The Beautiful American (31 page)

“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d be back. And is that little four-eyes? You’ve grown, Dahlia. Not bad looking for an American.”

Dahlia pushed her glasses back up her nose and glared at him. “You could help us,” she said. “We need to tear down the wood so we can open the door.”

“Don’t bother,” he said. “Side door is already open.” He slunk away, his cigarette tip glowing in the dark.

We walked around to the side. The door wasn’t just open; it had been taken off the hinges and carted away. We walked cautiously inside, already prepared, we thought, for the worst, already so fatigued by the shock of arrival we expected we couldn’t feel much more.

The night we’d left Grasse, it had been moonless and silent. Everyone had stayed in their homes behind tightly closed blackout curtains. No one waved farewell. No one knew we had left until several days later, I suspect, when it would have been noticed I wasn’t queuing up for our rations.

The night we returned to Grasse, in 1945, the war was over, or at least the most visible part of it. Men sat outside the café once again, drinking, playing chess. Housewives gossiped loudly in their courtyards or shouted from window to window over the narrow streets. There were no Nazi flags, no German slogans pasted on walls, no soldiers on the streets. The people of Grasse had taken their city back for themselves.

But the end of war does not necessarily mean peace. Coming into town, we had seen a group of young women clustered under a
streetlamp on place du Petit Puy. Their heads had been shaved; several looked bruised and beaten. The retributions, the punishments of the collaborators, had begun.

Dahlia saw the women and looked at me, frightened. I wondered if we had left the safety of Switzerland too soon. But the three of us had agreed: it was time to come home.

The Swiss had granted us a tolerance permit, allowing us to reside but not to work, and so we had spent those years in a single attic room in Geneva, living on charity from the Quakers, in a hotel that had been converted into a hostel for war refugees. Dahlia had been allowed to attend school, and Natalia had been allowed to play the piano in the ballroom, which had been converted into a mess hall for the refugees.

Those had been lost years, for me, unable to work, unable to return to either Grasse or Poughkeepsie, unable to do anything but live with regret and fear. When I thought about Nicky, a blackness came over me. We hadn’t heard from him or about him. We hoped he had been sent to a labor camp, because we had heard you could survive the forced labor. But there were other places you did not survive, were not meant to survive.

Those good years, the happy years in Paris and then Grasse, were a lifetime away. Some days, walking along the shore of Lake Geneva with nothing to do but wait, I missed even Lee, and then I would remember Lee in bed with Jamie, her arms around his neck, that strange little smile on her face.

And as I remembered, it seemed so long ago, so irrelevant. Survival mattered. Nothing less.

“We have survived,” Dahlia said, that night of our return to Grasse. She was twelve years old and it seemed strange for my little girl to sound so grown-up.

I was glad to be home for many reasons, but she was the main one. This was where she had been born, where she had spent happy years of childhood, and no matter where I might live in the future, Grasse would be beloved to me because it had been beloved to Dahlia. I reached over and tousled her hair.

“We survived. The house hasn’t,” Natalia muttered.

We walked wordlessly from damaged room to damaged room. The kitchen had been scavenged of dishes and pots and pans; the rugs and curtains had disappeared. Upstairs, clothes we had left behind no longer hung in the old wardrobes.

“It was the war,” Natalia said. “People needed them.” But betrayal made her voice tremble.

The devastation went beyond theft: flowered wallpaper hung in damp strips and a heavy smell of rot and cat piss filled the air. A thick layer of dust coated everything. Although much of the furniture had been taken away, probably to be burned as fuel when coal ran short, Natalia’s piano was there, out of tune but intact. She ran her fingers over the keys, tried a chord, then shut the lid.

Dahlia’s school uniform still hung on the back of a chair. She picked it up and shook the dust off it, laughing at how small it was.

Natalia wandered aimlessly, picking things off the floor, running her hand over dusty sills, tilting her head, listening. She had hoped Nicky would be there, waiting for us, but the silence in the house was absolute.

