It was only by coincidence that Robert Walsh, her escort from that long-ago debutante ball, was coming through Paris. He had been in Europe for five years, a trip his parents had continued to fund in hopes it might give him some level of gravitas. And he had changed, grown older and more thoughtful, though he had also spent a fair amount of time drinking and wooing Italian and Czechoslovakian girls.
But his parents had tired of funding his exploits and demanded he return home. He booked a ticket home through Cherbourg, and arranged for one last stay in Paris, and when he arrived, he found a telegram from Margie’s parents, pleading with him to bring her home. And so he did. He got dispensation to go to her room on the third floor, setting off piles of charmed, pretending-to-be-offended squeals when the other girls saw him there, and placed her journals and her notebooks in a trunk—the same trunk in which I would find them almost seventy-five years later. He packed up her dresses and her shoes and her new Parisian hat. He hired a driver to carry her things downstairs and then take them to the train station, and then, when it was time to go, he half carried her down the narrow staircase himself.
Robert took her to Cherbourg, buying a sleeping car for the short journey on the train, and they boarded the ship together. He took her to see the ship’s doctor, who refused to keep her in the infirmary for fear of contagion, so Robert took her back to the stateroom. There had been no more rooms available, so he had simply bought her a ticket in his. Her parents would never know, and he could take better care of her there.
The journey was a week long, but to Margie it might have been only a few minutes, or a few years. The doctor had been right, at least, that the sea air and being away from the dirt and smoke of Paris would ease the irritation in her lungs. One day she was well enough to bathe and wash her hair, and then to go up to the deck and sit outside, wrapped in three rugs, pulled back toward the wall to shelter her from the wind, but the next she was so exhausted she only wanted to sleep, Robert sitting by her side, putting warm, wet cloths over her nose and mouth to loosen the remaining mucus in her lungs.
The roll of the ship in the deepest waters, pushing through the summer storms, kept her nauseated and unbalanced, and she pushed away the soup Robert had sent down. When she was awake, she turned her face to the wall, memorizing the whorls and flecks of the wood. He had unpacked some of her books and he read to her for hours at a time. The words passed over her like water, but the sound of his voice and the motion of the ship lulled her to sleep in quiet calm. He left the books on her night table for her to read herself, but she did not touch them, and one particularly rocky night they flew across the room and hit Robert in the head while he was sleeping. He kept them in the drawer afterward.
That week on the ship, taking care of Margie, sickly and silent, changed Robert. He went to the lounge to play cards and found he could not concentrate. He dressed for dinner but left the table before dessert to check on her, he nodded absently at the women who flirted with him, not even bothering to make promises he wouldn’t keep, avoiding the balls and parties each night where he would have been endlessly fawned over and fêted, instead spending the night in the cabin with Margie, reading to her as she closed her eyes and braced her stomach against the movement of the ship on the waves, finding stewards to bring endless hot water for compresses on her chest and cool water to soothe her when she felt feverish, hanging up his tuxedo and spending nearly all his time in his flannels.
Watching her sleep, he remembered the way they had talked at her debut, how they had both been so young and romantic and foolish, thinking the world could belong to them without consequence. She had been honest and optimistic, different from the girls he knew, all talons and agenda. And now she was so vulnerable, and he was awash with guilt for taking her away from the place she had told him she dreamed of being.