The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me! Anyone else but me, anyone else but me!” they shouted tunelessly into the night, over and over, till one by one we rose and wandered into the house, to the heat of the promised stove, the pillows and blankets spread out on the floor.

  I was the last to leave the circle of the dying fire. The stars had begun to disappear into the gray dawn, as if they were as tired of the night and the English countryside as I was.

  Instead of seeking the animal warmth and companionship of the shipwrecked group sleeping on the floor in front of the stove, I went to the room Lee had allotted me and wrapped the mildewed blanket around me. Wooden slats covered half the window, a remnant of the blackout years, but now they looked like prison bars.

  Dionysus, the god of wine and merriment, liked to ride on the back of a panther. And the medieval bestiaries of rare animals all said the same thing: the panther was the only animal with a sweet scent of its own. I fell asleep, remembering the lavender scent of my daughter’s hair.

  • • •

  I awoke with a raging headache and in complete, devastating confusion, all the beds of my life—my childhood bed in Poughkeepsie, the hard mattress of my room in Paris with Jamie, the oversoft feather mattress in my room in Grasse—all mixing together. But I was in none of them.

  A guest bed, in a guest room. Lee’s house in England. A child was crying and I thought it was another of my nightmares, that if I pulled the blanket tighter over my head and forced it, dreamless sleep would return.

  It did not. The child cried louder as I drifted in and out of sleep. The clamminess of the mildewed blanket, in my disturbed dreams, changed into the damp dirt walls of a cell and I slipped back in time to the place of waking nightmare.

  The crying continued, turning from sobs to hiccups. Dahlia had once cried ceaselessly for two days. Sleepless and frantic, I had walked with her in my arms, step after step, till I fell into the soft bed of lavender outside the door, and we both slept like that, curled into perfume, our faces so close together we breathed in each other’s breath.

  The dilapidated wildness of Lee’s house challenged me as I moved from room to room over bare, creaking floors, through cold patches where drafts merged. I had slept only for an hour or two and dizziness made my steps uncertain, but my nose finally caught the scent of coffee, and I followed it into the kitchen, where the young nanny sat with Lee’s boy, trying to feed him.

  “He doesn’t like oatmeal,” she said.

  “No,” he said, glaring at me. I poured a cup of coffee and fled.

  Lee found me later sitting under the same tree that had sheltered us during our carousing of the night before. Wilmington Man, that long and ancient figure cut into the hillside, strode in his before-the-world-was-born way, taunting. I have always been here, he seemed to be saying. I always will be here, long after you are moldering dust.

  Lee wore her battered combat boots, unlaced so that they thumped with each step, and a military jacket over her white sleeping gown. The morning light was not kind—she looked tired.

  “I hope the evening didn’t upset you,” she said, sitting next to me. “It does get out of hand sometimes. I admit, I encourage it to. There are days when the only thing that makes me want to be sober is Anthony.”

  We sat in what passed for companionable silence, listening for what we no longer heard: B17s overhead, the shrill screams of falling bombs, rifle shots. The morning was absolutely still.

  I thought, then, maybe I would tell her about Dahlia. How I, too, was in love with my child, and that child was missing, that I had come to London looking for her, and hadn’t yet found her.

  “It has taken so long to get used to the silence,” Lee said, standing. “I never thought I’d miss the noise. I never thought peace would be so hard to return to.”

  “It’s not so peaceful yet in France,” I said, remembering the jail cell in Lyon.

  “I find it difficult to speak with people these days,” Lee continued. “Especially old friends I haven’t seen in a while. God knows what life has been like for them. And what question could be asked that isn’t absolutely banal in its stupidity? For instance, tell me, Nora, was the war hard for you? Isn’t that the most banal question you’ve ever heard?”

  There was a little coffee still in the bottom, but it had gone cold and cloudy. I splashed the remains onto the stone at my feet. “Two years ago, I would have saved that bit for the next morning, and been glad to have it.”

