The Light of Paris(47)

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The morning after she moved in, Margie approached the woman at the front desk about a job. The woman sized her up, finally producing a card with an address on it. “The American Library in Paris called yesterday. They’re looking for someone.”

Margie took the card with shaking fingers. A job at a library! In Paris! It was as though it had all been made for her. She put on the new French hat she had found after days of searching for something large enough—French women seemed to have tiny heads and somewhat less enthusiastic hair than Margie—and her best shoes, and headed off to 10 rue de l’élysée.

The library wasn’t a library like she had imagined, not like her library at home. Down a wide side street near the Jardins des Champs-élysées, she matched the address to a stately town house, wide and tall, with a huge, imposing front door and silent windows. Next door, a window washer stood on one of the balconies, and the glass he had left behind sparkled in the sun. The street was lined with similar houses, and it was so quiet Margie would have sworn no one lived there at all. Across the street, a high wall topped with a wrought-iron fence surrounded the élysée Palace, where the president lived, and a couple of gendarmes stepped down the street, looking askance at Margie as she hesitated on the sidewalk.

Their attentions made her self-conscious, so she pushed herself to approach the door and lifted the heavy brass knocker, letting it fall twice. In the quiet street, the sound seemed enormous, but no one came. She knocked again, and when there was still no answer, she turned the knob and stepped inside.

The once grand house was now clearly in need of love. A wide marble floor spread out in front of her, checked in enormous squares of black and white, looking dusty and dull. An empty desk stood in the center of the foyer. She walked forward, looking left, then right. Rooms opened to either side with wooden floors scuffed and dark, the Oriental carpets faded from hundreds of feet. They were filled with shelves of books and a haphazard collection of tables and chairs. In the room to the right, under a chandelier that promised it might glitter again if only it were given a good cleaning, a small, slender man with heavy, round glasses sat writing at a table, a handful of books spread in front of him. In the room to the left, their faces gone warm and golden in the sun flooding in through the windows, two women sat reading. Margie stood in the foyer, inhaling the smell of books and old wood and dust, and smiled happily.

“Can I help you?” A woman came from one of the rooms at the back, her heels clicking efficiently across the floor.

“I’m here about the job? The American Girls’ Club sent me?” Margie said. The woman came up to her, putting out her hand, which Margie shook.

“Excellent. I’m Mary Parsons, the director. And you are?”

“Margie Pearce.” Miss Parsons was smooth and elegant, like a Parisian, but her accent was clearly American. She wore a blue dress, belted in at her slender waist. Her hair was held at the back of her neck in a loose bun that somehow still allowed her to look young and chic. Margie touched her own hair self-consciously, tied back in the prim Victorian knot she had always worn, unfashionably demure.

“I’m so glad you’ve come. They sent another girl, but she was an absolute disaster. You’re not an absolute disaster, are you, Margie?” She tossed this statement over her shoulder as she walked back to the desk in the center of the foyer, and Margie stood for a moment, and then, realizing she was supposed to follow, hurried along behind.

“No?” Margie said. She meant it to come out confidently, but it ended up sounding as though she weren’t sure whether or not she was an absolute disaster. Living in Paris was so strange—at times she felt as if she were growing at home here, could find her tongue and ask for a baguette or order an omelet or buy a tomato from the lovely man on the corner without being reduced to a quivering aspic herself, could navigate the Métro and walk confidently along the streets without consulting her map like a tourist. Yet here she was, fumbling for words in this outpost of her own country. “I mean, no, I’m not a disaster,” Margie said, finding a firmness in her voice she didn’t entirely feel.

“Do you know anything about the Libe?” Miss Parsons asked. Margie had assumed she was a Miss; there was no wedding ring on her finger, though she was a good ten years older than Margie. She was confident and pretty and efficient, and modern without being inappropriate, and Margie wanted to sit down and sigh for the longing of wanting to be like her.

“Not really,” Margie admitted. Should she? Libraries were glorious places that gave you all the books you ever could read. What else was there to know?

“Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux,” Miss Parsons said, as though it were an incantation. Margie, who had fallen asleep in Latin class more than she had stayed awake, wondered if it were. “Do you speak Latin?”

“I’m afraid not.” Margie mentally kicked herself for snoozing through Miss Tappan’s lessons on declension. It was just that the grammar had been so exhausting, and she had never thought she would need it, not really.

Miss Parsons didn’t seem to mind. “‘After the darkness of war, the light of books.’ That’s our motto. The American Library in Paris,” she said, settling a stack of papers in front of her and stamping them firmly as she spoke, “was founded in 1920 to house the one-point-three million volumes sent by the Library War Service for the U.S. troops in France. Our purposes are to memorialize the American Expeditionary Force in France, to promote understanding and knowledge of America, and to provide an example of American library methods to the librarians of Europe.” Miss Parsons had delivered this entire speech without even looking at Margie, who had perched herself on the edge of one of the chairs in front of the desk, but here she interrupted her paperwork and looked up. “Do you know anything about library methods?” she asked, with rather more interest and hope than she had expressed in Margie’s Latin skills.