The Beautiful American (35 page)

Lee picked out more photos in the order in which she remembered taking them, and all humor disappeared from the work as she, traveling with the army, pushed east, deeper and deeper into the ravaged landscape. A photo from Cologne showing a dead German soldier, his hands blown away. The daughter of the burgomaster of Leipzig, back arched in death on the leather sofa on which she had killed herself.

And then, the photos Lee took at Dachau after the camp had been liberated by the American GIs, dead bodies piled like firewood.

“Dave was with me,” Lee said. “I thought I had seen the worst during the battles, but when we got to the camp, I couldn’t believe it. How much worse the worst really was, the smell of hundreds,
thousands, of decaying bodies. I thought I’d never wash that smell away. I still have nightmares about it. I dream I’m getting dressed up for a fashion shoot, but when I look down, I’m wearing those striped pajamas the prisoners wore and both my feet have turned blue with gangrene.”

Lee was shaking so violently she dropped her cigarette. It landed on a photo and where the glowing tip touched the paper, a little ring of blue turned into a circle with minuscule flames. I slapped it out with my hands. Lee only watched.

“God, Roland would never forgive me if I burned the house down,” she said.

As if on cue, we heard Roland calling for Lee. “Where are you?” he shouted. And then, in a lower voice, barely audible, “Damn.” A few moments later we heard him calling from the front of the house, and then his voice faded away.

Lee smiled. “He’s swell, isn’t he? He came to fetch me from Paris after the liberation. I was having a little trouble maneuvering on my own by then. So he came for me, all knight on his white horse, and carried me back to England. Even kicked his girlfriend out of the flat so we could be alone together.”

She lit another cigarette and picked up another photo from the pile on the floor. “Want to see more?”

“Yes.”

“My favorite.” The world’s favorite, in fact: Lee having a good soap-down in Hitler’s bathtub. The famous, beautiful Lee Miller had crossed Germany with the American army and stayed in his abandoned apartment in Munich when the Führer’s death was announced.

As filthy as the soldiers with whom she marched and badly wanting a bath, Lee had arranged a few props in the tiled bathroom—a
statue of Venus, her combat boots, a photo of Hitler—then filled the tub and climbed in.

“I stank that day.” Lee exhaled a perfect circle of smoke up toward the ceiling. “We all did. When I saw that bathtub, I couldn’t think of a better way to wash off the stench than to use the butcher’s own tub.”

There was a strange look on Lee’s face in the photo. Her eyes were looking up to the corner, as if watching someone the viewer could not see. You couldn’t help but wonder whom or what she was thinking of, who that unseen person was. So many of us had that expression during the war—the look of someone who didn’t know the whereabouts, or condition, of a beloved. Natalia had worn it constantly in Switzerland.

“Were you thinking of Roland?” I asked her.

“Actually, I was thinking how boring Hitler’s little apartment in Munich was. My God, his bedroom was upholstered in chintz. Except for all the linens and crystal monogrammed with ‘AH’ you’d think you were in a traveling salesman’s home. I went to Eva Braun’s house on Wasserburgerstrasse and had a nap in her bed, thinking how happy I was she was dead.”

The final photo in this series: Hitler’s house in Berchtesgaden, burning, a solitary male figure in the foreground watching. The photo seemed out of focus at first till I realized it was the rising intense heat of the flames that had set the air all astir. It was a photo of hell.

“That’s it.” Lee gathered up the photos and stuffed them back in the envelope. “That’s what Mommy did during the war. I think soon I will be finished with photography. After taking these photos . . .”

We both stared out the small single window for a while. Time
seemed to move back and forth from childhood to Paris to the war, and back to childhood. I felt like that little girl looking up the tree at Lee, waving down at me from the top, except that little girl had seen the future and was already haunted by nightmares of the evil yet to come.

We sat silently, not touching, both looking out the window, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Dahlia’s name was on my lips—I was about to tell Lee about my child when Lee emptied her flask in one more long gulp and stood.

“Roland may have cooked up a few eggs,” Lee said. “Better grab a couple. Eat while you have the chance, that’s the rule.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
he record player was still on when we went back downstairs, now an old Jolson tune, and we could hear the two young women in the stove room, speaking in low tones so that only a word or two stood out as we passed them—Arnold, Normandy. I knew they were speaking of one more lost young man.

