The White Rose (34 page)

“Are you all right?” Sophie says, with real concern.

“I don't think so,” Oliver manages. It comes out hoarse, and barely audible.

“Are you lost?”

He shakes his head.

“Are you…Did you want to talk to me about the flowers? For the wedding?”

Oliver looks at her. He hasn't done the first thing about the flowers for her wedding. And now, just thinking about the flowers for her wedding fills him with abject misery. “I'm sorry,” he hears himself say. “I feel terrible about what happened.”

She frowns. Oliver notes the faintest of freckles on her skin. Those circles under her eyes—he hadn't seen them before. Maybe they weren't there before, or maybe he just hadn't noticed. But how could he not have noticed? He has missed so much, he thinks.

“You came all the way up here?” Sophie asks. “To apologize?”

“Yes!” Oliver says, with some relief, and truthfully enough. He has in fact come all the way up here to apologize, albeit not to her.

“Well, it's not necessary. I shouldn't have run out like that. I've actually been meaning to phone you, myself.”

“You have?” he asks, astonished.

Sophie grins awkwardly. “Not that you haven't seen crazy brides before…”

“You are so beautiful,” says Oliver.

They look at each other in shock.

“I won't take it back,” he tells her.

Sophie nods. “All right.”

“Don't ask me to,” he adds, sounding very nearly angry.

“All
right
,” she says.

The door opens. Someone pushes past them, up the stairs.

“Would you like to go somewhere? And talk?” says Sophie.

Oliver nods.

“My apartment is—”

“Yes,” Oliver says, and walks past her, quickly, terrified to make contact. After the smallest hesitation, Sophie comes, too, then passes him to show the way, walking slightly ahead and not looking back. They cross Amsterdam and walk east on 118th, to Morningside Drive. He knows the address. He has written it himself, week after week, and taped it to a bowl or a vase of white roses, and given it to Bell for delivery, but he has never been here, himself. He follows Sophie inside the building, past the slumbering doorman, into the ornate, aged elevator. He won't meet her eyes, and neither of them says a thing.

There is exactly one thought in Oliver's head, and that is the remembered patch of revealed abdomen between the misaligned buttons of Sophie's flannel shirt. Whatever presents itself as an impediment to that patch of skin will have to be swept aside, he is thinking. Not because the hunger he feels is carnal—not merely that—but because he feels he is
supposed
to put his hand on her there, and then his mouth, and when he does these things he will understand why he is following Sophie Klein to her apartment, so full of longing that he wonders how he can survive the walk, and the wait, though it's measured in minutes, and then seconds. She is clattering her keys ahead of him in the narrow corridor. She is turning the key in the lock, then turning around to face him, her back to the open door, and then they are both inside.

He touches her face and her throat, the long thick plait of her hair. He touches her hand. It never occurs to Oliver that she does not want him to do these things. Sophie stands perfectly still, her breath shallow. “I want,” he begins to say, but the object of his want escapes into redundancy. He wants everything: her hair, which is somehow unbound around them, and her breasts under his hands and her mouth, amazingly open, and at last, the white skin of her belly, which he goes down on his knees to press his cheek against. He is not confused about where he is, or whom he's with. Whatever disquieting thoughts occur to him—the fact that he is in love with Marian, for example, the fact that Sophie is engaged to Barton—he beats back and then returns to her, and to the amazement on her face. She holds him very tightly. “Sophie,” Oliver says, kissing her throat and asking permission.

It afflicts him that another man might have touched her like this, but only until he is inside her. When he is inside her she looks at Oliver as she cannot possibly have looked at anyone, ever, ever, and he understands for the first time what it means to a woman to be, actually, penetrated by another person, and the privilege of that, and the joy of that, which is so much more than physical. Tenderness passes between them as they move, first slowly, then less slowly. Sophie pulls him against her, and he opens his eyes to watch until she stops and is very still. She is so lovely, he thinks. She breaks open his heart.

“Oh, don't cry,” Sophie tells him, but he does. And then she does, too.

“I'm involved with someone,” Oliver says, sobbing.

Sophie's fingers move in his hair. “What a coincidence. Me too.”

Without stopping crying, he laughs. Then he asks her what they are going to do.

“I don't know,” Sophie says.

They lie in some discomfort on the hard floor of her entryway, their clothes detached and strewn about them. Sophie's hair falls over Oliver's face like a veil. The afternoon light fades through Sophie's living-room windows, and the shadows edge up the hallway to where they are lying, and finally it is dark everywhere.

