The Light of Paris

In front of me was a low, small trunk. Leaning forward, I opened it to find a stack of folded, faded fabric and a wooden box with a sliding top that turned out to be full of dark pebbles, rescued from the gentle smoothing of the water by some curious hand long ago. Below those were an accordion file full of financial paperwork, a stack of envelopes bound together so tightly the rubber band had bitten into the centers of the envelopes on both the top and the bottom, a pile of books, and a few composition books, their covers yellowed and dry. Picking one up, I flipped through the pages. It was a mishmash of things: a listing of clothing comprising a girl’s wardrobe, some poetry, a draft of a letter to the aforementioned girl’s mother with lots of cross-outs and exclamation points, a hastily drawn calendar, and some absentminded doodles. I looked through, smiling, thinking this could have been any girl’s diary, really, from anytime. Substitute high-heeled sneakers and short overalls for petticoats and gloves and it could have been written today, but the dates sprinkled throughout the pages told me it was from 1914. I flipped back to the front cover and there, in a valiant (if failed) effort at pretty penmanship, was my grandmother’s maiden name: Margaret Brooke Pearce.

Putting the notebook aside, I pulled the next one out of the trunk. This one was labeled four years later: 1918. It was more of a diary than the first notebook, though there were still occasional digressions into the mundane: pages of addition adding up to a teenage budget, a list of girls’ names and where they were going to college (I felt a little surge of pleasure at this: 1918 and the entire graduating class of girls—only thirty, but still—were every one of them going to college). In February, I read this entry:

The ’flu is here, and the school is in a complete panic. They can’t send us home, they say, because too many people are sick and we’d only infect them on our journeys. Instead, they’re quarantining us here. Everyone is awfully disturbed, but I think it’s rather romantic. Of course, I don’t have it yet. I’ve always been healthy as a horse, as Mother says, so maybe I won’t get it at all?

And a few weeks later:

Well, Lucinda’s caught it. They’ve run out of spaces in the infirmary, so they’ve gone and turned the gymnasium into another infirmary. She’s there now. Of course, it’s not as bad as it could be—there are these awful photographs of soldiers who are down with it, just shoved into bed after bed anywhere they can find the space—churches, gymnasiums. Abbott ran out of medical staff and teachers to help long ago, and they’re asking the mothers to come. The funniest part—Mother has agreed! I suppose she thinks it’s war service, even though the war is practically over, or so everyone keeps saying.

Anyway, they’ve closed down one of the other dormitories, so I’ve got a new roommate now that Lucinda is gone (and good riddance to bad rubbish, says I); Ruth is only a sophomore, but she’s quite droll and we get on très well. Her sister sent a pack of peanut brittle and we stayed up late last night gorging ourselves and laughing until we felt positively ill (or possibly that was due to the peanut brittle). The good news is there are only half the classes and with the weather so drab I was able to sleep it off. Mother would be furious I ate so many sweets.

To be honest, I feel a little jealous that Mother is coming up here to take care of these other girls. She’s never been up to visit me, not even for Family Weekend. Part of me wishes I would get the ’flu, just a little case, and then she’d have to take care of me, too. When I picture my own mother ministering to mean old Lucinda, sitting by her bedside and dabbing at her forehead with a cool cloth, it makes me more than a little ill with jealousy.

It was so strange to read the entries and think of my grandmother writing them. She had died when I was twelve, so to me she had only been Grandmother, old and stiff and formal to a fault. It was impossible to reconcile the woman I had known with this girl, so honest and young and silly. It could have been my diary, with all the complaints about her mother and the sugar overload.

My stomach growled again, hard and insistent, and I wiped a few more beads of sweat off my forehead. Time to go, then. I’d check in with Sharon to see if she’d strangled my mother yet, and then I’d figure out what to do next. I started to put the notebooks and letters back into the trunk and then paused. In my confusion that morning, I hadn’t packed a book, and these looked like a better-than-average distraction. Maybe I’d find something my mother and I could bond over. Gathering up the packet of letters and the pile of books and notebooks, I stacked my arms full and headed down the stairs.

