The Light of Paris

“I’m ready to go,” I announced, hanging my sweater in the closet.

Phillip, who had been flipping impatiently through channels on the television, turned and looked at me. “What is that on your dress?”

I looked down to see the outline of my chalky fingers on the bottom of the skirt. “Oh, you know. I was working a crime scene.”

No smile. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Just clean up, Madeleine. We’re going to be late.”

“And I’d hate to miss a moment with Dimpy,” I said. I walked over to the kitchen and wet the corner of a towel, dabbing at the dust until it disappeared. Throwing the damp towel onto the counter, I sighed loudly, which was my best passive-aggressive effort at letting Phillip know I didn’t want to go to this dinner. I didn’t want to pretend to be interested in real estate investment and development, and I didn’t want to make conversation with the wives. I hated that we were always on the periphery. And maybe it was worse that night because I knew I could have been with Miss Pine. I could have been painting, and afterward I could have gotten a steak sandwich, which was definitely not on my diet and even more definitely would have been delicious, Phillip’s sense of smell be damned.

Instead, we went to Twelve, which was about trendy cocktails, tiny, artfully arranged portions on enormous plates, and waiters so attentive I felt like I had to put my arm protectively around my meager dinner lest they whisk it away if I stopped to take a breath.

“Madeleine, hellllllooooo,” Dimpy Stockton brayed at me. We’d seen each other only a few days ago at the Women’s Club, and we weren’t particular friends, but you might have thought, from the performance she gave, that we were reuniting after the war.

“Hi, Dimpy,” I said as she dropped a cool, perfumed kiss on each of my cheeks. She looked exactly like you would expect someone named Dimpy Stockton to look, with a shockingly tight facelift and a pile of cocktail rings more threatening than a set of brass knuckles.

“I thought I might see you at the historical society board meeting today,” she said, and there was an odd scolding tone to her voice.

“Oh, on Fridays I read to orphans,” I said solemnly.

“Isn’t that nice? You’re always so community-minded.” Dimpy patted me on the hand. I tilted my head at her. How disconnected from reality was she? Life wasn’t a production of Annie. You couldn’t just go to an orphanage and corral unsuspecting children into storytime. But Dimpy was sailing along happily. “You missed the most ghastly argument,” she said, tossing her head back and regaling me with a story about the trauma of choosing a theme for the annual gala.

I nodded at whatever Dimpy was saying, watching Phillip glad-handing his way around the table. When he smiled, it was dazzling, and it reminded me of how charming he had been when we first met, how having his attention focused on me had felt rare and precious, had made me into someone else, someone who might have something beautiful and special inside her after all.

Over time, he had treated me less and less that way, focusing his charm on people from whom he still needed something, people who hadn’t already sworn to spend their lives with him. Now I could see his charisma was an act, something he turned on and off at will, but I could still recall the way it had felt to be held in the sunlight of his smile, and that only made being out of it colder.

Before Phillip, I had been biding my time until I got married, at which point I assumed my life would really begin. While the girls I had gone to school with found perfect husbands and had perfect babies, I went on blind dates my mother arranged for me with the sons and grandsons of women she knew from the country club. I never managed to retain their attention for more than a few dates (though, to be fair, they rarely retained mine for more than a few minutes). I had lived alone and worked in the alumni department of Magnolia Country Day, the same school I had attended, where I wrote fundraising appeals that managed to be gracefully desperate, and helped organize an endless parade of events even I didn’t want to go to. I painted, and I read, and the years went by, until I looked up and I was almost thirty and still no one had chosen me.

Phillip’s interest in me had come as a relief. Finally, I would not be the only single one at class reunions. Finally, my mother would be happy with me. Finally, I would have proof that someone thought I was beautiful, someone thought I was enough, someone thought I was worth marrying. I wore my engagement ring like a sigil to ward off everyone’s doubt and pity, most of all my own.

