Mrs March

by Virginia Feito

  “I know.”

  “It was very … graphic.”

  “Yes. That’s what it was like in those days. I did a lot of research. As you know.”

  She did know: the trips to Nantes, the meetings with the historians at the Bibliothèque Universitaire, the books delivered to their apartment from helpful experts worldwide—she had been witness to a full year of research. And yet she had not paid attention, had never suspected the possibility of such a betrayal. She pursed her lips in preparation for one last prod. “Did you research the—the whores?”

  “Of course,” he nodded. “Everything.”

  He went on eating, unconcerned, and Mrs. March breathed in deeply. Perhaps Patricia had made a mistake. Perhaps the whore from Nantes, the wretched Johanna, wasn’t based on her at all. Perhaps, she considered with sudden relish, she was based on George’s mother! Mrs. March stifled a happy chortle.

  After dinner they bade good night to Martha, who was waiting by the door, out of her uniform, square olive purse hanging from her wrist. They locked the front door after her, and as George slipped into his study, Mrs. March retired to the bedroom, to the freshly turned sheets and her white flannel nightgown and the hardcover copy of Rebecca on the nightstand.

  She sank into her pillow, sighing with a relief she mistook for contentment. She held the novel with cautious fingertips so as to avoid staining it with hand cream, but as she tried to turn a page, her thumb slid across the paper, blurring the word cowardice to illegibility. She looked over morosely at the books piled high on George’s nightstand. She had always been jealous of George’s intimate relationship with books: how he touched them, scribbled on them, bent and folded them, their pages impossibly ruffled. How he seemed to know them so thoroughly, finding in them something she couldn’t, as much as she tried.

  She turned back to her book, determined. After a few moments she found she was having trouble concentrating—thoughts of intimidating party guests and potential catering fiascos interrupting every phrase on the page, overflowing in every indentation—so she took some pills she had bought over the counter a couple of weeks ago. The pills were very light, the pharmacist had assured her; purely herbal, but they did the trick, and soon she was swimming into a deep sleep, not even noticing when George finally came to bed—or whether he ever did.

  Having failed to secure a chef from the fusion place in the West Village that was all the rage and now boasted a two-month wait (Mrs. March had never been), the Marches hired caterers instead. Mrs. March called once, twice, three times to confirm. They were to be supervised by Martha, who knew the kitchen far better.

  The morning of the party, Mrs. March busied about the living room, checking the stereo system and room temperature. She placed a row of chairs along one wall in case George or his agent wanted to give a speech to a sitting audience. She wheeled the television set out of the living room and into her bedroom. She replaced the bulb inside the picture light over the original Hopper, and eased the Christmas tree into a corner, mindful of its ribbons and trembling baubles. They had acquired it, following Rockefeller Center’s lead, right after Thanksgiving. Or rather, George had, dragging it home with the help of his editor. “After all these years he still delights in boyish things like lugging around a Christmas tree,” Mrs. March murmured to herself. She was prone to rehearsing potential snippets of conversation; she liked feeling prepared.

  As she positioned the tree against one of the windows, where it was sure to be avoided, a large framed photograph on one of the bookshelves caught her eye. She waited until the workers had retired to the kitchen before inspecting it. It was an old picture of George’s daughter from his previous marriage. Paula. Or, as her parents called her, much to Mrs. March’s disgust: Paulette.

  Mrs. March began dating George in secret during her senior year, when she was twenty-one. George, thirty-two at the time, was a promising author who taught English literature and creative writing at the university. She had never attended any of his classes. They met for the first time at the cafeteria, where they happened to be in line together when George added a carton of yogurt to his tray and offhandedly commented, “Subdue your appetite, my dears …” in her general direction. Although Mrs. March was unaware he was quoting Dickens, she responded by laughing delightedly—repeating the quote while smiling and shaking her head, mock-admonishing George for his cheekiness.

  The words George March is the most attractive man on campus, uttered by her roommate their freshmen year, had resonated with Mrs. March long before she’d even seen George in person, and she had found motivation in them from their very first encounter. Words she summoned, to this day, with triumph, cherishing them like priceless family heirlooms.

