A Certain Age (27 page)

“Iced, if you don't mind.”

She addresses the manager, who still looms protectively near the door. “Mr. Simpkins, could you arrange for iced tea? And lemonade for Evelyn.”

“Of course, Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”

When the door closes, she moves to the desk and busies herself with the articles there. She's removed her jacket, but her neat patterned blouse and unexceptional navy skirt remain in place, terribly dignified. “I apologize for the heat, Mrs. Marshall. We don't seem to be getting much air today.”

“Not at all. The city's worse, believe me.”

“Evelyn, darling,” she says, addressing the tyke, “would you mind going into the bedroom and fetching your toys? Mama's packing our suitcases now.”

Little Evelyn rises to her little feet—evidently Mama is a figure of some authority, a fact I can appreciate for the miracle it is, these days—and trundles off to the door on the opposite wall, leaving the two of us alone in the parlor.

“Did you have something particular to communicate, Mrs. Marshall? Or merely sympathies?” She flutters back and forth between desk and suitcase, and I suspect she's trying to disguise a little untoward trembling. (It's a trick I employ myself, from time to time, when confronted by an immovable Boy.) She continues, arranging papers, not looking at me, “I'm afraid my sister isn't here, at the moment. She wanted a little privacy, after the shock this morning, and went back to our house in the city.”

“Yes, I know.” I set my gloves and pocketbook on the sofa table. “Is there anything I can do for you? You seem distressed.”

“Do I? Actually, I feel quite calm. I suppose it will all sink in shortly, and then I'll be in pieces.” She sets the papers in a leather portfolio and the portfolio in the trunk. “Did you say you
knew
that Sophie's in the city?”

“Yes. Mr. Rofrano has gone to meet her there.”

That stops her. She turns to me, hand on waist, eyes rather wide-ish. “Mr. Rofrano?”

“Yes. Do you mind if I sit down? The heat.” Rather than wait for permission, I allow a chintz armchair to absorb me into its thickets.

“Mr. Rofrano,” she says again. “Do you think that's wise?”

“If you're asking whether I trust Mr. Rofrano, I do. He
is
my fiancé, after all, and while you may question his judgment in that regard, I challenge you to question his honor.”

She studies me without embarrassment, nods, and turns back to the desk. Someone's been busy there; it's covered with reports and folders and stacks of correspondence held together with plain black string. There is also a slip of paper that looks dangerously like a telegram, not that I'm snooping. I wonder, not for the first time, about Mr. Fitzwilliam. Whether he actually exists. She's wearing a ring, but you can buy a ring anywhere, can't you? Seduced and abandoned, the old story.

“Very well,” she says, “but that's not why you're here, is it?”

“No. I have a keen interest, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, a very keen interest in your father's acquittal—”

“Then I'm afraid you must have been terribly disappointed this morning, when he was convicted of the crime.”

“I was as shocked as anyone. Or perhaps
bemused
is a better word. Why the jury would convict him, when the courtroom was clearly consumed by a titillating flame of reasonable doubt. I suppose the dear fellows figured someone had to pay, and it might as well be him.”

She turns her head. “You don't believe he killed her?”

“You speak so dispassionately, Mrs. Fitzwilliam. These are your parents we're talking about. Do you really believe your father capable of murder?”

“I wouldn't have thought so, no. But I don't necessarily consider myself an infallible judge of human character.”

Aha!
I think, just as a knock strikes the door, and the refreshments arrive. This minute clue into Mrs. Fitzwilliam's past gives me far more satisfaction than it should, and perhaps a grain of hope that she might, after all, be inclined to confide in me.

I sip my iced tea decorously while the waiter leaves and Mrs. Fitzwilliam
settles Evelyn in the bedroom with her lemonade and cookies. A breeze at last makes its way through the open window, scented very faintly by the sea. I rise and carry my drink to the view, and it's not my fault if the desk rests along my path, and the telegram lying atop the desk, and I so happen to notice the words
Cocoa Beach
at the beginning of the typescript before I direct my gaze virtuously out the window.

