The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  The other guests arrived—the minister hired to perform the ceremony, the neighbors down the hall, Momma’s banker who had helped with the house sale, and a few others. Mr. Littlewood put a record on the phonograph, something with lots of clarinet and soft drums and then a crooner singing about meeting a million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store. Momma passed a tray of crab cake on crackers and we sat on leatherette chairs and the chrome-legged sofa. We moved as little as possible because it was too hot and crowded. The backs of my legs stuck to the chair and every time I shifted, there was a tearing sound of skin pulling away from the fake leather seat.

  The room filled with sour smells and chitchat. Mr. Littlewood took a chair next to mine and asked me dozens of questions about France, mostly about housekeeping there. What did they use to scrub floors? And that, ahem, commode in the washroom? He had done so well as a Fuller Brush salesman in Poughkeepsie that he had been able to buy a larger franchise in Los Angeles.

  “Not quite Beverly Hills,” he said, “but not too far from it. I intend to expand out that way. Your mother has always wanted to live in California.” He winked at me, an exaggerated stage wink for my mother to see.

  “Has she? I didn’t know that.”

  “There’s probably lots about your mother you don’t know. It’s like that with mothers and daughters. Fathers and sons as well. We all have secrets.” He winked again.

  We sipped our too-sweet sherry, and he rose to circulate, told to do just that by a severe nod by Momma. Jamie’s mother came and sat next to me, fussing a bit with the pink tulle of her hat. “Well, Nora,” she said, and her voice was cool enough to break the heat wave. “How are you, over there in France?” She had begun to dye her brown hair, and gray roots showed at the temples. There were crinkles around her eyes and mouth, and the line of her corset, needed to contain years of sweet rolls and cakes from the bakery turned to fat, showed through the thin silk of her flower-printed dress.

  “I’m doing well enough, thank you, Mrs. Sloane.”

  “Thank the good Lord Jamie had the sense to come home. I wish he’d never taken up with that Miller girl, though. She had him pretty down, there, for a while. I warned him about her, but would he listen? Don’t you think he looks well?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Jamie was standing in a corner, talking to Mr. Littlewood. He sensed we were discussing him. He turned and gave me a smile, the old kind, corners turned up and slightly dimpled, as if he was trying not to laugh.

  “We were so glad to get him home again. Can’t say that the time in France and then in New York was particularly good for him. We shouldn’t have let him go.”

  I didn’t remember that Jamie had asked permission, but that was beside the point.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “I think it was just what he needed. Especially if it was what he wanted.”

  “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” she said knowingly. I rose and went to talk to the minister.

  After a while I moved to the door and looked at Jamie over my shoulder, inviting him to follow me. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him and acting a stranger to him. He put down his sherry and five minutes later we were sitting outdoors, side by side on an iron bench under a chestnut tree.

  “Not at all like Paris, is it?” he joked, waving at the smokestacks trailing sooty banners in the jagged skyline over Poughkeepsie.

  “No. Don’t you wish we were sitting at the Dôme, drinking a cognac? You always took the chair right under the T of the tabac sign.”

  “Remember the old waiter who always flirted with you a bit? It’s been a long time, Nora. Feels like a lifetime ago.”

  For me, the years had fallen away and I felt that old excitement and yearning. After five years and that betrayal? How could I? But there it was. During the course of that awful afternoon party, second by second I had grown more aware of him till sometimes it felt we were the only two people in the room. Time and distance had not diminished that old tie between us. Nothing had been forgotten. I had merely been asleep and was waking up once again. He wasn’t as young or confident as he had been, but he was still my Jamie, the boy I loved.

  “God, it’s hot. I thought I was going to melt in there,” I said. I still love you, I did not say. Should we give it another go? I wanted to ask. Planned to ask. For Jamie, I’d even move back to Poughkeepsie.

  We sat in silence, keeping a formal foot of space between us, not talking or touching, just watching the pigeons who gathered at our feet assuming bread crumbs were in the offing. I rehearsed in my head the words I needed to say.

