Turncoat Read online

  I watched her go, wondering what in the hell this was all about. Even at the time, knowing as little as I did—knowing nothing, really—I had the unwelcome sensation that some critical balance in our lives had just shifted, that a vital, unseen underpinning had snapped. That things were never going to be the same.

  Chapter 2

  You see, the thing is, Lily wasn’t supposed to have a father.

  We’d been married for almost seventeen years, and from the beginning I’d understood that she was an orphan. Her father had been a barber who’d been shot by the Nazis in 1943, one of six local shop-owners executed in reprisal for the assassination of a German colonel near their town. Her mother, always unwell, had lived long enough to see the Liberation and had died of a lung infection during Christmas, 1944. That’s what she’d told me on our first date, in a London pub, back in 1945, and I’d never doubted it.

  I mean, why would I?

  I jerked my head to get my mind back on track. It was past 7:30 and I had a class to teach at nine, so I had to get myself dressed too. Lily had said she’d explain over breakfast. That was good enough for me.

  * * *

  But she didn’t. Breakfast was a rushed affair, and over my juice, scrambled eggs and coffee and Lily’s espresso, brioches, and jam (a proteinless French breakfast was one of the few Gallic traditions she retained, while I, having been here since childhood, was as all-American in my eating habits as in everything else), I learned nothing. Softly and reasonably, she turned aside all my questions. It was far too complicated to try and explain now; it would be better if I heard the story all at once, but that couldn’t be done in fifteen minutes; she was sorry she’d misled me for so long about her father—it had weighed on her from the beginning—but, really, there was a good reason, as I would understand once I heard the whole story. In a way, as upsetting as it was, she was glad that she’d finally be able to set the record straight. Tonight we’d have a simple, quiet dinner, perhaps roast chicken and salad, and a couple of glasses of Chablis, and she’d lay everything out for me and answer all my questions, every single one. Would I mind waiting till then? Would that be all right?

  Well, no, not really—I wanted to know right then—but I didn’t see that I had much choice, so I said all right.

  “Oh, Pete, you look so solemn,” she said, laughing. “Cheer up, it’s not as bad as all that. I over-reacted, that’s all. Seeing him standing there was a bit of a surprise.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said.

  She stood up and put the dishes in the sink. “I’d better go or I’ll be late. Drop me off?”

  “Sure,” I said, getting up to find the keys.

  Lily put a hand on my arm to stop me. “Kiss?” she said, closing her eyes and putting out her lips in that childlike, expectant way she had, still so sweetly affecting after all these years. I kissed her willingly, tasting cherry jam and brushing the backs of my fingers along her cheek, now back to its usual satin. Her face was “on,” she was wearing a powder-blue woolen two-piece suit with a high-collared, boxy little jacket that made her look more elegant and beautiful than ever. Friends are always saying she looks like Leslie Caron, but I could never see it; I think it’s just that they know she’s French and that she’s always worn her hair in this really cute, boyish bob, as short and thick as velvet nap. In any case, there’s certainly no argument about her being slim and beautiful and pert, and right now, with the red gone from those clear, beautiful, cornflower-blue eyes, she looked terrific.

  Me, I felt lousy.

  She touched a finger to my upper lip, just under my nose. “You’re not mad at me?”

  “Come on, you know I’m not mad at you. Just … I don’t know. …”

  “Mixed up?”

  “Yes. And concerned.” And unsettled. And apprehensive, although I didn’t know about what.

  She gave me one more lip-smacking kiss and grabbed her purse from the counter as we headed out the door. “There’s absolutely no reason for concern. You’ll see, I promise. All will be clear.”

  * * *

  My nine o’clock Survey of European History class went smoothly enough (it should have, after ten years of teaching it), after which I spent a couple of hours in my office working up an outline for a promising new upper-division seminar on the later Renaissance in Italy, occasionally stopping to commiserate with students who came by to express disappointment or concern (or in one case, “utter confoundment”) over their midterm scores. Then cheeseburgers in the faculty cafeteria with Louis Winkleman, who had a new hypothesis about the Dream. This one was the fourth, actually. Number two had been something about repressed guilt (what else?) stemming from the searing moral ambiguity of dropping bombs on human beings, no matter how worthwhile the end, but while I wasn’t crazy about having done it I was pretty sure I wasn’t suffering any searing moral ambiguity either, repressed or otherwise. So theory number two bit the dust too.

