An Infinity of Mirrors Read online

  Bernheim’s custom was to make love from nine in the morning until noon; to lunch from one o’clock until three; to sleep until six in the evening; then to alternate from the lady’s bed to his for love-making until ten o’clock in the evening, at which time a light snack and a magnum of champagne was served in the lady’s room. After that they would tango to the gramophone records from eleven until three o’clock in the morning. This regimen required his greatest concentration, and he would be unmindful of complaints from other clients of the hotel. At three o’clock they would retire to their separate rooms to sleep until nine the next morning, when the happy schedule would begin all over again until the lady tired. Twice, despite the enormous sums he had spent at the Hôtel de la Gouache, the management permitted a bird to awaken him at an ungodly hour; on both occasions he had had the bird shot.

  Paul-Alain Bernheim was dedicated to everything in life, but most of all to pretty women. If a woman was pretty he had to know her better. His method was direct. On the first day he would send a basket of flowers. On the second day he would send baskets of flowers every hour on the hour; florists had dueled over securing or retaining his account. If on the third day there was no response to the dozens of messages concealed beneath the blooms, he would send a fiacre filled with flowers. Then that night he would bribe his way into the woman’s house; crouching on the carpet outside her bedroom, he would scratch at the door until elemental curiosity forced her to leave her bed and open it.

  “For God’s sake, what is it?” one whispered harshly, “who are you? my God, Bernheim! Are you crazy, Bernheim, my husband will kill you, your flowers have already driven him out of his mind why are you here you will ruin my marriage, Bernheim, for God’s sake leave, leave now before there is blood!”

  Using his stage voice which could break an electric light bulb at thirty feet, he would answer, “Why have you not telephoned me?”

  “Ssssshhhh! My God, telephone you, I hardly know you! My God you must be totally insane, Bernheim, please, please go before he wakes up and turns into a raging tiger—no, oh no, stop that, Bernheim, no.”

  He was relentless with such women because they had pretended to ignore him and forced ultimate methods. He would reply, “If you do not want me, I prefer a scandal. I demand to see your husband now. I must have you. Let him run me through, but I must have you.”

  He was not young when he did these things, because it took some years of experience to develop such pragmatic psychology, but his own wives told Paule that the women always appeared the next morning at eight-thirty A.M. at the Hôtel de la Gouache, ready for duty.

  On the Friday evening that she was twenty-two, the evening before Paule’s life changed forever and a new age began, as on every other Friday evening before, in the third year of his sixth wife, Paule listened intently to her father saying, “The Jews, my dearest, understood the abstract concept of freedom before anyone. Until we evolved this, man was so captured by all of his humanized gods that it was impossible for him to be free. Our one God, an abstract, gives us freedom to do as we will. Our God is not for this Jew or against that Jew. When the time comes, our God is always free to ask for an accounting, for actions good or bad. When Martin Luther turned his back on Rome he made a profound change in the Christian religion by changing man-God relationships to almost the sort of relationship we Jews have with our God. In fact, Martin Luther invited the Jews to become Protestants with him, because he saw that there was no longer any separating chasm between Judaism and Christianity.” As her father talked on he gave Paule one more small reason for her serenity. The more human the world became, the higher her adoration soared.

  Two

  From the time of her father’s second divorce Paule—who did not think of herself as being gallant—had developed a most gallant and simple basis for refusing to recognize that she might ever be unhappy. She knew that if her father would permit her to stay with him—if it did not come into his head, in some rage, to send her away to the Hôtel Meurice with the others—there could be nothing which might upset her calm or prevent her joy. All during her adolescence, she had been certain that she would never leave her father willingly, and she resigned herself to the fact that she could never marry unless her husband would agree to come and live with them at Cours Albert I. As the young men came to call, as she fell in and out of love, as she reached twenty and passed it, nothing happened to change this resolve. The frequency of her father’s divorces, each one emphasizing his loyalty to her, only strengthened the conviction.

  As the thought of the meaning of Veelee grew on her, it grew with her dismay. She loved Veelee: that was immutable and it bore with it other requirements. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the German Army. Because of the army he had not had a permanent, fixed residence since the age of nine. She could not imagine the German High Command ordering him ino a perpetual billet at Cours Albert I. Putting her father aside while she thought about this business of loving Veelee, she began to understand that Veelee was to all others as a planet is to motes. But she could not leave her father. He had never left her in all of the times he had smashed his life to start all over again; he loved her and he was loyal to her and he needed her. But the thrilling fact of Veelee was stored in her memory to be examined minutely when she lay on her bed staring out into the night. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen, and his virile good looks were the equal of her father’s. They were both the same tree-sized men, very straight, craggy in some places, gnarled in others, and they could both sing off-key exquisitely and with intense devotion.

  Paule arranged to have Veelee call at Cours Albert I at all sorts of odd hours, but for any number of reasons her father was never there. It was spring; he was engaged in rehearsals, in a new love affair, in a divorce, in the purchase of cuff links, and in a lawsuit which he hoped would lead to a duel. She was determined not to have to tell her father about Veelee. They must meet. Her father must see and weigh and judge, then know as she knew about Veelee. She pronounced his name in the French way with a hint of song at the end of the world; she couldn’t say it any other way, and he told her he had written to his sisters in Berlin to say his name was no longer Willi, for Wilhelm, but Veelee.

