The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  She laughed with delight. “Okay!” she echoed. “That beautiful American word. Oh, how wonderful to talk with another American. Follow me.”

  We dodged between jammed and honking cars, splashing through puddles, to a tearoom across the street. Without waiting for the hostess, Lee took the best available table, by the center window.

  “Can’t get over the traffic,” she said with a sigh. “You take your life in your hands just trying to cross the street. During the war there wasn’t a car in sight, most afternoons. Certainly not at night, during the blackout.”

  When she took off her coat and draped it over the chair between us, her perfume tingled in my nostrils, expensive and slightly burning from a note of geranium oil. The scent of geranium swept me back to Grasse, to the dark mixing room, the shelves of bottles, the locked safe where the formula was kept. Jamais de la Vie was an expensive perfume, still made by the enfleurage method, each flower petal hand pressed into a sheet of lard to capture its fragrance. Lee was wearing the equivalent of a hundred roses and jasmine flowers.

  She leaned closer. “Were you here for the bombing, or did you go back to the States?”

  I still wasn’t used to the openness with which some people spoke of those years. For me, they were locked boxes. I was also taken aback by how much I knew about Lee, and how very little she knew about me. Friends and family had made sure that, for years, I knew of Lee’s doings, her work and travel, her lovers. Obviously no one had thought to give her news of me. But that is the nature of fame, isn’t it? Lee was famous.

  Lee ordered tea and a large pot soon arrived, and a plate of pastries. We sat at our lace-covered table and poured Earl Grey into china teacups. Lee took a silver flask from her purse and poured a healthy shot into her tea. I thought somehow it was all a mad dream, it couldn’t be real; Man Ray would walk in at any moment, demanding attention, asking Lee where she’d been, and Jamie would be just behind Man, looking anxious. No, that was years ago. The world now, after the destruction, was made of hot water flavored with burned-grain fake coffee, and all the teacups had been broken.

  Lee bit into an éclair and the cream oozed out, smearing her crimson mouth. She laughed and flicked her tongue out to the corners. “Real cream,” she said with delight. “I shouldn’t be eating this. Impossible to lose weight these days. Didn’t I hear you were in France during the war?”

  “I heard you were all over Europe, often in two or three places at the same time,” I said, avoiding her question. “I saw some of your photos.”

  An edition of British Vogue had made its way to the zinc counter of Omar’s café, there in my little village in the hills of southern France. The war photos had been almost surreal in their horror. I had thought at the time, leafing through that dog-eared magazine, that our years in Paris, the experiments in surrealism, had somehow been a training ground for what was to come: the violence, the disconnection.

  Man Ray, her lover, protector, and promoter during those prewar Paris years, had once made a sculpture of Lee with a single eye representing the entire body of the woman he adored. He had constructed another image in which he had slit her neck, making a crimson gash like an extra mouth. The body had been reduced to separate parts. We were none of us whole. Maybe that was how we had survived, in parts, like pages torn out of a book so that the story could not be read but only guessed at.

  Lee sneezed and coughed into a handkerchief. “Wretched cold,” she complained. “Had it for weeks. So what did you think of my photos?”

  I came back to the moment, to the teacup in my hand, the plate of cakes with their sensual promise of cream and vanilla. Lee wanted me to praise her photos. It was easy to do.

  “They were magnificent. Dozens of gray tones.” I had remembered that much about photography. A rich photograph had as much color as the real world, except all the colors were some variant of gray. In some ways, perfumes were like black-and-white photographs. Most people will say of a scent “That is floral” or “That is citrus” when, in fact, the perfume has dozens, perhaps a hundred, different components. Art is all subtle variation.

  “You remembered our discussions. I’m flattered.” Lee preened slightly, tilting her head and smiling more broadly, still dabbing at her nose.

  “And the light in the photographs,” I said. “You made natural light seem precise, even staged, like in a painting.”