Roland stood in front of the ancient stove, frying eggs.

“Morning, Nora. Some breakfast?” He gave me a smile over his shoulder and flipped the eggs in the pan, showing off. “Hope your hangover isn’t as bad as mine.”

“I could use an aspirin, if you have any.”

“If we have any . . .” Roland smirked in Lee’s direction. “You’re looking at the queen of contacts. Lee even had aspirins in her kit when she was at the eastern front, didn’t you? What can we get you? A duchy in Romania? An ancient papyrus? An audience with the queen, to go with the aspirin?”

She blew him a kiss, but made a face behind his back when he returned his attention to the stove and the eggs.

And then, they did what most married couples do, began
talking about things I knew nothing about, part dismissive, part show-off, presenting their lives to this almost-stranger in the kitchen. I sipped my coffee, ate the eggs Roland put in front of me even though I wasn’t hungry, and pretended I wasn’t there.

From somewhere high upstairs, I heard a child’s scream, a shout, a thud. Anthony was throwing things. When she was two, Dahlia threw everything she could get her hands on, anything she was strong enough to lift. She broke cups and plates and powder compacts and perfume bottles, laughing joyfully all the while.

“Bet you look forward to the sun,” Roland was saying to Lee. “The warmth. Looks like it’s going to rain again this afternoon.”

“Mostly the fruit,” Lee said. “Sicilian oranges. Can’t wait. Did I tell you, Nora, I’m doing a photo shoot in Sicily next week? ‘Traveling at Ease,’ they’re calling it. I’ll have to learn how to say ‘Don’t look at the camera’ in Italian. I can already say it in French, German, Arabic, and Romanian.”

“There’ll be the usual pretty young models in two-piece bathing suits and shorts, soaking up the sun,” Roland added. There was an edge to his voice that made me put my cup down and look at Lee.

“He’s always on the lookout for a new mistress,” Lee said. “Be careful he doesn’t ask you to apply for the position, Nora. He’s greedier for women than Man was.” Roland, still at the stove frying more eggs for himself, having fed Lee and myself, said nothing.

I went back outdoors, slamming the screen door behind me. Lee’s comment about Roland’s infidelity had broken open old scars, had reminded me of all the broken promises between Jamie and myself. But it was too late to catch the ferry. I’d have to stay another day.

Farley Farm had a library, as did all good English country houses, and even a few books that hadn’t been burned as fuel, as well
as some newer novels Lee had purchased in London and brought with her. I found a well-thumbed copy of
Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier and walked out onto the flat Sussex landscape for a quiet day of reading, apart from the others. I took some rolls and butter and a half-empty bottle of cognac.

It was a fifteen-minute walk over the downs to get far enough from the house to achieve privacy, to find a place in the rolling green hills where I could neither see the farm nor be seen by the others. The vast openness of the landscape was another kind of loss and sorrow.

When you have lost someone, horizons change. You look, and force yourself to see her, top of the head, face, shoulders, torso, legs, appearing incrementally over the rise. But she never does.

Finally, I crested one hill and discovered a large boulder, too big to have been removed through those centuries of taming the very ground, and crouched against it, my sweater bundled up as a pillow, my face turned to the sun, now playing hide-and-seek in accumulating clouds.

Chirps sounded in the turf around me and protective mother birds, angered by my intrusion, hopped and stared me down with their round yellow eyes. A new season of the living yelled at me to go away. I sat perfectly still, and soon the morning returned to silence.

I opened
Rebecca
and read that glorious first sentence:
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
But soon my thoughts wandered as aimlessly as the turf-grazing sheep. Lee and Roland. Little Anthony. Jamie. Pablo. Where was Man Ray? Lee hadn’t mentioned him yet. Wise not to mention a lover in front of a husband, of course, but every time I saw Lee, I expected to see Man behind her. That was how it had been in Paris, Lee and Man, inseparable. Until she met Aziz.

The last thought before sleep claimed me: Dahlia, sixteen years old, just beginning that breathtaking change from child to woman, beautiful beyond words, the perfect blend of her mother and father. I tried to breathe shallowly to avoid the pain of her loss, but there was no avoiding it. The grief twisted inside me like a caged beast.

