1
America was Natalie’s idea.
She’d gone to the upstairs travel agency of Madame Dubray on rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, and politely listened as Madame extolled the fresh sea oysters of Saint-Malo, the forests and glades of Perpignan where there were no longer lions, the sunstruck beaches of the Côte d’Azur where Mademoiselle could air her still-youthful breasts in innocent, unfettered freedom.
Natalie shyly hid her still-youthful breasts with her forearms as she told Madame that unfortunately those were all places that Pierre would have chosen for an August vacation and she was no longer interested in accommodating her shifty fiancé. She reminded Madame that she was a librarian specializing in Americana at the Bibliothèque nationale, so touring the United States seemed a more intriguing and practical choice than staying with the French in France for the August vacances as she’d done all her life.
Sighing, Madame agreed, in the grudging way of one who thought some people would garden in basements if you let them. “You would prefer what, Mademoiselle Clairvaux? Shopping in New York? Mickey Mouse in Orlando?”
She shook her head and said she would like to tour America on an overland route from the East Coast to the West.
Madame Dubray held her face carefully fixed as she asked, “How?”
Natalie felt unfairly tested. “Railway?”
Madame smirked. “Railway,” she said. “In America.”
“Or perhaps I could rent an automobile.”
Madame scoffed, “Aren’t you the audacious one? Motoring through all the forty states.”
“There are fifty.”
“Well, not worth seeing,” said Madame.
Natalie told the travel agent that she wasn’t confident there was a good way to do what she wanted, that’s why she’d thought it necessary to visit Madame. But she very much wanted to see some of the attractions and natural wonders in the American interior that Europeans frequently missed. She lifted from the floor beside her a coffee-table book and turned its pages to show photographs of children on candy-striped swings below a car chase on a drive-in movie screen, snow falling on the just-alike homes of Levittown, hot sunlight and green machinery baling yellow hay in Iowa, an ominous rainstorm over a trailer park in Kansas, a girl in cowboy boots selling yard gnomes at a flea market, a giant bingo parlor with hundreds hunching over their game cards. “Like these,” Natalie said, “not the typical places.”
Madame Dubray gave it some thought and said, “We have one possibility.”
Natalie said in English, “Oh goody!”
2
Mademoiselle Clairvaux was a gorgeous woman of twenty-six with an oval face, caramel-colored eyes, and a luxuriance of coffee-brown hair, and she sometimes wore serious eyeglasses she didn’t need in order to intimidate men who seemed to think she needed touching. But she forgot those glasses in her hurried packing in Paris and she was so wearied with unsolicited attentions on the flight from Orly to New York City that she purchased heavy black spectacles like those Buddy Holly favored before she got on the Sunday morning shuttle to the Port Authority terminal.
There she found the See America bus hulking in a side alley like a venerable but malfunctioning machine that had been cannibalized for auto parts or just plain meanness, its metal surfaces wildly paisleyed with left-over housepaints. Luggage of Samsonite, canvas, grocery box, and gunnysack was waiting to be stowed in its craw. Waiting, too, were its forlorn passengers: a crazy old coot with binoculars, some Japanese children sullenly playing with Gameboys, some Canadians for whom cordiality was not a priority, a husband and wife in matching safari jackets, a crewcut man who tiptoed wherever he went, a hugely overweight woman continually folding chocolate eclairs into her mouth, three teenaged girls from Scotland who seemed near panic over a spree that had gone lame many days ago and now considered Natalie Clairvaux with desperate affection.
She nearly walked away, but she knew such delicacy about transportation and companionship would make her a tourist, not a traveler. She’d lack moxie. And so she joined the See America tour as she’d planned.
The first stop was Hoboken and the boyhood home of Frank Sinatra, though there was no sign on the house and the owner looked worriedly at them from a chink in the venetian blinds. They then saw the world’s largest buffet; the location for a 1940s movie that starred either Peter Lorre or Adolphe Menjou; a café where a waitress succeeded in juggling four out of five coffee cups; Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania, where on February second a woodchuck seeing or not seeing its shadow would somehow predict the climate; a hideous motel near Lake Erie where the tour group was put up that night, and where Mademoiselle Clairvaux hesitated at her room’s threshold for many minutes, skeptically staring in.
In eastern Ohio, Natalie woke up from a morning nap in a truckstop where idling semis throbbed and percolated outside the bus windows. Huddling like a waif, she walked down a long line of them, considering with puzzlement the opportunities that a number of truckers offered, and found her tour group inside a cafeteria. She herded along behind them, skating a tray on aluminum rails, and choosing from among the appalling alternatives some crusty chicken pieces. A cook then plopped a softball of mashed potatoes on Natalie’s dish and flooded the plate with Crayola-yellow gravy. The husband in the safari jacket confided, “We’re packing beef jerky if you need it.”
She had no idea what that was.
The husband was about to show her when his wife began hitting him with a spoon.