The Pickwick Arms occupies a commanding position at the top of a hill, and if I strain my eyes through the haze, I believe I can make out a sliver of Long Island Sound, and Long Island beyond. I'm consumed with a passionate longing for Windermere. For the dunes and the crashing ocean. The boys, sunburned and salty, digging channels in the sand with their tiny shovels. The sun crawling over the infinite sky.

The bedroom door closes softly behind me. I say, without turning, “What was she like? Your mother.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Believe it or not, my dear, I
am
here to help you. I was the one who dug up Mr. Magnifico, did you know that? I want nothing more than a happy conclusion to this awful matter.”

“But why? Why do you care?”

I turn, holding my wet glass close to my chest, and smile sincerely. “Why, because of Ox. I'd do anything to help my brother.”

She looks amazed. “But they're not engaged anymore. Sophie hasn't worn the ring since February. I presume she means to return it, now that the trial's all over.”

“Ah, but you see, my brother is still deeply in love with her. He wants to marry her, whatever happens. But he's been awfully worried about how all this is affecting her. If there's a shred of hope that Mr. Fortescue—”

“Faninal.”

“—that your father's innocent, why, Ox wants—
we
want—to keep on laboring in pursuit of justice. For your father's sake, and for yours.”

“And because you want Sophie beholden to you. You want her to feel as if she's obliged to marry the man who rescued her father from the gallows.”

“There's no such things as the gallows anymore, dear. They're quite outdated.”

I am sorry to say that Mrs. Fitzwilliam doesn't appreciate my little quip. I heave a suffering sigh in the face of her disapproving gaze. She hasn't got the pretty blue eyes of her sister; hers are more pale and washed of color. Gray, I should call them, though I've never been satisfied with that description. It's more of a blue that didn't have quite enough will to bloom.

“My mother's character, Mrs. Marshall,” she says, after delivering me that chiller, “has been thoroughly dissected in a public courtroom over the past two weeks. I can't imagine what else you need to know.”

“But is it
true,
all of it? Was she really so bad?”

“For what it's worth, I don't think she was bad. I think she was ill. I
knew
she was ill, even when I was a child, and I didn't understand.”

“Do you mean she went mad?”

She returns to the desk. “No. But she changed, after Sophie was born. I was six years old. She was like Sophie before that, all full of sunshine and love. And the light went out of her. I don't know why. My father didn't know what to do. He started spending more and more time in his workshop. They both had some family money, so he didn't really need to work, but—well, I guess it was just easier for him. He doesn't like to be helpless. He likes to fix things when they're broken, and my mother refused to be fixed, like one of his machines, and he got—
angry,
I guess. You know how people hate things they don't understand.”

I don't know what brought on this lengthy confession. I'm not the kind of person in whom most women choose to confide. I imagine they think I'm like Mr. Faninal, that I'll set about trying to fix them, and I believe most women—like poor Mrs. Faninal—don't really want to be fixed. Or (more likely) they understand the impossibility of really fixing a person, the way you fix a car or a rusty hinge. They just want someone to share the burden. Fair enough, I suppose. So I stand there quietly by the window and allow Mrs. Fitzwilliam to share her burden with me—it's not unlike what she said in court, under oath, except that somehow it is—without interruption. I have
the idea that she won't tolerate any leading questions, she's far too clever for that, so when she pauses for breath, I simply say, “I guess we're all guilty of that, from time to time.”

She's looking down at one of those bundles of correspondence, tied so snugly in waxed black string. She picks up the telegram, folds it in half, and slips it inside. “I don't know about all those other men. I never saw her do anything wrong like that. Or maybe I just don't remember. I was so young.”

“It's a shame your sister doesn't remember anything.”

“A shame? I've always thought it a blessing.”

“Yes, of course. For her peace of mind. I only meant from the practical point of view. Finding out exactly what happened, that morning.”

