The Beautiful American (6 page)

“Finishing school? What do they finish?” Jamie sneered, and handed me the flask of gin. It was an August night, so hot my clothes steamed next to my skin and even the backs of my hands were sweating. Jamie had taken off his shirt and lay flat in the grass at the lake park, looking up at the stars. Moonlight reflected off his chest and I couldn’t look away. Jamie was good-looking, but it had never occurred to me that he might actually be beautiful in a Greek-statue kind of way.

“They learn about the different kinds of fish forks,” I said, “and how to discuss art in various languages, and how to seat people at table—you know, where the countess goes and how to address a bishop. Probably a bit of flower arranging thrown in. Nice is famous for its flower market in the Cours Saleya,” I said, quoting the encyclopedia. “And the Promenade des Anglais, a four-mile boardwalk along the ocean.”

“I hear she’s fast,” Jamie said. “She’ll be teaching those French boys a thing or two. Maybe she’ll dance the hootchy-kootchy for them.”

I slugged his shoulder. Hard. “Shouldn’t talk about a girl like that.” I had never told Jamie that Elizabeth and I had once been friends. Never told him about that day on her porch, the white dress, the smell of medicines, the gossip about the rape. There was always plenty of talk about Elizabeth in Poughkeepsie, but no one ever talked about that and I had come to realize almost nobody knew. It was better that way, and I wasn’t about to break the silence. Not even a rich girl would survive such gossip, small-town pity and judgment.

“That hurt! Penalty. Now you have to kiss me.” Jamie sat up.

That wasn’t a penalty, of course, and it was a game I was willing to play.

Elizabeth never made it to finishing school in Nice. As soon as she arrived in Paris, she fired her chaperone, cashed in her train ticket to Nice, and wired home to her father that she intended to stay in Paris and study art. So much for fish forks and bishops.

•   •   •

S
even months after Elizabeth’s departure, Mr. Brennan, the butcher who filled Mrs. Miller’s kitchen orders for lamb chops and roasts, told me Elizabeth was back home. Her mother had fetched her, kicking and screaming was his understanding, back from Paris. Speculation on what exactly Elizabeth had done to end her studies abroad ranged from smoking opium to a stint as a white sex slave.

“Emancipated,” my mother muttered. “She probably had sexual intercourse with half of Paris.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said, and Momma slapped me.

•   •   •

E
lizabeth, dragged back home, didn’t stay put for long. She toyed in theater studies at Vassar College, got bored, and went to live in Greenwich Village before I even had a chance to bump into her again at the bookstore. We heard she was dancing in a chorus until illness drove her home to P’oke. For several years local gossip trailed her as she went back and forth, New York to P’oke, P’oke to New York, her moodiness and fragile health making it impossible for her to stay long in one place, stick with one idea.

Her face was already appearing in magazines, though. She had begun a modeling career. Girls like Elizabeth Miller didn’t settle down like the rest of us were expected to do. They made names for themselves. They thumbed their noses at that convention called reputation.

Elizabeth Miller took classes at the Art Students League in New York; she modeled lingerie at Stewart’s department store. One day, as she was crossing Fifth Avenue, she stepped into the path of an oncoming car and was rescued by a stranger who pulled her back onto the sidewalk.

The stranger was Condé Nast himself. Yes, that one, the head of the huge publishing empire. Mr. Nast took in Elizabeth’s slender height, her long neck and blue eyes, the dress she had purchased in Paris the year before, and within months she was a
Vogue
cover girl, beginning the climb to fame. This was the legend of Lee Miller. How much was truth, how much rumor or invention, I’d never know.

The larger question: do they matter, simple facts? America was in love with celebrities, the photographers and flappers with their short bobs and sexual daring. The world was already in love with Lee and all she represented: the new woman, brave and bold, matching men in sexual freedom, and carrying secrets. They were like their own photographs, full of dark and light, heavy with shadows.

CHAPTER FOUR

“S
tand still,” Jamie shouted. “Don’t smile. Try and look mysterious.”

Jamie had purchased a camera, a little black Leica, and when we went for our Sunday walks, he photographed me sitting under a tree looking into the distance, propped against a doorway trying to look sophisticated, leaning closely into the camera, weeping. The tears were fake, squirted onto my cheeks from an eyedropper of tap water. He carried a copy of
Photoplay
magazine in his back pocket and referred to it when posing me in various ways.

