The Beautiful American (37 page)

“We are very old friends,” Lee said, pouring more wine into her mug. “From Paris, before the war. And way before that, Poughkeepsie. At one time we even shared a lover.”

Lee smirked when she said it, intending to give that little pinprick to Roland, who had just come into the room, his arms full of wood.

But I was the one most injured by that casual remark. And Jamie. Caught in her wake, her games, her predatory sexuality. He had suffered because of Lee.

Blame was a comforting emotion, and I wanted comfort. If it hadn’t been for Lee, somehow Dahlia would never have disappeared. I would have had a family with Jamie, the three of us safe and
together. Not true, perhaps, but at that moment I didn’t care about the truth.

“We go way back, Lee,” I said, locking eyes with her. She stopped smiling and her head tilted to one side. I was ready to pay her back for her betrayal, first of me, and then of Jamie.

“I was there one day when you came home from Vassar Hospital.”

She froze. Her eyes opened wider. Carefully, she put her mug on the floor, her gaze never leaving mine, her mouth opening slightly.

We stared at each other for what felt like hours and I watched as shock flickered across her face. Did I imagine it, or did those famous lips silently voice the word “please”? She was frightened that I would tell, would make her own sad history part of the silly game we were playing.

“Hospital?” Carmen asked. “Were you ill as a child, Lee?”

“Poor thing,” said Lisa, no sympathy in her voice. They both leaned forward, eager for gossip.

Roland poked at the logs in the woodstove, his face flushed with heat or emotion, I couldn’t tell which. Surely she had told Roland, her husband.

“Tell them,” Lee said, lighting a cigarette. “Tell them of my illness, Nora. Now is your chance, if you want revenge.”

Roland put down the poker, closed the door of the stove, and came and sat next to her. Protectively, lovingly. So, he knew.

“Yes, tell,” insisted Carmen, leaning forward. In the end, it was the look on Carmen’s face, a predatory, vulpine glance, that changed the outcome of that moment. Lee did not make friends easily, especially with other women, who resented her beauty, her power, her almost masculine freedom. Carmen was no friend.

And much as I resented what had passed between Lee and
myself, that look of casual indifference on her face when I found Lee and Jamie in bed together, I was not her enemy.

“Whooping cough,” I lied, as if I were bored with the conversation, with the evening. “She was sick for weeks. Months.”

“Is that all?” Lisa was plainly disappointed. “Who goes to the hospital for whooping cough?”

“Apparently I did. I don’t remember. I think I hear Anthony crying. Back in a minute.” Lee rose to go upstairs. She paused and put a hand on my shoulder when she passed behind me.

“Poughkeepsie must have been a complete bore,” said Carmen. “Imagine growing up in such a place. I’ll have some more wine, too, Roland.”

“Where did you grow up?” I asked, not really interested but sensing that things needed to be said. The air had grown too thick and menacing.

“Los Angeles. City of Angels. I’m going back for a screen test soon. For a new Bette Davis movie,
All About Mary
.” Carmen lit a cigarette, posing like a girl in a commercial, head thrown back, hand suggestively placed in front of her mouth, fingers stroking the lighter.

“It’s
All About Eve
, not
Mary
,” corrected Lisa, downing the contents of her glass.

Pablo was looking at me curiously, black eyes under thick brows moving back and forth over my face. He knew the whooping cough had been a lie and was trying to discern the truth simply from my expression. I had seen him look that way in his studio in Paris before the war, when he stood in front of one of his paintings still searching for its truth.

Lisa rose, put a record on the phonograph, and danced a tango by herself, purposely tripping over her own feet to make us laugh.

Roland came over and poured more wine into my glass, his face a mask. “Thank you,” he mouthed silently.

Thank you for not telling that Lee had been raped as a child, that she had been a victim. We lived in a time that made it dangerous to be a victim. Dahlia had learned firsthand what it meant to be a victim.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“N
ot my daughter!” were the first words in my head when I woke up, arguing again with Nicholas, and it hurt all over again. I was confused, as I had been my first morning at Farley Farm, and the words rang with too many meanings, too many lost daughters and grieving mothers. Perhaps those were the words Lee’s mother had used when she first heard what had happened to her daughter, that rape at seven.

