“There’s something that’s bothering me, Thom. You could have struck that deal on the phone with Jones in a few minutes. Even Charlie would have agreed to that without getting too troublesome. Why make me come out here, in this weather?”
Thom shrugged and tried to get another cigarette lit. He cupped his hands to protect the match, but even so the wind was too strong. Eventually he threw away the match and put the cigarettes back in his pocket. “I go back north tomorrow,” he said, meeting her eyes again. His chin was drawn down, his eyes cast upward at her. “I just—had to see you.”
A smile broke over her face before she could stop it. As soon as she had control of herself, she folded it away.
“Come with me,” he said with sudden urgency. “It’s going to be bad, you know that, right? Now that Charlie has challenged Coyle Mink. You can’t fight him, Cord; he’s organized, violent, into all kinds of rackets. He’s not some genteel bootlegger from the island. And he’s crazier than Charlie. Come with me now. I can keep you safe.” He reached for her hand, holding it out for her until she gently shook her head. “We can drink old-fashioneds and dance to the radio and be happy wherever we are.”
The roar of the propellers was at her back, and she knew Max had landed. Her mind was on fire with what Thom had proposed. What he was offering sounded beautiful, but it also frightened her, and she was struck with desire to be far away from all these bloody and complicated entanglements, to have nothing to do with the past.
“I can’t,” she said simply, and gave him her hand to shake.
When she let go, he bent down and lifted his pant leg. The gun didn’t frighten her, because by the time she saw its metallic flank he’d pressed it into her palm.
“It’s the gun you came after me with. That night. I’ve been carrying it around with me; I don’t know why. But maybe you’ll need it now, more than me,” he said.
It was the gun her father had taught her to shoot with at the beginning of the summer, at a time when she’d believed life wouldn’t go on if she never saw Thom again. Tears were welling in her eyes, so she slipped the gun into her pocket and turned toward the sea.
Meanwhile the seaplane was bobbing on its floats next to the ship. Max had propped open the door to the cockpit and was extending a long, foot-wide board, which he wedged between the boat’s railing and the cockpit. He had barely glanced at Cordelia yet, but she could see how worried he was, how intensely focused on the task at hand.
“Steady that,” he commanded Thom, who obeyed though it must have pained him. “Here,” Max called to Cordelia, and threw her a rope. Holding tightly to the rope, Cordelia clambered to the railing and then onto the board. After a few steps, she was within arm’s length of Max. He grabbed her and with all his strength pulled her into the cockpit, where he drew her tight against his chest. “I told you not to,” he whispered, but it was not a reproach.
“I’m sorry. I had to.”
“I know.”
Max let go and was once again all business. He kicked the board down into the water and sealed the door to the cockpit without glancing back at Thom. The goggles came down over his eyes as she fastened herself into her seat.
“Thank you,” she said. “There’s no one I’d rather see right now,” she added, and meant it. She knew that Thom was down below, and that if she dared to look at him his eyes would be wide and shiny, silently offering her a future that sounded more real than any she had ever contemplated. But she couldn’t take it. She couldn’t keep running. She had to be here, with a boy whose motives were pure, who was always reaching for some clean, bright future.
“You’re welcome. But mostly I came because I would have gone crazy, not knowing where you were, if you’d come back to shore all right.”
She smiled faintly. “I’d better go tell Charlie it’s done.”
“Don’t worry, I talked to Charlie.”
“You did?”
Max glanced at her, and for the first time his serious facade cracked open into a grin. “How do you think I found you? After I got your telegram this morning, I was frantic, trying to get hold of Charlie. I told him there was a storm coming. Little exaggeration—it won’t hit for some hours. But he told me to do what I had to do to keep you safe. We’ll call him from the East End.”
“Good,” she said. The pale green water rose and fell back on itself below them, and she saw that none of it was so frightening as she had found it before. Nothing was really so bad, if you were brave enough to confront it. Relief washed over her, knowing she had done what she had to do, and as the plane lifted off she rested her hand on his shoulder and whispered to him that everything was going to be all right.