In my bedroom, I dropped the papers on the bed and went to wash the travel stink and attic dust off my skin. Drying my hands, my engagement ring snagged on the towel, and I tugged it free, staring at it. It had been cleaned a few months ago when I went to Tiffany’s to buy a present for one of Phillip’s nieces (why a five-year-old girl needed a present from Tiffany’s was beyond me, but this was how the Spencer family worked), and it sparkled in the light, the scratches on the metal, evidence of years of bumps, bangs, and scrapes, barely visible.

There was a dark blue thread from the towel stuck underneath the stone. I pulled it out, the thread breaking on either side, leaving a tiny piece of blue fuzz underneath the prong. I picked at it for a moment, a tide of irritation building inside me, pushing aside the sick, sinking fear that had been resting heavily in my chest. Why did Phillip get to be the wronged party? What had I done wrong, other than be honest, admit for once that I was unhappy, that there was something broken between us?

On the counter was a small china dish and I tossed the rings in there, clinking the lid back on with satisfaction. Now I wouldn’t have to look at that piece of lint marring the ring’s perfection. I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. And I certainly wouldn’t pay any attention to its bare and blinding absence on my finger.

four

MARGIE

1924

Five years after her debut, my grandmother was sitting in the parlor, twenty-four years old and generally agreed to be a spinster. She had graduated from college two years before, and now she found herself lost.

“What are you thinking on, Margie?” her mother asked. “You’ve done half of that in the wrong color.”

Margie lifted her embroidery hoop and peered at it closely. “Oh, damn,” she said. “Well, it’s not as if it was any good to begin with.”

“Don’t swear, Margie. You’ll never get a husband with a mouth like a fishwife,” her mother scolded with a tired sigh. She held out her hand. “Give it here. I’ll take the stitches out.”

Margie crossed her eyes. There was going to be no husband. She knew it, and she guessed her mother knew it, and only said things like that to keep the fiction alive, for whose benefit she wasn’t sure. Margie hadn’t been keen on getting married in particular, but she had very much liked the idea of a love affair or two. There had been a time when she had been starry-eyed enough to think some man might see beyond her plainness and find the person underneath and fall madly in love. She thought maybe Robert Walsh had. Oh, but she didn’t like to think of him at all.

“Mr. Chapman is coming for dinner tonight,” her mother said without looking up. She was plucking out Margie’s sloppy, miscolored stitches. When she handed it back, there would be tiny holes where the thread had been, and puckers in the fabric, but Margie would be expected to redo it anyway. What use were these things now? When women had the vote, when girls could go to medical school, when every day little earthquakes of change brought something new? The time of embroidery and silver polishing was ending, and another time, one Margie had only glimpsed the night of her debut, of dancing and parties and women free to do as they pleased, dress as they wanted, had begun. But not in her mother’s parlor. It might as well have been 1885 in there, the décor Victorian, ornate wallpaper and dark wood and enormous, heavy, velvet-covered furniture that seemed to do nothing except produce dust. Her mother, who had been raised in a house even more dependent on rules and rigidity than the one she ran now, had gritted her teeth and barred the door against any change.

Margie wasn’t really interested in the speakeasies or the liquor or the Charleston, and heaven knows the clothes wouldn’t have suited her. Her interests were more creative. Upstairs in her room was a series of notebooks—some she used for journals, the others for her stories. Abbott Academy’s literary magazine had published a series of poems and short stories she’d written, and Margie had been proud to bursting to see her words somewhere other than in her notebooks, and in typeface instead of her cramped, busy hand. But when she’d shown the magazine to her parents, their reaction had been condescending, a dismissive nod after skimming through. Her father had grunted. “That’s nice,” her mother had said, but her mother didn’t think much of stories or poems in the first place. She believed reading should be edifying, and was particularly fond of publications from the Temperance League.

In college Margie had won the Mary Olivier Memorial Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the literary society had published a few of her stories in their journals. It wasn’t like high school; they didn’t send copies of everything home, and she didn’t think her parents had ever seen those, which was a pity, as they were much better. This was what she wanted, why she longed to be able to leave the parlor and go into the world outside, to write and to publish and to talk to other people with imagination. Nowadays it wasn’t like the unfortunate Brontë sisters, who’d had to publish as men to get any attention. Now women could be reporters and poets and even novelists. But how could she have anything to write about if she never left these four walls? She wanted to be out there, living!

