When you see what some women marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.
—HELEN ROWLAND
SOPHIE
At the very same instant
FOR THE first time in over two weeks, Sophie experiences a moment of doubt.
Julie warned her about this, so it’s really no surprise—standing there in front of all those legendary people, wearing a daring dress, holding a champagne glass and a ridiculous baton—that the nerves jolt back to life and fizzle under her skin. The beads stick to her rakishly exposed back. Is it her, or has the room grown intolerably humid in the past few minutes? Or perhaps that’s all part of Mrs. Marshall’s tropical theme.
Just remember what you’re trying to achieve, darling, Julie said. Remember the alternative if you fail.
The alternative. Sophie glimpses Jay, entombed in shock at the front of the crowd. A terrified lock of hair has broken free from the glossy shield on top of his head, to drag untended across his brow. Poor Jay. Was she really in awe of him once? He looks like a schoolboy in the grip of some terrible aging disease. A cocoanut hovers dangerously above his skull. He will be terribly, terribly disappointed, won’t he? But he’ll get over it. Some other girl will accompany him to South America, if she can afford it. Some other girl will make the bargain.
As all these women have. They are all ages, spread out before her, all stages of love and matrimony and divorce. All hair colors, all shapes, all degrees of beauty. Some are dressed fashionably, some frumpily. Some entertain glints of intelligence in their eyes, and some are irreversibly dull. But they have all exchanged their independence for security. Not one woman, Sophie’s willing to bet, ajoins her husband right now, like a loving married couple. Not a Vanderbilt, not an Astor, not a Morgan nor a Schuyler nor any other of the illustrious names ringing in Sophie’s ears, the people with whom she will be expected to associate, as the wife of an old Knickerbocker scion.
Not one of these women has earned a single penny in her life, has she? Her clothes, her apartment, her house in the country, her jewels, her shoes, the bottle of milk in her icebox: all of them have been paid for by the industry of some other person. She is beautifully, uselessly, benevolently beholden. Left to herself, she couldn’t possibly sustain this luxury. She couldn’t even sustain necessity.
And Sophie’s the same. Her father’s money, her father’s hard-earned patents. He did it all for Virginia and Sophie, he says, so they would be comfortable. And they are comfortable! But they’re beholden. She and Virgo are in his thrall, just like every woman in this room exists in thrall, whether she realizes it or not. Whether she resents it or not.
As for the men. Equally variable. Some have earned wealth, and some have inherited it. Some—like Jay himself—are required to marry it. But would Sophie want to marry any one of them? Exchange the thrall of her father for the thrall of someone else?
There’s been a change of plans.
Sophie is not going to marry Jay Ochsner. She’s not going to live under her father’s roof, spending her father’s money, marrying a man of her father’s choosing. No, not any longer. Not another minute!
Sophie’s going to take an apartment with Julie Schuyler. She’s going to apply for a job in an engineer’s office, or a manufacturer of some kind, answering telephones if she has to, studying at night, taking on more and more responsibility, until she’s huddling over the sketches and blueprints herself. Until she’s designing and building things herself. She’ll be in thrall to her boss, maybe, but it’s a different kind of thrall. An honest, democratic thrall, with no hypocrisy attached to it.
Everyone’s getting a job. Well, so is Sophie.
She lifts her glass a little higher and thanks God there’s no sign of Octavian, no reproachful eyes to overturn her resolve. Instead, there’s Julie Schuyler, golden and smiling. She stands just to the right of center, waiting for her cue: not far, in fact, from the tropical figure of Mrs. Theresa Marshall, whose elegant face is now splattered with horror.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Sophie begins, and that’s all that anyone ever hears of Sophie Fortescue’s declaration of independence, because the crack of a gun echoes madly down the corridor and off the walls of Rio de Janeiro, setting the cocoanuts to trembling, and everybody just screams.