A Certain Age (33 page)

The New York Herald-Times, June 15, 1922

TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

Dear readers, for the past two decades I've brought you the latest from the world of the greatest, and today I have the privilege of outdoing even myself. Yes, my dears, your own Patty Cake has scooped them all in the Trial of the Century.

My sources tell me that the dramatic events of two days ago—the conviction of the Patent King on the charge of murder, to the great dismay of the pretty Patent Princesses, followed by the notorious shootout at the Pickwick Arms Hotel that sent both Mr. Faninal and his apparent rival, Mr. Lumley, to their final rewards—have proved a mere cover for the real story, the genuine article, which I now bring to you in all its horrifying certainty.

Far from being an injured party, it seems, Mr. Lumley is the mastermind of all. In a tear-streaked confession to the authorities, Mrs. Lumley revealed that she did not, in fact, first encounter her husband at the Bluebeard Restaurant in Scarsdale, two weeks after the murders, but that he had begun stepping out with her earlier that summer. It was he who conceived a plan by which the kitchen maid would seduce the master, who (Lumley learned from his comely partner) had been left brokenhearted by the easy behavior of his wife in the years following the birth of their second child. Blackmail would then ensue (over which liaison I can't say for certain, since there are so many to choose from), enabling the Lumleys to start off married life on the right foot: that is to say, shod by the affluence of the Faninal family.

But plans went awry, as they so often do, and the soon-to-be-Lumleys were interrupted in a heated discussion one morning by none other than the lady of the house. The kitchen maid, it seems, was developing too great a tendresse for her victim, and wanted to make an honorable retreat. Mr. Lumley, I am sorry to say, was of a different mind, and in the course of the ensuing argument, Mrs. Faninal became
unavoidably cognizant of their scheme. Hearing the victim's gasp of outrage, Lumley took the nearest weapon—the famous kitchen knife—and made certain threats. The gallant lady defied him, and for this final act of courage paid the ultimate price, God rest her troubled soul.

In the immediate aftermath of this dreadful act, Mr. Lumley naturally swore his paramour to secrecy, and concocted a scheme by which she would make a false confession to Mr. Faninal, claiming that their guilty affection had been discovered by Mrs. Faninal; that during this violent confrontation the maid had been forced to strike her mistress in order to save herself, and the blow proved fatal. Mr. Faninal, racked with guilt that his lady love should have endured such a horrifying struggle because of his own passion for her, gave the girl sufficient money to start a new life, and then—as the world knows—disappeared with his two daughters, promising to take his kitchen maid's secret to his grave.

And so, it seems, he tried to do.

No doubt you will be hungry for particulars, dear ones—heaven knows I am—and I feel confident that my colleagues in the newsroom will labor day and night to satisfy your appetites. For now, however, I mean to sit back and absorb what we have just learned, and to perhaps spare a prayer or two for the soul of the Patent King, whose character we have all misjudged so grievously.

And lastly, I offer up another prayer for his two surviving daughters, whose whereabouts at the moment are not publicly known. I don't know about you, but I find I cannot blame them for their current seclusion, given this mauling they have both gracefully endured, and I wish them every possible happiness in the years to come.

Marriage is like twirling a baton, turning handsprings, or eating with chopsticks. It looks easy until you try it.

—HELEN ROWLAND

THERESA

Southampton, Long Island, the fifteenth of June

F
OR SOME
time, I sit straight in my chair, elbows on the desk, and regard those last words on the page before me.

In the absence of the steady clicking of the typewriter keys, the ocean makes itself heard from the open window to my left. The slow, familiar crash of water. It's not quite dawn, and the wind is calm and briny, the gray light just visible on the sky outside. I grasp the knob on the right-hand side of the typewriter and scroll the paper upward, until it falls free from the roller.

Ordinarily I would mail the column to New York, inside a plain brown envelope addressed
NEW YORK HERALD-TIMES, Attn. MR. MIGS BERKELEY,
but this is a special story, a scoop that will appear on the front page of the afternoon edition, and I've got to telephone every last word to Migs by seven o'clock this morning, from this quiet little office on the attic floor of Windermere, of which even Sylvo is unaware.

