The Beautiful American (26 page)

“Dahlia, say hello to your grandmother,” I said.

Dahlia stepped shyly forward and gave her grandmother a kiss on both cheeks. A French greeting. Momma wiped her face and pecked Dahlia on the mouth. Dahlia wiped her mouth. We’re not off to a great start, I thought.

“I still haven’t forgiven you,” Momma said as the taxi took us to her new apartment. My aunt had died and left the house to Momma, who had promptly sold it along with most of the furnishings. “Leaving like that. No good-bye, no word from you for months on end. And to do what you did . . .”

“Not in front of Dahlia,” I said. “And I haven’t asked for forgiveness.”

Dahlia was sitting on my lap, listening intently. Forgiveness. That was an English word she did not yet know.

Momma’s apartment was filled with new furniture from the Sears catalog: an upholstered sofa, a coffee table, swan-neck lamps twisting off the walls like modern gargoyles—lots of chrome and
Bakelite—and in the bedroom, twin beds with Hollywood-style headboards of padded pink satin and bows.

“What happened to the furniture from our house? I thought it was in storage?” I asked. We had had good, solid oak pieces passed through generations.

“I gave it to the Salvation Army. Don’t live in the past, Nora. We have to move forward. Coffee? I bought a spice cake from the bakery. You used to love their spice cakes.”

Had I? I didn’t remember.

“Come on, missy,” Momma said, offering her hand to Dahlia. “Let’s have some cake.”

We sat at the new kitchen table, all metal with folding legs so it could be stored away, Momma eyeing my suit and haircut and nodding approval. Dahlia looked at her cake as if it might bite her, and when she tasted it, she spit it back out onto her plate.

“I want apple cake,” she said in French.

Momma’s eyes almost fell out. “My God, Nora. My grandchild is French.”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Then Momma laughed, and finally Dahlia.

•   •   •

“I
just want to warn you,” Momma said the next day. Her fiancé, Harold Littlewood, was coming for cocktails, and she had invited a few “close friends” as well. I was in the kitchen stuffing the valleys of celery with cream cheese for the canapé tray. Momma, already wearing a floral sundress, very off the shoulder and short to the knees, was wiping clean a dozen rented sherry glasses.

“Warn me about what?”

“Jamie will be here.”

I put the spreading knife, still loaded with cream cheese, on the table.

“Okay?” Momma asked. “His family and I became quite friendly while you were over there in Par-ee kicking up your heels.”

Dahlia was sitting on a kitchen chair playing with a doll her grandmother had bought her, braiding its hair and cooing to it in French.

“What’s that funny look mean, Nora?” Momma narrowed her eyes. “You said he wasn’t the f-a-t-h-e-r, so what’s the harm? You didn’t lie to me, did you?”

“No harm. It’s just been a long time, that’s all.” Then, quickly, “Dahlia, do you want a cookie? Are you hungry?”

•   •   •

I
spent the rest of the afternoon trying to calm myself, to pretend that it would be pleasant to see Jamie, to catch up, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about him anymore. In my memory, he was the passion of my life. What was he now, in the present? Perhaps my feelings weren’t so much in the past as I had thought, because I caught myself looking in the mirror, brushing back my hair, trying to see myself as he would later that day, hoping that his eyes would light up.

There was also the matter of my daughter. In my mind’s eye I saw that pretend tea party on the dusty ground in Grasse, the three settings instead of four because Dahlia did not have a father. The silent movie—“I didn’t know about the child, Bess! Please, marry me. Say you’ll be my little wife!”—played over and over again in my imagination. Stop it, I kept telling myself. You’re not a young girl swooning over the high school hero anymore, or even that expatriate girl in Paris, certain—mistakenly so—that her man was hers alone.

Momma had insisted the sherry hour be formal, so we stood in line to greet her guests—first Momma closest to the door, then Mr. Littlewood, then me. Mr. Littlewood gave my shoulder an occasional pat for reassurance. He, more than Momma, guessed that this event might be painful for me. We had met the evening before, over a fish fry at Stenkel’s Grill.

I liked Mr. Littlewood. He was a man of even temper, and he seemed to adore Momma. He was polite to me and had brought a tube of pickup sticks for Dahlia to play with, patiently explaining the game to her, how you had to throw them into a pile and them remove them, one by one, without disturbing the others. He gave her a hairbrush. “Fuller, of course. The best. It will last you all your life, little girl, long as you don’t lose it. ‘Make it work. Make it last. Guarantee it no matter what.’ That’s our motto.”