Mrs. Fitzwilliam sets the bundle of papers in the trunk and turns to me fiercely. “Well, you haven't had to live with this all these years, have you? You haven't spent fifteen years trying to bury it all. Everything you knew, everything you were. Every possible suspicion.”

She speaks softly, because of the little girl in the room next door, but her intensity—the tautness of her face, the force of her words—pins me to the window, speechless. Another hot breeze strikes the small of my back. I curl my left hand around the wooden frame.

“Yes.” Her arms fold across her chest. “Just
imagine
that for a moment, Mrs. Marshall. Just imagine growing up with that suspicion.”

“I wish”—my throat is dry, making speech difficult—“I wish I could relieve you of that.”

She stalks to the desk. More papers. An ebony pencil case. “You can't. It's already done. He's been found guilty, and he hasn't objected to that verdict, either to Sophie and me or to the public, and now I have only to regret that I didn't take Sophie away with me when I could. That I left her alone with him when I went to France.”

“You believe he committed the crime, then?”

“Oh, yes. Father never testified. He never actually claimed he didn't do it, did he? And he doesn't lie,” she says, with a bitterness that might mean all kinds of things. She chucks the objects into the trunk. “And here's something
else, something I didn't tell them in court, though I probably should have.”

Ask the girls,
Giuseppe said.
The girls know.

The hair goes all electric on my arms. A tingle makes its way down the column of my spine, and back up again, and I set my glass on the windowsill—the ice is beginning to clatter about, betraying my nerves—and say, “My goodness. Why ever not?”

“Why
not
? Did you ever have a father, Mrs. Marshall?”

“Not that I can recall. He died of a corrupted liver when I was seven. Lost his fortune in the panic, I'm told, and naturally turned to drink, as a gentleman should.”

“Well, I'm sorry about that,” she says, a little mollified. “But if he had lived, and he were sitting there in the courtroom, watching you as you testified, and no one asked you that specific question, no one
thought
to ask it. Because of course, nobody imagined . . .”

“Imagined what?”

She perches on the edge of an armchair, next to the trunk. A leather portfolio rests in her hands. She looks into the empty fireplace, or maybe the set of irons next to it; hard to tell, from this angle. Her hair is soft and waving, just covering her ears, and my goodness if she doesn't look appealing. What a cad, this soi-disant husband of hers. I've a mind to track him down myself, real or not, and give him a good shaking.

“That he was in love,” she whispers.

I wait for her to go on, but she doesn't oblige me. She's thinking very hard now, biting her lip. Wondering if she can trust me.

I had a daughter once. Don't you remember? I knew she was a girl, growing there in my womb; she just felt different, somehow, from the boys who preceded her. I went so far as to decorate the nursery in pinks and laces, to make unbearably frilly clothes for her with my own two hands. Sylvo thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. Anyway, they let me look at her, after she was born. She was so clean and white and peaceful, such a lovely pure little thing. You would hardly know she was dead. Her fingernails were like pearls. I touched her fist for a moment, slightly curled upon her pillow, and
her hair, which was light brown and still damp from the delivery, and then her miniature round nose. Then they took her away to ready her for burial. Before she was put in her casket, I made them dress her in one of those frightful pink frocks I sewed for her, in the ecstasy of my anticipation. The rest I gave away to the foundling hospital, except for a small knit cap, which I kept in my drawer. From time to time, I took that cap from its hiding place, and I imagined the little girl she would have been. I would think, Let's see, she is two years old now and starting to talk in sentences, she is six years old and reading her picture books, she is seventeen years old and falling in love for the first time, probably with some unsuitable lad. Just like her mother.

And if she has some confession to make, some burden in her heart that needs sharing, I will settle myself next to her and take her cool, soft hand between mine, and say something like:

“In love with whom, dear?”

