‘Tell me, umm, where are you going in Europe?’ he said.
‘It’s Iris — I bet you forgot.’
‘I won’t again.’
‘Paree,’ she said. ‘Brussels, Amsterdam, Geneva, Rome, Vienna. There’s more, oh, ah, Venice. I’m still forgetting one.’
‘Maybe Budapest.’
‘Nooo, I don’t think so.’
‘Berlin?’
‘That’s it!’
After a moment, Stahl said, ‘You’ll see a lot.’
‘Where are you going, Mr. Stahl?’
‘Just to Paris, to make a movie. And please call me Fredric.’
‘Oh, is that all? “Just to Paris”? “To make a movie”?’ A ladylike snort followed. She was already writing the postcard. You’ll never guess who I… ‘Are you French, Fredric?’
‘I was born in Vienna, wandered about the world for a time, lived and worked in Paris, then, in the summer of 1930, Hollywood. I’m an American now.’ He paused, then said, ‘Tell me, Iris, when you planned the trip, did you think about the politics, in Europe?’
‘Oh who cares — they’re always squabbling over something. You can’t go to Spain, ’cause there’s a war there, you know. Otherwise I expect the castles are all open, and the restaurants.’
He could hear approaching footsteps on the iron deck, then a ship’s officer flicked a torch beam over them, touched the brim of his cap and said, ‘ Bonsoir, Madame, Monsieur.’
‘What’s it called, your movie?’
‘ Apres la Guerre. That would be After the War, in English. It takes place in 1918, at the end of the war.’
‘Will it play in Bryn Mawr?’
‘Maybe it will. I hope so.’
‘Well, we can always go to Philadelphia to see it, if we have to.’
It was true that he’d ‘wandered about the world’. The phrase suggested romance and adventure — something like that had appeared in a Warner Bros. publicity bio — but it didn’t tell the whole story. In fact, he’d run away to sea at the age of sixteen. He was also not really ‘Fredric Stahl’, had been born Franz Stalka, forty years earlier in Vienna, to a Slovenian father and an Austrian mother of solidly bourgeois families resident in Austria- Hungary for generations. His father was beyond strict; the rigid, fearsome lord of the family, a tyrant with a face like an angry prune. Thus Stahl grew up in a world of rules and punishments — there was hardly a moment in his early life when he wasn’t in trouble for doing something wrong. He had two older brothers, obedient little gentlemen and utterly servile — ‘Yes, papa,’ ‘As you wish, papa’ — who studied for hours and did well in private academies. He had also a younger sister, Klara, and if he was the bad boy of the family, she was the angel and Stahl adored her. A beautiful little angel, with her mother’s good looks. Inherited, as well, by the boy who would become an actor and take a new name.
It was said of him by those who made a living in the business of faces and bodies that he was ‘a very masculine actor’. Stahl wasn’t sure precisely what they meant, but he knew they were rich and not for nothing. It referred, he suspected, to a certain inner confidence, expressed by, among other things, a low-pitched voice — assurance, not just a bass register — from an actor who always sounded ‘quiet’ no matter how loudly he spoke. He could play the sympathetic lawyer, the kind aristocrat, the saintly husband, the comforting doctor, or the good lover — the knight not the gigolo.
His hair was dark, combed back from a high, noble forehead which rose from deep-set eyes. Cold grey eyes — the grey was cold, the eyes were warm: receptive and expressive. Just enough grey in those eyes for black- and-white film, and even better — it turned out to his great relief — in technicolour. His posture was relaxed — hands in pockets for Stahl was not a weak gesture — and his physique appropriate for the parts he played. He’d been scrawny as a boy but two years as an Ordinary Seaman, scraping rust, painting decks, had put just enough muscle on him so he could be filmed wearing a bathing suit. He couldn’t punch another man, he wasn’t Clark Gable, and he couldn’t fight a duel, he was not Errol Flynn. But neither was he Charles Boyer — he wasn’t so sophisticated. Mostly he played a warm man in a cold world. And, if all his movies were taken together, Fredric Stahl was not somebody you knew, but somebody you would very much like to know.
