The Light of Paris(20)

“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.