The Beautiful American (28 page)

Dahlia kept growing ever prettier, ever taller, as seasons passed. With that athletic American build inherited from her father she towered over many of her friends. She looked older than her age and one day I remembered that Lee had been only seven when she was raped. Lee, too, had been taller, prettier. I didn’t sleep well after that. For a month I wouldn’t let Dahlia out of the house unless I was with her, not even to walk to school.

Finally, Natalia took me aside. “I had a son, not a daughter, but still I know a mother’s fear,” she said, touching the cross she always wore. “You must protect her, yes. But you cannot suffocate her like this.”

“I had a friend. When she was very young, something awful happened to her.”

“I understand. Yes, we will be careful. But Dahlia has friends and a protector here in addition to you. Her godfather is Monsieur
LaRosa, remember. Keep her away from the butcher, though. He likes to touch girls. Otherwise, she is safe.” Natalia raised her eyebrows. I realized I never saw children in his shop, only lines of unsmiling housewives glaring at the skinned rabbits and legs of pork and lamb hanging from ceiling hooks. They all knew.

“Okay,” I said. After that, I let Dahlia go to school and come home alone, as the other children did. But never did I send her to the butcher shop, not even when she was old enough to carry money and run errands.

Just a few months after this conversation, in the late summer of ’39, Hitler invaded Poland.

That evening Madame LaRosa unexpectedly and uncharacteristically tapped on a window in our sitting room rather than politely knocking at the door. Natalia gave me a cross look and told me to open the window. She had been listening to a music program on the radio.

Dahlia and I were sitting at the table, struggling with the multiplication tables. I had been trying to reassure my daughter that the multiplication tables could be memorized, it just took time and practice. Dahlia, unconvinced, chewed the eraser end of her pencil and made faces at me. She let her new glasses slip down her little nose and crossed her eyes. She hated the glasses and I didn’t like them either. She looked older with them. She was growing so quickly. When I looked at her I wanted to stop the clock, stop the seasons, keep her small and safe.

“Look,” Madame LaRosa said through the opened window, holding up a newspaper. “War.”

“Come in, Louise,” Natalia said. “Don’t stand in the street like a hoodlum.”

No one could have looked less like a hoodlum than Madame
LaRosa, with her neat chignon pinned at the back of her neck, her sprigged dress with its lace collar. She was flattered by Natalia’s suggestion that she might be youthfully dangerous, and when she let herself in through the front door, there was an unusual spring in her step.

“We must make preparations,” she said. “Albert says that now Hitler has gone into Poland, France will declare war on Germany.” She sat and fanned herself with the newspaper, thinking, and that suggestion of youthful excitement vanished. Her face grew serious, sad. “Thank God my Albert is too old to be called up.”

Natalia made the sign of the cross. We were both thinking of Nicky, hoping that he, then fifty-two, would also be too old.

On September 3 France declared war, as Monsieur LaRosa had predicted. Natalia, normally reluctant to use the telephone we had installed in the hall, called Nicky every day for a week and each time it was the same message: No, he hadn’t been conscripted. Too old, I could hear him shout over the line.

“We will make preparations,” Natalia said the next week, when I was packing for a trip to Nice. “Tomorrow, you will ask Nicky what he thinks.”

I had no idea what preparations were made for a war. I knew how to soften and knead together little pieces of soap to make one larger piece and how to thin cream with milk to make it go further and how to line thin-soled shoes with newspaper to make them warmer in cold weather. All children of the Depression knew those things. But war? War was the panther, his mouth open, ready to spring at the throat. How did you prepare for that?

“I think Mother is right,” Nicky told me the next day. “Don’t trust it. The government thinks they can make this go away by ignoring it. They are wrong.”

Nicky and I were sitting in the café of the Hôtel Negresco, his favorite spot when he wanted to get away from his own little hotel, to see what other menus were offering, who was bartending, what the favorite cocktails of the season were. Everyone knew him, everyone gave him special treatment, and our wine was always “on the house.”

