A Certain Age (14 page)

“The Big Bad Wolf?”

“I'm not joking. Do you make a habit of this kind of thing?”

“I've never done this kind of thing. But you're my cavalier, Mr. Rofrano. You're here to watch over me, isn't that right?”

He looks down at her with shocked eyes and doesn't reply.

Sophie puts her hand on his, there on the fence rail, her thick woolen mitten on his leather glove. “I'm not stupid, Mr. Rofrano. I'm not as sheltered as you think. I know what a good man is. I know whom I can trust. I wouldn't get into a car with just any old fellow, would I?”

He glances down at her hand on his, and then—a little slowly, as if the act requires courage—returns his gaze to her face. He looks so somber! Sophie wants to wrap her arms around his waist and lay her head on his chest. She wants to pour comfort between his ribs, to anoint his troubled forehead.

“No, you wouldn't,” he says.

He's wearing a peculiar expression now, one that Sophie can't fathom. His lovely straight nose is red from the cold. So are his lips. His eyes, out here in the winter sun, have turned the most beautiful shade of arctic blue, like the water beneath an iceberg, and Sophie loves all these colors in him. Isn't it marvelous, Sophie wants to say. Isn't it simply marvelous being here in this January field with you. Isn't it marvelous just to be
alive
with you, breathing in all this bracing air, blinking our eyes, beating our hearts, alive,
alive
.

“You're sensational,” he murmurs, so softly that Sophie isn't quite sure she heard him properly.

She leans forward. “What's that?”

“Nothing.” He picks up her hand and kisses the back of the mitten, right before he tucks the arm back inside his elbow. “Come along, Miss Fortescue. I think I have something else to show you, on the way back to New York.”

THE ROADS ARE QUIET AND
empty as they curl their way southwest. The shoreline makes a sharp right turn at the New York border, Mr. Rofrano explains, and if you stand on a Connecticut beach and gaze out to sea—Long Island Sound, that is—you'll be facing due south. Not until Massachusetts does it all straighten out again, everything in its rightful place, the foam-topped Atlantic Ocean stretching eastward to the brink of Europe.

“To France,” Sophie says. “Do you think someone will ever fly across in an airplane?”

“I expect so, eventually. If we want it badly enough.”

“Did you ever want to try?”

“I don't know. I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Not even when you were young?”

He laughs. “I'm not
that
old, am I?”

“I mean before the war.”

Mr. Rofrano quits laughing and rubs his leathery thumb against his forehead. The air inside the Ford is close and smoky, filled with human scent. “Maybe I did. I guess we were all full of dreams, then. But it was all a tin-pot fantasy. The airplanes we had then, they were just wood and glue and canvas. Then the war came in and the airplanes got better. They got a lot better, real fast—that's war for you, I guess. But we lost the nerve. We stopped dreaming. All we dreamt about was fighting. Fighting and surviving the fight. Flying across the ocean, well, there wasn't much object in that.” He pauses. “And then all the good pilots got killed.”

“Not all of them.
You
weren't killed.”

“I got lucky.”

“And you were good, too.”

He shrugs.

“I'll bet you were really good, weren't you? I'll bet you were the best pilot in your squadron.”

Mr. Rofrano finishes the cigarette he's smoking and tips the stub into the draft. They're approaching a village of some kind, a few tired clapboard houses huddled against the edge of the turnpike. “Yes,” he says, slowing the car, bouncing over the frozen ruts, and then, “Could you open up the basket in the back? I could use a ham sandwich.”

BY THE TIME THEY RETURN
to the Boston Post Road, the afternoon is turning middle-aged and the ham sandwiches are all gone. Mr. Rofrano stops at a service station for gas. He checks the oil and the tire pressure. They had a flat a while back, and Sophie helped him patch it up. “You know something about cars, do you?” he said, and Sophie smiled and said
A little
.

But she took in his admiring smile and thought, Mr. Rofrano is the kind of man who likes girls who know something about cars. That's something, isn't it?

