A Certain Age (32 page)

There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

Crossing the Third Avenue Bridge into Manhattan, an hour later

J
AY NEEDS
a cigarette. He asks Sophie if she minds.

“Not at all,” she replies. Who cares about a cigarette, after all? Sophie doesn't. The top is down, the warm draft whips away the smoke.

“You all right?” he asks, after he's put the cigarette case safely back in the inside pocket of his jacket

“Not particularly.” Her voice is braver than she expects. That's something, isn't it?

“Poor Sophie. I'm awfully sorry. I suppose he wasn't much of a father to you, but—well, it's an awful way to go, a damned shame that you were there—”

And Sophie begins to laugh, just high hysterical giggles rippling out over the Harlem River, louder and faster and louder. She bends over, clutching her ankles, staring at the floorboards, gasping for air, and each time she thinks she's got herself under control, the giggles bubble back up in her throat.

And that's when she realizes that her shoes don't match.

BECAUSE JAY IS SO ABSURD.
Sophie's not really thinking about her father, is she? Not yet. That's too immense to comprehend, too stunning, the sight of her father flinging himself upon her just as Lumley fired his gun. The little jerk his body made as the bullet penetrated his back and sliced through his heart, stopping the muscle instantly. The police said she was lucky the shot didn't find her, too, but apparently her body crashed to the ground at just the right angle. The spent bullet ended up striking the wall instead.

That her father—her father!—just died, died just now, is no longer alive, has snuffed out his own life to save her life, because Mr. Lumley was going to shoot her: my God, that's too much to think about. There isn't even any pain, just the numb list of Things She Must Do. Find Virginia and communicate this development, before the newspapers generously handle that task on her behalf. (The reporters were already gathering outside the Pickwick Arms, clamoring for information, and Lieutenant Curtis had to escort the four of them—Sophie and Jay, Octavian and Mrs. Marshall—out through a hidden back door and a dark-shrouded basement that looked suspiciously like an underground saloon.) Make funeral arrangements. (Where on earth did you bury such a man? Greenwich? New York City? Boston, where he was raised and disowned?) Lawyers. Money. Personal effects. All those things, lining up like shocked miniature soldiers at in the center of her mind, while a single question pounds and pounds at the back of her mind:
WHY?

Why would her father submit to a verdict of guilty in the murder of his wife, when he hadn't committed the crime?

Because he hadn't committed the crime. He didn't murder his wife. Sophie knows that now. She knows that as surely as she now understands the terror that inhabited her body while she ascended the elevator in the company of Mr. Lumley, sucking his peppermint candy in greedy smacks of his tongue and mouth.

But she will never know why, or how, because her father is dead. She will never speak to him again. She'll never know who he really is, who he really was, and it's
that
—the shock of a story cut off in the middle, a life cut off in the middle—which she can't comprehend. Can't stretch her mind to encompass.

It's over. She's safe. And her father is dead.

And the front of her mind? That's occupied, too. Stupidly occupied by another thought entirely, by an image: the image of Octavian, escorting Mrs. Marshall quietly to his green Model T, opening the door for her, settling her inside. His face absolutely still, not even looking her way. Not even a parting glance, as the magazines called it. She heard the motor start, the pistons settle. The smell of exhaust.

The thing about Mrs. Marshall, she's so good at managing everything. The graceful way she extracted Octavian from Sophie's side, the way Sophie found herself being led tenderly away by Jay Ochsner, while Octavian performed the same service for Mrs. Marshall. How had that happened? A few smooth words, a limpid gaze. A strange air of inevitability. Octavian didn't even struggle. Like an animal led to slaughter, except he was doing the leading. He tucked Mrs. Marshall's hand into his elbow and escorted her downstairs like the most delicate creature, which Mrs. Marshall certainly was not. Delicate. My God. Those shoes. How did Sophie come to wear one brown shoe and one black?

The car is pulling over to the side, slowing, stopping. The brake sets with a groan. Jay's arms surround her shoulders. “Poor Sophie,” he croons. “Poor little dear. What a shock. No wonder.”