  “Light,” she said quietly. “That’s always the most important element, isn’t it?” The smile disappeared. She looked out the window at the wet, dismal street. “During the blackouts I thought there would never again be enough light in the world, that it could never fall with a promise of grace instead of a threat. Have you seen Pablo’s Le charnier—The Charnel House? All black and white and gray, like Guernica. For a while the whole world seemed black and white and gray. Even the battlefields. The blood turned gray. Did you see the exhibition in Paris, ‘Art and Resistance’? How come I didn’t see you there?”

  Lee’s fingers tapped nervously on the table.

  “I wasn’t there,” I said.

  We finished our tea, carefully speaking only of what did not matter. The weather. The new fashions, new movies. She never mentioned Jamie, nor did I.

  “I hear back in the States they have invented color television,” Lee said.

  “Have they?” I didn’t have or want a television. All I wanted to see of the world was just outside my window in Grasse. I wanted to see the lavender fields, and I wanted to hold my daughter. At the table next to us, a little girl began to wail that she wanted her dolly and her mother leaned over and whispered in her ear. The child stopped wailing, but sobbed those awful silent tears of a bereft child.

  “Has your father bought one? A color television?” I asked, distracted by the little girl. Mr. Miller had been keen on new gadgets, often buying things for the joy of taking them apart and putting them back together. Lee had inherited her mechanical ability from him. From my own father, Mr. Miller’s yardman and gardener, I had inherited what in Grasse they called “a good nose.” I had been tested and could pick out three thousand different scents; most people could pick out only a few hundred.

  “He’ll probably try to build his own.” Lee laughed. “And do it.” We fell silent, overwhelmed.

  “Look.” She stood and pulled on her gloves. “Can you come to us this weekend? Come meet Roland. I married, you know. Twice, to be precise. Aziz and I married after you left Paris, but it didn’t last. God, Cairo was so boring. But I think this one will last. Come meet the husband, and little Anthony. Yes, I have a child. A boy. The most beautiful little boy in the world. I’m absolutely besotted.”

  Pain knifed my chest. “I didn’t plan a long stay,” I said, trying to sound a touch careless, a little preoccupied with all the things I had to do. “And I didn’t bring evening clothes. In fact, I am wearing my entire travel wardrobe.”

  It was a silly excuse but one that would do when the truth was too painful. I didn’t want to see Lee holding her child. Lee, who had never wanted to marry, to have children, now had both husband and son. And my child was lost; her father, the man who should have been my husband, was an ocean away, living with a different wife, a different family.

  Lee laughed. “Darling, that doesn’t matter. Wear a sheet if you must. It will be like the old days. Do come! On Friday, take the afternoon train to Lewes and we’ll pick you up at the station. On Sunday, we’ll drive you to Newhaven and you can catch the ferry to France.”

  She stood and reached for the bill, signing it rather than leaving cash. I read her signature upside down. Lady Penrose of Poughkeepsie, it said. Lee still had a sense of humor.

  I hadn’t yet agreed to the weekend, so she played her strongest card.

  “Pablo will be there,” she said, and was out the door before I could say no.

  Pablo. When I had to leave Paris, Pablo Picasso had been the one to help me, not because we wer
e close—we were not—or because he was particularly kind to young girls in trouble—he was not. It had merely been one of those life-forming coincidences. That day, as I stood on the Pont Neuf wondering where I would go, what I would do, he had come toward me on his way to somewhere. There was just enough kindness in his voice when he asked, “Ça va?” that I sobbed my story out to him. He had already known, of course. That’s the sad truth of betrayal. It makes a poor secret except to the betrayed.

  He paused, then gave me a piece of paper on which he’d written the name of a friend who would take me in. He would write to her the very next day, he promised, and I fled to his friend, Madame Hughes, in Grasse. Seventeen years ago. A war ago. A child ago. A lifetime ago.

  Lee had introduced me to Pablo, and to many others. She had given, and she had taken. I looked out the window and watched Lee cross the street with that determined stride of hers. She waved, grinned, and disappeared into the crowd.

  I stared at the card, wondering how much the train to Lewes would cost. No one ever said no to Lee Miller, and if she thought they might, she simply never asked the question. Of course, there was always a first time. Why should I interrupt my search for Dahlia to play houseguest for the woman who had, years before, derailed my dreams? Because the search is over, a dark voice said in my head. There is nowhere else to look.

