The Lucky Ones (17 page)

18

WHEN THE CONCIERGE RANG TO TELL CORDELIA THAT she had a visitor, her friends were already snoring lightly in the big hotel bed. Even the sound of the telephone didn’t wake them. Cordelia kissed each girl on the forehead, left them a note, and draped a thin, silken wrap over her shoulders as she hurried through the darkened sitting room. The elevator seemed to take forever, but she experienced its floor falling away beneath her feet like a thrilling amusement park ride. Then there was Max, waiting for her in the lobby. He reached out his hand for hers, wordlessly leading her outside. Like that, they were once again a society of two.

“That’s mine.” They were standing under the hotel awning between two great topiaries, and it took her a few moments to realize that he was talking about the gleaming white-and-tan automobile parked halfway down the block. Its headlights stood up alertly on either side of its long snout, and its flanks curved exuberantly over the gold hubcaps. “It’s a Studebaker President,” he said, and she could hear the pride in his voice. “The stock-car drivers can get it to go almost sixty-five miles an hour!”

“It’s awfully pretty.”

“Can I take you for a drive?”

“Why, yes, Mr. Darby, I think I’d like that.”

The air was dense with mist as they ambled down the indigo sidewalk with their arms loosely attached. She could see the white drops hanging above the road when a car sailed by. There weren’t many cars or many people out at that hour—just silhouettes keeping close to the wall of buildings, in and out of the orange light of the street lamps, figures as wrapped up in themselves as Cordelia and Max were in each other. The skin of her arms was almost sleek with the moisture, but neither of them was in any particular hurry to get out of the weather.

“Where did it come from?” Cordelia asked as Max opened the passenger-side door for her.

“I have a new patron—”

“I
heard
,” Cordelia interrupted with a smile.

Max grinned and closed the door. His eyes shone at her through the open car window. “You see? I knew you knew everything. Anyway, he gave it to me.”

“He?” she asked, once he’d come around the front of the car and started up the motor.

“I guess I don’t know that. I just assumed. He—or she—can’t tell me their name. So far, they’ve only dealt with me through a lawyer.”

“They must have a lot of money, to give you this.”

“Yes,” Max acknowledged.

“I’m glad.”

“Wait till you see my new apartment. They’ve set it all up for me, Cordelia. I’m going to be able to fly every day again.”

She didn’t know how to congratulate him for this good fortune, so she just leaned across the front seat and placed a kiss on his cheek.

“I just couldn’t wait to tell you. Are you hungry? Can I take you for a bite?”

“I’m starving.”

They continued to the all-night diner on the corner of Fifty-first and Broadway, where the glass windows curved and all those seated inside had a view of the whole intersection. The place was so illuminated from within that Cordelia could already see the pies in the pie case on the counter and the dyed red hair of the woman making change at the register. They crossed Broadway arm in arm. Only about half the booths were occupied at that early stage of the morning; girls in evening gowns were awaiting stacks of pancakes with gleaming eyes, while a few less-well-dressed souls gratefully accepted plates heaped with pastrami on rye.

A waitress wearing a yellow uniform and a placid face led them to a table. If she recognized either of her customers she didn’t let on. She took their order—apple pie with cheese for Cordelia, eggs and bacon for Max—as though she were listening to a husband she no longer loved reading aloud from the sports page.

Cordelia pulled a few pins from the back of her head and let waves of honey- and bark-colored hair fall around her shoulders. Propping her elbow against the table, she put the heel of her palm against her temple and pushed her fingers through the thick strands.

“Where I come from,” she murmured, “you can’t order breakfast past nine or dinner past six, and if you go out at night past ten you would think the whole town had died. They might actually have arrested you if you were out this late. They certainly wouldn’t make you eggs.”

Shrugging at the wonder of it all, she closed her eyes. Being here, with Max, felt like a confirmation of the dim suspicion she’d held since way back in Union, on nights when the lights had been shut off but she could not yet sleep: that she was destined to be remarkable.

When she opened her eyes, he was still there. The brave and expert character the papers wrote about, with his pale blue eyes and taut, sure posture.