  “I once saved a chocolate bar for a couple months, carrying it around just in case. By the time I decided to eat it, it was crawling with bugs. Such waste.”

  She wasn’t referring to the hoarded chocolate bar. Waste. War, the carnage, the revenge and retribution. Giving birth to a child, then having her disappear.

  I had been numb when I agreed to come here, but seeing Lee with her husband and child had stirred up such pain in me I wanted only to go back to Grasse.

  “What time do the boats run? Would Roland give me a lift to the ferry?”

  “Stay another day, why don’t you?”

  I sat looking down at Wilmington Man, who had been striding the hill through all the long and ancient ages. What did he think of us, the shortness of our lives, the silliness of our passions?

  From inside the house, music jumped out at us, loud as an alarm. “Kiss me once, and kiss me twice and kiss me once again, it’s been a long, long time.” Laughter, shuffling feet. Dark-haired Roland came out of the house carrying a cup of coffee. In semishadow he looked a little like a taller version of Man Ray. It occurred to me that the men Lee had been most serious about had been physical opposites of her fair-haired, blue-eyed father. Roland saw us and waved but veered off in a different direction, leaving me still alone with Lee. The sun was halfway up the sky, burning off the chill and the damp.

  “I remember the first time I saw you in Paris,” she said, leaning back and looking hard at me through narrowed eyes. “At the Jockey. You were so pretty. I thought, ‘That boy doesn’t deserve her.’ I even thought you might challenge me for Man. He was quite taken with you, you know.”

  “I remember it, too,” I said. I had stood outside the Jockey with Jamie, thinking what a grand city Paris would be for raising a child.

  “God, I miss the Jockey,” Lee said. I could hear the other guests of Farley Farm laughing, dancing inside the cold, drafty house. Nine o’clock in the morning, and they sounded half-drunk already. “We had fun there, didn’t we?” Lee gazed out on Wilmington Man. “Time to chat,” she said.

  I was exhausted and in such deep emotional pain I no longer trusted words. Lee could tell her stories. I could listen. And then I would go home. Home. An empty house.

  “So, Lee, tell me about your war. I heard you followed all the rules, as usual.”

  Lee laughed, loudly, immoderately, the laugh I remembered from Paris when she could make a whole room turn and look at the loud American and then they would smile, too, because she was so beautiful. “You heard about my little problem with the army. I suppose everyone has. It makes a good story. Can you imagine someone, even a general, telling me to stay behind the lines with the other women? I hadn’t gone through the red tape and paperwork of becoming a bona fide war correspondent to stay behind with the gals. I got to some of the battlefields even before some of our advance boys.” This was the Lee I remembered.

  “And they found you there, already bivouacked and looking pretty.”

  Lee reached into the pocket of her fatigues and pulled out a small bottle. She poured a generous helping into the remains of her coffee. Her hands were trembling. “Remember that day we went out early to take photographs, and you told me the story of Atlas and his brother, what’s his name?”

  “Gadeirus,” I said.

  “Gadeirus. You were always the brainy one.”

  “And you were the brave one.”
>
  “Well, that’s what my war felt like. Twin brothers, fighting each other, because part of me knew what it would be like, terrifying, yet I couldn’t stop. Once I started taking photographs of it, I kept pushing myself forward. Some things, I’ll never forget. Maybe I should just show you. Want to see some photos?”

  I followed her up a back staircase out of the kitchen, to an upstairs room with a single window, filled with cardboard boxes, dust so thick in the air it was like a blanket.

  “This will be a darkroom, at some distant time,” Lee said, sitting on the floor. I sat opposite her, my back against a stack of boxes. “I’ve been keeping busy.”

  Downstairs, there were shouts in the kitchen, laughter. Other risers up and in search of coffee, but Lee and I had emptied the pot.