“My father's dying,” says Sophie.

Oliver opens his eyes. He can't see a thing in the dark.

“Sophie,” he says, “I'm sorry.”

“He has hepatitis,” she says. “We found out last winter. It was just after I met Bart.”

Oliver's head is on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. “Yes.”

“The crazy thing is, all this time I've refused to see the connection.”

Oliver concentrates. Across the city, a siren whines. A thought occurs to him, but in a delayed, sluggish manner. “Isn't hepatitis…I mean, can't they cure that?” he says.

“Hepatitis A, they can cure. Hepatitis B. Unfortunately, our letter came up C.”

“And that's…”

“Bad.”

It's so cold now. The bare floor is cold. Oliver turns tightly toward her until his face, at least, is warm.

“How long…,” Oliver begins to ask. “I mean, what are his doctors saying?”

“Oh,” she says, “I don't think doctors tell you anymore. They didn't tell us, anyway. Maybe we just didn't ask. He was hospitalized last summer, then for a week in September. They keep switching the drugs, but it's sort of a diminishing return, you know?”

Oliver nods against her chest. She is, he realizes, both obstinate and wretchedly frail. Like himself. Which also, and just as suddenly, occurs to him.

“You lost your father,” she says, matter-of-factly.

“Yes,” he confirms.

“Did you get over it?” Sophie asks.

The unwelcome image of Henry Rosenthal shudders into his head. “No,” he says.

“But you have your mother?” she asks, her voice cracking a bit.

Oliver lifts the hair from over his face. He can see her eyes. “Sophie,” he tells her, “you won't be alone.”

As if to prove this, the telephone rings. Sophie flinches.

“I don't have to get that,” she says, unconvincingly, but when Barton Ochstein's booming voice begins to fill the apartment, she curses and scrambles to her feet. Oliver watches her move, naked, down the corridor. “I'm here,” she cries, snatching up the phone.

Oliver sits, his back against the entryway wall. His sweater hangs on by one arm. His pants and shorts bunch stupidly at his ankles. He can hear Sophie, muttering agreements, giving nothing away. “Oh, no,” she says, with false empathy. “Well, I'm sure that's fine. Okay. Okay. Yes, you too.”

Oliver stands and pulls up his pants. He puts his other arm into the sweater and pulls it over his head. Then he walks down the corridor.

Sophie is sitting on a stool, next to the kitchen counter. Oliver's flowers—his, not Barton's—are on the counter, failing. One rose droops down to the butcher block, forlorn. The call is over, and Sophie leans forward, forearms together on the Formica surface. Her hair falls over her shoulder, nearly obscuring her breasts, her ribs, but oddly not her face. “That was Barton,” she says, unnecessarily.

“I gathered.”

“He doesn't want to have the rehearsal dinner at the inn after all,” she says. “He managed to get his plumbing parts delivered. For the downstairs bathroom.” She trails off. “At his house. So he wants to have the dinner there.” Sophie pauses. “He's very proud of his house, you know. He likes people to see it.”

“Sophie,” Oliver says.

“I said it was fine. I don't really care about it one way or the other. And my father loves Bart's house.”

“
Sophie
,” he says sharply. “What are you talking about?”

She looks up at him and frowns.

“My father…You should have seen him when he met Bart. When I started seeing him, my father was so thrilled.”

Oliver shakes his head.

“It's…He thinks of Bart as someone who will keep me safe. Do you understand? Because he won't be here,” Sophie says, stumbling over her words. “And he's right. I'll be safe. I don't feel anything.” She laughs, a strained laugh. “How safe is that?”

“You can't marry him, Sophie.”

“I realize that,” she says. “But I can't not marry him, either.”

Oliver is about to ask for an explanation, but he stops himself. He doesn't feel entitled to the question. Instead, he looks away from Sophie and takes in what he can see of the apartment: the view of the open sky over Morningside Park and Harlem beyond, a few paintings, a wall of bookshelves. Over the kitchen table is a framed poster bearing the black-and-white image of a woman's wide face, her dark hair parted far on the side of her head, with German text. It announces an exhibit, Oliver thinks, or perhaps an academic conference. He peers at the title,
Die Weiße Rose
, deciphering the language as best he can. Then he understands.

“Is that your white rose?” he asks Sophie.

