The Light of Paris(98)

So no tearful, romantic reunion then. No train station rendezvous, no lost Parisian weekend. A few weeks ago, that might have deflated me, but I had learned something from my grandmother about romance and reality, and how they had to fit together.

“Are you sure this is what you want? Are you certain it’s for the best?” she asked. To my surprise, there was no rebuke left in her tone. Only sadness.

“I don’t want to be married to him.” I remembered Phillip’s harsh words when I had told him I wanted a divorce, and a little shiver went up the back of my neck. It had been there all along, that sharpness. And if I hadn’t brought it out by asking for a divorce, who knew when it might have appeared. It was for the best. My mother might never understand, but it was.

“And what are you going to do now?”

I could have named a thousand things I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to put on a twinset and go to any meetings at Ashley Hathaway’s house. I wasn’t going to straighten my hair anymore or pretend I wasn’t hungry. But what was I going to do? That was much harder.

I thought of my mother, of her endless charities and duties, of the organizations she supported and all the thousands of ways she had made herself matter in a culture that had devalued her because she was only a woman. I thought of how her mother had kept her at a distance because the memories were too much, and how unfair that was, and I thought of how my mother had kept me at a distance because she didn’t know any different, and because she didn’t want me to be unhappy, and how it had only made me unhappy anyway. And I thought of how my grandmother and I had both married men for reasons other than love—fear and duty and responsibility and loneliness, and how it had left both of us resigned and unhappy. I thought of my grandmother in Paris and how she described the light there, the way it fell, beautiful and terrible and romantic, and I thought of how little joy there can be in this world and how much I wished we should all grab it whenever it flew by, like the light of a shooting star.

I thought of my grandmother, and what she might have made of this buffet of choice I had before me, of the freedom seventy-five years of progress had given to me, as a woman, and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to imagine it. I had a little bit of money, I had time, I had a passport. Really, there was only one thing to do.

“I think I’m going to Paris,” I said.





twenty-eight





MARGIE


   1924


Dear Mother and Father,

I wish to thank you so very much for such a lovely wedding. Though I have been to so many, this was truly the most splendid of them all, despite how quickly it was organized. Robert and I feel lucky to have had such a sendoff into our new life together. Thank you so much for inviting such a large and impressive group of people to celebrate with us. I do hope you are pleased.

Robert and I expect to return to Washington on Tuesday, as he must be at the office on Wednesday, and we will be pleased to have you to dinner at the new house as soon as possible afterward. It will be such a pleasure having you nearby, and I only regret our many obligations will keep us from seeing each other as often as we might like.

Thank you so much for hosting such a beautiful wedding. I am sure Washington will be talking of it the entire season.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Pearce Walsh





twenty-nine





MADELEINE


   1999




August, and the air lay wet and hot around us as we sat on the back porch of The Kitchen, the occasional quick wind more of an unpleasantly hot exhale than a relief. As was my habit lately, I had thrown my hair up into a messy knot, and the curls that sprang free pressed damply against my bare neck.

“Where are you sitting?” Sharon asked, attempting to insert a cranky toddler into a high chair at the end of the table. I had babysat the twins a few nights so Sharon and Kevin could go out, but I was embarrassed to say I still couldn’t tell the boys apart. They were one gloriously sticky, flailing, kissable, undifferentiated mess. This one kept arching his back every time Sharon tried to slip his legs underneath the tray, so I leaned forward and tickled him, which made him collapse into giggles so she could catch him unawares and get him settled. “Thanks.”

“I’ll sit over here,” I said, moving down to find an empty chair and plopping into it, setting my beer down on a napkin.

“I’ll sit next to you. Kevin! Come feed your children.” Kevin loped over and kissed Sharon’s forehead, taking the other squirming twin and sitting down with him in his lap. Sharon left him cutting avocado and chicken for the boys and collapsed into the chair beside mine. “I am pooped. Vacation cannot come soon enough.”

“When are you leaving?” Kevin’s mother had a beach house on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they were all going for a week. There was nothing like late summer in Magnolia to make you long for water and an ocean breeze.

“Next week. I am totally planning on leaving all child care to Grandma while I sit on the sand and read a book. And drink,” she said, reaching for my glass, which was sweating the napkin underneath it into wet shreds, and draining half of the beer in one long swallow. “God, this is so good.”

“Henry, can you bring me another beer, please?” I called out across the porch. There were well over a dozen people there—Sharon and Kevin and the boys, Wanee and her family, Cassandra, Pete and Arthur, the owners of Java Good Day, and their daughter, Caitlin, Kira, my boss from the art supply store, and Henry and me. It was Monday night and The Kitchen was closed, the rooms strangely empty and echoing when I walked inside to go to the bathroom.