A Certain Age (30 page)

We walked a little farther, heels smacking on the pavement. I was going to ask how he learned to fight like that, how he learned to knock a man senseless and not even care, but I already knew the answer to that, didn't I? I already knew the source of the darkness inside him; there was no need to drag it out into the light and dissect it into its endless component pieces, and then oil up the parts and put the Boy back together again, like Humpty Dumpty. Instead, we continued on to the club and got ourselves all pie-eyed, and then we continued on back to his apartment and fucked, splendidly and desperately, for what remained of the night. Voilà! All better again.

But I did ask, a few days later, how he had remained so calm, when I had been paralyzed with fright. I wanted to know the trick, you see; I wanted to know how I could laugh in the face of danger, or at least to deliver danger a solid punch to the kisser.

Well, there were two ways, he said. The first is that you're born cold-blooded. The second is that you learn.

How do I learn? I wanted to know.

(We were lying in bed, nice and snug, listening to the midnight rain batter the window.)

Trust me, said the Boy. You don't want to learn.

ANYWAY. BACK TO BREAKFAST, ARRIVING
at my door this very instant. But—surprise! It's not breakfast.

Well, to be perfectly fair, the breakfast is there on its tray, all right: coffee-scented, strengthfully borne by a slight, wiry man. Beneath his low-slung cap, however, his face is rather familiar, and not at all servile.

Mrs. Lumley lets out a cry.

“Monty!”

Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can't be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half the time.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

The lobby of the Pickwick Arms, that same instant

M
ISS SOPHIE
Faninal, poised at the familiar Pickwick front desk, wearing yesterday's navy suit and a fresh pair of white gloves, curls her fingers around her pocketbook and attempts to master a growing sense of panic.

“But I don't understand,” she says. “Why hasn't my sister answered her telephone? Hasn't anyone bothered to check on her?”

“We are not in the habit of disturbing our guests unnecessarily, Miss Faninal,” says the man behind the desk.

“Except to telephone them.”

“That was the police.” He glances at the men standing at Sophie's shoulder, dressed in uniform, and then at the man standing quietly at her side. He clears his throat. “In any case, Mrs. Fitzwilliam rang down at approximately six forty-five to order breakfast, so I believe we can rest assured that she is alive and well.”

Sophie holds out her hand. “Then you'll be so good as to return my key, won't you? My sister and I
were
sharing the suite, after all.”

The man coughs and glances again at the policemen behind her. “Of course. But I'm afraid these gentlemen must wait in the lobby. It is not our policy to disturb our guests—”

“Unnecessarily. Yes. I quite agree.” Sophie forms a white cotton fist around the brass key, which is attached to a round brass plate engraved with the number 404, and turns an exact half circle. “Gentlemen? You'll excuse me. I shall return shortly with my sister, and we will put ourselves entirely at your disposal.”

She looks each man in the eye, and saves a last confident half smile for the detective in charge, a man named Lieutenant Curtis. Lieutenant Curtis has been unexpectedly kind. From the moment of her arrival, driven out of Manhattan and into the suburbs in Octavian's Ford—driven by Octavian himself at a steady and ripping forty miles an hour, engine whining in disbelief—the lieutenant has taken her shock and dismay at face value, unlike the rest of the squad, who seem to think she has something to do with her father's escape from the Fairfield County Jail, at some point in the middle of the previous night. She wants to tell them that she was drinking bourbon on the kitchen floor with Miss Julie Schuyler at most points in the middle of last night, when she wasn't dancing a mad and unsteady turkey trot to an old ragtime record on her father's Victrola, but that isn't the kind of thing you tell a disapproving arrow-straight police detective, is it?

At least she had Octavian by her side, thank God, tousle-haired and reassuring. He didn't say much, but he wasn't leaving her alone: that much he made clear to everyone concerned, including Sophie. He was popping out of the Ford and onto the sidewalk almost as soon as she opened her front door on Thirty-Second Street, an hour or so earlier, asking if she was all right. “No, I'm not,” she told him. “My father's just escaped from jail.”