I had spent the afternoon with a series of clients from department stores in America and Germany who were already ordering for spring shipments. The war was in the north—it hadn’t reached us yet—and I couldn’t think past the fact that my new heels were too tight and that Nicky looked like he was putting on weight.

Inside, a band was playing a tango. I could hear the clatter of crystal glasses, soft conversation, and women’s laughter dance in and out of the notes of the music. The world was all soft air and fragrance and music and the pleasant weight of Nicky’s hand on mine. War seemed a different reality altogether, the witch’s house in an otherwise beautiful and enchanted forest.

“Buy sacks of flour and sugar,” Nicky said, breaking our silence. He was preoccupied that night. “And eiderdowns. Make sure the coal cellar is full. Tell Mama to wall up some of the best wines in the cellar, and her good jewels.” He said it casually, as if he were making a list for market day. “Would you like to dance, Nora?”

The tango ended and the band played something slow and sweet. We danced, and his arm was tight around my waist.

“If you want to go home, back to America, this is the time,” he said. “Soon, it will be too late.”

“Maybe when the school year is finished,” I said. “It would be too difficult to take Dahlia out of her classes now. Too upsetting. Besides, this feels like home to me. Mr. and Mrs. Simmons aren’t leaving. Why should I?” The Simmonses were an elderly couple who
spent half the year in Nice, in Nicky’s hotel, and the other half in Paris. Originally from Chicago, they liked to buy me a coffee and have a chat when I was in town and their conversation was full of quaint phrases and gossip from many years before.

“It is different for them,” Nicky said. “They are old. You are young, and you have a child to think of.”

“My child is happy here. And so am I. We’ll stay here. My adopted country.”

“Brava,” Nicky said, holding me even tighter. “I just thought I should tell you. This will get serious.”

The words meant little to me, who had never experienced war except as a horror that happened elsewhere, as shown in the newsreels of the Great War and the Spanish Civil War. It only became real for me when Dahlia came home with a gas mask dangling from her book pack. One had been handed out to every schoolchild in France. My daughter tried it on to show it off and changed from her beautiful child-faced self to a gnome with an insect face. “For when the Bosche gas us,” she explained.

“I don’t think that will happen in Grasse,” I said, trying to reassure myself more than my child. Even so, Natalia and I swept and scoured a portion of the cellar and stored away candles, matches, blankets, a basket of preserved foods, and jugs of water. Our own private bomb shelter.

Natalia selected the best wines from her cellar, some bought many years before when Monsieur Hughes had still been alive, and we bricked them behind a false wall in the shelter. “A song,” she sighed, reading the labels and handing me the bottles, one by one. “He bought them for a song. Nicky says that when the war comes, and after, they will be worth much. I can’t imagine the vineyards with no one working in them. Nicky says there won’t be any grape
harvests for a few years. He says there will be nobody to pick the grapes.”

We filled the coal bin, stocked up on extra bags of flour and rice when we could get them. Prices had already skyrocketed because others were doing the same.

All that planning for disaster made me want some lightness, for Dahlia if not for myself, so I bought cloth and made a new dress for her, sunshine yellow wool, with flounces at the hem and on the straps. The skirt billowed so much she looked like a flower when she spun around in it. For myself, I bought a copy of
Vogue
for the first time in years, to see what Paris made of all this preparation. And there it was, in black and white, in full-page advertisements: the war as seen by the fashion industry—chocolate boxes shaped like gas masks; dresses shaped like parachutes with dozens of pockets so that you could grab items you might need on your way to the bomb shelter.

Over the next few months, two and a half million other Frenchmen were put into uniform and sent up to the German border. In Grasse, Monsieur Bonner’s two eldest sons went. We were glad to see them go. After Natalia’s warning I looked harder at that family and thought there was too much of the father in the sons, and judging by the silence and the stern faces of the other customers, they felt the same way.

Pierre Morgan, who was not really quite right in the head and spent his days making strange little drawings on any paper he could find, was also called up. We all wondered how they could ever train addled Pierre to hold a gun instead of a pencil.