In fact he was good at his profession — had two Oscar nominations, one for Supporting Actor, the other for the lead in Summer Storm — and very much in control of gesture and tone but, beyond skill, he had the single, inexplicable quality of the star actor or actress. When he was on screen, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.
Stahl shifted slightly in the deck chair, the damp was beginning to reach him and he had to suppress a shiver. And, he sensed, the weather was turning — sometimes the ship’s bow hit the oncoming wave with a loud smack. ‘We might just have a storm,’ he said. It was, he thought, time to get Iris back where she belonged, the cuddling had devloped a certain familiar edge.
‘A storm?’ she said. ‘Oh, I hope not. I’m afraid I’ll get seasick.’
‘You’ll be fine. Just remember: don’t stay in your cabin, go someplace where you can keep your eyes on the horizon.’
‘Is it that easy?’
‘Yes. I spent two years at sea, that’s how I know.’
‘ You? A sailor?’
He nodded. ‘I ran away to sea when I was sixteen.’
‘Your poor mom!’
‘I wrote them a letter,’ he said. ‘I went to Hamburg, and for a month all I did was sweep out the union hall, but then a Dutch ship needed a deckhand and I signed on and saw the world — Shanghai, Batavia, Calcutta…’ This had been the purest possible luck; Stahl had gone to sea in the spring of 1914, before the war, on what by chance was the ship of a country that remained neutral, thus he was spared service for the enemies of Austria- Hungary.
‘Say, you’ve had some adventures, haven’t you,’ she said.
‘I did. In 1916 we were shelled and set on fire, just off the coast of Spain. An Italian destroyer did that.’
‘But, you said “neutral”…’
‘We never knew why they did it. Exuberance, maybe, we didn’t ask. But we managed to reach the port of Barcelona, where I got help from the Austrian legation. They could have sent me off to fight in the trenches, but instead they gave me a job, and that was my military service.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I opened the mail. Made sure it got to the right people.’
She started to ask a question, but then a gust of wind hit her and she said ‘Brrr’ and burrowed against Stahl, close enough now that her voice was soft. ‘So,’ she said, lingering on the word, ‘when did you decide to become an actor?’
‘A little later, when I was back in Vienna.’ The Ile de France lifted and fell, hitting another wave. ‘I think, Iris, it might be time for you to go back to your cabin, your husband’s probably beginning to wonder where you are.’
‘Oh, Jack sleeps like a log when he’s drunk.’
Nonetheless, she wasn’t coming to Stahl’s cabin. She didn’t really want to, Stahl felt, maybe she wanted to be asked. But, in any event, what he didn’t need was a public row with some lush over a wife’s shipboard infidelity. With certain actors, Warner Bros. wouldn’t have cared, but not Fredric Stahl. He put a hand on her cheek and turned her face towards him. ‘One kiss, Iris, and then back to our cabins.’
The kiss was dry, and tender, and went on for a time because they both enjoyed it.
The storm came full force after midnight, the liner pitching and rolling in heavy seas. Stahl woke up, grumbled at the weather, and went back to sleep. When he left his cabin in the morning, the exquisite art deco carpets had been covered with rolls of brown paper and, up on deck, the sky was heavy with dark cloud and every wave sent spray flying over the bow. Returning to his cabin after a long walk, he found the ship’s daily news bulletin slipped beneath the door. The French Line wishes you good morning. Temperature at 0600 hours 53°. The Paris weather 66° and partly cloudy. The 1938 Salon d’Automne will open 5 October at the Grand Palais in Paris. The International Surrealist Exhibition remains open at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 60 artists, including Marcel Duchamp, and 300 works, including Salvador Dali’s ‘Rainy Taxi’. Yesterday at the European Championships in Paris, the Finnish runner
