The White Rose (41 page)

W
edding central, Sophie thinks, walking into the kitchen of their Millbrook house and nodding grimly at Frieda, entrenched since the day before in full command mode. The long wooden counter is strewn with yellow legal pads, one of which is being slowly leaked over by a great chrome urn of coffee. The party urn, brought out only for large functions, like her father's historical society meetings, or a wedding.

“No, no,” says Frieda unkindly. “I did not say that. I did not say four to park the cars. I said
enough
to park the cars. There are two hundred and eight guests expected.”

Lacking the physical object of her scorn, Frieda narrows her eyes at Sophie.

“No, I do not think so either. Yes. Twelve. Good. And by four o'clock sharp on Saturday, please.”

Crisply, she puts down the phone, then crisply picks it up.

“Four men! Idiots.”

“Hi, Frieda,” says Sophie.

“Your dress is upstairs,” Frieda says, dialing.

Sophie pours coffee for her father. She stirs in his low-fat milk and Equal, staring dimly out the window over the winter vineyard and the field where the horses are grazing. She can't see Win, her own horse, but that doesn't surprise her; Win tends to favor the shelter at the far end of the barn. The horse Barton rides when he visits is standing at the fence, nose to the ground. Barton is a fine rider, which means a great deal in Millbrook. She wonders if Oliver can ride. Oddly, it has never come up between them. Like so much else, Sophie thinks, stirring.

“Yes,” Frieda says. “I am holding for Mr. Weil. No, thank you, I need to speak with him personally.”

Mr. Weil, Sophie thinks. The cake guy? No. Millbrook Spirits.

“Well, tell him it is Miss Schaube calling. About the Klein wedding. Yes.”

Hostile silence.

“Oh, a small matter of five missing cases. Yes, that is what I said. Missing!”

Sophie closes her eyes. Surreal. Unreal. Or what is that thing people always say? That thing. That whine.
It was a nightmare.
They mean: a missed bus, a lost reservation at the restaurant, a canceled plane at the airport. Only once has Sophie ever heard someone use the expression and felt it was earned, it was necessary. A mother on the news one night, describing the sick, elastic feeling of turning around in the supermarket and finding her child not there, the hours that followed, the not knowing.
It was a nightmare.
Awake but not awake, functional but not really alive.
This
, Sophie thinks, her spoon clattering against the coffee mug,
is a nightmare.

“That will be cold,” Frieda says. “It is for your father?”

“Oh.” She nods. “Yes. Sorry.”

“And that woman called about your hair. She would like to speak with you before Saturday. You need to phone.”

“All right.”

“You want to tell me something?” Frieda says.

Sophie stops. The coffee mug in her hand is indeed cooling.

“Something?” Sophie says.

“Why are we doing all of this?” Frieda says bluntly. “You are not happy about this. This is not a happy wedding.”

“No, it's fine,” Sophie says, automatically.

“Fine. Is fine good enough? You would want your own daughter to be ‘fine' two days before her marriage?”

Sophie looks at her, mildly stunned. There, secreted in the typically blunt and quite accurate observation, is the nearest Frieda has ever come to admitting a maternal sentiment for her. Sophie's instinct is to cross the room and hug her. But this passes.

“Frieda, I know it will work out,” she says instead.

“What? What will work out?”

“Barton has never lied to me,” she hears herself say, as if this were the issue at hand, and not the fact that she doesn't love Barton, she loves Oliver, who loves someone else.

“Your father would not want this, if he thought you were not happy,” Frieda says curtly.

“I know that. Look, everything's okay. I just have that pre-wedding thing. Just…jitters. There's no problem.”

Frieda stares at her. Then—mercifully, without signaling any more disapproval—she picks up the phone again, punches numbers on the keypad, and begins berating the rental agency for having sent the wrong covers for the chairs.

