The Light of Paris(27)

That delight lasted for approximately two hours. Because once they had waved goodbye to their mothers, who stood on the pier as the ship gave a long, mournful wail of its horns and a groan of its steel sidings and pulled away from the dock, two tugboats escorting them out toward the ocean like tiny bridesmaids at a wedding, Evelyn turned to Margie with a hard, mean look in her eye. Around them, most people were drifting away from the railings, some of them heading to the top deck for a better view of their departure, the city spreading out behind them, wider and wider, others heading to their staterooms to settle in, some looking for entertainment. Evelyn dug into her handbag and pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and turned her head slightly to exhale, so the smoke brushed against Margie’s cheek as it drifted away. “Here’s the situation, Margie. I let you come along because I knew it was the only way Mother would allow me to go to Europe. But I intend to have a truly fabulous time on this trip, and I don’t want you ruining it.”

Margie hadn’t suffered any delusions about what her relationship with Evelyn on this trip might be like. Neither of them were the type to giggle girlishly together through castles and moors, and Margie hadn’t pictured them gossiping about dates over café crème at Café de la Paix, but she’d thought Evelyn might be willing to compromise. Margie had imagined she’d have to drag Evelyn through the Uffizi Gallery and the Louvre, and wake her after she fell asleep during an opera at La Scala, that Evelyn would smoke and make eyes at the porters and would have to be rescued from a couple of nightclubs before the trip was over. But Margie had never predicted an open rebellion.

“So I’m going to do what I want to do, and you’re going to do whatever it is you . . . do,” Evelyn said, casting a doubtful glance at Margie’s sturdy traveling dress, “and we’ll not get in each other’s way, all right?”

With that, Evelyn glanced over Margie’s shoulder meaningfully, and she turned around to see a group of young people, somewhere between her age and Evelyn’s, she guessed. Two women and five men. The women were sipping champagne from glasses, but two of the men had gotten hold of bottles and were drinking straight from them, as though they were common rummies. She’d known alcohol was legal on the ship, but she’d thought there might be a formality, waiting until some invisible border line were crossed. “What will I do?” Margie asked.

“Why don’t you read a book or something? Isn’t that what girls like you do?” Evelyn asked. She checked her reflection in a newly shined brass finial on the nearest rail, and then, without so much as saying goodbye, she slid past as though Margie were a ghost, all air and no substance, and joined the group, laughing and talking. One of the girls produced another champagne glass, but Evelyn saucily took the bottle and drank straight from it, to their cheers and applause. When had she met them? Maybe they had just known one another on sight, people like Evelyn and those other girls, beautiful and confident, made for this strange new world where women had jobs and wore short skirts to their debuts and smoked openly.

The group drifted away, and Margie stayed, alone on the deck, looking over the railing at the shipyards until they passed beyond the fingers of land that made up New York, and then, after a time, she moved to the back of the ship, looking off to the side where the Statue of Liberty stood, her torch raised high. Margie saluted her, watching the land recede into the distance. As the tugboats split off, making their slow way back to land, Margie faced the empty blue ocean ahead.

So much for glamor and adventure. Turning back, she looked at the blank space behind them that had been the city, the ship now picking up steam at an amazing rate, the smokestacks bellowing black into the air. There was a little twinge of homesickness in her belly, and her throat closed up behind a swell of tears.

“Enough,” Margie said aloud. She threw her shoulders back, blinked her eyes rapidly. Homesickness. Of all things. What on earth did she have to be homesick for? Hadn’t she spent years wishing for something, anything (other than Mr. Chapman) to take her out of her parents’ house, to set her free? Hadn’t she read a hundred novels about women having adventures and pictured herself in their stead: traveling through time, falling in love with a seemingly dastardly but actually quite charming pirate, solving thefts of art in Milan, exploring the Nile? And now here she was, with a paid ticket—a whole series of them, actually—to adventure, and she was weeping on the deck and wishing she could go back to the mother she’d been wishing to get away from. “Be a heroine, Margie,” she said aloud, and strode off down the deck to explore the ship.

Somehow, the hours passed and the week went by. Margie walked on the wind-whipped open decks, and she read in a window seat in the ship’s library overlooking the bow of the ship, cutting through the endless sea. At night she dressed for dinner and ate next to Evelyn’s empty chair, and she made polite conversation with the older couples at the table, all of whom seemed to wonder what she was doing there but none of whom were impolite enough to ask. She went to lectures and one night walked out with the astronomy club, looking at the spray of stars across the sky, shining through the night like a lost message from centuries ago. She found an alcove in a little-used lounge where she could write undisturbed, and she took her notebooks there and filled page after page, settling into the flow of the words, never having to keep an ear cocked for the tread of her mother’s feet on the stairs, prepared to jump up and shove her notebook into a drawer, to hide her ink-stained hands guiltily.