The Light of Paris (27 page)

My mother cleared her throat. “I'm glad you and Phillip are getting along.”

Getting along. Was this the standard we aspired to in our marriages in
this family? “We were never not ‘getting along,' Mother. It's not that easy.” It would have been easier on some levels if we hadn't gotten along. Hadn't I wished for that? For big blowout fights, with plates hurled at each other's head, complaints from the neighbors about the noise? Wouldn't that have made it so much easier to say, “I am unhappy. I want a divorce”?

“Did you tell him to come here?” I asked.

“No, I didn't. But I did talk to him a few times.”

“That's great. Thanks for going behind my back.”

My mother was flustered, patting her hair and then tugging at her sleeves as though anything about her would dare to be in a state of disarray. “I didn't know what to do. You're here, and he's calling, and really, Madeleine, he is so charming. I've never understood why you can't be grateful for what you have. It wasn't like there were men lining up down the block to marry you.”

I slammed the lid of my suitcase, which, given that it only flopped limply on top of my dirty clothes, was tremendously unsatisfying. “And why do I have to be grateful for that? You act like he rescued me by marrying me, like not being married was a fate worse than death. Why is that the most important thing I could have done with my life? What if we hadn't gotten married and I had—I don't know, moved to India and worked with lepers or something?”

“You aren't really the type.”

“Ugh! That's not the point!” I threw my hands up in the air and sat down on my bed, nearly sliding off the clothes still piled there as I dug out another handful of antacids. I looked at my mother, standing there, perfectly coiffed, her posture stiff and straight, as though she were a rocket ship about to take flight.

“You've always been a romantic, Madeleine. But life isn't romantic. Most of the time, it's rather mundane. There are things that must be done, bills to be paid, obligations to be met, people to mollify, choices to make. You've got this silly idea your life should be all rainbows and sunshine.”

“You're making me sound like a child.”

She sighed, turning her gaze from me and looking out the window. “In some ways you are a child. You clearly don't value Phillip, or anything that has been given you.”

“It's not fair to say that. You don't know what things are like between Phillip and me. You don't know what goes on in someone else's marriage, or someone else's house.”

“You can't tell me he's some monster. He's well raised and a good businessman and he's polite. And so handsome.”

I shot her a look from beneath lowered eyebrows. “Handsome is not a personality trait.”

She shrugged, crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I'm saying you should be happy with what you have. You're wasting your time. Do you know how long your father and I waited for you? You could have had your children by now, and instead you're holding out for some perfect dream of a life that just doesn't happen!”

I had never seen my mother so emotional. In the scheme of things, of course, she wasn't emotional at all. But for her to raise her voice was highly uncommon. It just wasn't something she did. Even when I had been a child, my parents had spoken to me calmly and reasonably. When I was a teenager, prone to attempting fits of drama and picking fights, it was seriously disappointing to shout and slam doors only to have them respond in quiet, measured voices I couldn't rail against.

“Don't you want more for me, Mother? Don't you want me to be happy?”

“The thing that's holding you back from being happy isn't your situation, Madeleine. It never has been. It's
you
.”

I opened my mouth to respond and then clamped it shut again as what she said sank in.

It was true that I had always been restless, always uncomfortable, always chafing against the things everyone around me seemed so happy
with. And I'd tried so hard to fit in. I'd had my hair straightened, eaten bean sprouts and crackers and cottage cheese until I wasn't the fattest girl in the yearbook photo, learned what to talk about at fundraising lunches, pledged a sorority and memorized the bylaws, greetings, and songs. I had joined the organizations I was supposed to join, gone to the parties I was supposed to go to, donated to the charities I was supposed to support, married the man I was supposed to marry. And I was still miserable. But everyone around me was happy. So maybe it was me. Maybe it had been me all along.

“I'm not going to be a shield for you to hide behind. Now, my suggestion is that you go back and commit yourself to Phillip and your life there, instead of lying around here moaning about how difficult everything is when you have it more than easy.” My mother stood up and nodded, as though she had finally said what she had come here to say, and turned and walked out of the room, leaving me certain, yet again, that I was in the wrong and everyone else must be right.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So despite having done exactly what my mother suggested—gritting my teeth and diving into the fray—more times than I could remember, I decided to do it again.

