The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  • • •

  “Men!” said Pablo Picasso’s friend Natalia Hughes, the first morning I was with her, vomiting wearily into a slop bucket. She wiped my forehead and tsk-tsked in sympathy.

  Madame Natalia Hughes was the widow of Eugène Hughes, wine merchant of Grasse, and before that the widow of Senia Alexandrov of St. Petersburg, and daughter of Vladimir and Eugenia Rodyanov, also of St. Petersburg. Outcasts of the revolution. That’s what she called her parents, and herself and her first husband. “They drove us from our homes! And when I think of the poor tsar and tsarina and their children . . .” She shook her frizzed, slightly orange curls.

  Madame Hughes was seventy when she first opened her door to me, eyed me up and down for several minutes, then said, with her Russian-accented French, “You’d better come in. You don’t look well. Come, come.”

  After a very long day of trains and buses through the foreign south of France, I had arrived in Grasse. It was already late and dark and cold in the way that ancient stone towns can be cold, giving off an accumulated damp chilliness as soon as the sun sets.

  Natalia Hughes’ house was off the main square, place aux Aires, high up in the center of town, behind a large three-tiered fountain. Her house was ochre, like the other houses, steep and tall with a very austere facade adorned only by peeling pale blue shutters. There was a little terrace off the downstairs sitting room, just large enough for a table and three or four chairs.

  I could see for miles from that terrace, down to the other tiny gardens of houses on streets below us, to the lavender fields and olive orchards beyond Grasse, and the slumbering stony hills beyond the fields. When I walked to the other side of town, to the south, I could see all the way down to the ocean, miles and miles away, so steep were the hills. But all of those discoveries were made in the days to come, when I wandered the old city, trying to feel as little as possible, because when emotions did surface, they were anger and fear and more than a touch of simple self-pity. That first evening I was too exhausted for anything but a quick handshake and a sincere thank-you.

  “Pablo says you are an intelligent girl,” Madame Hughes said, taking my suitcase and carrying it up a narrow, steep flight of stairs, her hair shining like a torch leading the way. “That is important to me, that you are an intelligent girl. And you read nicely? You will read to me. We will keep each other company. Until your baby comes.”

  “Until my baby comes,” I agreed, having no idea what would happen after that.

  Perhaps I am making this sound an easy thing for me, this journey to Grasse, to my life as a mother without a husband.

  It was not. Some days I did nothing but walk all day, up and down the twisted, narrow streets, feeling like an animal caught in a maze. I missed Paris the way a person is missed, with pain and regret.

  I thought often of a plaster death mask I had seen once in Paris, at the Quai du Louvre. This was where L’Inconnue de la Seine, the drowned girl fished out of the Seine in the 1880s, had been found.

  All the artists of Paris had a copy of her death mask, that lovely sixteen-year-old girl who, fifty years before, had thrown herself into the river. The doctor who had prepared her for burial, after she had been taken back from the river to which she had given herself, had fallen in love with her and made a mask of her face. Her smile was as lovely as that of the Mona Lisa and the surrealists adopted her as a symbol of their own lost loves . . . or perhaps a symbol of the fragility of life and beauty. I thought of L’Inconnue often.

  But just as my thoughts turned dark during those days of walking the old town, I would turn a corner and see a stone house with potted flowers on the windowsills, bright red geraniums and mossy ferns against gray stone and ochre, and somehow the colors gave me courage . . . the colors of the flowers, and the permeating scents accumulated from the surrounding lavender fields and jasmine farms. Grasse had once been a glove-making city, and because tanning leather is a smelly process at best, it soon also had a few perfumers to scent the gloves. By the nineteenth century, Grasse had become the perfume capital of France.

  I had fled to the center of the world my father had told me about, where amber, jasmine, rose, cedarwood, vanilla, geranium, and rosemary and all the lovely scents met in little glass bottles displayed in shopwindows. The perfumes I had sold at Boulet’s had mostly come from Grasse. In a way, I had come home.

