The Beautiful American (30 page)

“It’s only a paper, Momma,” she said.

“A forbidden paper, published by the resistance fighters. Do you know what would happen to you, to us all, if it were found in this house? Do you think they wouldn’t question a child? You think they wouldn’t?” I raised my hand to slap her for the first time, and stopped just at the last second, when my hand was an inch from her face.

She looked at me, and the separation began, when my child was no longer exclusively mine, when she began to belong to something larger. There was a flicker in her eyes of anger and rebellion, and then a curtain fell over her face. The openness of childhood disappeared. Her face was unreadable.

I was the one who wept, not Dahlia. “Never bring that paper into the house. Promise,” I pleaded.

“Can we eat now?” She did not look at me, but out the window. Our neighbor, Madame Orieux, was hanging her quilts to air and stood framed in her own window, looking at us, her head tilted to its good side: she heard better in her left ear than her right.

When Dahlia looked back at me, it was as if we had changed places. See what you’ve done, her gaze said. Spoken so loudly, so indiscreetly, in front of that woman next door.

“You think I don’t know,” Dahlia said quietly so we couldn’t be overheard. “About the people who come at night and leave before morning. You tell me nothing, and then accuse me of keeping secrets. Why do you never talk about my father?” She stuck out her bottom lip and was again my child, my little one.

She ignored the bowl of soup I put in front of her.

I leaned against the sink, thinking what to say, what not to say.
This was the moment I had dreaded for years and there was no going around it or over it. I had to walk right through it.

“He was an American. A boy I knew. We went to Paris together, before I came here to Grasse.”

“Poughkeepsie,” she said, remembering our trip there years before. “Why didn’t you marry him?”

“He was in love with someone else.”

She looked up, confused, still young enough and innocent enough to believe that if you loved someone, he was bound to love you back.

“Does he know about me?” she asked.

“We separated before you were born.”

“So I know about him, and he doesn’t know about me.” She spooned her soup, her eyes thoughtful.

•   •   •

F
or Christmas, we put up boughs of evergreens and made presents for each other, and I also gave Dahlia her first bottle of cologne, a light fragrance suitable for a young girl.

Dahlia unwrapped it from its brown paper and turned it over and over in her hands, opening the flacon.

“Don’t you want to try it, sweetheart?” I coaxed, seeing my daughter but remembering my mother.

“At school, they say you are selling perfume to the Germans,” Dahlia said, looking up at me with her huge, serious brown eyes. “Is this one the German officers buy?”

“No. This is one I do not show them.” I felt cold, not just because it was December and we had only a small fire in the old tile stove.

“They are recruiting children?” I accused Nicky the next time I
saw him, the weekend after New Year’s. “This great organization of yours uses children?”

“I didn’t give her the papers. Someone from her school must be distributing them.”

“Not my child,” I said through gritted teeth. Vichy France was thick with police commanded by Germans, Frenchmen in blue uniforms and brown shirts, outcasts from the Far Right and released prisoners who tortured and assassinated those in the resistance.

“Children in occupied France are taking even greater chances,” Nicky said. “They cross the demarcation lines on their bicycles to carry messages. They go where adults cannot.” He closed the door firmly behind us, because I had accosted him in his office behind the reception desk instead of waiting for a more private moment upstairs.

“Not my child,” I said again, pulling on his arm, forcing him to look at me. “She is all I have.”

“All?” he said, quietly. “What about me? What about France, this country you said you love so much?”

I didn’t have to say it again; he saw it on my face. Dahlia was everything, the reason I worked hard, the reason I sold perfumes to Germans I detested, the reason I had stayed in Grasse where she was growing up safe and protected by me, Natalia, Monsieur and Madame LaRosa. She was my gravity, my center. Nothing mattered but her safety, her happiness.

That night I slept on the far side of his bed, not letting him touch me.

I thought of leaving France, but by then, it was too late. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and the United States had entered the war; I was no longer a member of a neutral nation, no longer able to travel openly. The first convoy of Jewish deportees had been sent
from Vichy to Germany and the true horrors were beginning. Even those who had once supported Pétain and the armistice with Germany now feared the future.

