The Paris Wife

FOUR

In 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 was 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.

When my father was alive, I often watched him come home while the women were still gathered. Hearing them he’d freeze and then retrace his steps, slinking back out the door. Where did he go? I wondered. How far did he have to walk and how much whiskey did it take to quiet my mother’s voice in his head? Did he remember the way he used to love his bicycle? I did. There was a time when he would happily ride anywhere in St. Louis, choosing it over any other mode of transportation, probably because of the freedom it offered. Once he hitched a cart to the back and took Fonnie and me along the paths in Forest Park, singing “Waltzing Matilda.” He had the most beautiful baritone, and as threads of song floated back to us in the cart that day, his happiness seemed so real and so strange to me, I was afraid to move in case I might startle it away.

It was a cold morning in February when a single shot rang through the house. My mother heard it first and knew instantly what had happened. She hadn’t let herself think the word suicide, that would be too terrible and too common, but she’d been half expecting it just the same. Downstairs, behind the locked doors of his study, she found my father lying on the carpet in a pool of blood, his skull shattered.

For weeks after, the noise of my father’s death rang through the house. We learned he’d lost tens of thousands of dollars in the stock market, that he’d borrowed more and lost that too. We already knew he drank but not that he did little else in his last weeks, plagued by throbbing headaches that made sleep impossible.

After he was gone, my mother stayed in her room, crying and confused and staring at the drawn curtains while the servants took over. I’d never seen this kind of chaos in my house and didn’t know what to do with it but play Chopin’s nocturnes and cry for my father, wishing I had known him better.

The door to my father’s study stayed closed for a time, but not locked. The carpets had been cleaned but not replaced, the revolver had been emptied and polished and placed back in his desk-and these details were so terrible I couldn’t help but be magnetized by them. Again and again, I imagined the last moments of his life. How alone he must have felt. How deadened and how hopeless, or else he couldn’t have done it, lifting the muzzle and tripping the trigger.

My mood grew so low that my family began to worry I might hurt myself. Everyone knew that children of suicides stood a greater risk of taking that route. Was I like him? I didn’t know, but I had inherited his migraine headaches. Each one resembled a dreadful visitation, pressure and nausea and a dull but constant thrumming from the base of my skull while I lay absolutely still in my airless room. If I stayed there long enough, my mother would come in and pat my hand and tuck the covers around my feet, saying, “You’re a good girl, Hadley.”

I couldn’t help but notice my mother responded to me more warmly when I was ill, so it’s no surprise that I often was or thought I was. I missed so much school as a junior and senior that I was forced to stay another year as all my girlfriends went away to college without me. It was like watching a train leave the station for some far-off and exciting place, with no ticket myself and no means to purchase one. When letters began to arrive from Barnard and Smith and Mount Holyoke, I suddenly felt sick with jealousy of my friends’ excitement and promise.

“I want to apply to Bryn Mawr,” I told my mother. Her sister Mary lived in Philadelphia, and I thought having a relative nearby would put my mother at ease.

“Oh, Hadley. Why do you insist on overreaching yourself? Be realistic.”

Fonnie came into the room and sat near Mother. “What about your headaches?” she said.

“I’ll be perfectly fine.”

Fonnie’s brow furrowed skeptically.

“Mary can care for me if something happens. You know how competent she is.” I put particular stress on the word competent because my mother loved and was often persuaded by it. For the moment, however, she only sighed and said she would give it serious thought, which meant that she would take the matter up with our neighbor Mrs. Curran and the Ouija board.

Mother had long been interested in matters of the occult. There were séances in our house occasionally, but many more of them down the street at Mrs. Curran’s. According to my mother, she was a savant of the supernatural and had a very familiar and persuasive way with the board. I wasn’t invited to attend the session, but when Mother returned home from Mrs. Curran’s she reported that I could go to Bryn Mawr after all, and that everything would be well.

Later I had to wonder about Mrs. Curran’s prophecy because it seemed blatantly false to me. I did go away, in 1911, but the whole venture was doomed before it even began. The summer before I left for Bryn Mawr, my older sister Dorothea was badly burned in a fire. Though she was well out of the house during the years I was growing up, Dorothea had always been the kindest and most supportive member of my family, and I felt she understood me in a way no one else did or wanted to. When things at home grew too stifling and restrained, I’d walk to her house and watch her two young boys wrestling around her, feeling calmed and restored.

Dorothea was very pregnant that summer. She was home alone with the boys a great deal, and one afternoon the three were out on the front porch when Dorothea saw that a fire had started in a pile of rubber tires in the empty lot next door. The boys were curious about it, but Dorothea was afraid it might spread to her own yard. She ran over and tried to stamp out the flames with her feet, but her long summer kimono quickly caught fire. Her stockings did, too, badly burning her all the way to the waist before she fell to the ground and rolled, snuffing out the flames.

When her husband, Dudley, called us with the news, we were at our vacation cottage on Ipswich Bay. We were all worried sick about Dorothea, but Dudley reassured us she was in the hospital getting the best of care. She had no fever, and the doctors believed she would recover fully. The next day, she delivered a stillborn baby girl. Dorothea and Dudley were both devastated, but the doctors were still saying she’d live. They kept saying that until she died, eight days after the fire. Mother got on a train for the funeral, but the rest of us stayed in Ipswich, heartbroken and numb.

