There are gaps in her journals then, and I can only piece together the story through her parents’ frantic letters and telegrams, and then Robert Walsh’s responses, calm and orderly, confident and soothing.
Margie spent her days walking through Paris. She had thought she and Sebastien could say goodbye to Paris together, but she hadn’t seen him since the night he had told her he was leaving. What would be the point? What was the use of a grand goodbye, when, after all, it was still goodbye? Instead, she prepared to leave Paris on her own, in a quiet way. She said goodbye to the Libe, and the Place de la Concorde, and the art gallery where she had seen Sebastien’s work, and the streets where they had walked and talked of nothing and of everything. At the end of each day, she bought some bread and an apple and a hunk of good cheese and she took them up to her room and she ate as she wrote in her journal. And then she went to bed.
For days, Margie had been feeling exhausted and she had developed a rough cough, but she had chalked it up to shock, to too much news, to the pain in her heart when she thought of leaving. She ignored both the physical symptoms and her emotions. She had made no plans, had not inquired about train timetables or sailing times or tickets. She could live for the rest of the month on her salary, and then she would have a few more weeks with her savings, but on some level she seemed to have decided that if she refused to think of it, it might not happen.
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.