Читать книгу: «The Light of Paris», страница 2

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.

She promised herself she would remember it all, hold on to every moment. But as soon as she set one satin-slippered foot on the stairs, it became nothing more than a lovely blur. She stored away memories of everything she could—the plush carpet beneath her shoes, Robert’s hand under hers, the fall of her dress around her knees when she executed her curtsy, graceful and slow as a dancer’s plié. The sparkle of champagne on her tongue, and Robert standing beside her, stiff and formal in his white tie, and the kiss her father dropped on her forehead as they waltzed, and the sight of all the debutantes with their escorts, swirling around the enormous dance floor like flowers, like snowdrops, like everything beautiful and bright and enchanted.

When the night was coming to an end, when the tables had been cleared and most of the fathers had left to smoke in the billiard room and the mothers were fluttering around the ballroom, chatting or passing gossip, or sitting at the tables, listening to the orchestra and remembering their own debuts in a more elegant time, a time when there was not so much sadness, when so many young men had not been lost and so many young women were not so bold and strange and unsatisfied, Emily Harrison came to fetch Margie and Grace. They had been standing alone at the edge of the empty dance floor, sighing happily at the music. “Come upstairs,” Emily Harrison said. “There’s a party.”

“This is a party,” Margie said, confused. She realized, with a little surprise, that she was somewhat drunk, and with even more surprise, that she rather liked it.

Emily Harrison rolled her eyes. “Not like this. A real party. One of the Europeans has a suite upstairs. Everyone else is gone, didn’t you notice? Come on.” Margie looked around to see the three of them were the only debutantes left in the ballroom. The rest of the girls had disappeared, as had their escorts. They were, in fact, the youngest women in the room by a good twenty years.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Grace demurred, and Emily Harrison huffed impatiently.

“Of course not. Perfect Grace. What about you?” she asked, turning toward Margie, who took a surprised step back. A real party? She didn’t know what that meant, but she was sure she’d never been to anything Emily Harrison, who had a tendency to wildness, would have called a real party. But the night was magic and she didn’t want it to end. Why shouldn’t she go?

“I have to tell my parents,” Margie said. “They’ll be leaving soon.”

“Tell them you’re coming home with me. Hurry up already.”

Margie found her mother sitting at a table with Anne’s and Grace’s mothers, their heads bent so close together it looked as though they were eating from a single plate. When Margie approached, they separated slowly, their conversation holding them together like sticky toffee. “Your tiara’s crooked again,” her mother said. She was wearing a gown of heavy blue velvet that made her eyes burn like sapphires.

Pushing a careless hand up toward her tiara, which didn’t feel crooked in the slightest, Margie told her mother she and some of the other girls were going to Emily Harrison’s, and she might stay the night there, if that was all right.

It was the biggest lie she had ever told, and she thought, for a moment, as her mother looked piercingly at her, that she had been found out, until her mother’s gaze flicked back to Mrs. Dulaney and Mrs. Scott, who hadn’t bothered to stop talking for one moment, and she waved Margie off, telling her not to ruin her gown, for goodness’ sake, to get Emily Harrison’s maid to take care of it and not to forget to pick up the fur she had borrowed from her mother and left at the coat check. Margie promised all these things, and her mother let her go.

Could it have been so simple all along? No wonder girls like Anne and Elsie and Emily Harrison were so wild. How easy it was to slip out from under someone’s thumb, if the conditions were right.

The girls left Grace swaying contentedly by herself by the dance floor, like a lily of the valley in a breeze. They took the elevator to the top floor and swished down the hall to a suite whose door was propped open slightly, letting out the sound of music. As Emily Harrison put her hand on the doorknob, there was a shout and a burst of raucous male laughter, and Margie jumped back slightly. She felt a little less drunk now, away from the orchestra and the sparkle of the ballroom, and a little more scared, but Emily Harrison simply hissed at her to come on.

Inside, Margie stood by the door, both terrified and fascinated. Someone put a glass of champagne in her hand and she drank it quickly, the pleasant light-headedness she had felt before rising up again.

One of the Southern girls sat on the sofa, a cigarette burning in one hand and what looked suspiciously like a tumbler of gin in the other. She had taken off the lace overlay of her dress—Margie could see it draped carelessly over the back of a nearby chair—and was sitting there only in the satin chemise, and Margie was certain she didn’t have anything on underneath it. A man sat on either side of her, one of them also smoking. Ash had fallen onto the cushions of the cream sofa between them.