  Lee reached over to the box closest to her and took out the envelope on top of the pile. She untied the brown string and fanned out the photos, selecting one the way a magician takes a card from the deck. It was a view of the Eiffel Tower, banal enough in its own way, already seen on a thousand postcards, except Lee had captured it on a foggy winter morning. The tower, seen in the distance, was barely visible, ghostly. Instead, the eye went to the four statues guarding the steps of the Palais de Chaillot, black, frozen figures larger than the man walking beneath them, also black, with a black umbrella over his head to keep off the drizzle.

  “I took this in ’forty-four, after the liberation,” she said. “Those statues, the snow, the beauty of the city and the insignificance of everything else. Thank God for General von Choltitz.”

  Hitler had had his soldiers mine every bridge and major landmark of the city. The day the Germans were forced out, Paris was to be burned to the ground. But one of his own generals, von Choltitz, the last commander of occupied Paris, had refused to obey the command. There was already talk of giving von Choltitz (a German!) the Légion d’Honneur in gratitude.

  Lee slid out a different photo. “That’s the balcony outside my room in the Hôtel Scribe in Paris.” Against the black scrolling ironwork of the balcony, half-buried in snow, were bottles of champagne and hoarded jerry cans of fuel.

  “One of the jerry cans is filled with wine. Never know when any wine cellar is going to give out. Be prepared. My war motto,” Lee said.

  The next photo made me catch my breath. Montparnasse. The street where Jamie and I had lived. The memory of a fragrance, a combination of sweet coal smoke, vanilla from the pâtisserie on the corner, cat urine, and eucalyptus, all combined into the scent that had once said “home” to me.

  I pointed to a fourth-floor attic window with a little wrought iron grille. I had kept our half bottle of milk on the sill. In the winter it froze, and Jamie and I would chip at it and float chunks of frozen cream in our coffee. I said, “If I leaned far enough out the window, I could see Notre-Dame-des-Champs.”

  Lee searched through the pile of photos. “This.” She picked up a photo I recognized of two women, one wearing a black mask and eye shield, the other holding an air raid warden’s whistle. They looked directly into the camera, two pretty woman in war gear sitting on the steps of an air raid shelter. “The Blitz,” she said. “I took this for Vogue. Great fashion shoot, isn’t it? It helped convince the editors I could cover more than skirt lengths.”

  “Who’s this?” I picked up a second photo, of Lee playing solitaire, Roland on one side, another man in uniform on the other.

  “Dave Scherman. Another war correspondent. We traveled together during the war. Sometimes he lived with me and Roland in Hampstead.”

  You could tell by his expression, his posture, that Dave Scherman was in love with Lee.

  “Sweet boy, and very talented,” Lee said. “When he first visited Roland, he thought all the Picassos and Magrittes on the wall of our London house were copies. Roland and his art collection have become real bigwigs, you know. He’s head of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. He’ll be traveling back and forth quite a lot. Too bad. I think I prefer it here now.” Lee grew pensive again. Her voice trailed off into a whisper.

  “What’s this one?”

  Lee tapped her cigarette ash onto the bare wooden floor. “Henry Moore. The sculptor. During the Blitz he used to go to the underground shelters and sketch people. Nice suit, isn’t it? He dresses well. Ah, this one. Funny, isn’t it? Davy in a helmet and gas mask under a sun umbrella. He liked to mug a bit for the camera.”

  The next photograph was of a surgery in a field hospital in Normandy, a man unconscious on a stretcher as a surgeon inserted a breathing tube. Next, a photo of a bomb bursting over Saint-Malo, the black cloud reaching up into the sky.

  Lee picked out more photos in the order in which she remembered taking them, and all humor disappeared from the work as she, traveling with the army, pushed east, deeper and deeper into the ravaged landscape. A photo from Cologne showing a dead German soldier, his hands blown away. The daughter of the burgomaster of Leipzig, back arched in death on the leather sofa on which she had killed herself.

  And then, the photos Lee took at Dachau after the camp had been liberated by the American GIs, dead bodies piled like firewood.