“Again? Didn’t he come last week?”

“He did,” her mother said blandly. “I invited him back. I thought you two got on awfully well. And so did he, apparently. He was pleased to accept my invitation when I told him you would be at home.”

“Oh, no, Mother.”

“Now, Margie, he’s a perfectly nice man. You said so yourself.”

“I was being polite! Mother, he’s twice my age! And so dreadfully dull. All that talk about government securities or exchange rates or something. I wanted to impale myself on the shrimp fork.”

“Margie, do you always have to be so dramatic?” her mother asked, shaking her head in a disappointed way Margie knew well. She finished pulling the last line of thread out of the hoop, wrapped the loose floss neatly into a bundle, and handed it back to Margie. “I don’t have to remind you that you are in no position to be turning down offers from eligible bachelors.”

“Mother,” Margie cried. She felt as if she were sixteen again, being pressed to go to a dance she had no interest in. After her season had ended, her mother had continued making arrangements for Margie to go out: to the symphony, to balls, to parties. There she was either roundly ignored and would find a quiet corner to read in (in which case she might as well have just stayed home), or she was yanked around from group to group by her mother as though she were an exotic new pet who needed showing off. Worse, lately, her mother had taken it upon herself to invite her father’s single business associates over for dinner, seating them next to Margie as though to judge how they would look as a pair, so Margie was forced to make conversation. And of course all the men her own age were either married or terrible rakes (and sometimes both, she thought, thinking of Anne Dulaney’s husband), so the dinner guests had skewed older and older until they had lit on Mr. Chapman, who was nearly fifty and never married, and who was perfectly genteel, but, as previously mentioned, dreadfully boring (which probably explained the never-married part).

“Mother, please don’t make me.” Margie sighed. She hated the way she sounded, young and spoiled, but how could she sound any other way when she was being treated like a child? This was the problem, she thought, with living in this house year after year, locked in this room with her mother, Margie embroidering while her mother tore her stitches out, having the same conversations while they both went quietly mad. She faked headaches on a regular basis so she could sneak upstairs to her room and write or read. Her mother hated how much Margie read; in addition to the frivolity of novels, she complained, squinting at those books all the time was going to ruin Margie’s eyesight.

Margie wished she could run away. Women lived on their own all the time now. One of the houses at the end of the block had been turned into a boardinghouse; she saw the girls who lived there heading off to work every day in twos and threes, laughing, heads bent close, sharing the secrets of a life she could hardly imagine. Surely they had their own problems, but they also had the freedom to take whatever job they wanted and live wherever they wanted and marry whomever they wanted, and she imagined those freedoms were worth a fair amount of pain.

And she could work, couldn’t she? She could work at the library—just the thought of spending her days with all those books made her giddy. She could be a writer for a magazine. She could fetch coffee or take notes, if it came to it. And as always, when she ran through this scenario in her head, she could feel her hopes rising, could see it as though it were already true. And then something would happen, someone would speak, and her bubble would burst and she would come back to the ground, to her mother’s parlor and this crooked, rumpled embroidery, and a life full of gatherings she didn’t want to go to and people she didn’t want to talk to and all the obligations her mother pressed on her until she wanted to scream.

“It will be fine, Margie. He’s a lovely man, and financially secure.”

“I don’t care about financially secure.”

“You’d care a lot more about it if you hadn’t lived that way all your life,” her mother said.

“It doesn’t matter to me, Mother. Not the way it matters to you.”

“It will be all right in the end, Margie.” Her mother lowered her head to her embroidery with a quiet smile, as though she had won something. “You’ll see.”

Though in the end, it wasn’t fine. It wasn’t fine at all.

After dinner that night, an endless affair in which Mr. Chapman and her father talked at length about some provision in the Howland-Barnes Act and Margie valiantly resisted falling asleep in her potatoes, her mother suggested Margie and Mr. Chapman take a walk. Margie, who had been cooped up inside all day, nearly fled for her wrap. Even a walk with Mr. Chapman was better than sitting with him and her parents for the length of coffee and polite conversation in the parlor.

