The Lucky Ones (24 page)

As they drove, Letty gazed out the window and knew what had happened. Cordelia had been her friend so long, and they had shared so many things. There had been times when they were almost like one person, when an insult to one girl was an insult to both. And with a flash she saw what Cordelia had done that morning, almost as though it were her own memory. How Cordelia had been unable to sleep, and with what joyful conviction she had hitched a ride to the airfield at dawn. What she had told Max, which was that the only place for her to be was with him, and the only thing for her to do was what he was doing. Her old best dream had been taken from her, and she had stepped into the next one without a backward glance.

The occupants of the car were silent as they left the East End, and so Letty was close with her thoughts, although she wasn’t sure if the great, weighty thing she was feeling was a sadness at missing her friend or an elation that a part of her was with Cordelia as she soared into the bright, brave future…

Although the days following the strange conclusion of the Darby–Laramie race (the names had been inverted now) were lonely ones for Letty, she was somewhat heartened by the fact that she spent them in a place that was familiar to her, and that the name being shouted by the news barkers at Pennsylvania Station had been known to her for a long time already. By then everyone agreed that Cordelia had been with Max when he didn’t bother to land at Montauk, beginning his daring flight over the Atlantic. Superstitiously, Letty chose the same small, round, marble-topped table where, some months ago, she’d sat deliriously sipping cold tea and wondering whether or not her father would let her live in his house, now that she was a runaway.

She didn’t feel like a runaway anymore. Astrid and Billie had assured her she could stay at Marsh Hall as long she wanted, but they were all somewhat nervous together, with Cordelia gone and her fate unclear, and she’d explained there was important business she had to see to in town. The last time she’d sat in that spot, contemplating her future, the click of every pair of shoes that passed her had seemed superior, effortless, as though those fashionably dressed folks possessed some key to life that she could only dream of. They did not seem that way anymore, but she watched them anyway, more carefully, her eyes shiny with the hope that she’d catch one particular face among the stream of travelers flowing underneath the soaring iron and glass ceiling. She might have gone and stayed with Paulette or one of the other Vault girls, but it seemed like good luck to her, to be back in the place where she and Cordelia had first seen the city together. Anyway, she was afraid that if she didn’t keep her vigil in Penn Station, she might miss him.

She knew that where she was going she’d need to watch every nickel, so she didn’t buy a newspaper, but she didn’t have to. The barker was shouting the latest headlines, and all the tables nearby were talking about it. There had been several first-person accounts from passengers aboard the
Aurora
, a luxury liner en route from Le Havre, France, to New York Harbor, of an airplane that looked very much like Max’s passing overhead. Cheers went up when that one came across the airwaves, and for a moment the busy traffic in the grand lobby slowed. Max Darby was a hero again, immaculate in his bravery, and those who had let his race prejudice them against him kept quiet. He was as American as the rest, perhaps more so, and he had set off into uncharted territory to prove his countrymen’s vigor and might. That was the moral of the story being told on the radio, anyway, and it had an aura of romance, now that it was suspected that his girl had been on board, too.

Letty felt buoyant with the news and smiled at everyone who passed.

But by afternoon she was hungry again, and though she continued to smile occasionally at strangers, she knew that it was a false expression and didn’t really contain any joy. The sense of conviction she’d begun the day with slowly leaked from her limbs, and the light started to fade from the sky and the shadows that the iron struts made drifted across the marble floor. They’d started to make announcements for the 6:10 to the West Coast, and Letty saw, for perhaps the thousandth time, that she was a silly girl, raised on pictures to believe a whole lot of nonsense. Her tea was gone, and what did she have to show for it but a growling in her stomach?

“All aboard for Chicago, Denver, Oakland, Los Angeles…,” the loudspeaker was saying.

“Would you like another tea, miss?” The boy was sweeping by her table again, and when she glanced up at him, she saw that he didn’t really mean it. He’d already asked her two times, so she shook her head faintly and stood up to go, heaving her duffel over her shoulder.

That was when she saw Grady, hustling through the lobby.

She felt like her heart was a bell that had just been rung.

He was moving so quickly, and she stood there, still, the reverberations of that first glimpse of him echoing through her body. His straw boater was angled down over his fair face, his seersucker jacket thrown over one arm and his suitcase swinging from the other. He was alone, and she felt so relieved by this that for a moment she didn’t know if she would ever be able to move again, and she feared that he would pass her, and board the train, and be gone before she managed to regain her composure. But it didn’t matter, because right then he turned and looked at her.

