A Certain Age (5 page)

“Cold roast meat,” says Virginia, “and salads.”

“It's wintertime. Luncheon should be hot.”

“I didn't know when we'd be serving.” Virginia glances at the clock, and then at Sophie. She lifts a pleading eyebrow, as if Sophie can somehow conjure Mr. Ochsner's cavalier by snapping her fingers, or tapping her heels together.

Mr. Fortescue throws up his hands. “What a joke. I should have figured. I should have known it would all go up in smoke, a fellow like that—”

“It's not Mr. Ochsner's fault, exactly. It's the cavalier who—” begins Sophie.

“And that's another thing. What man sends another man to do his courting for him?”

“Maybe it's a custom, among people of Mr. Ochsner's class,” says Virginia. “An old custom. I think it's charming and civilized.”

“Well, I don't like it. It seems to me, if a man really wanted to make an offer, he'd do it himself instead of sending in some—some—” He flails for a word.

“Oh, I'm sure Mr. Ochsner didn't mean it like that, Father,” Sophie says. “I think Virginia's right. It's just an amusing family tradition.”

“He comes from an
extremely
old and venerable family, Father,” says Virginia.

Mr. Fortescue retrieves his watch from his pocket and flips open the case. “Seems the joke's on us, if you ask me.”

“Oh, Father.” Sophie looks helplessly at her sister, who shrugs and glances at the door.

“Should have known,” said Mr. Fortescue. “These high society nitwits. Should have known it was too good to be true. Let this be a lesson.” He shoves his watch back in the pocket of his gray-striped waistcoat. His cheeks are pale; his nose looks as if someone dipped the tip in a raspberry sauce. “I'm hungry. I'm going in to lunch. You're welcome to join me.”

He turns to the pocket doors that lead to the dining room, and Sophie flies after him.

“Father, please. Virgo! Have Betty bring him something to eat.”

“Good idea,” says Virginia.

“I don't want to be brought something to eat. I want to sit down like a civilized man at his civilized table and enjoy my lunch.” Mr. Fortescue pushes open one door and then the other, exposing the neatly laid luncheon table and the series of covered dishes on the sideboard beyond.

Sophie takes hold of his arm.

“Please, Father. Weren't you the one to encourage Mr. Ochsner in the first place? Just a few more minutes.”

“I've waited long enough already. It's a joke, don't you understand? He's playing one of his jokes on us, playing us for fools. That's what they do, these nobs. They look down on us from Olympus and
laugh
. Now listen to me.” He turns at last and places his hand on hers, on her hand that circles his forearm. “You don't let down your guard again, do you hear me? Either of us. I never should have been taken in by that fellow, showing up on our—out of the blue, wanting to—I never should have thought—I never should have said yes.”

“It wasn't out of the blue. Julie Schuyler introduced us.”

“Well, and who's Julie Schuyler? Dizzy society girl, what's the word? A flapper. Don't trust them, Sophie.”

“Julie's perfectly nice. She's from one of the best families in New York.”

“And how does my Sophie go around meeting society girls?”

“In the millinery department, Father. I was buying a hat, remember?
You told us we could go out shopping, so we went to Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue, and—”

“Well, don't shop there again, do you hear me? Fifth Avenue. Don't you go shopping with this Schuyler girl again. I never should have—don't know what I was—we'll just go back to the way it was, do you hear me? They're just ciphers, all of them, just a bunch of idiots swanning around in silk jackets because their dads and granddads made some money. Well, I tell you, I think it's time we moved out of New York and found you a nice young man from—from—” He flails with his New Yorker's ignorance of outside geography. Flings his shopworn hands in the air. “I don't know, New Jersey or someplace.”

“Father—” whispers Virginia.

“You, too, Virgo. We'll see if that husband of yours is—well, if he's not—well, we'll just keep you to ourselves where you belong. Family, girls. Family's what matters. Family above all.” He takes Sophie's hand inside the crook of his elbow and turns them both to face the doorway, where a man stands quietly before the table, wearing an immaculate officer's dress uniform, flanked by the beaming Betty in her crisp white pinafore apron.

The man tucks his hat under his arm, just above his sword, and says, “I couldn't agree more, Mr. Fortescue.”

Sophie, during her many afternoon excursions to the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street, once came upon a volume of portraits from the last century, which occupied her for hours. They were mostly images of society women: women who lived in New York and Boston, or Paris or London, possessing titles and double-barreled names and severely corseted waists, wearing dresses and jewelry that seemed to have grown naturally from their skin. Among these creatures posed the busts of distinguished men, much less interesting, monochrome, grimacing behind the thickets of frizzled hair along their jowls, each one looking more or less like the other.

