A Certain Age (26 page)

But she can't shut out the sense of motion, the building momentum. She can't shut out the draft against her cheeks, or the screaming pitch of the
engine, or the way the machine bounces and strains for the sky. She opens her eyes just as the bouncing smoothes away and her stomach falls to the ground, and her chest takes on weight but her head soars giddily upward.

You are flying,
she thinks.
You are
flying
.

And it's all right. The airplane is strong, the engine doesn't miss a stroke. The wings lift them steadily toward the sun. When she gathers enough courage to turn her head, the entire horizon opens before her, all of Long Island, the hazy patchwork farms, the skinny yellow beach, the stripe of navy sea. The white dots of the sailboats, the gray spots of merchant shipping. The whole world in elaborate, mesmerizing miniature.

The plane banks left, and they're turning toward the ocean, tilting to the earth, still climbing. Another ripple of panic. But this is Octavian, she reminds herself. If you're going to go flying, you might as well have an ace for your pilot, a man who's chased enemy Fokkers and been chased in return, who's flown a machine nimbly through the various fronts of war and weather, who can certainly handle a well-kept civilian airplane on a tranquil summer afternoon.

Trust the machine,
she thinks. Machines won't fail you, as long as you treat them right.

The air is cooler up here, and she's glad for the jacket covering her shoulders, which Octavian insisted she wear. She was wrong about everything. She thought the sun would bathe them in warmth; that the sky would be calm and peaceful. But the draft rushes against her ears and the sides of the plane, and the engine roars beyond that. The wings level out. They're headed southeast, judging by the sun. Below them, the fields are getting smaller, compacting into yards and parks. More buildings, more streets. She wants to ask Octavian where they're going, but when she speaks, she can't even hear her own voice. The words disappear in the wind behind them, unheard.

They've stopped climbing. They're soaring above the earth at a nice level pace, and it almost seems normal now. The muscles of Sophie's abdomen unclench slowly. She looks over the edge and wonders how fast they're going. So many questions she should have asked before they left, but she
was carried along by her own recklessness, by her own determination to do something dangerous and forbidden. Now the madness has passed. There is no danger. There's just Brooklyn coming into view, Prospect Park, a cluster of tall buildings, the factories and smokestacks near the shore, belching out their noxious clouds. Over there, the Navy Yard, she thinks. A pair of battle cruisers sits against the docks, and they look like toy ships, or the models they had on display at the Cunard offices when the Fortescue family booked passage to Europe last year. A lifetime ago.

Octavian removes his arm from the controls and points to the right. Sophie's gaze lifts obediently, and there it is! Manhattan Island! Long, bristling, industrious Manhattan, packed tight with gray buildings in a rippling pattern, taller at the tip and then flattening out, and then rising again at midtown. A trio of bridges arch delicately across the East River, which is crowded with ships, glittering in the sun. Farther north, the Queensboro Bridge stands a little blurry in the summer haze, no longer mighty but miniature. Up here, you can't see the dirt and smoke and garbage. You can't see a bit of empty ground either, not a blade of grass anywhere. As if the buildings are just floating on the water, and there are so many of them, the whole thing should sink straight to the bottom. But it doesn't. The city gleams and strains toward the sky. It's invincible, eternal.

Sophie realizes they're over open water now, making a slow arc around New York Harbor and the very tip of downtown. Octavian points again, to the left this time, and she tears her gaze away from Manhattan just in time to see the Statue of Liberty rising above the water like a miracle, pale against the dark water. It's too much, Sophie thinks. It's too much beauty at once, wonder after wonder breaking over you, until you can't even breathe. You can't think.

They round the harbor and drone up the Hudson River. Sophie tries to notice the details now: to pick out one particular building and examine its windows and shape, the water tank fixed to its roof, and imagine who lives there or works there. The Sterling Bates building lies in that jumble there somewhere, on the eastern side, and here is Greenwich Village and Octa
vian's apartment and that damned speakeasy, with the decent, well-meaning bartender. To the north and east, the house where Sophie grew up, the neighborhood she knows, everything familiar. Everything she thought she knew; the childhood she thought she had. Coming up, the piers studded with ocean liners, the points of departure and return. She closes her eyes. It's too much.

