The House of Dreams (43 page)

“Is this great art?” she says, gesturing at the stacks of blue canvases. “What is all this?”

“You have to imagine it, when it is installed.” I picture the canvases laid out as I have numbered them, in a circular white-walled space. The blues merge to infinity, from darkest indigo through Prussian, ultramarine, cobalt, to heavenly cerulean and back, and there she is, a tiny white dot of life, Venus, the morning star, always there night and day. It is our endless sky, mine and my love's, the sky we saw when we lay on the beach and looked to heaven and talked of the future. “It's for Annie, always,” I say.

“Tell me, do you ever think of me, of Vita?”

I beckon her on and go to a locked wooden chest in the corner of the room beneath the window. I take the key down from its hook, and the smell of cedar fills the air as I lift the lid. I lift out a fold of linen and unwrap the gold embroidered cloth.

“I carried you with me,” I said as I put the gold wreath of myrtle leaves on her head. “I'm sorry I couldn't save you, and our child. I'm sorry I couldn't save my father. Forgive me.”

“There,” she says after a time, and touches my forehead. I feel myself lift, like a ship weighing anchor. “We got there in the end. It's time to let go,” she says gently, and I am on the beach again, and my children are running toward me. “I'll wait with you, while they come,” she says. “You carried us all. You weren't the only young boy who took on the burden and fortune of his family.” She strokes my forehead. The light is flickering, flashing behind my eyes. I see my father's face next to mine, in the photograph. The light flares. Our faces merge, become one. My eyes blink open, see endless blue. “When I look into your eyes, I see the ghosts of your father and mother, of all of us, staring back.” I know she tells the truth.

“I can't … what if, what if Sophie tells everyone? What will it do to my children if they find out I've lived a lie?”

“It will be okay, Gabriel, you're almost there, now.” She soothes my brow. “I know some nights the weight of carrying us, of all that guilt, has been too much, but a new day always begins.” She looks out across the beach. The children are running toward us. “You know, sometimes it's been like a spectral army standing shoulder to shoulder with you, fists in the air, showing them that they didn't win, that we live on and we didn't give in.” She leans down and kisses my brow, and the light fills my eyes, all fades to white. “You'll live on in them, too. Nothing matters more than the love we leave behind.” The sea, the light, it is so beautiful. “Relax. She's coming for you. Not long now.”

*   *   *

“Dad?” I hear Tom's voice calling me back. I hear Harry's voice above him, frantic, calling for an ambulance.

“I know CPR.” Sophie kneels beside me on the sand as they gather around. I feel her lips against mine, breathing life into me, her hands against my heart. I am like an old engine, winding down. Just for a moment, it catches. “Gabriel,” she says, turning my face to hers. “Gabriel, stay with me.”

I try to raise my hand to touch her face. “Vita?”

“Sophie, my name is Sophie Cass. Jack and Paige's daughter.” She smiles down at me. There are tears in her eyes. “Vita was my great-aunt.”

“You look … like her.” My voice is a whisper. Sophie leans closer, unable to hear. “Please, don't destroy”—I gasp for air—“my family.”

“I won't. Vita loved you. Both of you. That's what matters, not some story.”

Relief floods through me, and I close my eyes.

“She's proud … of you.”

*   *   *

It's true, you know, what they say, that your life flashes before you. I feel Sophie's hands on me again, her urgent lips forcing air into my lungs as I slip back, but I am far away, free at last to run down the years as the people I love most in this world gather around me, and the sea rolls on regardless. I see my arm fall to my side, the shepherd tumble one last time from my hand.

Then, she is there. Annie, my Annie, is walking along the shoreline, and she is young, and beautiful, and she has the sun in her. She's come back, this woman I have loved my whole life, and she has come for me.

And it has been a good life, because of one good man. And I have lived a simple life and done good work. And I have loved, oh, I have loved. My heart is light with thankfulness.

