The Beautiful American

by Jeanne Mackin

  Don’t think of graves, I warned myself.

  I finished my coffee, got back into Omar’s car, and found the street leading to Pablo’s villa, la Galloise.

  It was a ramshackle little house, not very pretty or even well maintained, but lovingly situated in a sunny space on the hillside, with ocean views and silvery olive trees off to the side.

  A pretty dark-haired young woman with a baby in her arms and a raw-kneed boy clinging to her legs opened the door to my knock.

  “You must be Nora,” she said. “He told me you would be coming.” She did not sound pleased to see me, but any woman with two children under the age of three has the right to seem annoyed and preoccupied by a stranger on her doorstep.

  “I’m Françoise. Come in.”

  Lee had told me about her, briefly: Pablo’s new lover, the reason he had grown silent when I asked after Marie-Thérèse and Olga. Françoise Gilot had been studying law in Paris when she met Pablo in a restaurant. During the war she had quit her studies to become a painter and Pablo’s mistress. She was less than half his age.

  “I said, come in.” Françoise was lovely and plainly impatient. She looked over my shoulder before taking me by the hand and pulling me into the house. “Last year Olga came and plagued us. She still won’t give him a divorce, you know. Catholic. She stood in front of the house calling me names. God knows what the villagers think. Can you believe it? I keep checking to make certain she isn’t back. Coffee?”

  She thrust her head back out the door and looked left and right before slamming it shut.

  “No, thank you.” The house was cool and smelled of last night’s dinner of scampi. Françoise was a different kind of housekeeper from Pablo’s wife, Olga, and the little villa showed obvious signs of busy occupation—toys on the floor, a milk bowl for a kitten in the corner, a perch with an owl on it, blinking at me and twisting his head almost in a circle in that strange owl fashion. Gauzy curtains fluttered in the breeze, showing cobwebs attached to the underside.

  Françoise stepped over a pile of wet beach towels and led me into the kitchen.

  “So you are Nora Tours,” she said, sitting down, balancing the baby on her knees so she could tousle the little boy’s hair. He had a long forelock, just as Pablo had once had. “I know one of your perfumes. What was it called? Oh, yes. Panther. Almost all amber, with just hints of rose and thyme.”

  I had made that one before the war, for a niece of Madame LaRosa, as a birthday present.

  “How did you come across it?” I asked, sitting down opposite her. “Only a few bottles were ever made, a single small batch.”

  “My father was a perfumer. He got it from somewhere. Friend of a friend. Are you still making perfumes?” Françoise took a biscuit from an opened wrapper and broke it in pieces for the boy, who looked up at her with Pablo’s dark, expressive eyes.

  “Haven’t composed any in a while.”

  “I ran away from home, you know. My father wouldn’t let me give up law to become an artist. I never see him anymore. For this.” She laughed.

  “I ran away, too. From Poughkeepsie. And then from Paris.”

  “I know. Pablo told me. Are you sure you don’t want a cup of coffee? Maybe something stronger?”

  “No. Please, why did he send for me?”

  Françoise grew serious. She kissed the top of her baby’s head, inhaling that rich smell of infancy, and a wave of brown hair fell over her face. “I’m supposed to prepare you,” she said, brushing the hair back. “Oh, God. Look at your face. Here.” She took a bottle of whiskey from the tray on the table and poured me a glass.

  “It’s good news, Nora. Lee found your daughter. Actually, her friend Davy Scherman found her. He’s researching a book on Paris and Lee told him to ask everywhere, to scour the streets, ask favors of all their contacts, for her friend’s missing daughter.”

  “I looked in Paris,” I said. “Everywhere. Asked at all the centers, all the offices tracking people, all the hostels and rooming houses.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t look in this place—a Dominican convent outside of Paris. The nuns had taken her in. Someone had found her begging outside of Notre-Dame.”

  I drank the whiskey but refused a second shot when Françoise offered the bottle. The baby on her lap began to pull on her long hair. Françoise patiently untangled his fists.

  I had so many questions. Why had Dahlia gone to Paris? Why had she left? What had she planned to do? Why hadn’t she come home to me? But the questions could wait.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Down at the studio, with Pablo. She arrived the day before.”

  It seemed a century before I could react, before I could breathe, or see, or smell the little vase of wild lavender and roses on the table. A century of nothing passed, and then a moment of everything arrived.

  “Dahlia is here?”

  “I told you. In the studio. She knows you’re coming. She seems to be in good shape. A little thin, a little dirty when she first arrived, but she cleaned up nicely. Pretty girl.” Did I imagine it, or was there a hint of jealousy in Françoise’s voice? “There’s a letter here for you from Lee.” Françoise took an envelope from a pile of unopened mail and handed it to me.

  My hand was surprisingly steady as I took the envelope and opened it as carefully as I pulled petals from rosebuds in the factory workroom. I recognized Lee’s bold handwriting.