“Where are we now?” she asks, peering out the window. The persistent sunshine has warmed the air a few degrees, and the low fieldstone wall rimming the roadside has lost its bluish cast. (
Real
cold—not thirty degrees or twenty degrees but even lower, that genuine frigidity that visits New York only a few times each winter—has a special color all its own.)

“Just outside of Stamford.”

“And where are we going? If I'm allowed to ask.”

“Sure you can ask. Doesn't mean I'm going to answer you.”

She pulls her head back in and looks at him. Possibly there's a smile curling up the corner of his mouth, but it's hard to tell. She reaches out to take his chin and get a better look. “Oh, you're joking, aren't you?”

“Maybe.”

“You've got a bit of ham, you know. Right there under your lip.” She brushes it away. “Am I allowed to guess?”

He turns back to the road. “Go ahead.”

“Is it in Connecticut?”

“Yes. Barely.”

“Greenwich?” she guesses. (Greenwich lies close to Stamford, doesn't it?)

“Yes. A part of Greenwich.”

“Near the water, or away?”

“Near the water. It's where I grew up. Since I was eight years old, anyway.”

“Your childhood house! Does your family still own it?”

“No.” He pauses. “My aunt had it sold when Mama died. Some family from New York bought it. They use it as a summer place.”

“So nobody's living there now?”

“I guess not.”

The road's paved all through Stamford and into Greenwich, and the Ford runs reliably up and down the hills, past the farms and houses and the clusters of storefronts. Here and there, in the hollows and in the lees of the buildings, piles of crusty gray snow still linger from some earlier storm. Sometimes Long Island Sound flashes into view, in between the brown slopes and the barren trees, and Sophie says something about how you can see things better in winter, without all the leaves.

“That's my favorite part,” says Mr. Rofrano. “That's what we get in return for the cold. You can see all the hidden things.”

“Yes!” Sophie says eagerly, because when she tried to explain this to Julie Schuyler one afternoon, walking through the park, Julie only laughed and told her she was a funny thing. Julie said that she hated winter, that she was going to marry an extremely rich man just for the purpose of having a house to move to during the winter, somewhere south where it never got cold.

“In France . . .” Mr. Rofrano begins promisingly.

“Yes? In France?”

He leans one elbow on the edge of the doorframe. “I missed the autumns here. The good old New England autumn. You don't get all the colors there.
The maples and the birch and the elm. But especially the maples. I missed the maples.”

“Maybe that's why you came home,” Sophie says. “For the maple trees.”

“Maybe so.” But his tone is too thin, too agreeable, and Sophie knows he's not telling her the truth. Not all of it, at any rate.

“Well, whatever the reason, I'm glad you did. I'm very grateful you came back home.”

He doesn't reply. He doesn't say a word, in fact, until they turn off the post road and onto an unpaved street, lined with elm trees at perfect intervals, leading south toward the water. They pass under the railroad tracks—the New Haven line, Mr. Rofrano tells her, when she asks—and then up a winding hill that flattens out into a straight and empty street. Each enormous house is set at the center of an immaculate dun lawn, and the boxwoods have been tucked under burlap for a long winter's sleep.

“Welcome to Greenwich,” Mr. Rofrano says, and there is just enough irony in his voice to make Sophie wonder.

A FEW MINUTES LATER, MR.
Rofrano parks the Ford under the far-reaching skeleton of an oak tree and points to a large white clapboard house. “That's it,” he says.

“Your old house?”

“They've painted the trim green,” he says. “It used to be black.”

“It's very pretty. Who had the turret bedroom?”

He drums his thumbs against the steering wheel. “I did.”

Sophie opens the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To walk around, of course. Nobody's here.”

Sophie marches forward across the lawn, without looking back, and a moment later the car door slams shut behind her. She smiles and tucks in her muffler. A set of wicker furniture remains on the porch, although the cushions have been removed. She settles herself in a chair and nods at Mr.
Rofrano as he climbs the porch steps and comes to a stop before her, hands on hips. “Join me? I'm afraid there's no lemonade.”

“There's a better view out back, you know. Clear across the sound to Long Island.”