I swore this time would be different. This time it would work. I would really enjoy my charity work. I would go out with Phillip to the places he wanted to go. I'd host dinner parties for his colleagues and I wouldn't doze off when they were talking about gold bricks or pork bellies or whatever it was they talked about. (Really, I had only fallen asleep the once, and only because I had already been having trouble sleeping—it turned out Terrence Mather's explanation of the future of mutual funds had done the trick.) Maybe if I were more like the person I had been when Phillip and I got married, he would be more like he had been then too—charming, romantic, complimentary.

I could do this. I could be the woman my mother had always wanted
me to be, the woman Phillip wanted me to be, the woman I wanted to be. Because that woman wasn't constantly torn up inside, thinking of the way things might be different. She just took what she was given—and really, hadn't I been given so very much?—and she learned to like it. And it wouldn't matter anyway. I didn't have anything better to turn to. I didn't have Paris, I didn't have Sebastien, and even my grandmother hadn't kept those things. I had the life I had chosen, the life I deserved, and I might as well start living it.

At first Margie thought she might get another job. She told herself she could stay even if Sebastien left. Paris was hers now, and she couldn't bear the thought of leaving it, even if he wasn't there.

She asked Miss Parsons if there were other places an American girl might find a job, summoned up the courage to inquire at the front desk of the Club if there were any new jobs. But there were so many American girls, and Margie knew she looked so heavyhearted, so flat and broken, when she went to inquire about the few open positions, and so she was unsurprised when she was not hired.

And she must have a job if she were to stay. Her parents would not send her any money, unless it were for passage home, and even then she could feel the strings attached to that generosity pulling at her, even from so far away.

In the end, it didn't matter. Because Margie got terribly, terribly sick.

There are gaps in her journals then, and I can only piece together the story through her parents' frantic letters and telegrams, and then Robert Walsh's responses, calm and orderly, confident and soothing.

Margie spent her days walking through Paris. She had thought she and Sebastien could say goodbye to Paris together, but she hadn't seen him since the night he had told her he was leaving. What would be the
point? What was the use of a grand goodbye, when, after all, it was still goodbye? Instead, she prepared to leave Paris on her own, in a quiet way. She said goodbye to the Libe, and the Place de la Concorde, and the art gallery where she had seen Sebastien's work, and the streets where they had walked and talked of nothing and of everything. At the end of each day, she bought some bread and an apple and a hunk of good cheese and she took them up to her room and she ate as she wrote in her journal. And then she went to bed.

For days, Margie had been feeling exhausted and she had developed a rough cough, but she had chalked it up to shock, to too much news, to the pain in her heart when she thought of leaving. She ignored both the physical symptoms and her emotions. She had made no plans, had not inquired about train timetables or sailing times or tickets. She could live for the rest of the month on her salary, and then she would have a few more weeks with her savings, but on some level she seemed to have decided that if she refused to think of it, it might not happen.

When she went to bed one Sunday night, struck with a more intense fatigue than she had felt before, she knew she could no longer deny that she was sick. She slept through the night, feverish and uncomfortable, turning again and again so the sheets twisted around her legs. A deep, raw feeling settled in her chest, and she woke herself coughing. Leaving her bed to use the toilet, her vision was blurry and indistinct, and she had to lean on the wall halfway to the bathroom to rest. She sat in the stall, pressing her face against the cool tile wall, until someone knocked on the door, and she started awake and stumbled back to her room.

She slept that way, woozy and fitful, the pain in her chest when she coughed growing sharper, for a day, and on Tuesday, when she didn't show up for work, Miss Parsons called the Club. The woman at the front desk agreed to check on Margie, and found her still in bed, dehydrated and near delirious, her skin so flushed with fever she looked like she had been sunburned. Her cough had an unpleasant rattle to it, and though
her skin burned to the touch, she was racked with chills. The matron called Miss Parsons, who called a doctor, who protested at having to climb all the stairs, and examined her. After the Spanish flu pandemic, most people had been anxious to the point of hysteria about illnesses, but he seemed unimpressed. “Pneumonia,” he said. “She needs sea air. There is a fresh-air colony at Cavalaire-sur-Mer on the Côte d'Azur.”