His chest is nice and warm. She lets her head rest there for a moment. She thinks of the way Octavian held her hand in the hotel bedroom, the way his palm felt around her fingers. He didn't say anything, just allowed the understanding to flow between them, because he had just killed a man for her sake, hadn't he? He had killed Lumley for her. They were united in a deep and primitive way by this terrible thing. Death. And now Octavian was unspeakably comforting her, and she was comforting him, and in that singular moment she wasn't alone, and everything was going to be all right.

“It's all right, darling,” Jay says. “It's going to be all right. I'll take care of you, darling, don't worry about a thing. Jay will take care of you.”

Her head's so heavy. Jay's shirt is rumpled and damp, and Sophie realizes she's crying. That her giggles have turned into shameful sobs.

“Jay will take care of you,” he says again, stroking her arm, and Sophie closes her eyes and thinks,
No, you won'
t.

THE TRAFFIC'S AWFUL, AND BY
the time they turn the corner of Thirty-Second Street, Sophie has recovered her composure. She feels, in fact, quite clearheaded. She will telephone Mr. Manning and schedule a meeting for this afternoon, in the firm's offices downtown, to sort out the events of this morning into some kind of logical order, to solve whatever mysteries can be solved—Mrs. Lumley is still alive, after all, still able to explain some part of the story—and in the meantime she will take a long bath and a nap. She will change clothes. She will summon the servants (surely they will have appeared by now) and explain the situation, or what she understands of it, and Dot will make her some lunch. Once all the practical affairs have been concluded, she will join Virginia in Florida, and they will decide what's to be done. What they will do with their lives. Sophie's not certain what that means, but she does know that it won't include Jay Ochsner. Maybe not even any man at all, ever. She doesn't seem to have much luck with them.

The car rolls to a stop, and Sophie doesn't wait for Jay to set the brake and walk around the fender to open her door. She reaches for the handle and helps herself.

“Sophie! Wait!”

She takes the key from her pocketbook and opens the door. “Come on in,” she says, tossing her hat on the stand and the pocketbook on the table. “I won't be a moment.”

When she arrives back downstairs, Jay is standing in the parlor, hat between his hands, as if he's not quite sure whether he's been invited to stay. Sophie pauses on the threshold, squinting a little at the polite figure he makes, planted near the window, through which the golden afternoon sun is still pouring. The diffuse light is gentle on his worried forehead.

She steps forward and holds out a square box of navy-blue leather, stamped in gold. “Thank you,” she says.

He stares at the box, and then at her face. “
Thank
you?”

“You've been very kind. I appreciate your driving me home. But I can't marry you, and I don't wish to raise your hopes. It's simply impossible.”

He stands there, a bit stupid with shock, a few steps away. His hair's all broken up into thin, greasy pieces from the drive, and his eyes squint in the sunshine. His poor suit, all rumpled. He turns his head a few degrees, taking in the decoration of the nearby wall, and says, “You do know that Rofrano's my sister's lover, don't you? They're planning to get married, once she divorces her husband.”

“I know that.”

“And you don't care? You don't—Look, Sophie.” He turns back to her, wearing a look of pathetic appeal, like a dog that doesn't realize it's no longer a puppy. “I know I'm not young and brash, like these bright fellas out there, but I do love you. I've stood by you, all this time.”

“You've stood by me? Or my money?”

He winces. “By you. I won't say your money wasn't a part of it, in the beginning. But I really—I came to care for you. It's true. And I've already sowed my oats, Sophie. I'm ready to settle down and be a husband to a nice girl, a sweet loyal girl like you. I think you'll see, when all the shock wears off, that—”

“No, Jay.” She says it kindly. “It's not the shock. It's just impossible. You know it is.”

He looks down at her hand, which is still outstretched, containing the navy-blue box. The rose-shaped Ochsner engagement ring.

“Jay. Please. Let's be dignified about this.”

He says something, a couple of words she can't hear. He lifts his head, and good gracious! His eyes are actually wet. Wet and blue. But he takes the box anyway, and then holds her hand in his soft, damp palm.