12
“I FEEL SOOOO MUCH BETTER,” SOPHIA RAY SAID INTO her compact. “Don’t you feel soooo much better?”
“Yes.” Letty was gazing into her own compact and was indeed feeling much improved. Her reflection showed a finely tuned version of herself—her lashes looked longer somehow, and her lips more full. The only way to escape the heat with dignity, Sophia had told her, was to go to Bergdorf. At the department store’s salon Letty had had her hair freshly bobbed and her nails and toes trimmed and painted. Sophia emerged with her short hair freshly peroxided, her features dramatically made up, and her spirits high.
As they stepped onto the sidewalk, she took her protégée by the arm and led her to their waiting limousine. “Hector, hurry, please, we haven’t much time, especially with traffic like this.”
As they pulled away from the curb, Letty noticed a group of young girls gathered tightly together under a large umbrella, baldly gawking at Sophia Ray and her friend. They did not live in the neighborhood—Letty could tell by their clothes—and they weren’t there for shopping. Letty smiled at them and didn’t feel even a little guilty for being so glad not to be one of them anymore.
The limousine was blocked by a tangle of traffic, worsened by the bad weather. Drivers berated one another with bleating horns and fists thrust through open windows. Meanwhile, in the back of the beige town car, all the surfaces were soft and fine, and the hurly-burly of the street seemed like another world.
“You know I’m going to need your friendship more than ever when I’m away.”
“Tell me why you’re going away again?” Letty sunk against the soft leather upholstery. Although Letty had more or less decided not to think about the incident at Jack Montrose’s party, she couldn’t help but feel a little curious about Sophia’s unexpected departure.
“To lose five pounds, dear. Seven, if I can possibly manage. Three days of mountain air and interminable walks and a ghastly amount of celery! We’re going to start filming the picture on Monday, you see. I want my cheekbones to cut right through the screen.”
“But you’re already so thin.”
“Well.” Sophia closed her eyes, as if that went without saying. “There is another reason I must go.” The pause that followed was charged with meaning, and Sophia’s eyes traveled back and forth to the front of the car twice. Letty looked, too—Hector was wearing his chauffeur’s cap and staring impassively at the street in front of them. The girls bent their heads toward each other. “You remember how we talked about Mr. Montrose, how very important he is? And you know how we had to…be alone at his party?”
Sophia’s voice went very low and her brows went very high, and Letty was trying hard to return her gaze neutrally. Letty sensed what she going to say, and wished she wouldn’t, and tried to prepare herself not to appear scandalized by the revelation.
“Well, you see… Mr. Montrose is escorting me to the spa.” Sophia’s eyes widened significantly when she said this, and the corners of her mouth flickered. A current of excitement flowed from her toward Letty, and though Letty felt a little sickened by the thrill her mentor derived from her deviance, she tried to grin back in response. “You won’t tell, will you?”
“Of course not!” Letty winked, hoping this would disguise the sorrow she felt for sweet, true Valentine. “It’s our secre
t,” she added earnestly.
“Good. And Letty?”
“Yes?”
“Take care of Valentine for me while I’m gone, all right?”
“I’ll try,” Letty promised with an earnest nod.
“Keep the motor running, won’t you, Hector?” The green awning of The Apollonian filled the car window, and the liveried doorman was rushing to open the door, wielding an umbrella to protect the ladies from the drizzle now making the sidewalk slick. Sophia had leaned forward to address the chauffeur, and only half turned when she spoke to Letty. “Letty, hon, you’ll take the bags up, won’t you?” The girlish intimacy of the previous moments had been replaced by Sophia’s more customary brisk assertiveness. “And tell Val how bad the traffic was, and explain to him that I would have come up to kiss him good-bye, but it seemed very likely that I’d miss my train if I did…”
A few moments later, the elevator doors drew back, and Letty stepped into the penthouse, weighed down by the shopping bags she carried in both hands. An involuntary smile sprang to her lips at the tranquil scene in the sunken living room. Under a purring ceiling fan sat Valentine, wearing a white dress shirt tucked into white slacks over brown loafers, his face half obscured by the New York Star-Courier that he held aloft.
