Margot: A Novel

by Wendell Steavenson

Genres: Coming of Age; Historical Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

A moving portrait of a young woman’s struggle to break free from her upper-class upbringing amid the whirlwind years of the sexual revolution.

It’s the mid-1950s and Margot Thornsen is growing up between a Park Avenue apartment in New York City and her family’s sumptuous Oyster Bay estate, as the presumed heir to her late grandfather’s steel fortune. Stuck in the mores and bores of WASP society with its cocktail parties and white-gloved galas, Margot is constantly rubbing against the strictures of her domineering mother, who never misses an opportunity to lecture her on the importance of marrying well. Meanwhile, Margot dreams of microscopes and beetles and books.

As she comes of age in the 1960s, a time of war and assassinations and riots, Margot’s path diverges and she finds herself in the expansive world of Radcliffe College, navigating a new age of sexual liberation, scientific discovery, acid trips, and rock ’n’ roll. The old rule book has been burned. There are no more limits. But now that she can choose, what does Margot really want?

Hailed for her “intelligent and heartfelt fiction” (Kirkus Reviews), Wendell Steavenson writes with grace, precision, and great psychological perception. With Margot, she has crafted an intimate portrayal of the quiet torment of young women of the era, a comically caustic mother-daughter story, and a memorable evocation of one woman’s passion for the wonder of science.

 

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Release date: January 24, 2023

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

PART ONE

 

BEGINNING

1

MARGOT PULLED HERSELF UP. THE RUNGS OF THE ROPE ladder sagged under her Mary Janes. Don’t look down! Below, the mossy planks of the old treehouse; above the blue sky, laced with leaves. Stevie said there was a nest with three blue eggs inside. The trunk of the oak was crumpled up and hollowed with squirrel hidey-holes. Catkins, dangling yellow and powdery, splotched her hands like finger paint. The leaves made whispering sounds like the seashore. Some of the leaves had ragged edges, Margot saw a fat caterpillar with green stripes eating them. She reached out to touch his soft bristles. A gust of wind blew up. The rope ladder swayed and banged against the trunk, her knuckles scraped on the bark and Margot let go—felt herself fall. Heard a loud CRACK, right inside her head.

Her first thought was: Perhaps I am dead now and Mother will be mad at me for gallivanting. But then Margot realized her thoughts were still thinking, so she must be alive. She began to count to ten for when the pain came, but by the time she got to six, her vision blacked out.

Assessing this development, Margot wondered if she could stand. Her mother would be furious if she had gone blind and had to miss Trip Merryweather’s birthday party. She tried to sit up, but felt seasick. If she threw up, her mother would say she had done it on purpose because she didn’t want to go to the party. She spread out her palms to steady herself. The stone path was cold to touch. She put one hand up to her face, it was warm and sticky. “Help!” Tried again to shout, more urgently, “HELP!” But the Big House was on the other side of the hill, it was unlikely anyone could hear. She decided to try and crawl.

Her fingers grubbed between the flagstones of the old path, knotted roots, mulchy leaves, dirt. Shuffled slowly on all fours, grazing her knees on twigs and acorn caps. The very dark behind her eyelids began to lighten reddish, then dissolved into a blur as her vision cleared. The sky fizzed.

She managed to limp back and push open the great big front door. Her mother was standing in the hall, sorting the pile of mail on the silver salver. A diamond flashed on her finger, the hardest of all minerals; her carmine lipstick drew a thin red line, her hair was lacquered into a Trojan helmet. She turned and stopped.

“Margot! Oh for heaven’s sake!”

Margot looked down and saw that her new dress was ruined with mud and blood. She felt the fear-tears gathering and pressed her lips together tightly to stop them from falling.

“Don’t make that face at me, young lady!” Her mother encircled her neck with her hand and tilted her head backwards to inspect the damage.

“Nanny Hastings!”

Nanny Hastings appeared in all haste.

“Look at the state of the child! Her dress is a write-off and her hair looks like she’s been dragged backwards through a hedge.”

Her mother’s fingernails pinched like clothespins. Margot felt her nose fill up, stinging, briny.

“Margot, I have told you before about your selfish behavior. You are eight years old. Old enough to know better! And Nanny Hastings, I have made it very clear she is not to go running off like some kind of feral goat.”

