The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  I scanned the faces, hoping that if I looked hard enough, long enough, I would see her bright eyes looking back at me from the crowd.

  Would she be on a ferry going from Dover to Calais? Perhaps on the train to Paris, or perhaps on the night train south from Paris? God knew where she had landed. Some of the wounded, the starved, were young girls Dahlia’s age. Their faces were the most painful to search, looking for familiar features. War should happen to men or at least grown-ups, not children.

  I found one girl with a resemblance to Dahlia: the black hair, the brown eyes from my side, the thick brows and high cheekbones from her father. But it wasn’t Dahlia. She caught me staring at her in the Gare de Lyon and pointed at me, whispering with her friends.

  My house was dark, but as soon as I went in—no key was needed; I never locked my door, in case Dahlia might make her way back home—there was a strong fragrance of flowers.

  Omar had placed a vase of roses in the sitting room, to welcome me. I sat in the dark, inhaling their perfume, trying not to feel anything. I fell asleep there, on the old chintz sofa, my traveling case at my feet, unpacked. One of the street cats pushed the door open sometime in the night and came and slept next to me. I woke to its purr, and to the sound of knocking on the ajar door. Who knocked in this neighborhood?

  It was a deliveryman, all uniform and smiles, with a case of champagne. From Lee. The card said only “Thank you.” A gift for my silence, for the lie about whooping cough.

  I stored the champagne in the small space under the cellar stairs where Nicky had told me to wall in his best bottles of wine to hide them from the Germans. After the war I bartered them for potatoes, eggs, pieces of cheese. Food somehow was even scarcer and more costly after the war than during it.

  The champagne stored, I washed, dressed in one of Natalia’s old flowered housedresses, and unpacked, knowing that I had to get through the day, just as I had gotten through the other days since Dahlia’s disappearance. I hung the green dress behind my bedroom door, where, each time I went to sleep at night, it would remind me of my folly. Green, the color of lost hope. In the kitchen, Natalia’s little kitchen where I still used the chipped and cracked china she had brought decades before, I put chickpeas to soak. I had no appetite, but I had to keep going, and that required food. I swept the floors, dusted the bookcases with Dahlia’s old schoolbooks in them.

  I moved through the day like a sleepwalker, rousing only when the pickers started their procession through the town, pushing and pulling carts laden with the first baskets of tea roses for the factories. They had started picking at four in the morning. I went to the open window of my bedroom, as did all the other housewives of Grasse, and inhaled deeply: first, there was a hint of aggressive clove, and then came that haunting sweet smoothness that lingers in the back of the throat that is the hallmark of the tea rose, and then an aftertaste of citrus. Meandering through the notes were myriad little grace notes of moss, pine, and pepper.

  So many different scents from one plant, so many memories with each one: clove for my mother, the back-of-the-throat sweetness for Dahlia, citrus for my father, who had liked bootleg gin flavored with lemon.

  Scents are like people—they are never just one thing, but a constantly changing variable. Unreliable. Attar of roses made from flowers picked from the north field of Hervé’s property in 1942 had a different fragrance from the same roses, the same location, picked in 1939. That’s why some recipes for fragrances were thirty pages long and were constantly being rewritten, to compensate for the unreliability of scent.

  That evening, Omar came to visit just as the sun was beginning to set. I had already prepared our meal: the chickpea stew, sweet mint tea, a bowl of oranges.

  Omar, like me, was a foreigner in town. To live in a place where you have not been born is to be always out of place, even when it is your choice. We chose dislocation, the surrealist angles where edges didn’t quite match up.

  He had come to town two years ago, raising eyebrows among the women of the town with his waving sandy hair, blue eyes, and tall, slender form. Omar was one of those searching for ghosts. His brother had come from Algeria to southern France to work in 1942, but during the great disappearing he, too, had disappeared into a German forced-labor camp, and never come back. Before that, Omar’s wife had died. He was alone, like me.

