The Beautiful American (33 page)

“If he ever touches her again, I’ll kill him,” I said.

Monsieur Bonner put down his cleaver and leaned closer to me over the counter. “That’s a threat. I’ll have to tell the police about that.”

“And maybe I’ll tell them about those rabbits. Black market, aren’t they? You’ve been selling black market for years, and maybe more than rabbits and chickens.” Madame LaRosa had told me that the townspeople thought the Bonner men had sold information. Nicky had died rather than give names and the Bonners had sold them.

There was a momentary fear in the butcher’s eyes.

“Get out of my shop,” he said. “Foreigners.” He spit on his own floor.

•   •   •

D
ahlia would sleep only with a light on. She alternated between seeming younger, a child with a mild lisp, and older, silent and forlorn, aware of things no girl should know. For weeks she wouldn’t leave the house, not to go to her classes, not to sit in the sun near the fountain, not to visit Madame LaRosa or go with me to the greengrocer’s and bakery. Neither of us could stand the thought of entering the butcher’s shop. Because I would no longer buy meat from the butcher, other families also began to boycott him: families with pretty daughters, I noticed. There was an acrid odor of ill will in the town, small and large acts of vandalism. Paint was splashed against
my front door. The neighbor’s cat went missing. This, too, was part of the war that did not end even after the treaties were signed.

There were strong winds that summer and autumn, hot and dusty currents that came in from northern Africa. When Dahlia began going to her school again, and returned in the evening to her studies at the dining room table, her papers had to be weighted down with plates so they wouldn’t blow away. She was there in the morning when I left, and there in the evening when I returned. She didn’t visit her friends or join in any of their activities.

I worried, sometimes, that she shared my thought: if I had gone home to Poughkeepsie instead of running away to Grasse, she would have been born and raised there; the rape would not have happened. It was my fault. The guilt sickened me, but then I would think, there would have been other horrors. She, illegitimate, would have been ostracized, a girl with no father with a mother who would have been the focus of a town’s gossip and hate. Dahlia’s fear and misery crept into me.

I was glad work was busy at the factory; it distracted me from my worry about Dahlia. The tourists had returned to the Riviera and we now had more of them than before the war, GIs still in uniform, demobbed soldiers, English and American couples on a European vacation. Once summer ended, the south of France filled with people escaping the cold weather of Paris.

I was busy and exhausted when I returned home that evening, my hair stiffened by the dusty breeze.

Dahlia had dinner ready for us, potato stew with tomatoes and chickpeas and basil. She had just ladled it into bowls and carried them to the table when we heard a knock on the door.

“Madame LaRosa,” I said, but I already knew it wasn’t she. She
would never drop in at dinnertime without an invitation. Dahlia’s face turned white with fear.

When I opened the door, three men in police uniform were standing there, strangers not from Grasse.

“Madame Tours?” The shortest man checked a paper in his hand.

“Yes.”

“You are to come with us. You have been named as a collaborator.”

“You must be mistaken.”

All three of them smiled. They had heard that often enough, their expressions said. “No mistake,” said the one with the paper.

“It was Monsieur Bonner.” Dahlia came and stood next to me. “He did this to get revenge. This is my fault.”

“Was it Bonner?” I asked.

“Can’t say,” said the short man, but I saw yes in his eyes.

“And did he tell you his son raped my daughter?”

“Momma.” Dahlia took my hand.

“Come along. This will be sorted out soon,” said the tallest. He had a hard look in his eyes. He seemed almost bored.

“What about my child?”

All three men looked at Dahlia, appraising her. “She’s old enough to stay on her own,” said the shortest.

“Go to Madame LaRosa,” I told her. “I’ll be home soon.”

“This is my fault,” Dahlia said again, dropping my hand and taking a step backward.

“It’s not. Dahlia, Dahlia, it’s not your fault! Go to your godmother. Stay there.”

Perhaps that was the fatal error, those words, “stay there.” They have such a ring of finality.

