The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  Nicky and I had a private table outdoors through professional courtesy and his having passed a large note to the waiter. That evening was the first and the last time I heard the word “resistance” from Nicholas.

  “Listen, Nora,” he said. “I need you to pay attention. Maman will not understand, and you must pay attention from now on to keep her and Dahlia and yourself safe.”

  Nicholas signaled to the waiter and ordered a second helping of steak and potatoes. His suit was already tight around his waist and he caught me looking at his vest, where the cloth stretched around the strained buttons.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We will all have plenty of opportunity to slenderize in the months to come. Finish your steak. You may not have another one for quite a while.” The waiter brought his second plate and Nicky and the waiter exchanged a glance I could not read, even though I was already paying attention.

  “He will be gone soon,” Nicholas said, “Most of the young men will be. And France will be divided. Eat, Nora.”

  Just as he was finishing his second helping, he looked up and I followed his gaze to where a man had just stepped onto the patio. He had dark hair combed straight over his forehead and his eyes never stopped moving over the crowd, watching, searching. He saw Nicky and came to our table. In the years to come I would remember this moment, this innocent little wave of greeting: when Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, came to our table. He wasn’t yet wearing the scarf around his neck that would become his trademark, the scarf that would hide the scar from his failed suicide attempt after he had been captured and tortured by the Gestapo the first time. He did not survive the second capture and torture.

  “The steak is good?” he asked Nicky, not looking at me.

  “Good enough,” Nicky said. That was all. The air became electric around them, filled with hundreds of unsaid words. Nicky gave him a packet, and the stranger left as quickly as he came.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Nothing that need interest you. Let’s dance, Nora. Don’t talk. Enjoy the music.”

  I found myself wishing, that evening, that I had never known Jamie, that I had been heart-whole when I had met Nicky. I felt at home in his embrace, safe and wanted. Love isn’t really about what we think of the other person, but how we feel about ourselves when we are with that person. With Jamie I had been too young, too naive, too clinging. With Nicky I was confident and content with life as it was. It wasn’t a grand passion, but it was a livable one, and perhaps that was better.

  But, I told myself, if I hadn’t known Jamie, I wouldn’t have Dahlia. And life was unimaginable without her.

  Soon would come rationing and hunger, bombers flying overhead. German and Italian soldiers, tanks rolling down our streets. Resistance. But that night we were still waiting for those things to come. We drank too much and Nicky whispered words in my ear to make me laugh.

  In between his jokes and murmurs he began to give me instructions. Buy as much perfume from the factories as my capital would allow. It, like everything else, would soon be in short supply. There would be a shortage of glass and labor, and without those the perfume industry would be crippled. Were the good wines walled up in the cellar? Maman’s pearls hidden? Keep your radio tuned to a German channel at all times. If you listen to the BBC, tune it back to the German channel immediately after. He smiled as he told me these things and anyone looking at us would have thought we were discussing the new summer fashions.

  “Why buy perfume?” I asked. “No one can afford it anymore. Who will buy it?”

  “Soon, German generals and colonels will come here. They will take French mistresses and will buy gifts for them. Don’t overcharge them. They will not forgive or forget. Sell as much as you can, as quickly as you can, because soon they will simply take it and pay nothing.”

  Blackout was already in effect by then: no lights, not even candles, allowed in case they might be spotted from overheard, or from the ocean. When the last light of the evening was gone, we made our way, in darkness, upstairs to his rooms, hearing laughter and shouts and moans from the street as others made their unlighted way back to rooms, homes, cars, wherever they were spending the night.

  “You know,” Nicky said that night, as we were undressing in the darkness, “if you weren’t such a good mistress, I would be tempted to marry you and make you my wife. Maybe when this is over, you should speak with Dahlia. I know you would want her permission.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, pressing up against him under the cool sheets.

  “Good,” he said.

  Were we engaged? Was it that simple? It had been so complicated with Jamie and in the end the complications had defeated us, the worries, the jealousies, the betrayals. Maybe, I thought, beginning the slow drift into sleep, this is how it’s supposed to be. Easy. Friendly. But was it really enough? Marrying Nicky when I still thought of Jamie seemed like a cheat.

  Lee had separated sex and love, I remembered. Perhaps I could separate love and marriage.

  • • •

  When I returned to Grasse after that June weekend, the boys that had gone off as soldiers to the front had been demobbed and sent back home, the butcher’s sons, André and Paulo, among them. The ones just back gathered in listless groups on street corners and in cafés, whispering, waiting, some of them visibly wounded, on crutches, faces puckered with burn scars or emptied pant legs flapping over missing limbs. André and Paulo had not a single wound between the two of them, and there was whispering about that, how they had hidden in the backs of trucks to avoid the fighting.

  I followed Nicky’s instructions closely in the following months, putting all my cash into perfume and other goods that might eventually be bartered. Other merchants were doing the same, acquiring and selling off stock at a dizzying pace, trying to keep one step ahead of the rationing, the shortages, the eventual outright theft of our goods by the Germans.