When I slept, I dreamed of damp cells and the double lightning-strike insignia of the SS flashing over the southern French hills—and the fields of lavender, the olive orchards.

•   •   •

P
ablo found me several hours later, asleep on the turf with the sheep grazing around me, the emptied bottle still in my hand, the novel spread open to the first page. When I awoke, he was sitting next to me, a sketchbook on his lap, charcoal in hand.

“God, what boring animals sheep are. You don’t mind,” he said, a statement, not a question. “I drew you when you were sleeping.”

“I probably owed you that much for having said no, in Paris,” I said, sitting up. “I didn’t think you would remember that.” The afternoon had changed during my sleep; the air was heavy with the rain to come and the sun was completely hidden, no more hide-and-seek.

“You made such a contrast with Lee,” he said. “It would have been an interesting exercise, a newer version of
Les deux amies
.” In that painting, one of the figures had been of Madeleine, an early lover. Did that mean Lee had been one of his lovers?

Pablo gave me the notepad so I could see the sketch. He had drawn me as an odalisque, arms over my head in a circle, legs twisted to one side, eyes shut but with a suggestion of movement behind them. A dreaming odalisque.

“You have given me longer legs. Thank you.”

“I gave you the legs you should have been born with.” He smelled pleasantly of pipe smoke. “Or perhaps not. Not all women should be tall, like our Lee.”

Our Lee. Of course they, too, had been lovers.

Pablo looked out over the gentle green hills, green as far as the eye could see with stone fences and white sheep, recently shorn so they appeared vulnerable and oddly shaped, all that tight white wool cut close to the skin.

Pablo had aged. We all had. But perhaps he had aged best, no belly paunch, no shaking hands, no visible scars or loss of limb; only two long furrows making commas from his nose to his jaw suggested his age. He had gone bald on top, and to compensate had cut the rest of his white hair quite short, so that his head looked like a handsome, perfectly shaped egg. Gone was the famous forelock. I remembered how he had tugged it at, repeatedly, that evening I first met him and his wife, Olga.

He signed the drawing, tore it from his pad, and gave it to me. “Keep it,” he said. “Don’t sell it.”

“I wouldn’t!”

“No. I mean if you need money, don’t sell it to anyone but me. I will buy it back from you.” That was how Pablo made gifts. He would give a drawing and then buy it back for a very good price. He was generous, and clever. That tactic helped keep his prices high, under his control. Pablo was very, very rich by then. He bought houses with two or three paintings.

“Thanks.” I slipped it between the pages of the novel. A few years before, I would have jumped at my good fortune. But now that the war was over and Dahlia had disappeared, my only need, to find her, was not redeemable by mere wealth.

“So you survived,” he said.

“Yes. When it got too dangerous, I went to Switzerland.”

“I sent Olga and my son to Switzerland.”

“But you stayed.”

“Of course.”

Pablo and his Paris studio, I had learned after the war, had become symbols of the resistance. He tilted his head up to the sun, then squinted down at me. “During the war all I could think about was food. I painted it over and over, fish, bowls of fruit, pigeons. Have you ever tried to eat a pigeon? The meat is black as a crow’s.”

“Man told me Hemingway used to eat crows, when he didn’t have money for a meal.”

“Man said a lot of things, not all of it true or important. Do you still live in Grasse?”

So he did remember.

“Yes. I went home, back to Poughkeepsie, once. But I went back to Grasse, and after the Germans invaded . . .” After 1940, no one traveled except to flee or escape.

“You stayed in the south. Safer there.” He nodded. “The Germans used to come to my studio in Paris, you know, looking for Jews, asking me if I was Jewish. They liked culture. That was how they described it.
Kultur.
And I would give them postcard reproductions of
Guernica
, and they would thank me. Idiots.”

I thought of his painting
Guernica
, full of screaming women’s heads, dying horses, body parts. In the upper left there was an oval like an eye, but the eye’s pupil has been replaced by a lightbulb, like those used to torture prisoners, to nearly blind them and sleep-deprive them. I had thought of that painting often while in jail in Lyon.