But for now, it's only four thirty, and I'm not inclined to pick up the receiver and make conversation, though I know poor Migs is standing by,
checking his watch, smoking a nervous cigarette. Well, let him wait. It's the least he can do, isn't it? When I'm delivering the scoop of the century straight into his waiting cup, cherry on top.

I lean back and stretch—my God, that feels good, poor old bones and sinews all cramped up—and look out the window. The surf bubbles quietly on the sand, that same stretch of beach on which my children have played, my guests have frolicked, my lovers have made love between the dunes. Every possible joy has been realized there. But you would never know, just now. It's empty and dark, the color of soot, and the sun is just a violet-pink promise to the east.

OUTSIDE, THE BREEZE IS BOTH
stronger and cooler than I expect, and I sit at the edge of the tide and bring my knees up to my chest, cradling the little lump of humanity inside. I think, as I always do, about the Boy. Not about that last dreadful half hour yesterday—I'd rather not think about that, the sight of his disappearing pink neck as I stood nobly next to my Sargent portrait in the foyer—but about those early days. The relief of physical intimacy. January the second, when the Boy was all mine, and we lay in the attic of the old carriage house while the frozen dawn assembled outside.

The Boy is no longer mine, but at least he's left something of himself behind, which—if I still believed in anything, and maybe I just do—I would consider a gift. A kind of earthly reward for my brief moment of nobility, only maybe it's a penance instead. Maybe the Boy's little daughter is my shame. God knows the world will consider her so. God only knows what I'm going to do with her. I suppose, like everything else, I'll find a way.

The sun rises and spreads, and I guess I'd better head back inside and telephone my column to Migs, before he has an apoplexy.

BUT THE HOUSE IS NOT
quite so empty as I left it. The scent of human habitation is thick in the hallway, and as I turn the corner to the back stairs, I
catch a glimpse of its source: my husband, sitting on the floor of the morning room, smoking a cigarette.

The sight is so unexpected I'm rooted to the spot. Hand on the newel post, foot on the step. Sylvo looks up, flushed and unsteady.

“My God,” I call out softly. “Sylvo? Are you all right?”

He doesn't answer, and I propel myself into motion, across the hallway and the worn rug. The smell of whisky surrounds him, though there's no visible evidence of sin. I lower myself next to his right side, shaking with terror.

“The boys?” I whisper.

“They're fine.”

The breath escapes me. I cross my legs, Indian-style, and take the cigarette from his fingers. It's nearly exhausted, but I extract a long draft anyway and hand it back to him. He crushes it out against his shoe and drops the stub atop the rug.

“She's left me,” he says.

“Adelaide?”

“Yes. She ran into an old flame, a younger fellow. It seems he's made himself a bit of a fortune since then. Army contracts.”

“Oh, Sylvo. I'm so sorry,” I tell him, and I mean it. I thread my arm through the crook of his elbow and lean my head against his shoulder.

“Don't be sorry. I don't deserve it. I'm just an old fool, I suppose. Older and more foolish than most.”

“Not that old, really.”

“I'll be sixty-three next month. My own father would have been dead for two years by now.”

“But you're not dead, darling. You're hale and hearty and handsome, with plenty of good years before you. You'll find someone else, I'm sure.”

He makes a noise that might be a sigh, but is really more like a snort, buzzing with nasal derision. “No doubt. No doubt I'll be shortly making a fool of myself all over again, won't I?”

“Oh, Sylvo.”

“Well, at least you're happy with Rofrano. I suppose that's something. I suppose that's the least I can offer you, after all I've forced you to endure. Which you have, with immeasurable dignity. My dear and long-suffering wife.”

“No.” I stroke his arm. “That's over, I'm afraid. He's left me.”

“What? When?”

“Yesterday. I'm far too old for him, you know. I'm from another age, really. It simply wouldn't work.”