Ahead of her, Octavian silently flies the airplane, looking over the sides now and again, making adjustments. A gust of wind catches them, an instant of dizzying loft, and Octavian rides it out without a flinch. She realizes—consciously, for the first time—that her life, at this instant, is entirely in his control. That she's trusted him once more, and that this leap of trust constitutes the real danger, the real gamble of the day. And maybe that's the reason they're up here in the air to begin with? To fly them both back to January.

Sophie stretches forward and runs her thumb along the back of Octavian's neck, along that tanned stripe below the leather cap. The skin is softer than she expects, warmer, and she thinks how
glad
she is that he's alive, what a miracle life is.

How the world makes so much more sense from above.

Jealousy is the tie that binds, and binds, and binds.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

Stamford, Connecticut, an hour or two earlier

I
F YOU'D
told me, in the summer of 1920, that my love affair with the Boy would lead inevitably here—this door with the peeling paint and the broken knocker, in the shabbiest waterfront corner of Stamford, Connecticut, begging the occupant to open the door—I'd have told you that I wouldn't stand for such a thing.

I, Mrs. Theodore Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue, have never stood before such a shabby door in my life, but I'm doing it now, God knows why. I have a plan, or rather the suspicion of a plan, and if Mr. Giuseppe Magnifico must be reasoned with—begged with, cajoled, seduced even—then Mrs. Marshall must hold her nose and seduce. I suppose it's not the first time I've sold my charms for the greater good.

I've never actually visited the place before, but I know the address. Who do you imagine tracked down the little devil to begin with? I paid a fair fortune to the Pinkerton Agency for this information, and I suppose the Pinkerton Agency—and Il Magnifico himself—did not disappoint. The trouble is, he's gone back to earth, and I'm having the devil of a time digging him out again.

“Now, Mr. Magnifico,” I say. “
Giuseppe
.” (More of a purr, that one. So much easier to purr in Italian.)

“Go away, Mrs. Marshall. I have nothing to say!”

“But you must, surely. I promise, I won't go to the police. I just want to know the truth.”

“The truth, she is not important! Mr. Faninal, he is guilty. The jury say the truth!”

“Now, Giuseppe. We both know that's not so.”

There is a harrumph.

“Giuseppe. You know you can trust me. Haven't I done
exactly
as I promised so far?” I pause to tap my fingernails against the edge of my pocketbook. The heat's not so bad here, really. There's a stiff little breeze coming off the sound, and it moderates the concentrated air of the street, the sticky awfulness that makes summer so unendurable in Manhattan, and nearly as bad in the slums of the lesser cities. By rights, I should be reclining among the dunes at Windermere. I should be enjoying the pleasant life with which God has seen fit to reward me, for my sins.

If it weren't for the Boy.

“Giuseppe,” I say, a little more sternly. “I really shall have to call the police, if you don't open the door. I'm in possession of a certain scrap of information that will shine an entirely new light on this case.”

“This case, she is closed! Mr. Faninal murdered his wife, that is all.”

“Giuseppe. We both know that's
not so
.”

Harrumph.

“Very well.” (Theatrical sigh.) “I suppose I've got no choice but to call in that nice Inspector Hopkins. The one who interviewed you before, remember? I'm sure he'll be delighted to know you've been lying to him, and to the court. Under oath, isn't that right?”

There is a quick click of the lock, and the door jerks open so decisively that I tumble, rather than stalk, into the hallway.

Oh, yes. The Boy has a lot to answer for, damn him.

IN CASE YOU'RE INTERESTED, I
was lying about that scrap of information. (I find I've been lying about a lot of things lately, scattering untruths about the place like so many stockings, discarded in the—what do the novels call it?—the heat of passion.) In fact, I haven't got a thing, but I do feel a certain amount of ownership as regards Giuseppe Magnifico, having scraped him off the bottom of the proverbial barrel with my own two hands, and those of the Pinkerton Agency. I feel as if he owes me.

One thousand dollars, to be exact.

“I have say all I can say,” he grumbles. He has also evidently been drinking again, and the neatness of his magnifico mustache is quite ruined. He is a gentleman, however, and he shoos an enormous tabby cat out of an armchair for me. I'm too much of a lady to refuse.

“Thank you,” I say, settling on the extreme edge. “However, I don't believe you, I'm afraid. I feel very much as if you're still hiding things from me.”

