Max looked at her and returned her smile. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“Only a little,” she answered, eyes sparkling. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“Yes, that’s what I thought.”
The harbor was littered with boats of every size—pleasure cruisers and tugs and the kinds of ships that carry rich people across the oceans and the kinds that carry freight. As Max pulled the plane higher they erupted, blowing their horns in loud celebration, as though they had heard the news already of Max’s feat and knew what they were witnessing. Of course that wasn’t possible, and Cordelia was happy with the knowledge that she was the one with him when he piloted his aircraft under all four East River bridges.
“You know, it’s funny,” she said, once they were turned back in the direction of White Cove.
“What is?”
“All this time I thought you were such a serious, secretive sort, but now I see you’re just a showoff, really!”
“I don’t have any secrets anymore.” He glanced at her and shrugged. “I guess I don’t have much to hide now.”
Cordelia nodded and sighed. It seemed to her at that moment that nothing could go wrong, ever. “I hope you don’t regret it. Asking me to be your girl, I mean. I know you want to be the greatest. And I know you are. I just—I’d hate it if I were the reason you don’t become what you most want to be.”
“Don’t say that.” Max was quiet a minute, but then he turned to her and his face was open and soft with understanding. “Anyway, you want to be the greatest, too.”
“Yes, I guess that’s true.”
Below them the packed grid of streets had given way to greenery, and they were quiet, listening to the roar of the engine slowly sinking through the clouds. When Cordelia saw the hangar squatting on the vast airfield, her stomach felt woozy and she wished she didn’t have to come back down to Earth yet. She wanted to keep going, out over Long Island, toward the ocean, or wherever Max would take her. Up in the air it was easy to feel that everything was clean and perfect. But that notion faltered when she saw the crowd that had formed near the hangar. Shiny black automobiles were parked at all angles, more than on any normal Sunday. They touched down—the ground meeting them with sudden impact—and sped across the grass. She watched through the glass as the crowd by the cars grew larger, and she began to make out the details of their clothing and to see that some of them were holding cameras.
“Oh, dear,” she said as they rocked to a stop.
Max’s jaw was set in a hard line. Cordelia’s eyes darted from him to the crowd and back again. She knew he was thinking of all the things that had been taken from him, the harsh words written. She remembered what he had said—that they would eat him alive for being a black boy with a white girl, and she was afraid that despite all he’d said to the contrary, he would regret this public coming out. But when she let her eyes rest on his, he gave her his brilliant smile, and she knew for sure that the public wouldn’t be able to stay out of love with him, even if they wanted to. “If I hadn’t been trying to impress you, all those people wouldn’t be here now.”
“You were trying to impress me?”
“Yes.”
She flushed with pleasure at this admission. Max pushed his flying goggles back away on his forehead, showing her his eyes before he pressed his lips to hers.
“Consider me impressed,” she whispered when he drew back.
The crowd was coming toward them now, cameras aloft. “Ready?” Max said, grabbing for her hand.
She undid the strap of her leather flying cap and shook out her waves of tawny hair. The crease of a smile appeared on one side of her face. “Ready.”
Max nodded and turned. He undid a latch and pushed on the door so that it opened upward, letting in the humid air as well as the clamor of the crowd. She watched him, heart aflutter. He was the same Max, serious and taut, but there was something new about him, too. His movements were freer, and his eyes didn’t avoid contact. Then he pushed open the door on her side, and she felt the breeze in her hair and the exhilaration of a great many people inching in her direction.
She didn’t look at them. She looked at Max as he raised his arms to catch her. They shared one quick, private wink before turning and moving forward so that the wall of bodies had to part for them. The sight of Max and Cordelia so confidently and publicly together momentarily stunned the crowd, but once they believed what they were seeing they turned and followed them in a herd. She wasn’t sure where she was going until she recognized one of the Greys’ Daimlers and her bodyguard Anthony standing at the edge of the embankment of cars.
“Miss Grey, were you in Max Darby’s plane when he flew under all four bridges?” It was a dry male voice, scratchy from cigarettes, and when she turned toward it she recognized Claude Carrion.
“You’re up awfully early, Mr. Carrion.”
“Boy pulls off a thing like that, I’ll drag myself out of bed. Anyway, sleeping isn’t my thing.”
He was hurrying along next to them, wheezing a little in the humidity, and Cordelia was secretly thrilled to think that the famous columnist was chasing her.
“Yes, I was with him.” By then Cordelia was close enough—she gave Anthony a significant expression, and he jumped from the front seat and opened the back door for her like a proper chauffeur. “That’s how we celebrate,” she said as she slid into the backseat of the Daimler.
“Celebrate what?” she heard Claude Carrion shouting.
“What does it look like?” Max replied before climbing in next to her.
By the time Letty was ensconced in the backseat of a taxicab, her shyness was gone and her eyes had begun to glitter. She had used every one of Sophia’s tricks as she got dressed and made herself up, and in every movement of her fingers, every pigment of makeup, was a whispered Valentine.