  George had courted her slowly, subtly—so subtly that she oftentimes wondered whether he was courting her at all. He would show up randomly wherever she was, but it always felt coincidental, spontaneous. They dated for six years, which saw his rise to polite fame and subsequent stardom, and then he proposed, adorably, over yogurt.

  She had longed for a traditional church wedding, but George had wed his first wife in one, so Mrs. March settled for a civil ceremony, at which her mother scoffed to this very day between spells of dementia.

  Marrying George in front of all the people who had attended his first wedding had been predictably grotesque. They had beheld his promise to love this other woman in sickness and in health until his dying day. And only a few years later—vows severed, photographic tributes retired from frames and mantels … it was inevitable that the value of this second marriage would diminish in their eyes. When George and Mrs. March were exchanging vows, she was sure she heard one of George’s guests murmur, “Let’s hope the food is better at this one.”

  Along with a new, shared apartment and a joint checking account came his eight-year-old daughter Paula. In the months leading to the wedding, Mrs. March had been dreading meeting George’s ex-wife, bracing herself for a jealous confrontation or at least barely concealed hostility, but she was pleased to discover that they got on quite civilly. The former Mrs. March had invited the soon-to-be Mrs. March over for coffee, and the two spent close to two hours superficially discussing the benefits of an education abroad, as each courteously took turns to look sideways at the clock until the meeting ended.

  The problem, Mrs. March had been disappointed to discover, was the daughter. She had been expecting a compliant, smaller version of herself; one she could dress in eyelet pinafore dresses and mold to her liking. Instead, Paula was cocky. Opinionated. Too pretty. She asked impertinent questions (“Why are your hands so dry?”; “Why does Daddy work but you don’t?”). She made a habit of vying for her father’s attention; “Daddy, oh Daddy,” she’d cry—pathetically, thought Mrs. March—whenever there was a storm or a scraped knee (her voice suspiciously strong for someone supposedly in so much pain). Mrs. March couldn’t stomach the way George boasted about Paula to friends. She would invariably chime in—parroting that the child was indeed special and gifted—while on the inside she screamed.

  She dreaded the weekends when Paula came to visit, and after the child had departed, traces of her always remained. A pink frilly shirt, folded by Martha among Mrs. March’s own things in the closet. Sticky chocolate fingerprints on Mrs. March’s favorite camel-hair blanket. Smudged glasses of unfinished water left on every counter.

  Even in her absence the air still carried Paula’s scent: that milky, flowery, entitled smell that resisted the bergamot room spray spritzed frantically by Mrs. March throughout the apartment.

  As a way to prove to everyone she could rear an infinitely more gracious and sensitive child, and also as a sort of punishment to Paula, Mrs. March herself had a child. She was glad it was a boy, glad she hadn’t been sentenced to witness her youth reflected, pure and unwithered, in a girl.

  Jonathan, now eight, occupied the bedroom Paula used to sleep in on her visits. A room Mrs. March had flayed and redecorated beyond recognition. She papered the walls with plaid fabri
c from Ralph Lauren, which gave off a coziness in the winter but turned stifling in the hot months, when the room would develop its own microclimate. She threw away all of Paula’s branded toys, the Mickeys and the Disney princesses, in favor of plain, old-fashioned ones, like a wooden rocking horse and an antique sled. The shelves she furnished with absurdly expensive first editions of old children’s books (Huckleberry Finn, Little Lord Fauntleroy). On one wall she’d hung a row of framed National Geographic covers. Jonathan had never read a single issue—nor would Mrs. March ever allow it, for him to come across photographs of topless tribeswomen, their collarbones adorned with thick beaded necklaces, their flat breasts pointing at their belly buttons. But she proudly claimed those framed issues were his favorites, when encountered by guests. The room was ready to be photographed for a magazine, if need be, at any given time.