“I’ll go to Nice and see if there’s any word of him,” I promised her. Those who had fled during the war were returning to their homes, but we knew many would not be coming back.

We slept on the floor that first night, on mildewed cushions. The next day we began putting the house to rights. We carried mattresses out onto the terrace for an airing, scrubbed the floors, made
arrangements for new strong doors and shutters. I went out to scour the shops for what I could find: a bar of soap, a few pots, some cloth for curtains, a handful of potatoes, a single slice of ham.

When I returned home after hours of standing in lines and haggling, Madame LaRosa was sitting with Natalia on the old sofa. When Madame LaRosa saw me, she sprang to her feet and we hugged for a long time, each fighting back tears.

“The police came looking for you the day after you left,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief. “That was how we found out you had gone. They came and asked us if we knew where you were. They came several times. I can’t think about what would have happened if you had still been here.” She did not ask why we had had to leave. We hadn’t been the only household sheltering fugitives.

Madame LaRosa had brought us soup and a cake and we ate together at the dining room table that afternoon. Like old times, Natalia said, though several dining room chairs, the carpet, and the old paintings had been taken and the room felt too large because of its new emptiness.

“I think I like the room like this,” Dahlia said. “Nice and open and sunny.”

“Very modern,” Natalia agreed, smiling bravely.

After lunch we went into the cobwebbed cellar, carefully carrying a single candle so that the old dry beams wouldn’t be set ablaze. I found a heavy stone and hammered away at the false brick wall. The wine we had stored was still there, safe. Natalia selected a bottle and back upstairs, we toasted our health, our homecoming, and the end of the war. Dahlia finished an entire glass and asked for more, but I wouldn’t give it to her. “Momma!” she complained.

“It will strengthen her blood,” Madame LaRosa said. “A second
glass, just today. And then no more until you are sixteen.” She wagged her finger at us.

Dahlia giggled and snuggled close to me on the cat-smelling sofa. Natalia looked at us, and did not smile. There was hunger in her mother’s eyes, hunger for her own child.

•   •   •

T
he third day of our return I took the bus to Nice.

The city looked worse for the poverty and neglect of the war years. On avenue Jean Médecin many of the shops were boarded and closed. Nicholas’ hotel, l’Auberge de l’Opéra, needed fresh paint and new shutters. The wood floors were stained and scuffed, and the menu posted on the board out front offered only seafood stew or sausages. Nicky would have been furious.

No one from the earlier years was working there. They were all strangers to me, and when I asked about the owner, they shrugged, they knew nothing. The hotel had changed hands.

One woman was kind enough to ask my name, and when I told her, recognition flared in her eyes. “Wait,” she said. “When I began to work in the office last year, there was some old mail on the desk. I think one of the letters was for you. I’ll go get it.”

A letter from Nicky. I’m safe, he would say. I’m in Portugal or Zurich. My hopes began to rise like morning mist steaming off a roof. I could feel a smile beginning to take shape on my face.

She went into the back room behind the counter . . . the same one Nicky used to emerge from, wiping coffee from his mustache with a pristine hotel napkin. When she returned and handed me the envelope with my name written in unfamiliar handwriting, those hopes that had begun to rise fell once again.

It was only an unpaid bill from my seamstress.

•   •   •

I
t was too painful to stay at Nicky’s hotel, so I took a room in a private house—everyone had “rooms for rent” signs up, trying to bring in a little money—and for two days I walked up and down the oceanfront, unwilling to go home to Grasse, to tell Natalia there was no word from her son. Nice was once again full of Americans and French, many still in uniform, but no more elderly gentlewomen from England, and certainly no Austrian barons. On the second day I ran into one of Nicky’s old waiters, Jean Carles. He was sitting on a bench, watching the waves roll in and out and break up the three-toed claw prints the seagulls left in the sand. Jean’s hands were jammed into the pockets of an old, frayed coat and he hadn’t shaved.

Those were the easiest changes to observe, because the younger Jean had been handsome and vain and well dressed. Now he was thin and dull-eyed. I sat next to him and after a few minutes he roused enough curiosity to look at me. He recognized me.

