Don’t waste time trying to break a man’s heart; be satisfied if you can manage to chip it in a brand-new place.
—HELEN ROWLAND
SOPHIE
Roosevelt Field, Long Island
AN HOUR later, when Octavian has landed the airplane and brought it neatly back in line with its fellows; when he has removed his helmet and goggles and Sophie’s helmet and goggles and put them back in the hangar; when he’s run his hands a last time over the fuselage, the way you check a horse’s legs for soundness, and exchanged pleasantries with the mechanics; he turns to Sophie and suggests a cup of coffee at the airfield café.
She nods yes. Octavian takes her hand, and she walks beside him on her unsteady legs toward the cluster of buildings on the western side of the field. The grass is warm and well beaten; she can smell its good greenness, the scent of summer. She loves the comfortable silence between them. She loves the weight of his fingers around hers, the way they tether her to the present moment, the present rectangle of sunlit meadow, instead of what lies beyond.
It’s too hot to stay inside, so Octavian carries the coffee and sandwiches outside and they make a picnic on the grass, near the parked Ford, watching the airplanes drone past, landing and taking off and circling above in a delicate aeronautical ballet.
Sophie swallows and says, “I wish we didn’t have to leave. I wish we could just stay right here.”
“I know.”
That’s all. I know. Sophie wants to ask him if he loves Mrs. Marshall, and if he does love her, why is he here with Sophie, holding hands with Sophie? And if he doesn’t love Mrs. Marshall, why the devil is he marrying her?
Instead she says, “Your airplane. Is that what you want to do? Design airplanes?”
“It’s the future,” he says. “Everybody will be flying soon. Getting inside an airplane will be no more strange than getting into an automobile.”
“And you’ll be in the middle of it.”
“I hope so.”
“You will. It’s what you were made for. It’s why you’re alive.”
He finishes his sandwich and pulls out his cigarette case. Beneath the peak of his flat cap, his eyes point east, across the runway, where a plane is just now touching its wheels to the grass, up the bluff to the second airfield. “He was a good man, Roosevelt. You’d think he’d be a bore, or a snob, growing up in the White House and all that. I thought he would. But he wasn’t. He was a smart fellow, a good pilot. The kind of fellow who’d draw off enemy fire to save the rest of the squadron, and not stop to think about it. He lasted about a month, once we started combat patrols. The Boche dropped a message a couple of weeks later, saying he’d been shot down behind their lines, and they’d buried him with full military honors. Better than getting blown out of recognition by a shell, I guess.”
“I can’t bear to think about it. I can’t believe you survived.”
He lights the cigarette slowly. “Do you know how long the average pilot stayed alive? About six weeks. Six weeks, Sophie. Every time I went up, I figured I wasn’t coming back. That my luck had run out.”
“But it didn’t.”
“It didn’t. Then I stopped believing in luck at all. It was just chance.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?”
“No. Luck’s a conscious thing, isn’t it? It means someone’s on your side. Fate’s on your side. Chance is just chance. A random play of numbers. And that’s all it is, a one-in-a-thousand chance that I’m sitting here with you, eating a sandwich, smoking a cigarette, instead of buried under a pair of crossed propeller blades on the French frontier.”
“Well, I think you’re wrong. I think it is luck. There’s a reason you survived.”
“No, there isn’t. Why should God choose me, instead of Quentin Roosevelt? He’s the better man.”
Sophie sets aside the crust of her sandwich and leans back on her elbows, watching Octavian smoke his cigarette, squint-eyed and thoughtful. It must be five or six o’clock, but the sun is still high. It’s midsummer, they have hours yet before the day is over. Before the light is gone.
“Because there’s something you’re meant to do,” she says. “Something you’re meant to be.”
He turns to her, and his face is tender. “What about you, Sophie? What are you meant to be?”
“I don’t know. At the moment it’s rather bleak, isn’t it?” She laughs dryly. “I’m the daughter of the murderer, the pathetic little girl who tried to wake her murdered mother. Forever notorious for an act I don’t even remember.”
“You really don’t remember? Not a thing? You were almost three, weren’t you?”
She shakes her head. “Julie says I’ve repressed the memory. That’s what your subconscious does, when you live through something awful. It buries the memory deep down, where you can’t find it.”
“Well, I wish to God my subconscious would do the same for me.” He flicks ash into the nearby turf. “Instead, it’s the opposite.”
Sophie’s hand, lying on the ground, starts to play with the grass. She plucks out one blade, and another. “It’s been the strangest thing, sitting there in court every day. Hearing this thing described, this little girl described, and she might as well be a stranger. And she’s me. I sat there on that kitchen floor, I saw it all. I saw my father murder my mother.” She lowers herself all the way back and stares at the sky. The grass prickles her ears, the back of her neck. “Is that why you took me there? Hoping I’d remember something?”
“My God, no. What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve just been wondering.”
“Sophie.” He moves beside her, and she turns her head, just enough to see him. “No. You were the one who wanted to go inside, remember? I just wanted—well, I’m not sure what I wanted, exactly. I already knew who you were. I didn’t have any proof, but I felt it. I knew it. You just—you fit. There was this hole”—he brushes his sternum with his thumb, the thumb holding the cigarette—“and you fit there. And the house was where I first found you. So I just—it was an impulse. A stupid impulse. If I hadn’t taken you there, your father wouldn’t have suspected—”
“We don’t know that for certain.”
“Yes, we do. I do. I know what he said to me, that night at Theresa’s apartment, while everyone was giving speeches. He thought I was going to expose you all.” He lifts the cigarette, what there’s left of it. “You know the rest.”
