The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

  “This is all too much to think about before breakfast,” I said.

  “You poor thing.” She stood, smoothing her skirt, and then she smoothed her expression, too, while I watched, righting and simplifying everything. It was a good trick. I wished I could do it.

  The rest of that morning passed in a daze as I brooded over Kate’s words and her concern for me. Was Ernest really someone to watch out for? He seemed so sincere and forthcoming. He’d confessed to writing poetry, for goodness’ sake, and those stories about being wounded at the front—and the silkworms! Was this all part of some elaborate ploy to take advantage of me? If so, then Kate was right, I was falling for it, heaving myself at him like a dumb country mouse—likely one of dozens. I could barely stand to think about it.

  “Maybe we should hightail it out of here before anyone stirs,” Kate said when we’d finished our coffee. “I don’t have to be at work at all today. What shall we do? The sky’s the limit.”

  “You decide,” I said. “I don’t much care.” And I didn’t.

  Another kind of girl might have suspected Kate of jealousy, but I was very simple and trusting, then. More than this, I was inexperienced. At twenty-eight I’d had a handful of beaux, but had only been in love once, and that had been awful enough to make me doubt men and myself for a good long while.

  His name was Harrison Williams and he was my piano teacher when I was twenty and just returned home to St. Louis after a single year at Bryn Mawr. Although he was only a few months older than I was, he seemed much older and more sophisticated to me. I found it both appealing and intimidating that he’d studied overseas with famous composers and knew loads about European art and culture. I could listen to him talk about anything, and I suppose that’s how it started, with admiration and envy. Then I found myself watching his hands and his eyes and his mouth. He wasn’t an obvious Casanova, but he was handsome in his way, tall and slender, with dark thinning hair. Most appealing of all was his impression of me as exceptional. He thought I could make it as a concert pianist and I thought so, too, at least for the hours I sat at his piano bench working through finger-cramping études.

  I worried a lot about my hair and dress those afternoons at Harrison’s. As he paced and corrected and occasionally praised me, I did my best to decode him. Did the tapping of his fingertip on his temple mean he had or hadn’t noticed my new stockings?

  “You have a lovely alignment at the bench,” he said to me one afternoon, and that’s about all it took to send me spiraling into a fantasy of my alignment in white lace, his alignment in morning tails and gorgeous white gloves. I played terribly that day, distracted by my own swooning.

  I loved him for a full year and then, in one night, all my wishing came apart. We were both at a neighbor’s evening party, where I forced myself to tip back two glasses of too-sweet wine so I could be braver near him. The day before we’d gone for a walk together in the woods just outside of town. It was fall, crisp and windless, with the clouds overhead looking like perfect cutouts of themselves. He lit my cigarette. I stamped at some yellow leaves with the toe of my lace-up shoes, and then, in the middle of a very nice silence, he said, “You’re such a dear person, Hadley. One of the best I’ve known, really.”

  It was hardly a declaration of love, but I told myself he did care for me and believed it—long enough for the gulping of the wine in any case. I waited for the room to tip just that much off its center, then walked up to Harrison, picking each foot up and putting it back down again, getting closer. I was wearing my black lace. It was my hands-down favorite dress because it never failed to make me feel a bit like Carmen. And maybe it was the dress as much as the wine that lifted my hand toward Harrison’s coat sleeve. I’d never touched him before, so it was probably clean surprise that stopped him still. We stood there, locked and lovely as statues in a garden—and for several dozen heartbeats I was his wife. I had already borne his children and secured his loyalty and was well beyond the thorny rim of my own mind, that place where hope got itself snagged and swallowed over and over. I could have this. It was already mine.

  “Hadley,” he said quietly.

  I looked up. Harrison’s eyes were the pale blue of drowned stars, and they were saying no—simply and quietly. Just no.

  What did I say? Maybe nothing. I don’t remember. The music lurched, candlelight blurred, my hand dropped to the lace of my skirt. A minute before it had been a gypsy’s dress, now it was funereal.

