THE
LUXEMBOURG
RUN
Stanley Ellin
1977
For Jeannie, with love
CONTENTS
The Invisible Prince/1
The King of Vondel Park/35
The Emperor of Square Nine/112
THE
INVISIBLE
PRINCE
Part I
2
Once upon a time, I was ten years old.
In a photograph taken of me on my tenth birthday — that, by simple
calculation, had to be in the year 1955, in the time of Eisenhower — I, David
Hanna Shaw, am standing alone on the summit of the Acropolis against the
whiteness of the ruined Parthenon and the dazzling blue of Grecian sky, garbed
in a flawless replica of the evzone military regalia. A small musical-comedy
hero with those pompons on my slippers, short pleated skirt, ornamental jacket
draped with cartridge belt, tasseled cap and all.
When you know that it was my mother who was inspired to thus
fantastically garb me, putting me through endless fittings in order that I might
be presented to a select gathering of Foreign Service families and their Greek
opposite numbers at a birthday party for me that afternoon, and that she then
forgot to send out invitations to the party, you know pretty much what there is
to know about my mother. Divinely featherheaded. And, before she started to
put on her middle-aged weight, divinely beautiful.
My expression in the photograph is interesting. All done up in costume
for a party that wasn’t being held, I am facing the camera with a smile. Not
forced either. Evidence that after only one decade of existence I had attained a
marvelous emotional balance. For eight years of that time I had been hauled
around European capitals by a scatterbrained mother, a pompous father, and a
succession of governesses, and what with that and the peculiar boarding
schools I was occasionally dropped into, I had absorbed the lesson that
yielding to the current is the way to go.
Of course, I had luck on my side. Where other Foreign Service kids from
the States were usually planted in one specific alien place and raised there in
an Americanized hothouse, I had a father whose office was always on the
move. His title was Commissioner of the United States Economic Agency in
Europe, a title much more formidable than any powers of the agency, but
which provided deluxe living quarters, staff, limousine, chauffeur, and a
popgun salute on arrival. It cost my father somewhat more to maintain his
position than it cost the government, but it was the position he wanted, the title
and perquisites of which made up his idea of glory.
3
At ten years old I already had a vast amount of such information tucked
away in my brain because I had the gift of tongues. I was fluent in French and
Dutch, competent in Spanish, Italian, and German, and had a fair smattering of
what might be called kitchen Greek. Also, I had pretty much a free run of any
quarters we occupied, and it was the domestics, taking small notice of this
silent, apparently uncomprehending little American boy, who not only filled in
my command of their native tongues, but supplied fascinating opinions of those
they served.
It stung sometimes to overhear the backstairs analysis of my mother’s
idiocies and my father’s overbearing stupidity and endless cheapness with
money, but I was wise enough to understand that if I raised a voice in protest I
would be cut off from the backstairs gossip. Only once I came near blowing
the whole thing. That was in our Brussels apartment where I found that to his
servitors my father was known as Monsieur le Bécoteur. Title of honor,
perhaps? But no, there was something about the way it was said that suggested
middle-aged Walloon lady, and faced her with the question. Her immediate
reaction was an involuntary hoot of laughter. Then she put on the familiar
frowning dignity. “C’est dégoûtant. Disgusting. Where did you hear it?”
“I don’t remember. But what does it mean?”
“Ah, you really are something, you know that? Well, I will tell you, so
that you do not say it in front of decent people. It means a man who touches
women where he should not. Now you see how disgusting it is? So you will
kindly put it out of your mind.”
Far from putting it out of my mind I seized on it as the clue to those latenight
conversations between my mother and my father when, in my bedroom
that adjoined theirs, I could catch heated words and phrases. “Incorrigible
womanizer,” went the treble, and “Oh, yes, I saw you with her! I saw what
was going on!” while the bass rumbled and grumbled angry denials.
Womanizer. Un bécoteur, hein? So now I knew.
By all the statistics ever extracted from case histories I should have been
as neurotic a kid as was ever destined to wind up on the couch, but somehow I
wasn’t. True, now and then I did suffer fits of melancholy. I would sit alone, a
lump rising in my throat, tears welling in my eyes, savoring a delicious selfpity.
But it never lasted long. Even through the woeful moment I was fortified
4
by the awareness that I knew things no one else around me knew; I was the
Invisible Prince.
I was, in fact, mostly content with myself and my lot. I suppose it never
struck me in my childhood that I wasn’t supposed to be.
