The Light of Paris(64)

“I shouldn’t be sitting. There’s so much to do,” she said. She folded and refolded her hands in her lap.

“There’s less than yesterday,” I said. Above us, the carpenter’s saw bit into a piece of wood. There was a clatter, then silence again.

“Did you need something?”

“We can’t just talk?”

“Well,” my mother said, as though that were an answer.

I nodded over at one of my grandmother’s notebooks, sitting on the edge of the table. “Grandmother wanted to be a writer. Did you know that?”

“Did she?” My mother’s interest was polite.

“She had some stories and poems published, in high school and college. The literary magazines. I’ve read them. They’re pretty good.”

“Where did you find those?”

“Up in the attic. You’ve never read them?”

“There’s so much junk in the attic—who knows what’s up there?”

“Did she write? I mean, do you remember her being a writer?”

My mother looked at me as though I were simple. “She didn’t have time. She practically ran the Collegiate Women’s Society in Washington, and she was on the boards of the symphony and the library, and they needed to entertain because of my father’s work. If you’re having senators and diplomats over for dinner, there’s not a lot of time for scribbling.”

It broke my heart a little to hear my mother call my grandmother’s writing “scribbling.” She sounded like my great-grandmother, Margie’s mother. I thought about telling her what I had read, about Margie’s trip to Paris, about her daydreams and her friendship with Sebastien, about her writing, but I kept my mouth shut. Telling Henry hadn’t bothered me at all, but telling my mother seemed like a betrayal. I knew she wouldn’t approve, and I wondered again how the woman in those journals had raised this woman, how the woman in those journals had become the Grandmother I knew, stiff and formal and reserved. She had been so happy in Paris—what had taken that from her? What had made her stop writing? What had changed?

“We could arrange to have these things shipped home to you,” my mother said, smoothly changing the subject. “Instead of taking them down to the basement just to bring them back up in a few days.”

The casual nature of the offer made me freeze, my stomach tensing. “What do you mean, a few days?”

“When you leave. You’ve been helpful, but don’t you need to be getting back to Phillip?”

There was a pause, heavy and expectant, between us. We hadn’t spoken about Phillip, or about me, or about anything serious, really, since our conversation the other day, and the idea of arguing with her made my chest feel tight. “I’m thinking about it,” I said. Though I wasn’t, really. It was odd how little I thought of him, how comfortable I felt without him.

“He called here, you know. He said you weren’t answering your cellular phone.”

“I . . . lost it,” I said. I should have felt better that he was calling, but that part of my heart felt dark and shriveled and unforgiving. He wasn’t reaching out. Not really. All he wanted, I suspected, was to berate me more, to put me back into the box I was breaking out of.

“Is there something you aren’t telling me?” my mother asked. She was hesitant, and a momentary shard of hope rose inside me, as it had the other day when I had thought she might be opening to me. “Has Phillip—mistreated you in some way?”

I paused, equally hesitant. We were wandering the edge of undiscovered emotional territory—honesty. Reality. “No,” I sighed. He would never hurt me, not the way she was asking about, anyway. As small and mean as he could be, he had never raised a hand to me, and as far as I knew, he hadn’t slept with anyone else.

“Maybe you’re disconnected. That happens in a marriage sometimes . . . things get busy . . .” She trailed off, hopefully, and I realized she was waiting for me to jump in and agree, to put her at ease, to end this awkward conversation.

“Maybe,” was the best I could give her.

“Madeleine,” my mother began, then interrupted herself to reach over and pat my hand. Her fingers were slender and cool. “You can’t just sit here and let it all fade away. Call him back at least. Talk to him. If there’s no real problem between you, then you have to give it another chance.”

I leaned back in my chair, lifted my hands to the ceiling, then let them fall back in my lap. I could feel myself starting to cry, and I didn’t want to cry. My mother never cried. My sorority sisters cried, but those were pretty, delicate tears, energetic enough to evoke sympathy, but not enough to cause mascara to run or redden their noses under their foundation. When I cried, it was loud and messy and ugly, my eyes pink and swollen, my nose red and stuffy. I didn’t want to cry in front of my mother for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that it made me so unlovely, and I already felt unlovable.

“You know why he married me, Mother. Did you really think it was going to last?”

“He married you because you were in love,” she said, with the strength of conviction of someone who refuses to see anything they don’t want to.

I fast-blinked away the tears hovering at the edges of my eyes, blurring the dining room into a soft wash of green and blue, like a Monet painting. “Well, I may have loved him, but he didn’t love me. I probably even knew it at the time, a little bit. Why was a man like Phillip going to marry someone like me? You thought that, Mother. I know you did. Everyone did. I know it’s all anyone at the wedding was thinking about.” My self-pity was coming to a rapid boil, and I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore, angrily wiping them away with my forearm. “He married me because I was malleable, because I’d let him walk all over me. And he does. He married me because I was pretending to be someone else, someone who would make him look good. He married me because he wanted Dad to invest in his company. He didn’t marry me for me. He doesn’t even like me. He doesn’t even know me.”