Sophie leaves the room with her cooling cup, her spirits as dull and hard as the stone floor she walks over. The farm has been as much her father's passion as the New York house, and as faithfully restored. Unlike the Steiner mansion, though, this home had spent its entire three-hundred-year existence in the smug cocoon of the non-Jewish elite, and while Jews had inevitably penetrated the Millbrook colony (one had even been admitted into the vaunted Millbrook Golf & Tennis Club way back in 1970), a brief frisson of regret had nonetheless flowed throughout the town when one of its great architectural prizes had passed—twenty years earlier—into the hands of the Chosen. The house Mort moved into then, and brought back to its origins soon after, had been the home of Dutch farmers and English younger sons, gilded members of the Astor 400 and impoverished, downwardly mobile WASPs, thinks Sophie, passing the great staircase and moving into the beamed living room, where her father is sitting before an absolutely searing fire. But never a Jew. Till Mort.

“Wow,” says Sophie, handing him the mug. “Hot enough for you?”

“Actually, no,” Mort says, making a face. “What did you do with this coffee? Bring it by way of the Gulag?”

She sits down on the couch, taking up the Home section and effortfully starting to read an article about a house specially built from recycled materials. As if, she thinks, willing it, the day were ordinary, the wedding unconceived.

“Where's Frieda?” Mort says, sipping his coffee and grimacing.

“In the kitchen. I mean the command center. Doing what she does best.”

“And why aren't you there with her? Don't you have a hundred things to do?”

Sophie considers this question. Actually, she can't think of a thing she needs to do, other than hit her marks and say her lines. And pretend to be happy. She is saving her strength for that.

“Frieda's good at this, Dad. You know that. She likes to expose incompetence.”

“Oh, I know
that
,” says Mort. “Are we seeing Bart tonight?”

Sophie shakes her head.

“No? Wasn't he coming to dinner?”

“He was. But he canceled. He said he had too much to do at The Retreat. For tomorrow night.”

“Ah,” Mort says. “That's going to be splendid. So much more personal than a hotel.”

“Inn,” Sophie corrects.

“Still a hotel. The Retreat is going to be your home. It means more to have your family and Bart's family meet in your home.”

Sophie, fighting tears, nods. She looks determinedly at the fire. Then, composed, she looks at Mort. And he actually
is
crying.

“Daddy,” she says, surprised.

“No, I was just thinking how much she would have loved this.”

Sophie says nothing. She knows who “she” is. They don't often talk about “she.”

“You're going to wear the pearls? With your dress?”

She flinches. Her mother's pearls aren't even here. They're at home. At her childhood home, that is, in her old room. They're in an old Leon Uris hardcover fitted to hide jewelry. (“Burglars,” said Frieda, who gave it to her, “are not book-minded.”) Sophie has forgotten them. Her mother's pearls, for her own wedding. She is a terrible daughter. And she loves him so much, Sophie thinks. “Daddy…,” she begins. “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

“It doesn't really matter,” Mort puts up his hand. “It's a fashion thing, is that it?”

“No, that isn't it.”

“I'm too sentimental. And you know, I don't even believe that stuff.
There in spirit.
There is no spirit. You know that, right?”

Soundlessly, Sophie nods.

“We're alive, then we're not alive. No in-betweens. Yes?”

“Yes,” she says, one hand at her throat, as if the forgotten pearls were there.

“It's just that she would have loved Bart, too. She would have loved so many things about him. She loved men who acted like gentlemen.” He chuckles. “I wasn't much of one, myself.”

“That's not true!” Sophie says, defending her living father to her dead mother.

“Oh, it was true. Back then it was true. I married up, no question.”

He looks at her.

“My God, she loved you.”

All semblance of control evaporates, and Sophie bursts into tears.

“Hey!” her father says.

“Sophie!”

She turns, blubbering. Frieda stands at the edge of the room, phone in hand.

“I'm okay,” Sophie says mechanically. “Is that for me?”

“No,” Frieda says, looking at Mort. “For you.” She covers the phone with her hand. “I am not quite sure how best to handle it.”

This statement, from Frieda, might be considered tantamount to Einstein expressing uncertainty about the theory of relativity. Sophie abruptly forgets why she is crying. “Who is it?” says Mort.