And, in a dry, heartbroken voice, she will tell me the truth.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can manage to chip it in a brand-new place.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

Roosevelt Field, Long Island

A
N HOUR
later, when Octavian has landed the airplane and brought it neatly back in line with its fellows; when he has removed his helmet and goggles and Sophie's helmet and goggles and put them back in the hangar; when he's run his hands a last time over the fuselage, the way you check a horse's legs for soundness, and exchanged pleasantries with the mechanics; he turns to Sophie and suggests a cup of coffee at the airfield café.

She nods yes. Octavian takes her hand, and she walks beside him on her unsteady legs toward the cluster of buildings on the western side of the field. The grass is warm and well beaten; she can smell its good greenness, the scent of summer. She loves the comfortable silence between them. She loves the weight of his fingers around hers, the way they tether her to the present moment, the present rectangle of sunlit meadow, instead of what lies beyond.

It's too hot to stay inside, so Octavian carries the coffee and sandwiches outside and they make a picnic on the grass, near the parked Ford, watching
the airplanes drone past, landing and taking off and circling above in a delicate aeronautical ballet.

Sophie swallows and says, “I wish we didn't have to leave. I wish we could just stay right here.”

“I know.”

That's all.
I know
. Sophie wants to ask him if he loves Mrs. Marshall, and if he
does
love her, why is he here with Sophie, holding hands with Sophie? And if he
doesn't
love Mrs. Marshall, why the devil is he marrying her?

Instead she says, “Your airplane. Is that what you want to do? Design airplanes?”

“It's the future,” he says. “Everybody will be flying soon. Getting inside an airplane will be no more strange than getting into an automobile.”

“And you'll be in the middle of it.”

“I hope so.”

“You will. It's what you were made for. It's why you're alive.”

He finishes his sandwich and pulls out his cigarette case. Beneath the peak of his flat cap, his eyes point east, across the runway, where a plane is just now touching its wheels to the grass, up the bluff to the second airfield. “He was a good man, Roosevelt. You'd think he'd be a bore, or a snob, growing up in the White House and all that.
I
thought he would. But he wasn't. He was a smart fellow, a good pilot. The kind of fellow who'd draw off enemy fire to save the rest of the squadron, and not stop to think about it. He lasted about a month, once we started combat patrols. The Boche dropped a message a couple of weeks later, saying he'd been shot down behind their lines, and they'd buried him with full military honors. Better than getting blown out of recognition by a shell, I guess.”

“I can't bear to think about it. I can't believe you survived.”

He lights the cigarette slowly. “Do you know how long the average pilot stayed alive? About six weeks. Six weeks, Sophie. Every time I went up, I figured I wasn't coming back. That my luck had run out.”

“But it didn't.”

“It didn't. Then I stopped believing in luck at all. It was just chance.”

“Aren't they the same thing?”

“No. Luck's a conscious thing, isn't it? It means someone's on your side. Fate's on your side. Chance is just chance. A random play of numbers. And that's all it is, a one-in-a-thousand chance that I'm sitting here with you, eating a sandwich, smoking a cigarette, instead of buried under a pair of crossed propeller blades on the French frontier.”

“Well, I think you're wrong. I think it
is
luck. There's a reason you survived.”

“No, there isn't. Why should God choose me, instead of Quentin Roosevelt? He's the better man.”

Sophie sets aside the crust of her sandwich and leans back on her elbows, watching Octavian smoke his cigarette, squint-eyed and thoughtful. It must be five or six o'clock, but the sun is still high. It's midsummer, they have hours yet before the day is over. Before the light is gone.

“Because there's something you're meant to do,” she says. “Something you're meant to be.”

He turns to her, and his face is tender. “What about you, Sophie? What are you meant to be?”

“I don't know. At the moment it's rather bleak, isn't it?” She laughs dryly. “I'm the daughter of the murderer, the pathetic little girl who tried to wake her murdered mother. Forever notorious for an act I don't even remember.”

“You really don't remember? Not a thing? You were almost three, weren't you?”

She shakes her head. “Julie says I've repressed the memory. That's what your subconscious does, when you live through something awful. It buries the memory deep down, where you can't find it.”

