A Certain Age (7 page)

“Keep going?”

“You don't need all this, do you? We could head out west and start a new life, and no one would know or care who we are.”

The engine coughs again and dies, and the Boy says something under his breath.

“Let me buy you a new car,” I say. “Please. A Christmas present.”

“You already gave me a Christmas present.”

“A New Year present, then.”

“I don't want presents.” He gets out of the car to crank the engine again. I watch him carefully for the signal. Turn the switch for the spark. My pulse thumps against my ears.
Keep going, keep going, keep going,
I think, in rhythm with the turn of the pistons, and my imagination, for some reason, returns to Sophie Fortescue in her house on Thirty-Second Street, about to sacrifice her eternal future to the dear and witless Edmund Jay Ochsner.

Better the poor thing had run away with the grocer's boy instead.

A sputter and a roar, and then the steady reassuring rattle of a Ford minding its duty. The Boy comes around to the passenger door and opens it. He places his foot on the running board and his hand on the top of the window.

“Well? How about it?”

“How about what?”

“Run away with me.”

I love his sharp and frosty nose, his keen eyes beneath the brim of his
woolen cap. We've parked in the deep shadow between two lampposts, so I have to imagine the rest. I lean forward and kiss him on his cold mouth.

“I need you to do me a favor, Boyo.”

“What's that?”

“I need you to look into this family. The—what was the name?”

He sighs. “Fortescue.”

“Fortescue. Something's fishy. Why would a man that rich live in a rinky-dink brownstone so far south and east? It doesn't make sense.”

“You know, it's just possible he doesn't care about money the way you do.”

“I don't believe it.”

He doesn't answer.

I put my gloved hand on his cheek. “Darling, it's my brother we're talking about. I just want to be sure. What if this man's a bootlegger, or something equally awful?”

“Theresa . . .”

“Just ask a few questions. I'm sure he keeps all those piles of money in one of those banks down there. You can ask a question or two for me, can't you?”

Another thing about the Boy: he maintains a terribly slow respiration. Sometimes, when I'm lying next to him, and my hand rests upon the scars of his chest, I feel as if I'm waiting forever for the next heartbeat, the next intake of air, and panic intrudes. What if he's dying? What if, like an automobile engine—or an airplane, for that matter—his heart and lungs slip into a rhythm so torpid, they begin to stall? And then my Boy will fall from the sky, and be gone from me forever.

At present, I can actually see that alarming breath of his, each puff making its tardy way into the convergent glow of the equidistant lamps, and I count them—
one, two, three, four—
while he stands there blocking the passenger door with his wide shoulders, one foot raised on the running board, his gloved hand gripping the edge of the window, not a muscle flickering in his ropy young body.

“Just a couple of meager questions,” I say. “Please? For me. You must
admit, it's all rather unusual. No one gets rich in Manhattan without trumpeting that important fact to the entire city.”

The Boy moves at last, taking my right hand in his left hand and drawing me out of the car. “All right. But only to prove you wrong.”

“I'm never wrong, Boyo. Remember that.”

He leans forward to kiss me good night, but we're right smack in the middle of an Upper East Side sidewalk, in the guilty half-lit space between two streetlamps, and even though I'm wearing my hat low upon my forehead and my scarf all the way up to my chin, I know at least three families whose windows overlook this particular patch of Manhattan. I move aside just in time.

“Until Saturday,” I say. “I'll come down after the Schuylers' party.”

“What if I'm out?”

“You won't be out, darling. You'll be waiting for me like a good boy.”

He leans back against the car and folds his arms across his chest.

“Well?” I say.

The Boy reaches inside his pocket and pulls out his cigarette case, the beautiful gold one I gave him for Christmas, engraved on the inside panel: With dearest love to my Boyo, M.T.M.

(My first name is Marie, after my grandmother.)

He doesn't bother reading the inscription again, not at this late hour, though I've caught him at it, from time to time, when he thinks I've fallen asleep. Instead, he puts a cigarette between his lips and strikes the match on the side of the case.

