The Light of Paris(9)

When the night was coming to an end, when the tables had been cleared and most of the fathers had left to smoke in the billiard room and the mothers were fluttering around the ballroom, chatting or passing gossip, or sitting at the tables, listening to the orchestra and remembering their own debuts in a more elegant time, a time when there was not so much sadness, when so many young men had not been lost and so many young women were not so bold and strange and unsatisfied, Emily Harrison came to fetch Margie and Grace. They had been standing alone at the edge of the empty dance floor, sighing happily at the music. “Come upstairs,” Emily Harrison said. “There’s a party.”

“This is a party,” Margie said, confused. She realized, with a little surprise, that she was somewhat drunk, and with even more surprise, that she rather liked it.

Emily Harrison rolled her eyes. “Not like this. A real party. One of the Europeans has a suite upstairs. Everyone else is gone, didn’t you notice? Come on.” Margie looked around to see the three of them were the only debutantes left in the ballroom. The rest of the girls had disappeared, as had their escorts. They were, in fact, the youngest women in the room by a good twenty years.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Grace demurred, and Emily Harrison huffed impatiently.

“Of course not. Perfect Grace. What about you?” she asked, turning toward Margie, who took a surprised step back. A real party? She didn’t know what that meant, but she was sure she’d never been to anything Emily Harrison, who had a tendency to wildness, would have called a real party. But the night was magic and she didn’t want it to end. Why shouldn’t she go?

“I have to tell my parents,” Margie said. “They’ll be leaving soon.”

“Tell them you’re coming home with me. Hurry up already.”

Margie found her mother sitting at a table with Anne’s and Grace’s mothers, their heads bent so close together it looked as though they were eating from a single plate. When Margie approached, they separated slowly, their conversation holding them together like sticky toffee. “Your tiara’s crooked again,” her mother said. She was wearing a gown of heavy blue velvet that made her eyes burn like sapphires.

Pushing a careless hand up toward her tiara, which didn’t feel crooked in the slightest, Margie told her mother she and some of the other girls were going to Emily Harrison’s, and she might stay the night there, if that was all right.

It was the biggest lie she had ever told, and she thought, for a moment, as her mother looked piercingly at her, that she had been found out, until her mother’s gaze flicked back to Mrs. Dulaney and Mrs. Scott, who hadn’t bothered to stop talking for one moment, and she waved Margie off, telling her not to ruin her gown, for goodness’ sake, to get Emily Harrison’s maid to take care of it and not to forget to pick up the fur she had borrowed from her mother and left at the coat check. Margie promised all these things, and her mother let her go.

Could it have been so simple all along? No wonder girls like Anne and Elsie and Emily Harrison were so wild. How easy it was to slip out from under someone’s thumb, if the conditions were right.

The girls left Grace swaying contentedly by herself by the dance floor, like a lily of the valley in a breeze. They took the elevator to the top floor and swished down the hall to a suite whose door was propped open slightly, letting out the sound of music. As Emily Harrison put her hand on the doorknob, there was a shout and a burst of raucous male laughter, and Margie jumped back slightly. She felt a little less drunk now, away from the orchestra and the sparkle of the ballroom, and a little more scared, but Emily Harrison simply hissed at her to come on.

Inside, Margie stood by the door, both terrified and fascinated. Someone put a glass of champagne in her hand and she drank it quickly, the pleasant light-headedness she had felt before rising up again.

One of the Southern girls sat on the sofa, a cigarette burning in one hand and what looked suspiciously like a tumbler of gin in the other. She had taken off the lace overlay of her dress—Margie could see it draped carelessly over the back of a nearby chair—and was sitting there only in the satin chemise, and Margie was certain she didn’t have anything on underneath it. A man sat on either side of her, one of them also smoking. Ash had fallen onto the cushions of the cream sofa between them.

In the corner, a phonograph played Al Jolson, and a few of the European girls (and, Margie was shocked to see, Elsie Mills) were dancing with their escorts, who had taken off their ties and tails. It wasn’t dancing of the sort she’d learned at cotillion; their bodies were pressed so close together Margie couldn’t have gotten a hand in between them. One of the men had dropped cigarette ash on the tallest European’s beautiful gown, but no one seemed to notice or care. Elsie and her escort, their eyes half closed, from attraction or liquor, moved more and more slowly, their heads drifting together, and then they began to kiss, at first gently, and then passionately. Margie stared—she had rarely seen anyone kiss, and certainly not with such hunger—and when she finally turned away, her face burned with shame and envy.

The air was hazy with smoke—in addition to the cigarette smokers, a group of escorts was playing cards and smoking cigars in a dining room off the front room. Emily Harrison had disappeared, and Margie felt immediately self-conscious and overheated, her corset pressing too tightly into her stomach. She walked quickly through the room to one of the side doors—This suite must take the whole floor, she thought—and opened it to find a couple engaged amorously on a bed. Slamming the door shut, she pressed her hand to her chest. Was this what everyone else had been doing while she and Grace were visiting and performing little plays together or reading on Friday nights? Had this been happening all around her and she had just never been invited until now? Or was this part of the new world that seemed to be trembling around them, ready to break open and swallow them all whole?