They had walked for a few blocks in silence when they reached Book Hill Park and Mr. Chapman suggested they sit down. Margie had a disturbing feeling of foreboding, and thought wildly, crazily, about escaping, about simply turning and running far away, where Mr. Chapman couldn’t catch her.

Instead, she sat down on the very edge of the bench, leaving a good two feet between them. “Margie,” Mr. Chapman began, in a somber tone, as though he were preparing to deliver a college lecture, “I’m sure you’re aware of how closely your father and I work together.”

He paused, and Margie realized she was supposed to respond. “Yes?” she said, though it came out more question than confirmation.

“It’s an alliance I wish to preserve at any cost. Your father is a great man, Margie. He’s brought change to Washington, to the banking industry.” Mr. Chapman was starting to drone. Margie wished there were a nearby plate of potatoes she could put her face in. She didn’t understand a fifth of what her father did; it all sounded dreadfully boring. The most exciting thing he had, as far as she was concerned, was a partial share in the Washington Senators, the baseball team, and her mother rarely allowed her to go to the games. “The obligations of someone of your class” apparently didn’t include eating peanuts, or doing anything fun, for that matter.

“I’d like to cement that relationship by marrying you, Margie,” Mr. Chapman said finally, putting his hands on his thighs and sitting up straight. He wasn’t looking at her; he hadn’t looked at her during the entire duration of his speech. He might have been talking to someone else entirely.

Margie wanted to laugh out loud, but she was too horrified. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chapman, but are you proposing?”

He looked at her frantically and she realized, with a jolt of sympathy, that he was nervous. Could it be that in his lengthy—impossibly lengthy, she thought!—life, he had never proposed to anyone before? Or maybe he had never proposed successfully, and was afraid of being shot down yet again?

Clearing his throat, Mr. Chapman pushed his hands down his thighs again. Margie guessed his palms were sweating. “I am, yes. Margie, we should get married. Your mother is anxious for you to get married, you know.”

Margie, who had read all sorts of romantic novels, had never heard of a proposal like this before. He hadn’t mentioned his feelings for her; hadn’t even mentioned her, really. Even Mr. Darcy had finally been moved to confess his emotions. She knew Mr. Chapman was older, and a pragmatic man, but what was she expected to say to this? If she’d been a different sort of girl, prettier, more graced in social niceties, she might have known how to respond, how to turn this back so he didn’t feel offended (though, really, she thought with some indignation, he deserved to be offended—he couldn’t even bother to pretend even the smallest bit of love for her?), but if she had been that sort of girl, she wouldn’t have gotten a proposal like this in the first place.

So Margie did the only rational thing. Standing up from the bench, she pulled her skirts up slightly to keep from tripping over them, and she turned toward the entrance of the park and ran. She ran the entire way home, not caring what the people she passed thought of this woman tearing down the sidewalk in her dinner clothes; she ran up the stairs and into her room, locked the door, and collapsed on the bed, panting, her body overheated, her feet sore from the press of her toes on the pavement through her delicate-soled shoes, her mind spinning.

She heard a knock at the door downstairs, voices in the hall, her mother’s high and anxious, her father’s and Mr. Chapman’s low and murmuring. The sound of her father’s study door opening and closing, and then an ominous silence for a long time. Margie closed her eyes on the bed. She couldn’t even think of what to do next. They were going to come up here, maybe both of them—God forbid all three of them—and her father was going to look hurt and her mother was going to be furious. She thought back to the conversation with her mother in the parlor. Her mother had known. Of course her mother had known. Mr. Chapman would have asked her father’s permission, and maybe her mother had been there, maybe her parents had even pleaded with him to take her on (that thought was too humiliating to linger on for long).

Below, her father’s study door opened and closed, voices in the hall, this time calmer, more conciliatory. The door closing. Her parents’ voices now, just the two of them. Margie stood, unlocked her bedroom door, and then lay down on the bed again, bracing herself for their footsteps on the stairs, their disappointed arrival.