“Yes,” he says. “I guess I'll be waiting for you.”

Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

Thirty-Second Street, Saturday noon

T
HE SOUND
of the doorbell reaches Sophie's ears while she sits cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, unscrewing the front plate of an old De Forest Audion receiving cabinet.

She's been wanting to get her hands on one for years, not because she's passionately interested in radio transmission, but because she wants to know how the thing works. Well, not quite. She already
knows
how it works, of course: the basic principles by which the radio signal is detected by a wire wrapped around the housing of the glass Audion tube, and the disturbance in its electrical current creates noise in the attached headphones. But she wants to
see
how it works, to take apart the circuits and examine the tubes, and you can only do that if it's sitting right in front of you.

Of course, a device like this would have cost a hundred and fifty dollars when it was first built eight years ago, and Sophie's never had that kind of money at her personal command, not even in her prosperous here-and-now. But a month ago, she spotted a small classified advertisement in the latest issue of
Electrical Experimenter
magazine, offering a used Type R J 6 De Forest
radio receiving cabinet for only twenty-five dollars, and while twenty-five dollars is still a great deal of money, she was able to scrape it together from the odd ends of Father's recent largesse. It arrived this morning by special delivery—Father, thank goodness, was in his workshop—and Sophie's been toying with it ever since. Examining each dial, running her fingers delicately along the round glass Audion tube. Like a surgeon, preparing to make an incision in a beloved patient.

In the old days, her room was littered with the carcasses of various machines—a Marconi transmitter, an electric iron, a pop-up toaster, too many Western Electric telephones to count—that kept her brain and her hands occupied during the long hours of the afternoon, when school was finished and Father was in his workshop and Virginia was in France. And then Virginia came home, and Sophie graduated from high school, and in some subtle and invisible way, like the transmission of radio waves across the atmosphere, Sophie came to realize that it was time to put away childish things. And she had. One by one, the devices made their way to the kitchen or the trash heap, depending on their states of usefulness (or, in the case of the electric dynamo, under Sophie's bed, because you never knew when you might need a dynamo!).

But this! A real De Forest receiving cabinet! Too tantalizing to resist, and wasn't it wonderful, really, to immerse yourself once more in the innards of a nice solid useful machine, operating on scientific principles, impervious to emotion and whimsy, doing exactly what you told it to do? A perfect puzzle, for which a perfect solution existed, and a new puzzle at that: a territory she's never explored until now, a miniature world just zinging with the thrill of discovery.

But the ring of the doorbell interrupts all this thrilling symmetry. Sophie raises her head, screwdriver poised in the air, and listens in bemusement to the noises below. Virginia's voice. A male voice.

And the smell, now that she's paying attention, of well-cooked food.

She glances at the clock. Fifteen minutes past twelve!

Sophie scrambles to her feet, tosses the screwdriver on the bed, glances
in the mirror on the chest of drawers. Horrors! Her hair all undone, her pinafore still attached. She whips off the pinafore and pins back her hair and flies down the stairs to the dining room, calling out desperate excuses, but her late arrival doesn't seem to bother the two people just settling to the table. One is her sister, and the other, rising politely to his feet, is her cavalier.

“Oh!” She stops and grips the back of the nearest chair. Her brain, still occupied with triodes, makes a sort of confused electrical twitch inside her skull.

“Good afternoon, Miss Fortescue. I hope you'll forgive me, intruding on your Saturday lunch like this.”

“Of course not!”

“Mr. Rofrano stopped by to speak with Father,” says Virginia, from the opposite side of the table.

Sophie gathers herself and smiles at Mr. Rofrano. “I guess you didn't know that Father's always in his workshop on Saturday mornings.”

“So I asked him to lunch,” Virginia says.

Mr. Rofrano pulls out a chair for Sophie. “And I can't tell you how grateful I am. A bachelor's Saturday lunch isn't usually so civilized.”

“Ham sandwiches?”

“If I'm lucky.”

“When we were poor,” Sophie says, flicking her napkin to her lap, triodes fizzling and receding into the distance, “Virginia used to make soup from the bones of the Sunday roast.”