  I rose to leave the restaurant, walking in the wake of Lee’s perfume. I smelled it, then, that bottom note I hadn’t noticed before. Camphor, eucalyptus, and the salty, acrid bottom note of merbromin. Medicine. The smell carried me backward.

  Scents are memories’ bid for immortality; they keep the past alive.

  • • •

  The waitress came and cleared away the teapot and plates as I watched Lee through the window of the tearoom, balancing her parcels and flagging down a cab. There was a look in her eyes that hadn’t been there before, and all during tea her fingers had drummed nervously on the table. Dread. That sleepwalking sense that though the immediate danger might be over, who knew what was hiding behind that door, around that corner?

  I returned to Harrods, to finish my search of the store. That was all I did, all I had done for six months: search. One by one, I had gone to all the places I had mentioned to my daughter, and I had told her the story of how Jamie and I had stood in front of Harrods one day and decided to go to Paris. I climbed the stairs to the top floor and worked my way down. There were lots of tall girls, some laughing, some serious. None was my daughter.

  I bought a hat for Dahlia, a little knit cloche with flowers embroidered on the side. It would go into the box I kept filled with all the gifts I would shower upon my child when she was back home. Buying those gifts had become my religion: if I bought that hat, that book of poems, the painted jewelry box for her earrings, then she was certain to be found.

  In the dress section I caught an image of myself passing a full-length mirror and for a moment did not know who that too-thin middle-aged woman with the dead eyes was, and I saw myself as Lee had just seen me. No wonder she had offered to buy me tea. I looked pathetic.

  You would, too, I told the mirror, if you had lost your daughter.

  In the women’s cocktail section one dress caught my eye, calf-length silk with a tight bodice and swirling skirt, green the color of spring leaves, pale and glowing. I stood before it, transfixed by all that shimmering green. It was Dahlia’s favorite color.

  She had a beret that color, and a matching scarf. All her schoolgirl friends had chosen different colors. They had gone hiking together on Saturday afternoons, arms linked, each girl in her chosen color, a bouquet of pinks, greens, blues, and magentas, bobbing and laughing down the cobbled streets of Grasse. That had been before the war.

  “Would you like to try it on? I’m sure we have your size.” A saleslady broke the memory.

  An hour later, back in my small hotel room, I opened my purse and let the bills and coins spill out onto the bed. I shouldn’t have bought the dress. But I saw myself wearing it, showing it off for Dahlia. It was another talisman. I let the dress drop back down onto the bed and thought about prewar things . . . Jamie, those long afternoons in Paris, the all-night parties in artists’ studios, Lee and Man Ray presiding over the scene like a goddess and god descended from Olympus, my first tastes of pâté and escargots and rich café au lait, the yeasty smell of the boulevards just after a rain. They seemed to be from a different lifetime. Before Dahlia.

  • • •

  By Friday the London sky had cleared, but I had entered a new state of mourning for my daughter. I had not found her in London, not in the homes and orphanages set up for lost children; not in any police records; not, thank God, in morgue descriptions of unclaimed bodies.

  My feet were blistered from wandering the streets, but I felt nothing. For the first time I faced the possibility that she might be gone forever and it was like staring into the mouth of a beast ready to swallow me whole. I would let it. Without Dahlia, there was no point in going on. I might as well be dead and buried.

  I purchased a train ticket for Lewes in the morning for one simple reason: I was afraid to be alone any longer. I did not expect comfort from Lee, or help of any sort, merely distraction. Somehow, I had to find the will to return to Grasse, to my home, my empty home, and decide how to survive the next thirty years; if I was to survive.

  I wondered what had driven Lee to take the chances she had during the war. Perhaps I just wanted to round off some of those jagged-edged, piercing fragments of our personal history, perfume them with nostalgia to hide the old odor of regret and blame.

