The Beautiful American Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN

  “The Beautiful American will transport you to expat Paris and from there take you on a journey through the complexities of a friendship as it is inflected through the various lenses of nostalgia, pity, celebrity, jealousy, and—ultimately—love. Jeanne Mackin breathes new life into such luminaries as Man Ray, Picasso, and, of course, the titular character, Lee Miller, while at the same time offering up a wonderfully human and sympathetic protagonist in Nora Tours.”

  —Suzanne Rindell, author of The Other Typist

  “Jeanne Mackin’s portrait of Europe in the years encompassing the Second World War is achingly beautiful and utterly mesmerizing, and her vividly drawn characters, the legendary Lee Miller among them, come heartbreakingly alive in their obsessions, tragedies, and triumphs. The Beautiful American is sure to appeal to fans of Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife and Erika Robuck’s Call Me Zelda, or indeed to anyone with a taste for impeccably researched and beautifully written historical fiction.”

  —Jennifer Robson, author of Somewhere in France

  “From Poughkeepsie to Paris, from the razzmatazz of the twenties to the turmoil of World War Two and the perfume factories of Grasse, Mackin draws you into the world of expatriate artists and photographers and tells a story of love, betrayal, survival, and friendship. As complex as the fragrances Mackin writes about, The Beautiful American is an engaging and unforgettable novel. I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Renée Rosen, author of Doll Face

  “An exquisitely imagined and beautifully rendered story of the talented, tragic, gorgeous Lee Miller.”

  —Becky E. Conekin, author of Lee Miller in Fashion

  “Jeanne Mackin blends a tale as intoxicating as the finest fragrance. Spanning wars both personal and global, The Beautiful American leaves its essence of love, loss, regret, and hope long after the novel concludes.”

  —Erika Robuck, author of Call Me Zelda and Fallen Beauty

  “Jeanne Mackin’s luminous novel about Man Ray and his model-mistress, Lee Miller, evokes the iridescence of 1920s Paris when youth and artistic freedom and sexual excess were all that mattered. The Beautiful American, which readers will rank right up there with The Paris Wife, takes readers from the giddiness of the flapper era to the grittiness of World War II. It is a brilliant, beautifully written literary masterpiece. I love this book!”

  —Sandra Dallas, New York Times bestselling author of Fallen Women

  PRAISE FOR THE OTHER NOVELS OF JEANNE MACKIN

  “I read this novel in two sittings, eager to learn how the lives and love stories turned out. . . . Before I realized it, I was swept up in Maggie and Helen’s intersecting worlds. . . . One of the book’s many charms is how wisely it reveals the values and passions of two women from very different eras who, nonetheless, have everything in common.”

  —Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife

  “[Mackin’s] narrator, while asserting that she is no ‘hagiographer of spurious mystics,’ is an engaging woman, solid in her station, widely conversant with the deeper reaches of the paranormal, and magically involved with her quest. Here she leads the mind in a chase as she finds herself tempted to believe in the return of departed spirits, in a prose that is as amiable to read as the palm of a hand. A haunting book in every way. Masterly and fervent.”

  —Paul West, author of The Secret Lives of Words

  “Jeanne Mackin has written a multilayered, multigenerational story of a spirited encounter with the spirit world.”

  —Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

  “A sensitive, affectionate, and appealing portrait of [Maggie Fox], the uneducated girl who at fourteen escaped rural poverty and a drunken abusive father to become America’s first and most famous Spiritualist medium.”

  —Alison Lurie, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Foreign Affairs

  “Plenty of romance and intrigue, vital characters and exquisite details of both period and place ensure a vigorous and satisfying read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The author of The Frenchwoman again imaginatively samples French history and here constructs a witty, lightly satirical, entertaining amalgam of murder, greed, and revenge . . . a richly intelligent and charming spellbinder.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Rich in detail, from descriptions of food and attire to historical personages, this first novel is well written and entirely believable. Mackin is positioned to join the ranks of popular historical novelists.”

  —Library Journal

  Other Novels by Jeanne Mackin

  The Sweet By and By

  Dreams of Empire

  The Queen’s War

  The Frenchwoman

  New American Library

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © Jeanne Mackin, 2014

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Mackin, Jeanne.