“It’s here,” she told the driver outside the little Italian place. Through the windows she could see the white tablecloths and the candlelight and knew it was the spot Valentine had chosen for their first real date. It was the perfect set for a romance. He had said that Frankie’s was out of the way enough that they wouldn’t have to worry about people speculating on their being out together. Some part of Letty knew that this ought to make her ashamed, but by then everything unfurling between her and Valentine had come to seem so entirely right that she didn’t want to think too much about his wife, whether or not this made her his mistress. Through the taxi window she gazed at the scene and let her heart open with happy expectation.
“You sure?” the driver asked her. He had one of those peculiar accents that add two extra syllables to even simple words.
“Yes.” For once in her life, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind, and her voice was loud and clear. She handed him a bill and told him to keep the change.
With drama and confidence she stepped onto the sidewalk. Her chin was lowered, her eyebrows raised, her hair still. She had slicked it with oil so that it looked almost like a glossy headpiece, short enough to reveal her earlobes.
Just outside the restaurant, Letty caught a glimpse of Valentine through the glass. He was sitting at one of the small round tables off to the side, a lit candle in a tall brass candleholder and an untouched bread basket before him. She was gratified to see that the red dress didn’t make her overdressed—he was wearing a tuxedo, just as she had hoped he would. He was staring off and his hand was tense on the table, and she realized that despite all his charisma and success, he was nervous to be meeting her, alone, like this. The straight, strong line of his nose was illuminated by the candlelight, and she could see the beautiful skin of his neck underneath the high white collar of his dress shirt. Her bottom lip dropped, and her knees went weak. She forgot the practiced, elegant walk she had learned over the last few weeks and went rushing in toward him.
When he saw her, he blinked, and a smile overtook his face. Standing, he opened his arms. She fell into them and turned her face up for a kiss, but his eyes were closed and he only p
ulled her against his chest, pressing her closer as though he had just crossed an ocean in the hope of seeing her and could not quite believe she was real.
“Letty,” he whispered, and released her.
They sat down, smiling moonily at each other.
“Doesn’t it feel like absolute ages?”
“Yes!” She bit her lip. In her old life she might have blushed at this moment, but she didn’t feel at all embarrassed by what was transpiring between them. “It was almost…painful…wasn’t it?”
“Yes, isn’t that peculiar?”
They stared at each other a few moments, and then he had to look away, as though overwhelmed by his good fortune.
“It is.” Letty took in a sharp breath. She wished that she had words for all the explosive color inside her, but it frightened her a little, too, trying to articulate such wild emotion. But she was feeling brave, and she decided to try. “I think it’s that everything just seems perfect when I am with you, so that even an hour away is a dreary, too-long time before I am with you again and all is as it should be.”
“I know just what you mean,” Valentine said simply as he lifted her hands and began to kiss her knuckles.
If there were other people in the restaurant, Letty had forgotten them. It was like the movies, when the camera shows you first the whole room, and then the man’s face, and then the woman’s, and then the man’s again, and then the woman’s, until you have forgotten that they are in a room at all.
The candle between Letty and Valentine flickered, and the spell was briefly interrupted by the appearance of a waiter at their table. He was wearing a long white apron, which hung below his knees, and his dark hair was parted down the middle and polished to his ears in the old-fashioned way.
“A bottle of mineral water for the table?” His arm was folded elegantly behind his back.
“Yes, please.” When he was gone, Valentine leaned back in his chair and sighed. The mahogany disks of his eyes blazed as he gazed at Letty. “Where did you come from?” he asked eventually.
Letty set her elbows down on the white tablecloth and rested her chin against her hands. With Valentine’s eyes upon her, she knew what she was—all red dress and white skin and thick eyelashes. Union, Ohio, seemed like a faintly remembered children’s story. “It was called Union, and they had plenty of churches but no movie theater. There wasn’t much to do, so I lived for the movie theater the next town over, and used to save all my money so that I could go there whenever I had time off from the dairy farm. The theater was in a town called Defiance, which sort of makes sense, because Father hated the movies and told me I was losing faith with God, going to them so much. Father had very strict rules, and he made all of us wear black, even after our year of mourning Mother was over, and we girls always had to wear buns, and my brothers always had to wear jackets, even in the summertime…”
“You miss them, don’t you?”
Letty had been telling her story in a sparkling voice, but now when she saw how sympathetically Valentine was regarding her, her smile wobbled and her light manner began to dissolve.
“I don’t know why.” Her eyes darted away from Valentine’s. “They hardly knew I was there! It’s only my little sister, really. She didn’t know yet how mean the world can be sometimes, and I was the only one who tried to protect her from it…” Suddenly her throat was chalky, and she had to draw her hands to her lap and clasp them. She told herself she must not cry. Here she was, in the great metropolis, in a little Italian place with candles dripping wax down the brass holder toward the white linen tablecloth, on a date with a movie star she had dreamed of her whole life, and she was teary over a long-gone place! “It’s so silly…” she began, and though she had tried to sound light, her voice broke over the words.
