The Beautiful American (27 page)

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 one 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

“O
h, 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.

“Who’s that?” Dahlia asked, grabbing for the photograph. She was in school for the first time that autumn, and wore the new blue and yellow uniform even when she didn’t have to. She loved going to school, just as I had. Children who are unhappy at home frequently prefer school to home. Dahlia was lonely. No siblings, no father, just me and Natalia.

She studied the photograph, squinting a bit at it. I reminded myself to have the doctor check her eyes. “It’s the man we met in Poughkeepsie,” she said. “At Grandmama’s wedding. You went out with him in the afternoon and when you came back, you looked sad. I saw you through the window.”

I had left Dahlia with Momma’s upstairs neighbor, that day of the party. “I couldn’t have been that sad. I was going to see you in a few minutes.”

Dahlia just rolled her eyes at me and studied the photograph some more.

“I don’t like her dress,” she said. “And the man looks stupid.” That was her new word. Everything, from her morning mug of milk
with a spoonful of coffee mixed in to the story I would tell her at bedtime, was stupid.

“It will pass,” Natalia always said, looking up from her knitting. “Nicky went through a similar phase.”

We had reached a stage in our friendship where she was simply Natalia, not Madame, and she felt free to criticize me, which she did often but not unkindly. Dahlia had begun calling her Grandmama and Natalia did not discourage her.

In that letter, Jamie also wrote about Lee. She had been in Cannes visiting Picasso that summer. Man Ray had been there, and an artist we hadn’t met, an Englishman, Roland Penrose.

“Bet they had a swell time,” Jamie had scrawled. “I bet those parties were wild. I wonder if Man Ray had his gun with him.”

Lee had been just a few hours away from me, but it might have been the other side of the moon. I had Dahlia, and my work with the perfumers, and the pleasantness of those evenings in Nice with Nicky. If, deep inside, a spark still simmered, a longing for the old friendship with Lee, of that first love with Jamie, for those heady café evenings blue with cigarette smoke when we argued everything from leftist politics to academy painting standards, well, then, I did my best to ignore that spark.

After her stay in Cannes, Lee returned to Cairo and Aziz, to duck shoots on an oasis, trips to souks and pyramids, cocktails at Shepheard’s, the women in pearls and black satin, all those very rich and bored people waiting, and not knowing what they were waiting for. Perhaps once in a while they discussed Mussolini’s intentions in northern Africa.

One of Lee’s more famous photographs from that time is “Portrait of Space,” taken during a desert expedition, with her camera shooting out through a torn screen to a distant and empty horizon.
The rip in the screen is shaped like a nomad’s tent, bedraggled by wind and heat, and the bare landscape has a menacing quality. Many of the photos Lee took in Egypt are empty of people, suggesting her state of mind: loneliness and discontent. Paris, for both of us, was a long time ago.

•   •   •

J
amie stopped writing. I had no more news from him, no news about Lee, and Momma’s letters from California were about the movie stars she had seen on the streets or going by in their chauffeured automobiles: Ann Sheridan, Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant. She underlined Cary Grant three times and added exclamation points. Some days in quiet Grasse I felt isolated and restless. Other days I felt at peace and tired in a healthy way from chasing after my daughter.