  Grasse, though, was not an easy city to love. Paris had been light and open and festive. Grasse was closed, dark, somber, especially in the shortening autumn days. Paris played and flirted and tempted. Grasse held her secrets dark and close. There were few straight lines in the city, few opportunities to view any expanse longer than half a block ahead, unless I climbed to a high hill to see the landscape or the ocean.

  Even time seemed lost. I could walk over tiles set in place a thousand years ago, and then pass a house where a radio was playing Duke Ellington. Time turned and twisted on itself.

  As days turned to weeks, I began to feel safe there. Not happy, and also not unhappy. Just existing, in the way that animals exist, eating and sleeping and feeling that new growth in the womb. I found a new rhythm to my life, and new friendships, new thoughts in new mornings.

  In exchange for room and board, I was to cook and clean for the two of us, and read to Madame Hughes in the evenings when she did not want to play her piano. I went to the butcher and the greengrocer to get ingredients for our noonday meal. As they simmered away on the stove, I rested, hand on my belly. Madame and I ate together in her tiny dining room, surrounded by lace doilies and statues of the Virgin Mary and dozens of silver-framed photographs topping the side tables and bureau.

  Sometimes in the evenings, Madame played her piano. She was a magnificent pianist, her long nimble fingers dancing up and down the keys as she played Chopin and Schubert, Liszt and Borodin.

  For Sunday dinners, Madame Hughes invited her oldest friends, Monsieur and Madame LaRosa, to join us. They were a handsome middle-aged couple, he impressive with a full beard just beginning to turn gray, she well rounded in shape and with a quick smile. Her perfume was Guerlain’s Parfum des Champs-Élysées and she was in love with all things Parisian, though she had never been there. I thought that was why she liked me: I had lived in Paris. His family was one of the larger landowners in the area, and supplied much of the jasmine and lavender the perfume factories used. His great-grandfather had been invited to meet Queen Victoria when she vacationed in Grasse a hundred years before. People in Grasse did not forget things like that.

  Monsieur LaRosa was much amused by my ability to name the different oils in perfumes with just one or two sniffs, and every Sunday he would bring a different sample to test me: old-fashioned Jardin de Mon Curé, smelling much like my father’s old garden, full of roses and lavender; the new Arpège with its modern notes of honeysuckle, coriander, and vetiver; Jicky, with its blended notes of bergamot, rose, and coumarin.

  Some of his perfumes were quite old, dating to Napoleonic France. His family had made a point of collecting them much the way other people collect fine wines.

  “God made Grasse so that the world could have perfume,” was his motto, repeated several times each visit.

  The other people of Grasse, the shopkeepers, the postman, the local gendarme, were politely formal with me. They were accustomed to having strangers in their midst, the occasional vacationer who wandered south from Paris or north from Nice. Such people did not stay and so did not matter. It seemed I was staying. I was certain there was plenty of speculation and gossip about Madame Hughes’ new companion.

  Madame Hughes and I soon grew close in the way that women do when there is a great age gap between them: I found her interesting and she found me amusing. She would tell stories of her early years in St. Petersburg, the glittering balls and sable coats, dancing in the style of Isadora Duncan in her short Grecian tunic for the court at the Summer Palace; the time she had given a private pi
ano recital for the tsarina Alexandra and her children, and how the children had spun around and danced when she played “The Flight of the Bumblebee.”

  Her husband, Senia, had been part of Tsar Nicholas’ special guard, an older man devoted to his young wife. And then, the revolution, that terrible leaving behind of all that was known, the flight to safety in a foreign country.

  “Never again will I be forced from my home,” Madame Hughes would exclaim, waving her long fingers with their many rings. “Sleeping in dirty hotels with bedbugs, depending on strangers and never knowing if you can trust them. No. I came here. Here I stay.”

  Southern France was spiced with these old Russian émigrés. The men, nodding over their cafés crèmes and brandies, could be seen in the cafés; their wives and daughters worked in shops and salons all along the Riviera.