Nicky did not come home for Christmas that year. We put up a little tree in our sitting room and set gifts under it, but Nicky called and said he couldn’t leave Nice. Too busy. Nor did he come
for New Year’s. I wondered if there was a new woman, if he had fallen in love with someone, and was startled to experience a strong pang of jealousy. What we had wasn’t love, not exclusive love, but still, I had come to depend on him.

“Nora,” he said over the phone, after he had finished a call to his mother. “I miss you.”

“Do you?” My voice was a little reproachful.

He laughed. “The supreme compliment. You are jealous. After all this time.”

“No, I’m not.”

“All the times you could have been, you were not. Now that there is truly no reason, you are. Perhaps it is American logic. I have to go to Lyon, Nora. I will be spending a few weeks there.”

Weeks. In all the time I had known him, he had never spent more than a few days. He said Lyon was chilly and impersonal compared with the sunny friendliness of Nice, and that the men who stayed in the Lyon hotel cared only about business. “Silk and steel,” he complained. “That’s all they think about.” The guests in the Nice auberge, like him, were pleasure seekers.

“What are you doing in Lyon?” I asked.

“Business,” he said brusquely. “My love to Dahlia.” He hung up.

“Monsieur Nicky?” Dahlia said, squinting up from her homework. The temper tantrums and tears were things of the past. Dahlia had grown calm, even-tempered, and usually cheerful. She was a happy child, but she did not like sharing her
maman
.

In May, Germany invaded France. They broke through the Maginot Line in the north with such force, such speed, that the French soldiers had no choice but to throw down their arms. Natalia, Madame LaRosa, and myself were sitting around the radio listening to the BBC when they made the announcement. Blitzkrieg.
We heard the word for the first time. It was just dusk and we were sitting in the semidark of Natalia’s curtained parlor. All three of us made the same gesture: we dropped our knitting and put our hands over our mouths.

“What is it?” Dahlia came into the room, pushing her glasses back up onto the bridge of her nose.

“The Germans are in France,” Natalia said.

Dahlia scratched at a scab on her leg. “Are they coming here?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.” Natalia crossed herself. We sat on into the evening, pretending to listen to the music from the radio, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. When the radio concert ended, Natalia went to the piano and replayed the piece, slowing the pacing of it, making it a dirge.

On the evening of June 10 the BBC announced that the Germans had entered Paris. A swastika flag flew over the Hôtel de Ville. I tried to imagine the Café Dôme filled with German soldiers, armed, sitting where Jamie used to sit, under the
T
of
tabac
.

The week after the Germans marched into Paris, I went to Nice and found the city overflowing. I could barely elbow my way down boulevard Victor Hugo.

Parisians had fled the city by the thousands, heading south. This flood of humanity merged with refugees from Belgium and Holland, and the roads and boulevards had turned to slow-moving parking lots, filled with cars and bicycles and even horse carts piled with pots and mattresses and trunks. I thought of Man Ray and Picasso and wondered if they were somewhere in this tide of humanity and for the first time in many months I wondered where Lee was. Not in Paris, I hoped.

I bumped my way through the crowd and found Nicky in the lobby of the hotel, poring over the register with his desk clerk.

“Tell Madame Lowe she must share her room with another woman. We will find a suitable guest and put a cot in the room,” I overheard. “No more singles, everyone must double up. And put two cots in the office as well.” He looked up and his face wore an expression I did not recognize. Worry. Fear. Anger. All mixed. Quickly, he thought to smile at me, to reassure me.

“Nora. Go upstairs, darling. I’ll be with you soon.”

I carried my overnight case and perfume sample case upstairs and waited, glad for Nicky’s spacious and quiet rooms at the top of the hotel. I switched on the radio and heard France’s new prime minister, Marshal Pétain, saying that the hostilities between France and Germany were ended. It was over. There would be no more war for France.

People were shouting in the streets, dancing without music. When I went back downstairs, bottles of champagne were being passed around in the hotel lobby.

“Better the Germans than the Communists,” said old Mr. Simmons, waving his glass at me. “Won’t be so bad, I suspect.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Nicky said, appearing at my side. It was the first and last time I heard him be rude to a guest.

Mr. Simmons glared down his long nose and went into the bar to find his wife.