  When the train arrived, a porter helped me find a seat. It was jammed full. All trains were, all buses, since gas was still strictly rationed. I shared a compartment with a large family that seemed to be going on holiday. The mother was surrounded by satchels and valises, so many that they filled the overhead rack and spilled onto the floor. Her many children ran excitedly back and forth in the passageway. There would be no more holidays for me. This was just another trip, backward, into the past. What for?

  Not forgiveness, I reminded myself. The war had made that word meaningless. Acceptance. Simple acceptance. The simplest things are the hardest to achieve.

  Lee met me at the train station, as promised, jogging toward me through misty steam and again balancing parcels, this time baskets of eggs, a recently butchered chicken, some spring peas.

  “I’ve been scavenging,” she announced proudly. “The ration card was used up days ago. Thank God for the black market. Things are still a bit basic at the farm, but we won’t starve. This way.” And she pointed to the station exit with that straight, elegant nose of hers. She wore trousers and combat boots and an old sweater with holes in the elbows, and I could see how pregnancy and childbirth had softened her body, though she was still slender enough to model for Vogue, if she wanted.

  Roland Penrose, her husband, waited for us beyond the gate and helped Lee carry her packages to the car. He was a solemn, dark-eyed man, older than Lee but not by much, well dressed in country tweeds with slightly frayed cuffs on the jacket, just enough to suggest taste and tradition. He was a man who knew the difference between casual and black tie, town and country, all the things Jamie had tried to learn. Roland Penrose had the best “eye” in England and Europe, and the friends and contacts needed to acquire art. His art collection was second only perhaps to the Guggenheim woman’s, according to a magazine article about him I had seen in the British edition of Vogue.

  He greeted me with gentlemanly graciousness, though he was plainly puzzled. Where had his wife found this stray? I wondered what Lee had told him, what she herself remembered. Our friendship, if that was the accurate term, had been brief and intermittent, though for me, at least, momentous.

  Roland drove fast, rattling around potholes and fallen branches from the storm of a few days before. I had to hold on to my hat, and when Lee laughed, I laughed as well, to hi
de the fact that I was weeping. Dahlia had loved fast cars, speeding trips through the countryside. When we rounded the corner and their new country home came into view, Lee looked at me and rolled her eyes. I laughed so hard I could barely catch my breath. If Omar had been there, he would have given me a gentle slap to break the hysteria.

  Farley Farm was a huge, ramshackle place with broken windowpanes, faded, peeling paint, and stray cows grazing in an old, weedy flower bed. Lo, how the mighty are fallen, I thought, and it was my mother’s voice speaking the words, and I was standing next to her, outside the Miller farmhouse in Poughkeepsie, New York, watching the pretty daughter of the house, Elizabeth, not yet known as Lee, step off the porch in her white summer dress.

  “We’ve no furniture,” Lee said, still laughing, climbing out of the car. “Most of it was used as firewood. It will be a bit like camping out. But some of the rooms are actually dry, if it should rain. And there’s a stove and plenty of brandy. We’ll be warm.”

  “Look at this,” Roland said. Holding the dead chicken in one hand, he took my arm with the other. “We have our own good-luck omen.” He turned me to face south, toward the Channel, where a gentle breeze stirred the grasses. Far below us, cut into the turf, was an ancient chalk outline.

  “The Long Man of Wilmington,” Roland said. “The house lines up with it during the summer solstice.”

  “Probably this was an ancient place of bloody sacrifice,” Lee said. “We appease the gods with frequent libations and lots of parties.” Lee took my hand and guided me into the house.

  Bare wood floors, peeling wallpaper, wild mint thrust into jugs to add color, huge empty rooms with an almost haunted feel to them . . . I hoped they’d gotten a discount price, because Farley Farm was a wreck. The wind blew through the walls so that the whole house seemed to vibrate with frustration and loss, and the beams creaked ominously.

  “We can’t make repairs yet because of the shortages.” Lee shut a door and it immediately blew open again. “Poor Roland spent an entire day trying to scare up a dozen nails. We’ll have to wait, like everyone else. Till then, we just huddle around the stove if it gets too cold.”