My heart hurt for Margo. This was the beginning of a heartache that lasted a lifetime, despite marrying the man she loved. Part of me wondered why she and Randolph could not bridge the distance between them. Why had she or they held on to Caro and the past so tightly?
The entries revealed Randolph clearly enjoyed Margo’s company, laughed with her, had fun with her, and was incredibly concerned when she got scarlet fever. They were true friends. The entries also revealed Margo’s illness fundamentally changed her. It was deep within every line, within every comparison to her twin, within every new fear she penned within Beatrice. She emerged from her illness timid, a shadow of her former self, and retreated both within her home and within her soul. But why? I thought to myself. She didn’t die. She lived.
The irony of my indictment struck me—I was the one who survived that day, yet how well did I embrace life?
My heart hurt for Caro as well. In many ways, I related to her journey better. I wasn’t sent away—at least not physically when Amelia died—but banishment can take many forms, and it changes you. It can harden you. Mom didn’t get up to see me off to school. She no longer greeted me after school in the kitchen to chat through the day. Dad rarely made it home from work for dinner. Then, within months, Mom stopped cooking altogether and each of us became responsible for our own meals and our own lives. I remember how that hurt. Dinner was where we came together. All five us at the table. But within one fall, Jason left for college and Amelia left for good. I was alone.
Like Caro, I found ways to cope. I went home with friends, studied at their houses, ate dinners with their families. I avoided our cold, silent house as much as I could, to the point that even if Mom and Dad had reached out, I might not have noticed. I stopped seeing them, just as they had stopped seeing me.
And, as I allowed myself to draw closer to true honesty, I still held tight to that hurt, that ache. I fed it, figuratively keeping one arm outstretched against my mom and against the world. Maybe I understood Margo better than I wanted to admit.
I set the diary aside and picked up the first stack of letters. Fall 1934. Caro had just arrived at school . . .
Brilliantmont, Lausanne, Switzerland
14 November 1934
Dear Margo,
Happy birthday, dearest!
There’s a surprise party for me this afternoon. No one can keep a secret around here. I’m excited and I’m having fun, but I miss you today—more than I thought I could.
I’m sorry I’m not coming home for Christmas. It would have been fun to celebrate together, and I should not have let Mother relay that message to you. You deserved to hear it from me.
I tried to telephone this morning to wish you a happy birthday and to explain, but the line was full of static and Father forbade me from making any more transnational telephone calls. A letter will have to do.
Renée invited me to Paris for the Christmas holidays and I can’t refuse such an opportunity. Yes, seeing Paris after all our studies will be a treat, but her father has also promised to make introductions for me. He is a silk manufacturer and works with Elsa Schiaparelli, Coco Chanel, and others. Wouldn’t it be extraordinary to work in fashion, Margo? And not just any fashion—French haute couture. Renée’s father can make it happen.
Isn’t that incredible? You’re the one who told me it could come true and I could be a dressmaker. I never believed it. I never saw my life reaching beyond Parkley, but I do now. I have been forced to, and perhaps that is as it should be.
And speaking of a future . . . Payne stopped by Geneva last week and George came with him. Payne sounded just like Father with his grave concerns of “rising nationalism.” It made me miss home and our long suppers terribly.
But then he left the table during dessert to meet a colleague in the lobby and my mind moved to other matters. George reached for my hand. He looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Most of the time unexpected things don’t bode well, but you give me hope. You are unexpected.”
I’ll confess to you, dear sister, I had begun to wonder if we were a summer fling. Me, sixteen. Him, twenty. But we weren’t.
He slowly leaned toward me and I found myself drinking in every aspect of his approach. His eyes are a delectable brown. They remind me of a light treacle, and his skin is translucent. You can see the blood rise in his face. It’s adorable because you really can see what he’s feeling, as well as those tiny shadows where his razor didn’t scrape close. And his lips . . . My gaze dropped from his eyes to his lips and I couldn’t look away. His lips hovered only an inch from my own. We were so close I felt his soft exhalation.
Time stops, Margo. It stopped then and I wondered what to do. Mother’s voice came to me, tight and precise, admonishing me to play demure and turn away despite every fiber of my being pushing me forward to close that inch. Turning a hair’s breadth either direction would have done it. One degree of tilt would have broken the taut thread between us. But I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to. We stayed so close yet so far for several heartbeats before George leaned back with a longing sigh. There was a tantalizing promise in that sigh, Margo. I could taste it.
As soon as the bill was paid, he tucked my arm within his and escorted me outside the hotel at a pace I could hardly match. Around the corner there was a small wooded park, and George marched me through it without speaking until we were deep in the foliage. There he stopped and looked around. Just as I shifted my focus from his face to the park, he captured my lips in his and had pressed me so close there was no space, no air, nothing at all between us.
It was perfect, Margo. Time stretched and we stood enfolded within each other forever, and he tasted like chocolate. When he finally pulled back, I couldn’t breathe.
Oh, he liked that. You should have seen his eyes—so sure of himself and of me. Part of me hated being so easily read, but another part felt powerful. I put that look in his eyes. I was the girl he wanted that badly. The game is over now . . . He knows he won. I am his. Yet I won too. He is mine.
After another lengthy kiss that really was a conversation in another, truer form, he wrapped an arm around me and walked us back to the hotel lobby and the car his father arranged to return me to school.
“Until next summer?” He handed me into the car.
I nodded and blushed a red streak I’m sure was terrifically unattractive, but I couldn’t do or say anything more. There were and are no words.
All week I have wanted to write to you and this is my first chance. Even now, I have only a few moments before class. How I wish you were here and we could room together and talk like we used to. Nothing is the same, Margo, and I’m afraid it will never be again. I wish I could be home. Never mind that I wrote that. I don’t wish it, Margo. I love it here, and I sense life would squeeze tight there.