“There is nothing important. Anyway, Mr. Faninal is verdict guilty.” He spreads out his helpless hands. “What more can we do?”

“But we both know he didn't do it, Giuseppe. Justice itself should prompt you to act.”

Justice is evidently not a cause that resonates with Mr. Magnifico. I can't say I blame him. His history with the law is lengthy and complicated, gone over at considerable length by the defense, during the endless hot hours of the trial. The crimes themselves are mostly of the petty kind, barring the odd assault thrown in for self-defense, but believe me, I quite understand that those are just the crimes we know about. He shrugs his shoulders and takes a chair. The tabby promptly occupies his lap. The room smells like the contents of a saucepan, along with a peculiar acrid odor that I presume has something to do with the cats, of which there are several.

“I do what you ask,” he says, caressing the pussy in his lap with long and languorous strokes. “I talk to the police, I go to court, I say what I have to say. Is not my fault if Mr. Faninal get the swing. Is
his
fault, for kill his wife.”

“He didn't kill his wife,” I say.

“How are you so certain of this?”

I lean forward. “Because I am, Mr. Magnifico. In any case, it's no concern of yours. You know the terms of our agreement. Mr. Faninal is to be acquitted, or you don't get the rest of your money.”

“So keep your money!”

Probably it was a mistake to give the man five hundred dollars at the outset, although his debts were so pressing—and by pressing, I mean actually
pressing,
by the sort of fellows one doesn't desire inside one's drawing room—that I felt I couldn't refuse. Now, cleared of immediate want, Giuseppe apparently has no need of my money. He's not a greedy man, I'll give him that. (Greedy for money, anyway.)

As to whether Mr. Faninal is or is not a murderer, I haven't the faintest idea, no more than you do. Like Mr. Magnifico, I have little interest in the justice of the matter. Mrs. Faninal seems to have been a rather unprincipled sort of creature, exhibiting no art or virtue at all in her indiscriminate, indiscreet adultery. She did not, of course, deserve to die brutally for her sins. But fifteen years of prison—and innocent or not Mr. Faninal has served a sort of prison sentence, in my view, for all that the prison was a comfortable one—must surely go some small way in the balance against what the French (perhaps too forgivingly) call a
crime passionnel
. That sort of betrayal, after all, can drive an ordinary man quite out of his ordinary senses.

Regardless, the damned jury has overturned all our plans for Faninal's acquittal, and instead of breathing a sigh of relief and retiring to Southampton for the summer, while the lawyers toil away on my divorce and the Boy, cleared of all chivalrous obligation toward the too-fair Sophie, prepares himself for matrimony, I'm wallowing in cat hair in a stinking house in Connecticut, and forgive me if my temper's running short with the unforthcoming Mr. Magnifico.

I open my mouth to tell him so.

But the fellow surprises me.

“You want to know who kill Mrs. Faninal?” he says. “You ask the girls. The girls know.”

“The girls? Do you mean the Faninal sisters? Sophie and Virginia?”

He folds his arms and settles back in his armchair, nodding, and his eyes are so keen and dark that I get the suspicion I've been robbed of my five hundred dollars. A tremor rattles my belly, not for the first time in Mr. Magnifico's company, and I settle one hand on my pocketbook, which contains a small but reasonably effective pistol.

We regard each other, eye to eye, while the tabby nudges his hand with her nose.

“Ask the girls,” he says again, that's all, and there's nothing I can do but rise from the armchair, to be replaced by a cat.

REGARDS MRS. VIRGINIA FITZWILLIAM, I
have little opinion. I haven't spoken to her since that disastrous party at the beginning of February, and—as I'm sure you know already—she's not the sort of person to reveal herself to any old spectator across a crowded room.

I do know that she's staying at the Pickwick Arms Hotel in Greenwich, about a half hour's drive straight down the Boston Post Road from the courthouse in Stamford. The Patent Princesses quietly took up a suite there at the beginning of the trial, and such is the extreme discretion of the proprietors, there is no press at all outside, even today, a fact for which I'm grateful.

The press. Have I mentioned them? Omnivorous, omnipresent little creatures, flashing their bulbs and shouting their questions. I half expected to find one of them lurking outside Mr. Magnifico's insalubrious abode when I slipped out the door, chased by the feral scent of cat urine, but there was only Ox's battered Packard, thank God, being eyed by a mangy fellow leaning against an electricity pole across the street.