“But Mrs. Thornsen, children need fresh air and—”

Margot watched her mother’s nostrils flare.

She said, “It was my fault, Mama, I wasn’t thinking.”

“You never think! You never think of anyone but yourself !”

Nanny Hastings opened her mouth but no sound came out.

“Take the child upstairs and clean her up.” Her mother looked at her watch. “I’ve told James to bring the car around at ten to three sharp”.

Margot put her quivering hand in Nanny’s. Her shoes squeaked on the marble hall where she was not allowed to play hopscotch on the multicolored squares, past the bronze Nubian, through the swinging door into the servants’ wing.

“Am I in trouble?”

“Don’t worry you,” said Nanny Hastings. “We’ll get you shipshape in a toddle.” She laid a cool palm against Margot’s forehead. “That’s quite a bump. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a proper black-and-blue shiner to show off to those hooligan Merryweathers.”

AS MUCH AS MARGOT loved exploring, as much as she was brave when it came to climbing trees or balancing atop stone walls, she was as wobbly as Jell-O in society. Lots of people in a room all together made her hang back, hug pillars, hide behind curtains, want to disappear. She could never think of the right thing to say, her words mumble-stumbled, her voice dropped to a hesitant whisper. Grown-ups patted her head distractedly, yes-yes and went back to talking about Russkies and Reds. The other kids didn’t reply to the questions she had so carefully prepared—What are your top five books? Who is your favorite explorer of all time? Where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world?—but only snorted, snotted, stuck their tongues out, pulled her hair, ran around in circles playing games she didn’t understand.

Trip was the youngest of the four Merryweather brothers who lived at Sage Hill, the estate next door. Firstborn were the twins, Runny and Dick. Trip had named his brother Runny when he was a baby because he couldn’t say Rutherford properly and now everyone called him that. Margot was disappointed that Runny and Dick were only fraternal twins because she had never seen identical twins. Runny was older by five minutes and, everyone agreed, the handsome one, who had inherited the protuberant Whitney eyes from his mother and had an asymmetrical pucker of a harelip scar. The twins were six years older than her, and Margot didn’t like Runny because he was mean. Once he put a pinecone on her chair at a lunch party and then laughed when she yowled and her mother had told her off in front of everyone. Another time he made her dress up in his mother’s evening dresses and call him “my lord.” Dick was nicer but he was always up in his room reading. Margot liked reading too and one time she asked him, “What are your top five books?” but he only said, “Oh, they are all sci-fi and you won’t have heard of them.”

Hal came next but everyone called him weirdo or oddball or goofus. He tried to suck up to Runny, but Runny mocked his big head and big cow eyes and sent him on impossible “missions.” Whatever was broken—which was many things with four boys tearing about that big old house full of porcelain tchotchkes—Hal got blamed and was made to take his punishment without complaint, according to the rule of “fagging,” which Runny had picked up reading Tom Brown’s School Days.

Terrence Romney Merryweather, Trip, was the spoiled towhaired baby of the family, angel-imp, dimpled, always smiling, never chastised. Even as a small child he had the natural confidence of the adored one who could do no wrong. Margot wanted to be his friend, but he was friends with everyone. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she found herself alone with him. These felt like warmly spotlit moments. With so many brothers and cousins around all the time, they were few. Once they sat in the conservatory and played backgammon and ate a whole box of Oreo cookies Trip stole from the larder. Once Trip let her play pirates with his grandfather’s real cavalry sword and had just laughed when she sliced a gash in the damask curtains. “Don’t worry, we can blame Hal for it.”

Once he had been the first to find her hiding in the linen closet playing sardines.

“Come and see what I’ve got in my trouser pocket.”

She looked and saw his wormy peter nestling in his jockey shorts.

“Ew, gross.”

“Don’t even think about touching it,” Trip told her, as if it were a great prize. “You’ll give me cooties.”

THE BAND-AID NANNY HASTINGS had stuck over the cut on her eyebrow pulled the skin and made her wince. James the chauffeur drove Margot and her mother down their long tree-lined driveway, a few hundred yards along Skunk’s Misery Road and then back up another long tree-lined driveway.

