The White Rose (36 page)

“Well, you're a better person than I am, Caroline, because I'm not sorry for him at all. I disapprove of Valerie's tactics, but I probably share her theory about this wedding. I think that's exactly what it is. The family name may not mean much to me, but it certainly does to Barton, and according to him, it certainly does to the prospective father-in-law. I do feel bad for the girl, though. I mean, unless she really loves him, and that's pretty hard to imagine.”

“But what's in it for her if she doesn't really love him?” Caroline says. “She must care for him.”

Marian sighs. “What do you think I should do?” she asks. “Should I warn them about Valerie?”

Caroline considers this, then shakes her head. “You can't stop it. Why add any more stress to the next few days? I'm sure they're under enough pressure, getting everything ready. And anyway, the Kleins are probably used to having horrible things written about them. You don't make as much money as Mort Klein's made without attracting the envy of strangers.”

Marian nods. “I think you're right. About Klein, too. You need a tough skin to be that successful.”

“As I'm sure you've discovered, yourself,” says Caroline kindly. “I admire you, Marian. You wear your own tough skin very well, I think. Very gracefully.”

Marian looks up. Ever ungifted at accepting compliments, she finds herself awkwardly touched, and grateful. “Thank you,” she says, meaning it.

“I remember thinking that last spring,” Caroline tells her. “You remember that day we ran into each other in front of Oliver's shop?”

Marian nods. She does remember that day.

“I thought something had changed about you. Or not a change, exactly, but that you'd sort of grown into yourself.”

“Grown into myself,” Marian laughs, deflecting.

“I mean, you know how every woman is supposed to have a magic age when she's never more lovely? Lillian Hellman said that, didn't she?”

“A woman not known for truth telling,” Marian comments, but still smiles.

“No, but she was right about that. Every woman does have her magic age, and when I saw you that day I thought it must be yours. Maybe your book was part of it. Maybe the success it had, and your pride about what you'd accomplished. That's all right. What I'm talking about, it's not the same thing as vanity. I remember thinking…” She stops. “This is going to sound bad.”

“Tell me,” Marian says.

“I remember thinking, I'm glad she wasn't an especially pretty girl, and I'm glad she wasn't a cute college coed, because if she had been, she wouldn't have this, now.” Caroline looks up at her. “I was so happy to see you, Marian.”

The check lands between them on its china plate. Both women reach for it.

“Let me,” Marian says. “I'm a rich author.”

“Let
me
. I'm a rich divorcée.”

They both laugh.

“You know,” Caroline says, “I think she has to love him. I mean Barton. Who are we to say? You can never tell why people get together. Or stay together. Can you? Or even split up, I guess. It's all a mystery…” She throws up her hands and smiles. “Great wisdom, right? From the fountain of age.”

Marian, her throat suddenly tight, can only nod.

“Only first, do no harm. That's my philosophy,” says Caroline.

She gives a girlish grin, and suddenly Marian can see Caroline in all her magic ages, all at once: the child Caroline in her ballet leotard, and in her velvet dress, and then the young woman Caroline in her smart violet Pucci shift, and then the settled, matron Caroline that afternoon in Greenwich, with eleven-year-old Oliver out in the backyard. She sees Caroline at forty-eight, with her fabulous cheekbones and graying hair, and then she sees Caroline of the future, thinner still and frailer, but also lovely, still lovely, walking on Fifth Avenue with her old friend, which for the briefest moment makes Marian want to cry with happiness. But she doesn't. Instead, she reaches for Caroline's hand across the table and squeezes it. “Welcome home,” she says.

J
ust after one
P.M.
on Monday, Oliver sits by the phone, knowing it is about to ring, but then when it does ring the sound of it shocks him anyway. The normal shop noises downstairs of opening doors and footfalls on the old floorboards, of paper being ripped from the roll and the r
efrigerator door opening with a suck—they are nearly surreal in contrast with that ringing phone. Oliver forces himself to breathe, reaches for the phone, and says, with genuine breathlessness, “Hello?”

