Maude and her daughters bought matching hats for their passport photos and planned an excursion for the weeks preceding the start of school. They would shop and dine in Paris. In Italy, they would see museums in Florence and the Vatican in Rome. Their house was sold, and the possessions Margaret held so dear were placed into storage along with the family’s furniture. It seemed a good trade-off for the adventures that lay ahead. Margaret wanted to see more of the world.
Her parents showed her a catalog from Brillantmont that featured photographs of smiling girls hiking the Alps and skiing on the nearby slopes. It promised trips to foreign cities and museums. Classes were taught solely in French, which thrilled Margaret. It was her best subject. Cooking classes in haute cuisine and patisserie baking were offered in a state-of-the-art kitchen.
This was supposed to have been a grand adventure. Within days, though, Margaret was miserable. She missed her parents and was unaccustomed to the discipline of the school. The adventures promised in the school’s brochure were mostly for older girls. At fourteen and twelve years old, respectively, Margaret and Roberta were relegated to the section of the school for younger students. Almost every moment of their lives was chaperoned, regulated, and demanding. This suited the studious Roberta, but Margaret longed for her days of freedom on Long Island.
On daily walks along Lake Geneva, Margaret had to keep pace with the girl in front. Their teacher insisted they stay in a straight line. Like the other students at Brillantmont, Margaret wore a pleated plaid skirt and a white blouse accented by a small scarf. These outdoor trips should have been the bright spot in her day, but instead they felt like torture. On this outing, they walked from the main chateau-style hall of the school, past terraced gardens overflowing with flowers. Wild cherry trees burst into bloom on the hillside, and as they neared the water’s edge, the calls of crew masters to their rowing teams broke the silence that enveloped the girls. Not once did the teacher stop and invite her students to take in the wonder around them. Rigid order was far more important. Margaret knew that if she lagged or stepped out of line, she would be forced to sit alone in the front hall after evening classes again. The swinging pendulum of the antique clock on the wall would be her only entertainment as its hands counted down her punishment with a constant ticktock.
Margaret joined the ski and field hockey teams in order to be outside as much as possible. She also found freedom in the library and music salon. Through books and records, she escaped the school’s walls and embarked on adventures in stories and song. She read volume after volume in English and French and made a game of memorizing poems by singing them to her favorite tunes. She sat beside the phonograph, singing along to emotional French ballads in her thin, wavering voice. The passion of the songs moved her, especially one called “The Time of the Cherries,” a ballad written during the Parisian Commune Revolution in 1871. It was a symbolic anthem to the blood spilled during the uprising, as well as to remorse for life unappreciated and nature’s wonder unnoticed.
Margaret was fascinated by the story that inspired the song. It was dedicated to a young ambulance nurse shot during the rebellion. Her white uniform, stained with bright red blood, reminded the songwriter of the splashes of red cherry juice on the streets of Paris. The season of the cherries, typically cherished and celebrated, had come and gone as barricades were built and battles fought. By the time the revolt was over, cherries had blossomed, ripened, and fallen to the ground.
Most likely the song touched Margaret so deeply because she keenly felt the loss of everything she cherished. She had taken her freedom on Long Island for granted. She missed roaming the fields, riding her horse, and playing in the woods. Most of all, she missed her home and family. Their life may not have been perfect; her mother was prone to depression and nagging; her father was away far too frequently. But Margaret missed the times that once seemed so ordinary—evenings around the piano when her mother felt well enough to play and sing, vacations on the coast of Maine, adventures in the woods, and cool mornings spent walking on the golf course with her dog beside her.
Those moments were gone. Now Margaret had to carefully measure the space between her feet and the heels of the shoes marching in front of her. Looking around at the lake or landscape distracted her, and she wanted to go to the library instead of sitting still in the hall and listening to that incessant clock.
*
By the time Maude came to retrieve the girls two years later, Roberta had closed the educational gap between herself and her older sister. Margaret read voraciously but had little interest in other studies. She now, however, harbored a secret desire to be a writer of great literature.
Bruce stayed on in India for another seven months while Maude oversaw the building of the family’s new house in Great Neck on Long Island. Margaret and Roberta attended a private school in the neighborhood until they were able to enter Dana Hall, a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, about fifteen miles from Boston. To Margaret, the close-knit community of the school felt like a second home. The twelve small cottages and the main building on its campus were bordered by fields of buttercups, timothy, and white violets. The courses, lectures, and assigned readings were challenging, but Margaret enjoyed learning new philosophies and discussing them with friends and teachers. She joined the equestrian team and a sorority and for the first time developed an intimate circle of friends. She grew close to her roommate, Katherine Carpenter, and they gave each other nicknames. Because Margaret’s hair was the same color as the timothy grasses surrounding the school, she was called Tim. Katherine was dubbed Kitty.
Having spent the last two years studying abroad, Margaret had missed many of the rites of passage other girls at Dana Hall participated in, such as coming-out parties. Nevertheless, the effervescent Margaret made friends quickly and pledged a sorority. She was thrilled to have those girls as her sisters, but in order to belong, the strong-willed Margaret had to submit to the older members. Pledges were required to run errands for the seniors and to refer to themselves as “It.” Margaret made their beds, delivered their packages, saved seats for them in chapel, and even tried to sew stripes onto the pants of one senior. She failed miserably at keeping the stripes straight, and after staying up all night trying to correct her handiwork, she was demoted to sewing buttons onto another girl’s coat. Even though she was a failure with a needle, in May, a group of girls blindfolded Margaret and led her to a ceremony where she was welcomed to the sorority.