Because that was the point, wasn’t it? To learn from the past, to learn from my mistakes, the mistakes of my mother and my grandmother. Both of them had lived the lives that were expected of them. I didn’t resent my grandmother for her choices. She had done what she had to do. I just hated that she had to do it at all. And my mother had spent so much time and energy holding me back, holding herself back. Imagine what she could have been if she had only let go and embraced who she was. Imagine what I could have been. Imagine what could happen if we all had the heart to be who we truly are.
“I wish I could have known him because it might have brought me closer to my mother. I wish I could have known him because—well, because there’s something about knowing where you come from, isn’t there?” I looked around at the china cabinets, which, though they had been emptied, were still full of generations of Walsh and Bowers memories. Someday it would be my job to keep these things safe, to remember the stories of the hand-painted plates my grandfather had brought back from a trip to China, to polish the silver someone claimed had been buried in the garden during the Civil War (but really, everyone said that—if it had been true, shame on the Union Army for not figuring it out).
“I can’t believe you never told me,” I said, and I was surprised by how bitter it sounded. I wasn’t angry so much as . . . well, what was it? Disappointed? Maybe if she had told me the truth before, we might have been closer. Maybe keeping this secret from me was part of what had kept us apart.
“It never seemed to be the right time.”
“I guess there never is a right time for that news.” Except it had been the right time, finally. It had been the right time to know I wasn’t a failure in a long line of feminine perfection. It had been the right time to know about my grandmother’s dreams, and to see what giving them up would do to you, would do to your daughter, would do to your granddaughter. She wasn’t wrong to have made the choice she had, but it would have been wrong for me to keep making it when I had nothing other than my own shame and fear at stake.
“Did she ever see him again?”
My mother shook her head, the light falling across her face, illuminating the lines on her skin. “I don’t think she did.”
So no tearful, romantic reunion then. No train station rendezvous, no lost Parisian weekend. A few weeks ago, that might have deflated me, but I had learned something from my grandmother about romance and reality, and how they had to fit together.
“Are you sure this is what you want? Are you certain it’s for the best?” she asked. To my surprise, there was no rebuke left in her tone. Only sadness.
“I don’t want to be married to him.” I remembered Phillip’s harsh words when I had told him I wanted a divorce, and a little shiver went up the back of my neck. It had been there all along, that sharpness. And if I hadn’t brought it out by asking for a divorce, who knew when it might have appeared. It was for the best. My mother might never understand, but it was.
“And what are you going to do now?”
I could have named a thousand things I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to put on a twinset and go to any meetings at Ashley Hathaway’s house. I wasn’t going to straighten my hair anymore or pretend I wasn’t hungry. But what was I going to do? That was much harder.
I thought of my mother, of her endless charities and duties, of the organizations she supported and all the thousands of ways she had made herself matter in a culture that had devalued her because she was only a woman. I thought of how her mother had kept her at a distance because the memories were too much, and how unfair that was, and I thought of how my mother had kept me at a distance because she didn’t know any different, and because she didn’t want me to be unhappy, and how it had only made me unhappy anyway. And I thought of how my grandmother and I had both married men for reasons other than love—fear and duty and responsibility and loneliness, and how it had left both of us resigned and unhappy. I thought of my grandmother in Paris and how she described the light there, the way it fell, beautiful and terrible and romantic, and I thought of how little joy there can be in this world and how much I wished we should all grab it whenever it flew by, like the light of a shooting star.
I thought of my grandmother, and what she might have made of this buffet of choice I had before me, of the freedom seventy-five years of progress had given to me, as a woman, and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to imagine it. I had a little bit of money, I had time, I had a passport. Really, there was only one thing to do.
“I think I’m going to Paris,” I said.
twenty-eight
MARGIE
1924
Dear Mother and Father,
I wish to thank you so very much for such a lovely wedding. Though I have been to so many, this was truly the most splendid of them all, despite how quickly it was organized. Robert and I feel lucky to have had such a sendoff into our new life together. Thank you so much for inviting such a large and impressive group of people to celebrate with us. I do hope you are pleased.