I see her now, Annie, my Marianne, dancing and turning in the snow at Air-Bel, dancing to the music of life itself, and I see her, and I feel her touch. I see her holding our children, and I see them, and I feel them, I am back, I am back. I never knew, I never knew I was alive until I held them.

I see her now.

Annie walks to me with the fluid grace of the girl. She tilts her head as if to say,
What are you doing there, Gabe?
and she kneels beside me in the sand, takes me safe in her arms. Annie lies down beside me, and I'm not scared anymore. I've missed her, so much, but now she is here with me, and we'll never be apart again. She lies with me, and I am home. I am filled with so much joy I could fly right up there above the beach, the sea, our world, with her. I can't bear it, it is so beautiful.

It all falls away.

I loved, I am love, I am free.

 

A
UTHOR'S
N
OTE

This novel weaves fiction with factual events at the American Relief Center (Centre Américain de Secours) in 1940–41. My admiration for Varian Fry and his team grew immeasurably the more I learned about them and the artists they saved. The “real” characters are fictional versions of just a few of the remarkable people involved:

Varian Fry (born 1907) was arrested and forced out of France on August 29, 1941. The ARC was raided and closed down on June 2, 1942, but the members of his team continued his work underground.

Fry received little thanks for his remarkable work during his lifetime. Now, the Consulate General of the United States in Marseille sits on place Varian Fry. After the war he divorced Eileen, but he married again and raised a family. In 1971, when Fry published the
Flight
portfolio of prints in aid of the International Rescue Committee (the organization that the ERC became), he struggled to convince artists to take part—though he was responsible for saving many of their lives.

He was honored with the International Rescue Committee's medal in 1963 and the Croix de Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1967. He died alone in his sleep later that year at only fifty-nine. A manuscript lay at his side. Varian Fry died surrounded by his incomplete notes for a new memoir, by his memories of Marseille.

In 1991, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council awarded him the Eisenhower Liberation Medal. In 1994, he was named “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem—an honor bestowed on non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust. It was an honor shared with Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. He was the first American to be honored in this way. Warren Christopher (U.S. secretary of state at the time) said: “Even today, Varian Fry's tale of courage and compassion is too little known in the United States.… We owe Varian Fry our deepest gratitude, but we also owe him a promise—a promise never to forget the horrors that he struggled against so heroically, a promise to do whatever is necessary to ensure that such horrors never happen again.”

S
OME OF
F
RY'S
C
OLLEAGUES

Danny Bénédite was released from prison and took over running the ARC after Varian was forced out of France. The onetime police official went on to become a leader of the underground Resistance. He died in 1990.

Hiram “Harry” Bingham IV (born 1903), Varian's “partner in crime,” was abruptly removed from his diplomatic post as vice-consul in Marseille in 1941. He went on to serve in Portugal and Argentina, where he traced Nazi war criminals. When he was overlooked for promotion, he left the U.S. Foreign Service in 1945. Like Fry, Bingham has been honored with several awards for his remarkable humanitarian work. He died in 1988.

Dr. Miriam Davenport (born 1915, Boston) married her fiancé, Rudolf, and escaped with him to America. They divorced, and she remarried twice. She worked for Albert Einstein and became a prize-winning artist. She gained a Ph.D. in 1973 and died in 1999.

Charles Fernley Fawcett (born 1915) followed up his daring work at the ARC with spells in the RAF and the French Foreign Legion. After the war, he performed in more than a hundred films and was a veteran of several conflicts. He continued to help humanity as a freedom fighter and was involved in Afghanistan in the 1970s and the cause of refugees. This modest hero received many decorations, including the French Croix de Guerre and the Eisenhower medal, and died in London in 2008.

Bill Freier (Wilhelm Spira) survived Auschwitz and a series of concentration camps including Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. Mina gave birth to their son during his imprisonment but suffered a nervous breakdown after the war and died in 1953. Spira died in 2000.

