill with her, and in that short time, Jill had changed too, into an easier, more comfortable little girl. Even at the end, Ann did not know precisely why the changes had come about within her, but she only knew she was happier, calmer with people, with Jill and with Fred. Often she had wished there were some real way she could repay Dr. Vederle. But she had never dreamed that the day might come when she might do it.

The others, yes, the Asches, the Rosenthalers—since 1934 she had helped many of her old friends in Germany. Secretly, she enjoyed doing it. Her friends said, “Ann’s being wonderful about affidavits for a lot of refugees,” and she was pleased. She had enough cynicism about herself to be, also, amused at her new role of chic, well-dressed savior.