A Certain Age (4 page)

“I do
like
Mr. Ochsner, though,” she says. “He's awfully kind, and he has such manners. He's like the men you read about in books. And his family! The
Ochsners,
Virgo. Like a piece of history.”

“He's an aging roué, Baby dear, and needs our money.”

“Well, of course. But at least he's grateful. He doesn't act as if he'd be doing
me
the favor, even though he has every right to be a snob, the family he's from. He's related to Paul Revere, you know.
And
Aaron Burr.”

Without warning, Virginia leans forward and puts her two hands on either side of Sophie's face. “Look at you. Your lipstick's all smudged. Did that Julie put blacking on your lashes?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you'd better wash it off before Father sees you. And use soap. A
lot
of soap.”

“All right.”

“Now listen to me. I know you want to please Father, and I know he makes it seem like you've got no other choice but to say yes, but that's no reason to marry this Mr. Ochsner if you don't want to. If you don't love him, I mean, or you don't think he loves you the way he should.”

“Of course not.”

Virginia's eyes have shed that awful film. They're brown and gleaming, just like they used to be, and her hands are delicious on Sophie's cold cheeks. “Not that he
shouldn't
be in love with you, Baby dear. You're such a lovable thing. But he's a New York bachelor. They're a different species. All they care about is the dough, and a good laugh. And I don't want anyone breaking my Baby's heart. I don't care what Father says. I took too much care in raising you.”

So Sophie's eyes turn blurry, because she knows what Virginia means, why Virginia's eyes are equally overflowing with caution and brown worry, and darn it all if they're not crying together, crying in each other's arms, crying as if Manhattan Island has just broken off from the rest of America to go drifting alone into the ocean, while the maid rolls her Irish eyes and heads into the breakfast room to light another fire.

SOPHIE COULD HAVE SLEPT AROUND
the clock, but Virginia wakes her at eleven, holding a glass of water in one hand and a pair of aspirin in the other. “Betty's bringing up a tray of coffee,” she says, not very sympathetic.

Sophie, turning her head in the direction of Virginia's voice, reflects that she may have been a little more—how did Julie put it?—a little more blotto last night than previously estimated. Or, alternatively, a nearby quarry has mistakenly delivered a load of rubble into her skull while she slept, by way of an ear.

She takes the aspirin and the water and swallows obediently. “Whatever happened to hair of the dog?”

“Not for you, young lady. Just be glad you weren't arrested last night. The paper's full of some raid the police ran on a place in the Village.”

“We were in Harlem. I think.”

“Still.” Virginia moves to the window and opens the curtain a few inches, causing the sunshine to outline her willowy shape, now clothed in a perfectly ethereal frock of blue silk that recalls the Madonna.

Sophie howls and buries her face in the pillow.

“You'd better get up,” Virginia advises. “Your cavalier is due here at noon, and cavaliers are always prompt, I'm told.”

So Sophie crawls into an upright position, pushing aside her hair, just as a perfunctory knock hits the door and the maid slides in, bearing a tray that's twice as heavy as she is. Evelyn follows her, squealing
Aunt Sophie! Aunt Sophie!
in two-year-old pidgin. Virginia goes on pulling aside the curtains, sending further shafts of merciless sunshine into the room, and Sophie decides that the teetotalers had it right after all, and she will never touch the demon liquor again.

“My goodness,” Virginia says cheerfully. “You look terrible. We'd better get to work.”

Lucky for Sophie, Virginia loves a good project, and at two minutes to twelve they descend the stairs, Madonna and virgin sister and beatific child, to join Father in the parlor, all newly redecorated in blue and cream. Sophie's head is still full of rocks, but the sharp edges are blunted by aspirin, and the rattle's not so bad, really, if she doesn't shake her head. She's wearing a dress of delicate fog gray that skims the curves of her calves, and as she pauses in the doorway, she imagines, for just the briefest flicker of an instant, that Father takes her hands and tells her she looks like an angel. Father does that sometimes. To Father, Sophie's always been an angel, as if her mother left behind a little piece of her eternal soul to illuminate them daily, and Sophie just
basks
in this adoration, just
lives
for it.

But only in her imagination.

In reality, Father folds his newspaper, stands up, and inspects her, head to toe. He asks her if she slept well, and she says
Like a baby,
and when that makes her blush because of Virginia, she adds
Right through breakfast!
just as cheerfully as she can, without spilling the rocks in her head.

He peers into her face. His ears are large and extend like a pair of wings from his old-fashioned whiskers, so that Sophie sometimes imagines he can actually hear her thoughts. (Or, in this case, the rattle of the guilty rocks.)

“Is something wrong, Father?” she asks, as innocent as can be.

“Oh, nothing.” He shakes his gray head. “For a moment there, I thought you were wearing lip rouge, that's all.”

Virginia laughs behind her. “The very idea! Baby wearing lipstick.”

“Not our Baby,” Father agrees.

Evelyn tugs at her dress. “Aunt Sophie! Aunt Sophie! Peetah's!”

Virginia swoops down and detaches her daughter. “Not today, pumpkin. Aunt Sophie's got a visitor. Mama will take you to Peter's after lunch and buy you a whole bag of lemon drops, all to yourself.”

“Lemmy drop!” Evelyn wriggles free and runs for the door.

“Not
yet,
Evelyn!”

Sophie turns to the window. If she cranes her head just so, she can glimpse the stream of people and vehicles gushing forth from the rusty spigot of Third Avenue. “This is so thrilling,” she says, in a voice too high by at least an octave. “Shouldn't he be here by now?”