That was the problem, really. It was all an imitation.

“Stop moving!” he shouted, aiming the Leica at me. “Look mysterious!”

“Fat chance,” I shouted back, balancing on the public dock at Upton Lake and trying to make my very contrived placement look natural. I was supposed to pose with my right arm across my forehead in a despairing gesture, imitating a Louise Brooks publicity shot, but it was a sultry August day, I was dizzy with heat, and Jamie had made me stand at the very edge of the dock, my heels already hanging in thin air.

I fell off the dock a second after Jamie took the shot.

What did not get photographed: me rising from the water, gasping and streaming like a mermaid. Jamie jumping in after me, laughing and pushing the wet hair out of my face, his fingers tracing a pattern on my cheek. That long gaze shared by two people who know they are about to become lovers.

We crossed that line between childhood and what comes after, the sweetness of flesh against flesh. Jamie took me by the hand and led me to the bakery delivery truck, and we lay down in the back, the truck bed’s cold ridges pressing into our bare flesh, leaving marks on our legs and backs after we had slowly, clumsily undressed each other.

“What’s that?” I asked warily.

“A rubber.” Jamie blushed violently.

“Jesus. Where’d you get it?” We all knew about them, how the soldiers coming home from France after the war had brought condoms back with them. They were hard to come by, though; you had to get your doctor to write you a slip and then convince the pharmacist that you were using them so you wouldn’t catch a disease.

“From my brother. He uses them all the time.”

“Let me see.”

“Want to help?” Jamie wasn’t blushing anymore.

“Absolutely,” I said.

I lost my virginity in the swirling stale scent of vanilla and yeast and sugar. Afterward, when the sun started to slide down toward the horizon, Jamie wrapped his arms around me and said, “Let’s run away together.”

It made sense. We had just reinvented the world, and could now be anywhere, as long as we were with each other.

“Where?” It was just a question to answer him, a way to make
him say more so that he would continue whispering in my ear. All I needed in my newness was to hear his voice and smell the mossy sweetness of his skin. I would have followed him to Tahiti or Timbuktu. Jamie was more practical.

“New York. We’ll have an apartment with a studio in it so I can do indoor shots. I’ll get a gallery. P’oke is nowhere, Nora.” I had told him that when I ran into Elizabeth Miller at the bookstore, she had called our town P’oke, and Jamie had been calling it that ever since.

“I can’t stay here, Nora.” He sat up and stuck a piece of grass between his lips, chewed it moodily. “Knowing what I’ll be doing every day for the rest of my life.”

By that time I was pretty much acting as a maid at my aunt’s house, ironing and cleaning and cooking for all three of us when I wasn’t working the perfume counter at Platt’s. Momma and Aunt Betty would spend all day smoking, listening to the radio, talking about their girlhoods, the men they could have married. Aunt Betty’s boyfriend had been killed in the war and there had been no one after that. She had inherited a little money from her father and had never worked, just grew old and dusty and as unused as the silver tea set she kept wrapped in tissue on the formal dining table.

I smelled dust all day long, a peppery, irritating odor of frustration, and some days, some nights, my impatience with life was so unbearable I thought I would burst through my own skin. Something needed to happen. Anything. One night I sat on the stoop of the house and watched people walk by, or bicycle by, or drive by in the occasional car, and my eagerness to join that parade almost made me jump up and run. The direction didn’t seem to matter. All that mattered was the possibility of movement and escape.

Momma didn’t notice my unhappiness any more than she had paid attention to my father’s. She had gone deeper into her own regrets.

“Look at my legs,” she said petulantly one day, pulling up her dress. “They’re still as good as a girl’s.” And they were, slender and strong and shapely. “I could have been a dancer in New York.” She tapped out a couple of steps, then collapsed onto the sofa. “Bring me a glass of cold tea, Nora. And turn on the radio.”

There was money in the world, in those years, and lots of ways to spend it. People were buying Model Ts, radios, clothes, taking weekend trips to Niagara Falls, going out to restaurants where some waiters put two fingers of gin in your glass if you ordered “milk.” Life had become a kind of party, and Momma hadn’t been invited.

“If only I hadn’t gotten pregnant,” she would sigh. “I had such potential.”

