A Certain Age (3 page)

I accept the cigarette gratefully and allow him to light me up. He starts his own smoke from the same match, shakes out the flame just as it reaches the intersection of his finger and thumb. Like me, he closes his eyes as the virgin draft fills his lungs, and I am reminded of the first time we shared a smoke together, after the bon voyage party (if that's the term) that Sylvo and I threw for Tommy.
You look like you could use a smoke,
he said, upon finding me alone on the terrace, staring across the dark wilderness of Central Park, and I agreed that I did, and we stood there smoking together at three o'clock in the morning, not saying a word, until I tossed my stub over the ledge onto Fifth Avenue and turned to him.
This is our little secret, Ox,
I warned him, and bless the idiot, he's kept it ever since.

“It's not just the lettuce, though,” he says now. “I was falling for her already, before I found out about that.”

I reflect for an instant on my brother's extraordinary capability for self-delusion. “No doubt,” I say.

“Wait until you meet her, sis.”

“Oh, I can't wait. When are you proposing? I'll have to consult my calendar and throw you two lovebirds a smashing little engagement party.”

“But, sis, that's why I came. Don't you remember?”

“Remember what?”

He looks around for an ashtray, and his gaze finally alights on the little oblong tin on the floor. I watch him step confidently to the bed and bend over. He's not quite the agile young sportsman he was in earlier days—everything takes its toll, and Ox has imbibed plenty of what constitutes everything—but he's still bendable enough, under that fat Chesterfield overcoat, and his glossy blond hair picks up flashes of light as he moves.

“Well,
well
.” As if he's just discovered a second Sphinx hidden between the floorboards. “Hel
lo
,
Sisser. Looks as if someone's been a little naughty.”

I choke back a cough. “What's that?”

Ox straightens and holds out the sardine tin in my direction. “Eight smokes already? That's some hibernation.”

“Give me that.” I snatch the tin and set it on the dresser, under the shelter of the lamp. “Now, then. You were talking about asking your young filly to marry you.”

Ox follows the ashtray and leans against the edge of the dresser, nice and close, so I can examine the dark smudges under his eyes and the chapped skin of his lips, which are bent into a familiar self-assured smile. Underneath the Chesterfield, he's wearing evening dress, which shouldn't really surprise me. Nor, for that matter, that he stinks of moonshine.

“
I'm
not the one who asks her,” he says. “Don't you remember?”

“I don't remember a thing. I hope you don't think
I'm
going to pop the question for you. I wrote all your college papers; isn't that enough?”

“The
ring,
Sisser. Don't you remember?”

“What ring? I haven't the slightest—oh!” I spit out the cigarette. “
Mama's
ring? The
rose
ring?”

Ox pats my hand on the dresser. “That's right. The old family tradition. I had it sent to the jeweler for a good polish, and now all that
remains,
all I
need
,
which is why, of course, I came to
you,
Sisser—”

“Oh, for God's sake, Ox. You can't be serious.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because it's a farce. A medieval farce. Who sends a proxy to propose for him these days? Chivalry went out with the Armistice, Ox, didn't you know? Chivalry went out when the Lewis gun and the chlorine gas and Picasso came in. This shiny modern world hasn't got any knights left in it.”

“It's not a farce, sis. It's a fine old family tradition. A cavalier presents the august family ring to the lady of one's choice, the lady who will one day become the next Mrs. Ochsner, ruler of all New York—”

“Darling, the Ochsners haven't ruled anything for years, not since Mamie Fish took over from Lina Astor. And now it's just anarchy. Actresses and artists and writers, God help us. The present Mrs. Ochsner commands a crumbling house on Thirty-Fourth Street and nothing else to speak of.”

“Not true. Mama has
pedigree,
Theresa, she has
history,
which is more than you can say of some ink-stained penny novelist.” He pauses grandly, flicks his ash into the tin. “Anyway, I need a cavalier. A ring bearer.”

I laugh. “Oh, Ox. Only you.”

“I'm serious, sis. How about one of your boys?”

“Absolutely not. They haven't got a knightly bone in their bodies. Unless it's a football you want delivered, they're not interested.” I stub out the cigarette.

“One of their friends?”

“What about
your
friends?”

“My friends are all married. Or else lecherous old bachelors like me.”

“You know what it is, Ox? You don't give a fig for family tradition. You just want someone to do your dirty work for you. You don't want to face the girl herself and ask her to marry you. After all, what if she does the sensible thing and says no?”