Virginia joins her, carrying Evelyn on her hip. “You'd have thought so. I guess modern cavaliers have all this traffic in their way.”

“You mean he's not riding up on a horse?”

“The card didn't say anything about horses.”

No, it didn't. But it was a pretty card all the same: ecru, formal, written in a mysteriously lovely script that might have come from a printer, so even and copperplate were its curves and scrolls.

Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner presents both his compliments and his Cavalier

Wednesday, the eleventh of January, nineteen hundred and twenty-two at twelve o'clock

if Miss Sophia Fortescue and her Family will be at home to receive them

And that was all. So brief and delicious, so dripping with invisible intrigue in the spaces between the elegant black letters. A cavalier! What could that possibly mean? Sophie looked up the word in the dictionary
last week, to be sure there wasn't some clue hidden in its French etymology. She discussed the whole affair with Julie Schuyler last night, sometime between a green cocktail and a blue one—oh, perhaps
that
was the source of Italy's appearance on her pocketbook?—and Julie's thin eyebrows rose buoyantly.
Jay Ochsner's sending you a cavalier? Oh, my stars. What fun
that
will be
. And she tipped her cigarette into the ashtray and zipped her lips, even though Sophie begged for more. No, she wasn't going to spoil Sophie's surprise, she said, not for all the bourbon in all the bathtubs in Kentucky.

And now the cavalier is late, which isn't fair. Caught in traffic like an ordinary mortal. Not that Sophie blames him; at the end of the street, there's the rusty flow of Third Avenue, and beyond that the titantic crammed-up grid of Manhattan Island: delivery wagons and motor omnibuses and taxis and limousines with chauffeurs and endless ordinary automobiles—just like theirs—and it might take an hour to go five blocks in that tangle. Would a cavalier take the subway, if the traffic were
too
awful? It seems unlikely, but then the habits of upper-class New Yorkers are still a mystery to Sophie. It's a world all its own, a rhythm she hasn't quite picked up, no matter how closely she listens, no matter how she thrills to its throb in her veins.

“He isn't that late,” says Virginia. “Only a few minutes.”

Sophie places her hand on the window frame, which is newly repainted in thick cream, terribly flawless. Father told Virginia to redecorate, after Mr. Ochsner came to call that first time, and Sophie still marvels at the transformation. Creamy trim and blue silk draperies and gilt-framed mirrors above the mantels, so that you caught endless repetitions of yourself as you turned around, each one bemused and lost inside a jigsaw of tasteful new splendor. How could this perfection belong to them?
Sophie's
creamy window frame.
Sophie's
clear and fragile glass, looking down on the cars crawling past, any one of which might contain a cavalier bearing the compliments of the dashing, golden-haired Mr. Ochsner, whose family owned such a glorious, ancient library, who had knights at his beck and call to deliver greetings to young ladies.

What a magical place, Manhattan! What a thrill, what a wallop to live
inside it. And sometimes you were bemused and lost, and sometimes you were full of glitter, sometimes your insides sizzled and bubbled and sang with the simple joy of a traffic jam outside your window, one that might or might not contain a genuine, twenty-four-carat knight. A
parfait
creature from another age, galloping free from all that modern steel.

Virginia continues in her housewifely vein. “I've had a buffet luncheon laid out in the dining room, in case he's the hungry kind of cavalier.”

“But the card didn't say anything about lunch,” Sophie says.

“I thought lunch might be implied in the part about twelve o'clock.”

“But eating seems so ordinary and human. Don't you think he'll be offended if we ask him to lunch?”

Virginia pulls away from the window and sets Evelyn on her feet, to go running into the dining room and inspect the rumored buffet. “Baby dear, he's a man. He'll want lunch.
If
he ever gets here.”

“Oh, he'll get here,” says Sophie, full of confidence, but as the minutes ebb past and Father rises from the settee to walk restlessly up and down the blue-and-cream Persian rug, no knight—hungry or not—emerges from the mass of traffic on the street below. Sophie listens to the distant belch of the horns, the shouts and the roars of engines, the mighty metallic hullaballoo of the Second Avenue El, and above all to the relentless
tick-tick-tick
from the ormolu clock above the mantel—a sound she somehow extracts from all that passionate din, even though she would rather not—but at no time does a squeal of brakes end at the Fortescue doorstep, or a cheerful Manhattan drawl drift up from the entrance.

Father snaps shut the case of his pocket watch. “This had better not be some kind of joke.”

“Oh, I'm sure it isn't,” says Virginia. “He's just stuck in all that traffic.”

Tick-tick-tick.
Then a pair of chimes, as the clock delicately suggests twelve thirty.

“I'm famished,” says Mr. Fortescue. “What's for lunch?”

Sophie turns. Father's planted his feet in the center of the priceless rug, and his thumbs are hooked in the pockets of his waistcoat. He's built on slen
der lines, not at all the kind of corpulent figure you expect to find among the wealthy of his sex: more well-dressed egg than man. Maybe because Mr. Fortescue's never been the eggy sort of person, and even the waistcoat and the gold watch are aberrations, interlopers on a body that would rather be wearing a plain broadcloth suit and sitting on a workbench, tinkering with gears and levers. Sophie shares his height—what there is of it—and his narrow shoulders and his incongruously voracious appetite; Virginia (or so Sophie's told) favors their mother, who was tall and extremely slender. Sophie can only wonder how they must have looked together.