The Beautiful American (32 page)

Was Jamie even alive? The thought, not a new one, clenched my chest with fear and loss. Once the States had entered the war, he would have been certain to enlist, to do his bit. More than once during those years in Switzerland, I had worried about Jamie, and then felt guilty because I should have been thinking of Nicky.

“Tell me about my father,” Dahlia said one evening, sitting next to me.

I pulled her close and brushed back her hair, noticing the recent change in its texture. When she was little, her dark hair had been so fine that ribbons and bands would fall out of it a minute after being tied, as if the hair had a rebellious life of its own. Now, though glossy, it could be held back with pins and ribbons; it was obedient, subdued. They had to come, I supposed, those first days of womanhood for my child, but if I could have delayed them, I would have; I would have kept her small and safe forever.

“He was a baker’s son,” I said. “And an athlete. A high school football hero. And he wanted to be an artist. A photographer.”

“Why not a painter or a musician?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to take pictures of things as they were, not reinvent them.”

“Maybe I’ll study photography.”

“They don’t teach it in colleges. You’d have to apprentice to someone who already has a studio and work like a slave. You wouldn’t like that,” I added, remembering Man Ray’s studio: the nude models, some of whom were prostitutes, the alcohol, the drugs, the sex. “I thought you wanted to study art history. Vermeer, wasn’t it? The old Dutch masters?”

“Tell me more about Jamie,” she said. I did. All the stories I thought she might want: the ambulance chases in New York for those tabloid photos, the boat across the Atlantic, nights of dancing the Charleston, his sadness in London when the galleries didn’t want his work. Our years in Paris: the cafés, the panther in the zoo. “And then he fell in love with someone else,” I ended.

“I think I’ll start reading the American writers,” Dahlia announced the next week. “I’m tired of Balzac and Verlaine.”

Dahlia was getting ready to leave me, to leave France, but I missed the signals. I think the war was partly to blame. Even people native to France wanted to leave; there were too many difficult memories and still too much hardship, and even when the war was over, it wasn’t really over.

There was, primarily, the question of collaboration and the trials of the collaborators. Who had worked with the Germans and who had merely done what they could to survive, and where was the dividing line?

Was it collaboration to maintain one’s old work of selling perfumes, once all the customers were German? When one sold perfume to the German officers vacationing in Nice, was one also
selling possible information? When did survival become collaboration, and collaboration treason?

I began to worry that they would come for me, and I had reason to worry. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and questioned—store owners, mechanics, wine sellers, doctors, priests, hairdressers, as well as Philippe Pétain, head of the Vichy state during the war. Pétain had been tried and found guilty and sentenced to death, though that was changed to life imprisonment.

News of the trials, one after another, dozens a day, filled our newspapers. But the secret justice was most feared: in the street, in cafés, in their own homes. Pistols put to the head, triggers pulled.

“You’d think people would want to put it behind them,” Madame LaRosa said one evening. “This need for revenge will do no good.” She didn’t visit as frequently once Natalia was gone, and we no longer shared Sunday afternoon dinners. Monsieur LaRosa had had a stroke and did not leave the house. “And if we all sought revenge for everything that had happened . . .” She put down the newspaper she had been reading and stared thoughtfully into the dining room, where Dahlia sat with her books and papers.

“Things happened here, when the war was ending, when the chaos seemed even worse than the war,” she said quietly. “To the women and the girls. Housewives sold themselves for a bar of soap, a loaf of bread. Young girls gave themselves for a pair of nylons or a chocolate bar. We didn’t talk about it. And there was worse, girls taken right out of their houses or stopped while going about their business.”

Madame LaRosa turned down the radio. We’d been listening to a music program, popular songs about homecomings and bluebirds. End-of-war music that for a few minutes allowed the listener to believe in happy endings.

“Sentimental, aren’t they?” Madame LaRosa said. She cleared her throat. “It wasn’t always soldiers,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t always soldiers and strangers.”

A second memory of that homecoming night: André Bonner, the butcher’s son, leaning against a wall, waiting, followed quickly by the old memory of Lee in her white dress, stepping off her front porch.

