The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin Read Free Book Online

hadn’t been able to come with me that evening, so I’d given theticket to Momma and pretended I had intended it for her all along. She wasn’t fooled.
    “Like what?” I asked, already knowing.
    “Girls who get in trouble don’t get rescued by a rich man’s son.” Momma gave me a stormy look. “They don’t buy the cow if they get the milk for free.”
    Once, I ran into Elizabeth at Lindmark’s, the bookstore run by bohemians from New York City. Elizabeth was in the travel section, looking at guidebooks to France.
    She had rimmed her eyes with black, making their blue even bluer, skylike. She was wearing perfume, L’Heure Bleue, the twilight hour. The ads said it was for women who wanted everything. It was the last perfume my father had bought for my mother, the smallest bottle available because it was very expensive.
    If Elizabeth remembered me, there was no flash of recognition in her eyes. I had become a stranger. Stung, I pretended not to remember her as well.
    “I need to get out of P’oke,” she said, looking up from a page that showed a photograph of boats on the Seine.
    P’oke. That was what she called Poughkeepsie. She made that casual comment to me the way one addresses a stranger, to impress and amuse. She had already forgotten our days of shared childhood. Perhaps it was just as well, I thought, considering how they had ended, that little girl in her white dress smelling of sharp medicines and ointments; my mother, like a member of a Greek chorus, whispering “ruined” in my ear.
    “Where do you want to go?” I asked, looking over Lee’s shoulder and standing close enough to smell the gin and tobacco of her jacket.
    “There.” She jabbed at the photo of the river, banked withbookstalls and strollers, the great church of Notre-Dame rising in the distance. “The Left Bank. Paris.” She looked up at me. “What a strange hat you’re wearing. I think I like it.”
    It was one of my father’s old gardening caps. I had washed it, trimmed it with ribbon, and wore it slightly tilted over one eye.
    “Can I buy it from you?” she asked.
    “No. You can have it. Here.”
    She put it on, tilting it deeply over her right eye, almost concealing it.
    “Thanks. Here, take these. We’ll trade.” She gave me her nicotine-stained gloves.
    When I finished high school in 1925, the year I learned how to dance the Charleston, the year I first read Gertrude Stein, I got a job at Luckey Platt’s department store, at the glove and perfume counter. I wore a pink smock with matching cap and spent my day dusting bottles and sorting gloves by size into their proper bins. When no one was looking, I would test the perfumes on my own wrist, inhaling foreign places, exotic lives.
    The same year I was snitching perfume and reading romances under the counter at Platt’s, a German politician, Adolf Hitler, had organized his new Nazi party, but no one was really paying attention. Not yet. That year, Elizabeth went to France, supposedly to finishing school in Nice.
    I looked it up on a map and there it was, a dot in southern France, on the Riviera, a dot that to a girl from Poughkeepsie represented all the sophistication and beauty the world could offer. “Oldest and largest town between Marseille and Genoa,” the encyclopedia in the library said. “A popular summer home for royalty and the fashionable world. Named by early Greek settlers for Nikea, the goddess of victory.”
    “Finishing school? What do they finish?” Jamie sneered, and handed me the flask of gin. It was an August night, so hot my clothes steamed next to my skin and even the backs of my hands were sweating. Jamie had taken off his shirt and lay flat in the grass at the lake park, looking up at the stars. Moonlight reflected off his chest and I couldn’t look away. Jamie was good-looking, but it had never occurred to me that he might actually be beautiful in a Greek-statue kind of way.
    “They learn about the different kinds of fish forks,” I