“We don’t ‘do’ sick,” said her mother. “I am sure Trip would be very disappointed if you were not there. Such a darling boy. A good catch for a mousy girl like you.”

How do you catch a boy, Margot wondered, was it like softball? Was that why she had to wear special itchy gloves?

The car pulled up beside the familiar colonnade of white pillars. Margot thought Sage Hill looked as romantic as Tara from Gone with the Wind, her mother derided the architecture as cookiecutter neo-Colonial. Her dress felt tight across her chest. Her head pounded. She was thirsty. Margot always dreaded birthday parties. “Stand up straight,” said her mother, running a fingernail down her spine. “Run along now and join in!” Joining-in was terribly important, but Margot could not understand the mechanism of it.

“Heya Pinecone!” Trip called out, running around the lawn after Hal. The boys were roughhousing, shirttails untucked. The girls stood to one side and Margot noticed, with a familiar dismay, that none of them were wearing white gloves. She suddenly hated her stiff-starched sailor dress; Lydia Cummings had pretty pink roses on her skirt, and Bernie Pratt was wearing knickerbockers!

Her mother walked briskly towards the other mothers, calling out “Hallo hallo hallo!” in her distinctive treble that could famously carry across the acre of ballroom at the Sherry-Netherland.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve such a tomboy! Margot fell out of a tree and gave herself a black eye. Run along, dear”—her mother pushed her away—“go and make nice with darling Trip,” and then turned to Dotty Merryweather, “Aren’t they just adorable together!”

Margot trotted off towards the gathering knot of children. The party entertainer, dressed up like a cowboy with a ten-gallon hat, was dividing them into pairs. She got Hal.

“Geez Louise!” said Hal, pointing at her black eye. “Did you get in a fight with your boyfriend Stevie?”

Margot opened her mouth to deny it, but was swept with a wave of nausea. She doubled over and vomited all over his feet.

The mothers arrived in a clucking clutch.

“What happened?”

“Poor dear.”

“Hal Merryweather! What have you done now?”

Hal was wiping his spattered shoes on the grass, laughing and pointing.

“She came! She saw! She spewed!”

Margot looked up at her mother, who was pursing her lips in disgust and irritation. “Now I suppose I’ll have to take her to Dr. Dome.”

Then the sky turned white. Margot’s knees buckled and, with a soft crunch, she fainted onto the gravel.

MARGOT’S CHILDHOOD DREW A chauffeured loop between the family estate of Farnsworth and her parents’ apartment at 655 Park Avenue. Back then, before the Long Island Expressway was built, the grand New York families traveled to their country estates on the North Shore, leaving the Manhattan grid via the 59th Street Bridge and following Northern Boulevard through the low-rise suburbs of Queens to the flat farmland beyond which it became the Hempstead Turnpike; turn right for the Phippses at Old Westbury, left for the Vanderbilts and the Guggenheims in their Gold Coast mansions, or continue on to the Teddy Roosevelts in Oyster Bay. Margot usually got carsick around Little Neck, where the clams came from.

In the city, Margot’s bedroom window was at the back and faced a gray brick air shaft. But at the Big House in the country her bedroom had a view of the rose garden and a turquoise stripe of swimming pool.

“It’s the largest private swimming pool in the world,” Margot told Lydia Cummings on the first day of first grade.

“My mother says it’s not polite to boast,” said Lydia Cummings.

Perhaps Margot’s reticence was the result of this early social trauma, perhaps it was a reaction to her mother’s resounding loudness, maybe it was just natural recalcitrance. But she would not learn this word until the finals of the third-grade spelling bee. Lydia Cummings was the most popular girl at the Chapin School, surrounded by acolytes who wore their kneesocks falling down and talked endlessly about sleepovers and ponies. First grade and second grade, Margot shared a desk with Bernie Pratt; best friends according to proximity. But over this past year Bernie had shed her puppy fat, insisted on being called Bernadette, and dropped Margot like a rotten apple when she was invited to Lydia’s for a tea party.