They took me to police headquarters in Lyon. It was not the same building where Nicky had been held. They were not the same people. The war had been won; the questioners had been changed. But the cells were the same, I thought, small and damp and dark. I slept on a cot crawling with bugs and when I woke up, a woman in uniform came and led me to a room with a single bulb, a straight-back chair in front of a desk, and two men in uniform behind the desk.

“You sold perfume during the war. To the Germans. Is this correct?”

“Yes. Early in the war. I had to earn my living.”

A room with a single bulb, me smelling of sweat and fear seated in front of two men in pristine uniforms . . . the stuff of nightmares. Nothing in my life had prepared me for such a thing.

“We think you sold information to the Germans,” said one man.

“That is a lie,” I said.

A half hour passed of accusations and my denials of them. It ended suddenly. One man looked at his watch. The two of them rose, their chair legs screaming against the bare wood floor. I was led back to my cell and kept there for three days, three days of judging time by the degree of darkness within the cell, because there were no windows. Night was lighter; they turned on a bare bulb in the hall outside the cell at night. Six meals: stale bread and cold coffee for breakfast; thin vegetable soup and more stale bread for supper.

I was left alone, and that was enough to terrify me, because alone I had time to think of what had been done to Nicky by the Germans. My jailors weren’t German, but they thought me guilty of a crime, and guilty people are at the mercy of judges who often feel no mercy.

The real nightmare, though, was thinking of Dahlia, her stricken face, and what she had suffered, was suffering. Madame LaRosa could be cold and formal. I hoped she was holding my daughter, comforting her, telling her everything would be all right.

On the fourth morning I was led back to the questioning room. I was so desperate to return to Dahlia I had decided to say anything that might get me back home. But that was the puzzle: if I confessed to their charges, I would never see her again. If I didn’t confess, I had no idea how long they would keep me.

Immediately after the war these interrogations happened quickly. Trials were brief and judgment followed close behind, like a dog trained to heel properly. Even Pétain’s trial for collaboration had taken only a few weeks. But the trials had ended; people wanted to forget the war years. It would be more convenient for them to simply forget about me as well, perhaps to leave me there until I said what they wanted me to say.

I was pushed back down in the chair. The short one, the bully, offered me a cigarette. I refused it. His partner leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. The questions again began. Did I tell so-and-so the names of the men of Grasse who had joined the resistance? No. Did I tell the Germans where the freedom fighters had hidden arms? No. A whole list of accusations, each one more elaborate and impossible than the next. I knew nothing.

“Madame, what did you tell them?” the short one asked finally, exasperated.

“How to select a perfume for their wife or mistress,” I said.

Both looked at me in disbelief. The quiet one almost laughed. The corners of his mouth twitched and he busied himself with papers on the desk. I hadn’t slept, and when I blinked at that bare bulb, I saw a halo around it.

A third man entered the room. He whispered something into the ear of the man who seemed to be in charge, the man sitting directly in front of me who had sat back, listening and watching, as his partner fired questions at me.

This time he spoke. “Is it true, madame, that you arranged for a delivery of perfume to a Mademoiselle Simon in Lyon, in the fall of ’forty-one?”

I remembered it. A stocky little German had insisted I send four bottles of Chanel No. 5, not just one, for her birthday. Nicky had laughed when I told him about it. He had asked for the address and the date it was to be delivered. It had struck me as unusual at the time, even more so now. Nicky. What were you up to, Nicky? It wasn’t just about the perfume, was it?

“Yes,” I said.

The three men whispered together again. I heard the name, “Alexandrov. Nicholas.”

“It is safe to admit such things now,” said the third man. “Did you also shelter refugees?”

“Yes.”

“Bring her some coffee. Hot coffee, with milk and sugar.” To me he said, “You are free to go, madame. The driver will take you back home.”

When I rose, they did as well, in new respect.

“He was a very brave man, your Nicholas,” said the man in charge. “I met him once, before he was taken by the Germans.”

I had thought I had merely aided people who needed to leave France. Thanks to Nicky, I had done more. I had given addresses, dates, names of Germans, for the resistance to do with as they needed.

None of that mattered anymore. Only Dahlia mattered.

When I got back to Grasse, it was dark and Natalia’s house was empty. I went to Madame LaRosa’s, and her house was dark and empty as well. Confused, I went back home to wait.