“It's that woman from the
Ascendant
,” Frieda says.

“She's not invited,” says Sophie.

“Yes, but I don't think she's calling about that. She says it's in reference to a story about Barton, for tomorrow's edition.”

Sophie frowns. “She just
wrote
a story about Bart.”

“She said to me,” Frieda announces, with hostility just tempered by confusion, “that Mr. Klein will be very unhappy if he is prevented from commenting on the story, and I will want to put him on the phone.”

All three of them contemplate this notion in silence. Then Mort stands up. “All right,” he says, holding out his hand. Frieda hands the phone to him and he puts it up to his ear. “This is Mort Klein,” he says.

Sophie watches him. He does not move, but his face begins to tighten.

“No,” he says curtly. “Absolutely not.”

Frieda, for once, looks unsure of herself. This is just novel enough to distract Sophie, but only for a second.

“That is an absurd and extremely offensive assertion,” Mort says. “Whoever is feeding you such an obvious falsehood can't possibly be a legitimate source.”

Sophie can hear the sound of her own breathing, open-mouthed and fast.

“Dad?” she says.

Mort puts up a hand.

“Does Richard Stevenson know you're preparing to publish such a libelous and unsubstantiated rumor? Do I need to phone him right now?”

He doesn't look good, Sophie thinks. She hates that he looks like this.

“Yes, of course I'm saying it. Other than that, I wouldn't dream of commenting. Now I need to end this conversation. I need to telephone your employer.” With a punch of his thumb he disconnects the call and then throws the phone onto the couch. All three of them stare at it.

“Daddy,” Sophie says, mystified. “What was it?”

“Frieda,” he says, “would you run and find me Richard Stevenson's phone number? New York and also Sag Harbor.”

Frieda takes the phone and walks briskly away.

“Daddy?”

“You're not to worry about it,” Mort says with false nonchalance. “I'm not convinced she's writing anything at all. She's probably just offended not to be invited to your wedding, after claiming in her column she'd be here.”

“Writing what, Dad?” Sophie says. “What did she say?”

“You're not to worry about it,” he says again, more sternly. “It's just lies.”

“About me?” Sophie asks, frantic.

“No,” he says, his tone softening. “It's not about you. It's something about Barton. Something obviously untrue. There's some lowlife who smells money, trying to get himself in the paper. That's all it is, sweetheart. I'm going to call Stevenson and see if I can nip this in the bud. Good,” he says, “here is Frieda.”

But Frieda, who has indeed returned and with the phone still in hand, is not wearing her usual expression of disapproving command. She is merely disapproving, and she looks at Sophie.

“Your florist is on the phone. For some reason, we are not permitted to phone him back in a few minutes.”

Mort looks at Sophie. Sophie looks at the phone in Frieda's hand.

“I don't know why he won't let me handle it. I told him I am in charge.” She speaks loudly enough to be heard on the other end of the line.

“I'll take it,” Sophie says, getting to her feet.

“Why he can't talk to me I don't understand. He says he will speak only to the bride. I told him, the bride is busy.”

“It's
okay
, Frieda.”

Frieda gives Sophie the phone, then goes to sit beside Mort. They are both watching her. “It's…about the flowers,” she says lamely. The phone is warm in her palm, she notes. Oliver is in the phone. “I'll go…I'll go take it in the kitchen.”

“Keep it short,” her father says. “I need to phone Richard Stevenson.”

“Okay.” Sophie nods. She turns and walks back to the kitchen, the Oliver phone in her hand. She does not know what to say to him.

“Sophie?” she hears, from the farthest distance.

She puts the phone to her ear.

“Sophie?”

“I'm here,” Sophie says.

“Sophie, I've been trying to reach you for days.”

Days
, she thinks, calculating. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. That's accurate. There was a message Tuesday night, two on Wednesday, one just this morning. She heard it as she lay in bed, in her apartment.

“Sophie?”

“I saw her,” Sophie hears herself say. “I was at the shop on Monday. I saw her. Your…the woman you're involved with.”

His silence tells her she isn't wrong.

“Sophie…”