“Oh, why didn't you say so?”

She springs back to her feet and follows Mr. Rofrano around the side of the house—the porch is wide and continuous, containing all the artifacts of summer living, down to a swing that creaks in some faint current of air—until they turn the corner and find the capacious terrace. More wicker. Mr. Rofrano pulls out a chair with flourish. Sophie nods her thanks and sinks into her seat. Before her, the lawn swoops straight down to the water, and the wind hits her hard enough to hurt.

“It's a bit nippy,” she admits.

Mr. Rofrano sits down beside her. “Well, that's what makes it such a great summer place. The breeze off the water. Right down there, now, that's the boathouse. Poppa taught me to sail in that harbor.” He pauses. “Well, that's not true, exactly. He had a fellow come out from the club, a sailing instructor. He taught us together.”

“But that must have been wonderful! Learning how to sail with your father.”

“You think so? The club instructor didn't think much of it, that's for sure, a gentleman who couldn't sail. But we weren't like the other families around here, the society families. My grandfather was born in Italy. He came here with his family in the seventies, when he was about thirteen or fourteen. They started a shop, made some money, and then Nonno met my grandmother on the El one morning. Fell in love. She was Irish.”

“Oh, my. I'll bet your great-grandparents didn't like that.”

He chuckles. “The families weren't too happy about it, but it seems Poppa was on the way already, so they got married and made the best of it.”

“I can just picture the wedding. All those disapproving parents scowling at each other, and your grandparents dancing together in the middle.” Sophie laughs. “Did they live happily ever after?”

“More or less. That's how I remember them, anyway. Smiling at each other. Arguing and then making up. Nonno took over the grocery, and then Poppa landed a job as a runner at Sterling Bates, right out of school, and worked his way up to stockbroker by the time he was twenty-two.”

“Ambitious?”

“I'll say. My mother, she was one of the partners' daughters. That's how we ended up in Greenwich, you know. Poppa didn't want her to have to leave her own kind, if you know what I mean. So we moved out here, and he did his best to fit in. The sailing, I mean, and tennis and all the rest of it. They sent me to prep in Massachusetts.”

“How did you like that?”

“It was all right. My mother's family kept up the school fees after Poppa died. They set up a trust for us both.” He takes out a cigarette. “It wasn't the same, though. Summers weren't the same without him. Quiet and awful. The summer before college, it was just like . . .” He fumbles with his lighter, which turns shy before the wind, and at last he turns his back to the sea to shelter the flame.

She waits until he lights the cigarette, until the smoke streams confidently from the tip and the smell of tobacco reaches the roof of her mouth. He is so lean, she thinks. Lean and bony. Obstinate jaw and cheekbones covered by fresh new skin, made ruddy by the cold. Her fingers are numb inside her mittens, and the wind bites her nose. “Could you see the sea from your turret window?” she asks.

Mr. Rofrano's hand halts at his lips, and for an instant Sophie catches a stricken expression on his face. He lowers the cigarette, without inhaling, and says, “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, it's just a dream of mine. When I was a little girl, I used to wish I had a turret window, overlooking the sea. Wouldn't it be wonderful? You could sit and read there, and when you looked up, the sea would be right there. You could daydream for hours.”

Mr. Rofrano leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees, and knits his hands together. The cigarette sticks out between his knuckles, flaring
orange in a sudden gust. Sophie follows his gaze, out past the shoreline, and for the first time she notices an island, about a half-mile out to sea, and a stone lighthouse squatting at one end, its tower sticking up like an overgrown chimney from the plain square house of the lightkeeper. She opens her mouth to ask Mr. Rofrano about the island and the lighthouse—did he ever land there in his sailboat, has he ever been inside?—but he speaks first.

“Yes. Yes, I could see the sea from my room.”

Sophie stands up. “Can we go inside?”

“Go inside?”

“Why not? Nobody's there. And you lived there once; it belongs to you.”

“I don't think the police would see it that way.”

Sophie lifts her hand to her brow and makes a show of looking around them. “I don't see any police, do you?”