The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

She went into the back room behind the counter . . . the same one Nicky used to emerge from, wiping coffee from his mustache with a pristine hotel napkin. When she returned and handed me the envelope with my name written in unfamiliar handwriting, those hopes that had begun to rise fell once again.

  It was only an unpaid bill from my seamstress.

  • • •

  It was too painful to stay at Nicky’s hotel, so I took a room in a private house—everyone had “rooms for rent” signs up, trying to bring in a little money—and for two days I walked up and down the oceanfront, unwilling to go home to Grasse, to tell Natalia there was no word from her son. Nice was once again full of Americans and French, many still in uniform, but no more elderly gentlewomen from England, and certainly no Austrian barons. On the second day I ran into one of Nicky’s old waiters, Jean Carles. He was sitting on a bench, watching the waves roll in and out and break up the three-toed claw prints the seagulls left in the sand. Jean’s hands were jammed into the pockets of an old, frayed coat and he hadn’t shaved.

  Those were the easiest changes to observe, because the younger Jean had been handsome and vain and well dressed. Now he was thin and dull-eyed. I sat next to him and after a few minutes he roused enough curiosity to look at me. He recognized me.

  “He won’t be coming back,” he said. “They shot him, at the École de Santé in Lyon. They said he fell from a window, but that was a lie. They executed him because he wouldn’t give names.”

  Nicky, my lover, my friend. To die like that. Alone. I couldn’t let myself think too much of what he had gone through before that final bullet ended the pain.

  Jean and I sat together for a while, watching the waves and seagulls, not talking. I wouldn’t be seeing Nicky again and the sadness was overpowering.

  I rehearsed in my head what I would say to Natalia, realizing there were no soft words, no gentle way, to announce the death of a son.

  • • •

  After events such as those, life does not return to normal. You must create a new existence, one full of holes and regrets. If grief were a perfume, it would be all top notes with nothing to follow. Bottle by bottle, we sold the wine Nicky had told us to store before the war. We lined up for ration coupons; we planted tomatoes on the terrace. I sewed curtains and a new school uniform for my child. We had the piano tuned and encouraged Natalia to try to play it, but the music was dead for her. When my daughter laughed, she did it behind her hands, as if in secret, because the laughter was gone.

  You go on, and you walk with ghosts beside you.

  The perfume factories woke up from the enforced slumber of war shortages and began production in earnest, trying to fill an already-waiting market eager for pleasure and luxury. I easily found work in the factories as a translator, an office girl. I also worked in the lavender fields, moving down the rows of plants, snipping flower heads and laying them carefully in baskets. The physical strain of that labor felt good, felt right. It felt good to go home with an aching back, too tired to speak. Natalia had already fled into her own private silence. Her grief became a wordless, stony one. The stories she used to tell disappeared, and the music as well. She sat by the window looking out into the street, refusing to give up the wait for the son who would never again come up that path and knock on that door.

  • • •

  Now begins the saddest story I know, how a mother loses her daughter, how a war never really ends but ripples through the rest of your life in ways you may not expect.

  Natalia had lived for hope, and once she knew Nicky was dead, she gave up that hope. She died the next year, of a weak heart. Her last words were in Russian, and I heard her say “Nicky” several times. When she was in her bed, struggling for breath, she looked through me into corners of the room, seeing things I couldn’t see. Her fingers moved over the covers as if she were playing a waltz, and then her breath rattled in her throat and the fingers lay still.

  Dahlia seemed to come to an end of her resilience, with the death of the woman who had been a grandmother to her. She wept inconsolably and would not return to school or her studies for weeks, not until I reminded her that Natalia had hoped she would go on to university and study languages or music. Only then did Dahlia agree to go back to the school in Grasse and begin to make up for the lost time during our exile in Switzerland and the disruptions of the war, working at the dining room table from late afternoon until midnight.

