A Certain Age (23 page)

But the Boy doesn't smile, only lifts his eyebrows expectantly. I ask him if he's seen the lucky man lying around somewhere.

“Lucky man?”

“Why, my brother, of course! I seem to have lost track of him. I don't know if you've caught sight of his fiancée, but she's making a real stir out there. I'm wondering if it's time to make the toast before someone gets hurt.”

The Boy's eyebrows aren't satisfied with this answer, but he makes the best of it. “Right over there,” he says, after only a brief pause, and I follow his nod to a cozy pair of armchairs next to the fire, where my brother sits deep in single-malt conversation with my nearly ex-husband, cigars twirling in the breeze.

I clap my hands, and the room snaps to guilty attention.

“Gentlemen,” I announce, “if you'll snuff out your cigars and follow me to the drawing room, it's time for our main attraction.”

BY THE TIME WE REACH
the drawing room, I've exchanged the Boy's arm for that of the lucky man, who seems to have developed a case of the nerves.

“You're awfully quiet, Ox, for a man who's about to see his dearest dreams come true.”

“That's why I'm quiet.”

“Ox.
You,
superstitious?”

“There's such a thing as things going too well, Sisser,” he whispers back.

“Nonsense. Buck up. Have you seen her dress?”

“Sensational, isn't it?”

“I suppose that's one way to describe it.”

We turn the corner from the hallway, and Rio de Janeiro spreads out
before us, populated by a throng of overdressed and half-ossified New Yorkers from the very best families. You can pick out Miss Sophie Fortescue right away. She's the one holding a glass of champagne (a different one from the first, I'll bet) and surrounded by all the admiring gentlemen, lapels flapping in eagerness to make a good impression for that moment (soon enough, they'll bet) when the joys of matrimony wear thin.

The orchestra leader is watching me dutifully. I make a signal.

Trumpet flourish.

Only a short one, however. I enjoy a touch of the theater, but everything must be in good taste. Even my palm trees contain just three or four imitation cocoanuts each. I lead my brother along the obedient parting in the crowd, in the manner of a father walking his daughter down the aisle, to the exact circle where the delectable Sophie awaits, holding her champagne against her cherry-red breast, admirably collected, betraying not a single stray nerve.

But there's something wrong, isn't there? I've seen plenty of aspiring brides in my time, believe me, and none of them regards the approach of her beloved with that kind of coy arch to her eyebrows, with that kind of mischievous curl to her bottom lip. As if she's got a secret she's just bursting to tell us all. She lifts one hand to fiddle with the tiny beads at her throat, and I'm only slightly mollified to see that she's still wearing her engagement ring, which splinters the light from three separate electric sconces and sends it dancing in graceful leopard-spot patterns on the walls.

The warning bells clang in my head. I have the strangest idea that I've transformed into Charon, and am leading my poor unwitting brother into the underworld. His palm is awfully damp next to mine. So maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe he's feeling this, too.

A swell of applause lifts us along the final steps. Nothing to do but go on, straight into the teeth of Miss Fortescue's mischievous smile.

“Mesdames et messieurs.” I reach her and take the ringed left hand into mine, so that I'm standing at the intersection of Fortescue and Ochsner, holding a hand from each, a human link between fiancée and fleeced. “My dear friends. I am so
delighted
to have you join us this evening, as we cel
ebrate the engagement—at
long
last—of my darling brother Jay, the light of my life, the thorn in my side, and once the most confirmed bachelor of my acquaintance”—my God, the girl is absolutely squirming now, like a fish on a hook—“to my dear and lovely sister-to-be, Miss Sophie Fortescue. Miss Fortescue—
Sophie
—let me be the first to embrace you, before I turn you over to my eager brother—”

“Actually—” says Miss Fortescue, just as I turn to plant a quelling kiss on that dewy young cheek.

“And now, I give you Ox!” I exclaim, slinging my brother into her arms, in an effort to stifle what comes next.

“Actually—” she says again, and I signal desperately to the orchestra leader, who whips the musicians into a noisy fox-trot. Ox wraps his hand around her waist and snatches her fingers, spilling champagne on the floor, as if I gave a damn about floors at the moment.