“Get us out of here, Nicky,” I said the next morning.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It is time. I will make arrangements. I will keep your daughter safe, Nora. I promise.”

Arrangements took time and there was a priority list of people needing to leave France. Others were in immediate danger: they would be shot if seen on the street, tortured if captured. We had to wait, he said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

W
hen next I went into Nice a few weeks after telling Nicky I wanted to leave France, there was a “Closed” sign on the door of the hotel and the lobby was filled with German officers. All of his regular guests had been told to find lodgings elsewhere. The Allies had landed in North Africa. Germany, knowing that an Allied invasion into southern France was planned, had sent their troops into Vichy.

“Go upstairs,” Nicky said, looking not at me but over my shoulder, watching. “Stay there and don’t open the door unless you are certain it is me on the other side of it.” I made my way through the lobby, trying to ignore the stares of the officers. Hours passed before Nicky joined me. He looked tired and anxious.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. He carried a tray with bread and a little cheese. “It’s all we have. They have emptied the kitchen, and the wine cellar. Go back to Grasse, Nora. Tomorrow. First thing. There is nothing more for you here in Nice. Wait in Grasse.”

“You are here,” I said almost apologetically, touching his sleeve. At that moment, I did love him. He was kind and charming and
gallant in a way Jamie had never been. And there I was again, comparing him to Jamie.

“Thank you for that,” he said. For our last night together, we drank a bottle of wine he had hidden from the Germans, and sat and talked nonsense long into the small hours of the morning, telling our stories to each other, filling in the holes of the past. I told him about climbing trees with Lee, the perfume bottles lined up in my mother’s bathroom. He told me about his father’s gold cuff links, the pearl tie stud he hid in his mouth when they crossed the border out of Russia, the dog he had had as a boy that had been left behind. We gave each other our memories. And in the morning, I went home to Grasse and stayed there, waiting for word.

•   •   •

N
atalia and I had three more nighttime visitors that spring. They were no longer announced. I just put food out in the evening, in case, and if it was gone in the morning, if the cups and plates had been moved, the blankets on the floor rumpled, I knew someone had been there. I wondered when our turn would arrive, when we would become nighttime travelers.

“Uncle Nicky didn’t call me,” Dahlia said the last Sunday evening in May. It was warm and because of blackout regulations we sat in the dark, on the little terrace. Occasionally we heard a plane overhead and the loud, angry buzzing would fill our heads; there would be a moment of fear, and then the sound would begin to fade away, the dangerous humming no louder than a mosquito’s, and there would be a moment of pure joy at simply being alive.

“He’s probably busy,” I said, caught in that moment of temporary bliss when the sound of the plane first died away completely.

“He always calls on Sunday evening,” Dahlia said. She sounded frightened.

“Then the lines are down. He’ll call tomorrow,” I insisted, hiding my own worry.

Roses were blooming and the air was heavy with their scent. When I closed my eyes and inhaled, concentrating on the odor, I was transported back to the night of Lee’s last party in Paris, the night Man shot at her. The night I found her in bed with Jamie. The sense of loss and defeat went through me like electricity, as if it had all just happened.

That overwhelming sense of dread told me that Dahlia was right. Attar of rose marked the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. Something was wrong with Nicky. The air blossomed with presentiment.

“What’s wrong, Momma?” Dahlia reached for my hand in the darkness.

“We’ll be fine,” I said, pressing her hand, promising both of us.

Natalia, inside and sitting at her piano, began the gentle chords of a Chopin nocturne. She played from memory, effortlessly, but there was hesitation in some of the notes. She, too, was hoping the phone would ring. It didn’t.

The next day, a school day, Dahlia stayed home. We were all three of us waiting. At dusk, at the end of those long hours, Solange, Nicky’s receptionist in Nice, knocked on the door.

“Pack a bag. One small valise each,” she said. “We leave as soon as it is dark. You, too, Madame Hughes,” she said, looking at Natalia. “You must come as well.”