Miss Parsons was certain a stay in the south of France would do wonders for Margie, but who would take her there? And who would pay? She sent a telegram to Margie's parents with the news, and they sent a panicked telegram back, pleading for more information. But how much information can one give in a telegram? The limits of communication that had given Margie so much time to spread her wings, to put her parents' inquiries off again and again, to distract them with stories of markets and museums and her detailed description of the interior of Sainte-Chapelle, were now an enemy.

On top of Margie's inability to eat, the fever and endless coughing fits left her exhausted. Dorothy piled pillows on the bed so Margie could sleep without drowning in the fluid in her chest. She dozed, waking only to cough, her body shaking with the effort, wheezing for breath, silent tears on her cheeks from the knife-edged pains in her chest. Sometimes she stayed awake, staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling, until whoever was sitting with her was so scared they would call the doctor, who only said she would be fine with a little rest and sea air and gave them another packet of pills.

It was only by coincidence that Robert Walsh, her escort from that long-ago debutante ball, was coming through Paris. He had been in Europe for five years, a trip his parents had continued to fund in hopes it might give him some level of gravitas. And he had changed, grown older and more thoughtful, though he had also spent a fair amount of time drinking and wooing Italian and Czechoslovakian girls.

But his parents had tired of funding his exploits and demanded he
return home. He booked a ticket home through Cherbourg, and arranged for one last stay in Paris, and when he arrived, he found a telegram from Margie's parents, pleading with him to bring her home. And so he did. He got dispensation to go to her room on the third floor, setting off piles of charmed, pretending-to-be-offended squeals when the other girls saw him there, and placed her journals and her notebooks in a trunk—the same trunk in which I would find them almost seventy-five years later. He packed up her dresses and her shoes and her new Parisian hat. He hired a driver to carry her things downstairs and then take them to the train station, and then, when it was time to go, he half carried her down the narrow staircase himself.

Robert took her to Cherbourg, buying a sleeping car for the short journey on the train, and they boarded the ship together. He took her to see the ship's doctor, who refused to keep her in the infirmary for fear of contagion, so Robert took her back to the stateroom. There had been no more rooms available, so he had simply bought her a ticket in his. Her parents would never know, and he could take better care of her there.

The journey was a week long, but to Margie it might have been only a few minutes, or a few years. The doctor had been right, at least, that the sea air and being away from the dirt and smoke of Paris would ease the irritation in her lungs. One day she was well enough to bathe and wash her hair, and then to go up to the deck and sit outside, wrapped in three rugs, pulled back toward the wall to shelter her from the wind, but the next she was so exhausted she only wanted to sleep, Robert sitting by her side, putting warm, wet cloths over her nose and mouth to loosen the remaining mucus in her lungs.

The roll of the ship in the deepest waters, pushing through the summer storms, kept her nauseated and unbalanced, and she pushed away the soup Robert had sent down. When she was awake, she turned her face to the wall, memorizing the whorls and flecks of the wood. He had unpacked some of her books and he read to her for hours at a time.
The words passed over her like water, but the sound of his voice and the motion of the ship lulled her to sleep in quiet calm. He left the books on her night table for her to read herself, but she did not touch them, and one particularly rocky night they flew across the room and hit Robert in the head while he was sleeping. He kept them in the drawer afterward.

That week on the ship, taking care of Margie, sickly and silent, changed Robert. He went to the lounge to play cards and found he could not concentrate. He dressed for dinner but left the table before dessert to check on her, he nodded absently at the women who flirted with him, not even bothering to make promises he wouldn't keep, avoiding the balls and parties each night where he would have been endlessly fawned over and fêted, instead spending the night in the cabin with Margie, reading to her as she closed her eyes and braced her stomach against the movement of the ship on the waves, finding stewards to bring endless hot water for compresses on her chest and cool water to soothe her when she felt feverish, hanging up his tuxedo and spending nearly all his time in his flannels.