My mother, of course, had been thrilled with Phillip’s pedigree. His great-greats of some ordinal or another had made a fortune in real estate, and now the men of the family continued to make the money and the women spent it, an arrangement I found incredibly depressing for copious reasons. I found out after we were married that all was not as smooth as that—when Phillip’s father died, he had left the family’s real estate investment business in crisis, threatening the livelihood of miscellaneous cousins and brothers-in-law, and it was only through a lot of fist-clenchingly tough deals and a handful of patient investors, including my father, that the ship had been righted and everyone could go back to shopping in blissful ignorance.

Did I ask why he’d never married? Of course I did. I was almost thirty and single, so basically I might as well have been dead, and Phillip was thirty-five, which was not as problematic for a man, but was still old enough to raise some eyebrows. He told me he’d been engaged and she had broken his heart, and that he had never recovered. Until me, I guess.

But I knew why he had married me. It was because I was so eager to please, because he would be in control and I would not object when he told me what to wear or what I could eat or how I should spend my time. And it was because his family’s business was in trouble and my father might become an investor if Phillip could only get close enough, and how much closer can you get than to marry a man’s spinsterish daughter?

I know. I should have seen it coming. But I had been tired of Sunday night dinners at my parents’ house, tired of social events at which I was the only unmarried one, tired of the same job I had held since my college graduation, tied to the endless, thudding repetition of the academic year. And because I thought being married would change things. I thought it would make me someone special. I thought it would mean, at last, that I wasn’t wrong and ugly and broken.

So I put aside my misgivings and I married him. I married him and I had the wedding my mother had given up all hope of my having, and I moved to Chicago to be with him, and I told myself this was a sign, a sign that I might be something more than how people had seen me for my entire life. A sign that I might not be as beautiful as my mother wanted me to be, that I might never fit in as easily as everyone around me seemed to, but that someone thought I mattered.

And for a while, that had been enough. Enough for Phillip and me to convince ourselves we were in something that at least resembled love. But it didn’t feel that way now. It wasn’t enough anymore.

Around me, Dimpy and the other wives kept up a running chatter that I found myself unable to focus on. Most nights I would have suffered through the conversation, distracting myself with other things, but I felt unable to settle down, shifting in my chair, tugging at my dress. Meeting those kids and Miss Pine had reminded me of who I used to be, and now here I sat, squirming in a stylishly aggressive chair, tracing the steps of every tiny decision I had made that had led me away from her.

Swirling around the drain of my emotions, I became angrier and more resentful, wishing I were at that painting class, wishing I were wearing something I could breathe in, wishing I were someone and somewhere else. When the men pushed their chairs back from the table, I shot out of my own seat so quickly I nearly knocked Dimpy, who was leaning forward to hear what one of the other women was saying, on her very pointy chin. As Phillip lingered, I danced my way toward the door, anxious to get in the car, to be in motion.

Phillip’s charm must have worked, because as we drove away, he punched the car ceiling and shouted with excitement. Teddy, apparently, had agreed to the deal. I closed my eyes and felt the wheels moving underneath me, pretended I was on a train heading somewhere far away, somewhere I had chosen.

But we only went home, and in the foyer, Phillip stepped up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist so his hands rested on my cookie-swollen belly and kissing the back of my neck. I stepped away with a shiver.

“Come on, Madeleine. I just made a ton of money. Let’s celebrate.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re never in the mood,” he said sulkily, and my face went hot with guilt. When we first met, I had found Phillip desperately handsome, but his looks had soon seemed austere and perfect as a marble statue, and his desire something animal and impersonal, completely unrelated to me. He would wake me in the night, pressing himself against me, and I felt not arousal but an offended fury, because his desire came from somewhere else, and there in the darkness, I could have been anyone. “How are we going to have kids if you’re never in the mood?”

Phillip began to stalk around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinet doors. Finally, he huffed loudly, dropping a heavy-bottomed tumbler onto the counter so it rattled, and poured himself a drink.

I was still standing in the foyer, which was drafty and cool, and I reached into the closet for my sweater, wrapping myself in its comfortable warmth. I could smell myself on it—perfume, the illicit ice cream I ate when Phillip was out for the evening, NyQuil from my last cold.