•   •   •

“O
keydoke,” I said after Jamie asked me to go away with him a second time. “But shouldn’t we get married first?”

“Artists don’t get married,” Jamie explained somewhat grandly. “We’re going to be bohemians, Nora.”

“That’s a quarterback bootleg,” I said, using the only football term I knew. It meant a fake play. “It’s your family.” I had never been invited over for Sunday lunch, never formally met them. They thought I wasn’t good enough for their boy.

“I promised my dad I wouldn’t get married till I was twenty-five,” Jamie admitted. “If I do, well, he’ll be pretty mad and disappointed. He might cut me out completely. You’ll come away with me anyway? You know you’re the only girl for me.”

I pretended to have to think about it. Let’s see. The choice was
to stay in Poughkeepsie, cleaning up poodle piss and listening to my mother and aunt complain about how unfair life was, or run away to New York with the man I loved.

“Give me a couple of weeks,” I said. This was, I knew even then, an irrevocable decision. Once a girl ran off with a boy, or even spent a single night with him, her reputation was ruined forever. I would be as bad as one of the summer regatta girls, doomed to being snubbed on the street, whispered about, no longer thought good enough to be invited into the homes of respectable people. But I didn’t care. If Jamie was going, I was going with him. But how?

Jamie and I were making love one night in the backseat of the delivery van when I remembered Daddy’s tin box buried under the peony bush. I had forgotten about it and left it behind when we moved into my aunt’s house.
For when you want to leave,
he had said. He had known.

“What’s wrong?” Jamie sat up next to me, alarmed. “Was I hurting you?”

“I know where I can get some money. At least, I hope it’s still there.”

“Later, honey,” he said, nuzzling my neck.

“Now. This won’t wait.”

We straightened our clothing, Jamie muttering all the while, and drove to my old neighborhood. Jamie parked the van across the street from the house and switched off the engine. Crickets chirped and a dog barked down the street in the darkness, and I sat there, fighting tears because I missed my father. The house had been painted a cheap pastel blue over its original gray. Daddy would have hated the color. The new owners had torn out the honeysuckle that had twined on the front porch. What if they had dug up the peony and found the box?

“Come on,” I said, nudging Jamie. “Now or never.”

“I just hope they don’t have a dog,” Jamie said.

We tiptoed like the Katzenjammer Kids up to one of their pranks, arms in front of us, feeling our way through the darkness into the back garden. There were no lights on inside the house, but it was warm enough that the windows were open. I hoped the new owners weren’t light sleepers. “No doghouse,” Jamie whispered.

The roses were in bloom. I had almost forgotten the nose-tingling clove and nutmeg scents of Souvenir de Malmaison, Tuscany, and Parsons’ Pink, all the old roses my father had kept. They were still there in his garden, hundreds of blooms each glowing like a pink full moon in the dark night.

The peony was still there, too, its delicate green stems bent under the weight of the dead blossoms. I knelt and felt for the stone, and when I lifted it, how light it felt compared with its weight during my childhood when I had been small! The tin box was still there as well. I cradled it to my chest, careful not to rattle the money inside. We tiptoed back out of the garden, and I felt less like a Katzenjammer Kid than Eve leaving Eden.

We counted the money later, in the van’s backseat. Almost a hundred dollars. “Thank you, Daddy,” I said.

•   •   •

I
bought a cardboard suitcase to keep in my locker at the employees’ lounge. Skirt by skirt, blouse by blouse, I moved my clothes out of the closet in the shared bedroom and into that suitcase.

We took the train into New York on a breezy autumn day. Jamie photographed me leaning out the window, holding on to my hat and smiling straight into the camera. The train hissed and steamed, rumbled and clanged, and it wasn’t just a physical movement but
one that involved my entire being. Jamie and I were going forward, into our own story. It was 1927, and I was twenty years old.

Five years, I told myself. In five years, I will be Jamie’s wife. So what if the honeymoon came first?

Elizabeth, now known as Lee Miller, was also in New York, taking dancing lessons, studying stage design (a skill she’d use effectively later in her photographs), and being photographed by Steichen and Genthe and the other greats. I had seen displayed all over Manhattan a
Vogue
cover with her face on it. I had stood in front of a drugstore magazine rack admiring the sophisticated gown she wore, the upswept hair, trying to see the little girl who had climbed to the top of the tallest tree. She was there, in the eyes.