The Light of Paris(88)

I had never seen my mother so emotional. In the scheme of things, of course, she wasn’t emotional at all. But for her to raise her voice was highly uncommon. It just wasn’t something she did. Even when I had been a child, my parents had spoken to me calmly and reasonably. When I was a teenager, prone to attempting fits of drama and picking fights, it was seriously disappointing to shout and slam doors only to have them respond in quiet, measured voices I couldn’t rail against.

“Don’t you want more for me, Mother? Don’t you want me to be happy?”

“The thing that’s holding you back from being happy isn’t your situation, Madeleine. It never has been. It’s you.”

I opened my mouth to respond and then clamped it shut again as what she said sank in.

It was true that I had always been restless, always uncomfortable, always chafing against the things everyone around me seemed so happy with. And I’d tried so hard to fit in. I’d had my hair straightened, eaten bean sprouts and crackers and cottage cheese until I wasn’t the fattest girl in the yearbook photo, learned what to talk about at fundraising lunches, pledged a sorority and memorized the bylaws, greetings, and songs. I had joined the organizations I was supposed to join, gone to the parties I was supposed to go to, donated to the charities I was supposed to support, married the man I was supposed to marry. And I was still miserable. But everyone around me was happy. So maybe it was me. Maybe it had been me all along.

“I’m not going to be a shield for you to hide behind. Now, my suggestion is that you go back and commit yourself to Phillip and your life there, instead of lying around here moaning about how difficult everything is when you have it more than easy.” My mother stood up and nodded, as though she had finally said what she had come here to say, and turned and walked out of the room, leaving me certain, yet again, that I was in the wrong and everyone else must be right.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So despite having done exactly what my mother suggested—gritting my teeth and diving into the fray—more times than I could remember, I decided to do it again.

I swore this time would be different. This time it would work. I would really enjoy my charity work. I would go out with Phillip to the places he wanted to go. I’d host dinner parties for his colleagues and I wouldn’t doze off when they were talking about gold bricks or pork bellies or whatever it was they talked about. (Really, I had only fallen asleep the once, and only because I had already been having trouble sleeping—it turned out Terrence Mather’s explanation of the future of mutual funds had done the trick.) Maybe if I were more like the person I had been when Phillip and I got married, he would be more like he had been then too—charming, romantic, complimentary.

I could do this. I could be the woman my mother had always wanted me to be, the woman Phillip wanted me to be, the woman I wanted to be. Because that woman wasn’t constantly torn up inside, thinking of the way things might be different. She just took what she was given—and really, hadn’t I been given so very much?—and she learned to like it. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. I didn’t have anything better to turn to. I didn’t have Paris, I didn’t have Sebastien, and even my grandmother hadn’t kept those things. I had the life I had chosen, the life I deserved, and I might as well start living it.





twenty-four





MARGIE


   1924




At first Margie thought she might get another job. She told herself she could stay even if Sebastien left. Paris was hers now, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it, even if he wasn’t there.

She asked Miss Parsons if there were other places an American girl might find a job, summoned up the courage to inquire at the front desk of the Club if there were any new jobs. But there were so many American girls, and Margie knew she looked so heavyhearted, so flat and broken, when she went to inquire about the few open positions, and so she was unsurprised when she was not hired.

And she must have a job if she were to stay. Her parents would not send her any money, unless it were for passage home, and even then she could feel the strings attached to that generosity pulling at her, even from so far away.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Because Margie got terribly, terribly sick.

There are gaps in her journals then, and I can only piece together the story through her parents’ frantic letters and telegrams, and then Robert Walsh’s responses, calm and orderly, confident and soothing.

Margie spent her days walking through Paris. She had thought she and Sebastien could say goodbye to Paris together, but she hadn’t seen him since the night he had told her he was leaving. What would be the point? What was the use of a grand goodbye, when, after all, it was still goodbye? Instead, she prepared to leave Paris on her own, in a quiet way. She said goodbye to the Libe, and the Place de la Concorde, and the art gallery where she had seen Sebastien’s work, and the streets where they had walked and talked of nothing and of everything. At the end of each day, she bought some bread and an apple and a hunk of good cheese and she took them up to her room and she ate as she wrote in her journal. And then she went to bed.

For days, Margie had been feeling exhausted and she had developed a rough cough, but she had chalked it up to shock, to too much news, to the pain in her heart when she thought of leaving. She ignored both the physical symptoms and her emotions. She had made no plans, had not inquired about train timetables or sailing times or tickets. She could live for the rest of the month on her salary, and then she would have a few more weeks with her savings, but on some level she seemed to have decided that if she refused to think of it, it might not happen.