  “Dave was with me,” Lee said. “I thought I had seen the worst during the battles, but when we got to the camp, I couldn’t believe it. How much worse the worst really was, the smell of hundreds, thousands, of decaying bodies. I thought I’d never wash that smell away. I still have nightmares about it. I dream I’m getting dressed up for a fashion shoot, but when I look down, I’m wearing those striped pajamas the prisoners wore and both my feet have turned blue with gangrene.”

  Lee was shaking so violently she dropped her cigarette. It landed on a photo and where the glowing tip touched the paper, a little ring of blue turned into a circle with minuscule flames. I slapped it out with my hands. Lee only watched.

  “God, Roland would never forgive me if I burned the house down,” she said.

  As if on cue, we heard Roland calling for Lee. “Where are you?” he shouted. And then, in a lower voice, barely audible, “Damn.” A few moments later we heard him calling from the front of the house, and then his voice faded away.

  Lee smiled. “He’s swell, isn’t he? He came to fetch me from Paris after the liberation. I was having a little trouble maneuvering on my own by then. So he came for me, all knight on his white horse, and carried me back to England. Even kicked his girlfriend out of the flat so we could be alone together.”

  She lit another cigarette and picked up another photo from the pile on the floor. “Want to see more?”

  “Yes.”

  “My favorite.” The world’s favorite, in fact: Lee having a good soap-down in Hitler’s bathtub. The famous, beautiful Lee Miller had crossed Germany with the American army and stayed in his abandoned apartment in Munich when the Führer’s death was announced.

  As filthy as the soldiers with whom she marched and badly wanting a bath, Lee had arranged a few props in the tiled bathroom—a statue of Venus, her combat boots, a photo of Hitler—then filled the tub and climbed in.

  “I stank that day.” Lee exhaled a perfect circle of smoke up toward the ceiling. “We all did. When I saw that bathtub, I couldn’t think of a better way to wash off the stench than to use the butcher’s own tub.”

  There was a strange look on Lee’s face in the photo. Her eyes were looking up to the corner, as if watching someone the viewer could not see. You couldn’t help but wonder whom or what she was thinking of, who that unseen person was. So many of us had that expression during the war—the look of someone who didn’t know the whereabouts, or condition, of a beloved. Natalia had worn it constantly in Switzerland.

  “Were you thinking of Roland?” I asked her.

  “Actually, I was thinking how boring Hitler’s little apartment in Munich was. My God, his bedroom was upholstered in chintz. Except for all the linens and crystal monogrammed with ‘AH’ you’d think you wer
e in a traveling salesman’s home. I went to Eva Braun’s house on Wasserburgerstrasse and had a nap in her bed, thinking how happy I was she was dead.”

  The final photo in this series: Hitler’s house in Berchtesgaden, burning, a solitary male figure in the foreground watching. The photo seemed out of focus at first till I realized it was the rising intense heat of the flames that had set the air all astir. It was a photo of hell.

  “That’s it.” Lee gathered up the photos and stuffed them back in the envelope. “That’s what Mommy did during the war. I think soon I will be finished with photography. After taking these photos . . .”

  We both stared out the small single window for a while. Time seemed to move back and forth from childhood to Paris to the war, and back to childhood. I felt like that little girl looking up the tree at Lee, waving down at me from the top, except that little girl had seen the future and was already haunted by nightmares of the evil yet to come.

  We sat silently, not touching, both looking out the window, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Dahlia’s name was on my lips—I was about to tell Lee about my child when Lee emptied her flask in one more long gulp and stood.

  “Roland may have cooked up a few eggs,” Lee said. “Better grab a couple. Eat while you have the chance, that’s the rule.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The record player was still on when we went back downstairs, now an old Jolson tune, and we could hear the two young women in the stove room, speaking in low tones so that only a word or two stood out as we passed them—Arnold, Normandy. I knew they were speaking of one more lost young man.

  Roland stood in front of the ancient stove, frying eggs.

  “Morning, Nora. Some breakfast?” He gave me a smile over his shoulder and flipped the eggs in the pan, showing off. “Hope your hangover isn’t as bad as mine.”