The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  My business in Nice that afternoon was even more successful than I had hoped. I met with a small group of German businessmen in a tearoom on the Promenade des Anglais, and spread out a little display of perfumes, old and new, explaining the various properties of the fragrances. Only one of the men spoke fluent French and my German was limited at best to words learned very late at night in Paris cafés . . . hardly appropriate phrases for a business meeting.

  The one who spoke French translated for his companions but gave me frequent sideways glances. I worried he was flirting. But when the orders had been placed and the deposit checks written out, he took me aside and said, “Don’t you remember me, mademoiselle?”

  I looked harder at him than I had before. Yes. He was older, dressed much more conservatively, but it was the art collector I had met that first night in Paris with Lee, the customer that wily Man had been wooing, the one who bought only Picassos.

  “Herr Abetz. How nice to see you again. How is your wife . . . ?” I couldn’t remember her name.

  “Trudie. She is well. She stays in Berlin now. Traveling no longer suits her. I am surprised you are in Nice. Did you weary of Paris?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wearied of Paris.”

  He eyed me and I thought he was seeing through that little lie. “Your friend. Miss Miller. How is she? A lovely girl. And your young man. His name escapes me.”

  “Mr. Sloane,” I said stiffly, uncomfortable with how easily he had put those two names together. Had everyone seen but me, even that very first night? I had been so busy showing off with that silly tango performance, perhaps I had missed the first telling signs.

  I stood. “So nice to see you again,” I said, offering him my hand.

  “Yes. I suspect the next time we meet, I will be in uniform. I will be commissioned.” He stood as well. “Our chancellor grows restless.”

  It was 1935 and in Germany Hitler had been elected to replace President von Hindenburg. Hitler was Führer und Reichskanzler—leader and chancellor.

  • • •

  Nicky and I quickly became friends during the day and lovers at night. I understood that when I returned to Grasse, other women would take my place. It didn’t matter. He was as elegantly polite as Aziz had been with Lee, and he kept secrets and withheld much, as I suspect Aziz did. With Jamie, love had been all or nothing. With Nicky, it was merely sensual and fun and fit neatly into a little compartment.

  There were nights when I had to have dinner with clients, German and American businessmen looking for luxury items for stores and hotels and expecting to be entertained before placing their soap and perfume orders. I wined and dined them; I flattered and even flirted a little. But at the end of the evening, after their purchase orders had been completed, Nicky would send a car and driver to pick them up and take them to the nightclubs of Nice.

  Then I would join him in his very lovely rooms on the top floor of l’Auberge de l’Opéra, where white lace curtains floated in the salty breeze and the morning sun warmed my bare legs sticking out from under the coverlet. He fussed with a coffeemaker in his green-tiled kitchenette, and I thought it was quite pleasant to be a woman of the world instead of a lovesick girl.

  All of this, of course, we kept secret from his mother. When he made his visits to Grasse, he was once again Monsieur Alexandrov.

  I did well in Grasse as a translator and seller. After a couple of years I was able to have my suits and dresses tailor-made. I bought a secondhand red Peugeot 201 and darted up and down the curving hillside roads, through olive groves and into scrubby pine forests and out again into the dazzling light of southern France. Dahlia, growing by leaps and bounds, came with me on short trips to the towns and villages around us, Vence and Pertuis and Apt, picnicking in lavender fields or meadows of wild thyme. Every two or three months I ventured south to Nice, to the perfume buyers and to Nicky.

  But sometimes it felt as if I were living someone else’s life, and somewhere in the universe there was a different woman with a different life, with a husband with tawny hair and sharp cheekbones who built a swing in the backyard for his daughter.

  The day I left Paris, I had split myself in two, like Atlas looking one way while his twin, Gadeirus, looked the other, and neither of them saw the disaster coming. I had been with Lee that day she went to photograph Blondel’s building on the rue du Louvre. I had thought she wanted to photograph the magnificent statues, but instead she photographed shadows on the street. It’s all about the light, she had said. Everything else is superfluous. I think we’re going to be friends, she said. We had been. And then, she became the disaster I hadn’t seen coming.