You can imagine the haste with which I started the engine and roared out of that place. Never, I hope, to return.

The Pickwick Arms, on the other hand. Awfully tasteful, and you can't deny I've got a fine appreciation for aesthetics, whatever you think of my morals. It's not one of those glamorous grand hotels, heavens no. Those are strictly for out-of-town adulterers, and the Pickwick is thoroughly
respectable. It's designed to look like an English inn of roughly Tudor provenance, reassuring you of its prestige by means of peaked roofs, half-timbered facades, and garden forecourts: a stockbroker's suburban mansion writ large. I expect the rooms are furnished in chintz. I leave Ox's Packard in the circular drive, keys in the ignition, and tug off my gloves upon entering the warm, floral-scented lobby. A bellboy approaches me with comforting obsequiousness. Does Madam have any luggage?

Madam does not, I tell him, but she should very much appreciate his taking a message upstairs to the suite currently occupied by Mrs. Fitzwilliam.

The bellboy's demeanor changes instantly from servility to suspicion, manifested in the adjustment of his cap an inch farther up his forehead, to reveal a pair of slim brown eyes. “I'm afraid that particular guest has asked not to be disturbed.”

“My dear boy,” I say, “do I
look
like a reporter, or a member of the curious public? Tell Mrs. Fitzwilliam that Mrs. Marshall has a private matter to discuss with her. I assure you she'll agree to receive me.”

The bellboy bites his lip. Poor fellow. I expect he's been hoodwinked already; these members of the press can be so damned devious.

I tuck my pocketbook under my arm and tell him he's welcome to discuss the matter with the manager before proceeding. I'll be waiting right here.

A discreet yet spirited discussion ensues behind the front desk while I settle myself on a chintz sofa and observe the tranquil comings and goings of the Pickwick set. Everybody's got a country house in Greenwich these days; it seems to be the done thing, if you like horses and people who like horses. Elsie Rockefeller tells me that the town's filling up with professional men who take the train into New York every day, leaving behind wife, children, and faithful hound in a handsome four-bedroom house with a half-acre yard. I sometimes envy them, these ordinary people of the professional classes. Maybe the husband's not exactly behaving himself in the city, maybe the wife's taking to drink when the kids are in school and there's nothing left to do but join the bridge club and the charity committee and redecorate the dining room. But there's a security to it, isn't there? The boundaries of your life
are neatly defined. You are not beset by mad passions for unsuitable objects. You don't find yourself embroiled in murder.

Or maybe you do. Why, I might appear perfectly normal to one of these linen-suited ladies passing across the lounge, just as normal and correct as they appear to me. I don't suppose anyone's fully immune to the temptation of a Boy. These days, nobody can say she will never get divorced, or go mad, or get murdered. Nobody can tell who's who.

“Mrs. Marshall?” It's the manager, calm brown mustache and all.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Fitzwilliam asks me to escort you to her suite.”

HOTELS, OF LATE, REMIND ME
naturally of the Boy: an irritating effect at the present instant, as I'm trying not to think of him at all. The Boy interrupts my customary mental sharpness, the necessary detachment with which I arrange my worldly dealings. To remember the Boy, just now, is to remember that he's spending
his
afternoon consoling the shocked and grieving Sophie, and to imagine just
how
he might be consoling her at this particular moment. Hardly conducive to mental sharpness, as I'm sure you understand.

So. I shall ignore the frisson of anticipation that activates my lungs as I follow the gray-suited manager down the fourth-floor hallway of the Pickwick Arms, and I won't consult my feelings on the subject of the Boy himself. I've got pressing matters,
practical
matters to conclude. Facts that beg my attention. Objects to pursue.

That I am losing my Boy, inch by precious inch, bears no relation at all to the matter at hand.

Do you know, after observing her for some weeks in the confines of that dreadful courtroom, I have come to feel that Mrs. Fitzwilliam and I might be real friends, if we can get past the fundamental incompatibility of our temperaments. She's packing a trunk as I enter—no maid for her—and a little girl in a rosy pinafore plays with a set of blocks near the open window. Her daughter, I presume. I haven't laid eyes on the rumored child until now.
Pretty thing. I take Mrs. Fitzwilliam's outstretched hand and thank her for taking a moment to see me.

“Of course,” she says. “May I offer you some tea?”