Winter was dark early mornings, clammy school corridors, do your homework, practice the piano, brush your teeth, bedtime seven-thirty. Winter was icy wind that cut like knives down the avenues, rain and splash from trucks dunking in the potholes, muggy fuggy updraft from subway vents. Her mother went through nannies like sheer stockings. A crabbity German woman who smelled of mothballs, a blowsy blonde her mother dismissed as “that floozy from Manhasset.” One was Scotch, like the drink Mr. Merryweather drank, with reddish hair, so that for a long time Margot thought Scotch was a color, not a country. Natalie from Montreal was the nicest; she took her skating in Central Park and to see the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum. (They were not real mummies; they were dead bodies preserved in formaldehyde and myrrh, which is a kind of hardened resin and one of the gifts the wise men gave the baby Jesus.) But Natalie fell in love with a dentist and moved to New Jersey. Nanny Hastings came from England, wore a brown uniform, and did not like candy, humidity, or dogs, but on the other hand she read stories at bedtime and Margot liked falling asleep to the sound of her voice.

Margot was an only child, she had no companion or comparison. She had once overheard Nanny Hastings tell Mrs. Hanna, the housekeeper at 655, “Mrs. T is too hard on the poor girl,” but she had thought she was referring to the new laundry maid who had recently ruined one of her father’s shirts. Her mother was implacably her mother. Peggy to her friends, Mrs. Harrison Vanderloep Thornsen to the world, a woman polished to a high gloss, who knew how to run a house, gave the most marvelous parties. “Raving perfectionist, competitive to the point of a fish fork tine,” Margot overheard Mrs. Cummings saying to Dotty Merryweather once. “She judges every smudge on your silver.”

It was true that her mother could spot a fingerprint on a knife blade at twenty paces. “Don’t touch that, Margot!” Her mother moved through the world making as little physical contact with it as possible. When she kissed a woman hello, she kissed the air beside her cheek. When she greeted a man, she proffered her hand limply, so that he was obliged to press the ends of her fingers instead of taking her palm in his and shaking it. When Margot tried to hug her, her mother arched away and kept her on the edge of her knees; Margot was not allowed to settle in the comfortable recess of her lap. After a few minutes of perching, her mother would set her down, “That’s enough.”

Of her father, Harrison Thornsen, Margot knew even less. He was a father-shaped man who came in from work at six o’clock, stowed his hat in the front hall closet, stopped at the bar to pour a balloon glass of his apple brandy, went into the den, closed the door, and watched the evening news on the television. On weekends he played golf. He was a remote being, far off, like Pluto. “How’s it all going in school, Margot? Are you valedictorian yet?” He tousled her hair and said, “Good night, don’t let the bedbugs bite.” He smelled of cologne, cigars, and wet leather. His shirts had his monogram embroidered on the pocket. He worked at Grand Old King’s corporation, United Union Steel, on the forty-second floor of the Pan Am Building. Last Christmas Margot had saved up her pocket money and bought him a silk handkerchief from Brooks Brothers.

Margot’s birthday was May 8. “Victory Day!” as her father liked to remind her every year. “Got the telegram right after that Hun general surrendered to Old Blood and Guts Patton, and we stood about, at ease, not even saluting. They locked him in the butcher’s shop and my sergeant found a case of French brandy—and boy, did we go to town on that town—”

“Harrison! Enough war story-ing!” said her mother, cutting through with a cake slice. “We’ve heard it all before.”

Margot couldn’t imagine her father as a soldier. His military tunic was hung up inside a dry cleaner’s paper sheath at the back of his closet. The wool felt thick and rough. Once, in the pocket she found a small brown glass jar, the kind that ointments came in. Margot unscrewed the lid and a trickle of sand poured out; she had to brush it around the carpet so that no one would notice.

Her parents were usually out in the evenings: cocktail parties, charity balls, galas at the Met. When they hosted dinner parties, Margot was required to come and say good night to everyone in her dressing gown and slippers. The ladies sparkled with diamonds and the mirrors twinkled reflections from the chandelier. “Do smile, Margot!” her mother would say, pushing her forward. Margot tried very hard to be polite and grown-up. She was careful to do as she was told. Please and no, thank-you-very-much. Shake hands and curtsy. Best behavior. Mind your manners like a young lady.