  I would sit on the sofa opposite the double doors to the dining room and glance at my child, my lovely child, looking pale and somehow saintly, like a church painting of the Virgin, her face lit by the single lantern she used, all else in dark shadows.

  My knitting needles would clack the way Natalia’s once had; I had found bags of wool stashed in Natalia’s dresser, good prewar wool that had somehow been left behind during the scavenging years. Dahlia took an occasional break from her work, to stretch and talk for a few minutes. She began again to ask questions about her father. What foods had he liked? Was he a good dancer?

  I searched for and found stuck in the back of a desk drawer the old photos Lee had taken in Paris. The edges were mouse-chewed and damp, but there were Jamie and me at the Dôme; Jamie in Man Ray’s studio setting up the lights, black cords twisted around his hands; Jamie and me mugging for the camera outside the Closerie des Lilas, where years before Hemingway had liked to drink.

  Ah, that youth, that freedom.

  “He was handsome,” Dahlia said, holding the photos close to her face and squinting.

  “Very,” I agreed.

  “I would like to meet him. Can we go back to Poughkeepsie, just for a visit?”

  Travel was still difficult then, and expensive. “I have to save up a bit,” I said. “It will take a while.” Natalia had left me the use of her house for as long as I wanted, and then it would go to a distant cousin. Meanwhile, there were taxes, repair bills, all more than the small salary I was earning.

  Was Jamie even alive? The thought, not a new one, clenched my chest with fear and loss. Once the States had entered the war, he would have been certain to enlist, to do his bit. More than once during those years in Switzerland, I had worried about Jamie, and then felt guilty because I should have been thinking of Nicky.

  “Tell me about my father,” Dahlia said one evening, sitting next to me.

  I pulled her close and brushed back her hair, noticing the recent change in its texture. When she was little, her dark hair had been so fine that ribbons and bands would fall out of it a minute after being tied, as if the hair had a rebellious life of its own. Now, though glossy, it could be held back with pins and ribbons; it was obedient, subdued. They had to come, I supposed, those first days of womanhood for my child, but if I could have delayed them, I would have; I would have kept her small and safe forever.

  “He was a baker’s son,” I said. “And an athlete. A high school football hero. And he wanted to be an artist. A photographer.”

  “Why not a painter or a musician?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to take pictures of things as they were, not reinvent them.”

  “Maybe I’ll study photography.”

  “They don’t teach it in colleges. You’d have to apprentice to someone who already has a studio and work like a slave. You wouldn’t like that,” I added, remembering Man Ray’s studio: the nude models, some of whom were prostitutes, the alcohol, the drugs, the sex. “I thought you wanted to study art history. Vermeer, wasn’t it? The old Dutch masters?”

  “Tell me more about Jamie,” she said. I did. All the stories I thought she might want: the ambulance chases in New York for those tabloid photos, the boat across the Atlantic, nights of dancing the Charleston, his sadness in London when the galleries didn’t want his work. Our years in Paris: the cafés, the panther in the zoo. “And then he fell in love with someone else,” I ended.

  “I think I’ll start reading the Amer
ican writers,” Dahlia announced the next week. “I’m tired of Balzac and Verlaine.”

  Dahlia was getting ready to leave me, to leave France, but I missed the signals. I think the war was partly to blame. Even people native to France wanted to leave; there were too many difficult memories and still too much hardship, and even when the war was over, it wasn’t really over.

  There was, primarily, the question of collaboration and the trials of the collaborators. Who had worked with the Germans and who had merely done what they could to survive, and where was the dividing line?

  Was it collaboration to maintain one’s old work of selling perfumes, once all the customers were German? When one sold perfume to the German officers vacationing in Nice, was one also selling possible information? When did survival become collaboration, and collaboration treason?

  I began to worry that they would come for me, and I had reason to worry. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and questioned—store owners, mechanics, wine sellers, doctors, priests, hairdressers, as well as Philippe Pétain, head of the Vichy state during the war. Pétain had been tried and found guilty and sentenced to death, though that was changed to life imprisonment.