  Dahlia, meanwhile, became a proper little French girl, with a perfect accent. In midafternoon she ate her goûter, her bread with chocolate, and when she sang in the bathtub, she sang French nursery songs.

  She had my dark hair, but she looked more and more like Jamie, growing tall and leggy for her age, her lightly freckled cheeks stretched over emerging slanting cheekbones. I would look at her and see Jamie looking back at me, and long for the great unknown of that life with him, the life I would never have.

  One day when we were sitting on church steps near a park, Dahlia went to play with a friend. I watched bemused at the way children turn a leaf into a saucer, a pebble into a teacup. Had I played at tea? No, Lee and I had climbed trees and chased her brothers; we had been tomboys playing rough and ready. Lee. I half hated her, half missed her.

  There were only three pretend place settings on the ground, and Dahlia’s little friend, Chantal, looked at her sternly and asked where her setting for her daddy was. “One and one and one and one,” Chantal said. “Four. Not three. My daddy is coming for tea.”

  “I don’t have a daddy,” Dahlia said.

  I waited, not breathing.

  “Why not? Everyone has a daddy,” said her playmate.

  Dahlia stood. “I don’t want to play anymore,” she said. She came to me and threw her arms around my knees. I tousled her dark hair and my heart did somersaults in my chest.

  • • •

  In 1937, in the spring of the year before I turned thirty, I got a card from my mother, and a note asking me to come home. She was getting married and moving to California and wanted to see me and my daughter. “We’ll tell them you’re married and widowed,” she wrote. “Make up a name.”

  Pretend I was widowed? As if no one would see through that ploy, I thought. For one month, the planned length of my stay, I could manage the farce. But Jamie would be sure to hear about it. Gossip would flow down the streets of Poughkeepsie like rainwater.

  Five years had already passed since I had seen him. Where had the time gone? In diaper washings and bedtime stories, I thought. Evenings in Nice with Nicky. I hadn’t heard from Jamie, or tried to contact him. Maybe it was time? And what would I say?

  Stop it, I told myself. Do you expect him to run to you, fall on his knees, beg you to marry him? I had seen a silent movie once at the moving picture house in Poughkeepsie, lovers separated by the Great War, the soldier coming home to the girl, to the girl’s daughter, born while he had been in the trenches. He had done that. Fallen on his knees, begged. It was only a movie, Nora, I told myself. More likely, you won’t see Jamie at all. And if you do . . .

  If I did, I wanted the movie version, the happy ending. I would end the silence and tell him everything. We were older, wiser. The betrayal was a long time ago. We could pick up where we left off. Or maybe not. Maybe that chapter was over. But how could it be? As soon as I thought of going back to Poughkeepsie, I thought of Jamie.

  Nicky sensed my indecision. “Go back,” he said. “You can afford to take a month off. A trip may be just what you need.”

  “Do I need something, Nicky?” I asked, sitting up on my elbows. He was in the bathroom just off the bedroom, his face covered with shaving cream that made his black eyes even darker, a towel wrapped
around his waist. “Is that what you think?”

  He put down the razor and looked at me. “I think if you don’t go to your mother, you will regret it later. And who wants to live with regrets?”

  “And what will you do, all that time?” I already knew.

  “Work hard and then find ways to amuse myself, darling. And miss you every minute.”

  • • •

  Dahlia and I sailed past the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July. The statue hadn’t been there when my great-grandfather had fled France and the revolution. I wondered what that great harbor had looked like to him, that bit of rocky real estate jutting into the Atlantic, before it had its skyscrapers and monuments, when New York was still a mud-path village and France, until the guillotine, had been the center of civilization. Roles had reversed. Now I was coming from a quiet hillside village in France to the greater city of Manhattan.

  We spent the night in the city, not at the Plaza but at a hotel just one price grade down, and used cabs, not the subway. I had the strange sensation that my older self, the woman wearing the tailored suit and the professionally clipped hair, holding her daughter’s hand, might bump into her young self, that poorly dressed, lovesick girl who would follow her guy anywhere.