And then Sophie had turned a page, and there stood an athletic young man in a red hunting jacket next to a burnished chestnut horse. His hat hung
from one hand, together with his riding crop, while the other hand contained the horse's reins, just beneath the chin, and (in brilliant contrast to his grizzled male relatives among the earlier pages) he was smiling. Smiling and smooth-skinned and radiant, his red-gold hair matching that of his horse, and Sophie gazed at him in rapture, blinking now and again when her eyeballs became too dazzled, and she wondered what
pill
he had swallowed, what
sun
had shone down on his birth, that he could gather so much electricity beneath his skin. According to the caption, he had died at twenty-seven of enteric fever, and when Sophie returned the next week to see his portrait again, the book was gone. Somebody had checked it out.

Now, then. This young man standing before the luncheon buffet doesn't look like the man in Sophie's portrait, not at all. For one thing, his jacket's olive green instead of red, and his hair's dark instead of red-gold. The fellow in the portrait was more beautiful, too, but then it wasn't his beauty that had caught Sophie's attention, was it? It was the
radiance,
the clean-edged ferocious good humor, the way his smile had
filled
the page to the very edges.

“Good morning,” says Mr. Ochsner's cavalier, and he puts one foot forward and sort of bows—bows!—as if anyone does that kind of thing anymore! His face is grave, except for his mouth, which twitches upward at each corner as if the four of them are all party to the same charming joke.

“My name is Captain Octavian Rofrano of the United States Army Air Service, and I've come on behalf of Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner. Have I the honor of addressing Miss Sophie Fortescue?”

His gaze falls upon Sophie's face, and she's struck with an almost irresistible desire to laugh, to fall down dead of laughter, because what sheltered nineteen-year-old girl can accept that beam of concentrated, smiling attention without falling down dead of something or other?

“Yes,” she whispers.

Captain Rofrano's right hand, it turns out, is not securing the headstall of a chestnut Thoroughbred, but a square box of navy-blue leather, stamped in gold. He opens the clasp with an agile white-gloved thumb, and up pops the lid to reveal a perfect miniature rose in bloom, made entirely of
tiny diamonds, far too exquisite and complicated and improbable for a mere engagement ring. An engagement ring.

“I offer to you, Miss Fortescue, the betrothal present of the Ochsner family, which has been handed down each generation to the bride of the eldest son, as a symbol of everlasting attachment. Will you accept it?”

Sophie's mouth turns round. She looks from the ring, resting patiently on a bed of old blue velvet, to the solemn face of Captain Rofrano, whose eyes alone are now smiling. But she's only nineteen, and she's seen so little of the world, and eyes are enough for her. Especially a pair of eyes like those.

She pulls her hand from her father's arm, bends her small form into a courtly curtsy, and says yes.

And really, if you yourself were settled right inside Sophie's young skin, wouldn't you do the same?

Ever since Eve started it all by offering Adam the apple, woman's punishment has been to supply a man with food, and then suffer the consequences when it disagrees with him.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

Somewhere in Manhattan, the next day

I
F YOU'RE
thinking I hauled the Boy straight from that Fourth of July swimming pool and into bed, why, shame on you. Like I intimated earlier, he has principles.

For some reason, as I pickle in a taxi on my way to Greenwich Village for my scheduled Thursday afternoon, regular as rain, going nowhere fast, I ponder those principles. I have a few of them myself: not the same ones, maybe, as you find on Main Street, and certainly not the same ones I commanded twenty-five years ago, or twenty, or even five. But I admire principles, whatever they happen to be, and wherever I happen to find them. I think it takes guts to have principles in this modern age, and even more guts to admit to them.

I remember—and this is a treasured memory, you understand, so indulge me a moment—I remember how I made my way over to him that night, around the open lip of the pool, while he watched my every unsteady
step: that took guts, too, I think, on both our parts. Or perhaps it was all the cocktails. My head was buzzing, and so was my skin. I said hello and told him my name, and he nodded.

“I know who you are, Mrs. Marshall.”

“Do you? How uncanny. Because I don't remember being introduced.”

Instead of replying, he took a drink from the glass in his hand, which might have been water but smelled like gin and tonic. I extracted the cigarette from between his fingers and lifted it to my lips.

“And what do I call you?” I asked.

“Whatever you like, Mrs. Marshall.”

“What do
they
call you?” I motioned to the crowd around us.

So he told me his name, and we got to talking. Small talk, you know what I mean. The strangely mild weather: mild, that is, for a New York July. The Babe. How we knew the hosts. What he did for a living, where he lived. It turned out he had returned from France a couple of months ago and taken a job as a junior bond salesman at Sterling Bates, on the corner of Wall and Broad. I asked him to tell me about bonds.

“Government or corporate?” he said.

“Never mind. Tell me about France.”

He finished his glass of whatever-it-was and took back the cigarette, of which there wasn't much. “You shouldn't smoke, Mrs. Marshall.”

“Why not?”

“My uncle was a doctor. He said they were coffin nails.”