“Then I guess it's good-bye,” he says, and he leans forward, kisses her cheek, and walks back down the hallway and out the door, settling his hat on his hair as he goes.

A man is like a cat; chase him and he will run—sit still and ignore him, and he'll come purring at your feet.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

Fifth Avenue, the same moment

T
HERE'S NOTHING
like the scent of your own home, is there? I don't mean how it ordinarily smells, when you're living in it—that smell you don't even notice, because it's always there, and so are you. I mean the peculiar perfume that greets you when you've been away, the delicate balance of wood and paint and plaster and upholstery, stripped of your own living essence: just the substance of the house and nothing else.

Of course, the Marshall apartment on Fifth Avenue is never exactly empty. There's the housekeeper and the cook and the maid, all of whom live in, in the old-fashioned manner; and there used to be Sylvo's valet, too, before my husband moved into his bachelor digs on Lexington Avenue. Moreover, I've only been away for a single night. Since yesterday morning, by my calculation.

Still, that single night has aged me like a lifetime, and the air that rushes through the opening of my own dear front door goes straight to my solar plexus, as if I've embarked on a voyage around the globe since I last stood here.
Home,
it says.

I close my eyes briefly and turn to the Boy.

“Why don't you fetch us both a drink, hmm?”

HE OBEYS ME SILENTLY, AS
he always does, measuring tonic and gin in perfect three-to-one proportion. I notice his hands, as he serves me: how large they are, compared to mine, and how they remain rock-steady throughout. To think he killed a man, just this morning.

I sink into my favorite armchair. The Boy remains standing, near the window, the one facing west over Central Park. The shadow of the awning runs across his body in an acute diagonal line from right shoulder to left hip, slashing him into two pieces: light and dark.

“Come sit down,” I say. “I can't see your face like that.”

“I'm sorry.” He moves forward a few steps, but he doesn't sit. Instead he props himself on the arm of the sofa opposite and swishes his drink. The other hand rests on his thigh.

“Ox tells me you shot Lumley between the eyes.”

“I didn't have much choice.”

“Poor fellow. An awful thing, jealousy. Drives one to the most terrible extremes. In France, I understand, they have a special exculpation for such crimes.”

“I suppose so.” He opens his mouth, as if he's going to say something more.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, really. Just something Sophie said.”

I swallow down the rest of my drink. The tonic is fresh and crisp, the gin pleasantly anesthetic. “Oh? And what did Miss Faninal say? Something clever, I suppose?”

“Not that kind of thing. It's just that she had the feeling, when Lumley turned around to shoot her, that he was involved somehow. In her mother's murder, I mean.”

“
Lumley
? My goodness! Did she remember something at last?”

“Not exactly. Just a flash. An intuition, I guess. She was there when it happened, after all, even if she was just a little kid.” He shrugs. “I'm not sure that it really matters, anymore. They're both gone.”

“No, that's true. But
Mrs
. Lumley remains very much alive, if memory serves, and I suppose that clever Lieutenant Curtis will discover the truth soon enough.” I hold out my glass. “Would you mind terribly? I'm parched.”

The Boy levers himself from the sofa arm and takes the glass from my fingers. I watch him cross the room, marveling at the economy of his motion, the apparent laziness that disguises his efficiency. No one I know walks quite like the Boy. I wonder, sometimes, if the war turned him into this perfect machine, or whether he was always thus. I find myself wanting to ask how he's feeling, what it's like to kill a man, does he want to talk about it. Instead, I tell him he's looking rather haggard, which is also true.

“I didn't get much sleep last night,” he says.

“Why not?”

Clink, clink,
goes the ice. The liquor cabinet's always kept in flawless order, according to the season. In June, the ice is changed three or four times a day, whether or not we've used any. Just another of the little luxuries we swells command, up here in our monumental Fifth Avenue apartments.

The Boy answers. “Because I slept in the Ford, outside Sophie's house. She was staying by herself, and I was afraid those damned reporters would find her.”
Phisht,
spits the tonic from the siphon.

