Free The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown Page A

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.
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œMr. Chapman is coming for dinner tonight,” her mother saidwithout 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