  Jamie took off his jacket and loosened his tie. Patches of sweat showed through the back of his shirt and his hair was damp and plastered flat. I caught the spicy scent, and all those mornings in our Paris apartment rushed back at me.

  You have to tell him about Dahlia, I instructed myself.

  “I have to tell—,” I started, but he said the exact same words at the same time. We both stopped, startled, laughed nervously.

  “You first,” I said.

  “Okay.” Jamie shifted his weight and crossed his legs, turning slightly toward me. “You left Paris without saying good-bye,” he said. “I was really upset. Why did you do that, Nora?”

  “The last time I saw you, you were in bed with Lee.”

  “I never meant to hurt you. It just . . . kind of happened.”

  “Isn’t that what you said in Paris? Did you love her, Jamie?”

  “I may have thought so at the time. I loved both of you. Different ways. When you left . . . and not even a letter to say where you’d gone. I worried. I didn’t find out you were in Grasse until Lee finally heard it from Man, who’d heard it from Picasso. I missed you,” he said, shaking his head.

  “How did you have time to miss me? I bet Lee kept you pretty busy. In the studio, I mean.” No need to be crude, I reminded myself.

  Jamie kicked a piece of gravel with the tip of his well-polished shoe. “It only lasted a couple of months. Well, for her, it was all fun and games. In New York, once her brother came to work in the studio, there wasn’t that much for me to do. Not enough work for two assistants. So out goes Jamie. I tried to make it on my own again, but it’s tough in New York. I had drinks with Julien Levy one night. Remember him? Nothing came of it.”

  I remembered. All those gallery owners saying maybe next year and meaning never, those days trudging up and down the avenues and side streets, Jamie’s portfolios tucked under our arms, all those nos. That nightmarish visit of Julien to our room, his bored thumbing through months and months of Jamie’s work.

  “I’d had enough,” Jamie said softly. “So, here I am. Back in Poughkeepsie. It’s not so bad. I just bought a great house with a garage. The bakery is doing well again, and I get jobs photographing weddings and things. No more art shots. No more knocking on gallery doors.”

  It was early evening and slanting sunlight cast deep shadows under his cheekbones. Dahlia’s cheekbones were still just a hint under baby fat, but I already knew she was going to have Jamie’s face. “Ever think about coming back to France?” I asked.

  “No. I’m done with traveling. I’m settling down.” Jamie took my hand for the first time and looked into my eyes. “I’m getting married, Nora. Next month. That’s why I bought the house.”

  I felt an invisible hand punch into my stomach.

  “I’m going to be a father,” Jamie was saying. “I’ve told Clara I’ll marry her, and I intend to. She’s . . . uh. Well, she’s going to have a child. Our child. It’s time, you know. Past time, as my mother keeps telling me. Other guys have three or four kids by my age.”

  That invisible punishing hand punched even deeper into my stomach. You have a child, I wanted to tell him. But there was no point. He was marrying someone else. I hadn’t wanted to force him five years ago, and it was too late to ask him to marry me now.

  He
laughed and ran his fingers through his too-short hair. “If our baby is a girl, I’ll have to make sure she stays away from guys like me. You okay, Nora?” He began to rub my hands as if I were in a faint or something. “I’m such a clod,” he said. “I forget your husband died. You poor kid. Who was he, Nora? Anyone I knew back in Paris? Where’d you meet him? Your mother said he was a Frenchman.”

  I felt turned to stone. “I didn’t have a husband, Jamie. That’s something my mother made up because I have a daughter.”

  Jamie opened his mouth, then closed it again. He wiped his hair back, that old gesture, except now his hair was cut short and when he smoothed it down, it revealed a receding hairline. And I loved him all the more for it, Jamie, stumbling out of boyhood toward middle age.

  He considered, choosing his words as if one might be poison. “Just a story. Because you have a daughter. Well . . .” He forced a laugh. “You always wanted children.” He cleared his throat. “Must be tough. And I understand why your mother did that. She has to live here, after all. And you know how people are. All that gossip, people looking down their noses. Doesn’t change how I feel about you, though, Nora. I hope I’ll always be your friend. I won’t ask who the father is. Not my place to judge. But I’d like to hit him in the nose for not doing the right thing.”