“Olivia!” says Barton, with obvious pleasure. “I'm delighted you called. I must tell you, I'd about given up.”

“I'm sorry!” Oliver says. “I'm sorry for that. I was…confused.”

“My dear,” says Barton. “That is the last thing I wanted. I thought we had a real rapport. I wanted to see you again. Simple as can be. Now tell me, did you love your flowers? They were far from inexpensive, I can tell you.”

Or would have been, thinks Oliver, if you'd ever get around to paying for them.

“They were beautiful, Mr. Ochstein.”

“Barton! I insist upon that.”

“Barton. I would have…thanked you before now, but Dr. Kahn is your cousin. I don't think she would like…”

Oliver waits optimistically for Barton to jump in, but he does not.

“I don't think she would like the idea of our seeing each other, Barton.”

“Oh now,” he says dismissively, “she needn't know. We hardly move in common circles,” he says with a chuckle.

“Oh. Is that so? I thought…don't you have many friends in common?”

“Not really. I doubt
my
friends would appeal to Marian,” says Barton meaningfully. “She's a fairly staid person, you know.”

She is not!
Oliver thinks, instinctively leaping to Marian's defense. But just what is Barton talking about here? Rent boys on Gansevoort Street? Dungeons in Tribeca?

“I think you would like my friends,” Barton continues. “They tend to have open minds. They would appreciate a young person like yourself. They would appreciate all your qualities.”

“I would like to meet them,” Oliver says carefully. “But first, I would like to see you, alone. I mean, if you still want to. I'd like to meet soon!”

It had better be soon. The wedding, after all, is just days away.

“Well, I'm a bit tied up for the next couple of weeks,” says Barton. “How about after the holidays? I would love to come see you in town. I'd make a special trip.”

“No,” says Oliver stubbornly. “Barton, do you really want to see me?”

There is silence on the other end of the phone. Oliver panics.

“Barton, don't you understand how hard this was for me? To phone you? I can't wait until after the holidays!” Oliver says, with quite genuine desperation. “I thought you felt the same way. I mean, all those beautiful flowers!”

In the continuing silence, Oliver's anxiety grows.

“Barton?”

“Just thinking,” says Barton.

“This Saturday?” Oliver suggests, coyly.

“Saturday's bad,” Barton says, understandably enough, given that Saturday is his wedding day.

“Well, what about tomorrow? What about today?” Oliver asks, then regrets it. Today would be problematic. With Marian's wardrobe off limits, he hasn't a thing to wear.

“No, no,” Barton thinks aloud. “I'm afraid I have a lot on my plate up here just now. I have…some people are coming in to see me at the weekend. I really can't make it into town.”

“I'll come up there if you're not coming to town. I can come to where you live! All right?”

There is another pause. Oliver waits like a dread-filled angler. But then comes a twitch upon the thread.

“That would be splendid. If you are really willing to come all this way…”

“I am willing!” cries Oliver, his mind racing. “I'll come to you. You said Saturday was bad. What about Friday?”

Friday is the rehearsal dinner.

“Unfortunately, no. Those people are arriving on Friday. Perhaps…Thursday?”

Oliver considers. Millbrook on Thursday is both temporally and geographically closer to the wedding than Manhattan on Wednesday, but he will have to work with what's available. “Thursday, then. I'll come to your house.”

“No!” Barton says firmly. “Not here. It's in a state. Construction,” he says lamely. “Why not…I know a little inn, not far from here. Very private and very…”

Discreet?
thinks Oliver.

“Just the place for a little quiet time together. Does that sound pleasant?”

“Oh yes,” says Oliver, his thoughts racing. “What's it called?”

“The Black Horse. In Stanfordville. No one will be there on Thursday night, I'm sure.”

Oliver wonders if “no one” means, literally, no one, or only none of the wedding guests, due to assemble there over the following days.