He drops his cigarette in the tin and turns to the bed. “She won't say no.”

“You don't sound very confident.”

“She won't say no. I'm sure of it. Her father's on my side, and she—well, she's a good girl, Sisser.”

“Does as she's told?”

“Exactly. And she likes me, she really does. I pulled out all the stops for her, sis. Charmed her silly. She likes horses, I took her riding. She likes books, I . . . well, I—”

“Pretended to like books?”

“You know what I mean. I dazzled her! I took her into our library on Thirty-Fourth Street, Papa's old library, and you should have seen the lust in her face.”

“So she's marrying you for your strapping great
library
?”

He turns back, smiling, and flourishes an illustrative hand along his body, from brilliantine helmet to bunion toes. “And my own irresistible figure, of course.”

As I said. Delusional.

I reach inside his overcoat pocket and draw out the cigarette case. There's only one left. I rattle it around and consult my conscience. “Of course, Ox. You're just as perfectly handsome as you were at twenty-two. In fact, I can hardly tell the difference.”

Ox picks the gasper out of the case and hands it to me. “Go ahead. Take it. And in return, you're going to find me my ring bearer, aren't you?”

“Maybe.”

“Sweet old sis. Always count on you to help a fellow out in a pinch.”

“Indeed you do.” I strike a match and hold it to the end of the cigarette. My brother watches me anxiously. The light's a little better now, the sun is rising, and the lines around his eyes grow deeper as the reality of daylight takes hold of them. The slack quality of his skin becomes more evident. And I think,
Is this how I look, too?
Despite the creams and unguents, the potions and elixirs with which I drench myself daily, has my face grown as shopworn as his?

When we'd been married a year or two, and Tommy was still a baby, my husband commissioned Sargent to paint my portrait. It's a gorgeous old thing, full-length, framed in thick gilt wood. It hangs in the middle of the gallery of our apartment on Fifth Avenue, the place of honor, where it's illu
minated by a pair of electrified sconces and gazes down from the heights to a certain point in the marble center of the hall, the exact position where any human being would naturally come to a halt and gaze upward to pay worship.

Because—forgive me, let's be honest—the creature depicted in that portrait is a goddess. She is as beautiful and self-assured as they come. She's wearing a dress of pale pink gossamer that hugs her tiny waist—giving birth at eighteen has its advantages—and a diamond necklace arranged like a chandelier upon her sculpted white bosom. Her dark hair is piled in loose curls on her head; her eyebrows soar confidently above her opaque almond eyes. The smile that curls the perfect bow of her mouth proclaims such an extraordinary volume of youthful self-satisfaction you're inclined to smack her.

In fact, go ahead. I wouldn't blame you, really.

On the other hand, who can blame
her
for her satisfaction? My God, the world's at her feet. At the age of twenty, she's succeeded brilliantly in the one great career open to her. She married one of the wealthiest and most eligible bachelors in New York; she has already given him a son and heir. She's rich and beautiful and clever. The newspapers adore her. In fact, not a single genuine setback has ever dared to obstruct the ascendant path of her life.

And on the face of that young woman there hangs not the slightest doubt that she will remain ascendant forever. A world doesn't exist in which she will have to fight for her beauty, to guard against the slow thievery of time.

She doesn't know, poor thing, that in less than a year, she will discover that her husband keeps a mistress, and that this mistress has also borne him a child—a small and perfect daughter—only two months after the birth of the Marshalls' own firstborn son. By then, of course, the portrait's subject will be several months into her second pregnancy, and she will face an important decision, the most vital choice of her life, and one on which all her future happiness depends.

Did she make the right one?

Well, I'm here, aren't I? I stand right here in the shabby attic of an old carriage house, as rich as ever, mother of three cherished sons, wife of a gen
erous and well-respected husband, passionately in love with a young and brilliant man—a man to whom I have no earthly right, a man who returns my passion with bone-snapping physical ardor—who at this very moment has flattened himself into the dust beneath the bed for my sake.

What more could a woman ask for, at my age?

I'm halfway through the cigarette before I address the question warping the eyebrows of the brother who stands before me. I wave away a curl of smoke, which has been illuminated into a kind of celestial spirit by the sunshine that now refracts through the window's ancient glass. The luminous new morning of the second of January. Remember that.

“Do you happen to know the young lady's name?” I ask.