  “I have a terrible headache,” I said to my mother, trying to explain why I needed to go home that instant.

  “Of course you do,” she said, and her expression softened. “Let’s get our girl to bed.”

  Once home, I let her lead me up the stairs and help me into my muslin nightgown. She tucked me into layers of quilting and put a cool hand on my forehead, smoothing my hair. “Get some rest now.”

  “Yes,” I said, because I couldn’t begin to explain that I’d been resting for twenty-one years, but that tonight I’d tried for something else.

  That was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel. After a time, though more slowly than I wanted, I came to see that Harrison wasn’t my failed prince and I wasn’t his victim. He hadn’t led me on at all; I’d led myself on. The thought of love could still make me queasy and pale, though, more than half a decade later. I was still gullible, clearly, and needed someone’s guidance—Kate’s, for instance.

  We tramped all over Chicago that day looking first for world-class corned beef and then for new gloves. I let Kate chatter away and distract me and felt grateful that she had warned me about Ernest. Even if his intentions were entirely above suspicion, I was far too susceptible just then. I’d come to Chicago wanting escape and I’d gotten it, but too much dreaming was dangerous. I wasn’t happy at home, but drowning myself in fanciful notions about Ernest Hemingway wasn’t going to solve anything for me. My life was my life; I would have to stare it down, somehow, and make it work for me.

  I spent another full week in Chicago and every day of that time brought some new excitement. We went to a football game, saw a matinee showing of Madama Butterfly, roamed the city by day and by night. Whenever I saw Ernest, which was often, I strove to keep my head clear and just enjoy his company without conjuring up any drama in one direction or another. I might have been a little more reserved with him than I’d been before, but he didn’t say anything and didn’t force any intimacy until my last evening in town.

  It was freezing that night—too cold to be out, really—but a group of us grabbed armfuls of wool blankets, poured rum into flasks, and then piled into Kenley’s Ford and headed out to Lake Michigan. The dunes were steep and pale in moonlight, and we invented a game around them, climbing to the top of one—drunkenly, of course—and then rolling down like logs. Kate went first because she loved to be the first at anything, and then Kenley went, singing his way down. When my turn came, I crawled up the dune as sand shifted under my feet and hands. At the top, I looked around and everything was bright frosted stars and distances.

  “C’mon, then, coward!” Ernest yelled up at me.

  I closed my eyes and let myself fall, barreling down over the hard bumps. I’d had so much to drink I couldn’t feel a thing—nothing but a thrilling sense of wildness and freedom. It was a kind of euphoria, really, and fear was a key part of it. For the first time since I was a girl, I felt the heady rush of being afraid and liked the sensation. At the bottom, I’d barely come to a stop when Ernest whirled me up out of the dark and kissed me hard. I felt his tongue for a hot instant against my lips.

  “Oh,” was all I could say. I couldn’t think about whether anyone had seen us. I couldn’t think at all. His face was inches from mine, more charged and convincing and altogether awake than anything I’d ever seen.

  “Oh,” I said agai
n, and he let me go.

  The next day I packed my bags for my return trip to St. Louis feeling a bit lost. I’d been so swept away by living for two weeks, I couldn’t really imagine going back home. I didn’t want to.

  Kate was working that day and we’d already said our good-byes. Kenley had to be at work as well, but had been kind enough to offer to drive me to the station on his lunch break and save me the cab fare. After everything was stowed and ready, I put on my coat and hat and went to wait for him in the living room. But when a body appeared in the hall to fetch me, it was Ernest’s.

  “Kenley couldn’t get away after all?” I asked.

  “No. I wanted to do it.”

  I nodded dumbly and collected my things.

  It wasn’t much of a distance to Union Station and we passed it mostly in silence. He wore wool trousers and a gray wool jacket, with a dark cap pulled down nearly to his eyebrows. His cheeks were pink with cold and he looked very beautiful. Beautiful was exactly the right word for him, too. His looks weren’t feminine but they were perfect and unmarred and sort of heroic, as if he’d stepped out of a Greek poem about love and battle.

