The Light of Paris(89)
When she went to bed one Sunday night, struck with a more intense fatigue than she had felt before, she knew she could no longer deny that she was sick. She slept through the night, feverish and uncomfortable, turning again and again so the sheets twisted around her legs. A deep, raw feeling settled in her chest, and she woke herself coughing. Leaving her bed to use the toilet, her vision was blurry and indistinct, and she had to lean on the wall halfway to the bathroom to rest. She sat in the stall, pressing her face against the cool tile wall, until someone knocked on the door, and she started awake and stumbled back to her room.
She slept that way, woozy and fitful, the pain in her chest when she coughed growing sharper, for a day, and on Tuesday, when she didn’t show up for work, Miss Parsons called the Club. The woman at the front desk agreed to check on Margie, and found her still in bed, dehydrated and near delirious, her skin so flushed with fever she looked like she had been sunburned. Her cough had an unpleasant rattle to it, and though her skin burned to the touch, she was racked with chills. The matron called Miss Parsons, who called a doctor, who protested at having to climb all the stairs, and examined her. After the Spanish flu pandemic, most people had been anxious to the point of hysteria about illnesses, but he seemed unimpressed. “Pneumonia,” he said. “She needs sea air. There is a fresh-air colony at Cavalaire-sur-Mer on the C?te d’Azur.”
Miss Parsons was certain a stay in the south of France would do wonders for Margie, but who would take her there? And who would pay? She sent a telegram to Margie’s parents with the news, and they sent a panicked telegram back, pleading for more information. But how much information can one give in a telegram? The limits of communication that had given Margie so much time to spread her wings, to put her parents’ inquiries off again and again, to distract them with stories of markets and museums and her detailed description of the interior of Sainte-Chapelle, were now an enemy.
On top of Margie’s inability to eat, the fever and endless coughing fits left her exhausted. Dorothy piled pillows on the bed so Margie could sleep without drowning in the fluid in her chest. She dozed, waking only to cough, her body shaking with the effort, wheezing for breath, silent tears on her cheeks from the knife-edged pains in her chest. Sometimes she stayed awake, staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling, until whoever was sitting with her was so scared they would call the doctor, who only said she would be fine with a little rest and sea air and gave them another packet of pills.
It was only by coincidence that Robert Walsh, her escort from that long-ago debutante ball, was coming through Paris. He had been in Europe for five years, a trip his parents had continued to fund in hopes it might give him some level of gravitas. And he had changed, grown older and more thoughtful, though he had also spent a fair amount of time drinking and wooing Italian and Czechoslovakian girls.
But his parents had tired of funding his exploits and demanded he return home. He booked a ticket home through Cherbourg, and arranged for one last stay in Paris, and when he arrived, he found a telegram from Margie’s parents, pleading with him to bring her home. And so he did. He got dispensation to go to her room on the third floor, setting off piles of charmed, pretending-to-be-offended squeals when the other girls saw him there, and placed her journals and her notebooks in a trunk—the same trunk in which I would find them almost seventy-five years later. He packed up her dresses and her shoes and her new Parisian hat. He hired a driver to carry her things downstairs and then take them to the train station, and then, when it was time to go, he half carried her down the narrow staircase himself.
Robert took her to Cherbourg, buying a sleeping car for the short journey on the train, and they boarded the ship together. He took her to see the ship’s doctor, who refused to keep her in the infirmary for fear of contagion, so Robert took her back to the stateroom. There had been no more rooms available, so he had simply bought her a ticket in his. Her parents would never know, and he could take better care of her there.
The journey was a week long, but to Margie it might have been only a few minutes, or a few years. The doctor had been right, at least, that the sea air and being away from the dirt and smoke of Paris would ease the irritation in her lungs. One day she was well enough to bathe and wash her hair, and then to go up to the deck and sit outside, wrapped in three rugs, pulled back toward the wall to shelter her from the wind, but the next she was so exhausted she only wanted to sleep, Robert sitting by her side, putting warm, wet cloths over her nose and mouth to loosen the remaining mucus in her lungs.
The roll of the ship in the deepest waters, pushing through the summer storms, kept her nauseated and unbalanced, and she pushed away the soup Robert had sent down. When she was awake, she turned her face to the wall, memorizing the whorls and flecks of the wood. He had unpacked some of her books and he read to her for hours at a time. The words passed over her like water, but the sound of his voice and the motion of the ship lulled her to sleep in quiet calm. He left the books on her night table for her to read herself, but she did not touch them, and one particularly rocky night they flew across the room and hit Robert in the head while he was sleeping. He kept them in the drawer afterward.
That week on the ship, taking care of Margie, sickly and silent, changed Robert. He went to the lounge to play cards and found he could not concentrate. He dressed for dinner but left the table before dessert to check on her, he nodded absently at the women who flirted with him, not even bothering to make promises he wouldn’t keep, avoiding the balls and parties each night where he would have been endlessly fawned over and fêted, instead spending the night in the cabin with Margie, reading to her as she closed her eyes and braced her stomach against the movement of the ship on the waves, finding stewards to bring endless hot water for compresses on her chest and cool water to soothe her when she felt feverish, hanging up his tuxedo and spending nearly all his time in his flannels.