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By Root 1332 0

in Trenton. Stepping into her bedroom was like entering the pages of Madeline itself. On one wall was the austere dining room of Madeline’s convent school, on another, the girls’ echoing dormitory. All around the room multiple Madelines were doing brave things, one making a face (“and to the lion in the zoo Madeline just said ‘poo poo’”), another balancing like a daredevil on a bridge over the Seine, still another lifting her nightgown to show off her appendicitis scar. The deep, squiggly greens of Parisian parks, the repeated motif of Nurse Clavel “hurrying faster and faster,” steadying her wimple with one hand, her shadow elongating with her premonition that “something is not right,” and, over by the light socket, the one-legged soldier, on crutches, beneath the caption that said, “And sometimes they were very sad”—the sense conveyed, by the illustrations, of Paris, a city as orderly as the girls’ “two straight lines,” as colorful as Bemelmans’s pastel palette, a world of civic institutions and statues of military heroes, of cosmopolitan acquaintances like the Spanish ambassador’s son (a dashing figure, to Maddy, at six), the storybook Paris that wasn’t without hints of adult error or misfortune, that didn’t candy-coat reality but faced nobly up to it, the singular victory for humanity a great city represented, and which, though vast, didn’t scare Madeline, who was so small—somehow all of this had communicated itself to Madeleine as a little girl. And then there was her name, so similar, and the familiar signs of class, and the sense she had of herself, then and now, as being the one in a troop of girls a writer might write a book about.

Nobody had wallpaper like hers. Which was why, as she grew up on Wilson Lane, Madeleine had never torn it down.

It was sun-faded now, and peeling along the seams. One panel, showing a Bouvier in the Luxembourg Gardens, was stained yellow from a roof leak. If moving back in with her parents didn’t feel regressive enough already, waking up in her old bedroom, surrounded by the storybook wallpaper, completed the process. Therefore Madeleine did the most adult thing she could do now, under the circumstances: she reached across the bed with her left hand—the one bearing the gold wedding band—and patted the bed to see if her husband was lying next to her.

Lately, Leonard had been coming up to bed around one or two in the morning. He found it difficult to sleep in the double bed, however—he was having insomnia again—and often moved to one of the guest rooms, which was probably where he was now. The space beside her was empty.

Madeleine and Leonard were living with Madeleine’s parents because they had nowhere else to go. Leonard’s fellowship at Pilgrim Lake had ended in April, a week before the wedding. They’d lined up a sublet in Provincetown for the summer, but after Leonard had been hospitalized, in Monte Carlo, in early May, they’d had to give the place up. Returning to the States, two weeks later, Madeleine and Leonard had moved down to Prettybrook, which, in addition to being a peaceful place for Leonard to recuperate, was within reach of top psychiatric care in Philadelphia and New York. It was also a good base from which to start looking for a Manhattan apartment. In mid-April, while Madeleine had been honeymooning in Europe, letters from graduate admissions programs had made their way, via the Pilgrim Lake post office, to Wilson Lane. Harvard and Chicago rejected her, but Columbia and Yale sent letters of acceptance. Having been turned down by Yale the year before, Madeleine took pleasure in returning the favor. She didn’t want to live in New Haven; she wanted to live in New York. The sooner she and Leonard found a place there, the sooner they could begin putting their life—and their eight-week-old marriage—back together.

With that end in mind, Madeleine got out of bed to call Kelly Traub. She used the phone in Alton’s upstairs office, a small beige room, at once cluttered and highly organized, that looked down on the back garden. The room smelled like her father, even more so with