Marrying Up - Part X
“Marrying Up” is a fictional story set in 1950s Manhattan revolving around Frances Riley, a difficult and ruthlessly ambitious young woman who moved from one social class to another—Irish immigrant off the boat to high WASP— when she married into the aristocratic Woolsey family.
THIS IS PART 10 of a FOURTEEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14
Image: Nati (Pexels)
It was hours before Jack came to bed. Frances had gone straight to their room from the kitchen, had lain rigid on top of the sheets in her dress and beautiful pearl choker as a maid ordered the boys to put on their pajamas in the room next door. Still in her dress, she'd listened to the murmur of the boys' voices, the sounds of the party breaking up, cars departing. As silence began gradually to fall over the house, she rose and stripped off her clothes, cursing herself for having forgotten her sleeping pills. She and Jack and the children weren't the only ones spending the night. Earlier she'd seen a maid with an armful of sheets and towels enter a room down the hall, and now she knew without anyone telling her that those sheets and towels were for Nancy.
She pulled on a nightgown, perfumed herself, climbed back into bed. The house was very quiet. She had a notion to sneak down the hall, listen outside Nancy's door, perhaps even go in there and make a scene.
The thought of Jack and Nancy's bodies entwined in the dark, moving with an old, familiar rhythm, a regenerated passion, brought on such anger, such jealousy that she growled deep in her throat.
For a second she was unable to breathe. She sat up choking, fighting to get air into her lungs. She needed her father! Only the sound of Kip's voice would calm her. With trembling fingers she reached for the phone, dialed the Brooklyn number. It was one in the morning, but Kip never minded being woken by her. At the other end the phone began ringing. She pictured Kip hearing it from the depths of a dream and slowly turning in his bed, snapping on the light. Then she realized he wasn't answering, wasn't there. She let it ring a few more times, and hung up. Probably he was with his lady friend. Heavy tears began to roll down her cheeks. She wondered if it was true that she and the cook were related and if Helen knew and despised her even more for a coarseness, a poverty that would never go away. In her mind her face swelled up till it was the size of the cook's beneath that hideous hairnet and her eyes grew as bulgy, and that was how she saw herself, a fat, ugly serving woman, as the door opened and Jack walked in. Her own perfume was in the air, but she smelled Nancy's, and her body, as it rose from the bed, felt the heat and swelter of the kitchen downstairs and the tingle of ostracism on her skin as she entered the dining room alone, Mrs. Jack Woolsey, who didn't belong there and never had and never would. And although she didn't think this with her mind, she understood in her blood the craziness of her mother as she grabbed a vase of flowers from the desk by the bed and threw it with all her might at Jack.
Cover Image: Karolina Grabowska