“Well, I wish to God my subconscious would do the same for me.” He flicks ash into the nearby turf. “Instead, it's the opposite.”

Sophie's hand, lying on the ground, starts to play with the grass. She plucks out one blade, and another. “It's been the strangest thing, sitting there in court every day. Hearing this thing described, this little girl described, and she might as well be a stranger. And she's me. I sat there on that kitchen
floor, I saw it all. I saw my father murder my mother.” She lowers herself all the way back and stares at the sky. The grass prickles her ears, the back of her neck. “Is that why you took me there? Hoping I'd remember something?”

“My God, no. What makes you say that?”

“I don't know. I've just been wondering.”

“Sophie.” He moves beside her, and she turns her head, just enough to see him. “No. You were the one who wanted to go inside, remember? I just wanted—well, I'm not sure what I wanted, exactly. I already knew who you were. I didn't have any proof, but I felt it. I knew it. You just—you fit. There was this hole”—he brushes his sternum with his thumb, the thumb holding the cigarette—“and you fit there. And the house was where I first found you. So I just—it was an impulse. A stupid impulse. If I hadn't taken you there, your father wouldn't have suspected—”

“We don't know that for certain.”

“Yes, we do. I do. I know what he said to me, that night at Theresa's apartment, while everyone was giving speeches. He thought I was going to expose you all.” He lifts the cigarette, what there's left of it. “You know the rest.”

“He threatened you, and you fought him off, and he took out his pistol, his stupid pistol he always carried around.”

“Don't fret. I don't blame him. I might have done the same, if I had you to protect. You and your sister.”

If I had you.
But he doesn't have her, does he? He has Mrs. Marshall to protect. Mrs. Marshall to love.

Sophie turns back to the sky. “Tell me. When are you getting married?”

A pair of men walk by, a few yards away, talking in loud nasal voices. Something about a man named Carter who's a terrible pilot, going to kill himself, and for some reason this is a good joke. Octavian waits until the nasal laughs have faded before he replies, in a flat pitch, “As soon as the divorce comes through. That's the plan, anyway. Then we're heading out to California. A lot of pilots out there these days, plenty of opportunity.”

“That's wonderful. I expect to hear great things from you.”

Her tone is too bright, and she knows it. How false she sounds, how brittle. Aren't they supposed to be honest together, at this point? What does it take anymore, for two people to say what they really mean?

“Listen,” he says. “For what it's worth—”

“Don't.”

“You have every right to be angry. You should be angry.”

“I was angry. I was so angry, that night I found out. Over the telephone!” A dry little laugh. “Now it doesn't matter.”

He doesn't reply, and Sophie closes her eyes. A drowsiness has begun to creep over her, a kind of relief after all the strain and exhaustion of the preceding months. The strain and exhaustion that await her when she returns. She hears the faint drone of an insect, or maybe it's another airplane. There is a rustle, a sigh. A weight coming down, as Octavian settles back in the grass next to her.

“As I said. For what it's worth. I meant to end things with Theresa, after I met you. I hated what we were doing together, but I couldn't stop, because I needed what she had to give me. And then
you
danced in, and I knew—I thought I knew—”

“Please don't.”

“She lost a son in the war. Awful thing. And then her husband, that same day we drove to Connecticut together, he told her he wanted a divorce. He wanted to marry his mistress. That very same day I found you, after all those years. So if you want to talk about luck—”

“Then we were never meant to fall in love, I guess.”

Above them, or maybe across the field—lying here in the grass, Sophie can't really tell—an engine sputters, coughs, and then catches again. She listens carefully to the reassuring buzz. The sign of life.

“No,” he says. “It's too late for that. At least on my side.”

“Then God is cruel.”

“Or it's just chance again. Dumb, random chance.”

Sophie rolls over to face him. His nose points straight to the sky, tipped with sunshine. His arms are folded behind his head, and the cigarette is gone.
He loves her. He just said so, didn't he, unless she misunderstood. She says quietly, “No. It's not chance, it's who you are. She needs you, and you're too good to leave her.”