“You’re not ready to have kids,” I said. Children were messy and inconvenient, and Phillip disliked both of those things, and once you had children, you would never be the most important person in the room, and Phillip really disliked that.

“It’s the next step. This is what you do. You get married and you have children. Everyone we know has kids. We’re the only ones.” He took an anxious sip of his drink. Phillip, always so conscious of what everyone else was doing, so worried about being left behind.

“Is that why you married me? Because it was the next step?” I asked. My feet hurt. I slipped out of my shoes, spreading my toes on the cold marble floor, looking for relief.

“Yes. I don’t know. It was time. We were both getting older. Both of our families wanted us to.”

“Right.” I turned and walked into the living room. It was dark inside, but through the windows, I could see the lights of the city stretching off into the distance, and the quiet blackness of the water. Phillip walked into the room behind me and flipped on a light switch, and immediately all I could see was our reflection: me wrapped in my sweater as though I were bracing against a storm, and him standing behind me, a faceless figure wearing an expensive suit and an impatient air.

“What do you want me to say? That’s your problem, Madeleine. Nothing is ever good enough for you. You’re never happy.”

“No,” I said, looking at us mirrored in the window as though I were watching a play. “I’m not happy.”

“You don’t even know how lucky you are.” He turned toward me, his mouth pulled down, and leaned back, draining the liquor in a single swallow.

Lucky. I thought of how the days were slipping through my fingers, how empty time went by. It didn’t feel lucky to live a life I had chosen but had never wanted. My fists were clenched, and I could feel myself shaking. I had been pushing down my anger, my disappointment, my irritation for years, and it seemed I couldn’t keep them inside anymore.

“How am I lucky, Phillip? How? Is it the way I never get do what I want to do? Is it the way you tell me I look fat when I so much as eat a cupcake on my own birthday? Is it that I live in this ugly place where I’m freezing all the time? Is that how I’m lucky?”

I knew I was risking something by speaking so plainly, but with a deep and desperate fervor, I wanted out. I wanted to pick my own clothes and decide my own schedule. I wanted a job and I wanted my own money and I wanted to paint and I wanted a house that didn’t feel like a museum, and I wondered how I had gotten to this place, where I had everything and still had nothing that was important to me.

Phillip scoffed, turned, poured himself another drink. “Most women would be thrilled to have a life like this. Expensive dinners, nice clothes, a professionally decorated home, a successful husband.”

“I would be thrilled, Phillip, if I cared about those things. But I don’t. I don’t care about fancy restaurants, or clothes, or interior decorators, and I don’t care …” I bit off the end of the sentence, my breath coming quickly. I don’t know what I would have said at that point; the words were bubbling out of me and I was filled with the kind of helpless, senseless rage that precedes an uncontrollable crying fit and doesn’t lend itself to thoughtful discourse.

“Then why,” Phillip asked, with a callous detachment, his eyes glittering, “are you still here? Maybe we shouldn’t even bother, Madeleine. Maybe we should just get a divorce.”

two

MARGIE

1919

My grandmother Margaret (Margie) Pearce was first and foremost a daydreamer, and as soon as she was old enough to write, she began to record the stories she told herself. They were adventure stories sometimes, love stories often. They were stories of escape, of romance, of the future she thought she might have, of the life she wished to live.

And in the same way I thought my life would begin with my wedding, my grandmother thought hers would begin with her debut. She believed her life had been a closed bud until that moment, waiting politely until that rite of passage came to bloom, to bring her all the things she dreamed about—romance and beauty and adventure and art—with the certain cultivated wildness of a rose.

Of course that wasn’t the way it worked out. In fact, if Grandmother and I had given it any thought at all, we would have realized debutante balls and weddings were the precise opposite of freedom: a courtly cementing of our futures into the concrete of the families and society in which we had been raised. But at the time, they seemed nothing more than a chance, for once, to be beautiful, and how could either of us turn that away?

Margie made her debut on a blustery, icy December day in Washington, D.C. It was so cold the clouds had been chased away, leaving a clear sky, bright with stars against the darkness. The week before, she had come home from her first semester of college, the months of classes a blur as she dreamed of the moment when she would finally descend the hotel’s staircase and make her grand curtsy, when everything would change, everything would begin.