“Barton,” he says, “that would be wonderful. And you'll book the room.”

“No! No!” Barton says quickly. “That is, Olivia, it would probably be best if you booked the room. Use your name, not mine, if you would. Naturally I'll reimburse you…”

Oliver sighs. “I'll book the room. And I'll meet you there at…?”

“Six on Thursday. And Olivia?”

“Yes, Barton.”

“It's a rather restrained sort of place. You know. In case you were wondering how to dress…”

Oliver, pointedly, does not respond.

“Not that your taste is anything but refined,” Barton says, solicitously. “I hope I haven't offended you.”

“I'm not offended,” says Oliver, who actually is, on Olivia's behalf. “Thursday at six, then. The Black Horse in Stanfordville. I'll book the room. You won't forget?”

“I am already looking forward to it!” says Barton warmly.

Oliver hangs up the phone. For a moment he can only stare at it, adrenaline and anxiety coursing through him. He should feel more mercenary, it occurs to him. After all, he does not like Barton, and it appalls him that Barton is conducting an affair on the eve of his marriage—at least until he remembers that Sophie is doing precisely the same thing—but there will be no sense of triumph in these proceedings, and absolutely no merriment. The game may be afoot—and it may, moreover, be his own game—but he feels far from playful now.

Oliver leans forward in his chair, folding his arms on the table's wooden surface and resting his head there. He is exhausted from thinking and planning and then second-guessing every single thing he has thought and planned. He feels depleted from lack of sleep, due not just to the late and fervent nights with Sophie but also to his near-constant elation and also to his near-constant sadness. The elation is for Sophie, the sadness for Marian.

Everywhere in his life is the absence of Marian. It isn't merely that he misses her or that he bitterly regrets the harm he has caused her, and the further harm he will cause when she finds out about Sophie. It's that, in spite of everything that has passed between them, she is the one person he most wants to tell, and talk to, about what has happened to him. More than anyone else—more than Bell, or even his mother—she is the one he wants to know this astounding fact, which is that he has suddenly and without warning discovered the woman he is supposed to be with, whom he cherishes, and who has swept away all others—herself included. Without Marian to talk to, it's almost as if Oliver can't commit himself to an opinion about any of this, still less think his way through what he needs to do, and what he needs to do will require much from him.

Oliver sits up in his chair. He picks up the phone again and calls information for the number in Stanfordville, New York. Barton is correct that “no one” will be in residence at the Black Horse Inn on Thursday night. The helpful young man who takes his name—who takes the name of Olivia Nemo—volunteers that they are quite empty that night. “In fact,” he adds, “I've just had a cancellation for the weekend, if you'd care to stay on. We're fully booked otherwise. A wedding.”

“Oh, that's all right,” says Oliver. “One night is enough.”

The call ends. Oliver sits, brooding.

It's as if the crumbs he has trailed behind him through the forest have all disappeared. He doesn't know where he is, or how he got here; he doesn't understand how, only two weeks earlier, he woke up one morning in Marian's house and went to sleep that night in Sophie's bed, his hands entangled in her hair, his life entangled in her life. Fallen in love, but not out of love—that's how it feels—as if he has been caught in one of those time-lapse photographs, jumping from one point to another and occupying the place he started from, the place he finished at, and every place in between. Why shouldn't he have this happiness, this feeling of completion? Every time he touches Sophie he is more sure. Every time he hears her voice it is both more familiar and more welcome. Most strange of all is that the uncertainty surrounding them—the blatantly unfinished business of her wedding and the grief Oliver nurses about Marian—seems not to have penetrated what is taking shape between them. Of course, of course, Sophie should have ended her engagement months ago, weeks ago, and at the very least, days ago, but Oliver isn't even very angry about her failure to do so, because while her passivity in this matter is certainly frustrating, he understands its cause.