“What about you? Do you need me?”

“About as much as you need me, I guess.”

He closes his eyes. His chest rises and falls. “I hope not. I hope you don't.”

Sophie puts her hand at the meeting of his ribs. Her white cotton glove is smeared with dirt and oil. “If you ask me,” she says, “what's worse is not feeling anything at all.”

“Well, then. What if I
am
asking you?”

Her hand looks so proper there, encased in cotton, resting on Octavian's shirt. “When I realized there was something between you two, you and Mrs. Marshall, of all women, I was furious. I was madly jealous. And it was
exhilarating
. It was almost as good as falling in love with you. And then Father was arrested, and I stopped feeling either one. I was so numb and shocked I didn't care. You could have married her the next day and had a dozen children, and I wouldn't have cared. The most terrible thing of all, like your heart is stricken inside your body.” She curls her finger around a button. “I would rather hate you again than go back to feeling nothing.”

He removes one arm from behind his head and traps her hand against his chest. “So you
don't
hate me anymore?”

“No. Well, I never really did, did I? I was just angry. Every time I closed my eyes, those weeks before the party, I thought of the two of you together, like lovers, and I couldn't stand it.” She stares at his profile. At his eyelashes, of all things: thick and dark against the bridge of his nose. Lighter at the tips, or is that the sun? She whispers, “I still can't.”

There is no answer to that, and Sophie doesn't expect one. The sky is warm on the crown of her head—she's taken off her hat, and so has he—and the drowsiness returns, along with a sense of slow rupture, as if she's cooking from within, and the drowsiness is just a symptom of her malady. His voice stirs her, just as her eyes are closing.

“What if I tell you—Sophie—what if I tell you that we aren't lovers? Theresa and—that I haven't—that we haven't . . . not for some time.”

“Some time?”

“Since the night of the party.”

She opens her eyes. His cheeks are stained with raspberry beneath his tan. “Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

His sigh moves her hand. “It wasn't honest. She's married. It never felt honest, even at the beginning, when I thought I was in love with her.”

“Then why didn't you ever stop?”

“Because I was afraid I would go back to what I was before. What I was when the war ended. When everyone was dead.”

His heart beats under her hand. The rhythm communicates through his shirt and her glove, and echoes back through the pulse in his fingers. It's a slow pulse, so slow it frightens her. She keeps longing for the next beat. The spaces between them are almost unendurable.

“Anyway,” he continues, “I
have
stopped. At least until her divorce comes through. Until . . .”

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

“Until what?”

His head turns. His eyes are quite blue now, reflecting the sky. A shadow passes over his skin, gone in a flash, in the mad drone of another airplane.

“You tell me,” he says.

IN THE CAR, HE KISSES
her. One minute he's sitting there, hands on the wheel. He's just cranked the engine; he pulls down the spark retard until the pistons smooth out into a contented rumble. His hand goes down to release the parking brake, and then, just before touching the lever, makes a U-turn instead, crossing over the small divide between his body and hers,
taking her softly by the cheek. The kiss is fervent and awkward. She tries to turn sideways and so does he, but his legs are too long and their mouths come apart.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“Don't be.” She takes off her gloves and picks up his hand, which has fallen on his thigh, and she places it on the placket of her blouse. He unbuttons the top button, the second, the third, and his fingers ease between the two edges to lie against the damp, delicate crepe de chine camisole that covers her chest. The top of the Ford is open; anyone can see them. She leans recklessly forward and kisses him, and this time it works better, because they're both ready. He kisses her beautifully, quite slow, gentle as the tide; his mouth is warm and tastes of tobacco. Better than Jay, better than anything. His fingers slip inside the camisole to touch her breast, to examine the curve and the weight of her, the texture at the very tip, minute and thorough, until she's staggered by her own audacity, by the way a man's fingers feel upon your naked skin, when you actually want them there. Hot and fizzy. He breaks off first, panting a little, and there is a moment of perfect wonder, staring at each other.