  Madame’s first husband had been wiser than many of the other Russian émigrés, though, and saw all too clearly that on a permanent basis the seaside would become too popular, too expensive for them, so he bought a little house in Grasse, in the hills, or as the locals called it, the balconies of the Riviera. A song, Madame said. That’s what he paid for it. She always fluttered her veined hands at this point in the story, indicating the flaking paint on the yellow walls of her sitting room, the scuffed, unvarnished floor underneath the threadbare Oriental carpets. A year after moving there he collapsed one day while watering a potted lemon tree, and never recovered.

  “My poor Senia,” she would say. “He was a very passionate man.” She would wink. “Perhaps if he had been calmer . . .” Five years later she married Monsieur Eugène Hughes, of Grasse. Monsieur Hughes had been calm, but he died anyway, three years after the wedding.

  “I have not had good luck with my marriages,” she would conclude, sighing. “Thank heavens Senia left me with my son, Nicky. Eugène and I had no children. I was, you understand, no longer young.” Sigh. A shake of the head. A playful smile as she remembered things she did not wish to tell me.

  Madame lived frugally, content with her chipped china and moth-damaged curtains and the other possessions that had survived years and events that fragile people had not survived. Her most valued possession was the baby grand piano. She stroked it every time she passed it, murmured words of love and encouragement.

  Pablo, in his letter to her, had not told her I was pregnant and she admitted, years later, that her first impulse had been to throw me out, that first morning when she held my head as I vomited into a slop bucket. Madame was not enthusiastic about having a child in the house. All that noise. And the scandal! But I had looked so pitiful, she explained. Far too young to be on my own.

  Her one child, now forty-five years old, was a widower who ran a seaside hotel in Nice, and a city hotel in Lyon. That was how she had met Pablo Picasso. He had stayed at the Nice hotel some years ago and Nicky had bought some of Pablo’s early works. Those drawings were now worth a pretty penny and Monsieur Picasso wrote to her twice a year, inquiring after her health. Et voilà! Again, that fluttering of hands for emphasis.

  Picasso, Lee had once told me, kept track of people who owned his works, making sure they did not sell them cheaply or even, sometimes, without his permission. It was one of his methods for controlling his prices and his reputation. “He’s clever, that little Spaniard,” Lee had said.

  In Grasse, Madame and I were both outsiders in a place where families went back for generations. We were part of the great diaspora of people discontented or endangered by their native geography and so forced to inhabit foreign places.

  By agreement, the father of my child was never mentioned, not even after my belly grew so big I looked like I had swallowed a watermelon whole. Not being able to talk about Jamie to anyone was like losing him all over again, but it was good preparation for my future as a mother without a husband.

  When I went and stood in line under the awning of the greengrocer’s to get vegetables for our evening soup, I listened as Madame Casseli complained about her husband’s snoring, and Madame Brialy sighed over her husband’s gambling. They would mutter together with genuine pleasure, women full with their men, their lives.

  “How is Madame Hughes today?” Madame Brialy would ask me. “And the baby? Does the kicking wake you up at night? You look pale.” No one asked about my husband. They politely called me madame rather than mademoiselle, but they knew. Scandal has a scent to it that good housewives easily pick up, a tang of history and failed reputation, perhaps like the methane sourness given off by apples gone bad.

  The butcher, Monsieur Bonner, did not call me madame or mademoiselle but only Nora, as if we were old friends. He looked at me too long and too hard, and once he put his hand on my belly. I slapped it away. He sneered and the cut of beef he sold me that day was full of gristle.

  One night in February when winds rattled the shutters and a damp cold filled the house, I mentioned to Madame Hughes that I had not written to my mother for several months. Madame tsk-tsked and brought down from her desk a pen and inkwell and several sheets of thick cream-colored stationery. “You will tell her,” she ordered. “She must know there is to be a grandchild.”

  It was difficult to write that letter, saying the words that mothers were terrified to hear: a child, no husband. We had never been very close and in Grasse I felt even more distant from her than I had in Paris. Yet Madame was right. Momma had to be told. I wrote the letter and posted it the next day.

