The Light of Paris (15 page)

That night, as I looked at myself in the mirror, I had seen the same wide-eyed terror that I had seen in the photos. “What have I done?” I whispered to myself, reaching out a tentative, trembling hand to the woman reflected back at me. “What have I done?”

Margie's parents, as she had known they would be, were furious. Even if cables weren't written in all capital letters, she swore she would have been able to hear them yelling from clear across the Atlantic.

LETTER UNACCEPTABLE STOP

PASSAGE BOOKED CHERBOURG 5/22 FOR NYC STOP

AUNT EDITH HEARTBROKEN STOP FATHER FURIOUS STOP COME HOME IMMEDIATELY STOP

She hadn't even bothered to reply to the last one, because the only answer she could think of was no. No, she wasn't leaving Paris. No, she wasn't coming home. Not now, and maybe not ever.

Because in the meantime, my grandmother had fallen hopelessly in love with Paris, with the city that had had enough of war and sadness and had promised itself it had reached
la der des ders
—that the Great War would be the last war, and they would not think on their grief and the empty bellies and the wounded and lost husbands and fathers and brothers. They would rebuild from the rubble and drink and celebrate. Margie went to the top of the Eiffel Tower and looked at the city spread
out beneath her feet, and she walked endless miles along the sidewalks, past lovers, past arguments, past families, past drunks reeling their crooked way home, past joy and heartbreak and rages and passions that would not be denied. She went to Napoleon's tomb, which she found both ghastly and awe-inspiring, and she went to see the
Panthéon de la Guerre
, a panoramic painting which she knew she ought to object to, as it went against all her pacifistic beliefs, but was so wonderful she couldn't contain herself from weeping a little bit, for the glory and pain of war and its endless bitter romance. She walked along streets of worn stones, and she stumbled into silent churches full of dust and the flicker of candles she never saw anyone light, and she walked through the galleries at the Jeu de Paume, thinking of when it wasn't a museum and instead was where Napoleon played tennis, and she wrote a story about an art theft and a daring girl detective and fell asleep in the Tuileries under a tree and when she awoke there was a guard shooing her away, and she ate a
crêpe
noisette et chocolat
on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville and licked her sticky fingers as she walked back home.

She never, never wanted to leave.

The place Sebastien had suggested she stay was the American Girls' Club, a large building sprawling lazily down a side street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse. When she turned off the wide boulevard and saw it sitting there on the narrow street, leaning forward as though it were eager to make her acquaintance, she wanted to gasp and clasp her hands together in joy, like a character in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. The buildings on the street were old and whitewashed, rather than the creamy gold of so much of the city, beautiful but exhaustingly repetitive, and the Club had green shutters and flower boxes filled with an explosion of purple and pink and blue. It looked more like a country cottage than a building only steps from one of the busiest streets in Paris.

She knocked but there was no answer, and when she turned the handle, the door swung open easily. She stepped into the foyer, deliciously
dark and cool after the brightness of the day outside. A woman sat in an office, a window open to the foyer, and Margie stepped over, waiting politely for her to take a break in her typing and notice Margie was there.

When the woman finally looked up and saw Margie, her expression hardly changed. “Yes?” she boomed.

Margie jumped. “Ah, yes?” she echoed, and then felt silly. “Er,
bonjour
?” Wait, she was in the American Girls' Club. Why was she speaking French? “I mean, hello?”

“Yes?” the woman asked again impatiently.

“Yes, you see, I'm Margie, and I'm American, you see.” She offered a quick smile in case her nationality might buy her a little kindness. The woman continued to look at her with a grimly determined expression, as though Margie were merely an obstacle to be mowed over in pursuit of her work, which, truth be told, is exactly what she was. “Someone said I might be able to stay here?” There was a little squeak in her voice and she swallowed hard.

“We rent rooms, yes. You have an American passport?”

“Well, yes,” Margie said. “I'm American?”