  News of the trials, one after another, dozens a day, filled our newspapers. But the secret justice was most feared: in the street, in cafés, in their own homes. Pistols put to the head, triggers pulled.

  “You’d think people would want to put it behind them,” Madame LaRosa said one evening. “This need for revenge will do no good.” She didn’t visit as frequently once Natalia was gone, and we no longer shared Sunday afternoon dinners. Monsieur LaRosa had had a stroke and did not leave the house. “And if we all sought revenge for everything that had happened . . .” She put down the newspaper she had been reading and stared thoughtfully into the dining room, where Dahlia sat with her books and papers.

  “Things happened here, when the war was ending, when the chaos seemed even worse than the war,” she said quietly. “To the women and the girls. Housewives sold themselves for a bar of soap, a loaf of bread. Young girls gave themselves for a pair of nylons or a chocolate bar. We didn’t talk about it. And there was worse, girls taken right out of their houses or stopped while going about their business.”

  Madame LaRosa turned down the radio. We’d been listening to a music program, popular songs about homecomings and bluebirds. End-of-war music that for a few minutes allowed the listener to believe in happy endings.

  “Sentimental, aren’t they?” Madame LaRosa said. She cleared her throat. “It wasn’t always soldiers,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t always soldiers and strangers.”

  A second memory of that homecoming night: André Bonner, the butcher’s son, leaning against a wall, waiting, followed quickly by the old memory of Lee in her white dress, stepping off her front porch.

  In the dining room, Dahlia sighed and closed her book with a thump. “I hate Greek,” she said, smiling, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Can I come sit with you?”

  “Yes.” She was old enough. She should hear whatever Madame LaRosa had to say.

  “Why didn’t they stop them?” I asked. “The police, the fathers and brothers.”

  “Because the men involved had friends who would protect them from accusations. It was war. There were more important things to worry about. That was what they said.”

  “Accusations of what?” Dahlia said.

  “Rape.” The word hung in the air like a sword.

  • • •

  On an evening in May I returned from a day of work at the perfume factory. Dahlia was in the kitchen, nibbling a pencil and frowning over the hated Greek translation she had yet to complete. Soon she would have to take her exams and decide where and what to study. I hoped she would be admitted to the Sorbonne, but Dahlia seemed indifferent to the possibility of living and studying in Paris.

  “Momma, there’s a letter from Poughkeepsie,” she said, pushing the mail toward me over the table. “Open it, quickly.” She brushed the hair out of her eyes and looked at me. She was already several inches taller than I was and to see this almost-grown child looking up, her face as shining as it had been on her first school day, undid me.

  “Who is it from?” Dahlia stood and tried to read over my shoulder.

  “Your father.” I had to sit down, quickly. It was an unseasonably hot day and my hands still smelled of jasmine, an almost overpowering smell in that still, closed room.

  Dahlia sat, too, her mouth a round O of surprise.

  Jamie’s handwriting had changed. It had a wobble, a tilt, a sense of rush.

  Dear Nora,

  I’ve been thinking about you. Showed some old photos to Clara yesterday and the one of you at the lake slipped out of the album. Remember that day you fell in? Clara could tell from my face that more than a dunking happened that day. I remember what happened afterwards. No more need be said. I wrote to your mother in Los Angeles and she says you spent the war in France and Switzerland. Why didn’t you come home, Nora? Is it because of what happened between us? That was so long ago. You shouldn’t stay away. Not because of that.

  I was with the U.S. Sixth Army Group in ’44 when they invaded southern France. I was probably just miles away from you. Got a little shrapnel in my shoulder, but nothing serious. After the armistice I went up to Paris for a bit but didn’t stay long. Was homesick for Poughkeepsie, believe it or not. There were times in Paris, Nora, when we were there together, that I thought I’d never want to be anywhere else. Things change, don’t they?