Watching her sleep, he remembered the way they had talked at her debut, how they had both been so young and romantic and foolish, thinking the world could belong to them without consequence. She had been honest and optimistic, different from the girls he knew, all talons and agenda. And now she was so vulnerable, and he was awash with guilt for taking her away from the place she had told him she dreamed of being.

When they arrived in America, her parents whisked her away and Robert went home alone, arriving on his family's doorstep exhausted, stacks of luggage on the street behind him, an unpleasant tangle of emotions inside him—shame and regret and disappointment for the years that had disappeared with so little to show for them, trepidation about what might lie ahead now that he must face it, and a curious feeling of loneliness that stemmed, he realized as he was bundled inside and made much of by his mother and the household staff alike, from missing Margie.

For her part, Margie rode home on the train without speaking, and walked slowly up the stairs to her old bedroom, the effort leaving her winded and rattling out the last of her cough. Shutting the door, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep for days until she could think of everything she had lost and everything she now had to do. Paris was already receding into a memory, the precise color of the afternoon sun on the buildings hovering tantalizingly out of reach, the calls of the flower sellers and the rag-and-bone men faint and muffled, the feeling of lightness, of freedom, she had experienced there distant and unbelievable as a mirage. It had been only a few months, but she felt new and raw, plunged too soon into the darkness of her parents' house, wondering how she would go on, wondering what could possibly lie ahead.

•   •   •

Oddly, it was being so sick
that made Margie's feelings toward her mother change. Weak and empty, Margie watched her mother bustling back and forth, in and out of her room, calling the cook for some toast and broth, or stewed fruit, heavy and sweet. She longed for the fresh fruit she had eaten in Paris, the color and flavor still bright. Her mother did not read to Margie as Robert had, and Margie found she missed the low, steady sound of his voice, an anchor against the constant rocking of the ocean, the close, small space of the stateroom. But when the house had gone quiet at night, her mother came into Margie's room and simply sat by the bed, holding her limp, damp hand in the small, dry palm of her own.

Margie thought back to school, when her mother had come to Abbott to care for her roommate, Lucinda. Had her mother only been waiting for a moment of vulnerability, an excuse to care for her? It was the first time she could remember in years that they weren't at war.

The pneumonia faded, but she still felt frail and tired. She slept often, though she knew it was partly avoidance and escape. In her dreams, she
was still in Paris, walking down the slender, cobblestoned alleys of the Latin Quarter with Sebastien, finding the city's secrets and cracking them open for their own pleasure. In her dreams, she could smell the flowers in the Tuileries and the garbage in the passageways behind the buildings and the sweat and perfume of Zelli's and the buttery rise of croissants at the boulangerie when she came home particularly late. In her dreams, jazz played in nightclubs and there were concerts in the gardens, and endless conversations in the cafés, and she drifted through it all, both in the world and not of it. In her dreams, her feet were never sore, though she walked and danced her way through the city. In her dreams, conversation still swirled around her, and every nerve ending in her body was alert and awake, and she could write for hours without her fingers cramping, capturing every scent, every taste, every sound, every emotion. When she woke, she would try to push herself back down into sleep, and if it would not come, she sometimes cried thin tears of frustration that entrance to Paris was denied to her even in her dreams.

“What will I do now?” she asked herself when she was alone in her room. Her voice only echoed emptily off the walls.

As she grew stronger, she realized she had a larger problem than being away from Paris. Though her lungs healed and her fever abated, and she began to take walks around the square, she was still fatigued, and the smell of food often made her feel ill. There was a taste of metal in her mouth no matter what she ate, and though she had lost even more weight during her illness, her breasts were oddly full and tender.

Though she had been raised at a time when such things were not discussed, Margie was a reader, and she had listened, at college and at the Club, to the conversations around her, and she knew exactly what was happening. Margie was pregnant, the father was literally across an ocean and promised to someone else, and her life was going to be over when her parents found out.