  Omar towered over most of the men, and because he was a man of few words, the town, in that way that small towns have, soon had an unspoken agreement that although he was Algerian, he was a man to be respected. He bought a café from an older man looking to retire, and Omar spent his days there, sitting in a chair in the sun playing chess or reading.

  We had been friends since the day six months before, when I came home from Lyon to find my daughter disappeared, the day I collapsed in the street outside Madame LaRosa’s empty house. He had caught me in midfall and helped me back to Natalia’s house. He had brought me a cup of tea and sat there, silent, watching. Omar knew when to talk and when to be silent. And he understood that in the ways that mattered, I was already a dead woman, incapable of caring for anything other than a missing daughter. I lived in the underworld of Dahlia’s disappearance. Omar and I had a trusting friendship and nothing more. We were both too filled with loss to want anything else.

  “Good journey to London?” he asked now, stepping through my doorway.

  Simple questions are the most difficult to answer. Good. What made a journey good? The food? The travel arrangements? The company? Or perhaps, finding a lost daughter was the only way a journey could be defined as good.

  “Not good or bad,” I decided. “Just useless.”

  “You stayed longer than you planned. There must have been a reason.”

  “I ran into an old . . .” I hesitated. “Friend,” I finished. How else to describe Lee? With all there was between us, acquaintance didn’t quite work as a definition, nor did enemy. “She invited me to her home for the weekend. I went.”

  “Good.” Omar smiled into his teacup.

  “Don’t gloat. I have not been miraculously healed of all pain. No problem has been solved. I ate more than usual, and drank too much. That’s all it meant.”

  “Good,” he said again. “I didn’t know you were looking for miracles, Nora.”

  “I’m not. Not anymore. I think, Omar, I am never going to see Dahlia again.”

  “That is a bitter thought.”

  “But true.”

  “Maybe it is too soon to give up completely.”

  “I can’t live with hope anymore—it is worse than pain. Come on, supper is ready. Let’s eat.”

  I pushed my food around the plate and watched Omar dip his bread into the stewed chickpeas, Algerian-style. No, I corrected myself. Not Algerian. That word was so large as to be meaningless to Omar. He was a Berber, a Kabyle, born in the mountains guarding the Berber desert, and his race was so ancient they were there centuries before even the Arabs arrived. Omar told me once that a scientist who traced peoples thought the Kabyle people were of Celtic stock, part of that wandering diaspora that also took root in Spain and Turkey, so that there were Spaniards and Turks with red hair and green eyes, just as Omar had sandy hair and blue eyes.

  Widowed, brotherless, he had his own grief, and that was what brought us together, and kept us together, in an undefined relationship, neither brother and sister nor lovers, just two friends who had lost too much and could sit together in comfortable silence when there was nothing left to say.

  We were silent while he ate and he was good-mannered enough not to press me to eat. But afterward, when we carried the tea and cups out to the tiny patio, he wanted to talk.

  “I will tell you of Grasse in your absence,” he said. “And you will tell me of London.”

  Night birds sang in the ancient olive grove on the terrace beneath us. I could see lanterns lit in houses, candles shining through windows, and in the greate
r distance a few headlights from cars climbing up and down the steep road connecting Grasse and Nice. The night was mild. Soon would come the heat. Dahlia had loved the heat.

  “London was cold and wet,” I said.

  My next-door neighbor, Madame Orieux, was quarreling loudly with her husband. Her shrill reprimands pierced the quiet, and his dull, soft “Non, non” of denial was like the call of a dove. They fought often, and she always won.

  “And who was the friend you met?” Omar asked, speaking very quietly, since the Orieux house was only yards away from my terrace and all her windows were open.

  “A woman. Lee Miller.”

  “The photographer? I know her work.” Omar sipped his tea and coughed a warning that we were outside, we could hear the quarrel. Madame Orieux stopped her shouting and windows slammed shut. “A copy of British Vogue ended up in the café last month. Lee Miller’s photographs of the lovely people of St. Moritz are in it.”

  “The beautiful people, that’s what they are called,” I corrected.