  The beautiful american/Jeanne Mackin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63562-9

  1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Missing children—Fiction. 3. Americans—France—Fiction. 4. Aliens—Europe—Fiction. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A3169B43 2014

  813'.54—dc23 2013049784

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise

  Other Novels by Jeanne Mackin

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedications

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE: DÉPART

  PART ONE: NOTE DE TÊTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PART TWO: NOTE DE COEUR

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART THREE: BASE NOTES

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWo

  EPILOGUE:
SILLAGE

  Readers Guide

  For my husband, Steve Poleskie, as always

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to the friends and colleagues who helped get this story to the page: fellow writer Nancy Holzner for her gentle but prodding encouragement—our conversations were my life raft; Ellen Edwards for her gracious and perceptive editorial guidance, and the others at New American Library: cover designer Anthony Ramondo; Courtney Landi, Craig Burke and Jodi Rosoff in marketing; editorial assistant Elizabeth Bistrow; publisher Kara Welsh and editorial director Claire Zion. Thanks to literary representative Kevan Lyon, and friends Alison Lurie, Diane Ackerman, Charlotte Greenspan and Natasha Tall who gave support, insight and the occasional French verb. Very special thanks to Tom Newton and Mary Kay Clapp, who helped me through this book and the ones that came before. Their friendship and encouragement are a great blessing. Thanks to Barbara Adams, the intrepid and extraordinarily patient traveling companion who accompanied me to Grasse and Nice. Finally, I owe a debt to artist Mary Frey, who, years ago when we were young and living happily in Boston attics, patiently encouraged me to look, really look, at photographs.

  PROLOGUE

  DÉPART

  The very first hint of fragrance, experienced when the perfume bottle is first opened, before the fragrance is in direct contact with the skin, the nose, and the heart. Similar, really, to a book opened but not yet read . . . or, perhaps, a door opened to a visitor not yet visible, one who lurks in shadow. The départ begins the journey of the perfume and its wearer.

  —From the notebooks of N. Tours

  In the ornate doorway of Harrods’ perfume hall people rushed past me as I stood, frozen.

  A radio played somewhere, Churchill’s voice rising over the crowd, commending the English again for surviving the storm-beaten voyage. The war was over; we were picking up the pieces and carefully, slowly putting our lives back together. But my daughter was lost, in her own way another war casualty. The grief struck me anew and I was immobile in a doorway, unable to go forward or backward, unmoored by grief.

  A summer afternoon long ago Jamie and I went to Upton Lake to swim and make love, and there had been a boat, abandoned by rich summer people who didn’t know how to tie a knot, and the boat had bobbed in the waves, turning this way and that as a storm stalked over the lake. I was that boat.

  “Move on!” the doorman shouted at me, but my legs wouldn’t work. I was exhausted. When I walked, there was a chant in my head, Dahlia is gone, Dahlia is gone, over and over, a syllable with every step, so that I hated to move. People pushed past me, some smiling in sympathy, some merely irritated. Their string shopping bags and brown-wrapped boxes jostled me; their elbows poked.

  The doorman frowned. He took me by the arm and pulled me out of that flood of people. “Look, dearie,” he said, “are you coming or going?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  His expression softened. He was an older man with a deeply lined face, pale eyes sunk into their sockets, and there was an authority to him that went beyond his doorman’s uniform. Probably during the war he had been an air raid warden. He would have been too old to be a soldier.

  “Well, then,” he said, “why don’t you go in? That’s always a good starting point. There you go.” He turned me around, gently, and gave me a little push, back to that threshold, where I suddenly remembered I wanted to enter, to continue the search for my daughter.

  I moved through the doorway, overwhelmed by the synthetic florals and citruses of the postwar perfumes. They enter the nose aggressively, fighting for attention like unruly schoolchildren. What I most remembered about my own child was how the long braid she wore down her back smelled of lavender, a single note of innocence. My lost child.

  Seventeen years ago, I ran away. And now, my daughter had, too, or at least I hoped she had, for the other possibilities were unthinkable. But after months of searching, I hadn’t found Dahlia in any of those places where a young girl might find shelter: not in the homes of friends in southern France; not in Paris in the narrow streets of Montparnasse, the cafés and gardens and boulevards of those years with Jamie; not in the orphanages that sheltered children whose parents had not survived. She had left no trace.

  So I had come, finally, to London, to the almost-beginning. Beginnings are like endings, never completely finished, simply receding like the horizon. Here, in the doorway of Harrods, one rainy morning almost two decades ago, Jamie and I had agreed that we would leave England and go to Paris, and that if all went well, we would marry and begin our family. I had told Dahlia that story, how I had dreamed of her years before she was born.

