The Beautiful American Read Online Free PDF Page B

at all, barely spoke. Something had happened while she had been away on a trip, and when we were swinging in a weary way on the old tires her father had suspended from the oak tree, I asked her what was wrong.
    “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” she said, staring at her shoes.
    “I won’t say anything, cross my heart.”
    “He put it in me.”
    Li Li would say no more. She pushed me off the swing and ran back to the house, slamming the door after her.
    “Momma, what does it mean, when a man puts something in a girl?” I asked when I was back home, sitting in front of my plate of fried eggs and peas. Mother’s mouth opened with horror. She slapped me and never answered the question, but I pressed my earto the wall that night and listened to my mother and father talking, and the next day I looked up intercourse in the library encyclopedia, and that other word, rape. Seven-year-old Elizabeth Miller had been raped.
    My father knew other servants of the house and I heard later about the treatments Elizabeth received, both at Vassar Hospital and at home; the special baths and acidic irrigations, the cervical swabs, the catheters and douche bags for treating gonorrhea; the regular visits of a head doctor, a psychiatrist.
    Li Li and I didn’t play together after that. Nothing was ever said. It just stopped by the mutual consent of Mrs. Miller and Momma. That was in 1914, the year the Great War began. Li Li had been raped by a sailor on leave, a friend of the family.
    Years later, Li Li became Lee, that one elegant syllable, and stopped being the object for other artists’ work and started making her own photographs. A large group of those photos was of interiors, with sharp angles, intense light and shadow, and images blurred by glass or hidden behind partially opened doors. A slightly opened door could be a promise or a threat. Hers were always threats. She could make even a row of perfume bottles look menacing.
    •   •   •
    E very Christmas, my father gave my mother perfume, tiny vials of Fougère Royale, Le Dandy, Parfum Précieux.
    Before wrapping them, he would place one drop on my wrist, and I would be transported. Fougère Royale was the scent of Mary Lennox’s Secret Garden in Yorkshire, just discovered and not yet restored to its old glory. Le Dandy made me feel like Marguerite St. Just, the wife of Sir Percy, the dandy who was secretly the heroic Scarlet Pimpernel of revolutionary France. Parfum Précieux was . . .I couldn’t find words for the sensation this perfume created until the afternoon Jamie and I went swimming, nude, on a hot summer day, after he had taken a photograph of me and I had fallen into the lake.
    Every year, at Christmas, my mother would open the little gift box from Luckey Platt’s department store, take a quick whiff, then screw the cap back on and exile the bottle to a shelf in the bathroom, as wasted as a book never read. She refused to wear scent, and he refused to stop giving it to her. Need I say more about that marriage? I had been conceived too soon for respectability and Mother never really forgave Father or me. There were no more children after me.
    When you’re a child, such things don’t weigh as heavily as they do later. I was happy in my false belief that all children had a mother who rarely spoke and a father who drank. Perhaps in Poughkeepsie it wasn’t far from the truth. It was a small town with large ambitions, an often uncomfortable blend, like Mr. Miller, the hard worker with flexible morals, as if the blooming largesse of the century wanted to accommodate all its own contradictions.
    The town, for me, was the river, the cliffs with the rich people’s houses on them, and the streets below with their Greek Revival banks, palazzo store facades, and Gothic churches. The Young Men’s Christian Association building had been designed in the style of an Italian palace. No wonder Lee and I grew up dreaming of real castles in Europe, that promised land