  For number three he’d gone back to his Freudian roots and come up with a B-17-as-phallic-symbol-faceless-woman-as-sexually-desirable-mother-German-planes-as-avenging-father guilt trip, but I wasn’t about to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. Look, I’m the first one to admit that Sigmund Freud was a smart guy, but the Oedipus complex? Every kid can’t wait to have sex with his mother? Every kid is afraid his father’s going to get upset about it (and why wouldn’t he, I ask you) and cut off his penis? Please, give me a break.

  No sale, I told him.

  “Okey-doke, scratch that,” had been his amiable response. There were, after all, always more where that came from.

  Frankly, my pal Louis Winkleman is a somewhat weird-looking bird with a spiky mop of ginger-colored hair, a tendency to jabber when he gets excited, and a goofy, manic, Marx-Brothers kind of grin that can make people who don’t know him wonder about his sanity. But he’s also intelligent, good-hearted, and upbeat, and he’s certainly never at a loss for an interesting theory for very long. So the moment he plopped into the seat across from me I knew from the look on his face that he was all ready with number four.

  He didn’t waste any time getting down to it. “I should have seen this years ago,” he said cheerfully, using the flat of his knife to lift the top half of the bun off his hamburger in order to position the sliced onion in a more centered position. “It was staring us right in the face. Okay, are you ready? Here we go. You were never wounded during the war, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Never even shot at, never even—”

  “Right, right, you know that.”

  He had gotten the onion adjusted to his satisfaction and now, with the tip of his tongue protruding to assist his accuracy, he set about surgically dissecting his sandwich into four perfectly equal pie-shaped segments, which he would then—as I knew all too well—eat in counterclockwise order, starting at the pointy end of each as if they were slices of pizza, up to and including leaving the crusty edges. Like many of his kind, Louis has some pretty queer habits. Then again, I’ve known him a long time and know that he often makes sense in spite of himself. He also has three teenagers, none of whom are visibly screwed-up, and how many psychologists can you say that about? How many anybodys can you say that about?

  “But some of your friends were,” he said.

  “Were what?”

  “Wounded, wounded. Pay attention.”

  “Well, yes, if you mean the guys I grew up with,” I said. “Two of them were killed. A few more were wounded.” I paused. “Some badly.” Morty Berger, my best friend as a kid, had come back from the Pacific without his legs.

  “But not you.”

  “No, I just told you—” I saw what he was getting at and paused in my chewing. “You mean I might feel guilty because I wasn’t hurt? That I should have been wounded?”

  He waggled his eyebrows.

  I sipped my Coke and thought about it. “You just might have hit on something, Louis.”

  He lit up. “Well, it took a while, but when it finally dawned on me—” H
e wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and set the remaining three-quarters of his sandwich off to the side, an infallible sign that he was shifting into lecture mode. “—that almost every dream element could be seen as a form of ego-defense against feelings of self-condemnation—”

  “Louis, this is really interesting,” I said, glancing at my watch, “but I’m afraid I’ve got to run. One o’clock appointment.”

  His mobile face fell. “Too bad. Another time then.”

  I didn’t doubt it. I thanked him, finished the coffee, and left. There really wasn’t any appointment. I just didn’t want to talk any more. Maybe Louis had finally put his finger on the source of the dream, but it was Lily that was on my mind, not my dreams, and I needed to be by myself somewhere and think about things. This was the most awkwardly scheduled day of the week for me, with one class at nine and the next one not until four, but for once I appreciated having all that time in between. I sat bundled up in my coat for a while on a bench near the lily pond, in the sunken gardens that flanked the library, but that wasn’t isolated enough, and besides, I needed to walk, so, leaving my car in the campus lot, I walked to the Avenue H station, caught the BMT, and took it to Stillwell Avenue, the end of the line, the Coney Island stop.