My brother says eagerly, “Sophie. Sophie Fortescue. She's a good girl, Theresa. Quiet as a mouse. The sweetest girl in the world. Wouldn't say boo to a goose.”

I hand him the cigarette—he looks as if he needs a smoke more than I do—and he sucks it in like oxygen. I look past his elbow at the bed in the corner, and the dozen or so mildewed horse blankets that the Boy gathered up to cover me last night. I objected to the smell, and he said a little mustiness was better than freezing to death, and anyway I'd get used to it. Human beings can get used to anything, he told me. It's how we survive.

And he was right. All I remember of last night, other than the terror of my dream, is the smell of the Boy's warm skin.

I return my gaze to the pasty and anxious ruins of my brother's face. “In that case, I can't begin to imagine what she sees in you, Ox, though I frankly
can
imagine why your courage failed you, in the face of all that virtue.”

He begins to object, and I hold up my hand.

“Nonetheless, and to your great and undeserved fortune,” I continue, “I happen to know
just
the boy to get the job done.”

A fool and her money are soon courted.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

New York City, nine days later

L
IKE ALL
good girls, Sophie hates to disappoint her father, so she takes heroic measures to ensure he doesn't hear a thing when she sneaks out on Wednesday night with Julie Schuyler to visit a jazz joint in Harlem.

The trouble is sneaking back in.

“I think it's stuck,” she whispers, rattling the knob of the service door. Her words form clouds in the frozen air.

Behind her shoulder, Julie swears. “You're such a bunny. Let me try.”

Sophie steps back and allows Julie to give the knob a rattle. The service door is set down below the street, in a discreet little well reached by a stairway to the left of the six worn stone steps that lead to the front door. Two years ago, the door belonged to the downstairs tenant, a middle-aged woman who quietly occupied the lower ground floor and sent up affectionate baskets of soda bread (she was Irish) with her monthly rent. But then she had moved out—out of the blue, just as quietly as she had lived, leaving only a last farewell basket on the square table in the front room—and they had opened up the staircase and turned her apartment into a proper kitchen
and scullery and maid's room, and now the door was a service entrance.

Prosperity has arrived to the Fortescue family, you see, and prosperity at least requires a house entirely your own. Even if you're hardly ever allowed to leave it.

“Damn.” Julie swears again without a thought. “I thought you said your sister had unlocked it before she went to bed.”

“She
said
she'd unlock it. And she always keeps her word.”

“Well, it's locked now.” Julie steps back and gazes through the murky glow of the streetlamps to the windows layered along the brown facade: the exact shade of a dirt road turned to mud by a week's worth of rain. The heel of her shoe crackles against a small pile of slush, refrozen during the night. “Which room is hers?”

“We can't
climb
!”

“Of course not, darling.
What
an idea.” Julie pats her pockets and turns for the stairs. “Have you got a good throwing arm?”

Sophie follows her up the steps to the sidewalk. The taxicab is rumbling by the curb, waiting to whisk Julie back to her own place on Sixty-Ninth Street, twenty-seven blocks and a world away. Soon the sunrise will be spearing between the buildings and down the long channels of the side streets, turning the brownstone pink and the windows gold. Waking the virtuous inhabitants. Next to her, Julie opens up a small beaded pocketbook and rummages through the tissue.

“Not very good,” Sophie admits, “but I'll give it a try. What have you got?”

Julie hands her a tube of lipstick. “Be careful, now. It's my favorite.”

Sophie's head is bleary, and that buzzing ring in her ears makes her balance unsteady. Also, the windows have an unnerving tendency to fidget whenever she tries to count them.

The taxi honks.

“Take your time,” says Julie.

“Tell him to clam up, before he wakes Father.” Sophie closes one eye, which seems to help. Virginia's room is on the third floor, overlooking the street, a good twenty-five vertical feet above the top of Sophie's close-fitting
hat. She has two windows, both of them draped in thick swags of green damask, suitable for her dignity as a married woman. Sophie chooses the window positioned nearest the bed and waits until the panes stop jumping before she draws back her arm and throws.

The lipstick hardly reaches the upper ledge of the parlor window when its trajectory starts to slow. Tilts. Hovers for an instant at the peak, and then falls back to the pavement in a metallic smack.

Julie bends over and picks it up. “Try again. And put a little more mustard on it, will you? I'm not getting any warmer out here.”