  Dear Nora,

  Contacts can be useful. Davy and I used all of them, in the army and the diplomatic service, and of course, finally it was a fishmonger who supplied fish for the American ambassador who told Davy where the child was. She had been sent out to buy fish for dinner and he noticed her, a girl from the south. No one in that place had seen her before. The other children the nuns had sheltered during the war had all gone home or found new ones and he wondered who the stranger was. I have found your daughter, Nora. She wouldn’t tell Davy why she wouldn’t go back home to you and he decided not to force her, to use an intermediary for the reunion. Remember being sixteen and being dragged back home? At least, I do.

  I remember more than you think. I knew all along you had been that childhood friend, the one who pulled me off the porch to play. A couple of times in Paris I almost said something. But I didn’t want to talk about it. Some memories, the more you talk about them, the stronger they become. Remember that when you speak with your daughter.

  So, this is a very belated thank-you. If I had gone back into the house that day, instead of being pulled off the porch by you, I might never have been able to come out again. The favor is returned. Have to go. Anthony is screaming for attention.

  Keep in touch this time.

  Lee

  I stood. “Where is the studio?”

  “Follow the path down the hill. It will lead you right there. The studio is an old perfume factory.”

  I could feel Françoise’s eyes on me as I found the path and began the gentle climb back down the hill. Then I heard the door shut and Françoise went back to her life, her children, as I walked to my child. Nothing mattered but that. Dahlia would be at the end of this journey.

  Each footstep on that rocky patch made the world new. Put your foot down, and light separates from darkness. Another step and the water separates from the land. Birds fly overhead on the fourth step. Dahlia is here. Dahlia is here. Dahlia is here became the rhythm of my steps and nothing mattered except that. The sun was high and hot on my shoulders and it seemed I had never felt such a wonderful warmth before. The light itself was a kind of home and everything else was just an address.

  EPILOGUE

  SILLAGE

  After the départ, after the surprise of the top note, the reassurance of the middle note, the longing of the bottom notes, there is sillage, the wake that is left when a woman wearing perfume leaves the room. Sillage is the closest thing to a molecular memory, the
closest thing to permanence in the impermanent life of fragrance, for it is sillage that imprints on the mind to create the final, lasting impression. It is the closing of the perfume’s story.

  —Notebooks of N. Tours

  August 4, 1977

  I am just going out the door for a picnic at Upton Lake with Dahlia and her three children when the postman arrives, carrying a letter from Roland Penrose. I haven’t heard from him in years and I know without opening it what the letter will say. I take the mail and go back inside to the coolness of the kitchen in Dahlia’s summerhouse.

  Lee has died.

  She was seventy, a bit young to die, I think, since, I, too, am now seventy. But considering all the risks she took, all she went through, perhaps it was a good span for her. She could so easily have died a violent death any number of times, but instead she died at home after a long slow illness, with her husband at her side.

  Lee, that beautiful, radiant, damaged child. The drop-dead gorgeous model. The brave and talented photographer. The woman who found my lost child. Gone. After that weekend at Farley Farm when she showed me those photographs of the war and war’s aftermath, Lee mostly photographed her family and friends, turning away from the crueler, uglier things that destroy, that kill or at least leave lasting scars.

  I refold the letter and close my eyes, seeing that little girl in her white dress on her porch.

  “Are you okay, Momma?” Dahlia comes in and sees the look on my face. She is in early middle age, but when I see her, I still see the girl sitting at the potting wheel in Pablo’s studio in Vallauris, her face smeared with clay, her eyes wide with delight mixed with fear, the girl who stood hesitantly and came to me, older, sadder because that is what time does to us.

  • • •

  My daughter, who had once been lost to me, but was found by Lee. After they took you away, André came to the house. The hesitation lasted only a second. She ran to my opened arms. He broke the window next to the side door and forced himself in. He told me I would never see you again. That you had been shot as a traitor. That it was my fault because I had told. So I ran away. I was afraid of him. I thought you were dead.

  We slept in Pablo’s studio that night. Françoise gave us pillows and blankets and supper. Dahlia curled in my arms, a child again. The next day, we went home to Grasse.

  • • •

  “Lee Miller has died,” I say, putting the letter in my pocket.

  “Oh.” Dahlia takes the car keys from the hook by the door and jangles them, an expression of indifference on her lovely face. She met Lee once, in 1955 in New York, where Lee had exhibited in the Family of Man show in the Museum of Modern Art. Dahlia was still a college student then, just beginning her final year. Lee had taken Dahlia’s hand and winked at me. The three of us did not talk about 1949, about the six months of Dahlia’s disappearance or what had happened to her before that.

  But I knew that Dahlia still had the occasional nightmare, as did Lee. The past does not die. It just acquires more shadows, blurs a bit like a fading photograph.

  Lee Miller’s final photographic essay for Vogue had been published two years before that night in New York: a humorous guide for home entertaining that poked fun at the Soviet system of work camps. She had photographed Roland and a whole regiment of famous artists shelling peas, clipping the grass, watering the garden at Farley Farm. And then Lee had put away her cameras. I think she got tired of shadows, of tones of gray. I think the images she had taken as a war correspondent never faded in her imagination, and whenever she held a camera and looked through the viewfinder, she was seeing unspeakable things.

