The Beautiful American (4 page)

Pablo Picasso was there, wearing his trademark beret and striped sweater. I wondered if he would remember we had met years before, that he had once done me a great favor. If he did, he didn’t refer to it. He smiled and nodded and looked at me through narrowed eyes, framing and composing.

“We never have less than six here for the weekend,” Lee explained. “It’s easier to stay warm in a crowd.”

“Are you an artist or a writer?” Lisa asked me, leaning over Pablo as if she might fall into his lap with any encouragement. She was already tipsy and her words slurred a bit.

“Neither,” I said.

“A woman of mystery.” Roland, with his grave eyes and
close-cropped dark hair, had come out to join us, and again he pulled my arm protectively through his. “Make them guess,” he told me. “Let it take all weekend. We’ll make it a game.”

“Sorry sort of game,” said Lesley Blanch, patting her short, tight curls. “Let the woman have her secrets, if she wants.” She winked at me.

“Supper is ready, by the way,” Roland announced. “Grilled chicken and spring peas. But don’t ask for seconds. There aren’t any.”

“But first, meet the heir to all this glory!” Lee rose stiffly from her chair, pressing her hand to her knee the way arthritics do. She’s not young anymore, I thought. I had somehow believed a woman like Lee Miller would be young forever.

A nurse in a cap and apron came toward us from the house, carrying a squirming toddler, about two, I guessed. Lee hurried to her and scooped the boy up in her arms with a whoop. “Come meet Mummy’s friends,” she said.

“No,” he said, pulling her hair and squirming. I felt a sudden pain to the heart, remembering Dahlia at that age, beautiful as an angel, cranky and fussy.

“Oh, come on, precious.” Lee opened his fist and planted a smacking kiss on his palm. There was an opacity to Lee’s beauty, a thick pane of protective glass between her and the rest of the world. I wondered if anyone there, other than me, knew the source of that defensiveness. But with her child in her arms, all defenses were gone.

“Nora,” she called. “Come meet Anthony.”

Reluctantly, I rose from the folding chair Pablo had arranged for me next to him.

The boy’s damp fingers closed around mine. As small as his starfish hands were, Dahlia’s had been even smaller. Anthony looked straight into my eyes as if he knew all my secrets.

Roland rescued me. “Enough, Lee. Let Nurse put Anthony back to bed, and let’s eat. I’m ravenous.” His eyes met mine and I saw the questions, the curiosity. Art collectors, the good ones, knew how to see, not just look.

“Where’s that promised bottle of brandy?” I said.

What was I doing there, in the middle of an English nowhere, reunited with a woman I hadn’t cared about ever meeting again, detoured from my search for my own child?

“You look stricken,” Lee said, taking my hand. “Food, and a good strong drink. That’s what you need.”

CHAPTER TWO

W
hen I was a child in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lee Miller was my playmate. Except she wasn’t Lee yet; she was still Elizabeth to the teachers who sent home the notes complaining about her behavior. To me and her family she was Li Li.

We were born a few days apart in the spring of 1907. Her father gave my father a cigar to celebrate. It was easy enough to do. My father, the gardener, was pruning a yew outside Mr. Miller’s office window. Mr. Miller merely reached through that window, saying “Success!” He already had a son, and he and his wife, Florence, had set their hearts on a girl.

“My missus had a girl, too,” my father is reported to have said. “Weeping now to beat the band.” Eventually I realized my mother hadn’t wept because she had wanted a boy but because she hadn’t really wanted children at all. The factory manager and his gardener puffed away together, that April afternoon, and it was probably the first and last private conversation they ever had, aside from instructions for the garden.

But that connection was strong enough that after a second son
had been born and Mrs. Miller decided her reckless, tomboyish daughter needed a gentle, feminine little playmate, I was drafted for the job. My mother put me in my Sunday dress, told me to be on my best behavior, and then rode beside me in the backseat of the car that Mr. Miller sent to fetch me.

She thought that was the proper thing to do, and she would sit in the car, smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading a movie magazine, as Elizabeth and I played. She was hoping that Mrs. Miller would invite her in for a cup of coffee, but that never happened. My mother was married to the hired help.