  Jonathan was a messy and occasionally pouty child, but he was quiet and thoughtful and smelled modestly of fresh laundry and soccer-field grass. He was currently away on a school trip to the Fitzwilliam Chess and Fencing Retreat in upstate New York, and would be returning in a couple of days. Mrs. March was proud of herself for occasionally wondering what he was doing, which she had decided was a symptom of missing him.

  Paula, now twenty-three, enjoyed a fabulous lifestyle, as she probably assumed was her birthright, and lived in London no less, where Mrs. March herself had long fantasized about living—steak at the Wolseley and drinks at the Savoy, a play in the West End on Saturdays. Paula called often to catch up with George. She never failed to ask after Mrs. March, which Mrs. March regarded as prying.

  Mrs. March studied the framed photograph in which a ten-year-old Paula posed, her eyes liquid caramel under arched eyebrows, her plump lips pursed—Mrs. March thought with scorn—ever so seductively. Ten-year-old Paula had insisted George place the photograph there, surely because it was at eye level, ensuring that everyone would see it upon entering the living room. Mrs. March now moved it to a higher shelf, facedown, and resumed her preparations for the party.

  She arranged the cushions on the couch, bringing to the forefront the chintz one, covered in a pattern of thrushes eating fruit. She tossed the cashmere throw on the back of the couch, then repeated the action again and again until it achieved an artfully careless look suggesting that Mrs. March had been reading and lost track of time, so at ease that she had forgotten about the party she was hosting, and only after a polite reminder from Martha (a meeker, subservient version of Martha), she had flung the throw to one side and had gone about her work.

  That morning Mrs. March had gone to the florist—the pricey one on Madison Avenue, which boasted its own little greenhouse—where she bought several large bouquets: red roses nestled in eucalyptus and winterberry branches; and hairy, drooping pine boughs that resembled the drum brushes she’d seen the jazz musicians brandish at the Carlyle. She placed a couple in the living room, and one in the guest bathroom, where she also set down a magnolia candle, an impressive display of foreign soaps, and a gilded glass bottle of hand lotion she usually hid in her nightstand. This was out of concern that Martha might mistake it for soap. The lotion was French, and Mrs. March suspected Martha couldn’t possibly know that lait pour mains meant “hand cream.”

  She straightened the painting that hung over the toilet—a flirty, playful piece depicting several young ladies bathing in a stream. Rays of light shone through the trees on the bank, illuminating the women’s waxen hair and bodies. They smiled modestly, eyes lowered, all of them facing the viewer. It was an invaluable piece, acquired for a song after it was unearthed in an old art gallery on the brink of bankruptcy. Mrs. March stood admiring it for some time, satisfied at the idea that she was a woman who could appreciate suggestive art, despite not knowing the name of the artist or feeling remotely comfortable with nudity, before exiting the bathroom, which now smelled overwhelmingly of pine.

  She moved to the kitchen, finding it so pleasurably dark and peaceful with the gentle snoring of the fridge she almost felt guilty about the imminent invasion of the caterers. In the end she had decided against the macarons for dessert, settling instead for raspberry cheesecake tartlets from a tiny bakery on the other side of the park (a zip code away from Patricia’s) and good old-fashioned strawberries and cream. The strawberries, stacked on the kitchen floor in wooden crates, were really something to look at. They shone bright and scarlet, like poppies. The cream, whipped with Madagascar bourbon vanilla and confectioners’ sugar, could have floated out of the crystal serving bowl like a cloud. She envisioned her guests’ faces, flushed with joy and admiration—tinged with envy, too—and could almost feed off the image itself.

  She admired her handiwork spread out across her kitchen. This was surely going to be the most enviable of parties, she concluded, certainly the most impressive one that she had ever been to, and the literary world was going to remember it for a long, long time.

  Not that she hadn’t been to sophisticated parties. A fair number of them, in fact.

  When she was young, her parents often threw ostentatious dinner parties in their apartment. Black-tie affairs with private chefs and jazz quartets. On these evenings, Mrs. March and her sister Lisa would be given an early dinner in the kitchen—usually a selection of leftovers they’d consume sulkily while the pink, glossy canapés that would be served at the party taunted them from the counter, warranting a surreptitious spit or two.

