The Light of Paris(7)
two
MARGIE
1919
My grandmother Margaret (Margie) Pearce was first and foremost a daydreamer, and as soon as she was old enough to write, she began to record the stories she told herself. They were adventure stories sometimes, love stories often. They were stories of escape, of romance, of the future she thought she might have, of the life she wished to live.
And in the same way I thought my life would begin with my wedding, my grandmother thought hers would begin with her debut. She believed her life had been a closed bud until that moment, waiting politely until that rite of passage came to bloom, to bring her all the things she dreamed about—romance and beauty and adventure and art—with the certain cultivated wildness of a rose.
Of course that wasn’t the way it worked out. In fact, if Grandmother and I had given it any thought at all, we would have realized debutante balls and weddings were the precise opposite of freedom: a courtly cementing of our futures into the concrete of the families and society in which we had been raised. But at the time, they seemed nothing more than a chance, for once, to be beautiful, and how could either of us turn that away?
Margie made her debut on a blustery, icy December day in Washington, D.C. It was so cold the clouds had been chased away, leaving a clear sky, bright with stars against the darkness. The week before, she had come home from her first semester of college, the months of classes a blur as she dreamed of the moment when she would finally descend the hotel’s staircase and make her grand curtsy, when everything would change, everything would begin.
Margie’s appetite had all but disappeared in the excitement, so her collarbones stuck out prettily, her cheekbones high, her face flushed. She tried to read, to sew, anything to pass the hours, but she couldn’t sit still. Instead, she found herself running to the window again and again, watching people stepping quickly along the sidewalk, their heads bent to break the wind. The weather made everyone hurry, rushing to get back inside, so it looked as though the entire scene had been sped up, the cars hurtling down the street, the tram at the corner buzzing recklessly by. But when she stepped away from the window and looked at the clock again, time had barely moved.
When five o’clock finally came, she rushed upstairs to her room and was already stripping off her day dress and putting on her own corset and petticoat by the time Nellie, the maid, came in.
The gown fell over her head in a rush of silk and the scent of flowers. Nellie had placed rose petals inside the dress while it was hanging, and a few of them fluttered to the floor when Margie slipped her arms into the sleeves. The gown was made with the palest cream silk and had a wide V-neckline. Despite the season, the sleeves were short, and she had a pair of long white gloves sure to make her hands sweat. But the dress’s loveliest feature was the delicate pink silk roses crossing the bodice and trailing their way down the skirt, tiny buds of spring pink with green leaves set behind them. To Margie, it looked like a garden come to life.
Other girls, in high school and in college, had suitors, even beaux, though Margie had never thought of such a thing for herself. Her parents would have forbidden it, for one, and for two, who would look at her, with her fat ankles and her broad shoulders, when there were girls like Elizabeth Tabb or Lucinda Spencer around, delicate little things with the girlish smile of Mary Pickford and dramatic eyes like Gloria Swanson? But that night, listening to the rustle of the silk against her petticoat as she walked slowly down the stairs, her head held high under the unfamiliar weight of a tiara, she thought she might, for once, be worth looking at. This was it, she thought. This was the night her life would begin.
At the hotel, the debutantes waited in an anteroom. Some of their dresses, Margie thought as she looked around, were shockingly modern—casual, even, a loose flow of fabric draping over their bodies without pause, making them look elegantly boyish and square. The dressmaker had offered Margie a similar gown. “It’s the newest fashion,” the woman had said, showing a dress of thin satin with a lace overlay, loose and flowing.
Margie’s mother had been horrified. “You can’t even wear a corset under that!”
About the corset, Margie didn’t mind, as she was rather fond of breathing, but she did mind that tender afterthought of a dress. It looked so plain compared to the gown she had imagined. And it was all well and good for someone who looked chic in dresses like the one the pleading designer was holding out to her. Those women didn’t have broad shoulders or large bosoms or muscular calves like she did. Margie knew well what she would look like in that kind of dress.
But clearly a number of the other girls had been brave enough to take the plunge. Anne Dulaney and Elsie Mills, who had been the first to bob their hair (to their mothers’ fury and everyone else’s shock), were, of course, wearing those dresses and, of course, being tall and so slender, looked stunning. They were lounging on a pair of fainting couches as though the very thought of the evening exhausted them. Two other girls in shorter dresses huddled together by an open window, smoking (and she was fairly sure the flask they were sharing wasn’t lemonade), and another cluster of girls in more traditional gowns stood at the opposite end of the room, pretending to talk while catching admiring glimpses of themselves in the mirror above the fireplace.
Feeling desperate, Margie kept looking for someone she knew well enough to sit with, until she spied Grace Scott and Emily Harrison Palmer, with whom she had gone to school until the ninth grade, when she had left for Abbott Academy and they for Miss Porter’s. Their dresses were as formal and old-fashioned as hers, and she felt a sense of relief as she settled down on a sofa beside them, the slight and familiar tremor she had felt upon comparing herself to the others, girls who would always be more beautiful, more fashionable, more right than she was, fading.