“Oh, dear,” he says. “Oh, dear. Look at us.”

“Isn't it funny?”

The sun, fully risen, turns the window alive. In another moment, it will be too bright to stare out to sea like this, the way we're doing, side by side.

“Forgive me,” Sylvo says.

“You were forgiven long ago, darling. We are who we are.”

“But I've made you unhappy.”

“I've made myself unhappy. And I suppose I've made myself happy, too, from time to time, so I can't really complain. In the great sum of things.”

He reaches for my hand. Sylvo's hand, well tended and familiar. The gold signet ring, nothing else. I weave my fingers into his.

“We could still be unhappy together, you know,” he says. A light, quiet suggestion.

“Now, that would be even funnier.”

“I'm quite serious.” He squeezes my hand and turns a bit, so we are just barely looking at each other, married eyeball to married eyeball. Breath to vinous breath.

“You're a little the worse for whisky, darling, but I appreciate the thought all the same.”

The sun blisters the glass, too bright. Sylvo draws me back on the rug, and we lie there, staring at the ceiling, for some time. I breathe in the comforting fumes of his drunkenness, the lingering rasp of his cigarette, and I think about the first time we arrived here, after returning home from our obligatory European honeymoon. I was already pregnant with Tommy, and not much inclined for what, in those days, we sometimes delicately called
bedsport. Like the gentleman he was, Sylvo didn't insist on what (again, in those days) we called his matrimonial rights. He settled me in his arms instead, and we contemplated the bedroom ceiling together, and I remember how perfectly contented I felt, how perfectly
married:
even more, perhaps, than I had felt in the aftermath of passion.

Sylvo says softly, holding my hand against the rug, “How about it, though?”

I smile at the ceiling, high and white above us, so elegantly finished, and try to imagine my husband saying those exact words a quarter century ago. When we were both so young.

I reply, just as softly: “I suppose that depends.”

“Depends on what?”

I lay my other hand on my stomach, and I tell him what.

Love, like a chicken salad or a restaurant hash, must be taken with blind faith or it loses its flavor.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

Somewhere in Oklahoma, four weeks later

W
HAT SOPHIE
loves most about the open road are the stars. In Manhattan, only the very brightest ones are visible, and those usually turn out—disappointingly, somehow—to be planets. Here, in the middle of Oklahoma, there are millions of miraculous dainty suns, a dazzling array. You can lie back on your blanket, next to your sleeping husband, and count all night.

But you don't. All that open air and exercise means you're usually fast asleep by the time you reach a hundred or so. Still, the plenitude is reassuring. It's good for the imagination.

Tonight, sleep hasn't come so quickly, and not even the stars are helping. That happens, too, and Sophie knows what to do. Another quarter hour of fruitless counting, and she slides out from beneath the blanket—Octavian stirs, but doesn't wake—and finds the notebook in which she keeps the letter she's writing to Virginia.

Letter. It's really more of a diary, since she's received only a single communication from her sister—a postcard sent from Miami three and a half weeks ago, promising to send a forwarding address that hasn't yet arrived.
Sophie will send her the letter (forty-six pages and counting) when there's somewhere to send it.

Or maybe she won't.

Sophie lights the kerosene lantern and carries it away from the sheltering hollow in which they've set up their camp, to the boulder that's served as a table, and sometimes a sofa. She takes out a pencil stub and writes:
Still in Oklahoma. We love our little campsite here too much to leave, I guess. There'
s a lake nearby, where we bathe in the morning, and the weather's been terrific, nice and hot and dry. We haven't put up the tent in days. Of course, we've got to leave sometime, but we don't have to be in Los Angeles until the middle of August, when Octavian's new business partner returns from Europe.

She pauses, chewing on the pencil, because she's repeating herself, isn't she? Telling Virgo all the facts she already knows. And this letter isn't supposed to be like that. It's not supposed to be about facts.

I miss Father

The pencil hovers. Sophie adds a period.