In the dining room, Dahlia sighed and closed her book with a thump. “I hate Greek,” she said, smiling, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Can I come sit with you?”

“Yes.” She was old enough. She should hear whatever Madame LaRosa had to say.

“Why didn’t they stop them?” I asked. “The police, the fathers and brothers.”

“Because the men involved had friends who would protect them from accusations. It was war. There were more important things to worry about. That was what they said.”

“Accusations of what?” Dahlia said.

“Rape.” The word hung in the air like a sword.

•   •   •

O
n an evening in May I returned from a day of work at the perfume factory. Dahlia was in the kitchen, nibbling a pencil and frowning over the hated Greek translation she had yet to complete. Soon she would have to take her exams and decide where and what to study. I hoped she would be admitted to the Sorbonne, but Dahlia seemed indifferent to the possibility of living and studying in Paris.

“Momma, there’s a letter from Poughkeepsie,” she said, pushing the mail toward me over the table. “Open it, quickly.” She brushed
the hair out of her eyes and looked at me. She was already several inches taller than I was and to see this almost-grown child looking up, her face as shining as it had been on her first school day, undid me.

“Who is it from?” Dahlia stood and tried to read over my shoulder.

“Your father.” I had to sit down, quickly. It was an unseasonably hot day and my hands still smelled of jasmine, an almost overpowering smell in that still, closed room.

Dahlia sat, too, her mouth a round O of surprise.

Jamie’s handwriting had changed. It had a wobble, a tilt, a sense of rush.

Dear Nora,

I’ve been thinking about you. Showed some old photos to Clara yesterday and the one of you at the lake slipped out of the album. Remember that day you fell in? Clara could tell from my face that more than a dunking happened that day. I remember what happened afterwards. No more need be said. I wrote to your mother in Los Angeles and she says you spent the war in France and Switzerland. Why didn’t you come home, Nora? Is it because of what happened between us? That was so long ago. You shouldn’t stay away. Not because of that.

I was with the U.S. Sixth Army Group in ’44 when they invaded southern France. I was probably just miles away from you. Got a little shrapnel in my shoulder, but nothing serious. After the
armistice I went up to Paris for a bit but didn’t stay long. Was homesick for Poughkeepsie, believe it or not. There were times in Paris, Nora, when we were there together, that I thought I’d never want to be anywhere else. Things change, don’t they?

I hope you don’t mind that I wrote to you. I was just wondering how you were. Write, if you get the chance.

Jamie had written the letter on stationery from Tastes-So-Good Bakery and my mouth flooded with the remembered taste of vanilla and cinnamon and the smell of the floor of the van where we first made love.

Dahlia took the letter from me and held it almost reverently.

Then, she folded the letter carefully and gave it back to me. She stood and put a pot of water on the old coal-burning stove, beginning supper preparations. She moved strangely, like someone in an unfamiliar place who doesn’t know where the sharp corners are, the dangerous steps up or down. Her world had been reconfigured in the space of one letter, a few sentences.

“You must write to him,” she said, peeling a potato. “You must tell him about me.”

“Yes,” I agreed. She looked so much like him. The old hurt was still there, that betrayal and rejection when he chose Lee, not me. But a stronger feeling overwhelmed it, and that was my love for Dahlia. If she wanted the moon, I would pull it down for her. If she wanted her father, she would have him. With Nicky and Natalia gone, her family in Grasse had shrunk to only me and she needed more.

“I’ll write to him tomorrow,” I said.

“When I come home from school, maybe I’ll add a P.S. before you post it. That will surprise him. ‘Dear Father.’” Dahlia grinned.

But Dahlia didn’t come home from school the next day.

Her usual arrival time came and went and she didn’t show up. I was surprised. She was usually punctual. Children who grow up in wartime know better than to let their whereabouts go unaccounted for. Then dusk came. No Dahlia. I was angry. My serious child was becoming a little flighty, staring into mirrors when she thought I didn’t see, fussing over clothes, daydreaming over her homework. I wondered if she had a beau and hadn’t told me.

