A Certain Age

  “Now, how can I be patient, my love, when it’s your darling self I’m going to marry? I’d have to be made of stone.” He picks up her hand again—the one that doesn’t contain a teacup—and presses the fingers against his lips. She’s going to be left with a tattoo if he keeps this up. “I’d marry you tomorrow if I could. Tonight.”

  Virginia clicks her cup back into its saucer. “Mr. Ochsner. This is really unsuitable.”

  “I’m sorry.” He grins at her, the kind of effortless, lopsided smile that must have gotten him anything he wanted, at one time. When he was a child. “She’s just irresistible, isn’t she? And once a confirmed bachelor makes up his mind that he’s going to marry, why, he doesn’t want to remain single a minute longer than necessary.”

  Sophie rests her teacup on her leg, right near the pocket where Octavian Rofrano’s telephone number waits for her to act upon it. Now, she thinks. Now is the moment when she should speak.

  Open your mouth, Sophie. Say what needs to be said. Speak, for God’s sake.

  Sophie opens her mouth, but a grim, fatherly voice emerges from the doorway before the words stand a chance.

  “My thoughts exactly, Mr. Ochsner.”

  SHE’S A COWARD.

  All she had to do, really, was to stand up and say those words. Stand up and say, “I’m very sorry, the two of you; I know you both desire this marriage to take place as soon as possible. But I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake. I was swept along by the excitement of it all, by my inexperience, by my eagerness to do what everyone wants of me, and now that I’ve had a chance to reflect on what it all means—why, I just can’t. Not with Mr. Ochsner, anyway. And that’s it.”

  A good speech, isn’t it? Full of resolve, a dignified reflection. Impossible to argue. A girl who knows her own mind and isn’t going to let you persuade her otherwise. She rehearsed the words to herself as she sat there on the sofa next to Mr. Ochsner, while Virgo poured Father a cup of tea, and Father and Mr. Ochsner discussed their mutual satisfaction with the match. (Why don’t they marry each other, then?) Several times, she cleared her throat and set down her teacup. Several times, when someone posed her a question, she prepared to reply in the manner of the paragraph above.

  And could not.

  The look on her father’s face just strangled the words in her throat. The pig iron in his eyes pressed and pressed against her resolute vowels and courageous consonants, until they crumbled against the wall of her esophagus, ashes to ashes, drenched in tea.

  Now Jay is rising to his feet, beaming from every surface. Even his hands are beaming. They are going to be married on the fourteenth of February! Just a small ceremony, followed by dinner on Thirty-Second Street, only family and the odd close friend. And then off for the honeymoon! Father thinks South America is a splendid idea. Stay as long as you like. He’ll look out for a house for the newlyweds, have it all ready and fixed up by the time you return.

  “Father,” Sophie says, “may I speak to you for a moment?”

  “Sophie. We don’t want to be rude.”

  “Oh, I’m in no hurry,” says Jay, checking his watch to be sure. “Though I guess it wouldn’t do any harm to stop by the office and see if I’m supposed to be in court.”

  “Dear me! You’d better be off, then.”

  “Ha! Only joking, dear heart. I practice corporate law, don’t you know. Never spent a day in court in my life.”

  “Sophie,” says Father, “why don’t you see Mr. Ochsner out?”

  The hallway is chillier than the parlor. Sophie hands Jay his coat and his round hat from the stand against the wall. He puts them on and winds his scarf about his throat. Sophie stands carefully back, but that doesn’t stop him from reaching out to take her by the shoulders. “They aren’t coming out yet, are they?” he asks.

  “Not yet.”

  “Good.” He bends down and kisses her, so forcefully that Sophie staggers back against the opposite wall and gasps into his tea-scented mouth.

  “Mr. Ochsner!”

  He goes on kissing her. He hasn’t put on his gloves yet—they’re resting on the small console next to the umbrella stand—and his hands slip downward from her shoulders to the edge of her blouse. She works her fingertips into the space between his rib cage and her chest and pushes him away.

  “Someone’s coming!”