She looks up and nods. “Yes. That's Sophie Scholl. She was a member of the group.”

“I think you said…did they…” He can't quite make sense of the word, it's so medieval. “She was…beheaded?” Oliver asks.

Sophie nods. “All of them. They arrested them, interrogated them, tried them, and beheaded them. All in the space of a few days.”

Oliver stares at the woman. She looks about fourteen.

“She was so brave,” Sophie says. Her voice shakes. “She had everything to lose. She was a privileged member of Nazi society, and she risked it all. I, on the other hand, have nothing to lose, and I'm such a coward. I'm not even brave enough to do this one thing.”

“You can ask for help,” he tells her.

Sophie bites her lip. She sighs the way you sigh after tears: ragged and bereft. Then she looks at him.

“Will you help me?” says Sophie.

Oliver walks across the room to her, and she stands and faces him. She is almost his height, and much thinner than he had thought. Her hair, unbraided, comes down to her waist and shines in the dark. Standing so close to her, Oliver understands that all of his debts have been canceled, and all contracts dissolved, and that he has done nothing to merit that, nor bring it about, but that is not what stuns him most. What stuns him most is how this long and fraught day has hurtled to its necessary end, how its every twist and encounter has brought him here, to this room and this woman—and not just here, but peacefully here, because now, at last, he knows the thing that is wanted of him, and that he wants it, too.

Y
ou can hurt me.

Just before noon on Monday, Marian walks down Park to Fifty-seventh. As she turns east to cross the wide avenue, she is hit by a glare of sunlight and shuts her eyes tightly. But it isn't really the light, or not only that. In fact, she has been dreading this moment all the way here, all thirty blocks of the way, and yet, of the many other routes she might have taken, she still chose this one. For this purpose, she thinks now. For the specific pain it promises. Well, all right then. And she opens her eyes, and looks.

Just there. The traffic island, in the middle of the avenue: the precise last place she saw Oliver. She saw him in her rearview mirror as she drove off, furious and not at all sorry—at least, not sorry then—because he had stormed out of her car and her life and their love affair. Gone. So gone that she can barely remember, now, how he looked, standing there with his weekend bag and his petulant, childish—yes,
childish
!—expression.

You can hurt me
, she thinks again, her hands deep in the pockets of her heavy coat. Those words, they've been haunting her all morning, dogging her down Park Avenue. Two months ago she had let those words ruin an entire weekend she had planned to spend with Oliver. One of the few weekends, she now knew, that she would ever have with him. Why the words should have come back to her today has been a mystery until this very moment, but now, looking across the traffic at that small perch of cement, she understands. She could hurt him, yes. She was capable of it, yes, and he had given permission for it, yes. But here, exactly here, was where she had finally done it.

Marian clenches her hands inside her pockets. Only in the past couple of days has winter finally beset Manhattan, first one brittle frost and then a curtain of icy rain. Not that she hasn't felt cold for weeks, she thinks, and jittery, and certainly distraught. Because once the cushion of her rage had passed, that afternoon (and it passed so quickly, she had barely made it home in time), all the rest of her repertoire of caustic emotions had rushed in to fill the void: raw pain, blaring regret, every hoarded self-recrimination of the past six months. Those had been bad days, their only blessing that Marshall was not due back from his trip until the following week. She had unplugged all the phones, not so much to keep Oliver from getting through as to keep herself from calling him. This was good, she had concluded, somewhere in the middle of that rotten time. This was good. The affair had ended, as of course it had to be ended, from the start. Maybe, moreover, it was the best of all their possible endings: angry but at least fast, nasty but at least clean. And best of all, Oliver thought he was the one who had ended it.

Still, she sighs, looking across the moving traffic; some irrational woman in her head is disappointed, because Oliver is not, actually, still on that traffic island right now, just as she left him, two long unhappy weeks ago. Wilted to the spot in sadness, perhaps? Stubbornly waiting for her to pick him up? Sitting cross-legged atop his weekend bag with a baffled, all-is-forgiven expression? Oh don't be so dramatic, she tells herself. There is no one on the traffic island, as it happens, or only a copper-haired woman on a cell phone, waiting for the light to change. The light changes.

You can hurt me
, Marian thinks, walking forward, eyes straight ahead. She had done just that. She walks through the space he occupied, and then she keeps walking.