Isn't that funny? I miss him awfully. I have so many questions he can't answer, so many things I want to tell him. I wish I could tell him that I'
m doing fine, that I'm building a brave new future, and I'm not quite happy yet—at least the way I've always understood happy to mean, the way I used to be happy—but I've got something close to it, something maybe even a little better than simple joy. Or at least, it will be. Octavian says

She stops again. She hasn't written for a few days, and she's conscious that her words are stiff, the way words sometimes are when you haven't spoken with a person in some time. She's forgotten how much she already told Virginia, how much she's kept to herself.

And that single word:
Octavian.

She looks over her shoulder, at the bed they've made for themselves in the grass, covered by a tarpaulin and a blanket and a sheet—that's the mattress—and another blanket to cover them, just one, because it's July. The moon is thin and distant, shedding only the faintest amount of light, and she can't really see her husband. But she doesn't need eyes to know he's there, does she? His pres
ence is like a magnet, like a gravitational center, communicating itself to her as a current of electricity along some invisible primordial wire. His arm is a faint gray smudge atop the blanket, where Sophie should be. She can almost feel the weight across her breast. That's how connected they are, these days.

She turns back to the notebook on her lap.

Octavian says we'll have plenty of time for walls and roofs when we get to California. (And clothes, ha ha

She scribbles that out.

For now, it's the best honeymoon a girl could ask for. It's just us, getting to know each other, and as far as I'm concerned, I never want to see another human being. (Except you and Evelyn, of course.) No doubt that will wear away in time—wanting him and only him—but right now it's perfect, because I think he's the only one in the world who understands, and that understanding ebbs and flows between us in this beautiful and astonishing way, every time we touch each other, every time we speak. What I mean, I guess, is that we both need this freedom at the moment: to kiss and touch and be man and wife whenever we want, without anyone else to see or care or intrude on what we are saying to each

The lead breaks. Sophie's writing too urgently again. She takes the penknife out of her pencil case and sharpens the end, by the oily yellow light of the kerosene lantern. Around her, the peeps and hoots and rustles of the nocturnal world go quietly on, not regarding her at all. The prairie wind has died down, and the air is warm and still, smelling of sweet July grass. When she sets down the pencil case, she writes the word
other
after
each
, and puts a period after it.

Anyway, married life is grand and we are making more plans every day. Octavian works on his airplane designs and I'm learning how to draft, because I want to be a part of this, too: a real partner, and not just a financial one. (Octavian won't have it any other way, really, because he hates the idea that's he's somehow “taking” my money to build his airplanes.) We're going to find ourselves a pretty cottage in the middle of an orange grove. Octavian seems to want about twenty kids and I think I'd be happy with two or three, so I guess we'll have to compromise somewhere, although at the rate we'
re going

She smudges that out and puts a period after
somewhere
. Smiling to herself.

But I suppose that's the point of all this, these weeks we are taking to get to know each other, in the privacy of the Great Outdoors. If there's one thing we've learned, the two of us, it's that marriage isn't always easy, and there will be times that try us without mercy. We will sometimes—maybe even often—disagree, and things and people and events will come along that test our courage and resolve, and that'
s when we will turn to the memory of this precious time together, and the knot we are weaving to bind us into one. This language we are creating that belongs only to the two of us. Sometimes, when we are lying together at night, Octavian whispers in my ear a single word:
Wife.
And I know that word doesn't just mean
I love you
. (We hardly ever say
that
anymore, because it's so small and insufficient and unnecessary.) He means that I am his entire family, the source of his earthly happiness, the object of all the loyalty in his dear and faithful heart. That he will protect and adore me to his last breath. (The strength of his emotions sometimes awes me, and I think how strong I must be to receive and return them. He is not for the faint of heart, my Octavian.) You might say that all of our marriage vows are packed into that one marvelous little word.

And, in return, I tell him:
Husband
. And that's that, really. It's all we need to say before we go to sleep.

