The Beautiful American Read Online Free PDF Page A

hands were, Dahlia’s had been even smaller. Anthony looked straight into my eyes as if he knew all my secrets.
    Roland rescued me. “Enough, Lee. Let Nurse put Anthony back to bed, and let’s eat. I’m ravenous.” His eyes met mine and I saw the questions, the curiosity. Art collectors, the good ones, knew how to see, not just look.
    “Where’s that promised bottle of brandy?” I said.
    What was I doing there, in the middle of an English nowhere, reunited with a woman I hadn’t cared about ever meeting again, detoured from my search for my own child?
    “You look stricken,” Lee said, taking my hand. “Food, and a good strong drink. That’s what you need.”

CHAPTER TWO
    W hen I was a child in Poughkeepsie, New York, Lee Miller was my playmate. Except she wasn’t Lee yet; she was still Elizabeth to the teachers who sent home the notes complaining about her behavior. To me and her family she was Li Li.
    We were born a few days apart in the spring of 1907. Her father gave my father a cigar to celebrate. It was easy enough to do. My father, the gardener, was pruning a yew outside Mr. Miller’s office window. Mr. Miller merely reached through that window, saying “Success!” He already had a son, and he and his wife, Florence, had set their hearts on a girl.
    “My missus had a girl, too,” my father is reported to have said. “Weeping now to beat the band.” Eventually I realized my mother hadn’t wept because she had wanted a boy but because she hadn’t really wanted children at all. The factory manager and his gardener puffed away together, that April afternoon, and it was probably the first and last private conversation they ever had, aside from instructions for the garden.
    But that connection was strong enough that after a second sonhad been born and Mrs. Miller decided her reckless, tomboyish daughter needed a gentle, feminine little playmate, I was drafted for the job. My mother put me in my Sunday dress, told me to be on my best behavior, and then rode beside me in the backseat of the car that Mr. Miller sent to fetch me.
    She thought that was the proper thing to do, and she would sit in the car, smoking cigarette after cigarette and reading a movie magazine, as Elizabeth and I played. She was hoping that Mrs. Miller would invite her in for a cup of coffee, but that never happened. My mother was married to the hired help.
    Momma thought I would “learn to imitate my betters.” Her words. In fact, my table manners were already better than Li Li’s and her brothers’. The Miller children were not spoiled, but they were allowed a certain latitude to ignore much of the bourgeois adult world—things like grace before meals, combing your hair before sitting at table, not using curse words, standing up when an adult came into the room; such rules did not exist in the Miller household.
    So when I was dropped off at the farm where the three Miller children pretty much ran wild, Elizabeth would politely give my mother a tiny curtsy and smile and ask, “How are you, Mrs. Tours,” and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And as soon as my mother was gone, she would grab my hand and pull me into her wildness. We made foul and noisy experiments with her chemistry set, chased her brothers, and frightened the hens so much they would stop laying. Once in a while if her father was not at the factory, he would come out and tell us to stop tormenting the animals and the servants, but there would be a twinkle in his eye and we knew he didn’t really mind. He was proud of his daughter’s reckless bravery.
    Mr. Miller was not part of the old river-family society ofPoughkeepsie that regularly snubbed Momma at the Christmas charities or the Fourth of July fireworks. Mr. Miller hadn’t been born to money; he had earned it. In a way, Theodore Miller represented the true American dream and promise: work hard and you will prosper. And how rarely did that really happen? But there was a dark side, of course. There