The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  That night I slept on the far side of his bed, not letting him touch me.

  I thought of leaving France, but by then, it was too late. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the United States had entered the war; I was no longer a member of a neutral nation, no longer able to travel openly. The first convoy of Jewish deportees had been sent from Vichy to Germany and the true horrors were beginning. Even those who had once supported Pétain and the armistice with Germany now feared the future.

  “Get us out of here, Nicky,” I said the next morning.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It is time. I will make arrangements. I will keep your daughter safe, Nora. I promise.”

  Arrangements took time and there was a priority list of people needing to leave France. Others were in immediate danger: they would be shot if seen on the street, tortured if captured. We had to wait, he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When next I went into Nice a few weeks after telling Nicky I wanted to leave France, there was a “Closed” sign on the door of the hotel and the lobby was filled with German officers. All of his regular guests had been told to find lodgings elsewhere. The Allies had landed in North Africa. Germany, knowing that an Allied invasion into southern France was planned, had sent their troops into Vichy.

  “Go upstairs,” Nicky said, looking not at me but over my shoulder, watching. “Stay there and don’t open the door unless you are certain it is me on the other side of it.” I made my way through the lobby, trying to ignore the stares of the officers. Hours passed before Nicky joined me. He looked tired and anxious.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. He carried a tray with bread and a little cheese. “It’s all we have. They have emptied the kitchen, and the wine cellar. Go back to Grasse, Nora. Tomorrow. First thing. There is nothing more for you here in Nice. Wait in Grasse.”

  “You are here,” I said almost apologetically, touching his sleeve. At that moment, I did love him. He was kind and charming and gallant in a way Jamie had never been. And there I was again, comparing him to Jamie.

  “Thank you for that,” he said. For our last night together, we drank a bottle of wine he had hidden from the Germans, and sat and talked nonsense long into the small hours of the morning, telling our stories to each other, filling in the holes of the past. I told him about climbing trees with Lee, the perfume bottles lined up in my mother’s bathroom. He told me about his father’s gold cuff links, the pearl tie stud he hid in his mouth when they crossed the border out of Russia, the dog he had had as a boy that had been left behind. We gave each other our memories. And in the morning, I went home to Grasse and stayed there, waiting for word.

  • • •

  Natalia and I had three more nighttime visitors that spring. They were no longer announced. I just put food out in the evening, in case, and if it was gone in the morning, if the cups and plates had been moved, the blankets on the floor rumpled, I knew someone had been there. I wondered when our turn would arrive, when we would become nighttime travelers.

  “Uncle Nicky didn’t call me,” Dahlia said the last Sunday evening in May. It was warm and because of blackout regulations we sat in the dark, on the little terrace. Occasionally we heard a plane overhead and the loud, angry buzzing would fill our heads; there would be a moment of fear, and then the sound would begin to fade away, the dangerous humming no louder than a mosquito’s, and there would be a moment of pure joy at simply being alive.

  “He’s probably busy,” I said, caught in that moment of temporary bliss when the sound of the plane first died away completely.

  “He always calls on Sunday evening,” Dahlia said. She sounded frightened.

  “Then the lines are down. He’ll call tomorrow,” I insisted, hiding my own worry.

  Roses were blooming and the air was heavy with their scent. When I closed my eyes and inhaled, concentrating on the odor, I was transported back to the night of Lee’s last party in Paris, the night Man shot at her. The night I found her in bed with Jamie. The sense of loss and defeat went through me like electricity, as if it had all just happened.

  That overwhelming sense of dread told me that Dahlia was right. Attar of rose marked the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. Something was wrong with Nicky. The air blossomed with presentiment.

  “What’s wrong, Momma?” Dahlia reached for my hand in the darkness.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said, pressing her hand, promising both of us.

  Natalia, inside and sitting at her piano, began the gentle chords of a Chopin nocturne. She played from memory, effortlessly, but there was hesitation in some of the notes. She, too, was hoping the phone would ring. It didn’t.

  The next day, a school day, Dahlia stayed home. We were all three of us waiting. At dusk, at the end of those long hours, Solange, Nicky’s receptionist in Nice, knocked on the door.

  “Pack a bag. One small valise each,” she said. “We leave as soon as it is dark. You, too, Madame Hughes,” she said, looking at Natalia. “You must come as well.”

  Natalia crossed herself and sat heavily, as if her legs couldn’t support her. “My God,” she whispered several times.

  Dahlia, sitting at the table in the parlor, frowning over Latin conjugations, heard us and came into the kitchen. She put her arm around Natalia, and the child tried to comfort the woman. Dahlia didn’t weep or show fear. Her face looked so adult at that moment it froze my heart. She’s growing up too quickly, I thought. It’s the war.

  “What does this mean?” I asked. “What is happening?”

  Solange smiled. “He told me you would ask questions. He said, ‘Tell her it is time to go. Remember Varian in Marseille.’”

  Our old code. I could trust Solange.

  “Is Nicky coming, too?”

  “No.”

  Natalia began to moan. Quicker than I did, she saw what this meant. She put her hands over her eyes and wept. Dahlia hugged her tighter.