“Only when we were lucky enough to have Sunday roast at all.”

“And then when Virginia was in France with the Red Cross—”

“You went to France?” Mr. Rofrano turns to her sister.

“She met her husband there,” Sophie says. “A medical officer. Very dashing.”

“Really? Which army?”

Virginia says calmly, “The British one. He was a surgeon in the Medical Corps.”

“Good man. I hope to have the chance to meet him.”

For a terrible instant, Sophie can't think of a word to say, and even Virginia's immaculate composure seems to have failed her. Mr. Rofrano, noticing the silence, looks up from his soup with a stricken slant to his eyebrows.

“Oh, he's out of town at the moment,” Sophie bursts out, a little too shrill, “but I'm sure you'll have the chance before long.”

“At the wedding, I hope?”

“The wedding?”

“Your wedding to Mr. Ochsner.”

Sophie reaches for the water glass. “Oh! Of course. I'm afraid I haven't gotten used to the idea yet.”

“Give her a week,” says Virginia, “and I doubt she'll be talking about anything else.”

Sophie hopes this is true. She woke up Thursday morning having entirely forgotten that she was engaged to be married at all, until the maid came up and said that Mr. Ochsner was waiting below, and even
then
she wondered, for
several
minutes, why on earth the man would call at such an ungodly hour. She washed and dressed, and she was just pinning her hair when she remembered that little word
Yes
, uttered under the sublime influence of the cavalier's blue eyes, and she realized that Mr. Ochsner was, in fact, the man whose hand she had accepted. Mr. Ochsner was her fiancé.

Not Mr. Rofrano.

“But darling, it's perfect,” Julie Schuyler said the next day, as she and Sophie made their way along the bridle path in Central Park, a habit recently introduced to Sophie's Friday mornings. “He's just the kind of husband a girl wants. Young enough to walk unaided, old enough to let you do as you please. You'll have a visiting card to strike everyone dead, and your money will make everything jolly.”

“And Father loves the idea.”

“Of course he does. Most daddies would do murder to see their little girls so well-placed. The important thing is, do you like him?”

“I adore him.”

And it's true! It isn't just that Father pushed the idea so forcefully. She
does
adore Mr. Ochsner—
call me Jay
, he said on Thursday morning, and she tried the syllable out in her head,
Jay Jay Jay
—yes, she does adore Jay
.
How can she not adore him? He's handsome and dashing and funny. He's jolly, to use Julie's word, and more importantly, he's kind. A bit ribald, maybe, but she likes that about him. She likes his irreverence, which is both youthful and sophisticated at once. She likes the flattering intensity of his interest in her. She's under no illusions about his intelligence, but you can't have everything, can you? And she will be free. Even Father said so:
You can do what you like, Sophie, married to a man like Ochsner. That name is like gold.
A glorious future stands right before her. Soon, as Mrs. Edmund Jay Ochsner, she can go out and meet people. Anyone she likes! She can make friends, like Julie Schuyler, and quench her thirst for things like riding in Central Park on a Friday morning, hearing Julie's stories, stopping to talk with Julie's friends, who are so brash and witty and free and
modern
. They've rarely had guests in her father's house.

Except this one. Mr. Rofrano. Twice in one week! Sophie's mouth heats up with all the things she wants to say, the questions she wants to ask him. He sits next to her, while Virginia sits across, and he eats his soup the way he did on Wednesday, like a man who knows his manners. Over that first lunch, he told her he was raised in Connecticut, near the shore, until he went away to prep when he was fourteen. His father was a stockbroker. He had flown airplanes in France for the new United States Army Air Service, once America entered the war. That was about all she knew, for he liked to turn the conversation away from himself, and they soon discovered a shared passion for the new art going up around all the galleries in town. (
Father hates it, naturally,
she said, sending a sidelong glance in her father's direction, and
Daddies usually do,
he answered, just like Julie had.)

And now he's back. He's right here, sitting by her side, full of mystery and undiscovered detail. “What did you want to ask Father?” she says, almost too thrilled to eat.