  The Gypsies called these years the “great disappearing.” That was what it was like. Every week something different and vital disappeared from our lives. Our wheat, wine, cheese, fruit, were all sent to Germany. The Nazis forbade the fisherman to take out their boats and fish disappeared from our tables, so that soon we were living on “tomatoes and sunshine,” as people bitterly said. Trust among neighbors evaporated like water from salt fields, leaving behind suspicion.

  As Nicky had said would happen, the men began to disappear. Some were sent as forced labor to work camps and factories in Germany; others became resistance fighters who went into the hills and forests or the secret cellars of Lyon to fight against the Nazis and against what Vichy France had become: a country of collaborators, who believed better the Germans than the Russians, and this would be over soon, and it wouldn’t be that bad, if we just went along.

  One evening in 1941, on the Negresco patio, I ran into one of Man’s occasional models, a red-haired girl named Marie-Louise. I was not friendly at first—I had spent the day demonstrating perfume samples to my new buyers, all German officers who were sending them to mistresses, French girls in Paris. The experience had left me sour. But Marie-Louise was in a talkative mood and didn’t care if I wanted to listen or not.

  She spent an hour filling me in. Lee and Aziz were still officially married—Marie-Louise stressed “officially”—but Lee was in England living with the art collector Roland Penrose and Aziz was in Egypt. It was a matter of time before they were divorced, if Lee managed to survive the war.

  “Why wouldn’t she?” I asked, not liking Marie-Louise’s tone.

  “She takes awful chances, Man says. Running around with her camera, photographing even when the air raid sirens are going off. Man says she’s going to become a war correspondent. She’s tired of fashion shoots. She’s photographing for Vogue again, but taking pictures of the war.”

  That was Lee. Climbing to the top of the tree, taking every risk that p
resented itself. I felt a shiver of fear for her. “Where’s Man?” I asked.

  “Paris. But not for long.” Man had left Paris when the Germans entered, but like most of the refugees, he had returned soon after. That was in the early part of the war, before the laws against Jews had been passed, before the trains to the camps began, and when Parisians, even Jews, thought they would be left alone. The next time Man left, it would be many years before he would return to Paris.

  Pablo was still in his studio on the rue des Grand Augustins, Marie-Louise reported. In Paris, all the theaters and restaurants were open, but they were filled with Germans. Marie-Louise sighed and downed her whiskey. She herself was trying to get a laissez-passer to go back to Paris, where she had been hired to appear in a musical revue, but it was tough; the passes to get through the demarcation line between occupied and Vichy France were not easy to obtain.

  “I should never have come to Nice,” she complained, and got up to stumble to the bar for another refill. By then the waiters had been replaced by waitresses and the girls of Nice did not give good service to the haughty Parisian girls who were stranded there.

  “You were friends with Lee Miller?” Nicky asked, taking Marie-Louise’s chair. He had appeared out of nowhere, walking very silently for such a heavyset man. “They say she is taking some very good photographs of the Blitz in London.”

  “She was always handy with a camera, and in the darkroom,” I said, and my tone made Nicky look at me hard and raise an eyebrow.

  The ocean was streaked orange and violet with the colors of the sunset. Seagulls called overhead. Even the seagulls looked newly skinny, I thought. “When you go back to Grasse tomorrow, leave the side door unlocked when you go to bed,” Nicky said. “Leave what food you can on the table. You will have visitors, two people, and no one, especially Maman, is to know about this. They will be gone by the time you get up in the morning. We are moving them to Switzerland.”

  It happened as he said. The next day, around one in the morning, when Grasse was in darkness, I heard the side door open. Natalia and Dahlia were asleep. I listened, ear to my closed door. Two voices, very soft conversation. A spoon fell once. And in the morning, before dawn, they were gone. I got up earlier than usual to clean up their dishes, to put away the pillows and blankets from the floor of the pantry.

  This happened several times in the following months. Nicky never explained; I never asked. Once, in the morning, there was blood on the floor. I cleaned it up as best I could, but it stained the tile, so I made up a lie about cutting my finger on the butcher knife to tell Natalia.

  “That was a lot of blood from a little cut,” she said, peering at the floor. “Perhaps we should put a rug over the stain. Just in case.”

  In case the police should get suspicious and decide to search the house, she meant. Nicky’s mother was more aware of what was going on than her son gave her credit for.

  France was divided, and so were we, in Grasse and in other towns. There were households like ours, which listened to the BBC each evening, reports from London, and from de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French. Ours was not the only home that sheltered faceless midnight visitors. But there were other households that belonged to the right-wing Parti Populaire Français, people who attended meetings where they used the Nazi salute as a greeting and who ferreted out names and locations of resistance fighters to give to the police.

  Sometimes, when I was standing on line to buy the few eggs or ounces of meat our coupons allowed, a man or a woman would glance at me and look quickly away and I would wonder, is that the person I must not know about for their own safety and mine? Or is that a person of whom I must beware?

  Nicky gave me a name, Varian Fry in Marseille. “He is from the Emergency Rescue Committee of New York,” Nicholas said. “If anything happens, someone will come to you and give you that name. You can trust them.”