Sophie throws again, piling on the mustard thick and high, and this time the lipstick nearly achieves the third floor.

But not quite.

“Amateur,” Julie says.

“And you can do any better?”

“No.” Julie turns and raps on the taxi window. “Ty? Come out here. We need you.”

The door opens, and Julie's date pours himself swearing onto the sidewalk. He's bundled up in a dark coat and a gray muffler and a thick wool hat, and while his eyes are bright, the pouches beneath them are thick and bruised. He wants to know what the hell they're doing.

“Just trying to hit that window there,” Julie says, pointing, handing him the tube of lipstick.

“
Whose
window?”

Sophie says, “My sister's. The third one up.” She says it softly, because Ty is an unpleasant man, doesn't say much, and he's cheap with the waiters. He didn't like the jazz either. He never said this out loud, but Sophie could see, by the narrowness of his eyes, the contumelious tension of his mouth, drink after drink, what he was thinking.
Nigger music.
She'd heard the phrase somewhere, on the sidewalk maybe, in an ugly tone. You heard a lot of things on a New York sidewalk, whether you knew what they meant or not.

Ty takes the metal tube in his palm, which is gloved in black leather and exceptionally large. He turns the lipstick just so, and closes his hand into
a fist. Sophie steps aside. He winds back his right arm. The lipstick shoots into the air like a bullet and shatters a pane of glass in the center of the lower sash of Virginia's window. An instant later, the slivers rain daintily on the pavement below.

“Dear me,” Julie says.

Ty lifts his foot to the running board. “You told me to hit the window. I hit the window. Now can we get the hell out of here before my wife calls the hotel to wish me good morning?”

Sophie watches the facade anxiously, winding her mittened hands around each other. Her pocketbook dangles from her elbow. The curtains part, and a gasp floats down to the sidewalk below. “Sophie? Is that you?”

“Yes!” Sophie whispers, as loud as she can. In the frozen morning air, the sound carries easily. “The door's locked!”

“It's six o'clock in the morning!”

“Is it?”

“You broke my window!”

“I didn't break it! Ty did.”

“Who's Ty?”

Ty has already disappeared back in the taxi, behind a grand black slam of the door. “You coming?” he growls to Julie, through a cracked-open window.

“All right, all right,” Julie grumbles. “Can you take it from here, darling?”

“I guess so. Virginia?”

Her sister sighs with such monumental emphasis, the sound transforms into a groan by the time it reaches Sophie's ears. “Coming,” she says, and her head melts away, and the curtains fall back together just as the taxi roars from the curb.

“JUST WHO WAS THAT AWFUL
man who broke my window?” asks Virginia, setting a glass of warm milk on the marble-topped kitchen table
at which Sophie is seated. Or rather sprawled. It's a sprawling kind of moment, when you're home at dawn after a disgraceful night on the town, and your brain is achingly acute but the bones of your arms and legs have turned into sand.

The room is wintry—the maid has only just risen to build the fire—and while Sophie's taken off the new mink collar her father gave her for Christmas, she still wears her long black coat, unbuttoned. Her gloves lie in a heap on the table, next to her crimson pocketbook, also new, which appears to have had something blue spilled across its middle. Sophie can't imagine what. The resulting purple stain meanders along the silk, looking a little like Italy and its associated islands—that spot to one side might be Capri, or was it Corfu?—and Sophie supposes the pocketbook is probably ruined. Did that matter anymore? It used to matter terribly. Just like broken windows used to matter.

“I don't know. He's some baseball player Julie knows, visiting the city for the New Year.” Sophie sips the milk and closes her eyes, and all at once she's not drinking milk in a newly built kitchen while a stranger bustles about the gleaming Wedgewood range, but reading at the homely wooden table of the makeshift kitchen upstairs—now a proper dining room—drinking milk while the distant hollow sound of the phonograph drifts in from the parlor, playing some tune from
HMS Petticoat
. Father's favorite.

“Well, he wasn't very nice.”

Sophie opens her eyes. Virginia settles heavily in the chair next to hers and lifts another glass of milk. She wears an emerald silk kimono over her nightgown, and the lines of her face suggest a night that wasn't especially rich in slumber.

“No, he isn't,” Sophie says. “Julie says he's mean as a snake.”

“Then why does she step out with him?”

Sophie fingers her glass. Drinks a little. Sobriety is returning—it wasn't that far away to begin with, Sophie's not really fond of cocktails—and the milk forms a nice thick comforting film over the walls of her abused stomach. “I guess she likes it. The danger, I mean.”