In the winter they went to the Big House in the country for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter. In June, when school got out, Margot and her nanny were packed off to Farnsworth for the duration of the summer. Her mother arrived for July 4th and stayed through Labor Day; her father came out on weekends. Her grandmother, Marguerite Fantasia Vanderloep, known to all as “Goody,” lived at Farnsworth all year round. Margot thought Goody must be a hundred years old. Her skin was like silk stockings fallen down at the ankle. The lace edge of her blouses ruffled against the slack skin of her neck and smelled of lily of the valley. She was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear and wore a wig. When Margot kissed her, white talcum puffed into the air like a powdery halo. Everyone whispered her name behind her back, but to her face, on account of her deafness, they shouted. Margot saw that everything happened because of her grandmother, but that her grandmother did nothing. Perhaps Goody was the Wizard of Oz.

“I THINK YOUR DAUGHTER is concussed.” Dr. Dome’s voice was doomy-boomy, far away. “She’ll need an X-ray.” Margot’s eyelids itched. “Ah, now she’s waking up.” Dr. Dome was looking at her but talking to her mother, who was sitting in the chair by the door, smoking a cigarette. Margot’s head was hammers and daggers, her arms heavy lead pipes. Worse, she realized, mortified and goose-flesh, she was completely naked under a gaping paper gown.

“Where are my clothes?” she asked.

“Don’t whine,” said her mother, and Margot stifled her sob.

Dr. Dome loomed above, shadowed by the penlight that he beamed right into her eyeballs. “Lie back now and I’ll put the stitches in. Don’t move or you’ll make me jolt and you’ll get a scar.” Margot gripped the edge of the vinyl gurney and crossed her legs for privacy. “Lie flat,” Dr. Dome insisted. The needle stung like the bejesus, as Mrs. Hanna would have said. Margot bit her lip, tears rolling down the sides of her temples and collecting in her ears.

Afterwards, in the waiting room, waiting to have the X-ray, shivery, exposed, forehead throbbing, her mother gone to berate the nurse for the delay, Margot picked up a newspaper and read that Watson and Crick had discovered the shape of DNA.

She didn’t understand the words: deoxyribonucleic, defraction, or double helix; it was the diagram accompanying the article that caught her eye because it looked like the twisted-up rope ladder she had fallen off. She traced the elegant ellipses with her fingertip, headache receding, counting-climbing the looping rungs, turning around the turns in her mind as they wheeled her through to the X-ray room, where the technician told her to close her eyes and count to ten, counting-climbing, still looking for the blue eggs laid by a bluebird that flew upside down in a blue sky—

“WHY IS THE SKY blue?”

“Because it reflects the sea,” said her mother without looking up from her breakfast.

“Why is the sea blue?”

Her mother put down her knife with a clatter, “Oh Margot, stop asking questions.” Margot reached up and felt the knotted threads above her eyebrow. “And stop touching your stitches. You’ll make a scar.”

“Like Daddy,” said Margot. Her father’s scar was on his thigh, a pink plastic crater near the tan line of his bathing trunks.

“Scars can give a man character, but they are ruinous for a woman’s looks,” said her mother. Margot scraped the cold, hard butter against her scratchy toast. “The sky is blue because of the earth’s atmosphere,” said her mother after a pause.

“Is that so, dear?” said her father, squinting at his wife over the top of his Wall Street Journal. “I just thought it was one of those unanswerable questions. Like the chicken and the egg.”

“What about the egg?” asked Margot.

“It’s nothing to do with any egg,” said her mother.

“Well, I could do with an egg,” said her father, looking down at his empty plate.

Margot knew there weren’t any eggs because it was Saturday and Mrs. Ambrose’s day off. On Saturday at Farnsworth, there was only cornflakes and toast.

“What is the earth’s atmosphere?” asked Margot.

“Margot, do stop! You would try the patience of a saint.”

“Here’s one for you, Margot,” said her father, trying to lighten the tone. “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Margot knitted her brows together to think, but frowning made her stitches pull.

“To look for the egg?” The egg was somehow important.

“Ha-ha!” Her father ruffled her hair.

“To get to the other side,” answered her mother wearily.

Margot did not risk asking again “Why?” even though it seemed odd for a chicken to want to cross a road. Later, Stevie told her it was a joke, but she still didn’t really get it.

She didn’t get, either, why the sky was blue if it reflected the sea. ...