Mary Jayne Gold (born 1909, Chicago) escaped to the United States in 1941. After the war, she divided her time between New York and the south of France and named her Saint-Tropez villa “Air-Bel.” She never married or had children, but she maintained her contact with Killer. She died in France in 1997.

Raymond Couraud escaped France in April 1941. Killer rewarded Mary Jayne's faith in him and became a hero of the British Special Operations Executive and the Special Air Service.

Albert O. Hirschman (born 1915, Berlin; aka Albert Hermant, aka “Beamish”) had a long and distinguished academic career and became one of the world's leading experts on economics. He taught at Columbia, Yale, and Harvard Universities and was Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He died in 2012.

Justus “Gussie” Rosenberg (born 1923) attempted to escape via the Pyrenees but was caught and arrested. He escaped, joined the Resistance, and managed to get to the United States after the war, where he completed his studies. He is Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature at Bard College and co-director of the Varian Fry Foundation.

S
OME OF THE
C
LIENTS

André (1896–1966) and Jacqueline (1910–1993) Breton arrived safely in New York after being detained in Martinique. They later divorced, and both remarried. Their daughter, Aube Breton-Elléouët (born 1935), is a distinguished visual artist.

Marc Chagall (born 1887) was finally convinced to leave France after he was arrested by the police in Marseille. Fry secured his release. He died in 1985.

Peggy Guggenheim (born 1898) and Max Ernst (born 1891) finally met in Marseille. Max said, “When, where, and why shall I meet you?” Peggy said, “Tomorrow, four, Café de la Paix, and you know why.” They escaped to the United States together and married. They later divorced, and Guggenheim established a museum of modern art in Venice, founded on the paintings she rescued from war-torn France. She died in 1979 and Ernst in 1976.

*   *   *

As Fry himself complained writing his memoir,
Surrender on Demand,
trying to write this story with its “hundreds of characters is worse than
War and Peace
.” In the confines of fiction, it is necessary to simplify the true story—it was not possible to include all the people involved in the remarkable rescue operation in Marseille, but this in no way diminishes the contribution of Fry's unnamed colleagues. The Varian Fry Institute and Varian Fry Foundation both have excellent Web sites with information about all the people who helped Fry in Marseille and the full events of this time.

Many more of the world's greatest artists and intellectuals were saved than the original two hundred names on Fry's list. Some fifteen thousand people came to the ARC seeking help, many of them “ordinary” relief cases. The organization gave aid to more than 560 families and took food parcels to those detained in concentration camps. More than two thousand people were rescued.

There is a dedication at Harvard University that expresses Varian Fry's tenacious humanitarian spirit well: “To one who dared to defy authority and attempts at restraining the human impulse for good.” The Emergency Rescue Committee of New York, for which he did such remarkable work, became the International Rescue Committee—it continues to operate in more than thirty countries, aiding refugees and victims of oppression whenever and wherever it is needed. Fry's legacy lives on.

 

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Justus “Gussie” Rosenberg for his generous help writing this novel and Aube Breton-Elléouët for her kind permission to conjure a version of her five-year-old self. Thank you to Dr. Sarah Wilson, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Pierre Sauvage, Richard Kaplan, Paul B. Franklin, and Marisa Bourgoin of the Archives of American Art; Michelle Harvey of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Constance Krebs of the Association Atelier André Breton; and Laurene Leon Boym for their help with my research.

Thank you to Professor Jon Stallworthy and Lorna Beckett of the Rupert Brooke Society, for their kind permission to quote from Rupert Brooke's “The Great Lover.”

My thanks to the incomparable Sheila Crowley, Rebecca Ritchie, and the team at Curtis Brown and to my wonderful editor, Anne Brewer, and all at Thomas Dunne for their help with this story.

As ever, love and thanks to my husband and family for their support and encouragement. This much. Always.

 

Also by
Kate Lord Brown

The Perfume Garden

 

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR