A Certain Age (8 page)

“Only
weeks
?”

“
Only
weeks?” Sophie has to shout above the clatter of the El.

He takes her by the elbow as they start perilously across the avenue. There isn't much traffic, but none of the few vehicles seems inclined to pause. “It can take a lot longer. But you seem like an adventurous girl.”

“I don't know about
adventurous.
But I do like to try new things, when I can.”

“Yes, I'll bet you do.”

They race past an omnibus just in time and duck under the thick steel girders supporting the tracks. “Why do you say that?” Sophie asks.

“What, that you like to try new things? I don't know. The things you've told me. Tinkering around with machines.”

“Oh, I don't do that so much any more.”

“Why not?”

And just what does she say to that? The truth?

She shrugs. “Too busy, I guess.”

“Anyway, you didn't hesitate when I handed you that ring and asked if you'd like to get married. That's adventurous.”

Sophie stops and wheels around to face him, right there under the thunderous El. He's standing before a girder, and his face looks down at hers from the exact center of a pair of parallel lines of rivets. “That's because you made it sound like such an adventure,” she says.

“Well, marriage
is
an adventure, I think. Or should be.”

“That's what I've always thought. I hope so, anyway. More exciting than this.” She points upward to the railroad tracks.

Mr. Rofrano smiles, a lovely warm smile that broadens his face. “What, more exciting than an elevated train?”

“More exciting than being on a rackety old track, going to the same place every day, passing the same stations, never really talking to anybody. Never really
going
anywhere. Locked between your same two rails.”

The day is overcast, and anyway it's a New York day, yellow-gray and poisonous with the smoke of a million coal fires, a thousand smokestacks retching prosperity into the air. But a dollop of light still finds Mr. Rofrano's face, through the complicated skeleton of the elevated railway, and as his smile fades, millimeter by millimeter, like a plant left to die by neglect, Sophie notices the true shape of his jaw, the angularity of his chin, and wonders whether he's considered handsome by his friends, or if it's just her.

“And now you want to get married,” he says, and Sophie notices another thing: the lightness of his eyes, which examine her in a very grave way that makes her feel just the smallest bit defensive.

“Well, is there anything grander than that? Vowing to love someone for the rest of your life? When you've found the right person, I mean.”

Mr. Rofrano rests his shoulders against the steel pillar behind him. “That's the thing, isn't it? Finding the right person.”

For some reason, God knows how, Sophie finds the nerve to lean forward and cup her mittened hand around his elbow, and it's larger than she expects, solid and woolly, filling her entire palm. “Oh, you'll find someone, Mr. Rofrano. I'm sure of it. Your perfect girl is just waiting for you, right around the corner. You've just got to
find
each other.”

If he's taken aback by her nerve, he doesn't show it. All the curiosity, all the movement in his face seems to have died away with that smile, and he might almost be a waxwork, fixed in concentration at a point just past her right ear. He stands so still, she's almost afraid to breathe. Only the pinkness of his cheekbones suggests life.

A snowflake whirrs past her nose, and another. She lets her hand drop away from his elbow, just as the steel begins to vibrate under the stress of an approaching train. But she doesn't look away. Oh, no. She keeps her sights
stuck bang on the fascinating color of his irises, until he can't help himself. He meets her gaze.

“Have you always been so brave?” Mr. Rofrano asks.

“Not always. Just the past couple of months, really.”

His lips part, and Sophie thinks he's going to ask her what brought about this recent surge of courage. Or who. And she hopes he will, because she's dying to tell him the whole story, dying to tell him all she's seen and learned, and why. The new world opening before her.

But no. He's just sighing, or maybe it's a groan, swallowed by the noise of the train. He takes her gently by the arm and navigates them both through the steel and the snowflakes to the open air, where his hand falls away.

THE WHOLE STORY IS THIS:
They met at the millinery department in Bergdorf Goodman two months ago, and
that
was when everything changed: Sophie's days before Julie, and her days After Julie.