  My child was terrified of the fireworks and the parades and the commotion. She was not normally a fearful little girl, but we led such a quiet, calm life in Grasse. I realized how little English she knew, how for all purposes she was, in fact, a French girl. I looked at her the way I anticipated my mother would and wondered, what am I doing? Shouldn’t I bring my daughter home for good, before it is too late?

  The question was an awakening. I still thought of Poughkeepsie, or at least the United States, as home. And there was a deadline to my situation. At some point, Dahlia might become irrevocably French. Not a bad thing in itself, but it meant that if I wanted to stay with her, I, too, would have to stay in France.

  Momma met us at the Poughkeepsie train station, looking as I had never before seen her look, or at least didn’t remember her looking. She seemed younger, not the old woman I had anticipated, and her hair was bleached blond. She was slender and made-up with red lipstick and powder to hide her freckles. When she came toward me, tottering a bit on her heels, forced to take small steps by the tightness of her skirt, Dahlia hid behind my skirt and looked up at me, her eyes large with fear.

  “Nora!” Momma shouted, waving. The train was pulling out already and the noise made it impossible to hear each other. I waited till the train had chugged down the tracks, the grinding of metal on metal and the hiss of the steam dying away.

  “Hi, Momma,” I said.

  We looked at each other. We did not hug or kiss, just looked.

  “You’re older,” she said.

  “You’re younger.”

  “And who is this?” She crouched down carefully in her tight skirt, her knees twisted to the side, and extended a lace-gloved hand to Dahlia.

  “Dahlia, say hello to your grandmother,” I said.

  Dahlia stepped shyly forward and gave her grandmother a kiss on both cheeks. A French greeting. Momma wiped her face and pecked Dahlia on the mouth. Dahlia wiped her mouth. We’re not off to a great start, I thought.

  “I still haven’t forgiven you,” Momma said as the taxi took us to her new apartment. My aunt had died and left the house to Momma, who had promptly sold it along with most of the furnishings. “Leaving like that. No good-bye, no word from you for months on end. And to do what you did . . .”

  “Not in front of Dahlia,” I said. “And I haven’t asked for forgiveness.”

  Dahlia was sitting on my lap, listening intently. Forgiveness. That was an English word she did not yet know.

  Momma’s apartment was filled with new furniture from the Sears catalog: an upholstered sofa, a coffee table, swan-neck lamps twisting off the walls like modern gargoyles—lots of chrome and Bakelite—and in the bedroom, twin beds with Hollywood-style headboards of padded pink satin and bows.

  “What happened to the furniture from our house? I thought it was in storage?” I asked. We had had good, solid oak pieces passed through generations.

  “I gave it to the Salvation Army. Don’t live in the past, Nora. We have to move forward. Coffee? I bought a spice cake from the bakery. You used to love their spice cakes.”

  Had I? I didn’t remember.

  “Come on, missy,” Momma said, offering her hand to Dahlia. “Let’s have some cake.”

  We sat at the new kitchen table, all metal with folding legs so it could be stored away, Momma eyeing my suit and haircut and nodding approval. Dahlia looked at her cake as if it might bite her, and when she tasted it, she spit it back out onto her plate.

  “I want apple cake,” she said in French.

  Momma’s eyes almost fell out. “My God, Nora. My grandchild is French.”

  I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Then Momma laughed, and finally Dahlia.

  • • •

  “I just want to warn you,” Momma said the next day. Her fiancé, Harold Littlewood, was coming for cocktails, and she had invited a few “close friends” as well. I was in the kitchen stuffing the valleys of celery with cream cheese for the canapé tray. Momma, already wearing a floral sundress, very off the shoulder and short to the knees, was wiping clean a dozen rented sherry glasses.

  “Warn me about what?”

  “Jamie will be here.”

  I put the spreading knife, still loaded with cream cheese, on the table.

  “Okay?” Momma asked. “His family and I became quite friendly while you were over there in Par-ee kicking up your heels.”