I sat up in bed and looked out the window, over the picture-book landscape of Farley Farm, the velvety green and brown South Downs dotted with yellow flowers, the kind of landscape where happy endings are implied. I had stopped believing in them. Last night I had almost announced Lee’s childhood rape to the house party, to those silly vain women who, you could see it in their eyes, would love to somehow get a claw into the very famous, beautiful Lee Miller; and to the editor, Lesley, with her hooded, all-seeing eyes, wheels always turning in her head, looking for a good gossipy story.

Almost. I had stopped in time. I think that even when I’d found
Lee in Jamie’s arms, I could not have screamed the news of her rape to the world. There is destruction beyond destruction, the ground-into-dust annihilation of image, and Lee lived by her image. I couldn’t do it. There had already been too much destruction.

It was still early—dawn was no more than a hint of gray in the eastern sky—so I hoped to be alone with my first cup of coffee. But Lee was already up and about. I saw her out the kitchen window in her fatigues and wellies, pacing and counting, perhaps planning a vegetable garden. When did she sleep?

When she saw me, she stopped counting, came into the kitchen, and poured two cups of coffee.

“Your mother used to bring you out to the farm. We played together.”

“Yes.”

“You never said anything. Not when we met in the bookstore in Poughkeepsie, not all that time in Paris we were together.”

“No.”

Lee went and stood at the window, her back to me. “So few people know about it. The rape. The more people who know, the more I am forced to remember it, to think of it.”

Dahlia had said almost the exact thing when she begged me not to go to the police.

“You want to forget, but of course you can’t,” Lee said, lost in her own thoughts. “You just keep running away from it. And it’s always there, in front of you, waiting around the corner to take you by surprise, and it’s never even a damn surprise. Have you heard about the rapes? Women being raped by the thousands, all over Europe. France. Germany. Romania. The final act of war, the beginning of peace. Rape.”

Lee came and sat at the table opposite me. It was a good table,
thick scrubbed oak, the kind of table that lasts for centuries. “I think,” she said, rubbing her hand over the table to brush away crumbs, “you are the only person who knew me both in Poughkeepsie and Paris, who knows what happened. And you kept quiet all these years.”

Her voice was neutral, flat, as if her reaction were somewhere she couldn’t reach, a dark corner. “You know everything about me, and I know nothing about you, I think.”

Lee stopped flicking her hand back and forth over the table. She looked at me in a way she rarely did, the way she rarely looked at anyone or anything, seriously, unmasked, open. “When I saw you, there, outside of Harrods, I thought it was just the war that made you look like that,” she said. “Devastated. Walking, but not really with the living. Then I thought maybe you were still angry about Jamie. But it’s something else.”

“I have a daughter, Lee. A child.”

“Is that why you left Paris? Jamie’s? If I had known . . .”

“Would anything have happened differently?”

She thought. Lee was many things, but never a coward, so she answered honestly. “Probably not,” she admitted. “I was drunk the first time. So was Jamie. And you know the problems I was having with Man, his possessiveness, my need to be free, not owned.”

I closed my eyes and thought back to that night, Jamie holding Lee in his arms, her little smile of satisfaction and something else. Power. Her power over men—and she had tremendous power—was part of her revenge for what had happened to her when she was seven.

Forgiveness is a kind of perfume, made of many different essences and materials, not just one. The
départ
is the memory of the wound, a bitter woody smell. The top note is anger and hurt, the
smell of roses picked just past their prime, when they have opened too fully and already begun to drop their petals. The middle note is regret, an amber scent of time unable to move backward or forward. But the bottom note of forgiveness is understanding, and that smells of fresh air and a hint of lemon, astringent and healing.

“I don’t know where my daughter is, Lee. She had disappeared.”

I told her, the whole story, because telling stories is part of forgiving. It is the only way to move forward, even if the story moves back. So I told her about the early years in Grasse, Dahlia’s childhood, Natalia, Nicky. The rape. When I told her about the rape, she put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes narrowed to slits. I told her about the jail cell in Lyon and coming home to my empty house, about the months of searching in Grasse, Nice, Paris, and London, how I thought Dahlia might have been following the path of the stories I had told her about me and Jamie.