But when it turned dark and she still wasn’t home, anger turned to fear. I put on a cardigan because the spring night had turned chilly, and walked to the places where I thought she might be: the café where she and her friends sometimes ate cakes after their classes; the bookstore, which was already closed and dark inside. I walked toward her school, thinking she had been hurt, had twisted her ankle or fallen on the steep cobbled street; perhaps she was waiting for me and crying in pain, but I couldn’t find her.

“I will wake up from this,” I began to tell myself. “It’s only a bad dream.” But it wasn’t a dream.

I broke into a run, but she was not on any street where I might have expected to find her. By the time I made it to Madame LaRosa’s house, I was sobbing and incoherent. Pale with fright, she went upstairs to make sure her husband was safely asleep, then came out into the night with me. We searched the narrow streets of Grasse for hours, calling Dahlia’s name. Around midnight Madame LaRosa took me by the hand. “There is nowhere else to look. You must go home and wait,” she said.

The thought of stepping into that house, emptied of Natalia, of Nicky, and now of Dahlia, filled me with horror.

“Perhaps she is already there waiting for you,” Madame LaRosa said. “Come, I’ll go with you. I won’t leave you alone.”

As soon as we entered, we heard the weeping. Dahlia was upstairs in her room. I went up the steps two at a time. She was curled up on her bed, still in her clothes. I turned on the light.

“No,” she whimpered. “Turn it off.”

I had already seen the torn blouse, the blood on her legs running into her socks, the bruise on her face. I went to her and rocked her, folding her small and safe into my embrace, darkness filling my chest.

“I’ll go get the doctor,” said Madame LaRosa.

The doctor, a young man fresh from medical studies in Paris, gave Dahlia a brief examination, cleaned her wounds, and then gave her tablets to make her sleep.

“There shouldn’t be lasting damage,” he said confidently, and I had to press my fists against my stomach to keep from hitting him. It wasn’t his child in there, still crying in her sleep. “If signs of infection show up in a couple of weeks, call me.”

I thought of Lee on the porch, smelling of chemicals. Not my child. “I’ll need a written statement for the police,” I said, the blackness in my chest giving way to fury.

“Are you sure?” He looked at me with pity but also with impatience. “Do you want to put your daughter through that?”

He and Madame LaRosa exchanged glances. “Think about it,” he said. “If you want a report, I’ll have it ready in a couple of days.”

I sat by Dahlia all the rest of that night and the next day. She slept for a full twenty-four hours, waking only around midnight, stretching and yawning and then, immediately, the memory of it making her turn on her side, knees pulled up to her chest. When I tried to leave for a few minutes, she whimpered in fear.

“I shouldn’t have been out that late,” she said the next day, when she had recovered enough to drink a bowl of coffee with milk.

“No,” I said. “This is not your fault. You did nothing wrong. I’m going to the police this afternoon. Madame LaRosa will come and sit with you.”

“No!” she cried in terror. “Don’t tell anyone! Please!” Her eyes widened with fear and horror. “He said if I told anyone, it . . . it would happen again.”

“Who?”

Dahlia clamped her mouth shut and tried to turn away from me.

“Was it André Bonner?”

Her silence was the answer.

That afternoon after Madame LaRosa came to sit with Dahlia, I went out, slamming the front door behind me. I could feel the eyes of people watching as I passed houses and stores. Curtains stirred open and shut. People who had been standing in groups talking grew silent. They knew.

When I went into Bonner’s butcher shop, the other customers parted to let me through. I went to the counter and tried not to gag on my fury, mixed now with the metallic smell of blood from freshly butchered rabbits.

Father and son were working side by side, skinning the rabbits. There was a pail of heads and feet and blood and fur. Monsieur Bonner looked up. His son did not. André was almost middle-aged by then, married to a little mouse of a woman who bore him a child every year and a half. When he stood next to his father in the shop, though, he still had the look of a frightened boy.

“You already used up your coupons,” Monsieur Bonner said. “What do you want?”

“Ask him what he did to my daughter,” I said, pointing at André.

“On Tuesday night? My boy was here with me. All night. Weren’t you, boy?” Father and son grinned at each other. The other customers left the shop, the doorbell jingling with each hurried departure.