  “You can let me out here,” I said as we neared the station.

  “Would it kill you to give a guy a break?” he said, finding a place to park.

  “No. Probably not.”

  A few minutes later, we stood together on the platform. I clutched my ticket and my pocketbook. He held my suitcase, shifting it from hand to gloved hand—but as soon as my train appeared, its silver-brown body trailing smoke and soot, he set it down at his feet. Suddenly he was holding me tight against his chest.

  My heart beat fast. I wondered if he could feel it. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything at all, just kissed me, and through that kiss I could feel all of him radiating warmth and life. There was so much I didn’t know about Ernest and even more I wouldn’t let myself ask or even imagine, but I found myself surrendering anyway, second by second. We were surrounded by people on the platform, but also entirely alone. And when I finally boarded my train a few minutes later, my legs were shaking.

  I found a seat and looked out my window into the crowd, scanning the dark suits and hats and coats. And then there he was, pushing closer to the train, smiling at me like a maniac and waving. I waved back, and then he held up one hand like a sheet of notebook paper, and the other like a pencil, pantomiming.

  I’ll write to you, he mouthed. Or maybe it was I’ll write you.

  I closed my eyes against hot, sudden tears, and then leaned into the plush seat as my train carried me home.

  FOUR

  n 1904, the year I turned thirteen, St. Louis was host to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the World’s Fair. The fair grounds covered twelve hundred acres in and around Forest Park and Washington University, with seventy-five miles of paths and roads connecting the buildings and barns and theaters. Many of these structures were plaster of Paris over wooden framing, built to last only a few months, but they looked like opulent neoclassical palaces. Our crown jewel, the Palace of Fine Arts, boasted a sculpture garden fashioned after the Roman Baths of Caracalla. There were lagoons you could paddle along, enormous man-made waterfalls and sunken gardens, exotic animal zoos and human zoos with pygmies and primitives, bearded girls and pinheaded boys. All along the Pike, hundreds of amusements and games and food stalls enthralled the passersby. I had my very first ice-cream cone there and couldn’t stop marveling at how the sugary cylinder wasn’t cold in my hand. The strawberry ice cream inside it seemed different, too. Better. It might have been the best thing I’d ever tasted.

  Fonnie was with me on the Pike that day, but she didn’t want ice cream. She didn’t want cotton candy or puffed wheat or iced tea or any of the other novel offerings either, she wanted to go home where our mother was preparing to host her weekly suffragette meeting.

  I’d never understood why Fonnie was drawn to Mother’s group. The women always seemed so unhappy to me. To hear them talk, you would think that marriage was the most terrible thing that could happen to a woman. My mother was always the loudest and most emphatic one in the room, nodding sharply while Fonnie passed plates of teacakes and watercress sandwiches, trying very hard to please everyone.

  “Another half hour,” I said, trying to bargain with Fonnie. “Don’t you want to see the Palace of Electricity?”

  “Stay if you like. I’m surprised you can enjoy yourself.” And then she flounced imperiously off into the crowd.

  I was enjoying myself or had been until she reminded me I was supposed to be sad. It was probably very selfish of me to want to stay and smell the salt on the popcorn, and hear the braying from the barns. But it was April and the cherry trees around the lagoons were flowering. I could close my eyes and hear fountains. I could open them and imagine I was in Rome or Versailles. Fonnie grew smaller in the crowd, her dark skirt blotted by riotous color. I wanted to let her go without caring what she thought of me or said to our mother, but I couldn’t. I took a last dejected look at my ice-cream cone and then dropped it into a trash barrel as I trotted off after my sister toward home, where the curtains were drawn and the lights were banked, and had been for some time. We were in mourning. My father had been dead two months.