“He won’t be coming back,” he said. “They shot him, at the École de Santé in Lyon. They said he fell from a window, but that was a lie. They executed him because he wouldn’t give names.”

Nicky, my lover, my friend. To die like that. Alone. I couldn’t let myself think too much of what he had gone through before that final bullet ended the pain.

Jean and I sat together for a while, watching the waves and seagulls, not talking. I wouldn’t be seeing Nicky again and the sadness was overpowering.

I rehearsed in my head what I would say to Natalia, realizing there were no soft words, no gentle way, to announce the death of a son.

•   •   •

A
fter events such as those, life does not return to normal. You must create a new existence, one full of holes and regrets. If grief were a perfume, it would be all top notes with nothing to follow. Bottle by bottle, we sold the wine Nicky had told us to store before the war. We lined up for ration coupons; we planted tomatoes on the terrace. I sewed curtains and a new school uniform for my child. We had the piano tuned and encouraged Natalia to try to play it, but the music was dead for her. When my daughter laughed, she did it behind her hands, as if in secret, because the laughter was gone.

You go on, and you walk with ghosts beside you.

The perfume factories woke up from the enforced slumber of war shortages and began production in earnest, trying to fill an already-waiting market eager for pleasure and luxury. I easily found work in the factories as a translator, an office girl. I also worked in the lavender fields, moving down the rows of plants, snipping flower heads and laying them carefully in baskets. The physical strain of that labor felt good, felt right. It felt good to go home with an aching back, too tired to speak. Natalia had already fled into her own private silence. Her grief became a wordless, stony one. The stories she used to tell disappeared, and the music as well. She sat by the window looking out into the street, refusing to give up the wait for the son who would never again come up that path and knock on that door.

•   •   •

N
ow begins the saddest story I know, how a mother loses her daughter, how a war never really ends but ripples through the rest of your life in ways you may not expect.

Natalia had lived for hope, and once she knew Nicky was dead, she gave up that hope. She died the next year, of a weak heart. Her last words were in Russian, and I heard her say “Nicky” several times. When she was in her bed, struggling for breath, she looked through me into corners of the room, seeing things I couldn’t see. Her fingers moved over the covers as if she were playing a waltz, and then her breath rattled in her throat and the fingers lay still.

Dahlia seemed to come to an end of her resilience, with the death of the woman who had been a grandmother to her. She wept inconsolably and would not return to school or her studies for weeks, not until I reminded her that Natalia had hoped she would go on to university and study languages or music. Only then did Dahlia agree to go back to the school in Grasse and begin to make up for the lost time during our exile in Switzerland and the disruptions of the war, working at the dining room table from late afternoon until midnight.

I would sit on the sofa opposite the double doors to the dining room and glance at my child, my lovely child, looking pale and somehow saintly, like a church painting of the Virgin, her face lit by the single lantern she used, all else in dark shadows.

My knitting needles would clack the way Natalia’s once had; I had found bags of wool stashed in Natalia’s dresser, good prewar wool that had somehow been left behind during the scavenging years. Dahlia took an occasional break from her work, to stretch and talk for a few minutes. She began again to ask questions about her father. What foods had he liked? Was he a good dancer?

I searched for and found stuck in the back of a desk drawer the old photos Lee had taken in Paris. The edges were mouse-chewed and damp, but there were Jamie and me at the Dôme; Jamie in Man Ray’s studio setting up the lights, black cords twisted around his
hands; Jamie and me mugging for the camera outside the Closerie des Lilas, where years before Hemingway had liked to drink.

Ah, that youth, that freedom.

“He was handsome,” Dahlia said, holding the photos close to her face and squinting.

“Very,” I agreed.

“I would like to meet him. Can we go back to Poughkeepsie, just for a visit?”

Travel was still difficult then, and expensive. “I have to save up a bit,” I said. “It will take a while.” Natalia had left me the use of her house for as long as I wanted, and then it would go to a distant cousin. Meanwhile, there were taxes, repair bills, all more than the small salary I was earning.