5
The man who took that photograph of me
as midget Greek warrior was named Ray Costello, and he was a sort of gift
from my grandmother and grandfather Hanna in Florida, shipped across the
Atlantic to serve as my bodyguard in Athens. Whatever news of Greece during
that period reached the Miami Herald, it must have portended for those folks
on South Bay Shore Drive at least the kidnapping of their grandson. The one
and only grandchild. The J.G. Hanna son, who would have been my uncle had
he lived, was killed in World War II at Anzio. The Hanna daughter, my
beautiful, scatterbrained, egomaniac mother, had produced me, then gone out
of production, and, I suppose, had made it clear to her family that she had no
intention of ever returning to it.
So one day Costello showed up at the mansion in Athens, a chunky,
hard-faced man who wore a gun in the shoulder holster under his jacket and
who never spoke unless directly addressed. And, even then, with the absolute
minimum of words. Altogether a heroic image, but not really much of a
companion.
Of course I was not completely marooned in Europe. Once or twice a
year I would spend time basking in the adoration of grandma and grandpa
Hanna in South Florida, and if there was any outside agency which could be
credited with the perhaps unnatural equilibrium that sustained me through most
of my very young life, it had to be those folks in that house on South Bay Shore
&
nbsp; Drive who obviously thought I was the greatest thing to ever come down the
pike. My grandmother was the more demonstrative addict. Everything I said
dazzled her.
“Tell me what you and grandpa did today, darling.”
I would tell her.
“Now tell it to me in French.”
I would tell it to her in French.
“Perfectly beautiful,” my grandmother would say. Then motioning over
Mrs. Galvan, the Cuban housekeeper, and aiming me at her: “Now tell it to
Emiliana in Spanish, darling.”
My grandfather, not quite so overt in his enthusiasms, was, however, the
more potent influence on me. A slight little man, always cool and neat, he was
6
the one for the boat outdoors and the checkers and chess indoors. The boat,
moored at Dinner Key, was named the Carrie H. in honor of my grandmother,
and it was an imposing forty-footer, rigged for deep-sea fishing, and capable,
chose to take her there. There was also a captain and a one-man crew, the
captain generally looking very uncaptainlike to my critical eye, the crew
always in patchwork clothes and smelling strongly of fish and beer. Each
morning at dawn we would set out with full bait buckets for the trolling lines,
and return at noon in time for lunch, sometimes with a catch on display
considerably larger than I was.
For a while I had the impression that my grandfather made his living as a
fisherman, and it came as something of a disillusionment to be informed by my
grandmother that no, he was a lawyer, and a very good one. There was never
any question in my mind that whatever he was he would be good at it. Always
soft of voice, he never had to raise that voice to command attention. At most,
there was a small, unfunny smile he took on that was like a danger sign. Once
there was a scene behind the closed doors of the living room where he and
some men were closeted on business, the men's voices alarmingly angry, his
voice hardly to be heard, and when they all emerged at the end, the men
slamming out of the house red-faced with bad temper, my grandfather wearing
that little smile, my grandmother said complacently to me, “Grandpa can drive
a hard bargain, dear, and some folks just seem to resent it.”
Whatever that meant, I could see he was more than a match for three
very angry men, all of them much larger than he was.
Sometimes I practised that little smile in the mirror, but I could never
make it very impressive.
7
The evening of my partyless tenth
birthday in Athens, the simmering relationship between my father and mother
finally came to full boil.
That midnight I was wakened by my mother, and drugged with sleep was
helped to dress and led downstairs to the car, where Costello was waiting for
us. Then we were driven to a hotel off Syntagma Square where we spent the
rest of the night. Next afternoon we were on our way to Paris by train, and the
following day set up in the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli.
It was not until then that my mother took me into her confidence. She was
in no mood to mince words. Father had made Mother very, very unhappy, so
they were separating now and would divorce later. Mother had done her best
to make a loving home for all of us, but it was simply no use.
She squeezed my hand. “You do understand, darling, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. Then I said hopefully, “Will we live here in the hotel?”
“I will, darling, but you’ll be living at school. A delightful school. Le
Lycée Anglais d’Auteuil, not a half-hour from here. You start next week.”
C’est la vie.
Well, it was a lycée, a “middle school,” and it was certainly planted
right there in Auteuil on the outskirts of town, but how that Anglais came to be
part of its title is something else again, because of its several dozen youthful
boarders — we ranged in age from the innocent eights to the sophisticated
sixteens — I was the only one to whom English was the native tongue.