Margie seemed to have spoken the magic words, because the woman began bustling about in her little office, picking up forms from various cubbyholes and bringing a notebook to the ledge that stood between her and Margie.

As she gathered her papers, the woman rattled off information about the Club's accommodations (single or shared rooms, shared bathrooms), rules (no gentlemen or liquor in the rooms, no Marcel irons in the bathrooms), and costs.

Though she gulped when she heard the price for the only available room, a single on the third floor, Margie took a deep breath and nodded. However foolish it was, she was actually carrying all her remaining money with her. Her mother had warned her, regularly and loudly, before departure, of the insidiousness of pickpockets in Europe, but also of
thieving chambermaids and usurious hotel owners. To Margie's mother, Europe looked like one of those medieval maps, where the cartographer had filled in the unknown spaces with fear:
Here be dragons
. And as much as Margie didn't want to believe her mother's anxieties, she seemed to have absorbed them anyway, so every departure from her hotel room was fraught with decision: should she take her valuables with her and risk a pickpocket, or leave them to the mercies of a thieving chambermaid? In the end, she took them with her most days, taking comfort in the knowledge that the French didn't even seem to have a word for pickpocket; they'd had to borrow it from English. With shaking hands, she opened her bag and pulled out her money, slowly counting out 125 francs, the price for the first week. It was quite a bargain, and yet it felt like the greatest extravagance she had ever experienced, especially when she looked at the anemic amount of money she had left. As the woman counted the money, Margie carefully filled out the card the woman had handed her. She was doing this. She was actually doing this.

When she had finished, the woman behind the desk called for a girl to take Margie upstairs. Her guide turned out to be a somewhat swaggering girl named Helen, from Ohio, who took Margie through the Club's narrow hallways and up to her room. The building was U-shaped, with a center courtyard where a half-dozen girls were sitting in the sun, a few of them reading, a few talking. In the corner was a spigot that might have been connected to a well at some point, the stone grown mossy and cracked from disuse, and at the back of the courtyard lay a rose garden, blooms opening, fat and fragrant, to the sun. Sebastien had said the Club (or more specifically, its eponymous girls) had somewhat of a reputation, and Margie was prepared for scandal around every corner, but nothing seemed amiss, which was slightly disappointing.

Helen led her up a hysterically pitched flight of stairs to the second floor, where there was a sun room above the foyer, as bright and clean as the floor below was dark and cool, and through a rabbit warren of
hallways, then up more stairs to the third floor. It was quieter up here, and the air was still and hot despite the open dormers in the hall. As they walked, Helen rattled off a list of additional rules and instructions, which Margie was following with one ear while looking around every corner with the other, trying to memorize the building's twists and turns. In her head, the drumbeat of her disobedience and the surety of her mother's disapproval played on, but she felt no shame. The stairs didn't make her feel anxious or tired. There was only the excitement of everything to come. She would be like those girls in the boardinghouse down the street from her parents' house in Washington, walking out confidently every morning to her job, she would be like those writers she saw in the cafés, head bent down, scribbling furiously in her notebook, she would be like Sebastien or Evelyn, bold and unafraid.

Finally they arrived at a door, and Helen handed her a key with a flourish. “Your room.” They were at the end of the hall, and Margie opened the door tentatively to find a light-filled room, bright and swaying with dust in the sunbeams falling in through the two dormer windows. “Two windows,” Helen said. “Lucky.” She peered into the room and then shrugged. “See you around.”

Margie stepped inside, her hands held open beside her as though she were absorbing the air, letting this place fall into her. She opened the window facing the backs of the houses on the street behind the Club, looking down at laundry drying on the lines, a rabbit eating from a vegetable garden in the corner of a yard. As the air rushed in, she ran to the other window, pushing it open too, looking out into the courtyard, the girls below still lazing in the sun, the roses sending their sweetness up to Margie on the air.