Momma thought I would “learn to imitate my betters.” Her words. In fact, my table manners were already better than Li Li’s and her brothers’. The Miller children were not spoiled, but they were allowed a certain latitude to ignore much of the bourgeois adult world—things like grace before meals, combing your hair before sitting at table, not using curse words, standing up when an adult came into the room; such rules did not exist in the Miller household.

So when I was dropped off at the farm where the three Miller children pretty much ran wild, Elizabeth would politely give my mother a tiny curtsy and smile and ask, “How are you, Mrs. Tours,” and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And as soon as my mother was gone, she would grab my hand and pull me into her wildness. We made foul and noisy experiments with her chemistry set, chased her brothers, and frightened the hens so much they would stop laying. Once in a while if her father was not at the factory, he would come out and tell us to stop tormenting the animals and the servants, but there would be a twinkle in his eye and we knew he didn’t really mind. He was proud of his daughter’s reckless bravery.

Mr. Miller was not part of the old river-family society of
Poughkeepsie that regularly snubbed Momma at the Christmas charities or the Fourth of July fireworks. Mr. Miller hadn’t been born to money; he had earned it. In a way, Theodore Miller represented the true American dream and promise: work hard and you will prosper. And how rarely did that really happen? But there was a dark side, of course. There always is.

“He’s a womanizer,” my father said one day when my mother, over our supper of potatoes and ham, had sighed over the stylishness of Mrs. Miller’s wardrobe and the threadbare quality of her own.

“He’s a womanizer of great repute and no conscience. You should hear them talk down at the barbershop,” Father insisted, pushing his plate away. “Mr. Miller is very free and open in his private life, and his pretty Canadian wife has to accept it. Do you want that under your roof?”

“Hush,” Momma said. “Not in front of the child.”

•   •   •

F
or two years, Li Li and I played together every week. But one day when I was seven and dressing myself for the day to come, Momma came into my room and said, “No. Today you’re not going. Not ever again.”

“Why?” It was a warm, sunny day, good for running through the orchard, climbing trees, splashing in puddles left from the storm of two days before.

“She will go!” my father shouted from downstairs.

“What if she catches it?” Momma shouted back. Father thundered up the narrow stairs and burst into the room. It was Saturday and his suspenders hung from the waist of his trousers; his shirttails were untucked.

“You foolish woman. It can’t be caught. Not that way.”

“That’s not what I heard.” She defied him, hands on her hips.

“You heard wrong. Do you want me to lose my position? If you insult them in this way, they’ll soon find another gardener. Is that what you want?”

Momma sat down on the bed, defeated. That was the best way to win any argument with Momma: mention money.

So, I went, totally confused and eager to find out what it was I might catch. I hoped it might be a pony, though their voices had told me it wouldn’t be something fun.

One of my earliest memories: a little girl, blue-eyed, blond, dressed in white from top to toe—white bow in hair, white dress, white socks and shoes—stands inside her opened front door, hesitating. Mr. Miller’s driver has picked me up once again to play with the daughter of the house, but this time, instead of waiting in the car, my mother gets out and stands next to me, her hand heavy on my shoulder.

Li Li hovers warily in the doorway, looking as if she intends to run back into the house. The scent of mud and lilacs fills the air. There’s something else, something acrid, medicinal, a nasty smell coming from that front porch, but I don’t know its name yet. Menthol. Eucalyptus. Salt of mercury. Hospital smells.

Momma bends down a little and hisses into my ear, “That little girl is ruined.” Momma is holding my hand too tightly. I don’t know what she means. Li Li doesn’t look at all ruined to me. She looks pretty as ever, though she’s holding back in a strange way.

Mrs. Miller gives her daughter a gentle push forward. “Go ahead, Li Li. Go play. Don’t be afraid,” she repeats.

Li Li afraid? Since when? But it’s true. She doesn’t want to leave her mother’s side, to go through that doorway.

That settles it. I run from my mother and step onto the porch,
one step, two. I’m directly in front of Elizabeth, who is half hiding behind her mother’s skirt. I reach out my hand.

“Come on,” I say. I take her hand in mine and pull her, hard. She pulls back like a dog that doesn’t want to be crated, and I pull again, even harder. She stumbles forward with a little gasp and gives me a whack on the head. Not hard, not meant to harm, just in protest.