  “I don’t hear anyone.” As if he’s listening, or even cares. His eyelids have slipped downward, maybe he’s about to fall asleep, except that the rest of his face is flushed, and his mouth is toothily half-open, and his chest pumps like a small machine beneath the lapels of his black overcoat, and Sophie is astonished that she once actually wanted him to kiss her. That she actually once thought she wanted to marry him.

  She presses her palms against the wall. “Listen to me. I don’t want to get married.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t marry you!”

  The eyelids lift; the teeth disappear. “Can’t marry me? What does that mean?”

  “I just can’t, that’s all.” She tries to remember all her careful, reasoned words, but they’ve stuck somewhere on the wall of her skull, impossible to retrieve. “I’ve thought it over, and I can’t.”

  “Nonsense.” He reaches for her again. “It’s just nerves, that’s all.”

  “It’s not nerves.”

  “Every bride gets nerves.”

  Sophie pushes against his ribs again, but this time his embrace is interminable. Like resisting the walls of a canyon. He holds her close and croons in her ear.

  “We don’t have to get married on Valentine’s Day, you know. That was just an idea. We can wait a little longer, until you’re used to the idea.”

  “I won’t get used to the idea, I assure you.” But her protest is muffled against the wool of his overcoat.

  Jay sets her away, keeping hold of her shoulders with his wiry hands. “Then let’s elope. What do you say? We could sit here turning it over in our heads until the roses start blooming, but sometimes the best thing to do is to jump right in. Like learning to swim!”

  “Learning to swim?”

  “Exactly! We’ll run off to Niagara or someplace this weekend, and I’ll show you how terrific married life can be. I’ll spoil you rotten, Sophie.”

  “I think that’s a terrible idea.”

  “It’s a wonderful idea! You don’t know what you’re missing, that’s all.”

  “I have an idea, and that’s all I need.”

  “Now, darling.” He sweeps her back into his arms. “I know there’s a passionate girl inside there, just waiting to come out, and I intend to see that she breaks free. If we elope—”

  A mighty shove, and she’s free. “You’re not listening, Jay. We’re not eloping. We’re not getting married. I—”

  Jay puts a single finger to her lips. “Shh. Don’t say any more. I understand. My sister warned me about all this. She was married young, too, to a fellow a few years older. And you know what? It all turned out just fine. There are advantages, you know, when youth marries experience. Just you put yourself at ease, darling, and let me take care of everything. Why, I’ll make you so happy, you won’t see straight.”

  He slings his hat back on his head—like a born gentleman, he’s taken it off to kiss her—and winks that sleepy blue eye at her, an eye that’s winked a million times to a million girls, and adds just the right amount of somnolence to make it work. She can’t deny he’s a charming man, if you liked that kind of charm. She can’t deny his classy fingertips, his creamy self-satisfaction, his ability to show her the world and all that’s in it. Maybe a week ago, he was just the right man for her. Just the right ticket out of this black-and-white tiled hallway on Thirty-Second Street and into the wide blue-skied world. Even Father approved.

  But that was last week. That was before Connecticut.

  “But I’m not—” she begins, but Jay Ochsner is already opening the door, waving his hand in the air, departing in a breeze of cold, dirty air.

&nb
sp; The breath goes out of her. Her brave shoulders deflate, and then she straightens and kicks the door, leaving a small dent in the glossy new paint.

  “Sophie, my dear,” comes a fatherly voice behind her, quite calm, “did I hear you properly?”

  Sophie spins.

  Father stands before her, arms akimbo atop his spindly hips. The pig iron is back in his eyes, double strength. His hair, a little greasy from his labors, falls in thick pieces onto his forehead. Actually, he’s still a handsome man, if he were cleaned up properly from the hours spent dogging over his latest design. If he were a gentleman like Jay Ochsner, who seemed to stop off at work only when the whim struck. But Father, for all his shiny new wealth, is a working man. He doesn’t give a damn about the money and the leisure that ought to come with it; he’s only happy when he’s absorbed in some project: so absorbed that he can’t think about anything else, until his whole world has sunk into a few precise millimeters of metal that might or might not change the course of civilization.