  Their parents would then lock them in their rooms, which were connected by a bathroom. They would mostly spend the evening in Lisa’s room, since she was the eldest and that was the room with the television, and would watch horror movies and the occasional European art film, giggling at the nudity at increasingly breathless intervals.

  Sometimes they would be startled by a shrill outburst erupting from the living room or animalistic snorts in the hallway. One evening the bedroom doorknob turned slowly, then more violently, shaking the whole doorframe, under the rapt gaze of the girls, who sat together, motionless, until the rattling ceased.

  The cat, along with its litter box and food and water, would be locked in with them so that the guests wouldn’t be disturbed by it meowing or shedding on their coats or—God forbid—pouncing on the table. It would scratch at the door, yowling incessantly to escape. Upset by its suffering, Mrs. March would paw at the door in a pretend attempt to open it, then would feign vexation so that the cat would understand that she, too, was trapped inside.

  The mornings after these parties the house would smell different, like sandalwood perfume and cigars and—confusingly, because her parents owned none—scented candles.

  When Mrs. March turned seventeen, she was finally asked to attend one. It was her father who mentioned it offhandedly to her one Saturday morning from behind his newspaper.

  Feeling very mature or very nervous or a combination of both, she stole a bottle of sherry from the liquor cabinet and drank from it in her bedroom, shyly and haltingly at first, then in great consecutive gulps.

  That night, she debated somewhat too animatedly with her parents’ friends about theater and art. She laughed mindlessly at jokes she was not sure she understood. She interrupted a profound, intellectual discussion of the nature versus nurture debate, quoting Mary Shelley, whose work she’d been studying in class. She ate every single course the chef had prepared—a heavy, decadent Tudor-era feast—including roast venison and meat pie—and continued to drink until she realized all the guests had left and she was standing alone holding a glass of port she didn’t remember pouring.

  She hugged the toilet bowl through the night, kneeling on the cold tiled floor of the bathroom she used to share with her sister, and was sick well into the morning, purging her body of the thick, meaty meal, which came out of her in stringy pieces.

  She hid in her bedroom until well past lunchtime the next day. When she eventually emerged, the furniture placement in the living room seemed to be ever so subtly off by an inch, her father’s books looked to be out of order, and the blue c
hina vase on the piano depicted a dragon when she was sure it had always been a bird.

  Her parents sat at opposite ends of the sofa, each reading a copy of the same book, seemingly oblivious to the stench of liquor-dampened velvet. They didn’t look up as she walked in. Neither made mention of the party at all, which Mrs. March took as their grim tacit acceptance of her flaws—but her mother did insist on washing her hair. It was something she had always done for her daughter and continued to do until Mrs. March left for college.

  On this day, the day after her parents’ party, Mrs. March knelt on the bathroom floor as her mother sat on the rim of the tub and lathered. They did not speak but her mother did tug especially hard on her hair, and Mrs. March fought to curb her nausea, which was particularly challenging with one’s head upside down. She considered this to be her punishment for her behavior the previous night. As her mother roughly rubbed her scalp, she vowed not to drink another drop of alcohol until she had graduated college.

  She kept her word, attending university parties more as a spectator than as a reveler. Like a ghost, she would weave through the dorms and fraternities, observing the drunken Ping-Pong matches and the couples kissing ravenously in dark corners.

  She met her first serious boyfriend, Darren Turp, at one of these early campus parties. Mrs. March had imposed upon herself another steadfast rule: she would lose her virginity to the first boy to ever tell her that he loved her. And so she did, a year and a half later, on an unseasonably hot spring day, sweating on Darren’s dorm mattress (his father, good friends with the dean, had secured for him a single room). Afterwards, they fell asleep, and when Mrs. March awoke that evening, she struggled to recall anything other than sunlight on closed eyelids and sheets tangled tight around her ankles like clutching hands. She eased out of the bed as quietly as she could and inspected the sheets using Darren’s Eagle Scout flashlight, but there was nothing—not even a rusty, menstrual-like smudge. Her hymen, that so-called sacred piece of her, must have broken a long time ago.