In his brochure describing his institution, Monsieur Stampfli, founder
and headmaster, summed it up neatly. Here is a school which allows the
growing child himself to determine his course of study so that in the end he
emerges as a gloriously creative force in society. In practice, this meant that
one attended classes which entertained one and disregarded those which
didn’t, a process that made for a sketchy education at best. But the atmosphere
was amiable, the cuisine sufficient, and the library well stocked, so I had no
complaints in that direction.
The one item in the curriculum that required at least a show of
attendance was outdoor athletics, and a large, unevenly marked-off football
field with wobbly goal posts and torn net was provided to that end. Here it
8
was that I discovered I had an undreamed-of talent. I was agile and tough, I
was brainlessly unafraid of getting a boot in the shins or an elbow in the eye,
and with very little effort I could make that battered old soccer ball do tricks.
This became one of my distinctions among my peers. The other was
awarded me much against my will when the news of my parents’ divorce hit
the press. Stuck away here, a few thousand miles from America where the
divorce proceedings were being held, I could not, of course, get a first-hand
view of the mess, but I didn’t have to. My schoolmates — especially the
seniors, avid scandalmongers — were right on the ball.
For a couple of weeks they had all the grist they needed for their mill. It
was a mess all right, considering my father’s hitherto secret career as elderly
Don Juan; it was featured in the Paris papers, earned a gaudy half-page in the
London News of the World illustrated with photographs not only of my father
and mother, but also of a lissome British beauty in a barely discernible swim
suit. And finally, courtesy of Jean-Pierre de Liasse, our senior of seniors, I
was shown the two-page spread in the magazine Paris-Match where my
parents now appeared in the pictorial company of several Continental beauties
out of my father’s past. Paris-Match also played up the aged husband-youthful
wife theme, thus making me aware for the first time that my father was almost
the age of my grandfather Hanna, and somehow this seemed the most shocking
revelation of all.
A mess all right. “Un vrai micmac,” as Jean-Pierre de Liasse cheerfully
put it in kitchen French.
He and a handful of the other seniors, smokers and winebibbers all, took
to using my study as a sort of clubhouse during this bad time. I lived with that,
not only because I lacked the nerve to order them out, but because I sensed that
they were, under the hard-boiled talk, trying to be kind to me. Trying, in their
way, to fortify me against the wallops the older generation keeps landing on
the younger in their wild swinging at each other.
Jean-Pierre, at least as hard-boiled as a twenty-minute egg and the
school’s reigning nobleman — he was, in fact, Monsieur le Comte de Liasse
ever since his father had hit a
n oil slick at Le Mans while under full
acceleration — Jean-Pierre it was who put it in a nutshell. “Il jete sa gourme,
votre père. Your old man’s getting off his rocks while he can, that’s all. No
harm done. That’s how it is with all us men.”
9
“It doesn’t hurt to be a little discreet about it though,” remarked another
senior, and Jean-Pierre shrugged. “One gets careless at times. Then you get a
stink in the papers, especially if they can call papa a distinguished diplomat
and mama an international beauty. But our David is a tough one, right? He
looks the situation over, he says that’s life, that’s how it is with the old folks,
no sweat for me. J’m’en-fichisme. It’s the only way.”
Right. J’m’en-fichisme, that was the name of the game. Total
indifference. No sweat for me, baby, whatever goes on out there. It’s the cool
one who’s the real hero.
Not bad at all, having those seniors mark me as a cool one.
10
Now and then, mail arrived.
Affectionate little notes in violet ink from my mother on the Hôtel Meurice
stationery, each violet i capped not by a dot, but by a perfect tiny circle. Stern
messages from my father on State Department stationery in which I was
admonished to practise thrift — hard to do otherwise, considering my meager
allowance — and to heed my instructors. Long, chatty letters from my
grandmother, with a few teasing words appended by my grandfather.
Finally one day there arrived, not one of those notes from the Meurice,
but my mother herself, driving up in her own shining new little car and with a
stranger in tow. A smallish, gray-haired man, deeply tanned, and speaking in
an almost too precise Berlitz English. This, my mother said so brightly that it
raised my hackles with premonition, was a very dear friend, Mr. Periniades.
Milos Periniades. A Greek gentleman who lived in Rome and had business
here in Paris. And when in departing my mother said to me sotto voce, “You
do like him, don’t you, darling? I can see you do,” the sense of premonition
was overwhelming.
I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him any better on their next visit either. So
when the marriage took place in Rome, although I was invited to attend, I
made a point of reporting to the infirmary with an imaginary disease a day
before the event and spent the occasion malingering.