  I had already been in London for three days, walking the streets, asking hotel clerks and checking registers at shelters, looking for her, fighting down panic and dread. The boardinghouse where Jamie and I had stayed had been bombed and so had the little pub where we had had our noon fish-and-chips and pint. There was destruction everywhere. St. Paul’s Cathedral had been bombed, St. James’s Palace, the Houses of Parliament. Half the population of London had been made homeless. This was no place for a young girl on her own, even one with papers and a little cash, for her papers and her savings had disappeared with her.

  Dahlia is sixteen, I kept reminding myself. She was tall and strong and sensible. She spoke French and English fluently and could get by in Italian and German. She had good common sense. She had what she needed to survive, if her luck held.

  How had I produced such a child, me, the gardener’s daughter from Poughkeepsie? Dahlia was a wonder to me, but in my dread I didn’t think of her as strong and competent, but as a lost child crying for her mother.

  My lost child. Would I be returning home without her again? I had gone back and forth from Paris to Grasse for months, always leaving home with hope, returning in despair. Home again, without Dahlia. The thought kept me motionless inside that doorway.

  “Hey!” a voice muttered. “Move on.” A woman, tall, burdened with an armful of parcels, almost knocked me over in her haste to get out the door.

  “Watch yourself!” I snapped back. The woman looked at me over the top of her packages.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  Once she had lowered her arms and I could see her face, I knew her immediately. Lee Miller.

  The very famous and beautiful Lee Miller, the Vogue model, the muse for the artist Man Ray, who had made of her lips an iconic image of a woman’s mouth floating in the sky. She had gone on to become a famous photographer—the only woman photographer who covered battles, not just field hospital follow-ups and stories about the war nurses. She had photographed the London Blitz, the siege of Saint-Malo, the Alsace campaign, the camps in Germany. Nightmare photos.

  Lee was heavier than I remembered, and there was a puffiness around the eyes and in the cheeks that drinkers sometimes got. But nothing, not war, alcoholism, or middle age, could mar that perfect nose and those cheekbones, the thick wavy blond hair now worn postwar-style, falling over one eye. Those oh-so-famous lips.

  We stood for a long while, staring at each other in disbelief. It’s not often that you run smack into your own past.

  PART ONE

  NOTE DE TÊTE

  Top note: the fragrance first released when the perfume achieves initial contact with the skin of the wearer, predominating in the olfactory sense for approximately fifteen minutes. Quite often these first notes of fragrance remind the wearer of a certain day in childhood, the smell of a chamomile lawn or a spice cake, or a sunny day at a picnic spot. The top note is the first station on the journey, where the decision of yes or no must be made.

  —From the notebooks of N. Tours

  In the kingdom of smells, everything is either bliss or torture.

  —Colette

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You!” she said, and a few of her top parcels fell, as if in emphasis. The old doorman saluted and bent to retrieve th
em. Lee straightened her hat with a preoccupied gesture. She wore an expensive suit, well cut of real Scottish tweed, but it had seen better days. “I haven’t seen you since . . .” She paused, thinking.

  “Paris. Nineteen thirty-two,” I supplied.

  “Yes. Paris.” Her face softened. With the help of the doorman, she balanced her packages in a way that allowed her to extend her gloved hand.

  Lee shook hands like a man, with a strong grip and a pumping action. You had to stand your ground or her handshake could knock you off-balance.

  “You are dressing much better,” she said. “I like the jacket. Good lines.”

  It was one of Dahlia’s jackets, made for her by Omar’s housekeeper. Omar was my dear friend in Grasse, but I didn’t say that, because then I would have to talk about Dahlia and explain who Omar was and it would be difficult to end all the explanations. Seventeen years is a long time, even longer when a war stalks through them. Sixteen years could not be condensed to casual chitchat in the doorway of Harrods. “I like your suit,” I said, settling for the predictable.

  “I still feel more comfortable in trousers and combat boots.” Lee hesitated, considering. Perhaps she was pursuing phantoms as well.

  “Can you come for tea with me?” she asked. She hadn’t lost her startling spontaneity.

  “I have an appointment,” I lied.

  “Please. Just for a few minutes. I’d love the company. I just bought a new hat and really don’t know if it works or not. I need another woman’s opinion.” The hat was just an excuse, of course.

  “Okay,” I agreed reluctantly.