  I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t know if I was going to laugh or cry. And I knew I wasn’t going to tell him he was the father. He was getting married. Settling down in Poughkeepsie.

  He leaned back and put his arm around my shoulders and we sat like that for a long time, the summer heat mixing his sweat with mine through my blouse. I forced myself to breathe slowly, calmly. Did it never occur to him that the child was his? Apparently not. And that made her not his. Dahlia was mine alone.

  Crickets began to chirp and dogs barked down the street. The sun was slipping down in the sky as if it hadn’t the energy to stay up there, blazing away, and that was how I felt, too. Like sliding away.

  “They’re saying there’s going to be war in Europe,” Jamie said. “Maybe it’s time for you to come back, too. Stay home.”

  “Back to what? My mother is moving to California, I have no friends left here in Poughkeepsie, none that ever mattered.”

  “I’m your friend, Nora.”

  I stood. “We’d better go back. People will be leaving soon. Momma will want me to say good-bye to her guests.”

  Everyone left a half hour earlier than the invitations had said the party would end, and Mr. Littlewood kept reassuring Momma it was because of the heat, no other reason; the paper flower decorations had been real pretty, the sherry a good choice, the canapés delicious.

  “Even so, it will be good to get out of here. Start up again somewhere new,” Momma said, kicking off her heels. “California or bust, right, Harold?”

  “No bust for us, Adele,” he said, puckering up and kissing her.

  “Even so, I thought the Millers might come. Rude of them not to,” she said, pouting. “After all, our daughters used to play together. And she was over there in France with you, wasn’t she, Nora?”

  “You invited the Millers?” I dried a platter Mr. Littlewood had just handed me, and stood on tiptoe to put it on its shelf. Mr. Littlewood was wearing Momma’s frilled apron and whistling at the sink.

  “Sure I did. Hoped they might bring some of the photographs Lee has been sending from Egypt. She climbed the pyramids. I hear she’s settled down now with that Egyptian husband of hers.”

  Somehow, I didn’t think so.

  • • •

  I spent the rest of that month helping Momma pack up the apartment and get ready for the big move to California. The wedding itself was small, a candlelit chapel ceremony with Momma and Mr. Littlewood and me and Dahlia, and her neighbors for witness. Jamie came with his camera and tripod and took photographs for her.

  “I’m going to expand my studio, here in Poughkeepsie,” he told me. “Bakery half the week, and the studio the other half, a little sideline with portraits, weddings, and class pictures. Maybe even bring in an assistant or two.”

  “Good for you, Jamie. I’m glad to hear it.” I meant it. His best photos had always been of people, not things or places or fragments of dreams as arranged by Man Ray and the other surrealists. Clara came with him, and I recognized her from high school, the girl who had sat on the right side of me in geometry class. Bright, a little bossy, and none too pleased to see me again.

  “Going back to France again soon, Nora?” she asked.

  Jamie looked at Dahlia, all dressed up in a new polka-dot dress and holding Mr. Littlewood’s hand as we waited for the minister. I looked at her, too, trying to see her as Jamie did.

  “Cute kid,” he said, looking only briefly. Perhaps he saw only the black hair, the baby-round face. He didn’t see the eyes, his eyes, so deeply set they almost tilted, or the length of her legs. She would be tall, like he was.

  The minister arrived, looking harried and red-faced from the heat, and the few people there sat in a single row of folding chairs as Momma and Mr. Littlewood exchanged vows and rings. When it was over, she threw me her bouquet of white lilies.

  “Your dad and me. We had some tough times, but I tried to be a good wife,” she said, hugging me. She was wearing perfume, something I didn’t recognize. It was poorly blended with too much strong floral and a suggestion of powder. It was a perfume for a young girl and meant to be worn in a single dab, not large splashes. “Your father’s been gone for a long time, and you went off,” she said. “Now I’m Mrs. Littlewood. Mrs. Littlewood of California.” Her voice was a little fierce, as if she was convincing herself as well.