“Hello, beautiful.” There were a few wondrous seconds when Letty believed that this had been directed at her, but when Valentine moved the paper and his smile shrank away, she realized he’d assumed it was Sophia who had just disembarked from the elevator. Though she wished it wouldn’t, her stomach twisted in disappointment. “Oh. Hello, Letty. Where’s my missus?”
“There was—traffic,” Letty mumbled. Then she heard herself say train and spa and celery.
She watched Valentine, to see if he was wounded by his wife’s failure to say good-bye, but his face remained blank, his eyes focused somewhere in the distance. For a few seconds he continued staring into space, and then his gaze slowly traveled around the room, over buckskin-colored carpets and elaborately framed portraits, eventually settling on Letty. His face was the face he often wore in the second half of his pictures, during the part of the story when everything seems impossible but he nonetheless continues to be winning and brave.
“Are you lonely when she goes away?” Letty asked.
“Lonely!” he exclaimed. “How could I be lonely with you here? And of course, Sophia needs these little retreats.” With his next breath he puffed his chest out, as though he had just ingested a great deal of fresh mountain air himself. “And I need my escapes, too. We begin shooting the new picture on Monday, and it will be much easier to learn my lines without her here…”
“Doesn’t Sophia need to learn her lines, too?” Letty set the shopping bags to one side of the brass elevator doors and stepped down into the living room. “I mean, she’s in the picture, too.”
“Yes, of course! O’Dell and Ray, we’re a team!” Valentine laughed from the back of his throat and waved his hand in the air as Letty perched on the edge of the sofa opposite him. “Sophia is the reason we got as big as we did, you know. She was the one who had the ambition, the stomach for the whole game of it. Sometimes I think she even loves it. But she doesn’t care about the things I hold most dear. She doesn’t love the craft, as I do.”
Letty rested her elbow on the sofa’s arm and her cheek against her palm. She thought of the house on Main Street, where her mother had taught her how to dance, and where she used to put on plays starring herself and her older siblings. Her mother had always said that there was something sacred about artists, and Letty believed that still, and she was happy to discover that Valentine O’Dell, whose face on screen had always given her chills, felt just the same way she did.
“Say…” Valentine turned to face her again, and she saw that his smile was strong and true now. “Perhaps you’d help me? With my lines, I mean. You could read Sophia’s part.”
“I—I’d be honored.”
“Good!” Valentine clapped his hands together, punctuating the decision. “I’ll go get the scripts. Put on a fresh pot of coffee, will you? This might take all night…”
The smell of coffee was strong when Valentine returned, and Letty took the script from him and sat down at the kitchen table. Folding her legs underneath her, she began to flip the pages. She had never seen a script before, and it gave her a chill to think that this sheaf of papers was the real thing, what genuine motion pictures were made out of. “Miss Ray” was printed on the first page, and Letty’s index finger rested there a few seconds.
“You don’t think she’ll mind?”
“No, no—Sophia usually only does one take, anyway. It annoys her how I obsess over getting every tiny thing exactly right. You’ll be doing her a favor, as I will be much better prepared and not need quite so many takes as usual!”
Valentine poured them each a cup of coffee, and they got to work. At first Letty said Sophia’s lines as though she were just a secretary helping him memorize his part. But when she came to understand the story and Marie, the heroine, she delivered every word with emotion. Soon she was stopping in places, as Valentine did, when she thought a line was false or didn’t suit her character. This was precisely how she’d imagined artists spent their evenings, back when she was trapped in Union on one of those interminably boring nights after Mother died and Father became so strict. It didn’t matter that they were in an apartment house on Park Avenue. The room could have been any hole in the wall, down in the Village or in faraway Paris, and everything they said was full of energy and punctuated with impassioned hand gestures and laughter. Several times, Valentine interrupted their recitation to tell her a story about movie sets he had been on, times when he had changed a script or used a costume choice to convey something about his character.