The corners of his mouth trembled for a few seconds, and afterward they were both smiling at each other across Pennsylvania Station, just standing like that, too happy to move. They might never have moved again, if a voice hadn’t come crackling over the loudspeaker.

“Last call for California, last call for California. All passengers for Chicago, Denver, Oakland, Los Angeles, please board at track seven. Track seven for West Coast, last call, last call…”

“Come on!” Grady yelled, motioning for her.

They both started running, reaching each other halfway to track 7 and not stopping as they descended the steps to the waiting train.

“Can she buy a ticket on board?” he called to the first conductor they saw, but he barely glanced at them, only waved his hand and told them to hurry up.

They did as they were told, and boarded. The car was full of families and ladies in flower-bedecked hats and businessmen who had already unfolded their newspapers and settled in. They did not at first see any empty seats, and anyway they were both so breathless that neither of them managed words until the train had lumbered into motion.

“I hope you aren’t—”

“Peachy, she—”

“I—”

“Oh—”

“You see—”

“Never mind.” Grady beamed. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re—”

“All passengers, please be seated!” barked a conductor, down at the end of the car.

But they didn’t go searching for seats, not right away. Above their heads the sidewalks and skyscrapers, the delis and speakeasies and nightclubs of New York were squatting on the asphalt, stubborn and stationary, refusing to give up their places. Letty and Grady were flushed to be together, at the beginning of a long journey. They gazed at each other, trembling with their good fortune, afraid that if they blinked, their happy ending might fade too soon to black.

“Take your seats—,” the conductor began again. But he didn’t finish. They wouldn’t have been able to hear him, anyway. The whole car had erupted in applause at the way the fellow in the straw boater put his arms around the petite girl with the sleek bob, bending her backward into a kiss that went on and on as the train rolled west.

EPILOGUE

FOR GIRLS OF MY GENERATION, THE MERE MENTION OF those days can cause gooseflesh. The memory of how we sat around the radio, listening for the latest details. Of course there weren’t many details, and so a great deal had to be made up, and our best storytellers were inspired to spin epic yarns. The newspapers were full of all manner of speculation, and you could not go into an ice cream parlor or a shoeshine place without getting into a conversation about Max Darby and what he had been thinking when he flew off over the ocean and left Eddie Laramie in his dust, so to speak. Or how Cordelia Grey had come to be in the plane with him.

I listened from the roof of my family’s house. The air was clearer up there, almost cool, and I could see a long way. The grand houses positioned on their knolls, the farms in the lowlands, the sailboats on the water. Somewhere out there is a crumbling pier on a marshy strip of coast—though I don’t know precisely which one—where Cordelia once met Thom Hale at dusk wearing a red dress. I missed her more than I could have imagined, and I grew waspish with what they said about her on the radio, so I tried to remember stories she’d told me, when she still had that look of wonder in her eyes. That dress must have seemed like a dream to her by then. The breeze on the roof wasn’t strong; it nudged the flossy clouds but couldn’t really move them. In the days that followed the race, the weather was so lovely it ached, and I turned brown up there on the tar roof, even with the protection of my parasol.

Letty had left for Los Angeles—she and Grady called me, breathless, from Chicago in the middle of the night to tell me of their plans. The police didn’t have enough to hold Charlie, and it began to look like they were going to have to let him out of jail. Victor told Astrid it would be wise for them to leave the country. Virginia thought this was a splendid idea—she said it would be best for Astrid’s reputation to spend the fall and winter in Paris, and she gave them a little money, since Victor had lost his job with the Bureau. Once everyone was looking the other way, she said, a hasty divorce could be arranged; they sailed for Europe that afternoon. So I was by myself when the tenor of the radio announcers changed—after a few days passed with no sign of Max’s plane—and when reports of strange metal hunks washing up on the shore of Ireland came across the wires.

There was no one to talk it over with, and I am not in any case given to displays of emotion, so I took one of Father’s sports cars and drove as fast as I could through the lanes and back ways of White Cove.

That was how I found him.

I was passing Dogwood, without any intention of stopping, just to catch a glimpse of what she saw in the place. He was standing there, across from the gates, wearing worn pants and a black jacket that was too big for him, but that I suppose might have seemed fancy somewhere.