  “Don’t you worry none about your momma. We’ll make it work, make it last. Guarantee it no matter what—right, Adele?” Mr. Littlewood added.

  The next day, they were gone. California or bust. My mother had become a laughing bride, almost girlish in her shocking pink travel suit, leaning on Mr. Littlewood’s arm and looking up at him from under mascara-darkened lashes. I still hadn’t called him Harold. The new reality of her was so different from the remembered one of my childhood, that cold and distant woman, that row of untested perfume bottles on the bathroom windowsill. My father hadn’t made her happy, and she hadn’t made him happy. And as she had said, that was over. I wondered if Jamie’s child, in twenty years, would be saying the same thing about her parents. I tried with all my might to wish them well, to wish them happiness.

  Before I left Poughkeepsie, I took Dahlia to Upton Lake, to the same dock where Jamie had photographed me right before we decided to run away together. He had wanted me to look serious and mysterious that day, and I could only laugh because I was so happy just to be with him, to feel that electricity.

  Children have a special sense we lose when we grow up. They see what is invisible and hear what is silent. At the lake Dahlia let go of my hand and screamed like she was possessed. She would not be comforted, not by the promise of ice cream or a second bedtime story that evening. When I asked her what was wrong, she wept and jutted out her bottom lip in a mute paroxysm of worry, and then clung to me the way I had seen children do when they had gotten separated from their mother at market day. I think she sensed that I was longing for Jamie, for the past before she was born, and she didn’t like it. Who would? To have a mother go back to the time before us?

  I didn’t see Jamie again before I returned to France. Did I half hope he would rush to the train station, wave at me, shout, “Nora! I love you!” and stop me from going, take me in his arms and kiss me madly as the train steam hissed around us?

  I couldn’t remember which movie I saw that scene in. But it didn’t happen in my life. Jamie was at the bakery, or maybe he was at the tailor’s getting a rented tuxedo fitted for his own wedding. I got on the train with Dahlia, and after I found our seats and put our overnight cases on the overhead racks, there was no one to wave to out the window, no on
e to blow kisses to.

  I headed back to France with my daughter, Jamie would marry his Clara, and that electricity he roused in me, that sense that he was the only man and I the only woman in the world, would go back to sleep.

  The next day Dahlia stood on the deck of the ship and waved farewell to the Lady we had greeted while coming into New York Harbor, and I thought about beginnings and endings and all that is lost in between.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Oh, heavens, I missed you!” Madame Natalia stood at the door of her little house, arms wide. “The trip went well?”

  Dahlia dropped the box of gift chocolates she was carrying and ran to her. “I missed you, too,” she said, hugging Natalia fiercely. Her pink dress glowed against the faded ochre of the house. She smiled at me over her shoulder, her little face radiant with joy.

  I picked up the chocolates and tucked them under my arm and smiled at the two of them. It was good to be back. New York had been noisy and crowded; Poughkeepsie held nothing for me. Every place I had visited—the lake, the movie house, Platt’s department store, where I had first sold perfume—had felt lifeless, as if I had been a ghost visiting my own past. Grasse was the present. Grasse was home.

  A month after I returned, Jamie sent a letter written on stationery from Tastes-So-Good Bakery. There was a smear of grease at the bottom and I sniffed at it, inhaling the vanilla and cinnamon of childhood. The grease holding the scents had turned rancid during the letter’s weeks of travel. Jamie wrote mostly about Lee, who, according to the local gossip, had left Egypt without Aziz, and was to spend the summer in France. She was staying in Paris at the Hôtel Prince de Galles, if I wanted to get in touch.

  I didn’t. The past had been pushed into a box, and that box pushed into a corner. I wanted it to stay there, and to stay closed. I was worried about Jamie, though. He was getting married soon, yet his letter was all about Lee.

  A second letter from Jamie arrived in the autumn. He enclosed a photo of him and Clara in their wedding clothes, she in frothy white with a fishtail hem swirled at her feet, he in a black tuxedo with a too-tight collar, smiling gamely for someone else’s camera.