  “Where is Nicky?” I asked.

  Solange turned me aside and spoke quietly so Natalia couldn’t hear. “They have taken him to Lyon. We think to the École de Santé.”

  Gestapo headquarters. “My God,” I said, echoing Nicky’s mother.

  We did as Solange instructed. We packed a single bag each and left the house as it was, with dishes in the sink, Dahlia’s homework spread out over the table. Natalia paused in her sitting room. She closed up the piano, touched it lovingly. We went out into the night and Natalia looked once over her shoulder at the home where she had lived for so many years.

  “It happens again,” she said bitterly, and her Russian accent, slumbering for so long, made her words thud and growl. “I must flee and leave everything behind. First the Bolsheviks, then the Germans.”

  I felt numb with fear. Nicky had tried to prepare me, had warned me there were dangers ahead. But to think of him, that pleasure-loving, worldly man, in the bowels of the Gestapo headquarters . . . I couldn’t bear it.

  Solange and the others who took her place did not lead us to Marseille. The safe house there was already being too closely watched. Instead, we traveled in a northeasterly direction.

  Days later, sleeping in a mountain hut somewhere just outside Switzerland, I awoke in darkness, confused. A storm was raging, rattling the windows, blowing rain through a crack in my bedroom in Poughkeepsie. That was how I knew it was a nightmare. Daddy had kept our house in good repair; there had been no cracks in the window. Dahlia moaned and pressed closer to me. I put my arms around her. My daughter, my treasure. Places didn’t matter. Only Dahlia did. “Thank you, Nicky,” I whispered before falling asleep again, exhausted. He had kept my daughter safe, as he had promised.

  PART THREE

  BASE NOTES

  The bottom notes of a fragrance are recognized after approximately thirty minutes of wear, long enough for a woman to fall in or out of love, to remember the happiest or saddest days of childhood
, to reminisce about those moments when everything changed. Much can happen in half an hour. The world can change, and so the perfume must change as well, in a way that adds meaning to the notes that have gone before. The base notes are the foundation of the fragrance, the most lasting impression. When a perfume is remembered, it is usually the base notes that leave the strongest memory.

  —From the notebooks of N. Tours

  ...after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone . . . remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins . . .

  —Proust

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “My God,” Natalia said, standing in front of her house, three years later.

  The windows were boarded over with Xs of wood; paint had been splattered on the front. The window boxes had been torn away, leaving rusting nails jutting out. A ragged hole in the bottom of the door showed where the hungry cats of the neighborhood had been sleeping for the past few years. Someone had made that hole on purpose. No one can despoil a house worse than a tribe of tomcats.

  Natalia dropped her valise and rubbed her eyes as if clearing her vision might restore the house.

  Dahlia put her arm around Natalia’s shoulders. In the years that we had been gone, Nicky’s mother had developed a dowager’s hump, and she stood, bowed and comfortless, muttering softly in Russian.

  “So, you came back,” said a voice behind us.

  I turned to look. “Is that you, André?” I asked. The butcher’s son leaned against a wall smoking a cigarette. He had the same round-shouldered, chin-lifted attitude he’d had as a boy. I’d never cared for him. He looked too much like his father, spoke like him, eyed the women and girls of the town in the same way, as if they were meat to be hung in the shopwindow.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d be back. And is that little four-eyes? You’ve grown, Dahlia. Not bad looking for an American.”

  Dahlia pushed her glasses back up her nose and glared at him. “You could help us,” she said. “We need to tear down the wood so we can open the door.”

  “Don’t bother,” he said. “Side door is already open.” He slunk away, his cigarette tip glowing in the dark.

  We walked around to the side. The door wasn’t just open; it had been taken off the hinges and carted away. We walked cautiously inside, already prepared, we thought, for the worst, already so fatigued by the shock of arrival we expected we couldn’t feel much more.

  The night we’d left Grasse, it had been moonless and silent. Everyone had stayed in their homes behind tightly closed blackout curtains. No one waved farewell. No one knew we had left until several days later, I suspect, when it would have been noticed I wasn’t queuing up for our rations.

  The night we returned to Grasse, in 1945, the war was over, or at least the most visible part of it. Men sat outside the café once again, drinking, playing chess. Housewives gossiped loudly in their courtyards or shouted from window to window over the narrow streets. There were no Nazi flags, no German slogans pasted on walls, no soldiers on the streets. The people of Grasse had taken their city back for themselves.

  But the end of war does not necessarily mean peace. Coming into town, we had seen a group of young women clustered under a streetlamp on place du Petit Puy. Their heads had been shaved; several looked bruised and beaten. The retributions, the punishments of the collaborators, had begun.

  Dahlia saw the women and looked at me, frightened. I wondered if we had left the safety of Switzerland too soon. But the three of us had agreed: it was time to come home.

  The Swiss had granted us a tolerance permit, allowing us to reside but not to work, and so we had spent those years in a single attic room in Geneva, living on charity from the Quakers, in a hotel that had been converted into a hostel for war refugees. Dahlia had been allowed to attend school, and Natalia had been allowed to play the piano in the ballroom, which had been converted into a mess hall for the refugees.

