The Beautiful American Read Online Free Page A

enough to suggest taste and tradition. He was a man who knew the difference between casual and black tie, town and country, all the things Jamie had tried to learn. Roland Penrose had the best “eye” in England and Europe, and the friends and contacts needed to acquire art. His art collection was second only perhaps to the Guggenheim woman’s, according to a magazine article about him I had seen in the British edition of Vogue .
    He greeted me with gentlemanly graciousness, though he was plainly puzzled. Where had his wife found this stray? I wondered what Lee had told him, what she herself remembered. Our friendship, if that was the accurate term, had been brief and intermittent, though for me, at least, momentous.
    Roland drove fast, rattling around potholes and fallen branches from the storm of a few days before. I had to hold on to my hat, and when Lee laughed, I laughed as well, to hide the fact that I was weeping. Dahlia had loved fast cars, speeding trips throughthe countryside. When we rounded the corner and their new country home came into view, Lee looked at me and rolled her eyes. I laughed so hard I could barely catch my breath. If Omar had been there, he would have given me a gentle slap to break the hysteria.
    Farley Farm was a huge, ramshackle place with broken windowpanes, faded, peeling paint, and stray cows grazing in an old, weedy flower bed. Lo, how the mighty are fallen, I thought, and it was my mother’s voice speaking the words, and I was standing next to her, outside the Miller farmhouse in Poughkeepsie, New York, watching the pretty daughter of the house, Elizabeth, not yet known as Lee, step off the porch in her white summer dress.
    “We’ve no furniture,” Lee said, still laughing, climbing out of the car. “Most of it was used as firewood. It will be a bit like camping out. But some of the rooms are actually dry, if it should rain. And there’s a stove and plenty of brandy. We’ll be warm.”
    “Look at this,” Roland said. Holding the dead chicken in one hand, he took my arm with the other. “We have our own good-luck omen.” He turned me to face south, toward the Channel, where a gentle breeze stirred the grasses. Far below us, cut into the turf, was an ancient chalk outline.
    “The Long Man of Wilmington,” Roland said. “The house lines up with it during the summer solstice.”
    “Probably this was an ancient place of bloody sacrifice,” Lee said. “We appease the gods with frequent libations and lots of parties.” Lee took my hand and guided me into the house.
    Bare wood floors, peeling wallpaper, wild mint thrust into jugs to add color, huge empty rooms with an almost haunted feel to them . . . I hoped they’d gotten a discount price, because Farley Farm was a wreck. The wind blew through the walls so that thewhole house seemed to vibrate with frustration and loss, and the beams creaked ominously.
    “We can’t make repairs yet because of the shortages.” Lee shut a door and it immediately blew open again. “Poor Roland spent an entire day trying to scare up a dozen nails. We’ll have to wait, like everyone else. Till then, we just huddle around the stove if it gets too cold.”
    “We have two hundred acres, two barns, and assorted sheds.” Roland rocked slightly on his heels with the pride of ownership.
    “We are going to make this a working farm,” Lee said. And, of course, she would. Lee could still bend events to her will, the way water refracts light.
    “Meanwhile, you can sleep here.” She opened the door to a small room that was in better shape than most of the others she had shown me. The window was unbroken, and there was a mattress and even a little nightstand with a kerosene lantern. “If you get cold, as you will, come into the downstairs room. We all gather round the stove and tend to sleep in a large heap. It’s warmer and friendlier.”
    She left me to unpack my small valise: pajamas, a toothbrush and hairbrush, a change of underwear, a