  Paul-Alain Bernheim detested Germans. They were the snakes in his paradise. They were the only warning he had ever given to her and he made the warning as regularly as the announcements of the objectives of Adolf Hitler. All during that spring Paule was suspended between the song in Veelee’s eyes and her father’s thumping resistance to all Germans. Veelee had finally decided to kiss her and she was relieved because it meant that they had passed each other’s first tests and could move on to more sophisticated cross-examinations. Other men had kissed her on the day they had met her, but Veelee, with his aria and his fabled pearls, adoring her with his fingertips and from far within his eyes, had seemed to be trying to convey that they must savor all the fragrant fragments of courtship before they moved along, in good time and in more reflective spirit, to the foothills of the mountains of feeling and emotion. She strained to see these peaks, somewhere up ahead of them; in the meanwhile this calm promise was the beginning he sought for them. She felt protected by the crystal shimmer of that security—further still because he approached her so slowly and with such sureness, as in a stately dance, each moment highly polished and arranged for her pleasure.

  In mid-June, her father closed his play. He and Paule were seated together on the terrace which faced south on the Seine. Paul-Alain Bernheim was fifty-six years old but looked forty-six. He had starred in twenty-nine plays and had fought twelve duels, but he had begun to murmur that mirrors were not what they had been when he was a young man. On his father’s side he had come from a hum of lawyers, on his mother’s side from a clink of bankers. They had all been short people, but he stood six feet four inches, with a nose like a dancer’s elbow and shoes that could cradle a cat.

  “I thought it would be pleasant to go to Deauville just before the season. Do you agree?”


  “Oh, yes, I do. But I cannot.”

  “Why not?”

  “There is a man.”

  “Ah.”

  “A German.”

  “A German?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you like him?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then ask him to come with us.”

  “I would in a moment, Papa, but he couldn’t accept.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he’s … he’s the military attaché at the German Embassy.”

  “My God, Paule!”

  “I have tried so many times to have you meet him, Papa. I want you to know him.”

  “But I do know him. I have played him. Does he know you are a Jew?”

  She shrugged. “He knows I am your daughter.”

  All Bernheim knew was that they were in trouble. He tightened his control on himself as if this were opening night, because if he blew his lines or overplayed this most important role of his life, he could lose Paule. He knew that he must take everything very, very slowly.

  “Girls will be girls,” he said with a gallant but wry smile. “I suppose.” He pulled the bell rope. “Let us toast your wonderment, for if there is one thing on which I am an authority, it is falling in love.” Paule’s eyes filled with tears and she dropped her gaze. Clotilde the waitress appeared. Bernheim ordered Moët’s 1915 and waved her away. He had never thought so rapidly. He decided that he must divide his objection—that a Jew could not make a life among Germans—into five or six short, pleasant conversations, each of which must be spaced three days apart. Paule was—at least she always had been—very susceptible to his opinions, his wishes, and the conclusions he reached. Though of course, he told himself, that could not be expected to last forever. If he could hold her for these relaxed talks over the next three weeks, he knew everything could be saved. It was a love affair. In the springtime it was necessary to have a love affair. Everyone had love affairs; in fact he had several going himself at the moment. If he did not crowd her, if he permitted her to let him lead her to conclusions which were utterly inescapable, then she might feel that she had reached those conclusions on her own. He would need to spend time with his books. He would want classical allusions, statistics, records, tribal customs of the Germans, past destructions, and every other possible example. Perhaps a German Jew, who carried the German stain, could marry a German. But not a French Jew—and most surely not a French Jew like this lovely child who believed with all of her loving heart that it was an ennobling privilege to be a Jew without ever having been told of the price such inner glory had cost eighty generations before her. He had to reach her; he had to scale the barrier this new emotion had erected between them. He must seduce her into safety, and seduction took time, and patience, and mutual need. Slowly. He must cast merely a shadow over her confidence tonight. At the next talk there should be less joviality, less urbanity, more concern. Then the talk which followed must be statistical and hurtfully new: Austrian, German and Polish anti-Semitism, its ruthlessness. What were Prussians but German-Poles? Expose the record. Tell her about their army and where they stood on the subject of Jews. Make her understand that this was history, not opinion. Make her see that centuries of brutality and callous persecution could not be changed by romantic love. She would see it. If he could have his six short talks, well spaced, she would understand all of it. Naturally he would let the affair run its full course as long as there was no question of a marriage. He knew as well as he knew his name that as happy as she might be if she were married to a French anti-Semite, that was how miserable she would become living in Germany with a German who loved her with all his heart.

  “Have you been to Prince Nicholas’ exhibition?” he asked.

  “Yes. Very nice.”

  “Have you seen the American tennis player, Mrs. Moody?”

  “Helen Wills she is called.”

  “Have you been?”

  “No.”

  “André Lugue is back from Hollywood.”