Well, he wasn't expecting that, but he didn't waste any time. “Come along,” he said, opening the passenger door, and she didn't have to tell him where to go. He just drove, up Third Avenue all the way to the Bronx, where
he picked up the Boston Post Road and plowed straight through, almost without stopping. Like last winter, only faster and warmer and more ominous, and Sophie wasn't sleeping. She was clutching the door handle, clenching her stomach, as if that could make the Ford go faster, make the miles shorten and disappear. Father escaped. Why? He had just submitted to the guilty verdict the day before. He had admitted defeat. He had bowed his head and given in at last.

The question still screams in her mind, but she doesn't let it show. Oh, no. When Lieutenant Curtis nods his approval and turns to direct his squad toward the various entrances and exits of the hotel, she looks at Octavian and smiles bravely. “You'll wait here for me, won't you?”

“Of course. Do you want me to come up with you?”

“I don't think they'll let you. They're suspicious, for some reason.”

“Don't worry about that. Just get your sister down here, and I'll speak to the lieutenant. Find out what I can.”

Her hands are damp inside her gloves. She rolls the key in her palm. Octavian looks expectant, almost as if he's about to lean down and kiss her good-bye. As if they have the right to kiss each other.

“I meant to ask—” she says hurriedly.

“What?”

“Why weren't you with her? Last night?”

“She wasn't there.”

“Oh. I see.” The air in the lobby is warm and summerlike; every window is open to catch what morning freshness is available. To her left, the desk clerk is casting curious looks, though he's pretending to write in his ledger. Sophie feels a little sick. As she turns to the elevator, she says, “Could you see if they have anything to eat? I'm famished.”

“Of course. Coffee?”

“Yes,” she says, over her shoulder.

There is a single elevator at the far end of the lobby, with burnished bronze doors, hidden behind a pair of pillars. As Sophie waits for the car to descend, another guest joins her, a man. A little too close. She makes a half
step to the side, and he says, in a low voice, “I beg your pardon. Miss Fortescue?”

“Faninal.”

“I beg your pardon. I couldn't help overhearing that you're on your way up to see your sister?”

She doesn't turn her head. She stares up at the slender arrow on the dial above the bronze doors, heart thudding, and says, “I'm afraid it's a private matter, sir, but I appreciate your interest.” (Her standard response to a member of the Curious Public.)

The man shifts his feet. She can't see him, but he seems about average: average size, average clothing. His voice has a bit of masculine bite, that edge of roughness that suggests a smoking habit.

The arrow begins to move downward. Three. Two.

The man persists. “I—I understand. It's just . . . well, I believe my wife is upstairs with her, this very minute.”

“Your wife?”

“Yes, ma'am.” He hesitates. “I think you're acquainted with her. Mrs. Lumley.”

The bell dings softly, and the doors open, revealing a delicate metal grille. The attendant opens it and looks at them expectantly from beneath his cap. The car behind him is small and square, upholstered in red, smelling faintly of a woman's stale floral perfume. A narrow bench of red leather runs along the back wall.

Sophie turns to the man beside her. He's shorter than she remembers from the trial, and his eyes are dark and pleading. “Mrs.
Lumley
?” she says. “She's visiting my sister? Right
now
?”

“Yes. She—she left early this morning, and I couldn't help wondering why—she wasn't herself—I followed her here, just to make sure she was all right, and . . . well.” He tips his hat. Licks his lips. “I'm sorry. Don't mean to disturb. But I'm awfully worried, and they won't tell me what room it is.”

“Sir? Madam?” says the bored attendant.

Sophie recognizes the weight of Mr. Lumley's face, the sick despondency
of his eyes. The poor man. Her heart beats a little faster. Her skin itches beneath her clothes. Mrs. Lumley! What in God's name is Mrs. Lumley doing with Virginia?

She reaches out and touches the man's elbow.

“Mr. Lumley. I'm so sorry. I'll send her right down to you, I promise.”

She steps forward into the elevator car. Says,
Fourth floor, please
.

The attendant reaches for the grille. Just as he begins to rattle it shut, Mr. Lumley hops forward to join them both in the car.

“If it's all the same to you,” he says, staring up at the dial, reaching into his jacket pocket, “I think I'll come along.”