No one came.

Instead, she heard them move into the parlor, their voices becoming only the faintest sound in the still house. The maid and the cook had cleaned up after dinner, put the house to bed, gone to bed themselves. It was only her parents below, deciding her fate, and her, lying hopeless and powerless in her room, wondering what, exactly, was to become of her now.

Finally, her mother flung the door of Margie’s room open. “Margaret Brooke Pearce,” she thundered, and her face was so tight with fury that Margie slid backward on her bed, as though she could disappear into the wall. “You horrible, ungrateful thing. How dare you refuse Mr. Chapman?”

Margie opened her mouth, but all that came out was a squeak. “Do you think you are such a desirable property that men are lined up around the block for you? You are twenty-four and unmarried. Do you know what that means? The men who might marry you are taken. Every day you get older, and every day there are girls younger than you, prettier than you, and heaven knows more polite than you, who are making themselves available for marriage. This was your chance, Margie, and you have destroyed it.”

“I didn’t want to marry him,” Margie said, her voice wavering on the edge of tears. “He doesn’t love me. And I don’t love him.”

“Love. Love! I suppose you get these ideas about love from the books you are always reading. Oh, you think I don’t know what you do up here with your time, Margie, but I know how you waste away the hours dreaming. Other girls are bettering themselves. They do good works, they go to Temperance League meetings, and if they do read, it’s something edifying. They go to parties without complaining. And you’re shut up here with your books and these notebooks and the one time you get a chance at marriage, you ruin it.” Her mother’s fury arced up and she raised her arm, reaching out and swiping a stack of notebooks and papers off Margie’s writing table.

Leaping off the bed, Margie stood up straight, her fists clenched by her sides. “You don’t care about me. You only want me to marry him because it will be good for Father’s business.” One of her notebooks had fluttered open on the ground and she lunged for it, closing it and clutching it to her chest.

“And what’s wrong with that? Your father’s business is what feeds you and clothes you. That business is what you use to buy these precious books. That business is what will pay your way when we are gone and you are old and alone and unmarried.”

A sob caught in Margie’s throat at her mother’s harsh words. “I’m not going to get married. I will pay my own way.”

“How?”

“I’m going to be a writer.” Margie lifted her chin defiantly, though she didn’t feel defiant. She felt like burying her face in the pillow and crying. It was all so unfair. She understood love didn’t have to be like it was in novels, but was it so wrong to want there to be something between her and the man she would marry? Something to look forward to, other than the cool, businesslike agreement her parents had?

“A writer? A woman writer? What living would you earn doing that? Not one that could keep you in the style to which you’ve been accustomed, I can tell you. You are far too old for these silly, foolish dreams, Margie.” She looked as though she were going to say something else and Margie braced herself, then, as abruptly as her mother had come, she turned on her heel and left the room, closing the door loudly behind her.

When her mother had gone, Margie unclenched her fists, looking at the pale moons her fingernails had carved in her palms. She felt, suddenly, very, very tired. She lay down on the bed again, staring at the ceiling, tears rolling down the sides of her face. There was no way out. She had everything, and she had nothing. She was going to spend the rest of her life like this, watching her mother pulling the threads out of her embroidery, sneaking up to her room to write stories no one would ever see, her parents bringing suitors to the table, digging closer and closer to the bottom of the barrel until there was no one left, and then Margie would be alone forever, and none of those foolish, lovely dreams would ever come true.

Margie fell asleep in her dinner dress, her shoes still on, lying there on top of the coverlet. When she woke in the morning, she drew herself a bath and sat in the water until it went cold. She pulled her hair into a simple knot at the base of her neck, dressed, faced herself in the mirror. She looked the part of the wretched spinster, she thought: pale, wearing a dark dress as though mourning the death of her own life. Well, this is it, she thought. And if they want me to marry him, I won’t. I just won’t. I’ll get a job, not even a fancy job, a typist somewhere—places are hiring female clerks more and more often now. And I’ll move into one of those boardinghouses, and I’ll only come over here for holidays, and we’ll all sit around the dinner table and be terribly polite, and then I’ll be happy because I’ll be free.