“I wanted to talk to him about airplanes, actually. I've been fiddling with
a new engine design, and I thought he'd be able to help me. We discussed it a little last week.”

A tingle sweeps down Sophie's spine, as if someone's just attached a cathode to her neck. “Ooh! What sort of design?”

“Do you know something about engines?”

“A bit.”

Virginia laughs. “Don't be modest, dear. Sophie's a chip off the old block, you know, Mr. Rofrano. She's got a wonderful knack for mechanics. I think she'd spend all day in the workshop with her father, if he let her.”

“Would she?”

“I just like tinkering with things, that's all.” Sophie turns her gaze to her right hand, gripping the spoon a little too hard.

“I see. And where is this workshop?” asks Mr. Rofrano. He's finished his soup already, and he sets the spoon neatly along the edge of his plate.

“When we were little, he used to work in the little shed in the garden. But once his patents starting making money, he found a shop a few blocks east, a real place, and got a real assistant to help him, instead of just me. I'm sure he'd be happy to discuss this engine of yours . . .” Sophie intercepts a warning look from Virginia and drags to a stop. “That is, if you ask nicely.”

“Tell us more about what you do, Mr. Rofrano,” says Virginia, and the cavalier obliges, while the soup is taken away by the maid and replaced with cold sliced chicken and mayonnaise. He speaks of interest rates and credit risk, and how business is really picking up again at last: almost as if they were two sensible people instead of a pair of young ladies. Sophie asks him about Mr. Morgan, and whether he really did save Wall Street during the Panic, and how you got to be such a man that others would follow you during a storm like that.

“Reputation,” says Mr. Rofrano, without hesitation. “You can like or dislike Mr. Morgan, but when he says a thing, he does it.”

There's no sign of Father, even when the cake is brought out for dessert, and as soon as Mr. Rofrano sweeps the final crumb into his mouth, he checks his watch and says he really must go.

“Let me walk you to Father's workshop,” Sophie says. “It's only a few blocks away, and I know he'd be delighted to see you.”

He laughs. “I'm not so sure.”

“Sophie,” says Virginia, in her warning voice, but Sophie pretends not to hear and jumps up to fetch her coat, even though they now have a maid to perform such errands.

“It's no trouble,” she says, “and I like walking.”

“Then I'd be delighted.”

They strike out, side by side, at a pace decidedly more measured than Sophie's usual quick stride, neither one pushing the other for greater speed. As if they're mutually reluctant to reach their destination too quickly. Sophie's mouth is dry. She licks her lips and says, “How long have you known Jay?”

“Jay?”

“My fiancé.” The word tastes new and fragrant on her tongue.

“Oh. I don't really know him at all, actually. I'm a friend of his sister.”

“My goodness! I thought you were pals.”

“Pals?” He laughs. “No, we run in different circles, Jay and I.”

“Except for his sister.”

“Yes. Except her.”

Their shoes make a neat, irregular rhythm on the pavement: Sophie's light and clicking heels, Mr. Rofrano's reassuring bass soles. The wind burns her cheeks and smells of snow. “What circles
do
you run in, then?”

“None, really. I work too hard, I guess.” He slides his hands into his pockets. “I play hockey, some evenings.”

“Hockey? Really?”

“I used to play at school, before I left for France. Hockey and flying.” He laughs. “I guess they're not so different, in some ways. Anyway, when I first got back from France, I didn't want to see another airplane as long as I lived, so when autumn came I took the hockey back up.”

“When do you play?”

“A couple of nights a week, during the winter. Tuesdays and Fridays.”

“How exciting! I don't even know how to skate.”

The corner of Second Avenue approaches relentlessly, loud and black under the looming El. A northbound train rumbles up, a block away, and Mr. Rofrano raises his voice. “It's a little tricky starting out, but you get the feel for it. I've been skating since I was a little kid.”

“That's the best time to start, isn't it? I've been learning to ride horses with a friend of mine lately, and it's taken me weeks to get the hang of it.”