“
My
doctor says they're good for my nerves.”

“To each his own doctor, I guess.”

“Then why do you smoke them?”

He gave me a bored old look that said the answer was too obvious for words, and I remember thinking, at this point, that maybe I was wrong. Maybe there was no frisson, at least on his part; maybe he wasn't interested in flirting at all, now that he'd seen me up close. The water in the swimming pool, picking up the reflection of the torches, still made those funny patterns on his cheeks and forehead, and I couldn't tell the color of his irises. But
I could see that he was even younger than I'd thought. The skin around his mouth was taut and thick, and the lips were still full, like a child's. He was twenty at most, I thought. Younger than Tommy. Young and clean and unspoiled.

I stepped in, next to his elbow, and spoke in a soft voice, because I was so frightened. “What were you doing in France?”

“Flying airplanes. Shooting down other ones, when I could.”

“But the war ended a year and a half ago.”

“I hung around Paris for a bit afterward.”

“Ooh la la.”

“It wasn't like that,” he said.

He was so close I could feel the draft of his eyelashes when he blinked, which wasn't often. The smell of his skin made me think of dandelions. Or newly cut grass. One of those outdoor things. (I later learned that the scent belonged to his shaving soap, a brand he found at an otherwise ordinary drugstore on the corner of Duane and Reade.) He was green and robust and very warm, and his eyes were still regarding me with that peculiar torchlit concentration, and when I put my hand on his arm, the muscle was ropy and vigorous beneath my fingers, and I wanted him so badly—skin, muscle, warmth, everything—my mouth watered. My stomach rumbled.

“Really?” I said. “Maybe you could tell me about it. They tell me I'm a very good listener.”

He didn't reply, at least out loud. He just went on looking at me, while the leopard spots jiggled around his face.

I shrugged. “Or you could fetch me a gin and a cigarette, and we could sit here drinking and smoking, and nobody needs to say a thing.”

And then he said—God, I'll never forget this—he puts this enormous hand on my shoulder, covers my whole bare shameless shoulder and then some, his big thumb lining up along my collarbone and almost into the tender little hollow of my throat, and he says to me, in this baritone voice that couldn't possibly belong to a twenty-year-old: “Mrs. Marshall, I don't think
it's right to go drinking with another man's wife, especially if he's not around to sock me in the face for trying.”

I couldn't say anything at first. I don't think I could breathe, I was so angry and ashamed. The Boy has that effect; he can make you feel ashamed of yourself, just by looking at you: not mad, not angry, just melancholy. The way Jesus probably looked at his disciples at the Last Supper. I gathered myself and snapped, “You're such a boy.”

He lifted his hand away. “I guess I am, Mrs. Marshall.”

And he sort of bowed, and turned away, and as he walked back into the house, I remember how the anger left me in a whoosh, and all I wanted to do was sit and cry. Cry like a baby who's lost her mother.

And maybe that's why I'm pondering all this ancient history, as the taxi inches down Fifth Avenue toward Washington Square, and the dirty white lights wink at me from outside the window. I'm bereft. That feeling he left me with, on that suffocating Fourth of July night, returns to me whenever the Boy is absent from my side, and most especially when we've parted on uncertain terms. I roll down the window, allowing a blast of frigid air into the interior of the taxi, and stick my head bravely out into the Manhattan night to see what's up. What's keeping me from the Boy's apartment on Christopher Street. And it's just traffic. Bawling horns and flashing lights, just people trying to get to another place. Just New Yorkers in a hurry, going nowhere.

WHEN I REACH THE APARTMENT,
the Boy is not around. No matter. I've got a key. He gave me a key right away, the first night I spent here. He had it made specially for me, a locksmith around the corner on Bleecker. “Don't lose it, now,” he said, placing the thing in my palm, and I said, dry-mouthed, that I wouldn't. I didn't say that nobody had ever given me a latchkey before. You didn't trade keys with your lovers; you met when he was home, or you met somewhere else. Keys imply ownership, and lovers are
free free free,
aren't they?

I've brought a picnic. I don't cook—I can boil the Boy a breakfast egg,
but even that always turns out too runny or else too hard, though he never complains—so I just haul along provisions cooked by somebody else. And I set a lovely table. The Boy has his mother's old china, a nearly complete set of white-and-ochre Spode, not that we need bouillon dishes, let alone twelve place settings of them. I took out the dinner and dessert plates and the soup bowls and packed the rest back in the crates in the basement. We have some silver I brought down from Fifth Avenue (God knows it's not missed) and the Boy always brings me flowers, extravagant ones, which I put in the vase in the middle of the square wooden table in the miniature hall, wedged between the miniature kitchen and the miniature parlor. It's gorgeously intimate, like a pair of newlyweds just starting out in life.