  Possibly Coney Island doesn’t strike you as the place to go when you want to be by yourself and think about things, but that’s because you haven’t seen it in the wintertime when the place is virtually shut down. Crossing Surf Avenue is like crossing Main Street in some windblown ghost town, with every little souvenir store, and hot dog stand, and frozen custard counter, and weight-and-fortune penny scale locked up and battened down till summer. Nathan’s Famous stays open, mostly for form’s sake, I suppose, but it doesn’t do much business. On days as dreary as this particular cold, rain-spattered, November one, the men behind the counter stand around drinking coffee out of cardboard cups to keep warm and talking to each other to stay awake.

  Then, when you cross under the Boardwalk and come out on the beach, it’s spookier yet. All the things that make Coney Island Coney Island—the Cyclone, the Wonder Wheel, the parachute jump—are stilled and skeletal against the gray sky. The enormous beach itself is bare of everything but the empty steel-mesh trash cans placed every fifty yards or so in rows that seem to extend forever. Here and there a sheet of newspaper blows over the sand, and one or two hunched-over, solitary walkers with troubles of their own are usually slowly moving along the water’s edge, keeping to themselves. The whole thing is kind of creepy, really, but if it’s a reflective, inward-turning ambience you’re looking for, you couldn’t do any better than Coney Island in winter.

  And so I went down to the shore, breathed in the salt air, turned up the collar of my coat, pulled down the brim of my hat, and plodded into the wind, with nothing but the rumble of the surf in my ears and only the occasional horseshoe crab shell for company. Plodded and thought.

  Lily and I had met in the spring of 1945, in London. She was going on eighteen, a typist at the Free French headquarters in Carlton Gardens, and I was that nineteen-year-old flyer I was telling you about, except by then the fighting was in its final stages and I’d been transferred to administrative duties at a SHAEF headquarters administrative bureau in Grosvenor Square, acting as a clerk to a Captain Hendricks.

  I’d been working at the files out front one day, and in came this heart-stoppingly beautiful girl with a manila envelope for the captain. Not beautiful in the movie-star sense, I suppose—not with that long, coltish face of hers and a nose to match, and those wide, flat cheekbones, and those very slightly (but delightfully) crossed eyes—but she sure bowled me over. You have to understand: the place was a madhouse—-negotiations between de Gaulle’s provisional government and everybody else had broken down for the hundredth time and every one had been running around screaming at everyone else for days. We were all going nuts. So when I irritably rolled my eyes up from an impossible mess of paperwork, ready to do battle with whoever it was that had come to bother me, and saw instead this composed, lovely girl standing patiently at my desk and looking at me with eyes as blue and clear and calm as a glacial pool, it was as if a cool, damp cloth had been laid across my forehead. I felt time slow down from breathless-fast to nice, easygoing normal. From the very first, that was the effect she had on me.

  “Allo? Ey ’ave ’ere sumzing for your Capitaine Ahngdreeks,” she’d said smiling, with the most charming French accent imaginable, and that finished the job; I was a goner. I invited her out for drinks on the spot. (Well, I didn’t know she was seventeen. I thought she was nineteen, maybe even twenty. Yes, really.)

  We talked for six hours straight, mostly in a noisy, beery, smoke-filled pub off Russell Square that was full of horny G.I.s and local English girls. Language was no problem. Lily—she was “Lili” then, Lili Vercier—was well into the process of learning English, and I spoke fluent, idiomatic French. Naturally enough; my father didn’t bring the family to the States until 1935, when I was nine. I told her about that, and about Brooklyn, and the Dodgers, and America, and life in the Air Force. She talked about her girlhood in Veaudry, and the glorious pre-war summer vacations she’d taken with her parents in Corsica at her grandfather’s chestnut farm in the green hills above the Mediterranean, and, of course, about the deprivations, and scarcities, and humiliations of the Occupation years.

  And about the tragic death of her unfortunate father.