But I hadn’t found my child.

Outside the window over her sink we could see Roland and Anthony sitting in the dirt, playing with a kitten who arched her back with pleasure and figure-eighted in and out of Roland’s feet.

Lee didn’t speak. She rose from the table and dribbled some red wine left from the night before into the stew she had been preparing. She upended the bottle and drank the rest.

“I haven’t heard from my daughter, or about her, Lee. She’s disappeared.” Outside, Roland picked up the kitten and scratched it behind the ears. We’d had a cat once, a marmalade tiger who followed Dahlia the way a puppy would have.

“I’ll have to see about that,” Lee said, distracted, throwing a pinch of salt into the pot. “God, things got screwed up, didn’t they? Or maybe they just keep going round and round in circles. If
anything happened to Anthony . . . I’ll ask around. See if there’s a trail of any sort.”

She said it so carelessly, so lightly.

Lee’s country house party played croquet that afternoon, a drunken match filled with quickly emptying wine bottles and language that would never have been allowed in the croquet games of our childhood. Roland was good at it, and when he knocked Lee’s ball away from the wicket for the fourth time in a row, she threw her mallet, not exactly at his head, but close enough that we decided to think of a game that didn’t involve potentially harmful objects.

She was pretty drunk by then, and so was I. When the others went in to play gin rummy, we opted to stay outside, in the fresh air. We were talked out by then and Lee had fallen into a black mood of sullen silence.

“Don’t take it personally,” Roland told me. “I’ve learned not to. It’s going to take time for her to recover.”

The next morning, when Roland rose early to take me to the first ferry, Lee didn’t come with me.

“Still sleeping,” he said. “Or sleeping it off, however you want to look at it.”

Just like the old days. I left England certain that Lee had already forgotten or dismissed me and my daughter.

•   •   •

I
t was very late when I arrived back home. The Channel crossing had been rough, the trains had all been jam-packed and behind schedule, the stations impossible to navigate because of the crowds of people. The waiting rooms and platforms had been filled with a stench of sweat and beer and bandages, once in a while an oasis of a floral scent on a well-dressed woman.

France had been like this since the liberation of Paris. It was as if the war had frozen us in place, and now, unfrozen, there was a great need, desire, for the freedom of movement.

Freedom to be home, to be reunited with loved ones, to go somewhere new and without memories. Some of the travelers were men whose faces were still frozen with secrets that must not be said. Some travelers had been prisoners of war. Some had been liberated from the death camps in Germany and wore ill-fitting, foreign-looking clothes provided by the Quakers. The wounded, the traumatized, the almost-dead, moved among us like waking ghosts, searching for a familiar place, somewhere, perhaps, where they had been happy, or at least safe.

I scanned the faces, hoping that if I looked hard enough, long enough, I would see her bright eyes looking back at me from the crowd.

Would she be on a ferry going from Dover to Calais? Perhaps on the train to Paris, or perhaps on the night train south from Paris? God knew where she had landed. Some of the wounded, the starved, were young girls Dahlia’s age. Their faces were the most painful to search, looking for familiar features. War should happen to men or at least grown-ups, not children.

I found one girl with a resemblance to Dahlia: the black hair, the brown eyes from my side, the thick brows and high cheekbones from her father. But it wasn’t Dahlia. She caught me staring at her in the Gare de Lyon and pointed at me, whispering with her friends.

My house was dark, but as soon as I went in—no key was needed; I never locked my door, in case Dahlia might make her way back home—there was a strong fragrance of flowers.

Omar had placed a vase of roses in the sitting room, to welcome me. I sat in the dark, inhaling their perfume, trying not to feel
anything. I fell asleep there, on the old chintz sofa, my traveling case at my feet, unpacked. One of the street cats pushed the door open sometime in the night and came and slept next to me. I woke to its purr, and to the sound of knocking on the ajar door. Who knocked in this neighborhood?