“ACTUALLY—” she shouts, above the music and the applause and the laughter and Ox's frantic dancing. “EVERYBODY! WAIT!”

She tugs herself free from Ox's embrace and staggers to the orchestra leader, and I'll be damned if she doesn't snatch the baton right from the poor fellow's hand. The musicians—astonished, rudderless—trip all over the notes and land in a discordant heap atop the next measure.

“That's better,” says Miss Fortescue, and she doesn't need to shout this time, because the room has fallen into the most delicate, primeval silence. She spins slowly to the bodies arrayed before her, all the rich and the great in this fair city, and not one of us can move a finger. Not even me. Certainly not Ox. We wait—breathlessly, fearfully—for her to speak.

The mischievous smile is all flattened out, replaced by a most solemn, big-eyed charm. She touches her rippling hair with one hand and lifts her half-empty champagne glass with the other.

“I'm afraid there's been a change of plans,” she says.

When you see what some women marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

At the very same instant

F
OR THE
first time in over two weeks, Sophie experiences a moment of doubt.

Julie warned her about this, so it's really no surprise—standing there in front of all those legendary people, wearing a daring dress, holding a champagne glass and a ridiculous baton—that the nerves jolt back to life and fizzle under her skin. The beads stick to her rakishly exposed back. Is it her, or has the room grown intolerably humid in the past few minutes? Or perhaps that's all part of Mrs. Marshall's tropical theme.

Just remember what you're trying to achieve, darling,
Julie said.
Remember the alternative if you fail.

The alternative. Sophie glimpses Jay, entombed in shock at the front of the crowd. A terrified lock of hair has broken free from the glossy shield on top of his head, to drag untended across his brow. Poor Jay. Was she really in awe of him once? He looks like a schoolboy in the grip of some terrible aging disease. A cocoanut hovers dangerously above his skull. He will be terribly, terribly
disappointed, won't he? But he'll get over it. Some other girl will accompany him to South America, if she can afford it. Some other girl will make the bargain.

As all these women have. They are all ages, spread out before her, all stages of love and matrimony and divorce. All hair colors, all shapes, all degrees of beauty. Some are dressed fashionably, some frumpily. Some entertain glints of intelligence in their eyes, and some are irreversibly dull. But they have all exchanged their independence for security. Not one woman, Sophie's willing to bet, ajoins her husband right now, like a loving married couple. Not a Vanderbilt, not an Astor, not a Morgan nor a Schuyler nor any other of the illustrious names ringing in Sophie's ears, the people with whom she will be expected to associate, as the wife of an old Knickerbocker scion.

Not one of these women has earned a single penny in her life, has she? Her clothes, her apartment, her house in the country, her jewels, her shoes, the bottle of milk in her icebox: all of them have been paid for by the industry of some other person. She is beautifully, uselessly, benevolently beholden. Left to herself, she couldn't possibly sustain this luxury. She couldn't even sustain necessity.

And Sophie's the same. Her father's money, her father's hard-earned patents. He did it all for Virginia and Sophie, he says, so they would be comfortable. And they
are
comfortable! But they're beholden. She and Virgo are in his thrall, just like every woman in this room exists in thrall, whether she realizes it or not. Whether she resents it or not.

As for the men. Equally variable. Some have earned wealth, and some have inherited it. Some—like Jay himself—are required to marry it. But would Sophie want to marry any one of them? Exchange the thrall of her father for the thrall of someone else?

There's been a change of plans.

Sophie is not going to marry Jay Ochsner. She's not going to live under her father's roof, spending her father's money, marrying a man of her father's choosing. No, not any longer. Not another minute!

Sophie's going to take an apartment with Julie Schuyler. She's going
to apply for a job in an engineer's office, or a manufacturer of some kind, answering telephones if she has to, studying at night, taking on more and more responsibility, until she's huddling over the sketches and blueprints herself. Until she's designing and building things herself. She'll be in thrall to her boss, maybe, but it's a different kind of thrall. An honest, democratic thrall, with no hypocrisy attached to it.