“I just can’t believe it,” she said simply, meaning the scene and him and being there together and the fact that he was getting another chance, all of it. “Tonight I think I could go almost anywhere and no one would stop me.”

“I know just what you mean.”

Cordelia put the mug down and fixed him with an amused gaze. “But you always could go anywhere! You know how to fly.”

“Me?” He shook his head as he stirred his coffee. “That was nothing, just what I did before. This is a whole new beginning. I don’t want to spend my life entertaining people with silly tricks, you know.”

“No? What then?”

“I want to fly solo to Alaska. Or Patagonia. I want to be the first person under twenty to fly from New York to Paris.”

“New York to Paris?” She smiled at the way the two silky syllables that represented a city across the big ocean flowed into each other. There was a time when that place would have sounded impossibly distant to her, but now it seemed just within her grasp.

“Yes—I’ll need the right plane, of course.” His brow gathered over his broad, flat nose, and his fingers tensed around his coffee cup as he stared off into some vague, future place. He didn’t even notice when the waitress arrived at their table and let their plates clatter down against the tabletop.

“Anybody home?” Cordelia singsonged when she realized that he still hadn’t noticed the food right in front of him.

“I’m sorry. I’m boring you.” Max drew his knife through the fried eggs, and the yolk spilled out over the hash brown potatoes. “I just—I can’t wait.”

“Boring me!” Cordelia smiled over the rim of her coffee cup. “You think boys where I come from use words like
Patagonia
?”

“I don’t want to know about boys where you’re from,” Max said quickly without looking up from his plate as he put a bite of egg and potato in his mouth.

“Oh.” The spell that had been over them broke, and Cordelia’s eyes went down to her pie and she found she didn’t want it as much as she had before. There was only one boy where she was from to speak of, and she had left him as surely and irrevocably as she’d left the town. Until that moment she hadn’t thought that there was anything to tell Max about him. But ever since she’d learned Max’s secret, she must have half thought he would eventually come to know hers, which was that the day she left Union she had promised to be John Field’s wife forever, in the church on Main Street, with her aunt and uncle and his whole family watching. But it wasn’t really John she was worried about. She thought of the way Thom had kissed her on the boat, and hoped that Max never learned of it. She wanted nothing but to be in Max’s company, but now she knew how easily her desire for Thom could be stirred up, and she hoped that it would stay away forever.

While Max went on cleaning his plate of eggs, Cordelia’s attention drifted to the window. Outside the mists had intensified to true rain. A downpour gusted across the wide intersection, and a rogue wind brought the onslaught against the glass as loud as pebbles.

The door opened, and a mixed group came through the door screaming with laughter. Although the air that followed them was not remotely cold, Cordelia shivered and put her hands around her coffee cup. The newcomers were abuzz over the state of their clothes and the torrent they’d been caught in. The girls’ dresses were drenched and clinging to their skin, and Cordelia could see the boys’ undershirts through their wet dress shirts. They were holding newspapers over their heads, which had done little to protect them.

Outside the rain continued, so loud and beautiful that Cordelia couldn’t help but smile. As the drenched group went past their booth, a petite girl with a muddied hem dropped her newspaper on the ground. Her slicker must have protected it from the rain, because it was dry, unlike the others, which had been abandoned in gray wet clumps by the door, and Cordelia was perfectly able to read the type on the far right corner, which proclaimed it Monday morning, the 19th of August, 1929. Max must have noticed the paper, too, because he reached to pick it up, but when he moved as though to return it to the girl, Cordelia gave him a quick, subtle shake of the head and flashed her eyes so that he would know to keep it. “It’s the morning edition,” she whispered.

Max handed it over and went back to his eggs.

But her good mood was replaced with a quickening dread when she saw the headline.
LARAMIE SAYS NO NEGRO COULD BEST HIM
, it read,
CHALLENGES DARBY TO RACE
.

In a few seconds, her eyes had absorbed the rest of the article—a young pilot from Queens had said that Max must be chicken because of his color, and all kinds of other nasty things, and though he wanted to prove it by racing Max from one tip of Long Island to the other, he doubted that Max would have the courage to accept.