“You aren’t from around here, are you?” I called out to him over the rumbling of the motor.

He kept on gazing up at the house. His hair was overgrown, but not long enough to cover his ears, and he was so unusually tall that I felt an uncharacteristic desire to protect him. Standing attentively at his side was Good Egg, Letty’s greyhound. His face would be handsome, I thought, once he grew into it. “No,” he said, after a while.

“Would you like to talk?” I asked.

“No,” he repeated, although after another pause, he climbed into the passenger seat, slapping the side of his leg so that Good Egg would follow. “Can you give me a ride? No one but you has passed for a long while.”

“Sure,” I said, putting the car in gear. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t care.”

I laughed faintly. “My name is Billie Marsh, by the way.”

“John Field.”

“Were you at the party? The night they…”

He shook his head. “I was looking for Cordelia Grey. But I guess I was a day too late.”

“Oh.” I glanced at him and saw how he slumped when he said her name. “Do you know her?”

He had to put his fist over his mouth to say the next bit, which was how I noticed the ring on his left hand. “She’s my wife.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, rather heartlessly.

“I haven’t seen her since the beginning of summer. Then a week ago, I saw her name in an article about Max Darby…” When I saw how he covered up his whole face with those big hands, I felt even worse for sounding surprised.

“You’re from Ohio, aren’t you?” I went on, trying for gentle.

He nodded, and though I couldn’t be sure, I think he wept a little after that.

“Listen, she was a friend of mine, too. In fact, she left a suitcase with some things, at my house. I haven’t had the heart to go through it yet, but now that you’re here… Perhaps there’s something in it for you to keep.”

He couldn’t quite bring himself to answer, but neither did he ask to be taken anywhere else, so I steered the car back to Marsh Hall and told the butler to get us tea. To my great relief, he gave no more signs of tears, and stared rather unabashedly at everything in the house, which I suppose was somewhat grander than the houses where he came from.

“Well,” I said, once it was painfully obvious we weren’t going to gain in conversational fluidity. “Shall we go through Cordelia’s effects?”

He nodded.

The suitcase was old leather, and he seemed to recognize it when I brought it out. “Her mother’s,” he said softly, letting his fingers linger against the brass handle.

“She never knew her?” I asked.

“No.”

I undid the clasps and opened the suitcase. The collection of totems within was not what I had anticipated; they seemed so girlish, almost naïve, all there together. The hand-sewn white cotton dress, which John lifted and put to his face. The newspaper clippings, which so poignantly mapped the years that she’d followed her father’s doings from afar. The worn notebook, which contained mostly outdated tourist information on New York City, as well as a few choice quotes that she diligently attributed to the radio character Cara Gatling. A love letter signed
DG
, matchbooks from nightclubs that were popular that summer, a humble gold wedding band.

Of course there was the revolver. After John put aside the dress, he picked that up, turning it over in his hand with a fearful, impressed quality in his features. Perhaps it was because none of these items quite fit with the Cordelia I knew that my attention settled on the folded piece of paper with the telephone number
HUnter-4201
scrawled on the back. Unfolding that piece of paper, I felt a wave of relief that John hadn’t seen it first, because I think it might have ruined him, and also because what I found there explained for me why Cordelia did what she did. I stepped away, toward the window, and read what Max must have written to Cordelia on the night before his race:

Cordelia
, he began in his grade-school penmanship,
I have never written a letter like this before and I don’t guess I’ll do it very well. You were always pretty good at knowing what I meant to say, so hopefully you will now. The main thing is I want to tell you how lucky I am I finally got to know what it is to love a girl. I never cared much about girls, and you took me by surprise, and that about tripled what I know of this world. You’re pretty much the brightest thing I’ve ever seen and the only girl I can imagine ever wanting. But I’ve come to know you, too, and seen a few things about how you do things. For me it’s always going to be about risking everything to break away and sail above it all. That’s what I want from life. But you—you’ve lost too many people already and I wouldn’t want to think you’d gone hard inside, on my account or for anybody else. You had better forget about me and learn to love somebody with their feet on the ground. Till then think of me up in the air, where you know my thoughts will be of you. Love, Max

There were a few tearstains on the page, and I imagined how she must have felt when she read it. That is, I think her emotion must have been similar to mine, knowing I wouldn’t see her again: cut open. But in the resulting chasm I saw for the first time the contents of my own heart. It was vaster than I could possibly have imagined. As I stood at the window—hiding that letter away so that John Field wouldn’t ever have to know of it—I saw her everywhere, in the unfurling white streaks and in the ripening blue that surrounded them.

