When they arrived in America, her parents whisked her away and Robert went home alone, arriving on his family’s doorstep exhausted, stacks of luggage on the street behind him, an unpleasant tangle of emotions inside him—shame and regret and disappointment for the years that had disappeared with so little to show for them, trepidation about what might lie ahead now that he must face it, and a curious feeling of loneliness that stemmed, he realized as he was bundled inside and made much of by his mother and the household staff alike, from missing Margie.
For her part, Margie rode home on the train without speaking, and walked slowly up the stairs to her old bedroom, the effort leaving her winded and rattling out the last of her cough. Shutting the door, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep for days until she could think of everything she had lost and everything she now had to do. Paris was already receding into a memory, the precise color of the afternoon sun on the buildings hovering tantalizingly out of reach, the calls of the flower sellers and the rag-and-bone men faint and muffled, the feeling of lightness, of freedom, she had experienced there distant and unbelievable as a mirage. It had been only a few months, but she felt new and raw, plunged too soon into the darkness of her parents’ house, wondering how she would go on, wondering what could possibly lie ahead.
? ? ?
Oddly, it was being so sick that made Margie’s feelings toward her mother change. Weak and empty, Margie watched her mother bustling back and forth, in and out of her room, calling the cook for some toast and broth, or stewed fruit, heavy and sweet. She longed for the fresh fruit she had eaten in Paris, the color and flavor still bright. Her mother did not read to Margie as Robert had, and Margie found she missed the low, steady sound of his voice, an anchor against the constant rocking of the ocean, the close, small space of the stateroom. But when the house had gone quiet at night, her mother came into Margie’s room and simply sat by the bed, holding her limp, damp hand in the small, dry palm of her own.
Margie thought back to school, when her mother had come to Abbott to care for her roommate, Lucinda. Had her mother only been waiting for a moment of vulnerability, an excuse to care for her? It was the first time she could remember in years that they weren’t at war.
The pneumonia faded, but she still felt frail and tired. She slept often, though she knew it was partly avoidance and escape. In her dreams, she was still in Paris, walking down the slender, cobblestoned alleys of the Latin Quarter with Sebastien, finding the city’s secrets and cracking them open for their own pleasure. In her dreams, she could smell the flowers in the Tuileries and the garbage in the passageways behind the buildings and the sweat and perfume of Zelli’s and the buttery rise of croissants at the boulangerie when she came home particularly late. In her dreams, jazz played in nightclubs and there were concerts in the gardens, and endless conversations in the cafés, and she drifted through it all, both in the world and not of it. In her dreams, her feet were never sore, though she walked and danced her way through the city. In her dreams, conversation still swirled around her, and every nerve ending in her body was alert and awake, and she could write for hours without her fingers cramping, capturing every scent, every taste, every sound, every emotion. When she woke, she would try to push herself back down into sleep, and if it would not come, she sometimes cried thin tears of frustration that entrance to Paris was denied to her even in her dreams.
“What will I do now?” she asked herself when she was alone in her room. Her voice only echoed emptily off the walls.
As she grew stronger, she realized she had a larger problem than being away from Paris. Though her lungs healed and her fever abated, and she began to take walks around the square, she was still fatigued, and the smell of food often made her feel ill. There was a taste of metal in her mouth no matter what she ate, and though she had lost even more weight during her illness, her breasts were oddly full and tender.
Though she had been raised at a time when such things were not discussed, Margie was a reader, and she had listened, at college and at the Club, to the conversations around her, and she knew exactly what was happening. Margie was pregnant, the father was literally across an ocean and promised to someone else, and her life was going to be over when her parents found out.
twenty-five
MADELEINE
1999