Everyone's getting a job. Well, so is Sophie.

She lifts her glass a little higher and thanks God there's no sign of Octavian, no reproachful eyes to overturn her resolve. Instead, there's Julie Schuyler, golden and smiling. She stands just to the right of center, waiting for her cue: not far, in fact, from the tropical figure of Mrs. Theresa Marshall, whose elegant face is now splattered with horror.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sophie begins, and that's all that anyone ever hears of Sophie Fortescue's declaration of independence, because the crack of a gun echoes madly down the corridor and off the walls of Rio de Janeiro, setting the cocoanuts to trembling, and everybody just screams.

The New York Herald-Times, June 2, 1922

TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

Well! It seems your humble correspondent still possesses the capacity to be surprised, after all. We all filed into the courtroom this morning, expecting to be regaled with blood and gore courtesy of the much-risen-in-the-world Mrs. Lumley, and instead the prosecution—with a decided air of triumph—called the splendidly named Mr. Giuseppe Magnifico to the attention of the court.

Who is Mr. Magnifico, you ask? Why, none other than the gardener, about whom much has been rumored but never proved, for the simple fact that he could not be found. Well, he's been found, dear readers, and I must urge you to dismiss any small children and otherwise delicate minds from the room, for the substance of his testimony proved more shocking and morally degenerate than we newspapermen could have dared to hope.

He is a colorful character, Mr. Magnifico, and fully worthy of his name. He plays to type with extraordinary precision, down to his baroque black mustache and his extremely slick hair. He seemed, of all things, to desire the admiration of the court stenographer, a most stern and high-necked lady of perhaps thirty-five or forty, and bent himself to this task with utmost charm, though the lady (to her credit) gave him no encouragement whatever.

Possibly she was too busy transcribing Mr. Magnifico's sentences, for there were many of them, often long and tangled, and always entertaining. I am afraid I shall have to summarize, or I shall never meet the six o'clock deadline mandated by my long-suffering editor.

Mr. Magnifico, I am sorry to report, was indeed engaged in a friendship of an immoral and adulterous nature with the victim, Mrs. Virginia Claire Faninal. I must admit that I cannot blame her entirely, when I compare the earthy—if rather viscous—charm of Mr. Magnifico with the charm entirely absent in the accused,
he of the Wright Brothers ears. It was Mr. Magnifico's belief (confirmed, so he claims, by Mrs. Faninal herself) that the child she was shortly to deliver redounded not to the credit of Mr. Faninal, but to that of his humble gardener, who, by virtue of his profession, apparently knew a thing or two about planting seeds.

Now, these revelations are not altogether surprising in themselves. You will remember that we, the curious public, suspected as much, following those hints that made their way into the fact-hungry press when some enterprising reporter first obtained notes from the interviews given to the Greenwich police department by the now-Mrs. Lumley, in the days after the murder itself. (Let it be a warning to all persons contemplating the sin of adultery, that the kitchen maid will inevitably know your secret.) But Mr. Magnifico has now confirmed before the court what was previously mere speculation, on the part of Mrs. Lumley and the investigators themselves, and what is more, Mr. Magnifico explained, shaking his head, he did not believe that he was the only person enjoying the favor of Mrs. Faninal's fair company.

At this, the accused himself did not wait for his attorney, but rose to his own feet and objected to Mr. Magnifico's claims as speculation.

No, Mr. Magnifico insisted. He himself had witnessed Mrs. Faninal so engaged while Mr. Faninal was away from the house, though, out of respect, he would refuse to name publicly the occasion or the man. But he would say this: that he believed Mrs. Faninal was neither morally corrupt nor weak-willed, and that her actions were the result of some sickness of her mind. He had, in fact, ended the liaison for that reason, and he was afraid for Mrs. Faninal's health when he did, so dramatic was her reaction to this dismissal.

Mr. Magnifico said much more, of course, but those were the points most relevant to this case, and as I still have the contributions of Mr. and Mrs. Lumley to relate, I am afraid I must refer you to the rest of this newspaper for a more comprehensive account of Mr. Magnifico and his testimony.