“Eddie. He’s a big jock,” Max explained. “Hangs around the airfield but he’s got no discipline. Nativist type. Thinks because his granddad was born there, that makes him more righteous than somebody who just got off the boat. Or somebody whose people were forced over on boats. I guess he doesn’t like me very much anymore.”

“He sounds like a moron.” Cordelia was trying to be reassuring, but she couldn’t really tell what Max was feeling. He was gazing off as he had been before. If Eddie Laramie’s words had hurt him, she couldn’t tell.

“He is. And not much of a flyer, either, though he can get off the ground.”

The wedge of pie sat between them, the orange slice of cheese hardened and shiny on top, a few brown crumbs scattered around the table. The silence lasted until Max cracked his knuckles. He cast a worried glance around the diner as though the world’s benevolence toward him was slipping then and there, and he might be able to prevent its fall, if only he were quick enough. Cordelia reached out for his hand, but before she had a chance to squeeze it, a grin broke across his face.

“You’re not going to do it?” she said.

“Of course I am. I could beat that boy with a blindfold over my eyes.” He put his elbows on the table and smiled until she had to smile back, too. “I’ll beat that boy easy, and then everyone will have to take me seriously again.
You’ll
see.”

Lowering her chin and holding his gaze, she replied: “I believe in you.”

“Good.” Max pulled a bill from his pocket and dropped it on the table. “Now come on, I want to show you my new apartment.”

“It’s going to rain again.” Astrid was standing so close to the glass that her words formed a misty screen that blurred the greenery.

“Doubt it.” Victor was sitting on a folding chair just outside the door of her bedroom, where he had stood watch since they returned from the city. When Charlie had called the St. Regis first thing that morning, wanting to talk to Cordelia, they had discovered that she’d disappeared to see Max in the night. He’d insisted that Astrid come home immediately, despite her protestations that Cordelia would be back soon. Of course Charlie was nowhere to be found since she had returned. Now her suitcase was splayed open on the bed, the clothes that she had thought she would wear during her city escape spilling across the bedclothes, disappointing reminders of the fun she’d thought she was going to have. “It was on and off all last night, but I think it’s over.”

“Well, just in case, I think I had better take a walk now, before it gets so bad I can’t be outside. Ever since we drove back through those gates I’ve felt like a caged bird!” Astrid spoke just as carelessly and irreverently as she always used to, but Victor didn’t laugh or even smile. He’d heard her, though. She knew because he stood up when she walked past him, and followed her down the stairs at a respectful distance.

“Don’t you think you had better put some shoes on?”

They had reached the front entryway, and Astrid paused on the threshold. The motorcars that were usually parked down the hill, in front of the garage, were all gone or put away, and the lindens that flanked the gravel driveway bowed in her direction. Overhead, the clouds were heavy and dark. Without the cars the landscape looked timeless; it might have been a scene from any old Victorian novel, the kind where a tortured heroine makes the mistake of walking on a moody heath to clear her mind and comes back with a fatal cold.

“No,” Astrid replied as she stepped into the stone porch and began down the switchback of carved stone steps. She was wearing white linen pajama pants and a white linen blouse—which was exactly what she was wearing when Charlie had gone ballistic and ordered her home—and she couldn’t think of any shoes suitable to such a costume. “I don’t think so.”

By the time she reached the grass, he had caught up to her, and they walked out across it side by side. She wondered if Victor knew where Charlie was, and what he’d say if she asked him to tell her.

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

A long pause followed. “Why would you ask me that?”

They were coming up to the hedge maze, its plant walls rising, bluish, over the trim lawn, with the two stone sphinxes that sat on either side of the entry like the sentries of some lost civilization. It had never occurred to Astrid what a lonely thing a country estate was, how underpopulated and far away from the rest of life. “I mean, is it a very normal kind of thing? Does one get used to it? Do you think I’m a very pampered, silly girl to be so shocked by it all?”

Victor clasped his hands behind his back and sighed as they glided past the topiary flourishes and into the maze. “No, you shouldn’t have seen it, that’s all.”