Sophie rests the notebook against her knees and lifts her arms to the night sky, stretching and stretching, linking her fingertips above her head. There is a continuous and friendly ache in her muscles these days—Octavian's not for the faint of frame either—but she doesn't mind that. She relishes this new awareness of her own body, the faint and decadent echoes of physical love. They remind her of her wedding night—or perhaps
elopement
is a better word—eighteen days ago, in an otherwise unremarkable hotel room outside of Philadelphia, and the gentle, patient way by which her new husband coaxed her into the intimacies of marriage. As it turned out, there was nothing at all the matter with her sex-instinct. It was all just a question of honing it properly! What a relief
that
was.

Sophie looks down at the page again, the careful and small-written lines in the light of the kerosene lantern. Does she really mean to send this letter to Virgo, after all? Or is it just for her, for Sophie: an ecstatic diary of her
unconventional honeymoon, so she can read it one day and remember what it was like to be newly married, embarking on the open road in a forest-green Model T, starting a life and a business and a family together? Embarking from the abyss of grief, inch by inch, toward a new and promising future.

She puts the pencil back to the paper.

We held another funeral today. I don't think I've mentioned those yet. Actually, I don't know if
funeral
is really the right word. We did the first one somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Octavian was talking about France and one of his friends who was shot down and died behind enemy lines, the last day of the war, and I could see he was growing more upset, until he stopped talking altogether. So I said, let's hold a service for him, and I got out the Bible from one of the trunks in the car and that's what we did, and it seemed to help a great deal.

Sophie reading the service. Octavian sitting there on a rock with his head bowed, the moonlight spilling over his bare shoulders—it had been awful, though she didn't write that down, my God how silent and upset and shuttered away—and when she closed the book he just took her in his arms and wept, and eventually they crawled under the blanket, into the most beautiful silence in the world, full of pain and joy and intimacy, the most astounding night, and afterward Octavian slept until nine o'clock the next morning, a thing he had never done before.

Tonight we had a funeral for Quentin Roosevelt. Octavian only knew him for a few weeks, but I think they had a kind of sympathy together. I think they were men of the same substance, though Octavian won't have it, because he never believes himself to be nearly so good as he really is. I suppose

“Scribbling again?”

Sophie startles all the way to her feet, pencil flying.

Octavian laughs and hauls her into a bearlike embrace. “Sorry. I thought you heard me coming.”

“I usually do,” she says, into the skin of his chest, thinking how much she loves the sound of his laugh, and how much more often he's laughing now. How much
freer
his movements now—imagine that bear hug on their careful and tentative wedding night!—and his words, too. “I was writing about the funeral.”

“Mmm. Come to bed.”

“But I'm not finished yet.”

“I can't sleep alone.”

“Lies.”

He growls in her ear—hungry bear!—and lifts her off her feet.

“The lantern!” she exclaims, and he swoops it up, too, pretending to drop her as he does, and they stagger, laughing, to the blankets, where he drops her right smack in the middle and collapses by her side.

LATER, WHEN THEY'RE SETTLED IN,
and Octavian's arms hold her securely in place—
No more running off tonight, now
—she tells him that she was writing to Virgo about the funeral for Quentin Roosevelt.

“We can drive into Tulsa tomorrow, if you like,” he says. “See if there's any word from her.”

“All right.”

“You're not worried, are you?”

“Not yet.” She hesitates. “Are you worried?”

“I guess I am, a little bit. She's my sister now, isn't she?”

“Yes, she is,” Sophie says firmly, snuggling deeper.

Octavian breathes into her ear, a terribly slow respiration.

“You know, if you want to do one for your father . . .”

“One what?”

“You know. Like we've done for my buddies.” (He doesn't like the word
funeral
either.) “So, if you want to do it, I can read the service for you. The way you have for me.”

She finds his hand on the wool before her.

“Let's wait for Virginia,” she says. “Virginia should be there, too.”

“All right.” He kisses her temple. Touches the parting of her hair. Adds, quietly: “Wife.”

She closes her eyes and tucks his fingers close, right where they belong.

“Husband.”