  “Ee was keel by ze Boches. Zey shoot eem in ze strheet,” she’d told me sadly. “Wiz five uzzers.”

  All right, I’ll be perfectly frank here. I was more engrossed in watching that red, luscious mouth form the words than I was in the words themselves. (Look, I’d just turned nineteen. Tell me about your priorities at nineteen.) Still, my heart honestly went out to her; she was like some tender, soft-petaled flower that had miraculously survived the muddy, bloody hell that Europe had just been through. I’d asked questions what had happened to her father and she’d gone into some detail: about the German colonel (bald, scar-faced), about the other hostages (the tobacconist, the baker, the baker’s assistant, the pharmacist, and the butcher), and about the executions themselves. The townspeople, including Lili, had been herded together and forced to watch. The victims had been placed against a sinister, heavily pitted wooden wall made of thick planks and brought in by truck for the purpose, then shot one at a time by a three-man firing squad. Her father had been third, dying bravely, without a word. Afterward, the body had been turned over to her mother and then buried in the churchyard with the others in a stirring ceremony.

  Sure, except that six hours ago he’d been standing on my stoop banging on a film can and yelling about things not being what they seemed (I’ll say!), and money, and forgiveness, and who knew what else.

  I came to a halt. St. George. He’d said something about St. George. What had that meant? My specialty is medieval and Renaissance history, so my mind naturally enough turned to the St. George of The Faerie Queene, the St. George of the dragon, the patron saint of England and Portugal (and in Greece, of lunatics), the probably mythical figure probably derived from the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Beowulf legend. But that line of thinking wasn’t likely to produce much of anything. Whatever Lily’s father had been raving about, I was pretty sure it hadn’t had anything to do with eighth-century Anglo-Saxon literature. Dead end. The only other St. George that came to mind was the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, the one with “the world’s largest indoor saltwater pool.”

  The light was fading and a thin rain had begun to mist down, not enough to bother me. I started plodding again, occasionally turning over a shell from one of the big, menacing-looking (but harmless, they tell me) horseshoe crabs with my toe. My mind began to drift, as it usually does after an hour or two at the beach. I hadn’t thought about the St. George Hotel in a long time. The grand old pile—it had been built in the 1880’s, the largest hotel in New York at the time—was as exclusive as hotels got in Brooklyn, but its celebrated, ornate, glass-
ceilinged swimming pool was open to the public for a small fee and I’d spent a lot of memorable hours there with Morty when I was fifteen or sixteen, either in the water trying to pick up girls or upstairs on the balcony that overlooked it, trying to see down the tops of their bathing suits. Neither effort had ever been met by what you’d call wild success, as I recall, but that hadn’t stopped us from trying.

  I was smiling to myself now. Memories of the St. George pool, of the chubby, baby-faced Morty and—I stopped short again. Christ, what was the matter with me? I turned and jogged over the damp sand back out to Surf Avenue. There was a telephone kitty-corner across the street from Nathan’s. I found a dime in my pocket, located the number of the St. George, and dialed. Was there a Mr. Marcel Vercier staying there?

  There was, I was told, but he didn’t answer his telephone. Did I wish to leave a message?

  “Yes,” I said, and then, quickly, “no.” I hadn’t really figured out how I wanted to go about this. Or even if. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of doing it behind Lily’s back, and I was hopeful that I still might not have to. After all, we were going to talk it out that evening over dinner. Right?

  “Look, Is he going to be staying there a while?” Just in case we didn’t get around to it at dinner.

  “Well, I’m not permitted—”

  “Please, it’s extremely important.

  “Well … all right. Apparently, yes. He’s booked his suite through next Wednesday.”

  Suite? At the St. George? For a week? Wow.

  “Er … good, thanks very much.”

  I hung up thoughtfully, and headed for the elevated station. On the way I passed a General Electric appliance store where a knot of people was huddled in front of a window display of television consoles. I stopped to see what it was that was engrossing enough to keep them standing out there in the cold rain, expecting a sports event, but all four sets were tuned to a strangely haggard-looking Walter Cronkite.