Margie shrugged and sat down behind the desk, putting a piece of stationery from the Library War Service—there was reams of it, they’d be using it forever—in the typewriter and starting a letter to her parents, only to interrupt herself to write in her journal at great length about Sebastien. She considered using code, in case anyone else were ever to read it, but who would want to read her lovesick scribblings anyway? Miss Stein came in and asked for help in her usual curmudgeonly way. Margie hardly noticed, moving airily along the shelves, pulling volume after volume until at last the woman retreated, mollified. Margie answered two telephone calls and found the answers they were looking for (the height of the Eiffel Tower, 954 feet; the sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams). It felt as if nothing could disturb her happiness.
And when Miss Parsons called for Margie after lunch, asked her to come upstairs to her office, Margie was so happy she didn’t even think something might be wrong.
“Margie, I have some bad news.”
“Oh?” Margie said. She was still smiling, Miss Parsons’ serious demeanor having failed to immediately crack her good mood.
“The grant we applied for didn’t come through. Well, it came through, but it wasn’t as much as we were hoping.”
“Oh no,” Margie said, with the detached, polite disappointment of someone who has just heard bad news that in no way impacts them. “How much did they give?”
“We asked for fifty thousand dollars.” She stopped, hesitated. “They only gave us seven thousand.”
“Goodness. That is disappointing.”
“It is.” Miss Parsons ran her fingertips along the edge of her desk, then put her hands in her lap. “The thing is, Margie, one of the things we had earmarked that grant money for was your salary.”
The smile finally faded from Margie’s face, and a slow, cracking chill spread from her feet up to her heart, like a river icing over in the winter. “What do you mean?”
Miss Parsons, to her credit, looked utterly heartbroken. “It means, Margie, I have to let you go. The Libe’s funding is so tight, and you’ve really been absolutely invaluable. It’s just . . . we simply can’t afford to keep you.”
“I thought there was a grant just for my position,” Margie said, as if Miss Parsons might have miscalculated.
“Yes, well.” Miss Parsons shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Things have been tight, and we’ve borrowed against it.”
“But I thought the library was doing so well. The classes for the French librarians, and the grant from the Carnegies and the membership is up quite a bit. I signed two people up myself yesterday. . . .”
Miss Parsons was shaking her head, looking at Margie with an expression somehow both guilty and sympathetic. “It’s much bigger, unfortunately. Our costs are so large and our support now that the war is over is so small. And if I could keep you on, Margie, I would. I would in a heartbeat. The way you’ve taken to Paris, the work you’ve done here, your attitude—you’re so helpful. We just can’t afford it now. I’ll give you a reference anywhere you want to go.”
“Sure,” Margie said dully. Over Miss Parsons’ shoulder she could see out the window into the yard behind the Libe, and beyond that the grand roof of one of the mansions along the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It glittered in the sunshine, winking at her cheerfully, mindless of her tragedy.
After Miss Parsons had dismissed her, Margie dragged herself back downstairs to the desk. The letter to her parents still sat, half typed, in the typewriter, and she pulled it out, folding it and putting it into her bag. She would finish it by hand later. The cheerful clack of the keys right now would be too much to bear. Her joyous journal entry, also half finished, seemed silly and inconsequential now. She would have to leave Paris. She would have to leave Sebastien. She calculated frantically the amount of money she still had. Oh, she shouldn’t have bought that new hat, she should have insisted she and Dorothy go to Rosalie’s for dinner instead of having tea at Rumpelmayer’s—it was far too dear.
Only what was the point of being in Paris if she hadn’t enjoyed herself? And she really had been so conservative. She had gone to the Opéra Comique twice, and to the Palais Garnier to see Parsifal only once, though she could have lingered in that incredible building for hours, would have been delighted to go every night just to stand in the Grand Foyer, to see the spectacle of the paintings and the carving and the gilt-edged furniture and the way it shone everywhere you looked. The opera was a necessity, wasn’t it? And other than that, she ate at the artists’ cafés, and Sebastien bought her dinner sometimes, and when she ate on her own she stuck to bread and cheese and once, because she couldn’t resist their perfection, a lovely carton of strawberries from the market on rue Mouffetard.
All the regretful accounting in the world couldn’t save her now.