Thursday, September 5, 1940
MARSEILLE
On the promenade in Marseille, where Nanée had always bought postcards, peanuts, and Eskimo Pies, a single peddler’s hoarse voice offered a newspaper no one wanted to read. France had accepted peace under onerous terms: the Germans kept two million French prisoners of war, extracted heavy financial reparations, and split France in two. Germany controlled the north and the Atlantic seaboard while Vichy prime minister Philippe Pétain, as authoritarian as Hitler and beholden to him, called for a “new moral order” in the south, replacing the French motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” with “Travail, famille, patrie”—work, family, homeland—by which they meant to shame any woman who had ever dared bob her hair or take a drink or a job or a man to her bed. Nanée had taken advantage of the new Nazi interest in getting foreigners away from the Atlantic ports to finally return Peterkin to T, who was in Tours by then to find Danny’s mother, having left Dagobert with the adoring children up in La Bourboule. Nanée caught a freight train to collect Dagobert, her car, which T had taken back there, and her trailer of possessions. But she couldn’t bear to return to Nazi-occupied Paris, so she came instead to rat-infested, brothel-laden, relentlessly sunny Marseille.
She meant to arrange a Pan Am Clipper from Portugal or, failing that, a ship on which she would have to pray German U-boats would respect neutrality. When it came time to leave France, though, she couldn’t fathom what she would do back in the States. Would she move into the Evanston house with Mother and Misha? Live alone at Marigold Lodge? Stay in New York in hopes of contributing somehow to the war effort despite her country’s stubborn isolationism and her own complete lack of skills? So she renewed her foreign-resident permit and stayed in this city in which every language was spoken, all the refugees from Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s sweep through Europe crowding the city’s hotels and cafés and streetcars, along with the Spahis and Zouaves and Senegalese soldiers who’d fought with the French, now trying to make their way home.
With the better hotels already full, she counted herself lucky to find a dark little room at the Continental, too near the old port’s ugly transporter bridge and fishing boats to be elegant, even without its faded blue wallpaper flowers of a type never seen in actual soil. But the room did have—along with a tarnished brass bed, three torturously straight-backed chairs at a pale wooden table, and a single tired pink lamp—a private bathroom with that ultimate of luxuries: a claw-footed tub.
She set the photograph of her father and herself on the dresser, propped beside it the art photograph of the woman seeming to swim in murky water, On Being an Angel, and littered the room with her books. She stored tins of meat, biscuits and chocolate, and bottles of whiskey and wine in the armoire, on the top shelf of which she stashed her Webley. And she paid an exorbitant price for a three-band radio with a splintered walnut case, chipped Bakelite knobs, and a perfectly intact brass double-needle dial she could tune to the BBC news.
Her friend Miriam Davenport saw her name on a list at the American consulate, and in no time they were living in each other’s pockets. Miriam couldn’t be more different from Nanée. She wore her ash-blond hair parted from forehead to nape and plaited into two braids tied together atop her head like a cartoon milkmaid rather than a Smith College graduate in France on a Carnegie scholarship. Her laugh was too loud, and her clothes hung poorly. She was engaged; she’d come to Marseille in search of a way to get her fiancé out of Yugoslavia. Like Nanée, she’d lost her father, but while Nanée’s daddy had left a fortune, Miriam’s left only debts.
Still, they met every evening at the Pelikan Bar, where Miriam greeted Dagobert by exclaiming, “Hitler! Hitler!”—the name alone provoking him to bark like mad, which made everyone laugh. They ate dinners out, since the meat and bread rationing didn’t yet apply to restaurants, then moved on to conversations in the local bars about when Germany would occupy all of France. Nights often ended with friends crowding into Nanée’s hotel room to listen to the 1:00 a.m. BBC broadcast while taking turns soaking in Nanée’s tub—a radio, booze, and a bath luxuries Nanée was happy to share.
Now Nanée walked with Dagobert on leash toward the H?tel Splendide, where Miriam was going to introduce her to her boss, Varian Fry. Fry had recently arrived in Marseille, sent by the newly formed American Emergency Rescue Committee—in French, Centre Américain de Secours, or CAS—with a list of some two hundred notable artists and intellectuals: Picasso, Chagall, Lipchitz, and Matisse; writers like Hannah Arendt; Nobel Laureates; and even the journalist who’d bestowed on the German National Socialist Party the nickname Nazi, Bavarian slang for “bumpkin” or “simpleton,” which became so ubiquitous that Hitler’s only recourse was to embrace it. Fry was working behind the political cover of providing perfectly legal aid to refugees and a CAS “affiliation” with the respected American Red Cross to quietly arrange illegal escapes from France for those on his list. Surely this Fry fellow could use Nanée’s help, and her money too.
But Varian Fry was reluctant even to meet Nanée, Miriam had warned; he didn’t think people like Nanée existed.
“Does he imagine me a spy for the Gestapo or Vichy or both?” Nanée responded, and they’d laughed together as they laughed at everything.
Then Miriam replied matter-of-factly, “I’m afraid this is how Varian believes spies work, though—sending beautiful women to infiltrate.”
Nanée wanted to do something to help, the same as any decent person in this newly terrible world surely must. Having failed at getting Peterkin out of France and at finding Danny, she was now intent on learning from someone who knew what they were doing. And the people on Varian Fry’s list included many of the same people Danny had arranged French residency permits for before the war. If she couldn’t help Danny or his family, perhaps she could help those he’d helped himself.