Inside, the floors were a bright blond wood that made the room practically glow despite the scuffs and cracks from years of use; the white walls were freshly painted. A bed with a metal frame, a mattress, a pillow, and a stack of sheets on top, a dresser, a chair. That was it. And
Margie, who had grown up in a home with so much wealth, stuffed with furniture and antiques and all the money anyone could have wanted, nearly wept at the simplicity of it. This room was hers, Paris was hers, this life was hers, at last, her life was hers.

•   •   •

The morning after she moved in,
Margie approached the woman at the front desk about a job. The woman sized her up, finally producing a card with an address on it. “The American Library in Paris called yesterday. They're looking for someone.”

Margie took the card with shaking fingers. A job at a library! In Paris! It was as though it had all been made for her. She put on the new French hat she had found after days of searching for something large enough—French women seemed to have tiny heads and somewhat less enthusiastic hair than Margie—and her best shoes, and headed off to 10 rue de l'Élysée.

The library wasn't a library like she had imagined, not like her library at home. Down a wide side street near the Jardins des Champs-Élysées, she matched the address to a stately town house, wide and tall, with a huge, imposing front door and silent windows. Next door, a window washer stood on one of the balconies, and the glass he had left behind sparkled in the sun. The street was lined with similar houses, and it was so quiet Margie would have sworn no one lived there at all. Across the street, a high wall topped with a wrought-iron fence surrounded the Élysée Palace, where the president lived, and a couple of
gendarmes
stepped down the street, looking askance at Margie as she hesitated on the sidewalk.

Their attentions made her self-conscious, so she pushed herself to approach the door and lifted the heavy brass knocker, letting it fall twice. In the quiet street, the sound seemed enormous, but no one came. She knocked again, and when there was still no answer, she turned the knob and stepped inside.

The once grand house was now clearly in need of love. A wide marble floor spread out in front of her, checked in enormous squares of black and white, looking dusty and dull. An empty desk stood in the center of the foyer. She walked forward, looking left, then right. Rooms opened to either side with wooden floors scuffed and dark, the Oriental carpets faded from hundreds of feet. They were filled with shelves of books and a haphazard collection of tables and chairs. In the room to the right, under a chandelier that promised it might glitter again if only it were given a good cleaning, a small, slender man with heavy, round glasses sat writing at a table, a handful of books spread in front of him. In the room to the left, their faces gone warm and golden in the sun flooding in through the windows, two women sat reading. Margie stood in the foyer, inhaling the smell of books and old wood and dust, and smiled happily.

“Can I help you?” A woman came from one of the rooms at the back, her heels clicking efficiently across the floor.

“I'm here about the job? The American Girls' Club sent me?” Margie said. The woman came up to her, putting out her hand, which Margie shook.

“Excellent. I'm Mary Parsons, the director. And you are?”

“Margie Pearce.” Miss Parsons was smooth and elegant, like a Parisian, but her accent was clearly American. She wore a blue dress, belted in at her slender waist. Her hair was held at the back of her neck in a loose bun that somehow still allowed her to look young and chic. Margie touched her own hair self-consciously, tied back in the prim Victorian knot she had always worn, unfashionably demure.

“I'm so glad you've come. They sent another girl, but she was an absolute disaster. You're not an absolute disaster, are you, Margie?” She tossed this statement over her shoulder as she walked back to the desk in the center of the foyer, and Margie stood for a moment, and then, realizing she was supposed to follow, hurried along behind.

“No?” Margie said. She meant it to come out confidently, but it ended
up sounding as though she weren't sure whether or not she was an absolute disaster. Living in Paris was so strange—at times she felt as if she were growing at home here, could find her tongue and ask for a baguette or order an omelet or buy a tomato from the lovely man on the corner without being reduced to a quivering aspic herself, could navigate the Métro and walk confidently along the streets without consulting her map like a tourist. Yet here she was, fumbling for words in this outpost of her own country. “I mean, no, I'm not a disaster,” Margie said, finding a firmness in her voice she didn't entirely feel.