The dry, dusty wind was still blowing when I went to bed, but I did not fall asleep. The next day I went back to Madame LaRosa’s, thinking she and Dahlia would have returned from wherever they had spent the night, that Dahlia would burst out the door and hug me in greeting. But the house was still locked up and empty.

“Monsieur and Madame have gone to Normandy,” said a passerby who saw me peering in a window. “Her sister sent for her.”

“Did they take a young girl with them?”

“No. It was just the two of them. There was no young girl with them.”

That was how I met Omar, who became my friend, who kept me going, taught me to hope. He was passing on the walk, his arms full of freshly cleaned tablecloths for the café. He dropped the cloths and caught me as I collapsed.

To suddenly live in a world where you can no longer find your daughter, where you no longer know where she is, or if she is . . . it was worse than any other disaster of my life, worse than all of them put together. I would have endured any of them, all of them, a thousand times over, rather than hear those words:
There was no young girl with them.
The world went black when I heard those words. Where was Dahlia?

“Come. I’ll take you home,” said the man who helped me back to my feet.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I
t was six months since I’d been questioned. Six months since my daughter had disappeared, and now I was at Farley Farm in England, and Lee was pouring a very long shot of whiskey into my glass. I drank it in two long gulps, coughing after I swallowed, and Lee gave me a knowing glance. Roland pointed at the door and gestured like a traffic cop, his arms windmilling us into the drafty dining room for supper.

There really wasn’t enough chicken to go around, but hunger wasn’t a bother. Those of us who had spent the war years in Europe had learned to ignore the rumbling hollowness of our stomachs. There was plenty of alcohol. Dinner was noisy with laughter, the clattering of knives and forks on chipped china, and the constant, slightly underwater sound of wine or stronger stuff being poured, sipped, guzzled.

I thought of my father coming home to his supper, still wearing his gardener’s overalls, so that my mother yelled and called him a lout and hurled other insults. She had had aspirations, my mother. She wanted her husband to come to table in a tie and jacket, to
speak of the avant-garde art exhibit at the armory, or one of the new books reviewed in the Sunday
Times
. Daddy had been content to trim hedges, to water the seedlings in the greenhouse, to read his same grimy anthology of poetry over and over.

After supper, he fell asleep in his easy chair, and Mother would jab angrily at a piece of embroidery. He would wake up from a dream and put his arm around my shoulders and whisper, “Someday we’ll go to France and see the great gardens. Just you and me. We’ll see that panther in the Paris zoological gardens.”

“Isn’t Anthony precious?” Lee had changed seats and sat beside me, pouring more garnet red wine into my emptied glass. Her hand shook a little.

“Yes, he’s a beautiful child.”

“I had a tough time with him. Days in bed, getting stitched up after. Never got my figure back. Never will, I guess.” Lee put the bottle back on the table. She had spoken a little loudly and the two young women had leaned closer to us to listen. Lee laughed, a sound like breaking glass, and went back to sit beside Roland. If I had somehow thought this was going to be an intimate weekend with Lee Miller, I had been very mistaken.

After dinner we went back outside, wrapped in blankets against the chill.

I listened to the night, to the wind in the leaves, to Lee telling a story about her travels in Budapest immediately after the war, the newly homeless aristocrats, the starving peasants. “The streets were full of oxcarts and American cars,” she said. “I photographed the graves of the American boys who died in the raids there. Grass had barely begun to grow over them, and the American and Brit oil companies were already there negotiating for rights.” She picked up a stone and threw it at a tree. It plunked and fell to the ground.

The spring light slowly evolved from misty green to a soft gray that blurred outlines, and I was drunk, too. Jamie would walk through the door at any minute; Dahlia had not yet rooted in my belly, changing everything.

Lee brought out candles and lanterns when it was fully dark and we sat there, finally exhausted and silent, locked in private memories as stars appeared, one by one; and when the moon rose, we gathered a second energy and started again. Roland went into the house and came out with another armload of bottles. They clinked as he walked, making the same sound as perfume bottles being boxed in the factory.