Ten minutes later, Marian steps into P.J. Clarke's and takes off her coat, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The long-fabled bar is full of men drinking their lunch, and she steps carefully between bodies toward the restaurant. She is late, but not very late, and when she gives her name to the maître d', he nods curtly and turns, gesturing over his shoulder. Marian follows, carrying her coat, fighting her apprehension.

Caroline sits near the back of the restaurant, her menu open on the red-checked tablecloth. She looks very thin—nearly gaunt, thinks Marian—but she is also lovely. Her short hair is cut in the same style as last spring—the last time they were together, and memorable to Marian for so much more than their chance encounter—but it is now peppered with gray. Caroline looks up and waves, and when Marian reaches her, Caroline gets to her feet and offers not the kiss Marian expects, but a real hug. Marian, after the smallest pause, hugs back.

“How are you?” Marian says as they sit.

“Actually, I'm all right,” says Caroline. “I know I'm not supposed to be, but the amazing thing is, I am.” She smiles, shaking her head. “That's your cue to tell me I'm in denial, or something.”

“Wouldn't dream of it,” Marian says. “If you feel all right I won't argue with you.”

“I wish everybody else felt that way,” she says. The waiter comes and stands by the table. Without a word, he conveys the hostility of service traditional to P.J. Clarke's. “Shall we have a drink?” says Caroline.

“Oh, why not. A
real
drink. No wimpy wine.”

“A sidecar!” says Caroline, with delight. “Remember?”

“How could I forget? Two sidecars, please.”

The waiter, with a grimace, goes away.

“When I was seventeen, one of the waiters here had me in tears,” Marian says.

“You took it personally.”

“Yup,” she says. “I always did, whenever anyone behaved badly. Now I couldn't care less.”

Caroline laughs. “An advantage of getting on in years. Right?”

“Well, there ought to be a few.”

Marian looks over at the next table. A four-top of generously proportioned men in suspenders are cutting into thick steaks.

“Time stands still,” she observes.

“Oh, I don't know,” says Caroline. “I was sort of thinking of a steak, myself.”

“Good. I know they say you can't be too thin, but you look too thin.”

Caroline looks up. “It hasn't been a walk in the park. It's been a hard time, if not exactly a shock. But I've had a chance to think about what I want to do now, and I've discovered that there
are
things I want. Once you know what you want, everything sort of brightens up, you know?”

“You get to go and get it.”

“Precisely. Ooh, good.”

Their drinks arrive. They are bright orange, electric with Cointreau and cognac.

“To your mom,” says Caroline, lifting hers. “She would be horrified.”

“Yes! Imagine! Women, in P.J. Clarke's!”

“Dining alone!” Caroline adds.

“But we're not alone, we're together.” Marian sips. The drink is heavenly and absolutely lethal. “Oh my God. Wasn't this restaurant in
The Lost Weekend
? Now I know why.” She smiles appreciatively at her glass. “It's a good thing I canceled my office hours this afternoon. Please tell me you're not driving home.”

Caroline shakes her head. “I'm not driving home. I'm staying in town. I have an appointment with a broker tomorrow at nine.”

Marian looks at her. “You're moving back. Is that what that means?”

“That's what it means,” says Caroline. “When you live in Greenwich for thirty years and still tell people you're from New York, it's really time. Don't you think?”

Marian nods. It takes her a moment to work through the anxiety this announcement produces, but once she does, Marian is happy. The waiter materializes, silent and expectant. “Do you know what you want?”

“Um…shell steak. Rare, please,” says Caroline.

“I'll have the spinach salad.”

He takes their menus and goes away.

“He ought to have one of these,” Caroline says, laughing and lifting her glass.

“Have you told…your son?” says Marian.

“Oliver,” Caroline says, actually reminding her of his name. “Yes. He's happy about it. Well, I think he's happy about it. He's a bit obscure these days. He's certainly thrilled that Henry's gone, though of course he's concerned for me.”

“Of course,” Marian mutters.

“When I told him Henry was seeing someone, he was so angry. I think he was angrier than I was.”

Marian, who does not trust herself to say the right thing, merely nods.

“But he's never been…forgiving of Henry, you know? He lost his father at exactly the wrong moment for that.”

Marian carefully sips her drink. “You mean, he idolized David.”

“He was old enough to have memories of him, but not old enough to see his flaws. Henry would have had to be superhuman to satisfy him. Not that Henry didn't try. He used to take Oliver to the Met, but it was pointless. Oliver hates music. He once took him to a ranch in Wyoming. They even played in a father-son tennis league one summer. After a while, I think Henry just kind of cut his losses.”

