The Two Hotel Francforts: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

here, too, if Portugal ends up on the other side. Please, darling.” I stopped her hand, with which she was rummaging in the armoire. “Please be realistic.”
    Whatever she was holding, she dropped. I let her hand go. She sat down on the edge of the bed and began to weep. “It’s not
fair
.When I went to Paris, I told my family I was never coming back to New York, and I meant it. And now they’ll have the chance they’ve been waiting for all these years—to laugh at me. To say ‘I told you so.’”
    “But you don’t even have to see them.”
    “Are you joking? They’ll be on the pier waiting for us. The minute we step off the gangplank, there they’ll be.”
    “But how will they know we’re coming?”
    “My mother will know. She knows everything I do.”
    I sat down next to her and put my arm around her hot, narrow shoulder blades. “I won’t let that happen,” I said. “I’ve told you from the beginning, Julia, I’ll take care of you. I’ll protect you. Why, we don’t even have to stay a single night in New York, if you want. We can take a taxi right from the pier to Grand Central. Catch the train to Chicago. Maybe visit my brother Harry—”
    “He’s never liked me. He disapproved of your marrying me.”
    “That was ages ago. He’s missed us.”
    “I wouldn’t be comfortable there. I’m not comfortable anywhere except Europe. When we set sail from New York, I swore I’d be buried here—you remember—and I meant it.”
    “And you will be, Julia. You will.” She glanced up at me. “Oh, I don’t mean it like that. What I mean is, when the war’s over, we’ll come back. We’ll start up where we left off. Because as the crow flies, New York’s not really far, is it? Literally as the crow flies, now that there are these Clipper flights.”
    “I wish there were no flights at all. No ships, no flying boats, no way to get across the Atlantic.”
    I kissed her cheek. “That’s how you feel today,” I said. “Trust me, once we’ve put these last weeks behind us, things will look brighter.”
    “We’ll see.”
    She got up then. She went into the bathroom. I could hear water running in the sink.
    “Oh, I meant to ask you,” I said through the half-open door, “what did you think of her—aside from the dog?”
    “Who? Iris? She’s mad—but then again, those people usually are.”
    “Those people?”
    “Writers. Didn’t he tell you? They’re Xavier Legrand. You know, the detective novels. They wrote the first one as a lark and then, just to see, sent it to a publisher in the States. They pretended that the author was a neighbor of theirs, a retired French police commissioner, and that they were his translators. Well, for the first three books they managed to fool everybody, but then a
French
publisher started sniffing around, wanting to bring out the originals. Which of course was out of the question, since there were no originals—the books were written in English—so they had to make a clean breast of it. But no one seemed to mind, and now it’s an open secret that Xavier Legrand is really this expatriate couple. They’ve done quite well, too. Not that they need the money.”
    “They’ve got money?”
    “Of course, she didn’t say so. Those sort of people never
say
so—and yet it’s the way they don’t say so that tells you.”
    She came out drying her face. That we were not “that sort of people”; that I had to work; that without my job we couldn’t have afforded to live in France—it had always been a sore point for her. My background is solidly middle class—my father ran a smelting works—which made me, in many ways, an improbable match for her. What she really needed was a man like Edward, a man with money to burn, money he didn’t have to earn. Yet when I met her, there was no such man in the offing, or at least none who was willingto give her what she was holding out for, which was an apartment in Paris. I don’t mean to poor-mouth. We lived more