“She should watch herself.”

“Oh, he's leaving town on Friday. Back home to Georgia and his wife and kids.”

“Well, I can't say I'm not happy to hear that, Baby dear.” Virginia pats her hand and looks up at the clock. The maid, closing the oven door, sweeps a curious glance across the two of them. Sophie can see the girl from the corner of her eye. She can't quite get used to this new intrusion in their lives, the way Virginia and their father can: the remorseless omnipresence of servants, every waking moment, every sleeping one, too. Gives her the creeps.

“You'd better get upstairs,” Virginia adds. “You'll want a few hours of rest before that fellow arrives.”

“What fellow?”

“Don't you remember? Your cavalier is coming today.”

Sophie claps a hand over her mouth. “That's today?”

“You're such a scatterbrain, Baby. Haven't you been looking forward to this for days?”

“I have. I just forgot that today was Wednesday.”

“It naturally follows after Tuesday.”

“I know, but Tuesday hasn't ended yet.”

Virginia laughs and finishes her milk. “For
you,
maybe. And now I've got to go see about that window your baseball player broke. If Father finds out—”

“Oh, you won't tell him, will you?”

“Of course not.” Virginia holds up her thumb, and Sophie presses it with her own, the old signal. The thumb pad is cushiony, warm, like the old parlor sofa. Virginia's face behind it has grown a little wistful. “I don't mind. You
should
have a little fun while you can, Baby. Before you get married to Mr. Ochsner.”

Sophie drops a remorseful gaze at the table. She
has
had fun. These past few weeks, the fun's trickled right in, excursion by excursion, each one artfully disguised under one excuse or another, a subversive collusion of Virginia and Sophie and Julie against the regime of the Fortescue household. Julie Schuyler,
blond and brilliant:
Let's go out and be naughty tonight, somewhere where nobody knows who we are, I know just the place.
And she had. And it was
nice
—
really
nice—not to sit at home reading for once, listening to the phonograph. Nice and somewhat exotic to drink horrid cocktails that made your head fuzzy, and listen to oddly paced music that made it fuzzier, and then try to dance and end up laughing safe in Julie's long blond arms. Even Julie's baseball player couldn't spoil things, though he
would
keep looking at Sophie as if she were a dish of roasted chestnuts he'd like to crack open, one by one.

All at once Sophie's head is drenched in fatigue. She drops her thumb away to cover a yawn, and when her mouth is back under control, she says to her sister, “My pocketbook is probably ruined, don't you think?”

“You can get another.”

“But it's such a waste. Shouldn't it matter?”

Virginia shrugs. “Everything's changed, Baby dear. All our worries are over.”

But Virginia's voice is out of tune, a hair flat. On her face there is such an
absence
of joy, such a pancake dullness in her eyes, that Sophie raises her head and shakes off the sleepiness. “Is everything all right, Virgo?”

“Yes.”

“Have you heard anything?”

The right-hand side of Virginia's mouth forms a smile. “No. Same as yesterday.”

“Well.” Sophie picks up her pocketbook and runs her hand along the length of purple Italy. A few feet away, Virginia's hand lies atop the table, caressing her glass of milk, and Sophie (not for the first time) steals a glance at the wedding band that crimps the skin of her sister's telltale fourth finger, just to reassure herself that it still exists. That some physical evidence survives—other than the small child sleeping upstairs, and the letters that appear on the hall table, from time to time—of this phantom brother-in-law from the battlefields of France. Sophie ventures: “I'm sure he'll write soon. As soon as he can.”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

“He must be miles away from any settlement. Florida's such a big state.”

“Well, that's the idea, isn't it? Big and lots of land. Lots of opportunity. Now go to bed, Baby dear. You have a big day tomorrow.”

“Today.”

Virginia laughs. “Yes, today. I can't wait to see what all the fuss is about. I'm sure it's going to be great fun.”

The strap of the pocketbook is a long filigree triple chain, which can either be tucked inside or slung over Sophie's elbow or wrist. A very pretty chain, finely wrought, nothing like the workmanlike chains she encounters in Father's workshop. She fingers it now, slides the delicate metal along the tips of her fingers, making them tingle, and thinks,
I wonder whether you could design a machine to make these, delicate work, but I'll bet you could do it with the right die, with a really precise gear to do the links.