Dahlia had looked at him with large, serious eyes and offered a very grave,
“Merci, monsieur.”

“Lordy, lordy,” Mr. Littlewood had laughed. “A Frenchy!”

Mr. Littlewood winked at me and forked a piece of fried haddock into his mouth. “In this family, the daughter is as pretty as her momma.” He gave Momma’s arm an affectionate pinch. “And Dahlia here, well, she’s going to be the real beauty, aren’t you, little miss?”

The Sloanes were the first to arrive that afternoon, father, mother, two older brothers . . . and Jamie. They made their way down the line, shaking hands, exchanging exclamations about the weather—“excruciatingly hot”—and murmuring “how do you do’s” to Mr. Littlewood, who shook their hands and then slipped them a business card.

I concentrated on smiling and giving my handshakes the just-right amount of pressure, but I watched Jamie out of the corner of
my eye as he greeted Momma, Mr. Littlewood, and then stood in front of me.

“Hi, Nora,” he said. “I heard you were in town. Good to see you.” The electricity between us was so strong I thought the room would catch fire. Five years disappeared.

“I wasn’t certain you would come,” I said.

“Why not?” He was still holding my hand, smiling.

He looked older. Well, so did I. But Jamie also looked defeated, even more so than he had that night Julien Levy had thumbed through his photographs, bored, pretending he would give him a show next year. Jamie’s shoulders were slumped. His suit was too tight—those bakery cakes—and his hair too short. He had barbered it back to Poughkeepsie standards, cut away the long waves he had worn in Paris to look artistic. Now he looked just like the man he swore he would never be, the early-up, early-to-bed baker smelling of yeast and stooped from the worktables. My heart pounded against my ribs. Signs of age and mortality added to the tenderness of what I still felt for him. No question about it.

“Staying long?” this new Jamie asked.

“A few weeks. Can I get you a sherry?” God. We were like actors in a bad play.

The other guests arrived—the minister hired to perform the ceremony, the neighbors down the hall, Momma’s banker who had helped with the house sale, and a few others. Mr. Littlewood put a record on the phonograph, something with lots of clarinet and soft drums and then a crooner singing about meeting a million-dollar baby in a five-and-ten-cent store. Momma passed a tray of crab cake on crackers and we sat on leatherette chairs and the chrome-legged sofa. We moved as little as possible because it was too hot and crowded. The backs of my legs stuck to the chair and every time I
shifted, there was a tearing sound of skin pulling away from the fake leather seat.

The room filled with sour smells and chitchat. Mr. Littlewood took a chair next to mine and asked me dozens of questions about France, mostly about housekeeping there. What did they use to scrub floors? And that, ahem, commode in the washroom? He had done so well as a Fuller Brush salesman in Poughkeepsie that he had been able to buy a larger franchise in Los Angeles.

“Not quite Beverly Hills,” he said, “but not too far from it. I intend to expand out that way. Your mother has always wanted to live in California.” He winked at me, an exaggerated stage wink for my mother to see.

“Has she? I didn’t know that.”

“There’s probably lots about your mother you don’t know. It’s like that with mothers and daughters. Fathers and sons as well. We all have secrets.” He winked again.

We sipped our too-sweet sherry, and he rose to circulate, told to do just that by a severe nod by Momma. Jamie’s mother came and sat next to me, fussing a bit with the pink tulle of her hat. “Well, Nora,” she said, and her voice was cool enough to break the heat wave. “How are you, over there in France?” She had begun to dye her brown hair, and gray roots showed at the temples. There were crinkles around her eyes and mouth, and the line of her corset, needed to contain years of sweet rolls and cakes from the bakery turned to fat, showed through the thin silk of her flower-printed dress.

“I’m doing well enough, thank you, Mrs. Sloane.”

“Thank the good Lord Jamie had the sense to come home. I wish he’d never taken up with that Miller girl, though. She had him pretty down, there, for a while. I warned him about her, but would he listen? Don’t you think he looks well?”

“Yes, indeed.” Jamie was standing in a corner, talking to Mr. Littlewood. He sensed we were discussing him. He turned and gave me a smile, the old kind, corners turned up and slightly dimpled, as if he was trying not to laugh.