  “Lovely, beautiful. But they are not. The women wear too much makeup and they are built like boys.” Omar poured more tea and sipped it thoughtfully. “So, you met this old friend, Lee Miller. Where did you go?”

  “First, to a tearoom. We ate éclairs. Then, she asked me to spend the weekend at her country house.”

  “And you did.”

  “And I did. Why, I don’t know.”

  “Do you not?” Omar reached over and took my hand. “So much has been lost it is good to find something again for a change.”

  I hadn’t wanted to find Lee. I had wanted to find my daughter. The visit with Lee at Farley Farm had been a detour, that was all. But I found myself smiling, pleased that Lee had survived.

  “Tell me what has happened in Grasse since I left,” I said. “How is Fatima?” Fatima was his housekeeper. She was also a wonderful seamstress and a great fan of Coco Chanel, able to imitate her styles without patterns, though using much humbler fabrics and without using the glass pearls and beads. It was not unusual, in Grasse, to see women pickers in the fields wearing what, from a distance, looked like Chanel jackets.

  I hadn’t had the heart to tell Fatima when the great Chanel had been accused of being a collaborator and rescued from her own ignoble trial and possible imprisonment by her friend Winston Churchill.

  “Fatima is well. She will come tomorrow and visit you. The first tea roses have been picked. Madame Guiard gave birth to a baby boy. I finished La peste. You should read it, Nora, it is quite good. Camus has created a fable about the German occupation. Did you see any soldiers in the north, when you were traveling?”

  “Almost none. It is as if a street sweeper has pushed them down the rain gutter and washed them away.”

  Omar leaned back in his chair and thoughtfully steepled his fingertips together in front of his face. “Grasse is already busy with the season’s work. I told you, the tea roses are already blooming. Don’t worry, my friend.” He reached over and took my hand, gave it a little squeeze of reassurance. “You are safe. Tell me, who else was there, at this house in the country in England?”

  “Two silly young women from California, a journalist from everywhere, and Pablo Picasso.”

  Omar had been tilting back in his wicker chair, gently rocking it back and forth. He stopped. “The artist,” he said quietly.

  “Yes. That Pablo. I knew him years before, in Paris.”

  Omar laughed. “And you never thought to mention this? Next, you will tell me that Princess Elizabeth was Dahlia’s godmother or that . . .” He struggled, considered. “Or that Albert Camus sends you letters.”

  “No. None of those things is true. But yes, I knew Pablo Picasso in Paris. He even did me a favor, once. He sent me to Grasse.”

  “Then I hope to thank him someday.” Omar reached over and patted my hand. “I must tell you. André Bonner is gone.”

  “Gone?” I couldn’t even say his name.

  “Yes. He took all the money from his father’s till and left in the middle of the night.”

  After Dahlia’s disappearance, the police had finally questioned the butcher’s son. He had denied everything, and his father had repeated the story that they had been together at home the night of Dahlia’s rape. But after his false accusations about me, after Dahlia’s disappearance, the entire town had turned against him. “Nazi lover” had been painted on the door of his house.

  We sat in silence after that, Omar probably thinking of strategies for tomorrow’s chess game with Monsieur Hubert, who was a formidable player. I tried to think of nothing, not of Lee or Jamie or Nicky or Natalia, or even Dahlia. And the harder I tried not to think of them, the more they crowded around me so that soon I was having trouble breathing. Where was my daughter?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  After that trip to London, that meeting with Lee, I resumed living, which was not the same as enjoying life. I woke and drank coffee, I went to my work. I came home, I ate a little. I sat in my chair and listened to the radio, and then I went to bed to sleep just enough to have strength to repeat the process the next day.

  Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night and thought I heard the floorboards creaking outside the door of Natalia’s bedroom, or the gentle breathing of Dahlia in the room next to mine, and I would have to suffer, all over again, the first pains of learning I was alone. Sometimes I thought about the panther in the zoological gardens in Paris, and wondered if he had survived the war. I hadn’t stopped to see him, when I was searching for my daughter. The thought of his hard yellow gaze undid the little courage I had left.