Natalia crossed herself and sat heavily, as if her legs couldn’t support her. “My God,” she whispered several times.

Dahlia, sitting at the table in the parlor, frowning over Latin
conjugations, heard us and came into the kitchen. She put her arm around Natalia, and the child tried to comfort the woman. Dahlia didn’t weep or show fear. Her face looked so adult at that moment it froze my heart. She’s growing up too quickly, I thought. It’s the war.

“What does this mean?” I asked. “What is happening?”

Solange smiled. “He told me you would ask questions. He said, ‘Tell her it is time to go. Remember Varian in Marseille.’”

Our old code. I could trust Solange.

“Is Nicky coming, too?”

“No.”

Natalia began to moan. Quicker than I did, she saw what this meant. She put her hands over her eyes and wept. Dahlia hugged her tighter.

“Where is Nicky?” I asked.

Solange turned me aside and spoke quietly so Natalia couldn’t hear. “They have taken him to Lyon. We think to the École de Santé.”

Gestapo headquarters. “My God,” I said, echoing Nicky’s mother.

We did as Solange instructed. We packed a single bag each and left the house as it was, with dishes in the sink, Dahlia’s homework spread out over the table. Natalia paused in her sitting room. She closed up the piano, touched it lovingly. We went out into the night and Natalia looked once over her shoulder at the home where she had lived for so many years.

“It happens again,” she said bitterly, and her Russian accent, slumbering for so long, made her words thud and growl. “I must flee and leave everything behind. First the Bolsheviks, then the Germans.”

I felt numb with fear. Nicky had tried to prepare me, had warned me there were dangers ahead. But to think of him, that
pleasure-loving, worldly man, in the bowels of the Gestapo headquarters . . . I couldn’t bear it.

Solange and the others who took her place did not lead us to Marseille. The safe house there was already being too closely watched. Instead, we traveled in a northeasterly direction.

Days later, sleeping in a mountain hut somewhere just outside Switzerland, I awoke in darkness, confused. A storm was raging, rattling the windows, blowing rain through a crack in my bedroom in Poughkeepsie. That was how I knew it was a nightmare. Daddy had kept our house in good repair; there had been no cracks in the window. Dahlia moaned and pressed closer to me. I put my arms around her. My daughter, my treasure. Places didn’t matter. Only Dahlia did. “Thank you, Nicky,” I whispered before falling asleep again, exhausted. He had kept my daughter safe, as he had
promised.

PART THREE

BASE NOTES

The bottom notes of a fragrance are recognized after approximately thirty minutes of wear, long enough for a woman to fall in or out of love, to remember the happiest or saddest days of childhood, to reminisce about those moments when everything changed. Much can happen in half an hour. The world can change, and so the perfume must change as well, in a way that adds meaning to the notes that have gone before. The base notes are the foundation of the fragrance, the most lasting impression. When a perfume is remembered, it is usually the base notes that leave the strongest memory.

—From the notebooks of N. Tours

...after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone . . . remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins . . .

—Proust

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“M
y God,” Natalia said, standing in front of her house, three years later.

The windows were boarded over with Xs of wood; paint had been splattered on the front. The window boxes had been torn away, leaving rusting nails jutting out. A ragged hole in the bottom of the door showed where the hungry cats of the neighborhood had been sleeping for the past few years. Someone had made that hole on purpose. No one can despoil a house worse than a tribe of tomcats.

Natalia dropped her valise and rubbed her eyes as if clearing her vision might restore the house.

Dahlia put her arm around Natalia’s shoulders. In the years that we had been gone, Nicky’s mother had developed a dowager’s hump, and she stood, bowed and comfortless, muttering softly in Russian.

“So, you came back,” said a voice behind us.

I turned to look. “Is that you, André?” I asked. The butcher’s son leaned against a wall smoking a cigarette. He had the same
round-shouldered, chin-lifted attitude he’d had as a boy. I’d never cared for him. He looked too much like his father, spoke like him, eyed the women and girls of the town in the same way, as if they were meat to be hung in the shopwindow.