  I hope you don’t mind that I wrote to you. I was just wondering how you were. Write, if you get the chance.

  Jamie had written the letter on stationery from Tastes-So-Good Bakery and my mouth flooded with the remembered taste of vanilla and cinnamon and the smell of the floor of the van where we first made love.

  Dahlia took the letter from me and held it almost reverently.

  Then, she folded the letter carefully and gave it back to me. She stood and put a pot of water on the old coal-burning stove, beginning supper preparations. She moved strangely, like someone in an unfamiliar place who doesn’t know where the sharp corners are, the dangerous steps up or down. Her world had been reconfigured in the space of one letter, a few sentences.

  “You must write to him,” she said, peeling a potato. “You must tell him about me.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. She looked so much like him. The old hurt was still there, that betrayal and rejection when he chose Lee, not me. But a stronger feeling overwhelmed it, and that was my love for Dahlia. If she wanted the moon, I would pull it down for her. If she wanted her father, she would have him. With Nicky and Natalia gone, her family in Grasse had shrunk to only me and she needed more.

  “I’ll write to him tomorrow,” I said.

  “When I come home from school, maybe I’ll add a P.S. before you post it. That will surprise him. ‘Dear Father.’” Dahlia grinned.

  But Dahlia didn’t come home from school the next day.

  Her usual arrival time came and went and she didn’t show up. I was surprised. She was usually punctual. Children who grow up in wartime know better than to let their whereabouts go unaccounted for. Then dusk came. No Dahlia. I was angry. My serious child was becoming a little flighty, staring into mirrors when she thought I didn’t see, fussing over clothes, daydreaming over her homework. I wondered if she had a beau and hadn’t told me.

  But when it turned dark and she still wasn’t home, anger turned to fear. I put on a cardigan because the spring night had turned chilly, and walked to the places where I thought she might be: the café where she and her friends sometimes ate cakes after their classes; the bookstore, which was already closed and dark inside. I walked toward her school, thinking she had been hurt, had twisted her ankle or fallen on the steep cobbled street; perhaps she was waiting for me and crying in pain, but I couldn’t find her.

 
“I will wake up from this,” I began to tell myself. “It’s only a bad dream.” But it wasn’t a dream.

  I broke into a run, but she was not on any street where I might have expected to find her. By the time I made it to Madame LaRosa’s house, I was sobbing and incoherent. Pale with fright, she went upstairs to make sure her husband was safely asleep, then came out into the night with me. We searched the narrow streets of Grasse for hours, calling Dahlia’s name. Around midnight Madame LaRosa took me by the hand. “There is nowhere else to look. You must go home and wait,” she said.

  The thought of stepping into that house, emptied of Natalia, of Nicky, and now of Dahlia, filled me with horror.

  “Perhaps she is already there waiting for you,” Madame LaRosa said. “Come, I’ll go with you. I won’t leave you alone.”

  As soon as we entered, we heard the weeping. Dahlia was upstairs in her room. I went up the steps two at a time. She was curled up on her bed, still in her clothes. I turned on the light.

  “No,” she whimpered. “Turn it off.”

  I had already seen the torn blouse, the blood on her legs running into her socks, the bruise on her face. I went to her and rocked her, folding her small and safe into my embrace, darkness filling my chest.

  “I’ll go get the doctor,” said Madame LaRosa.

  The doctor, a young man fresh from medical studies in Paris, gave Dahlia a brief examination, cleaned her wounds, and then gave her tablets to make her sleep.

  “There shouldn’t be lasting damage,” he said confidently, and I had to press my fists against my stomach to keep from hitting him. It wasn’t his child in there, still crying in her sleep. “If signs of infection show up in a couple of weeks, call me.”

  I thought of Lee on the porch, smelling of chemicals. Not my child. “I’ll need a written statement for the police,” I said, the blackness in my chest giving way to fury.

  “Are you sure?” He looked at me with pity but also with impatience. “Do you want to put your daughter through that?”