By the time I whirl inside the front door, the clock has already rung in six o'clock. The Boy will be home from work any minute. I spread out the tablecloth and uncork the wine, and then I open up the cupboard and find the precious Spode plates and the glasses, and the silverware from the drawer, and the napkins, and last of all the empty vase in the center, ready to be filled with hothouse flowers from the shop outside the Christopher Street subway station. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I discover that my hands are a little shaky, so after every dish and glass and spoon is settled in its precise millimeter-fine location, I mix myself a Tom Collins and settle down on the beaten-up sofa with a cigarette to wait for the Boy.

At the time he drove me back to the city on Tuesday morning, he hadn't liked my little idea about the ring, and he let me know it. He was supposed to be working at noon on a Wednesday, didn't I know that? Especially so soon after New Year's Day, when things were getting back to business, when everybody was investing his Christmas bonus, if a fellow was lucky enough to get one. And he hadn't worn his dress uniform in three years, and he didn't appreciate getting buttoned up to perform like some kind of dancing monkey for the pleasure of the leisured classes.

“I'm a member of the leisured classes,” I pointed out, “and you don't mind performing for
my
pleasure.”

“I do mind, actually, but I do it anyway. I'm your trained monkey.”

“You're my beloved.”

He said nothing to that. What was the point? It was an argument, after all, with which we were already minutely familiar.

I went on. “Darling, I
need
you to do this. You know my brother isn't the best judge of character, the little dear, and I'd like to see this isn't another of his harebrained schemes. For all we know, they've taken him in.”

“Taken him
in
? What for? He hasn't got a pair of dimes to rub together. More likely, it's the other way around, and they're the poor suckers thinking he's got something to offer them.”

“He's got plenty to offer them. Better things than money. Position, history—”

“An overdraft.”

“But it's a terribly prestigious overdraft.”

Well, he smiled at that, just a little bit, and I should have left it there. I really should. But I didn't like that bit about the dancing monkey, you see, and I wanted to set the record straight, so I piped right back up.

“If you mind it so awfully much, why do you keep seeing me?”

He sighed. “You know the answer to that.”

“I don't know the answer to anything with you. You're a perfect mystery to me. I suppose it's part of your charm.”

“Because I can't stop. I can't stop seeing you.”

“Why not?”

“Theresa. Isn't it enough that I'm hooked? Isn't it enough that you've got me revolving around you like a moon? What else do you want to drag out of me?”

“I don't want to drag anything out of you. I just want to understand you.”

He brought his fist down on the steering wheel, and we didn't say anything else, not until he pulled up on the corner of Madison Avenue and Sixty-First Street, where he usually let me off, and I said, “But you
will
do it, won't you?”

He got out and went around to open the door for me, and just before I turned away to walk up Madison, he called out
All right, I'll do it!

So I sent the jeweler down in a taxi that afternoon to the Sterling Bates building on Wall Street (the Boy went on to work that day, he's terribly industrious) and sat in my splendid little office overlooking Central Park, answering letters, wishing I had remembered to kiss him good-bye.

I always kiss him good-bye, just in case it's the last time.

The clock sounds six thirty, and my glass is empty. I fill it again and light another cigarette, and at last a noise appears on the stairs outside the door, a noise not belonging to the madcap city beyond, and I stub out the newly lit cigarette and open the window a crack. I rise from the sofa and straighten my dress and put on a smile.

The door opens, and in walks the Boy, wearing his gray overcoat and his felt fedora hat. He sees the table first, the candles already lit, and his face turns to mine, registering surprise.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“If you have to ask.”

“You didn't say you were coming.”

“It's Thursday, isn't it? But if I'm not welcome, perhaps you might be so kind as to hail me a taxi.”

His shoulders bend forward. He sets his briefcase on the floor and removes his hat. His straight, thick hair gleams obediently in the light. “Of course you're welcome, Theresa. You're always welcome. I just thought—well, you walked away without a word. You didn't stop by at all last week. I thought you were mad.”

There's a tremendous hollowing in my middle, a void that fills with sweet relief. I make my way around the sofa table, take his hat, and hang it on the stand. “I'm never, ever mad at you, Boyo,” I say, and I kiss his hand and his neck and jaw and lips, I remove his tie and his jacket and everything else, and a long time later we are eating our picnic and drinking our wine, and I'm wearing nothing but the Boy's dressing gown and getting beautifully zozzled, and I remember something important.

“So how did it go?”

“How did what go?”

“Yesterday. The ring. Tell me about the patent king and his gilded daughter. Are they grotesquely rich and vulgar?”

The Boy finishes his ham and drinks a little wine. He's wearing his trousers and his white shirt, unbuttoned, and he smokes a cigarette while he eats, an unfathomably degenerate habit for which I have admonished him frequently. After he drinks, he lifts the glass and stares through the wine toward the opposite wall. “No, they weren't vulgar. Not at all.”

“But Ox said he's making a million and a half a year.”