  Ours was the quintessentially good family, with Pilgrim lineage on both sides and lots of Victorian manners keeping everything safe and reliable. My father’s father founded the St. Louis Public Library and the Richardson Drug Company, which became the largest pharmaceutical house west of the Mississippi. My mother’s father was a teacher who started the Hillsboro Academy in Illinois and later a private high school in St. Louis called the City University. Fonnie and I went to the best schools wearing navy-blue skirts with knife-sharp pleats. We sat for private lessons at one of our two Steinway grand pianos, and spent summers in Ipswich, Massachusetts, at our beach cottage. And everything was very good and fine until it wasn’t.

  My father, James Richardson, was an executive at the family drug company. He’d go off in the mornings in his bowler hat and black string tie smelling of shaving cream and coffee and, just underneath, a ghost of whiskey. He kept a flask in his dressing gown. We all knew another lay tucked in his desk drawer in the study, which he locked with a tiny silver key. Still another waited behind stacked jars of stewed fruit in the pantry, where our cook, Martha, pretended not to see it. He tried not to be home very often, and when he was, he was quiet and distracted. But he was kind, too. My mother, Florence, was his perfect opposite—all sharp creases and pins, full of advice and judgments. It’s possible my father was too soft and too cowardly around her, inclined to back away into his study or out the door rather than face up to her about anything, but I didn’t fault him for this.

  My mother always preferred Fonnie, who was twenty-two months older than me. We had an older brother, Jamie, who was off to college before I started kindergarten, and there was Dorothea, eleven years older but very dear to me just the same, who married young and lived nearby with her husband, Dudley. Because of the closeness in our ages, Fonnie was my primary companion as a girl, but we couldn’t have been more different. She was obedient and bendable and good in a way my mother could easily understand and praise. I was impulsive and talkative and curious about everything—far too curious for my mother’s taste. I loved to sit at the end of our driveway, my elbows on my knees, and watch the streetcar trundle along the center of the boulevard, wondering about the men and women inside, where they were headed, what they were thinking, and if they noticed me, there, noticing them. My mother would call me back to the house and send me up to the nursery, but I’d simply stare out the window, dreaming and musing.

  “What could you possibly be fit for?” she often said. “You can’t keep your head out of the clouds.”

  It was a legitimate enough question, I suppose. She worried about me because she didn’t understand me in the least. And then something terrible happened. When I wa
s six years old, I managed to dream myself right out the window.

  It was a spring day, and I was home sick from school. When I grew bored with the nursery, which generally happened quickly, I began to watch Mike, our handyman, pushing a wheelbarrow across our yard. I was crazy about Mike and found him infinitely more interesting than anyone in my family. His fingernails were square and nicked. He whistled and carried a bright blue handkerchief in his pocket.

  “What’re you up to, Mike?” I said, shouting out the nursery window, craning over the sill to better see him.

  He looked up just as I lost my balance and fell crashing to the paving stones below.

  For months I lay flat in bed while the doctors wondered if I would walk again. I recovered slowly, and as I did, my mother had a baby carriage specially adapted for me. She liked to push me around the neighborhood, stopping at each of our neighbors’ houses so they could exclaim about the wonder of my survival.

  “Poor Hadley,” my mother said. “Poor hen.” She said it over and over, until her words became stitched onto my brain, replacing any other description of me, as well as every other possible outcome.

  It didn’t matter that I healed completely, learning to walk without a limp. My constitution was a great worry in the house and stayed that way. Even the slightest sniffle, it was thought, would damage me further. I didn’t learn to swim, didn’t run and play in the park as my friends did. I read books instead, tucked into the window seat in the parlor, surrounded by swirls of stained glass and claret-colored drapes. And after a time, I stopped struggling even internally against the prescribed quietness. Books could be an incredible adventure. I stayed under my blanket and barely moved, and no one would have guessed how my mind raced and my heart soared with stories. I could fall into any world and go without notice, while my mother barked orders at the servants or entertained her disagreeable friends in the front room.