  Dahlia was sitting on a kitchen chair playing with a doll her grandmother had bought her, braiding its hair and cooing to it in French.

  “What’s that funny look mean, Nora?” Momma narrowed her eyes. “You said he wasn’t the f-a-t-h-e-r, so what’s the harm? You didn’t lie to me, did you?”

  “No harm. It’s just been a long time, that’s all.” Then, quickly, “Dahlia, do you want a cookie? Are you hungry?”

  • • •

  I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to calm myself, to pretend that it would be pleasant to see Jamie, to catch up, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about him anymore. In my memory, he was the passion of my life. What was he now, in the present? Perhaps my feelings weren’t so much in the past as I had thought, because I caught myself looking in the mirror, brushing back my hair, trying to see myself as he would later that day, hoping that his eyes would light up.

  There was also the matter of my daughter. In my mind’s eye I saw that pretend tea party on the dusty ground in Grasse, the three settings instead of four because Dahlia did not have a father. The silent movie—“I didn’t know about the child, Bess! Please, marry me. Say you’ll be my little wife!”—played over and over again in my imagination. Stop it, I kept telling myself. You’re not a young girl swooning over the high school hero anymore, or even that expatriate girl in Paris, certain—mistakenly so—that her man was hers alone.

  Momma had insisted the sherry hour be formal, so we stood in line to greet her guests—first Momma closest to the door, then Mr. Littlewood, then me. Mr. Littlewood gave my shoulder an occasional pat for reassurance. He, more than Momma, guessed that this event might be painful for me. We had met the evening before, over a fish fry at Stenkel’s Grill.

  I liked Mr. Littlewood. He was a man of even temper, and he seemed to adore Momma. He was polite to me and had brought a tube of pickup sticks for Dahlia to play with, patiently explaining the game to her, how you had to throw them into a pile and them remove them, one by one, without disturbing the others. He gave her a hairbrush. “Fuller, of course. The best. It will last you all your life, little girl, long as you don’t lose it. ‘Make it work. Make it last. Guarantee it no matter what.’ That’s our motto.”

  Dahlia had l
ooked at him with large, serious eyes and offered a very grave, “Merci, monsieur.”

  “Lordy, lordy,” Mr. Littlewood had laughed. “A Frenchy!”

  Mr. Littlewood winked at me and forked a piece of fried haddock into his mouth. “In this family, the daughter is as pretty as her momma.” He gave Momma’s arm an affectionate pinch. “And Dahlia here, well, she’s going to be the real beauty, aren’t you, little miss?”

  The Sloanes were the first to arrive that afternoon, father, mother, two older brothers . . . and Jamie. They made their way down the line, shaking hands, exchanging exclamations about the weather—“excruciatingly hot”—and murmuring “how do you do’s” to Mr. Littlewood, who shook their hands and then slipped them a business card.

  I concentrated on smiling and giving my handshakes the just-right amount of pressure, but I watched Jamie out of the corner of my eye as he greeted Momma, Mr. Littlewood, and then stood in front of me.

  “Hi, Nora,” he said. “I heard you were in town. Good to see you.” The electricity between us was so strong I thought the room would catch fire. Five years disappeared.

  “I wasn’t certain you would come,” I said.

  “Why not?” He was still holding my hand, smiling.

  He looked older. Well, so did I. But Jamie also looked defeated, even more so than he had that night Julien Levy had thumbed through his photographs, bored, pretending he would give him a show next year. Jamie’s shoulders were slumped. His suit was too tight—those bakery cakes—and his hair too short. He had barbered it back to Poughkeepsie standards, cut away the long waves he had worn in Paris to look artistic. Now he looked just like the man he swore he would never be, the early-up, early-to-bed baker smelling of yeast and stooped from the worktables. My heart pounded against my ribs. Signs of age and mortality added to the tenderness of what I still felt for him. No question about it.

  “Staying long?” this new Jamie asked.

  “A few weeks. Can I get you a sherry?” God. We were like actors in a bad play.