He unwraps a piece of candy, pops it in his mouth, and offers another to Sophie.

“Peppermint?”

There are only two kinds of men: the dead, and the deadly.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

The Pickwick Arms, room 404, at the same time

W
ELL. YOU
can imagine my surprise! The murderous Patent King himself, turning up at my hotel room, dressed in a clever red uniform like a monkey and unaccompanied by any visible member of the police force: local, state, or federal.

“Why, Mr. Faninal!” I exclaim, surveying the room for possible weapons. The pistol still lies in my pocketbook, tucked inside the drawer in the bedroom. “What a tremendous surprise. I thought you were in prison.”

He closes the door with his foot and sets down the tray on the nearest table. Mrs. Lumley utters a scream and runs for the bedroom.

“Where's Virginia?” he says. “Where are my daughters?”

My gaze alights on the fire irons. I edge a half step toward the hearth. “They're not here, I'm afraid. Miss Faninal is consoling herself in Manhattan with my fiancé, while Mrs. Fitzwilliam and her daughter have taken the train for Florida.”

“Florida!”

“Yes. Something to do with that absent husband of hers. She's decided
the time is ripe to claim her matrimonial rights, now that her father's been convicted of murdering her mother. But what about—”

There's no point in continuing my sentence, because Faninal's gone and followed Mrs. Lumley into the bedroom. I hover for an instant, torn among fire irons and telephone and door. But I can't leave poor Mrs. Lumley to face the wrath of her onetime lover, can I? Heavens, no. I reach for a poker, nice and heavy, and then dash for the telephone, dragging the poker behind me.

“Put that down!” Faninal says, from the bedroom doorway. He's holding Mrs. Lumley by the arm, and the expression on her face is wide and stiff with terror.

I bring up the earpiece. “Nonsense.”

Faninal whips something out of his pocket and holds it to Mrs. Lumley's throat. “Put it down!” he roars, and
click!
The earpiece goes back in the cradle.

If I were the Boy, I think, standing there next to the telephone, cold hand wrapped around my impossibly heavy poker, I would have knocked Faninal to pieces by now. I would have slung my poker into his head and brained him. But something's stopping me. Maybe it's the baby, tiny and fragile and infinitely dear; maybe it's some flaw in my nature, some softness in my upbringing.

Maybe he can tell what I'm thinking. “Stay where you are,” he says, more softly, edging into the sitting room with his prize, step by step. He forces her down in an armchair and stands above her with that instrument of his: a kind of knife, except the blade has been sharpened into a point, like an old-fashioned dagger.

“You can't possibly imagine you're going to escape,” I say. “The police will come here first.”

“The police are already here,” he says.

“Then why did you come?”

“I wanted to see my daughters first.”

“First before what?”

His lips compress into a thin, pale line. He's not going to tell me, of course. Why should he tell me, a stranger?

“Well, they're not here,” I say, “so it's all for nothing. I suggest you surrender yourself to the police at once. I can't imagine what you hoped to accomplish by all this.”

Beneath his hands, Mrs. Lumley has begun to shiver. The whites of her eyes begin to show, and I realize her eyes are rolling back in her head. She slumps forward, and Faninal catches her just in time.

“I'll get water!” I exclaim.

“No! Stay where you are.”

“My God! Don't you care?”

There is a strange little silence. Around Faninal's eyes, the tense lines soften, and his lips part. The hand holding the knife drops to rest on the back of the chair, and the other hand eases Mrs. Lumley back into the cushion. He turns for the tray on the lamp table, a few feet away, and for some reason I don't press my advantage. I stay right where I am, between the fireplace and the telephone, clutching my iron poker.

Faninal takes a napkin from the tray and wets it with a little water from the pitcher. He comes around to the front of the chair and presses the cloth to Mrs. Lumley's temples, almost tenderly, and I hear him mutter something under his breath, though I can't make out the words.

