Free The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin

father say?” I asked.
    “Here. Read it for yourself.” Jamie thrust the letter at me, and stood to pace on the graveled path, smoothing back his thick blond hair with the palm of his hand. He had grown it longer, so that it grazed his shirt collar and waved over his ears, like an artist’s.
    I read the letter. There was a one-way ticket waiting for him at the steamer office, his father had written. Jamie was to sail immediately.
    “Just one ticket,” I said weakly.
    “Don’t worry, Nora.” He stopped pacing in front of me and leaned down to give me a quick kiss. “I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving you. I’ll find work.”
    “You’ve already tried,” I pointed out. It had been the same story in Paris as in London and New York. The galleries weren’t interested in his photographs, and the newspapers, even when they bought one or two, did not pay enough to live on.
    “Maybe he’s right. Let’s go home,” I said. “I’ll find money for my ticket.” For the first time since leaving Poughkeepsie I felt afraid. Something seemed to be coming, something bad, something you couldn’t fight. It was much more than the sense of a party ending; it was the sense of an ending to be followed by something menacing and unknown.
    “Let’s get married and go home,” I said, throwing out the last of the crumbs. Pigeons cooed and pushed one another at my feet, black and white and gray birds pecking at crumbs on a gray and white path, as monochromatic as a photograph.
    Of course we couldn’t go back without being married, without telling lies and saying we had been married all along, ever since running away to New York. Lee Miller could do something like that, live with a man “in sin,” but not me.
    “Soon as I’m twenty-five,” Jamie said.
    “Your family will understand if you jump it a couple of years,” I said. “Won’t they?”
    Jamie didn’t answer. His father had sent one return ticket, not two. I was still just the gardener’s daughter.

CHAPTER FIVE
    A month later, our funds exhausted, both of us were numbly aware of that single ticket for the steamer back to New York, waiting for Jamie to pick it up.
    “We’ve got enough for a dinner and a couple of drinks,” Jamie said. “Let’s go out. Put on your prettiest dress, Nora. That one with the red flowers on it. I’ve got a feeling something good is going to happen.”
    I dressed. We went out. Although we knew Paris quite well by then, we might have been experiencing it for the first time, that night. I wondered if that meant we would leave soon, that we had gone back to the beginning only to find it was an ending.
    Montparnasse was quiet that evening. It was January, cold. The festivities of Christmas and New Year’s were over and now it was just winter with nothing to look forward to but a spring you didn’t really believe in. People were inside, huddled for warmth. It wasn’t until we reached the larger boulevards that we found that pleasant sense of being in a sympathetic crowd, heard the soft voices of other conversations going on around us.
    It began to snow. Large, feathery flakes hovered in the yellow circles of the streetlamps, undecided which way to float, and then disappeared before they landed on the cobbles. We turned off the Champs-Élysées and walked a bit longer until we stood in front of the Jockey Club on rue Rabelais. Light flooded from its windows into the surrounding darkness. We heard laughter, and music.
    “We can’t afford this place,” I said, peering in the window at the mass of people inside. I had cut my straight, black hair and hanks of it kept falling into my eyes. “Jamie, look at the pearls that woman is wearing.”
    The Jockey was a bar where people like James Joyce and Hemingway drank, the already famous, and even if they weren’t rich, they were surrounded by rich people, and their credit was good. Ours wasn’t.
    “You’ve got to think big,” Jamie said. “Straighten your hat, Nora. We can sit at the