  I worked daily in the enfleurage room, pressing petal after petal of jasmine into trays of fat, where the flower essence would transfer itself from petal to fat. The petals had to be changed dozens of times during the next twenty-four hours to really saturate the fat with the odor. Then, the pomade would be washed in alcohol, and the alcohol itself allowed to evaporate. The “absolute” would be the end result, the powerful essence of fragrance that would be used, drop by drop, in the most expensive perfumes.

  Slowly, the perfume industry came back to life after the war, despite a shortage of labor, despite the difficulties of obtaining supplies, despite still-irregular shipping. Perfume is not a thing aside from the rest of life. Love enters through the eyes, but joy first enters through the nose and celebration requires perfume. Many of the perfume manufacturers had celebrated the end of the war by passing samples to the American GIs, to thank them and to remind them they had girls and wives back home waiting to see them again. New perfumes had been named for the day that Paris was liberated, and one perfumer tied thousands of small bottles of his perfume to miniature green and white parachutes and dropped them over Paris.

  Perfume was part of the celebration of victory for some, survival for others.

  So, we were busy. Dozens of us would work at a time in the enfleurage and still rooms, filling the perfumed air with chatter, so that sometimes when I would smell a certain fragrance, it would remind me that Celestine’s daughter had had the mumps when I pressed the jasmine petals, or that Anne-Marie had celebrated the birth of her first grandchild that day. Perfume itself was a form of memory, of a day, a certain soil, a particular flower in bloom. In the enfleurage room, we pressed memories into more memories.

  Sometimes I would be asked to go to the director’s office to translate a letter or business order sent to or from New York, and history would be repeated. I could see that eventually I would leave the factory for the office, for better pay and the things that money brought—new cushions for the sofa, rugs to replace the ones that had been taken, perhaps a car to replace the one I had given up.

  But there was no pleasure in those expectations. Not without Dahlia.

  And then one day in August I received a letter from Pablo Picasso. “Come see me,” he said. “Day after tomorrow. I have news for you. Good new
s.”

  Omar had brought me the letter from the post office, and waited as I tore it open and read it.

  “Ah,” he said. He could see it in my face. “Don’t be afraid to hope, Nora.”

  “He says there is good news.”

  “Then you must believe him.”

  “I can’t. Because if it is not news of Dahlia, good news of Dahlia, I think I will not survive it.” And then I felt selfish because he had lost his brother and his wife and yet he comforted me.

  Omar should have been a photographer or an artist. He read people better than Man Ray had, even better than Pablo did. “It is all right, Nora. Your hope will not harm me. I take pleasure in any good news my friend receives.”

  • • •

  The next day I rose early. I borrowed Omar’s ancient Citroën and motored down through the hills, refusing to allow myself to feel hope and optimism. It was a fool’s errand, I told myself repeatedly. He had some useless message from Lee, an invitation to a party or some nonsense. Do not feel hope, I commanded myself, much in the same way during the war I had commanded myself not to feel hungry, or afraid. Feel nothing or at least as little as possible. That was the safest path.

  It was a fine summer day, hazy with heat and sun that made the scent of wild thyme and lavender rise up like a kind of hope and prayer.

  By late morning, following Pablo’s directions, I had reached Vallauris, a small seaside town of whitewashed houses and rocky hillsides dotted with silvery gray olive trees. People were sitting at the crowded tables set up on the beach, and children with sand pails and little shovels ran back and forth, shouting with delight.

  I stopped at one of the red-and-white-striped-awning cafés for a coffee and sat remembering the times I had taken Dahlia to swim in the bay of Cannes, usually at la Napoule, a smaller and less expensive place than Cannes. The little town and beach there were presided over by an ancient castle guaranteed to fascinate any young girl. During the war the castle’s owner, a rich American named Marie Clews, had stayed and worked as a maid for the Germans who had taken over her castle, so that she could remain there, close to her husband’s grave.