Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [147]
The loss of the two FBI men’s lives apparently tormented Bedaux. His brother Gaston wrote that Charles Junior told him of the ‘sadness and disheartenment of his father. He was distressed that his own life had caused the death of two men.’
Charles Eugene and Charles Emile Bedaux had been cooped up together before–for two weeks at the Compiègne internment camp in September 1942 and more recently in Algiers. Theirs was an unusual distinction, that of having been prisoners of the Germans, French and Americans. In Compiègne and Algiers, they shared quarters with other prisoners. Now, they had only each other in the villa outside El Biar guarded by American Military Police. Circumstances were forcing father and son into the intimacy that they had avoided all of 33-year-old Charles’s life. There was little alternative but to speak more meaningfully than they had before. The father thought they might as well tell each other their life stories. After all, they were almost strangers.
For Charles Junior, the monologue could not have been easy. He had once viewed his father in heroic mould, as most other little boys do. His earliest memory was of flying above the French countryside in a two-seater aeroplane piloted by his father. That had been in the spring of 1914, when flying was a novelty, France was enjoying its final days of peace and Charles Emile was four. France and Germany went to war in August, and Charles Senior volunteered as an American for the French Foreign Legion. Charles Junior’s mother, Blanche, took their son home to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Thus began the first of many separations from his father.
Charles Senior was discharged in December 1914, without seeing action, after an accidental injury to his foot. He came home to Michigan, and the family took a rest on Michigan’s northern peninsula amid the wild Indian country of woods and rivers that Hemingway wrote about from his own childhood. Back in Grand Rapids, while his father grew rich and began to make himself famous as a businessman-engineer, young Charles’s world dissolved. Charles Senior’s affair in 1916 with his secretary, a young woman named Kathryn Glarum, caused tension at home. Blanche somehow convinced the mistress that they were both victims of her husband’s licentiousness, and both women left Bedaux. Blanche embarked on a tour of the Orient, taking young Charles and Kathryn with her. Aged seven, the boy would not see his father for six years.
In Japan, Blanche learned that Kathryn was communicating with her husband and sent the girl back to the United States. Continuing her eastern voyage with young Charles, Blanche met an American millionaire named Alfred Bagnall. Bagnall was, as Bedaux then aspired to be, a millionaire. Like Bedaux, he worked as an engineer–not of efficiency, but of electricity. He brought Thomas Alva Edison’s electric lighting to the Orient, first to the streets of American-occupied Manila, then to Japan. Sixty-year-old Bagnall was a philanthropist, whose charitable donations were often unsought and anonymous. When 27-year-old Blanche’s divorce became final, they married and moved with Charles Junior to Bagnall’s ranch in Orange County, California.
In the prison villa at El Biar, the son must have told his father about his education at the Harvard School on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, growing up in California during Prohibition and other aspects of his life about which the older man knew nothing. His first post-divorce meeting with his father took place in 1922, when, aged 13, the boy went to New York. It was a stiff, formal encounter in his father’s suite at the Ritz, and it did nothing to bring the absent father and abandoned son closer. The glamorous stepmother, Fern Lombard, was in the room the whole time. A few questions and answers were all the boy recalled of the meeting.
In 1929, aged 20, Charles Emile returned to New York to see his father again. He had finished school and was contemplating university, although he was already older than usual for entrance. On this occasion,