An Infinity of Mirrors Read Free Page B

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 Vee lee .
    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.
    â€œI thought it would be pleasant to go to Deauville just before the season. Do