The next stop was the House of Bottles, and then Heine’s Place where they all glumly peered at an orange ten-ton wheel of cheese in a refrigerated glass case. A sign on the wall said CHEDDAR. In Akron they tentatively entered an exhibit hall underneath a sign that read GOODYEAR’S WORLD OF RUBBER. Indiana was introduced by a pharmacist who gave his interpretation of the name “Hoosier,” held up for all to see the hand that shook the hand of Larry Bird, and guided them through the James Dean Grave and Memorial where Natalie counted three of the late actor’s imitators slouching through the cemetery in blond ducktails, black motorcycle jackets, and dangling cigarettes.
In Illinois there was an overnight at an even worse motel and from the room next door the continual ouching sounds of two salesmen snapping towels at each other while a bathtub filled. In Chicago’s stockyards they squeezed inside an old hog pen for a recitation of a poem by someone named Sandburg, then they visited a piano tuner, chewed gum outside Wrigley Field, watched sheets of children’s arithmetic homework swirl down the streets of the Windy City, and strolled through fields of broom corn in Arcola.
There was a tour of Herbert Hoover’s birthplace in West Branch, Iowa; Coca-Cola and celery sticks at th
e home of the grandmother who won the Tiniest Handwriting Contest; a visit to the spick-and-span headquarters of Maytag Appliances in Newton; and to a Chevrolet dealership in Council Bluffs where each member of the group got to sit with a salesman and haggle over the price of an Impala.
In Omaha’s Red Lion Inn Wednesday morning, Natalie sat with an Englishman named Clive at breakfast and said, “I am so excited to be here.”
Clive slurped his tea as she smiled at him, then solemnly resettled the cup in its saucer. “Compulsory politeness compels me to ask why.”
She told him she was born in the city of Rouen but she’d grown up in the Hôtel de La Manche that her grandmother owned in Port-en-Bessin on the shore of the English Channel, not far from the area that on D-Day, June 6, 1944, was known as Omaha Beach.
“And here we are in Omaha now,” Clive said. “So this wasn’t an impertinence on your part.”
She told him Madame Sophie Clairvaux had been seventeen in 1944 and when she met some of the soldiers with the 352nd Division she thought of them all as movie stars. She was sure she’d seen Gary Cooper striding dourly in a rainstorm. She was confident it was Clark Gable who’d winked at her from the front seat of a Jeep. And she’d fallen in love with a sergeant named Mitch who taught the French girl what a French kiss was, then left with his battalion the next morning. Sophie never heard from him again. She presumed he’d been killed. But she remembered him frequently, and even after a lifetime of hearing American tourists gripe about cold bath water, signs not written in English, and the constant noisiness of the sea, Madame Clairvaux was still wildly passionate about all things American, and she passed that along to Natalie.
“Would you mind terribly if I took advantage of your toast?” Clive asked.
She handed him the plate and told him she was three when she first used the English word “actually” in a sentence. At eight she’d memorized the lyrics to Ella Fitzgerald’s “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).” She requested, and got, a subscription to Mad magazine on her thirteenth birthday, and sorely wanted to go to America for college, but Madame Sophie Clairvaux so wanted her closer to Normandy that Natalie attended the Sorbonne, studying English literature, collecting old copies of Photoplay, and living in a garret near the cathedral of Notre Dame with ceilings so low she was forced to stoop as she cooked, and with walls so thin that she swore she could hear the optometrist next door swallow as she watched Little House on the Prairie. Then she earned a master’s degree in library science and went to work at the Bibliothèque nationale, where she met Pierre Smith at a party, told him he resembled a blond Rams linebacker, and was forced to explain “Rams” and “linebacker” and whether the man he resembled was preposterously handsome. And Pierre was so manly, charming, smart, and attractive that by evening’s end she’d discovered she’d got it bad for him.
“And that ain’t good?” Clive asked.
She shrugged.
Clive asked whilst chewing her toast, “Would this panting chap be he?”
She turned. Striding in high dudgeon across the floor of the Red Lion Inn was indeed her fiancé, his beautiful tie and black Italian suit tortured by air and railway travel, his blond lion’s mane in wild turmoil, his face aflame with shock and seriousness and the sunburn of insult. When he achieved their booth, he skewered her with a cold blue stare as he flung out his right arm and an index finger of accusation that seemed to guarantee an immediate “Ah hah!”
“Ah hah!” Pierre cried.
She turned back to Clive. “Yes. It’s him.”
3
Waiting on the sidewalk near the See America bus with the over-interested tour group, Pierre told Natalie in French that he’d been frantic about her disappearance until he finally recalled the name of the travel agent she’d used for her Brontë Sisters Weekend and got Natalie’s itinerary from Madame Dubray just yesterday morning. She’d got him on the next flight from Paris to Chicago and the overnight Amtrak into Omaha.
She imitated Madame. “Railway. In America?”
“Madame is as crazy as you are. She told me planes do not fly to Omaha. She said this while she watered her plants. And then she watered my head.”
With a meaningful glare, Natalie said, “She knew.”
“Ariel? That was just a kiss! On her birthday!”
“And Isabelle?”
“Weeks and weeks ago, before we were engaged.”
“And that girl in the Luxembourg Gardens?”