In the corner, a phonograph played Al Jolson, and a few of the European girls (and, Margie was shocked to see, Elsie Mills) were dancing with their escorts, who had taken off their ties and tails. It wasn’t dancing of the sort she’d learned at cotillion; their bodies were pressed so close together Margie couldn’t have gotten a hand in between them. One of the men had dropped cigarette ash on the tallest European’s beautiful gown, but no one seemed to notice or care. Elsie and her escort, their eyes half closed, from attraction or liquor, moved more and more slowly, their heads drifting together, and then they began to kiss, at first gently, and then passionately. Margie stared—she had rarely seen anyone kiss, and certainly not with such hunger—and when she finally turned away, her face burned with shame and envy.

The air was hazy with smoke—in addition to the cigarette smokers, a group of escorts was playing cards and smoking cigars in a dining room off the front room. Emily Harrison had disappeared, and Margie felt immediately self-conscious and overheated, her corset pressing too tightly into her stomach. She walked quickly through the room to one of the side doors—This suite must take the whole floor, she thought—and opened it to find a couple engaged amorously on a bed. Slamming the door shut, she pressed her hand to her chest. Was this what everyone else had been doing while she and Grace were visiting and performing little plays together or reading on Friday nights? Had this been happening all around her and she had just never been invited until now? Or was this part of the new world that seemed to be trembling around them, ready to break open and swallow them all whole?

She didn’t belong here, she thought. But what could she do? She couldn’t leave now. Her mother thought she was spending the night at Emily Harrison’s, and she didn’t even have cab fare.

Taking another few steps away from the blur of the living room, Margie found herself in a hallway lined with rich damask wallpaper in cream and silver. Suddenly, one of the other doors opened, and her escort, Robert Walsh, emerged, straightening his vest, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, and she blushed. Margie had always had the worst habit of blushing anytime she was in the company of any boy—or now, man—near her age, especially if he was at all good-looking, which Robert Walsh definitely was. Hearing the sound of a commode flushing behind him, she burned even hotter. “Hey there, are you all right?” he asked. Unable to look at him, she nodded.

“Party rather too much for you, eh?” he asked, and then, accepting her apparently stunned look as a reply, took her by the elbow and steered her away from the living room. “Come on. Let’s get you a little fresh air.” He led her down the hall to the last door, which opened into an enormous, and blessedly uninhabited, bedroom. Guiding her inside, he closed the door behind them and walked over to a long wall, tugging aside a curtain to reveal a pair of French doors. Margie stepped outside gratefully when he opened them.

The air was icy against her skin, and Margie wished she had gotten her coat from the check after all. Her mother would be furious if she forgot it, especially after she had been reminded. She always complained that Margie was irresponsible and flighty and addle-minded, and most of the time, Margie had to admit, it was true. It was just so easy to get lost in her thoughts, or in a book, or in a story she was writing.

Breathing the air in deep, grateful gulps, Margie felt her heart slowing and the flush fading from her cheeks.

“Damn, it’s freezing out here,” Robert said mildly. He shook off his jacket and brought it over to Margie, settling it around her shoulders. She pulled it closer around herself, inhaling the smell of him on the fabric—soap and Brilliantine and unlit tobacco.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, when the air had done its job. She had begun to shiver, but she didn’t want to move just yet. The champagne giddiness had gone, replaced by a different pleasure. Above them, the stars were sharp and lustrous, and she liked the steady comfort of Robert beside her.

He was handsome in a careless way, and though he had been raised to be polite, there was something of a rake about him. He drove a sporty Monroe roadster and though he was older than she, almost twenty-five, he didn’t seem to be in any rush to settle down and get married, or even work for a living. She always heard him talking about one party or another, or a trip he had taken to Atlantic City, or Boston, or New York.

Her parents had selected him to be her escort, and his parents had probably agreed for him. Yet here they were now, alone, and he didn’t seem to want to be part of what was happening out in the party any more than she did. Could it be that he was like her, maybe a little shy, a little dreamy? Maybe he had been misunderstood all this time and all he needed was someone who would allow him to be himself, and he would see that in her and she would look up at him with dewy eyes, her heart pounding, and …

“No need to apologize,” Robert said. “Your teeth are chattering—you must be frozen. Are you feeling better? Should we go back inside?”

Startled, Margie nodded, and he gestured politely for her to go in first. He closed the doors behind them, but the chill remained in the air, so Robert strode over to the fireplace, taking the match holder from the mantel and lighting the fire that had been laid there. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the sofa closest to the fireplace. She settled into the cushions, sliding out of his jacket as he brought over the coverlet from the bed and tucked her in, grinning and winking at her as though they shared a secret. Margie felt the heat in her face again.

“Thank you,” she said after a few moments, when she was warm again. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Robert shrugged. He sat down in an armchair by the fireplace, resting one foot on the opposite knee. He took the still-unlit cigar out of his mouth and set it in a large crystal ashtray on the tiny, spindly end table. “You’ve had quite an evening. And this party did go from amusing to outrageous rather quickly.”