Better. I whack her back and we both laugh.

“Your dad will bring you home,” my mother calls. “Don’t get your dress dirty. It’s just been washed and ironed. And don’t play rough!”

Our favorite game was to climb the highest tree in the yard, to see who could get closest to the top before the fear of falling made us clamber back to solid ground. She always made it to the top, some forty feet up. I never made it more than halfway.

But that day, Elizabeth did not play rough. She hardly played at all, barely spoke. Something had happened while she had been away on a trip, and when we were swinging in a weary way on the old tires her father had suspended from the oak tree, I asked her what was wrong.

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she said, staring at her shoes.

“I won’t say anything, cross my heart.”

“He put it in me.”

Li Li would say no more. She pushed me off the swing and ran back to the house, slamming the door after her.

“Momma, what does it mean, when a man puts something in a girl?” I asked when I was back home, sitting in front of my plate of fried eggs and peas. Mother’s mouth opened with horror. She slapped me and never answered the question, but I pressed my ear
to the wall that night and listened to my mother and father talking, and the next day I looked up intercourse in the library encyclopedia, and that other word, rape. Seven-year-old Elizabeth Miller had been raped.

My father knew other servants of the house and I heard later about the treatments Elizabeth received, both at Vassar Hospital and at home; the special baths and acidic irrigations, the cervical swabs, the catheters and douche bags for treating gonorrhea; the regular visits of a head doctor, a psychiatrist.

Li Li and I didn’t play together after that. Nothing was ever said. It just stopped by the mutual consent of Mrs. Miller and Momma. That was in 1914, the year the Great War began. Li Li had been raped by a sailor on leave, a friend of the family.

Years later, Li Li became Lee, that one elegant syllable, and stopped being the object for other artists’ work and started making her own photographs. A large group of those photos was of interiors, with sharp angles, intense light and shadow, and images blurred by glass or hidden behind partially opened doors. A slightly opened door could be a promise or a threat. Hers were always threats. She could make even a row of perfume bottles look menacing.

•   •   •

E
very Christmas, my father gave my mother perfume, tiny vials of Fougère Royale, Le Dandy, Parfum Précieux.

Before wrapping them, he would place one drop on my wrist, and I would be transported. Fougère Royale was the scent of Mary Lennox’s Secret Garden in Yorkshire, just discovered and not yet restored to its old glory. Le Dandy made me feel like Marguerite St. Just, the wife of Sir Percy, the dandy who was secretly the heroic Scarlet Pimpernel of revolutionary France. Parfum Précieux was . . .
I couldn’t find words for the sensation this perfume created until the afternoon Jamie and I went swimming, nude, on a hot summer day, after he had taken a photograph of me and I had fallen into the lake.

Every year, at Christmas, my mother would open the little gift box from Luckey Platt’s department store, take a quick whiff, then screw the cap back on and exile the bottle to a shelf in the bathroom, as wasted as a book never read. She refused to wear scent, and he refused to stop giving it to her. Need I say more about that marriage? I had been conceived too soon for respectability and Mother never really forgave Father or me. There were no more children after me.

When you’re a child, such things don’t weigh as heavily as they do later. I was happy in my false belief that all children had a mother who rarely spoke and a father who drank. Perhaps in Poughkeepsie it wasn’t far from the truth. It was a small town with large ambitions, an often uncomfortable blend, like Mr. Miller, the hard worker with flexible morals, as if the blooming largesse of the century wanted to accommodate all its own contradictions.

The town, for me, was the river, the cliffs with the rich people’s houses on them, and the streets below with their Greek Revival banks, palazzo store facades, and Gothic churches. The Young Men’s Christian Association building had been designed in the style of an Italian palace. No wonder Lee and I grew up dreaming of real castles in Europe, that promised land whence our families had arisen generations ago and to which we longed to return.

My mother, Adele, whose grandparents had arrived from Alsace-Lorraine full of stamina and good intentions, had worked at the DeLaval Separator company before she married. She had a good head for numbers and was given a job in the payroll department. This had been a source of great pride for her, since the DeLaval
Cream Separator Works was the biggest employer in Poughkeepsie. All that ended with her marriage and my birth.