During the trial, the defense devoted an entire day of testimony to the subject of Mr. Faninal's background. How he came from an old and respectable (though not precisely
distinguished
) Boston family; how he met Mrs. Faninal at a Cambridge party and fell in love; how they settled in Greenwich because Mrs. Faninal did not like city life, and how her parents—several rungs higher on that implacable Brahmin ladder—weren't all that pleased with Mr. Faninal's unsociable habits and obsession with engineering: his dirty hands, in other words. (The middle-class jury, I expect, was supposed to feel sympathy for his predicament—the man cast away from his wife's blue-blooded family, I mean, for daring to work with his hands for a living.) Better to move elsewhere, then, somewhere away from all that familial friction, and Greenwich was so
pretty and newly gentrified, the old farms now splitting up and filling with the country houses of the pedigreed people and their pedigreed horses. Mrs. Faninal fit right into Greenwich society, at first. Most of the seaside houses were occupied only seasonally, but the Faninals were year-round residents, and while the husband was considered a bit eccentric, the wife made friends at the garden club and the ladies' committee at the local Congregational church. And eccentricity is always overlooked among country families; it's almost a badge of pride, isn't it? It's only murder that gets you thrown out of the club, once you're in. Murder and cheating at cards.

Now, I admit, these revelations gave me a new appreciation for Mr. Faninal. I suppose my native snobbery was appeased by the fact that—lo, behold!—he came from decent blood, after all. But you can't quite forget those descriptions of the grisly Greenwich kitchen, the little girl weeping over her mother. Even as I fought to save him from conviction, I felt distaste. I felt the filthiness of what I was doing. I looked at his impassive face and thought maybe he wasn't human; maybe he wasn't worth saving, whatever my fine reasons for saving him.

But humanity isn't so simple, you know. As Faninal sits in front of Mrs. Lumley and presses that linen against her temples, no one could accuse him of a lack of common feeling. And there's the fact that he exists in this room at all. Why not simply disappear, when he had the chance? Almost as if he never actually meant to escape at all. As if he told me the truth, a moment ago: he only wants to see his daughters outside of a prison's four walls, without bars or guards or guilt.

“Mr. Faninal,” I say softly, “have you anything to say to me?”

Mrs. Lumley's eyelids move. Faninal's hand falls away, and there is a moment, brief and precious, filled with nothing but a kind of reverent interior silence. A bird whistles through the open window. A car engine roars down the nearby avenue. The morning sun beats and beats against the awning.

“Why, you
didn't
murder her, did you?” I whisper.

He presses his lips together.

“Why don't you say anything? Are you covering for someone?”

“No—”

“Who is it? For whom are you covering, Mr. Faninal?”

“Monty,” murmurs Mrs. Lumley, or maybe it's a moan.

The poker drops to the ground, making a soft thump on the Oriental rug. I fumble for the telephone beside me. As my fingers touch the earpiece, a sharp knock rattles the door. “Virginia!” calls a female voice.

Faninal jumps to his feet and lifts the knife. His face turns urgently toward me.

“Who
is
it?” I call, all singsong, like one of the birds near the window.

Muffled by wood: “It's Sophie.”

Now. I really don't know Miss Faninal all that well, considering the many bonds that link us together. We've barely spoken to each other, isn't that funny? But I've seen her day after day in court; I've examined, when I thought I could get away with it, all the details of her face and dress and manner. My rival. I've hated her and admired her, and hated that I admired her. I have come to comprehend—wretchedly, agonizingly—why the Boy can't resist her, why my darling Boy has gone and fallen in love with this clean young creature.

But I haven't come any closer to her than that, not even in her time of greatest need, when any woman could use a friend. I suppose, therefore, I'm not the best judge of her inner nature, of her true character. I'm not really in a position to understand the tone of her voice when she says, brightly, through the wooden door of a suburban hotel suite:
It's Sophie!

So there's no reason at all that I should suspect something's wrong, and yet, as Faninal drops his knife in relief and calls out
Come in!,
I release the earpiece of the telephone and bend down to grip the heavy iron poker with both hands.

The lock rattles; a key clinks loudly. I think—foolishly, since I already know the answer—
Well, now, if she's got a key, why did she knock first?

Then the door swings open, and Sophie herself appears under the lintel: pink of cheek, creamy of skin, slanted of eyebrow.

Accompanied by a man in a wrinkled brown suit.