  Lee channeled her famous energy and determination into cooking, of all things. I think that was how she finally found a measure of peace, through the simple act of preparing food and placing it before friends and family. She became quite good at it, a gourmet.

  “Well, are you ready? Tad says he wants to drive.” Tad is Dahlia’s oldest son and he looks much like his father, Thaddeaus, tall and blond and a little too serious. Like his father, he wants to be a physician. Dahlia’s second son, William, thinks only about football and Dahlia already worries that he will be aimless, unambitious.

  Her daughter, ten-year-old Adele, is a beauty. All anyone asks is that she smile. The sun comes out and all is right with the world when Adele smiles. Adele plans to become a photojournalist. Jamie gives her a new camera almost every Christmas.

  Dahlia herself is a professor of French literature at New York University. As soon as she was old enough, as soon as she was able, she returned to the United States and studied here, not in Paris, agreeing to spend her summers with me in Nice as long as I agreed to spend Christmas with her in New York. Omar doesn’t like New York. Too cold. He stays in France when I make my visits, sits over his chessboard and answers the business phone when someone calls to commission a perfume. I have composed perfumes for several movie stars (more of Lee’s contacts), for the wife of a Nobel Prize winner, for several department stores that want a name brand.

  Omar and I live in Cannes for most of the year, close enough to my beloved lavender fields and olive groves, but far enough away from Grasse and that sad history there so that we could start fresh with each other.

  Shortly after Lee found my daughter for me, Dahlia met her father, and her father’s wife, Clara. We have created a livable peace for all of us, though when I visit, I still catch Mrs. Sloane looking at me as if she would rather I disappeared back to France and never bothered them again. Jamie adores his daughter by me, and Dahlia, an only child for so long, enjoys the company of her half sister and half brother, her nieces and nephews. It is a family filled with tension and sometimes ill will and much too much regret. But we are bound together. Dahlia and I move back and forth, by plane now, not ship, and home is always in front of us or just behind us, except for the home we carry inside that is more than mere place.

  Now that Lee is gone, part of my home is also gone. I think of her that day in front of the panther’s cage in Paris, smoking cigarette after cigarette, musing about love and what is given up in its name. Beautiful Lee Miller. The little girl, Lee. The radiant young woman enchanting all of Paris. The exhausted mother, the bickering wife. The model, the photographer, the trailblazing female war correspondent. They were all Lee.

  Roland sent an old photograph along with the letter telling of her death. Lee and Man, me and Jamie, sitting outdoors at the Dôme in strangely old-fashioned clothing, looking young and hopeful, and all of us, in one way or another, wildly in love, in Paris. It’s a good photo. I wonder who took it? A stranger? Perhaps Aziz was there, or Julien? Doesn’t really matter anymore. There was a moment when anything was possible and the photograph proves it. Photos are a visual sillage, what remains when all else has left.

  “Come on, Momma!” Dahlia yells. “The motor’s running.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In addition to several other novels as well as short fiction and creative nonfiction, Jeanne Mackin is the author of The Cornell Book of Herbs and Edible Flowers and coeditor of The Norton Book of Love. She is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, in Washington, D.C. She teaches creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont and lives with her husband, artist Steve Poleskie, in upstate New York.

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  A CONVERSATION WITH JEANNE MACKIN

  Q. What inspired you to write this novel?

  A. Lee Miller was such a fabulous woman: beautiful, intelligent, brave, talented. Who could resist? Many people, myself included, read historical fiction because they want to learn about previous times and people, and it seemed the right time to bring Lee to the attention of readers. Her life
was such a compendium of major events: the beginnings of photography as an art form, the Great Depression, World War II; her life seemed wide open for a fictional treatment. She was stunningly beautiful and yet she wasn’t content to be merely beautiful; she went on to create her own art. Her photographs are bold and subtle and sometimes ahead of their time. She made surrealist photos, as did Man Ray, but you can also see the beginnings of minimalism in her advertising work. And her war photos . . . those speak for themselves. What bravery they required. I wrote about Lee Miller because I wanted to learn about her, to think about her, and I thought others would find her fascinating as well.

  Q. Why did you choose a fictional woman as your main character and make Lee Miller a secondary character?

  A. I needed a character who could be in a relationship with Lee during many decades and in many settings, from Poughkeepsie to Paris to London. I invented Nora as a counterpart to Lee, almost an alter ego. Lee is wealthy; Nora is lower middle class. Lee is bold and somewhat reckless; Nora prefers the sidelines. The two women learn from each other, and perhaps that is what a lasting friendship offers. In real life, I think Lee was closer to men than women, so I gave her Nora as a kind of gift, the friend she may not have had.

  Q. Several recent novels portray the American expat community in Paris during the 1920s, but your novel begins as the ’20s was concluding and goes all the way to post–World War II Europe. Why did you want to cover this longer period?