Margie’s appetite had all but disappeared in the excitement, so her collarbones stuck out prettily, her cheekbones high, her face flushed. She tried to read, to sew, anything to pass the hours, but she couldn’t sit still. Instead, she found herself running to the window again and again, watching people stepping quickly along the sidewalk, their heads bent to break the wind. The weather made everyone hurry, rushing to get back inside, so it looked as though the entire scene had been sped up, the cars hurtling down the street, the tram at the corner buzzing recklessly by. But when she stepped away from the window and looked at the clock again, time had barely moved.

When five o’clock finally came, she rushed upstairs to her room and was already stripping off her day dress and putting on her own corset and petticoat by the time Nellie, the maid, came in.

The gown fell over her head in a rush of silk and the scent of flowers. Nellie had placed rose petals inside the dress while it was hanging, and a few of them fluttered to the floor when Margie slipped her arms into the sleeves. The gown was made with the palest cream silk and had a wide V-neckline. Despite the season, the sleeves were short, and she had a pair of long white gloves sure to make her hands sweat. But the dress’s loveliest feature was the delicate pink silk roses crossing the bodice and trailing their way down the skirt, tiny buds of spring pink with green leaves set behind them. To Margie, it looked like a garden come to life.

Other girls, in high school and in college, had suitors, even beaux, though Margie had never thought of such a thing for herself. Her parents would have forbidden it, for one, and for two, who would look at her, with her fat ankles and her broad shoulders, when there were girls like Elizabeth Tabb or Lucinda Spencer around, delicate little things with the girlish smile of Mary Pickford and dramatic eyes like Gloria Swanson? But that night, listening to the rustle of the silk against her petticoat as she walked slowly down the stairs, her head held high under the unfamiliar weight of a tiara, she thought she might, for once, be worth looking at. This was it, she thought. This was the night her life would begin.

At the hotel, the debutantes waited in an anteroom. Some of their dresses, Margie thought as she looked around, were shockingly modern—casual, even, a loose flow of fabric draping over their bodies without pause, making them look elegantly boyish and square. The dressmaker had offered Margie a similar gown. “It’s the newest fashion,” the woman had said, showing a dress of thin satin with a lace overlay, loose and flowing.

Margie’s mother had been horrified. “You can’t even wear a corset under that!”

About the corset, Margie didn’t mind, as she was rather fond of breathing, but she did mind that tender afterthought of a dress. It looked so plain compared to the gown she had imagined. And it was all well and good for someone who looked chic in dresses like the one the pleading designer was holding out to her. Those women didn’t have broad shoulders or large bosoms or muscular calves like she did. Margie knew well what she would look like in that kind of dress.

But clearly a number of the other girls had been brave enough to take the plunge. Anne Dulaney and Elsie Mills, who had been the first to bob their hair (to their mothers’ fury and everyone else’s shock), were, of course, wearing those dresses and, of course, being tall and so slender, looked stunning. They were lounging on a pair of fainting couches as though the very thought of the evening exhausted them. Two other girls in shorter dresses huddled together by an open window, smoking (and she was fairly sure the flask they were sharing wasn’t lemonade), and another cluster of girls in more traditional gowns stood at the opposite end of the room, pretending to talk while catching admiring glimpses of themselves in the mirror above the fireplace.

Feeling desperate, Margie kept looking for someone she knew well enough to sit with, until she spied Grace Scott and Emily Harrison Palmer, with whom she had gone to school until the ninth grade, when she had left for Abbott Academy and they for Miss Porter’s. Their dresses were as formal and old-fashioned as hers, and she felt a sense of relief as she settled down on a sofa beside them, the slight and familiar tremor she had felt upon comparing herself to the others, girls who would always be more beautiful, more fashionable, more right than she was, fading.

“Who are they?” Margie whispered, leaning forward and cocking her head toward the smokers.