The difficulty, thinks Oliver, getting up at last from his chair and taking his jacket from the closet, is not between Barton and Sophie at all; it is between Sophie and her father. Mort, for reasons Oliver himself can't readily grasp, has a genuine attachment to Barton and obviously believes that he has brought his daughter to the brink of a good marriage. It's her reluctance to hurt him, and not her fiancé, that stops Sophie from acting on her own feelings—or lack of feelings, Oliver thinks, putting his wallet in his breast pocket. She is trapped, quite simply, by her love.

That Oliver—thanks to a bizarre and fairly embarrassing turn of events—happens to know something about Barton that Barton's prospective bride and father-in-law evidently do not, would under other circumstances be irrelevant, but it isn't irrelevant now. This information has become necessary. And in any case, time is now too short to wait for Sophie to suddenly rally and seize control of the situation. When she asked for his help, her problem became his own, and a matter of honor, even while it serves his own ends. He is far from sure that what he intends to do—that the plan on which he has finally settled, after all his exhaustive machinations—will even work, but it has to work, he decides. He can't bring himself to think of what its failure would mean.

The plan isn't so much a strategy as a destination: a room, with three people in it. Oliver knows now when and where the room is—he has just booked it—and he knows who the people are: Barton and Mort, who must reach an understanding together to cancel the wedding, taking the decision out of Sophie's hands and relieving her of its responsibility. The third person is Olivia, whose existence was once a frivolity, but no more. Having now arranged for the meeting of Barton and Olivia in this particular room, at this particular time, Oliver turns his attention to Mort. Getting Mort there is the remaining problem he needs to solve, and soon. But not right now. Right now there is an even more pressing task waiting for him, and he is too afraid of it to keep putting it off.

It's nearly two o'clock now, and downstairs Bell is undoubtedly watching the clock. He has an interview this afternoon at a midtown law firm for an Amy Lowell travel grant, an appointment for which he has borrowed Oliver's only suit. A dreadlocked poet of Jamaican extraction is probably the last person Lowell could have imagined traveling in her name, but Oliver knows how badly Bell wants this. He's never been to Europe or Asia, anywhere, really. Oliver has given him the afternoon off, and it's almost time for him to head uptown.

He puts on his jacket and goes downstairs. Bell, as predicted, is shifting nervously in the unfamiliar suit, standing in the middle of the room, as if he's afraid to get his clothes dirty.

“Hey, that looks good,” Oliver says. “You feeling fine?”

“Feel like shit,” says Bell.

“You want my advice? Tell them you need to see Greece. Tell them you need to drink from the well of Western civilization.”

“Colonial swine,” says Bell.

“Precisely,” Oliver smiles. “That's the point. Take it from me as a white, privileged, Ivy League–educated, heterosexual male.”

“You forgot Jewish,” Bell observes.

“I did not forget. I merely de-emphasized. Look, why don't you just go? I'll take it from here.”

“No, that's okay,” Bell says and shakes his head. His dreadlocks shift against his shoulders. “I can stay till three.”

Oliver smiles. “Bell. Go away,” he instructs. “All is well here. I will see you in the morning.”

Bell emits a nervous sigh. “I'll go. Okay.” He goes into the office and returns with his own coat, which he carefully puts on. Then he leaves.

Oliver steps over to the window and stands behind one of the urns, which he and Bell packed that morning with Boule de Neige. Silently, he watches Bell walk past the theater, the restaurant nestled in the crook of the street, and on to Barrow, where he turns the corner and disappears. The street is empty now. The afternoon is passing. There is nothing else to wait for.

Oliver puts the
CLOSED
sign in the window, turns off the lights, and leaves, walking in the opposite direction, toward Seventh Avenue. He feels prickly and false, as if he is already in disguise and fearing detection, as if anyone might tell, from looking at him, where he is going, what he is doing, which of course they cannot. He goes to Bleecker and looks around for a minute, a stranger in his own neighborhood, only vaguely clear on what he is looking for and how to find it. Then he walks south.