“Oh, Letty.” His hands were gentle against her forehead as he tucked strands of hair behind her ears. “Most of us are like you, you know—we didn’t really leave because we wanted to. It was more that we had to. I was eight years old when I ran away from home. But you’re one of us now, and I promise you, your talent will save you.”
“I’m not crying because I’m sad.” The saltiness of her tears had reached her lips, and she could taste it, but she wasn’t ashamed of crying anymore. “It’s just that I’m so happy.”
Even the reappearance of their waiter at the table didn’t make her feel ashamed over her outburst, although she was grateful to Valentine for ordering swiftly for both of them and then taking up her hands again.
“But it can’t all have been so grim,” he went on, when the waiter was gone. “Otherwise, how would you have known how to dance, to sing?”
Using the white dinner napkin, Letty dried her cheeks. The sadness had passed, and she enjoyed telling him about Mother and the big house on Main, and how they used to practice ballet and fox-trot and put on little musicales for the family, and how Mother always told her that she was born with extra luster. Valentine listened intently, as great oval platters of fragrant food came and went. Many of the dishes were made up of ingredients she had never heard of before, and he explained what everything was, and it tasted better to her because of this. As customers arrived and ate and departed around them, he began to tell her the story of why he ran away and how he came to work in vaudeville, and though she had read much of this story in the movie magazines, the version he told her now was more heartbreaking, and more true, than the one she knew.
It was many hours later that they stepped back onto the sidewalk, and this time Valentine didn’t seem to think secrecy was necessary. His arm was draped loosely around her shoulders. Above them the sky was that dark velvet of midnight, and though the stars were not so dense as they would have been in Ohio, where some of the houses did not even have electricity yet, those that she could make out twinkled through a romantic mist.
“You see those?” he said as he gestured heavenward. “That’s what you’re going to be.”
16
WHEN SHE PULLED ON HER WHITE SWIMMING COSTUME her hands trembled, but Astrid was still convinced that Sunday was the day she was finally going to get out of bed. Saturday had been a sad, silent nothing, but today was going to be just like any other day. She donned a thin kimono, which she tied loosely at the waist, and fluffed her hair and put on a wide straw hat with the crown cut out. In the hallway, she turned up her nose and threw back her shoulders and walked the way her mother had taught her to walk. As she floated through the ballroom she saw Charlie from behind, and for a moment she thought everything was normal. She could just pretend that the last moment they had shared was that kiss outside the yacht club. After all, he was still Charlie, and he was sitting on the verandah of their big house, enjoying their view.
At the edge of the verandah she spread her arms wide above her head, saying hello to the day and the lawns rolling outward from the house. The pool did in fact look inviting, and the air, even though it was so hot, felt comforting, like a nice, warm bath. Virginia had always joked that Astrid must be part lizard, because her blood ran so cold—she was cold when nobody else was—and she was happiest baking in the sun. The other night, when everything had felt so scraped out inside her, happiness would not have been something she’d thought of ever having for herself again. But in the light of day she remembered that happiness was the one thing she was chiefly good at, and she decided there was no reason she shouldn’t make herself as happy as possible that afternoon.
But all that fell apart when Charlie didn’t even look at her. His eyes were focused, if that was the word, on something far away. He pushed back his chair, its iron feet wailing against the large gray stones, and brought himself to his full height. Then she remembered how he had been the night of the storm—so big, as though magnified. Without acknowledging her he went back inside. Astrid’s eyelids fluttered, and for a moment her vision was full of spots. She blinked and saw a figure coming toward her across the grass.
“Victor!” she called out, waving one long thin arm above her head. Then the landsc
ape drained of color, and all she saw was white. She could feel her heart, because its beat was so ragged. But she could no longer feel her toes.
“Where am I?”
“Is she awake?”
Astrid pushed herself up on her elbows and blinked. There was Cordelia, sitting on the window seat, and when she saw that Astrid had come to, she put away her newspaper. The curtains were drawn, and a standing fan was blowing at her. On the other side of the bed, sitting on a chair, was Victor. He was looking at her as though he had been looking at her for a long time already, and when she saw those dark, pensive eyes with their long lashes she had a flash of him staring at her as he carried her up the stairs.
“Oh…” Astrid groaned as she fell back into the pillows.
“You’re at Dogwood.” That was Cordelia, speaking in a clipped but assuring manner. “I’m here with you. The heat was too much, that’s all, and you fainted.”
“How do you feel?” Victor asked softly.
“Like I lost a lot of blood.” After she spoke she remembered that it was someone else who had lost all that blood, and regretted her words.
Cordelia bent to kiss Astrid’s forehead. “Are you thirsty?”
As soon as she gave the faintest nod, Victor was up and moving across the room to pour her a glass of lemonade. The ice rattled in the silver pitcher before he returned and sank down beside Cordelia. They both hovered over her as she drank, and afterward she wiped the sugary lemonade from her lips with the back of her hand. “Really, what a lot of fuss!” Astrid was trying to sound brave and careless, but her voice was halting, and she knew that she was failing by the way Cordelia’s long, thin lips made a wavy line.