  Those had been lost years, for me, unable to work, unable to return to either Grasse or Poughkeepsie, unable to do anything but live with regret and fear. When I thought about Nicky, a blackness came over me. We hadn’t heard from him or about him. We hoped he had been sent to a labor camp, because we had heard you could survive the forced labor. But there were other places you did not survive, were not meant to survive.

  Those good years, the happy years in Paris and then Grasse, were a lifetime away. Some days, walking along the shore of Lake Geneva with nothing to do but wait, I missed even Lee, and then I would remember Lee in bed with Jamie, her arms around his neck, that strange little smile on her face.

  And as I remembered, it seemed so long ago, so irrelevant. Survival mattered. Nothing less.

  “We have survived,” Dahlia said, that night of our return to Grasse. She was twelve years old and it seemed strange for my little girl to sound so grown-up.

  I was glad to be home for many reasons, but she was the main one. This was where she had been born, where she had spent happy years of childhood, and no matter where I might live in the future, Grasse would be beloved to me because it had been beloved to Dahlia. I reached over and tousled her hair.

  “We survived. The house hasn’t,” Natalia muttered.

  We walked wordlessly from damaged room to damaged room. The kitchen had been scavenged of dishes and pots and pans; the rugs and curtains had disappeared. Upstairs, clothes we had left behind no longer hung in the old wardrobes.

  “It was the war,” Natalia said. “People needed them.” But betrayal made her voice tremble.

  The devastation went beyond theft: flowered wallpaper hung in damp strips and a heavy smell of rot and cat piss filled the air. A thick layer of dust coated everything. Although much of the furniture had been taken away, probably to be burned as fuel when coal ran short, Natalia’s piano was there, out of tune but intact. She ran her fingers over the keys, tried a chord, then shut the lid.

  Dahlia’s school uniform still hung on the back of a chair. She picked it up and shook the dust off it, laughing at how small it was.

  Natalia wandered aimlessly, picking things off the floor, running her hand over dusty sills, tilting her head, listening. She had hoped Nicky would be there, waiting for us, but the silence in the house was absolute.

  “I’ll go to Nice and see if there’s any word of him,” I promised her. Those who had fled during the war were returning to their homes, but we knew many would not be coming back.

  We slept on the floor that first night, on mildewed cushions. The next day we began putting the house to rights. We carried mattresses out onto the terrace for an airing, scrubbed the floors, made arrangements for new strong doors and shutters. I went out to scour the shops for what I could find: a bar of soap, a few pots, some cloth for curtains, a handful of potatoes, a single slice of ham.

  When I returned home after hours of standing in lines and haggling, Madame LaRosa was sitting with Natalia on the old sofa. When Madame LaRosa saw me, she sprang to her feet and we hugged for a long time, each fighting back tears.

  “The police came looking for you the day after you left,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief. “That was how we found out you had gone. They came and asked us if we knew where you were. They came several times. I can’t think about what would have happened if you had still been here.” She did not ask why we had had to leave. We hadn’t been the only household sheltering fugitives.

  Madame LaRosa had brought us soup and a cake and we ate together at the dining room table that afternoon. Like old times, Natalia said, though several dining room chairs, the carpet, and the old paintings had been taken and the room felt too large because of its new emptiness.

  “I think I like the room like this,” Dahlia said. “Nice and open and sunny.”

  “Very modern,” Natalia agreed, smiling bravely.

  After lunch we went into the cobweb
bed cellar, carefully carrying a single candle so that the old dry beams wouldn’t be set ablaze. I found a heavy stone and hammered away at the false brick wall. The wine we had stored was still there, safe. Natalia selected a bottle and back upstairs, we toasted our health, our homecoming, and the end of the war. Dahlia finished an entire glass and asked for more, but I wouldn’t give it to her. “Momma!” she complained.

  “It will strengthen her blood,” Madame LaRosa said. “A second glass, just today. And then no more until you are sixteen.” She wagged her finger at us.

  Dahlia giggled and snuggled close to me on the cat-smelling sofa. Natalia looked at us, and did not smile. There was hunger in her mother’s eyes, hunger for her own child.

  • • •

  The third day of our return I took the bus to Nice.

  The city looked worse for the poverty and neglect of the war years. On avenue Jean Médecin many of the shops were boarded and closed. Nicholas’ hotel, l’Auberge de l’Opéra, needed fresh paint and new shutters. The wood floors were stained and scuffed, and the menu posted on the board out front offered only seafood stew or sausages. Nicky would have been furious.

  No one from the earlier years was working there. They were all strangers to me, and when I asked about the owner, they shrugged, they knew nothing. The hotel had changed hands.

  One woman was kind enough to ask my name, and when I told her, recognition flared in her eyes. “Wait,” she said. “When I began to work in the office last year, there was some old mail on the desk. I think one of the letters was for you. I’ll go get it.”

  A letter from Nicky. I’m safe, he would say. I’m in Portugal or Zurich. My hopes began to rise like morning mist steaming off a roof. I could feel a smile beginning to take shape on my face.