  Father’s not a gentleman, and it shows. His skin is tough, his clothes are unkempt. In the symmetry of his features, there’s an accidental air, utterly untended and mostly unnoticed. He needs a wife, the way a lawn needs a gardener. Funny, Sophie’s only just thought of it now.

  A wife, Father. That’s what you need. Two grown-up daughters just aren’t enough anymore.

  She says clearly, “I said, I don’t want to marry Mr. Ochsner after all.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “So it’s off. The wedding. You can explain the whole thing to Mr. Ochsner. He doesn’t seem to be taking my word for it.”

  “No, of course not.” Far too calm. He pushes his hair back from his forehead and tugs at his right earlobe. An old tic. Means he’s thinking about something. Pondering. “And what, may I ask, do you propose to do instead? Find someone else to marry?”

  For some reason, this question ignites a certain spark of defiance inside Sophie’s belly. She tips her chin upward. “I don’t see that I need to marry anyone at all. I’m thinking of getting a job, in fact.”

  “A job! Well, now.”

  “Everyone’s getting jobs these days. Girls, I mean. You can’t just sit around anymore, waiting to get married. I might take a stenography course, or maybe work at a magazine. Or an engineer’s office. You must remember how clever I am with mechanics. It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “Oh, I see. Seems my daughter’s been out acquiring a few modern ideas.”

  The air in the hallway is quite cold. Sophie feels the hairs prickling her arms, the hardness of the tiles beneath her shoes. Father’s not bothered by cold, of course. He’s spent so much time in his drafty old workshop, he’s impervious. As if he’s got some kind of internal combustion in operation, right inside his rib cage, chugging out faithful quantities of British thermal units to keep him toasty beneath that tough old skin.

  “Yes, I have. I have lots of modern ideas,” she says bravely. “It’s a new age, isn’t it? We’ve done away with the old world.”

  “Have you, now? I don’t know about that. Looks pretty solid around here to me.”

  “Well, the war, for one thing. The old ideas brought us nothing but misery and death, and it’s time we threw off the shackles of the past and—”

  “Do you know what I think, Sophie?”

  “Yes, Father?”

  “I think you don’t know a damned thing, that’s what. Getting a job? I guess that’s not really a choice for most girls, is it? Never has been. There’s just a few of you lucky enough to have someone to provide for the family, without your having to get your own hands dirty. And now jobs are the fashion. The new craze. It’s going to emancipate you, is that the idea?”

  “I just think it would be much more interesting and useful than running around doing nothing.”

  Father rubs and tugs at his earlobe. Rolls and worries it. “Well, I think you have no idea what it means to work for a living. I think you imagine it’s a fine and pretty thing, the world out there, and it’s not.”

  “I don’t think it’s fine and pretty at all. I think it’s interesting.”

  “Interesting! You don’t know what interesting is, Sophie, or you’d be glad not to have it. I thought . . .” The hand drops away from his ear and falls to his side. “I thought, when you finished school, I thought maybe it was time to give you a bit more freedom, to let you make a few young friends and see a little more of life. Both of you. And look what it’s done.”

  As if on cue, a thin cry drifts down the stairs, shushed quickly.

  Father waves his hand at the hallway behind him. “You see? Virginia’s got a baby on her hands and some kind of new-fangled phantom of a husband who doesn’t see fit to visit. You think you should be out in the world, getting your hands dirty, instead of starting a nice clean virtuous new life with an upstanding member of society. You have no idea, the two of you, no idea what it takes to make a real life, out of raw clay, out of your own two hands.” He holds up his palms, his knobby fingers. “You see this? All I want is for my two girls to start their own families, to have a brand-new life. To go pure and unstained from this house into a better one. I thought, if they can just have new names. A new start.”

  “Oh, Father—”

  “But it seems I’ve made a mistake. You don’t have a clue, Sophie, not a clue what waits out there for the unwary woman. You think you’re so modern. You think I’m just a conservative old fool, sticking to the old ways. But I’m right. You’ll see that I’m right.”

  Sophie’s beginning to shiver. It must be the cold. She folds her arms and meets her father’s gaze: an act that requires all the bravery she can muster out of the contents of her pocket. The slip of paper etched with a promising number. “What does that mean?”