We spent a long time silently turning over her possessions. Dusk settled in as we did, making the edges of things murky. I asked John to stay for dinner, and he accepted, and after we ate I had the butler drive him and Good Egg to the train station. Though we pretended that we would write to each other in the coming months, we never did. I told him he should take her suitcase and its contents with him, and I suppose he brought them all the way back to Ohio, and perhaps even gave her a burial of sorts.

By the time the weather changed, the legend of Max Darby and Cordelia Grey had taken hold. Of course no one really knew what befell them, if they weren’t living on some island somewhere, or in Paris, or if they simply chose never to come back down to Earth. Schoolchildren across the country talked about his feat of bravery, and her act of love, and generally agreed that his brief encounter with the bootlegger’s daughter had inspired him to break rules and reach ever higher into the clouds.

In the fall,
The Good Lieutenant
had its premiere, and I don’t suppose you need to be told what a sensation Letty was after that. If the stories are to be believed, she was never paid for her work in Mr. Branch’s film, but after its release she had her pick of studios, and of course everyone knows how when the era of talkies really took off, she and her husband made picture after picture together, he as writer and eventually director, and she as star. The partnership of Larkspur and Lodge is one of the most celebrated in Hollywood, even now. Out there in the land of year-round sunshine they were protected from many of the hard things that befell those of us who remained back East.

For months I got letters from Astrid, postmarked in Paris, saying that as soon as the Marietta Phonograph Company’s stock tripled in value she would come back and set up house. The Feds did find Charlie’s stores eventually, and he and Jones both got sent up to Sing Sing, so it would have been safe for them to come back. But then the crash came, in late October, and she didn’t write for a long time. When she did, she never mentioned the Marietta Phonograph Company again. Father might have helped them, but he lost everything, too, and Virginia left him for a racehorse jockey, and I had to work my way through my last year of college but was very grateful afterward for my degree.

Some years later, a painter friend of mine said that he saw Astrid and Victor in a Paris market, holding hands and buying groceries for dinner, and that they were married and very much in love. When I asked how they got by, my friend only shrugged and mumbled something about Victor pickpocketing tourists and Astrid taking in laundry, adding that he had never seen two people so happy. The bit about the laundry is difficult for me to picture, but it would be a curious detail to make up, and so I am inclined to believe it.

At some point I did try HUnter-4201, and a pleasant man named Ogilvy explained that he had indeed been associated with Max Darby, very briefly, as the executor of the Max Darby Aviation Fund. At first he insisted he couldn’t disclose who was behind the fund, but when I told him about the letter, he sighed, said it couldn’t possibly matter anymore, and told me about Thom Hale’s investment. It wasn’t until after Prohibition was struck down that I saw Thom again—he had spent those last few years on his boat, bringing liquor down from Nova Scotia. After repeal, he lived in his father’s house and didn’t see many people, although I ran into him one day by chance on a street corner in the city. Manhattan was a different place by then—instead of nightclubs, people lined up for soup kitchens, and the girls couldn’t afford panty hose anymore and had to draw the seams up the backs of their legs with kohl.

When I mentioned Cordelia’s name, his face fell about a hundred stories, and I knew that he still loved her.

“Please don’t ever say that name to me again,” he said, before wishing me well and going on his way. Even then, in the depths of the Great Depression, he was wearing a fine, new suit—he went legitimate with his liquor-importing business and made the Hales far wealthier than they were even at the height of Prohibition.

Anyway, I don’t say her name, or any of their names, very often. Only when the world seems a little too spare and impoverished, and then I will replay in my mind the finery we wore that summer, for no reason in particular, and the things that we dreamed of before the fall. You see? I told you how it would be. Those bright-eyed girls, flitting to the city like moths, how quickly they became embroiled in its madcap nights. Each of them escaped New York, in her own way—one of them is famous, one of them is married, and one of them is dead.

Although I don’t like to think of it that way. When I remember Cordelia, I close my eyes and I am with her, out there beyond the land and nothing but the big, blue ocean ahead of her. What a riot of excitement she must have felt! To be so high up, free from all constraints, flying into the future beside a man as determined as herself. In my mind’s eye she is still wearing that white silk evening dress, and thus she shall remain. Forever aloft.