The Light of Paris(19)

“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.