Skyline Souvenir

Here, Now: the skyline looks lovely. The buildings are so tall… It really does strike me, every times I come to this city, that it is composed of phenomenal height. Even New York, for some reason, does not seem quite as tall to me as Chicago. Jonathan does not stay with me at the Drake, and so I have the suite to myself tonight. He’s been busy all day with business things; no time for me. So I went for a walk in Grant Park, and I photographed the Bean. I watched children in the Faces Fountain. I even went to the Art Institute to see the Toulouse Lautrec exhibition. My life in the Here is lazy, and I am restless in the Now. On Thursday morning, I leave for DC, and I haven’t even told Jonathan yet.

I left off rather abruptly in my Tale, didn’t I? That’s because Charlotte’s engagement was complicated. I took the week-long journey to my childhood home with one of my father’s servants, whom he had sent, and Anne. Having received special permission from Madame, Anne was allowed to accompany me on holiday. Though the traveling portion of the trip was not pleasant, (Anne and I not only had to share a bed chamber, but a maid as well), our welcome was quite warm at Lambert House, and my mother approved of Anne’s French and manners.

Charlotte was eighteen. Marrying age. She was even prettier than I’d remembered, but she was different, too. All of my sisters were different, and not just older. They were slower and almost, I think, resigned. While I had been sent to Paris for education and the opportunity to improve the family –as there was no heir yet, to speak of, and little likelihood that there would ever be one –it seemed only fitting that the youngest should try what she might. Charlotte, on the other hand, was bartered for and auctioned to the wealthiest buyer. You see, we all had jobs back then, even girls. More often than not, ours were the worst menial sort: to warm beds, whether in marriage or in outright prostitution. The latter, of course, I had yet to learn anything about.

In our late nights before the wedding, I lay awake with my sisters and Anne, all of us crowded into one bed, combing one another’s hair and whispering. We had questions for Charlotte about kissing and dancing and assemblies and operas, all of which she had had the fortune to experience ahead of us all.

“Est-ce que tu l’aimes?” I asked pensively one night as I stared into the blackness of the night. No skyline but the trees and no lights save a slivered moon and a flickering candle reflecting in the glass of the window. “Do you love him?”

I wasn’t raised with a sense of romance. Not really, anyhow. Even Here and Now, I am still surprised that I thought to ask such a question. It was wrong of me. Love him? She didn’t even know him. He was seventeen years her senior and he was taking the loveliest flower from our family’s garden. He was doing us, as well as himself, a favor. It was my foolish questioning that put an end to the late-night gatherings of myself and my sisters. Anne and I only would reconvene in my bed each night.

“Do you believe in love?” she asked me the night before the wedding.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “No one has ever taught me anything about love.”

There was poetry, of course. And romantic prose. But these were academics. The only men I had ever known in my life had been my father and the stable boys of my childhood, and then the footmen at my school. I had rarely seen another man, let alone gotten the chance to speak to one. And at fourteen I had simply thought that maybe eighteen unlocked more of the mysteries of the other sex than apparently it did in that day.

Charlotte looked beautiful on her wedding day. An announcement appeared in the Paris papers, Anne and I learned on our return to school, as her husband was quite important. I stood behind my three sisters, the youngest and the last at the front of the church. I listened to my sister’s soft voice swear to obey a stranger and put her life and happiness in his hands. And do you know? It was only two days later that Anne and I set off for school once more. We never spoke of the wedding again, as it had had a profound but indefinable impact on us. For years after that trip, I would remain staunchly disinterested in the prospect of my own marriage.

Now the telephone rings. It will be Jonathan, of course. Perhaps he has not forgotten me after all…