Virginia was there, too, though not altogether willing. She'd wanted to visit one of the more modest millinery shops nearby, but Sophie had never been inside Bergdorf's and begged her sister to go, with a ferocity that made much more sense in the aftermath. So they had walked together from Thirty-Second Street, weaving crosstown and uptown and into the burr of traffic and shoppers that was Fifth Avenue, and Virginia had gripped her pocketbook and looked up the grand six stories that comprised the department store and—well, she hadn't
quite
crossed herself, but she looked as if she wanted to. And Virginia had driven ambulances in France!

“Oh, come along,” Sophie said, taking her by the arm and dragging her through the revolving doors, and it was like entering another universe, wasn't it, a universe that contained every possible luxury and nothing but luxury, and smelled opulently of perfume and shoe leather and money.

Money. They had loads of money now: exactly how much, Father wouldn't say. Virginia had a better idea, but she wasn't talking either. All Sophie knew was that her sister's pocketbook contained five hundred dollars,
a sum almost beyond the reach of her imagination a single year ago, and that these five hundred dazzling dollars represented no more than a crumb or two of the daily bread that was now theirs, thanks to the ingenious simplicity of Father's pneumatic oxifying drill. Sophie didn't know how they could possibly spend five hundred dollars on something so ordinary as clothes and hats, but as she unwound her scarf—the hall positively shimmered with reckless heat—she thought it might be great fun to try.

In order to reach the millinery department, they had to wind their way through a vast emporium of pocketbooks and gloves and perfume and shoes, through a gentleman's haberdashery and a collection of lush fur coats, until they realized they had missed their destination altogether and doubled back to the elevator, where a uniformed attendant opened and closed the grille and announced the floors in the same stately tone as the elevator attendant at the Paris Ritz had done, last summer. (Except in French.) In fact, Sophie had felt more at home then than she did now, because she spoke French fluently but
this
language—the language spoken by the two ladies murmuring behind her in the car—seemed beyond her grasp, its points of reference too far uptown, inhabiting a separate physical dimension altogether.

They arrived on the third floor, and the attendant called out
Millinery! Ladies ready-to-wear!
in his voice of ceremonial boredom. Virginia and Sophie stepped obediently out, and so did the two women behind them, who were joined also by a quiet girl of perhaps eleven or twelve whom Sophie hadn't noticed until now.

“Go off and find your hat, then,” said one of the ladies, in a voice that made Sophie think of a mouthful of marbles.

“Lily?” said the other one. “Come with me and look at lovely hats?”

“Do you mind, Mother?” asked the girl, far too politely for someone her age, and Sophie didn't hear Mother's response because Virginia was already pushing forward toward the millinery in her resourceful way, and Sophie had no choice but to lope on after her.

But never mind, because a few moments later the second woman joined them among the racks of hats—the young girl had evidently gone with her
mother instead—and Sophie, settling a wide-brimmed hat over the crown of her head, heard her voice just to the left.

“Not that one, please. Unless you want to look like your mother.”

Sophie removed the hat and spun around, and there she was! Julie. Hair of blond, eyes of blue, mouth of mischief (and decidedly of lip rouge as well). She was smiling, taking the edge off her words, and she couldn't have been older than Sophie, though her sophistication radiated outward in luxurious waves.

She lifted another hat from the stand and handed it to Sophie. “Try this one instead. It's close-fitting, frames your pretty face. You've got too pretty a face to hide behind an enormous old brim like that.”

Sophie placed the hat on her head and turned to the mirror, and goodness me if the young woman wasn't dead right. The hat surrounded Sophie's face like a picture frame, so that her previously shadowed eyes now looked large and gamine. The mossy color made her hazel eyes greener and her lashes blacker, and suddenly she could see her eyebrows! And they were beautiful! “It's marvelous,” she said, turning one way and then another.

“You're the one who's marvelous; the hat just lets everybody see it, which is really the point, don't you think?” The other woman put out a leather-gloved hand. “I'm Julie Schuyler, and you can thank me later.”

Sophie took that hand. “Sophie Fortescue.”

