When five o’clock finally came, she rushed upstairs to her room and was already stripping off her day dress and putting on her own corset and petticoat by the time Nellie, the maid, came in.
The gown fell over her head in a rush of silk and the scent of flowers. Nellie had placed rose petals inside the dress while it was hanging, and a few of them fluttered to the floor when Margie slipped her arms into the sleeves. The gown was made with the palest cream silk and had a wide V-neckline. Despite the season, the sleeves were short, and she had a pair of long white gloves sure to make her hands sweat. But the dress’s loveliest feature was the delicate pink silk roses crossing the bodice and trailing their way down the skirt, tiny buds of spring pink with green leaves set behind them. To Margie, it looked like a garden come to life.
Other girls, in high school and in college, had suitors, even beaux, though Margie had never thought of such a thing for herself. Her parents would have forbidden it, for one, and for two, who would look at her, with her fat ankles and her broad shoulders, when there were girls like Elizabeth Tabb or Lucinda Spencer around, delicate little things with the girlish smile of Mary Pickford and dramatic eyes like Gloria Swanson? But that night, listening to the rustle of the silk against her petticoat as she walked slowly down the stairs, her head held high under the unfamiliar weight of a tiara, she thought she might, for once, be worth looking at. This was it, she thought. This was the night her life would begin.
At the hotel, the debutantes waited in an anteroom. Some of their dresses, Margie thought as she looked around, were shockingly modern—casual, even, a loose flow of fabric draping over their bodies without pause, making them look elegantly boyish and square. The dressmaker had offered Margie a similar gown. “It’s the newest fashion,” the woman had said, showing a dress of thin satin with a lace overlay, loose and flowing.
Margie’s mother had been horrified. “You can’t even wear a corset under that!”
About the corset, Margie didn’t mind, as she was rather fond of breathing, but she did mind that tender afterthought of a dress. It looked so plain compared to the gown she had imagined. And it was all well and good for someone who looked chic in dresses like the one the pleading designer was holding out to her. Those women didn’t have broad shoulders or large bosoms or muscular calves like she did. Margie knew well what she would look like in that kind of dress.
But clearly a number of the other girls had been brave enough to take the plunge. Anne Dulaney and Elsie Mills, who had been the first to bob their hair (to their mothers’ fury and everyone else’s shock), were, of course, wearing those dresses and, of course, being tall and so slender, looked stunning. They were lounging on a pair of fainting couches as though the very thought of the evening exhausted them. Two other girls in shorter dresses huddled together by an open window, smoking (and she was fairly sure the flask they were sharing wasn’t lemonade), and another cluster of girls in more traditional gowns stood at the opposite end of the room, pretending to talk while catching admiring glimpses of themselves in the mirror above the fireplace.
Feeling desperate, Margie kept looking for someone she knew well enough to sit with, until she spied Grace Scott and Emily Harrison Palmer, with whom she had gone to school until the ninth grade, when she had left for Abbott Academy and they for Miss Porter’s. Their dresses were as formal and old-fashioned as hers, and she felt a sense of relief as she settled down on a sofa beside them, the slight and familiar tremor she had felt upon comparing herself to the others, girls who would always be more beautiful, more fashionable, more right than she was, fading.
“Who are they?” Margie whispered, leaning forward and cocking her head toward the smokers.
“Southern,” Emily Harrison said, with a touch of haughty contempt, which was rich, considering her parents had come to Washington from Atlanta and her mother had an accent so thick you could have spread it on toast. “But those girls,” she said, nodding toward the group at the fireplace, “are European royals. Can you believe it? Minor, of course. Rumor has it they’re making the rounds looking for husbands here because their parents are flat broke.”
“Don’t gossip, Emily Harrison,” Grace scolded. Grace had always been overly kind, the sort of girl teachers selected to pal around with the new student, and prone to fits of tears over the tiniest of disappointments. “I’m sure they’re perfectly nice.”
“I didn’t say they weren’t perfectly nice, I said they were perfectly broke,” Emily Harrison said. She lifted her hands and examined her fingernails. “Everyone in Europe is broke. Everyone here, too, it seems. My mother says there never would have been a ball with this many debutantes in her day.”
“They’re so glamorous,” Margie said dreamily, looking at the Europeans. They faced away from her, a few of them with dresses cut low enough on their backs to reveal skin luminous as snow. Were they princesses? Margie wondered. Two of them wore tiaras, sparkling in the firelight, but Margie wore one herself and she was hardly a princess. It was just that they seemed so graceful, so perfect, every movement of their hands expressive as ballerinas, the curves of their throats, the bones of their faces as though they had been carved from marble. Their spines were stiff, their shoulders straight, and Margie self-consciously pulled herself back from slouching. Even if they weren’t princesses, they were royalty, and they would be walking down the steps with her.
“Isn’t it exciting?” Margie asked. She couldn’t contain herself. She supposed she ought to be blasé, like Anne and Elsie, so languidly aloof on their fainting couches, but she couldn’t. The night lay in front of them like a glittering promise, the sparkle of it, the elegance, the mystery of the excitement to come. Oh, Anne and Elsie were old poops, that’s all there was to it. She was going to dance with Robert Walsh, the terribly handsome friend of the family who was to be her escort, and drink champagne even if her parents didn’t approve, and she was going to enjoy every moment.
“Dreadfully exciting,” Grace said, and the sparkle in her eyes matched Margie’s, even though Grace was assured of marrying Theo Halloway—their families had arranged it long ago—and might not have bothered coming out at all if her mother hadn’t practically run Washington society. “I saw the ballroom on the way in, Margie. It’s simply gorgeous. And your gown is really stunning. You look lovely.”
“Thank you,” Margie said demurely, though inside she fluttered at the compliment.
Her father had said, “You look pretty, kitten,” but that was his job, and her mother had said, “Your tiara’s on crooked,” and then, after she had fixed it, “Nellie didn’t do a horrible job with your hair,” which was the closest thing to praise Margie had ever gotten from her mother, a tiny, precise woman who had never understood the starry-eyed, lead-footed daughter she had managed to produce.
“You look pretty too,” she said to Grace. Under normal circumstances that might have been an exaggeration—it was a good thing Grace was so kind and her parents were so wealthy, because Grace was so plain—but not that night. Grace was dark and the pale yellow of her gown glowed against her skin, and she looked happy, and Margie felt a little rush of sentimental nostalgia for the girls they had once been and the women they were becoming.
“Ladies.” Grace’s mother, Mrs. Scott, appeared at the doorway. The Southern girls quickly pitched their cigarette ends out the window and Margie saw the flask of not-lemonade disappear into one of their skirts. Mrs. Scott sniffed the air and looked at them disapprovingly. “We are ready to begin.”
Margie’s last name, Pearce, put her solidly in the middle of the line, right behind Emily Harrison Palmer, but that night she wished it were Robertson, or better yet, Zeigler, so she could savor the anticipation, the shiver in her stomach, the heat in her face. At first all she could see was the hallway and the line of debutantes in front of her, but as Emily Harrison began her slow descent, Margie saw it all laid out before her: the chandelier brilliant above, the pale glow of the girls’ dresses, light sparking prisms off hundreds of diamonds, setting the hall aglow. Her breath caught hard in her chest and she didn’t breathe, didn’t move, holding the moment in her hand like crystal, like snow, terrified it might disappear, shatter and whirl away in the air.
She