Their waiter stands beside them, waiting to be acknowledged. The two women lean back in their seats. Marian makes a point of not looking at him. “Two more sidecars, please,” she says as he sets her salad down with a
thwack
.

“Mmm,” says Caroline. “Red meat. I love it.”

“Good. Eat it. You need it.”

Caroline picks up one of the thick steak knives and cuts.

“You said it wasn't a shock,” says Marian. “Did you know he was seeing someone?”

Caroline nods. “Well, I knew he was gone all the time. And I knew he was with her. But she's got the highest profile of any client he's ever had, so it didn't seem out of order. Then in September we ran into her at a benefit, and when I met her I thought there might be a problem.”

“Because of how they behaved?” Marian asks.

“No. They were very good, both of them. It was how she behaved with every other man that night. There were ten of us at the table, and every single one of the men was sitting up straight and holding his stomach in. She's just one of those women…” Caroline trails off. She cuts another piece of her steak.

“Those women?” Marian prompts.

“Those women. You know, they're not even all beautiful, though this one is, of course. But you're not on the radar with them unless you have a Y chromosome. They'll talk to you, they'll stand a few feet away and look you in the eye, but they won't see you. You almost can't blame them—it's like they're missing the rod or the cone they'd need for you to be visible. But with a man they just come alive. Men
adore
them. Men just drop their lives to get a woman like that. I mean, isn't that more or less what her husband said?”

“The one she's divorcing?”

“Yeah,” says Caroline. “I read this in the
Ascendant
. He met her at some political fund-raiser, and of course she made a beeline for him. He's worth—what?—a hundred million? He said she just made him
feel
great, the way she
looked
at him, the way she
talked
to him. Do you know how to do that?”

“Nope,” Marian says.

“No. And neither do I. So anyway, it was out with his old wife and in with her.”

Marian sets down her glass. “Okay. Then what went wrong?”

“What went wrong,” says Caroline, “is that the husband made the mistake of thinking his new wife would then stop making
other
men feel great, and she didn't. I don't know,” Caroline shrugs. “Maybe she couldn't. So now there's the little problem of the hundred million and the iron maiden prenup and the four-year-old daughter who vitally needs shiatsu massages and a Louis Quinze escritoire for her playroom.”

“You know,” Marian says pointedly, “you don't seem very angry, Caroline.”

Caroline looks up. “Trust me. I'm angry. I'm angry that he made it through all the hard parts, like raising a kid who wasn't his and watching his wife become middle-aged, and
this
is where he loses it. And I'm furious at him for making me a stereotype. But I'm conserving my energy for myself.”

“Bravo,” Marian says.

“No, really.”

“Yes. Really. I think you're great.”

Caroline deflects the compliment. “When it occurred to me that I could sell the house and move back, you know how I felt? I felt like the sky was splitting open and light was just pouring through. I should have done it years ago, when Oliver went to college, but we were just very stuck in there. Or I was. Well, I thought we both were.”

“What will you do when you get here?” says Marian, immediately worrying that the question might offend Caroline, but she doesn't appear offended.

“Not sure. Well, I'll do more with the Ballet Guild, I suppose. As for the rest, I'll probably volunteer. Maybe dust off my social work degree.”

“Right!” Marian says. “I forgot you went to Hunter.”

“And never practiced,” Caroline says. “Isn't that terrible?”

“No,” Marian says evenly, “that was life happening to you. That was getting married and moving out of the city and having a child.”

Caroline shrugs. “I could have gone back to it, but things never seemed to settle down. First I was going to start work when Oliver went to school, but then David was killed. And then Oliver was sick, and I just couldn't.”

Marian goes slightly numb. She takes a careful sip of her drink and says, “Oliver was sick?”

“He had leukemia,” says Caroline, looking up. “You didn't know that?”

Marian shakes her head slowly, willing her face to be still.

“The year David died. Actually, we found out just before the accident. It went on for about a year.” She suddenly frowns. “I never told you this?”

“No,” Marian says.

“Well, they treated him with Cytoxan, which was pretty new then. We were extremely lucky,” she says.

“This was in Greenwich?”

“No. Sloan-Kettering. I took an apartment near the hospital.”

“You never called me,” she says, stricken. “I would have come right away.”