  • • •

  Dahlia and I had our first fight, that Christmas.

  One morning, I was changing the sheets on Dahlia’s bed. The air was cold and I was worried she would catch a winter fever that was going around, and had decided to wrap her pillows in flannel.

  Something rustled, and when I shook the pillow, a copy of Libération fell out of it. It was a resistance newspaper, and strictly forbidden. That word had new and frightening meanings under the Vichy government.

  I burned it in the stove and waited for Dahlia to come home for lunch.

  At noon I heard her fling her schoolbag on the table just inside the door.

  She came into the kitchen and gave me her usual hug and I could feel her shoulder bones through her sweater, as delicate as a bird’s bones. All our children were too thin. The food we grew, the milk and cheese from the cows and sheep we pastured . . . most of it was sent to Germany and we lived on rations.

  Because there was no more baby fat on her, Dahlia looked older than her age. Her cheekbones slanted across her face and there were dark hollows under them although she was only eight.

  She grew stiff in my embrace, and pulled out of it. “You’re angry about something,” she said.

  “I found the paper hidden in your pillow.”

  She sat at the table and pulled a hunk of bread from the loaf. The bread was gray with additives, sawdust and who knew what else? The baker wouldn’t say, was afraid to say. He used flour authorized by the military police.

  “It’s only a paper, Momma,” she said.

  “A forbidden paper, published by the resistance fighters. Do you know what would happen to you, to us all, if it were found in this house? Do you think they wouldn’t question a child? You think they wouldn’t?” I raised my hand to slap her for the first time, and stopped just at the last second, when my hand was an inch from her face.

  She looked at me, and the separation began, when my child was no longer exclusively mine, when she began to belong to something larger. There was a flicker in her eyes of anger and rebellion, and then a curtain fell over her face. The openness of childhood disappeared. Her face was unreadable.

  I was the one who wept, not Dahlia. “Never bring that paper into the house. Promise,” I pleaded.

  “Can we eat now?” She did not look at me, but out the window. Our neighbor, Madame Orieux, was hanging her quilts to air and stood framed in her own window, looking at us, her head tilted to its good side: she heard better in her left ear than her right.

  When Dahlia looked back at me, it was as if we had changed places. See what you’ve done, her gaze said. Spoken so loudly, so indiscreetly, in front of that woman next door.

  “You think I don’t know,” Dahlia said quietly so we couldn’t be overheard. “About the people who come at night and leave before morning. You tell me nothing, and then accuse me of keeping secrets. Why do you never talk about my father?” She stuck out her bottom lip and was again my child, my little one.

  She ignored the bowl of soup I put in front of her.

  I leaned against the sink, thinking what to say, what not to say. This was the moment I had dreaded for years and there was no going around it or over it. I had to walk right through it.

  “He was an American. A boy I knew. We went to Paris together, before I came here to Grasse.”

  “Poughkeepsie,” she said, remembering our trip there years before. “Why didn’t you marry him?”

  “He was in love with someone else.”

  She looked up, confused, still young enough and innocent enough to believe that if you loved someone, he was bound to love you back.

  “Does he know about me?” she asked.

  “We separated before you were born.”

  “So I know about him, and he doesn’t know about me.” She spooned her soup, her eyes thoughtful.

  • • •

  For Christmas, we put up boughs of evergreens and made presents for each other, and I also gave Dahlia her first bottle of cologne,
a light fragrance suitable for a young girl.

  Dahlia unwrapped it from its brown paper and turned it over and over in her hands, opening the flacon.

  “Don’t you want to try it, sweetheart?” I coaxed, seeing my daughter but remembering my mother.

  “At school, they say you are selling perfume to the Germans,” Dahlia said, looking up at me with her huge, serious brown eyes. “Is this one the German officers buy?”

  “No. This is one I do not show them.” I felt cold, not just because it was December and we had only a small fire in the old tile stove.

  “They are recruiting children?” I accused Nicky the next time I saw him, the weekend after New Year’s. “This great organization of yours uses children?”

  “I didn’t give her the papers. Someone from her school must be distributing them.”

  “Not my child,” I said through gritted teeth. Vichy France was thick with police commanded by Germans, Frenchmen in blue uniforms and brown shirts, outcasts from the Far Right and released prisoners who tortured and assassinated those in the resistance.

  “Children in occupied France are taking even greater chances,” Nicky said. “They cross the demarcation lines on their bicycles to carry messages. They go where adults cannot.” He closed the door firmly behind us, because I had accosted him in his office behind the reception desk instead of waiting for a more private moment upstairs.

  “Not my child,” I said again, pulling on his arm, forcing him to look at me. “She is all I have.”

  “All?” he said, quietly. “What about me? What about France, this country you said you love so much?”

  I didn’t have to say it again; he saw it on my face. Dahlia was everything, the reason I worked hard, the reason I sold perfumes to Germans I detested, the reason I had stayed in Grasse where she was growing up safe and protected by me, Natalia, Monsieur and Madame LaRosa. She was my gravity, my center. Nothing mattered but her safety, her happiness.