“We were so glad to get him home again. Can’t say that the time in France and then in New York was particularly good for him. We shouldn’t have let him go.”

I didn’t remember that Jamie had asked permission, but that was beside the point.

“On the contrary,” I said. “I think it was just what he needed. Especially if it was what he wanted.”

“Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” she said knowingly. I rose and went to talk to the minister.

After a while I moved to the door and looked at Jamie over my shoulder, inviting him to follow me. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with him and acting a stranger to him. He put down his sherry and five minutes later we were sitting outdoors, side by side on an iron bench under a chestnut tree.

“Not at all like Paris, is it?” he joked, waving at the smokestacks trailing sooty banners in the jagged skyline over Poughkeepsie.

“No. Don’t you wish we were sitting at the Dôme, drinking a cognac? You always took the chair right under the
T
of the
tabac
sign.”

“Remember the old waiter who always flirted with you a bit? It’s been a long time, Nora. Feels like a lifetime ago.”

For me, the years had fallen away and I felt that old excitement and yearning. After five years and that betrayal? How could I? But there it was. During the course of that awful afternoon party, second by second I had grown more aware of him till sometimes it felt we were the only two people in the room. Time and distance had
not diminished that old tie between us. Nothing had been forgotten. I had merely been asleep and was waking up once again. He wasn’t as young or confident as he had been, but he was still my Jamie, the boy I loved.

“God, it’s hot. I thought I was going to melt in there,” I said.
I still love you,
I did not say.
Should we give it another go?
I wanted to ask. Planned to ask. For Jamie, I’d even move back to Poughkeepsie.

We sat in silence, keeping a formal foot of space between us, not talking or touching, just watching the pigeons who gathered at our feet assuming bread crumbs were in the offing. I rehearsed in my head the words I needed to say.

Jamie took off his jacket and loosened his tie. Patches of sweat showed through the back of his shirt and his hair was damp and plastered flat. I caught the spicy scent, and all those mornings in our Paris apartment rushed back at me.

You have to tell him about Dahlia, I instructed myself.

“I have to tell—,” I started, but he said the exact same words at the same time. We both stopped, startled, laughed nervously.

“You first,” I said.

“Okay.” Jamie shifted his weight and crossed his legs, turning slightly toward me. “You left Paris without saying good-bye,” he said. “I was really upset. Why did you do that, Nora?”

“The last time I saw you, you were in bed with Lee.”

“I never meant to hurt you. It just . . . kind of happened.”

“Isn’t that what you said in Paris? Did you love her, Jamie?”

“I may have thought so at the time. I loved both of you. Different ways. When you left . . . and not even a letter to say where you’d gone. I worried. I didn’t find out you were in Grasse until Lee finally heard it from Man, who’d heard it from Picasso. I missed you,” he said, shaking his head.

“How did you have time to miss me? I bet Lee kept you pretty busy. In the studio, I mean.” No need to be crude, I reminded myself.

Jamie kicked a piece of gravel with the tip of his well-polished shoe. “It only lasted a couple of months. Well, for her, it was all fun and games. In New York, once her brother came to work in the studio, there wasn’t that much for me to do. Not enough work for two assistants. So out goes Jamie. I tried to make it on my own again, but it’s tough in New York. I had drinks with Julien Levy one night. Remember him? Nothing came of it.”

I remembered. All those gallery owners saying maybe next year and meaning never, those days trudging up and down the avenues and side streets, Jamie’s portfolios tucked under our arms, all those nos. That nightmarish visit of Julien to our room, his bored thumbing through months and months of Jamie’s work.

“I’d had enough,” Jamie said softly. “So, here I am. Back in Poughkeepsie. It’s not so bad. I just bought a great house with a garage. The bakery is doing well again, and I get jobs photographing weddings and things. No more art shots. No more knocking on gallery doors.”

It was early evening and slanting sunlight cast deep shadows under his cheekbones. Dahlia’s cheekbones were still just a hint under baby fat, but I already knew she was going to have Jamie’s face. “Ever think about coming back to France?” I asked.

“No. I’m done with traveling. I’m settling down.” Jamie took my hand for the first time and looked into my eyes. “I’m getting married, Nora. Next month. That’s why I bought the house.”