“Oh, of course. How gallant of you.”

He adds lime and returns to me. “I waited for an hour at Delmonico's, but you didn't turn up.”

“I was tied up in Connecticut. Didn't they give you my message?”

“Eventually.”

I pat the cushion next to me. “Sit.”

He sits. He's left his drink on the cabinet, half empty, and he knits his empty fingers in the slight gap between his knees. “Look. I've been a heel, haven't I?”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“No, I have. And you've been as patient as a saint. Let's just forget the last few months, all right? We'll go away for a few days, a week or two, and get back to where we were. I'll be the man you deserve, just like I promised. I was thinking we could head out to California right away—”

“Darling. Look at me.”

Gracious, he looks haggard. And I'll be damned if it doesn't actually suit him, somehow. When the bloom's off his cheeks, and his unusual seawater eyes have lost their sparkle, there's nothing left to admire but his good solid bones, the admirable heft of his brow and jaw. Yes, he's grown into a man, my Boy, over the past two years. He'll make a strong husband, a dependable father.

There is a slow flutter in my belly, like the wings of a butterfly.

I set down my drink and put my hand on the Boy's cheek.

“Dearest,” I say, “I have something to tell you.”

INDULGE ME FOR A MOMENT.
I suppose you might have been wondering about Mrs. Virginia Fitzwilliam, there at the back of your mind, at least until more important matters came along. You might have been wondering exactly how we went from a little confession—a dangerous thing, I'm told—to a pair of train tickets down to Miami. It's really rather simple, and I must say I'm proud of myself. A little maternal advice, it seems, goes a long way.

After Mrs. Fitzwilliam told me about her father's infatuation with the kitchen maid—how she saw them embracing in the library once, how the electricity between them was of such a curious voltage that it caught the notice of a nine-year-old girl—and how she carried this suspicion on her shoulders like one of those old-fashioned farmer's yokes, throughout the entirety of the next sixteen years, I put my arms around her and told her not to worry. At the time, I thought she was right, that her father had kept his silence in order to spare Mrs. Lumley any further questions, and that really it was a generous act, a graceful way for a murderer to pay his debt to society and to his daughters.

“And what about you, my dear?” I then said. “What will you do?”

She was silent, and I thought,
The poor dear.
The poor brave motherless creature.

I said, “Do you still love him?”

She knew I was no longer speaking about her father. “Yes,” she said.

“Do you believe he still loves you?”

“Yes.” Again. But it was a sob.

I was conscious, as we sat there on the sofa, of little Miss Evelyn Fitzwilliam, drinking her lemonade and eating her cookies in the other room. Who had looked after the girl, all those hours that her mother sat in an overheated courtroom? Some woman from the hotel, perhaps. “At least you have his daughter,” I said.

“A daughter he's never even met.”

At which point, Miss Evelyn herself toddled through the doorway, crumbling cookie in hand, looking a bit like her mother in her cheeks and hair, but something entirely different around the eyes. Something rather wild and beautiful and promising that raised all kinds of curiosity inside me. She turned her head a few degrees to the side and regarded me, trading my curiosity for hers, and a pair of words floated, uninvited, across my head.

How extraordinary.

So what else could I do,
in loco maternis
? What else could I do, except to give that broken, heavily yoked Mrs. Fitzwilliam an encouraging squeeze about the shoulders, and the best advice available from the vast four decades' store of my experience?

“Well, then, my dear,” I said briskly. “I think it's about time you did something about it. Don't you?”

BECAUSE, EVENTUALLY, WE ALL COME
upon that point of decision. The point at which you must act at last, for good or ill, and I suppose the choice you make, in that instant, represents the true nature of the bargain you have negotiated with your Creator. What sort of person you are. What sort of
person you will be. What sort of soul you will, one day, commend to His keeping.

I stroke the Boy's cheek with my thumb, and I notice how wizened the poor digit looks, how sharp the nail, next to his new, clean skin. And we were so happy together, once.

“My precious, precious Boy,” I whisper. “I think it's time for you to go.”