I remember feeling that I might not survive Dorothea’s loss, and maybe that I didn’t want to. Mother came back from St. Louis, bringing Dudley and the boys with her. They stepped off the train looking wretched, and what comfort could I offer? They have no mother, I found myself thinking over and over.

One afternoon shortly after the funeral there was a terrible storm in Ipswich Bay, and I talked one of the boys from a neighboring cottage into taking me out in it, in a rowboat. Waves slashed at the bow and came stinging over the sides and into our faces. I couldn’t even swim, but he didn’t turn back, even when the lighthouse captain signaled us to come in. The clouds were low and terrible and the air was drenched and salty. I felt as I if was drowning the whole time, over and over again. And even when we made it back to shore that day, the feeling that I was still out in the bay, sinking deeper and deeper, stayed with me through the rest of that summer and long afterward.

In September I boarded the train and went off to Bryn Mawr as planned, but my classmates seemed to be running on a different frequency. The girls in my dorm spent their afternoons in the salon drinking tea and frothy hot chocolate, talking about dance mixers and potential conquests. I felt well removed. As a girl I knew I was pretty, with bright red hair, nice eyes, and fair skin-but now I couldn’t seem to care whether boys noticed me or not. I stopped taking an interest in my clothes and my coursework, too. I began to fail exams, which was difficult and surprising to me, since, aside from my appalling pile of absences, I’d been a good student all of my life. Now I found I couldn’t summon any focus or attention or even interest.

The next fall, I let Fonnie and my mother persuade me to stay home. I can’t say it was any better for me there than at school. There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could, I had terrible, obsessive dreams about Dorothea and my father, replaying the last awful moments of their lives. I’d wake to a panicked feeling and the promise of more joyless days and nights. And if I said that I remained in this kind of coma for eight more years, then you’d understand how ready I was to live just as my mother began to die.

My mother was sick with Bright’s disease for years, but things got quickly worse in the summer of 1920. Throughout the hottest weeks of July and August, I hardly ever left the upstairs apartment, and when I did leave, she worried endlessly.

“Elizabeth? Is that you?” she called out weakly as soon as she heard me on the stairs. I wasn’t sure why she was using my given name after all these years, but much about her baffled me just then. She didn’t resemble the steel-spined and difficult woman who had always been able to dissolve me with a single word. She was frail and anxious, calling out again as I hurried up the stairs: “Elizabeth?”

“I’m here, Mother.” I came into the main room where she rested on the worn pink velvet settee. I put down my shopping bags and unpinned my hat. “Are you too warm? Can I open a window?”

“Is it warm?” Her hands kneaded the afghan in her lap. “I’m chilled to the bone.”

I pulled a chair over to the settee and took up her hands, rubbing them to bring blood to the surface, but wherever I touched, the impressions of my fingertips became set, as if her skin had become bread dough. I let her go and she started to whimper.

“What can I do?”

“Bring your sister. I need Fonnie with me now.”

I nodded and stood to leave, but her eyes opened wider. “Don’t go, please don’t leave me.” So I sat again, and this is how it went, all that long night. She took a little broth and slept lightly for a few hours. Then, near midnight, she became suddenly calm.

“I worry greatly for you, Elizabeth,” she said. “What will become of you when I’m gone?”

“I’m a grown woman, Mother. I’ll be fine. I promise.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Years ago Mrs. Curran and I spoke to Dorothea about you.” Her breath was labored, and I didn’t want to see her struggle this way.

“Shh. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does. We asked her about you several times and she rebuffed us. She had nothing to say.”

I’d always been skeptical of the occult-the board, the hushed, candlelit séances and automatic writing sessions with red scarves on the lamps-but now I felt a rush of cold through me. Was it possible that Mother had been in touch with Dorothea? And if so, why had my sister, dead for nine years, turned her back on me? Did she know something hard and sad about my fate? The idea terrified me and yet there was no way to be certain. I couldn’t ask my mother to elaborate on the session; she was exhausted and more anxious than ever. I also wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. What if the future was worse than the present? What if it didn’t exist at all?

All that August night I stayed in the straight-backed chair next to the settee. I swabbed Mother’s forehead and neck with a damp cloth and looked out at the warm summer night, the dark sky and darker trees, everything as remote as exhibits in a museum. And I knew that I too could die in this room. This was one way my life’s wheel could turn.

Hours later, near dawn, my mother died without a sigh or rattle or ragged breath. How very different from the way my father had gone-the crack of his revolver shaking the doors in their jambs-but no less final. While everyone else was downstairs sleeping, I looked at the face I’d hated sometimes and felt sorry for at other times. Her hands were curled to each side of her thin body, and I traced one with my fingertips, feeling a terrible and complex love for her. Then I went downstairs to wake Fonnie and Roland and call the doctor. I made breakfast and had a bath, and then sat with Fonnie in the parlor to see about the funeral arrangements. Mother’s body was still upstairs waiting for the coroner, and I could feel her there, still pressing on me. She’d always seemed to take pleasure in the quietness of my life, as if I’d become what she thought I would, which was not much of anything at all. This tugging was very old and powerful, and I knew I could easily give in to it, in to nothingness. Or I could push with everything I had the other way.