An instant later, Virginia swooped in, but it was already too late. The spark was struck, and when they had purchased their hats Julie forced everybody downstairs to find a pair of matching gloves in mossy leather, and then they had sat down in the café for tea. At which point, mid-sentence, Julie straightened in her chair and covered her mouth. “Gadzooks! I've forgotten my sister,” she exclaimed, but before she rushed back off to the third floor she had slipped her visiting card into Sophie's hand and said to come by for lunch tomorrow, because she was having a little party and needed a new face.

At the party, Julie introduced her to Jay Ochsner, who came calling on Thirty-Second Street the next day. Her father, bemused and suspicious, had taken Mr. Ochsner aside, and to Sophie's surprise they had emerged from this
meeting of one mind.
I would like you to encourage this man's suit, Sophie,
were Father's exact instructions, later that evening, and Sophie had. She would do anything to please her father. She had encouraged Mr. Ochsner, and discovered how much fun it was, having a handsome suitor all to yourself, eager to please and flatter you, allowed to escort you to places you'd never been allowed to go, all under the approving eye of a father whose approval came so rarely.

And so it went, for two whole months: shopping and tea and occasional clandestine adventures with Julie, courtship and tea and occasional clandestine kisses from the well-bred Mr. Ochsner. A new world. Maybe even a new Sophie.

SO THAT'S THE WHOLE STORY.
That's how, in a nutshell, a few hours after bidding Mr. Rofrano good-bye beneath the Second Avenue El, on a bitter Saturday evening in the middle of January, the formerly seraphic Sophie Fortescue possesses an elegant and slightly daring wardrobe to match her elegant and slightly daring fiancé, and no one seems happier than her own father.

“It's how your mother would have wanted it,” he says, the absolute and final word on the matter, as Jay settles her coat over her shoulders while a taxi putters outside, waiting to whisk them uptown to a party at the home of Julie's Schuyler cousins: Sophie's first party as an engaged woman.

Of course, Sophie will have to take her father's word for that, because she never knew her mother. Mrs. Fortescue died when she was just a baby.

ABOUT THOSE KISSES.

There were only four of them, really. The first one arrived in the library of the Ochsner house on Thirty-Fourth Street, a room of such stupefying riches that Sophie wandered the walls in a kind of trance, running her fingers over the leather bindings, gasping softly to herself. Later, she learned that the
rug beneath her feet was a rare Kilim, bought by Jay's grandparents in Istanbul on their wedding tour, and that the pair of Delft urns on the prodigious mantel had been given to his great-grandfather by the Prince of Orange himself, for some obscure reason lost to family legend.

At the time, however, only the room itself enchanted her: the shelves that reached from the floor to the delicately gilded ceiling, the books that filled those shelves. As a child, she had had few options for outside recreation, so with Virginia as her guide, she had explored vast and intricate worlds from the worn cushions of the parlor sofa, only to return those worlds to the nearby public library a week later. Books, after all, were expensive, and it was better to eat than read. So the little shelf in Sophie's bedroom contained a selection of volumes amassed lovingly over successive birthdays and Christmases, and the idea of an entire gilded library, old and venerable, covered with the fingerprints of one's ancestors, never needing to be returned to its rightful owner—why, it stole her will!

So she moved around the room in a slow clockwise rotation, trailed by a smiling Mr. Ochsner—he wasn't
Jay
yet, not quite—emitting little gasps from time to time, until she reached the end of one shelf and turned.

“Are all these really
yours
?”

He wore an expression she hadn't seen before, at least on him: a look of heartfelt wonder. The room was large, taking up an entire half of the grand first floor, and the winter light flattened against the side of his face. “Aren't you a doll,” he said, laying one hand against the side of her face, and he had leaned forward and kissed her, Sophie Fortescue, her first kiss ever. His lips were soft and confident and left her deliciously breathless, and even though she knew he'd probably never lifted a single one of those books from its shelf, she didn't mind the kiss at all. She thought it was strange and wonderful. In fact, she thought she might like another, and he obliged her a few days later when he came for lunch and presented her with a first edition of
Daniel Deronda
, one she'd especially admired, as a Christmas present.