“Southern,” Emily Harrison said, with a touch of haughty contempt, which was rich, considering her parents had come to Washington from Atlanta and her mother had an accent so thick you could have spread it on toast. “But those girls,” she said, nodding toward the group at the fireplace, “are European royals. Can you believe it? Minor, of course. Rumor has it they’re making the rounds looking for husbands here because their parents are flat broke.”

“Don’t gossip, Emily Harrison,” Grace scolded. Grace had always been overly kind, the sort of girl teachers selected to pal around with the new student, and prone to fits of tears over the tiniest of disappointments. “I’m sure they’re perfectly nice.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t perfectly nice, I said they were perfectly broke,” Emily Harrison said. She lifted her hands and examined her fingernails. “Everyone in Europe is broke. Everyone here, too, it seems. My mother says there never would have been a ball with this many debutantes in her day.”

“They’re so glamorous,” Margie said dreamily, looking at the Europeans. They faced away from her, a few of them with dresses cut low enough on their backs to reveal skin luminous as snow. Were they princesses? Margie wondered. Two of them wore tiaras, sparkling in the firelight, but Margie wore one herself and she was hardly a princess. It was just that they seemed so graceful, so perfect, every movement of their hands expressive as ballerinas, the curves of their throats, the bones of their faces as though they had been carved from marble. Their spines were stiff, their shoulders straight, and Margie self-consciously pulled herself back from slouching. Even if they weren’t princesses, they were royalty, and they would be walking down the steps with her.

“Isn’t it exciting?” Margie asked. She couldn’t contain herself. She supposed she ought to be blasé, like Anne and Elsie, so languidly aloof on their fainting couches, but she couldn’t. The night lay in front of them like a glittering promise, the sparkle of it, the elegance, the mystery of the excitement to come. Oh, Anne and Elsie were old poops, that’s all there was to it. She was going to dance with Robert Walsh, the terribly handsome friend of the family who was to be her escort, and drink champagne even if her parents didn’t approve, and she was going to enjoy every moment.

“Dreadfully exciting,” Grace said, and the sparkle in her eyes matched Margie’s, even though Grace was assured of marrying Theo Halloway—their families had arranged it long ago—and might not have bothered coming out at all if her mother hadn’t practically run Washington society. “I saw the ballroom on the way in, Margie. It’s simply gorgeous. And your gown is really stunning. You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” Margie said demurely, though inside she fluttered at the compliment.

Her father had said, “You look pretty, kitten,” but that was his job, and her mother had said, “Your tiara’s on crooked,” and then, after she had fixed it, “Nellie didn’t do a horrible job with your hair,” which was the closest thing to praise Margie had ever gotten from her mother, a tiny, precise woman who had never understood the starry-eyed, lead-footed daughter she had managed to produce.

“You look pretty too,” she said to Grace. Under normal circumstances that might have been an exaggeration—it was a good thing Grace was so kind and her parents were so wealthy, because Grace was so plain—but not that night. Grace was dark and the pale yellow of her gown glowed against her skin, and she looked happy, and Margie felt a little rush of sentimental nostalgia for the girls they had once been and the women they were becoming.

“Ladies.” Grace’s mother, Mrs. Scott, appeared at the doorway. The Southern girls quickly pitched their cigarette ends out the window and Margie saw the flask of not-lemonade disappear into one of their skirts. Mrs. Scott sniffed the air and looked at them disapprovingly. “We are ready to begin.”

Margie’s last name, Pearce, put her solidly in the middle of the line, right behind Emily Harrison Palmer, but that night she wished it were Robertson, or better yet, Zeigler, so she could savor the anticipation, the shiver in her stomach, the heat in her face. At first all she could see was the hallway and the line of debutantes in front of her, but as Emily Harrison began her slow descent, Margie saw it all laid out before her: the chandelier brilliant above, the pale glow of the girls’ dresses, light sparking prisms off hundreds of diamonds, setting the hall aglow. Her breath caught hard in her chest and she didn’t breathe, didn’t move, holding the moment in her hand like crystal, like snow, terrified it might disappear, shatter and whirl away in the air.