  My mother wrote back a month later, saying “I told you so,” and “don’t plan on coming home any time soon.” Not till it was sorted out, though what she meant by sorted out I didn’t understand. Jamie, she wrote, had come home from Paris and was in New York City, taking photographs for the society columns. “Is he the father?” she wanted to know. “Or did you act like a real tart, there in Paris? Why is Jamie in New York with Lee Miller? I just don’t understand you young people.”

  My mother had enclosed a clipping from the World-Telegram showing Lee in her French beret and fur coat, smiling into the camera from the railings of the arriving ship. The reporter had described her as the most beautiful woman in the “cargo of celebrities” on board and Lee herself was quoted as saying she was coming home to photograph Americans, because “everyone here is so good-looking.” Behind her, appearing a little lost in the crowd, was Jamie, looking not toward the camera, but at Lee.

  Jealousy put a vise around my chest so that it was hard to breathe.

  “You know this woman?” Madame Hughes was reading over my shoulder. She leaned close to me and I smelled the lavender of her clothes, the orange water she used to rinse her hair, her perfume heavy with amber and tea rose.

  “Yes, I know her.”

  She took the newspaper clipping and studied it. “Very lovely. But there is trouble in her face.” She put the clipping facedown on the table.

  I wrote back, denying that Jamie was the father. Let Mother make of it what she would.

  She wrote again some months later, including newspaper clippings of the doings of Lee Miller. Salt in the wound. I thought she sensed my trouble and did it on purpose. She sent the clipped and saved pages from Vogue showing Lee modeling a sequined evening gown by Lanvin, and ads for Lee’s new photography studio on East Forty-eighth Street, extolled as the American branch of the Man Ray School of Photography. Lee had left Man, but not his connections, not his useful reputation.

  • • •

  My child was born in June, when Grasse was filled with the fragrance of blooming roses. It was a difficult birth and the workers who marched down the street carrying baskets of dawn-picked roses for the perfume factories must have been appalled by my screams. The midwife’s concerned face terrified me because I thought I saw death in it; the pain was that bad. I fought her for a day and a half, and when the baby was finally put in my arms, I was too exhausted to do anything but count the fingers and toes before I fell into a feathery unconsciousness.

 
; “She’s hungry,” Madame Hughes said when I woke up. “You must feed her now.”

  The baby’s eyes met mine. She waved her minuscule fists. What I experienced was not so much love, not at first, though of course a mother loves her child, but a sense of being taken over, occupied, much as an army occupies a country. One hopes for a peaceful outcome, but my life was no longer my own.

  Thankfully Madame Hughes did not ask me to leave her home. She had been completely won over by the baby. Instead, she opened a larger room for me and equipped it with a new mattress, new curtains, and a cot for Dahlia. When Dahlia was a few months old, she was baptized. Madame Natalia—we were on more familiar terms by then—insisted on this, and she insisted that Monsieur LaRosa and his wife be the godparents. “He is powerful, influential,” she said. “People listen to him.”

  She invited all the neighbors to come and celebrate with us, and fed them chicken and cheeses and fruits. “A great expense!” she wailed with the usual flurry of her ringed hands. “But it must be done. Bad luck if not!” So I stood at the baptismal font, in the ancient Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Puy, dizzy from lack of sleep, and watched as the priest dribbled water over Dahlia’s tiny pink forehead and pronounced the words that made her a member of the church and the Notre-Dame congregation. I thought perhaps my father, with his old Catholic French heritage, would have been pleased.

  Later, I learned that the only reason the priest had agreed to the baptism of the fatherless child was because Monsieur LaRosa, who had agreed to pay for certain repairs to the church, had insisted.

  I announced the birth in a letter to my mother, who after several months of angry silence sent me a package with booties and a little cap and a warning that she hadn’t mentioned her granddaughter to anyone in Poughkeepsie. She also enclosed new clippings about Lee punctuated with her own gossip. Lee had been ill. Fatigue and overwork and perhaps a little too much drinking and dancing, most people suspected, but I knew better. It was that old lingering poison from her rape, the gonorrhea. When she was stressed or overworked, she had to go to bed for days, sometimes weeks. It had happened once or twice in Paris as well, though we had never discussed the true cause of her illness.