  “No more going out with that Schuyler girl, for one thing. No more sneaking out—don’t think I don’t know about that—and no more question of hiring yourself out for money. We’ve got plenty of money; I’ve seen to that.”

  “You can’t keep me trapped in here!”

  “Can’t I? I can, Sophie, but I won’t. You’re a good girl. I know you won’t disobey me. Will you, Sophie?”

  His voice, as he says this, is so dreadful it might as well be a threat. Sophie knows that voice well; it’s been her companion all her life. Since her earliest memory, her father’s voice has tugged on her conscience, dragged on her shame and her desire to please him. To elicit some small smile or word of praise. The choice is always clear: she can be a good girl, or she can disobey him. And she has always chosen the former, hasn’t she? She’s always been a good girl.

  Sophie wavers, physically wavers, there on her feet in the chilly hall. Her father’s face swims before her eyes, and she sees, for a brief instant, the view from a turret window toward the sea, except that it’s summer instead of winter, and there is a clean white sailboat beating hard for the lighthouse, against the wind, tack on tack, and she cannot tear her gaze away.

  Then it’s gone.

  Sophie turns to the hall stand and lifts her coat from its peg.

  “No,” she says, and she walks right out the door, without her hat.

  CHAPTER 10

  Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts, and his higher nature—and another woman to help him forget them.

  —HELEN ROWLAND

  THERESA

  About the same time

  BILLY’S WAITING for me at the apartment. My youngest. I’m afraid I spoiled him, once upon a time, but then you’re apt to do that with your baby. You want to hold onto his precious youth with both hands, because it’s your youth too, isn’t it? If he’s still a baby, you can’t be all that old yourself.

  He’s not a baby now, however. He jumps from one of the armchairs in the drawing room, and his polished blond head nearly scrapes against the ceiling. He snatches a cigarette from his mouth and says, “Ma! There you are!”

  I accept his kiss and ask him what kind of nerve h
e’s got, smoking his filthy cigarettes in my drawing room. He puts out the gasper. I tell him that’s better, and then I ask why he’s here at all. Isn’t Princeton keeping track of its freshmen anymore?

  (And don’t call me Ma, for God’s sake. This is Manhattan Island, not the middle of the Oklahoma Territory.)

  “Mama, Oklahoma’s been a state for a while now,” he protests, and then, agreeably childlike, he seems to remember why he’s here in the first place. “Look, what’s going on? I got a hysterical telegram from Ollie this morning, something about the two of you getting a divorce.”

  I remove my gloves and hat and toss them on the nearest table. “I am most certainly not divorcing your brother. Would you mind pouring me a drink, darling?”

  He skids to the cabinet. “You know what I mean!”

  “If you’re speaking about your father and me, then yes. It’s true. I suppose Papa must have written to Ollie already—”

  Billy whirls around, empty glass in hand. His face is tragic. “Mama!”

  “Would you mind with that drink, darling? Parched.”

  “You can’t let him do it.” Rattle of glassware, clink of bottle stopper. “You just can’t!”

  “How do you know it wasn’t me who asked your father for a divorce?”

  “Because you’d never do that. You’ve always stuck together, even when . . .” His hands pause in their work.

  “Even when he had other women?”

  “You weren’t supposed to know about that.”

  “Darling,” I say gently, “the drink.”

  He brings me my sherry, and a sleek martini for himself. He sits next to me on the sofa, looking adorably helpless. His lower lip is pink and trembling as it accepts the absurd rim of the glass.

  “Now listen,” I say. “It’s not so bad. Lots of people get divorces these days. Look at the Astors, my goodness.”

  Billy nods miserably.

  “Papa and I will always remain the best of friends, and—well.” I’m trying to think of some other hopeful aspect of the situation, and I find I can’t. I’m sure you’ll adore your new stepmother hardly seems tactful, at the moment. And I can’t possibly mention the Boy, not yet. The Boy’s only five years older than Billy. The Boy’s younger than Billy’s brothers, both of them. (Though, to be fair, Ollie’s only got him beat by a few months. Another fact I’d do well not to point out, at a tender moment like this.)