She liked picturing how the scenes they were reading would play on a screen. It would be embarrassing to tell Valentine as much, but this was the most exciting night she’d yet had in New York. She felt more alive here than she had in any nightclub, more alive than that night at The Vault when she’d been discovered.
“I was a broken man when the war ended,” Valentine began a new scene, his brows riven with feeling. He was standing, as though on the edge of a woods looking down on a valley, with his chin raised and one arm resting behind his back. “I thought my life was over, and wished I had died in that ditch along with my men…”
“But you have done so much for our village.” Letty moved ahead of him, turning one cheek to rest against her shoulder as though the emotion was too strong for her to bear. She let her eyes sink gently closed and almost murmured her next line. “Much more than we will ever do for you.”
“I am gratified to see the village coming back to life, after so much death and dying… But you cannot think I did it for them.” Valentine had taken another purposeful step across the tiled kitchen floor, and Letty cracked an eye to check her next line. But there was no next line, only a stage direction that made her heart go thump.
Kiss. Her face went numb, and she could no longer feel her fingertips. Are we really supposed to kiss?
“I don’t believe it,” Letty heard herself say. Now she was making up lines that were not in the script, and though she didn’t know where they were coming from, she felt she had to stall. Perhaps this was what she had been hoping for when she winked at Sophia and promised to take care of Valentine. But now, alone with Valentine, holding a piece of paper that said she should kiss him, it all seemed too frighteningly wild. “I don’t believe you weren’t thinking of us when you—”
Before she could say any more, Valentine had put both his hands around her small waist. His eyes had closed, and his mouth was lowering toward hers. She let her eyelids sink, afraid she might faint.
The kiss, when it came, was so soft it might almost not have happened, except that the featherweight of his lips against hers was a weight she could feel all over, in her knees and way down in her toes.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was already loo
king at her. The muscles around his eyes contracted, and a sparkle passed over his dark irises. His hands were still on her waist, and she was sure he could feel how her heart pulsed.
“Oh, my,” he said, and she knew it was not “The Lieutenant” speaking now but Valentine himself. “That—that was incredible.”
Out on Long Island, the bad weather was gathering again, obscuring the stars and their strange magic. Perhaps this dampened their ability to cross lovers, because, in a nook off the Sound’s coastline, where the water was still and reflective in calm weather, two young people recently and famously married were together, on a proper date, he in a fine suit of caramel-colored linen and she in a sleeveless white lace dress that seemed calculated to remind everyone that she had recently been a blushing bride.
In fact, Astrid had forgotten until they had arrived at the White Cove Yacht Club that she had once thought of having her wedding there. The spur-of-the-moment way her nuptials had happened in the end was a point of pride with her, and now she wouldn’t have it any other way. But when she saw the twinkling lights strung up along the edges of the outdoor dining area, and remembered where she had thought about positioning the altar on that wooden plank deck, she wondered if everything could have turned out differently, had they done it the right way.
Not that anything was so rotten, she reminded herself. That kiss with Victor after billiards earlier hadn’t really meant anything, and certainly Charlie deserved it, after all the things he had done. Except it was difficult to pretend that it hadn’t happened, with that hangdog expression Victor kept giving her when she came down in her evening clothes, and the way the skin over her cheekbones got toasty warm when she thought of him now.
“Baby?” Charlie was holding the door for her expectantly, and Astrid realized how lost in thought she must have been.
“Thanks, darling!” She forced her most brilliant smile and put one high heel in front of the other. But whatever foreboding she had felt before dissipated when she stepped into the dining room of the yacht club. She registered the envy in the eyes of the women who moments ago had been so proud of the fortunes they had married into, but now saw how their husbands suffered in comparison with brash and handsome Charlie.