After such exhausting entertainment, I suppose we were grateful for the evidence of the next witness, Mr. Lumley, the husband of the one-time kitchen maid, whose ascent into respectable matrimony and motherhood should be applauded as the very apex of the American Dream.

A small, plain man, Mr. Lumley seemed to have been called by the prosecution to vouch for the respectability of his wife, an office he performed admirably, if rather snorishly. Under questioning, he asserted that which we already knew: that
he met her some two weeks after the murder, when she dined alone at the Bluebeard Restaurant in Scarsdale, an establishment owned by him at the time. As he had not followed the case in the newspapers—he is not, it seems, a man interested in sensational news, preferring instead to fix his attention on the business pages, poor fellow—he did not recognize her face. He was, however, struck by the air of fetching distress that surrounded her (her pretty face, one presumes, had nothing to do with it) and upon learning of her role in the affair, was moved to do the chivalrous thing and marry her. (His face, as he regarded his wife, contained a commendable trace of tenderness, which did him much credit in the eyes of the courtroom.) Had she ever spoken of the events of that day? the prosecution delicately inquired, and he said that of course she had, at the outset of their friendship, but she had scarcely ever referred to it since. She had wanted to put such a distressing affair behind her, and he had quite understood her reluctance. A terrible affair, he said, shaking his head, and I believe I caught an extremely quick glance directed at the accused: one sharp with rebuke.

He seemed to be speaking the truth, too, for Mrs. Lumley, who made her entrance after the noontime recess, appeared reluctant in the extreme to discuss her recollections of that fateful day. She glanced often in the direction of the accused, though under her brow and in such a manner that communicated her unwillingness actually to meet his eye. Nonetheless, she answered the questions put to her without additional prompting, and so we learned how, on the morning in question, after cleaning the upstairs rooms, she came down to discover the body of Mrs. Faninal lying on the kitchen floor, and the pathetic figure of the youngest Miss Faninal, smeared with blood, kneeling next to her mother, urging her to wake.

Mrs. Lumley maintained her composure throughout this description, though her face was pale, and I believe her fingers shook. Her husband, now sitting in one of the rear benches, fixed a sympathetic eye on her throughout. She confirmed her suspicion that Mrs. Faninal had indeed seduced the gardener, Mr. Magnifico, into an adulterous association, but she would not speculate on the parentage of the unborn child. She insisted, however, that Mrs. Faninal was an excellent mother in all respects, almost too doting, especially on the younger child. At this point, she seemed to seek out the faces of the accused's daughters in the crowd, and her expression of agony is impossible to describe, leading one to comprehend some inkling of the dreadful scene in the Faninal kitchen that morning.

The prosecution then gently steered her toward the facts of the discovery: the
kitchen door left ajar, the kettle left whistling on the stove. Mr. Faninal had left for his workshop early that morning, as was his habit, and to her knowledge he had not returned, though as she was upstairs, in the rooms facing away from the street and the front drive, it was, she agreed, possible that she hadn't noticed.

The defense then climbed to its feet. In her opinion, asked the accused's attorney, was Mr. Faninal aware of his wife's adultery? Did he ever display any hint of jealousy?

Mrs. Lumley's plump face softened into compassion. She had no way of knowing, for Mr. Faninal was in all ways solicitous of his wife and her welfare, and his obvious grief upon learning of the tragedy had struck Mrs. Lumley's heart with deep force.

You may well be astonished by this revelation, for the court certainly was. Until now, we had heard nothing—and seen nothing—to dispute the notion that Mr. Faninal was a cold, determined, charmless man, and a father who kept his daughters under the most rigorous control. But Mrs. Lumley, as she spoke, regarded the accused with true feeling, though Mr. Faninal sat with bowed head and did not make any sign that he comprehended her.

We were thus left, on this extraordinary day, with the most extraordinary surprise of all: the possibility that Mr. Faninal might not prove the cold-hearted murderer we imagined.

Or perhaps he will. In a week or two, I suppose, we'll have the final verdict.