The Light of Paris. Элеонора Браун

not as bad as it could be—there are these awful photographs of soldiers who are down with it, just shoved into bed after bed anywhere they can find the space—churches, gymnasiums. Abbott ran out of medical staff and teachers to help long ago, and they’re asking the mothers to come. The funniest part—Mother has agreed! I suppose she thinks it’s war service, even though the war is practically over, or so everyone keeps saying.

       Anyway, they’ve closed down one of the other dormitories, so I’ve got a new roommate now that Lucinda is gone (and good riddance to bad rubbish, says I); Ruth is only a sophomore, but she’s quite droll and we get on très well. Her sister sent a pack of peanut brittle and we stayed up late last night gorging ourselves and laughing until we felt positively ill (or possibly that was due to the peanut brittle). The good news is there are only half the classes and with the weather so drab I was able to sleep it off. Mother would be furious I ate so many sweets.

       To be honest, I feel a little jealous that Mother is coming up here to take care of these other girls. She’s never been up to visit me, not even for Family Weekend. Part of me wishes I would get the ’flu, just a little case, and then she’d have to take care of me, too. When I picture my own mother ministering to mean old Lucinda, sitting by her bedside and dabbing at her forehead with a cool cloth, it makes me more than a little ill with jealousy.

      It was so strange to read the entries and think of my grandmother writing them. She had died when I was twelve, so to me she had only been Grandmother, old and stiff and formal to a fault. It was impossible to reconcile the woman I had known with this girl, so honest and young and silly. It could have been my diary, with all the complaints about her mother and the sugar overload.

      My stomach growled again, hard and insistent, and I wiped a few more beads of sweat off my forehead. Time to go, then. I’d check in with Sharon to see if she’d strangled my mother yet, and then I’d figure out what to do next. I started to put the notebooks and letters back into the trunk and then paused. In my confusion that morning, I hadn’t packed a book, and these looked like a better-than-average distraction. Maybe I’d find something my mother and I could bond over. Gathering up the packet of letters and the pile of books and notebooks, I stacked my arms full and headed down the stairs.

      In my bedroom, I dropped the papers on the bed and went to wash the travel stink and attic dust off my skin. Drying my hands, my engagement ring snagged on the towel, and I tugged it free, staring at it. It had been cleaned a few months ago when I went to Tiffany’s to buy a present for one of Phillip’s nieces (why a five-year-old girl needed a present from Tiffany’s was beyond me, but this was how the Spencer family worked), and it sparkled in the light, the scratches on the metal, evidence of years of bumps, bangs, and scrapes, barely visible.

      There was a dark blue thread from the towel stuck underneath the stone. I pulled it out, the thread breaking on either side, leaving a tiny piece of blue fuzz underneath the prong. I picked at it for a moment, a tide of irritation building inside me, pushing aside the sick, sinking fear that had been resting heavily in my chest. Why did Phillip get to be the wronged party? What had I done wrong, other than be honest, admit for once that I was unhappy, that there was something broken between us?

      On the counter was a small china dish and I tossed the rings in there, clinking the lid back on with satisfaction. Now I wouldn’t have to look at that piece of lint marring the ring’s perfection. I wouldn’t have to think about it at all. And I certainly wouldn’t pay any attention to its bare and blinding absence on my finger.

       four

       MARGIE

       1924

      Five years after her debut, my grandmother was sitting in the parlor, twenty-four years old and generally agreed to be a spinster. She had graduated from college two years before, and now she found herself lost.

      “What are you thinking on, Margie?” her mother asked. “You’ve done half of that in the wrong color.”

      Margie lifted her embroidery hoop and peered at it closely. “Oh, damn,” she said. “Well, it’s not as if it was any good to begin with.”

      “Don’t swear, Margie. You’ll never get a husband with a mouth like a fishwife,” her mother scolded with a tired sigh. She held out her hand. “Give it here. I’ll take the stitches out.”

      Margie crossed her eyes. There was going to be no husband. She knew it, and she guessed her mother knew it, and only said things like that to keep the fiction alive, for whose benefit she wasn’t sure. Margie hadn’t been keen on getting married in particular, but she had very much liked the idea of a love affair or two. There had been a time when she had been starry-eyed enough to think some man might see beyond her plainness and find the person underneath and fall madly in love. She thought maybe Robert Walsh had. Oh, but she didn’t like to think of him at all.

      “Mr. Chapman is coming for dinner tonight,” her mother said without looking up. She was plucking out Margie’s sloppy, miscolored stitches. When she handed it back, there would be tiny holes where the thread had been, and puckers in the fabric, but Margie would be expected to redo it anyway. What use were these things now? When women had the vote, when girls could go to medical school, when every day little earthquakes of change brought something new? The time of embroidery and silver polishing was ending, and another time, one Margie had only glimpsed the night of her debut, of dancing and parties and women free to do as they pleased, dress as they wanted, had begun. But not in her mother’s parlor. It might as well have been 1885 in there, the décor Victorian, ornate wallpaper and dark wood and enormous, heavy, velvet-covered furniture that seemed to do nothing except produce dust. Her mother, who had been raised in a house even more dependent on rules and rigidity than the one she ran now, had gritted her teeth and barred the door against any change.

      Margie wasn’t really interested in the speakeasies or the liquor or the Charleston, and heaven knows the clothes wouldn’t have suited her. Her interests were more creative. Upstairs in her room was a series of notebooks—some she used for journals, the others for her stories. Abbott Academy’s literary magazine had published a series of poems and short stories she’d written, and Margie had been proud to bursting to see her words somewhere other than in her notebooks, and in typeface instead of her cramped, busy hand. But when she’d shown the magazine to her parents, their reaction had been condescending, a dismissive nod after skimming through. Her father had grunted. “That’s nice,” her mother had said, but her mother didn’t think much of stories or poems in the first place. She believed reading should be edifying, and was particularly fond of publications from the Temperance League.

      In college Margie had won the Mary Olivier Memorial Prize for Lyric Poetry, and the literary society had published a few of her stories in their journals. It wasn’t like high school; they didn’t send copies of everything home, and she didn’t think her parents had ever seen those, which was a pity, as they were much better. This was what she wanted, why she longed to be able to leave the parlor and go into the world outside, to write and to publish and to talk to other people with imagination. Nowadays it wasn’t like the unfortunate Brontë sisters, who’d had to publish as men to get any attention. Now women could be reporters and poets and even novelists. But how could she have anything to write about if she never left these four walls? She wanted to be out there, living!

      “Again? Didn’t he come last week?”

      “He did,” her mother said blandly. “I invited him back. I thought you two got on awfully well. And so did he, apparently. He was pleased to accept my invitation when I told him you would be at home.”

      “Oh, no, Mother.”

      “Now, Margie, he’s a perfectly nice man. You said so yourself.”

      “I