  “Ah. When?”

  “Last week.”

  “What a voyage! How exhausting it must be.”

  “I saw Cochet and Borotra this afternoon against Colliers and Gregory at Roland-Garros.”

  “Who won?”

  “I didn’t stay.”

  “Ah.”

  “There is a delightful exhibition of nudes at the Grand Palais.”

  “We went to the Montpamasse show at the Salon de Tuileries last night. It seems quite successful.”

  “We?”

  “Veelee and I.”

  “Veelee? Oh! Yes. Is he a lieutenant?”

  “A lieutenant-colonel.” She smiled at him. “That is a very high rank in their restricted army for a man of thirty-four.”

  “Restricted?”

  “Their army is restricted to one hundred thousand men.”

  “Oh. Yes, yes.”

  “He is a tank officer, actually. They have very few of those because they aren’t allowed to have any tanks, you know, according to the Treaty.”

  “Oh, well. I suppose he can practice in one of the fighter planes they aren’t allowed to have either.”

  “He’s about to be posted back to Berlin.”

  “Marvelous! How soon?”

  “On the first of July.”

  “That will be a wrench. I can tell from your voice that it will be a wrench, although you did a noble job of disguising your expression. Well, never mind. The mails still work and he will have leave.”

  “He has asked me to marry him and to go to Berlin with him.”

  “Ah.”

  Clotilde poured the wine into two tulip-shaped glasses and disappeared. He lifted his glass and smiled at Paule. “To your decision, my darling girl,” he said. She nodded faintly. They sipped the wine.

  “What have you decided?” her father asked.

  “I have not been able to decide.”

  She could not leave her father. Everything in her mind and body excepting this pulled her toward marrying Veelee. Five wives ago, had she been of age and had Veelee been waiting then, she could have left her father. But by now she had stitched herself to him with steel cables of need and memory and fear. The fear of being sent away to the Hôtel Meurice and being left alone, the memory of the eyes of the wives who had been sent away, the need to stay with him at the center of the whole world. Her existence depended upon the dynamo which was her father. But he did not know that, any of it. As a great actor’s daughter, she had taught herself over thirteen years how to keep her desperation masked from him.

  “I have the feeling,” Bernheim said lightly, “that it is time I asked to be presented to this gentleman of yours.”

  “His name is Wilhelm von Rhode. His father and his grandfather have each been awarded collars of the Knights of the Order of the Black Eagle—he has explained to me that there is no honor more distinguished in their family profession. They have all been soldiers forever. Will you be free to meet him at dinner tomorrow night? Tonight he is struggling with a monograph which will explain all about the abstract handling of those non-existent tanks.”

  “Tomorrow? Oh, excellent. Yes. Here?”

  “I would rather here, but if you—”

  “No, no. Here. Yes. Will you arrange everything you think he might particularly like to eat with Miss Willmott?” He had finished the glass and had immediately poured another. “I am sure he comes from a very, very distinguished family, indeed,” Bernheim said, “but it is a different way of life, you know. Beyond a doubt. They have their customs. Their … uh … food. Their beers. Their approach to life, which the French have always found mysterious and alien—as, no doubt, they find ours.” He coughed. “Indeed, many, many of the people of the world find the Germans and their scheme of things to be quite bafflingly foreign.”

  “We are Latins,” Paule said. “Germans are hardly that, but they have different and remarkable qualities.”

  “To be sure, your Veelee has, or we would not be chatti
ng this way, but I was thinking more of their tendency toward paranoia. There are the three classical symptoms: delusions of grandeur—you know, Orders of the Black Eagles and Frederick the Great and that sort of thing—and you must admit that they do have delusions of grandeur inasmuch as they find it almost impossible to keep themselves from declaring war upon the world.”

  “That is all over,” Paule said. “Veelee explained that to me.”

  “I see. Yes. Then, there is the second grand symptom—retrospective falsification, meaning belief in only that part of the past one chooses to believe—even if it never happened.”

  “Do the Germans do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you remember an apt example?”

  “There are hundreds.”

  “One will do, Papa.”

  “Hm. Yes. Well. In December, 1918—and I remember it well because it was just a month after the Armistice recorded the defeat of German arms—the returning German forces were marched along the Unter den Linden, where German armies have always paced out their triumphs for the populace. They played the same music and waved the same flags that they would have waved if they had just finished sweeping the world before them, and when they reached the Brandenburg Gate the President of the German Provisional Government greeted them. “‘I salute you,’ Herr Ebert said, ‘who return unvanquished from the field of battle.’”

  There was a small silence between them while Paule thought about this. She resolved to speak to Veelee about it.

  “Even the Germans will acknowledge the third symptom. It forms their politics, their culture, their army, their family relationships. It is the delusion of persecution.” He finished the glass and stood up slowly. “But that is enough generalizing,” he said smoothly, smiling down at her with all of his enormous charm. “It is almost eleven and I must go out for a few hours. Tomorrow night?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “I look forward to it, darling girl.”

  She stood up and crossed the space between them quickly to throw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Papa,” she said. “I love you so.”