“He threatened you, and you fought him off, and he took out his pistol, his stupid pistol he always carried around.”
“Don’t fret. I don’t blame him. I might have done the same, if I had you to protect. You and your sister.”
If I had you. But he doesn’t have her, does he? He has Mrs. Marshall to protect. Mrs. Marshall to love.
Sophie turns back to the sky. “Tell me. When are you getting married?”
A pair of men walk by, a few yards away, talking in loud nasal voices. Something about a man named Carter who’s a terrible pilot, going to kill himself, and for some reason this is a good joke. Octavian waits until the nasal laughs have faded before he replies, in a flat pitch, “As soon as the divorce comes through. That’s the plan, anyway. Then we’re heading out to California. A lot of pilots out there these days, plenty of opportunity.”
“That’s wonderful. I expect to hear great things from you.”
Her tone is too bright, and she knows it. How false she sounds, how brittle. Aren’t they supposed to be honest together, at this point? What does it take anymore, for two people to say what they really mean?
“Listen,” he says. “For what it’s worth—”
“Don’t.”
“You have every right to be angry. You should be angry.”
“I was angry. I was so angry, that night I found out. Over the telephone!” A dry little laugh. “Now it doesn’t matter.”
He doesn’t reply, and Sophie closes her eyes. A drowsiness has begun to creep over her, a kind of relief after all the strain and exhaustion of the preceding months. The strain and exhaustion that await her when she returns. She hears the faint drone of an insect, or maybe it’s another airplane. There is a rustle, a sigh. A weight coming down, as Octavian settles back in the grass next to her.
“As I said. For what it’s worth. I meant to end things with Theresa, after I met you. I hated what we were doing together, but I couldn’t stop, because I needed what she had to give me. And then you danced in, and I knew—I thought I knew—”
“Please don’t.”
“She lost a son in the war. Awful thing. And then her husband, that same day we drove to Connecticut together, he told her he wanted a divorce. He wanted to marry his mistress. That very same day I found you, after all those years. So if you want to talk about luck—”
“Then we were never meant to fall in love, I guess.”
Above them, or maybe across the field—lying here in the grass, Sophie can’t really tell—an engine sputters, coughs, and then catches again. She listens carefully to the reassuring buzz. The sign of life.
“No,” he says. “It’s too late for that. At least on my side.”
“Then God is cruel.”
“Or it’s just chance again. Dumb, random chance.”
Sophie rolls over to face him. His nose points straight to the sky, tipped with sunshine. His arms are folded behind his head, and the cigarette is gone. He loves her. He just said so, didn’t he, unless she misunderstood. She says quietly, “No. It’s not chance, it’s who you are. She needs you, and you’re too good to leave her.”
“What about you? Do you need me?”
“About as much as you need me, I guess.”
He closes his eyes. His chest rises and falls. “I hope not. I hope you don’t.”
Sophie puts her hand at the meeting of his ribs. Her white cotton glove is smeared with dirt and oil. “If you ask me,” she says, “what’s worse is not feeling anything at all.”
“Well, then. What if I am asking you?”
Her hand looks so proper there, encased in cotton, resting on Octavian’s shirt. “When I realized there was something between you two, you and Mrs. Marshall, of all women, I was furious. I was madly jealous. And it was exhilarating. It was almost as good as falling in love with you. And then Father was arrested, and I stopped feeling either one. I was so numb and shocked I didn’t care. You could have married her the next day and had a dozen children, and I wouldn’t have cared. The most terrible thing of all, like your heart is stricken inside your body.” She curls her finger around a button. “I would rather hate you again than go back to feeling nothing.”
He removes one arm from behind his head and traps her hand against his chest. “So you don’t hate me anymore?”
“No. Well, I never really did, did I? I was just angry. Every time I closed my eyes, those weeks before the party, I thought of the two of you together, like lovers, and I couldn’t stand it.” She stares at his profile. At his eyelashes, of all things: thick and dark against the bridge of his nose. Lighter at the tips, or is that the sun? She whispers, “I still can’t.”
There is no answer to that, and Sophie doesn’t expect one. The sky is warm on the crown of her head—she’s taken off her hat, and so has he—and the drowsiness returns, along with a sense of slow rupture, as if she’s cooking from within, and the drowsiness is just a symptom of her malady. His voice stirs her, just as her eyes are closing.
“What if I tell you—Sophie—what if I tell you that we aren’t lovers? Theresa and—that I haven’t—that we haven’t . . . not for some time.”
“Some time?”
“Since the night of the party.”
She opens her eyes. His cheeks are stained with raspberry beneath his tan. “Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
His sigh moves her hand. “It wasn’t honest. She’s married. It never felt honest, even at the beginning, when I thought I was in love with her.”
“Then why didn’t you ever stop?”
“Because I was afraid I would go back to what I was before. What I was when the war ended. When everyone was dead.”
His heart beats under her hand. The rhythm communicates through his shirt and her glove, and echoes back through the pulse in his fingers. It’s a slow pulse, so slow it frightens her. She keeps longing for the next beat. The spaces between them are almost unendurable.
“Anyway,” he continues, “I have stopped. At least until her divorce comes through. Until . . .”
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
“Until what?”
His head turns. His eyes are quite blue now, reflecting the sky. A shadow passes over his skin, gone in a flash, in the mad drone of another airplane.
“You tell me,” he says.
IN THE CAR, HE KISSES her. One minute he’s sitting there, hands on the wheel. He’s just cranked the engine; he pulls down the spark retard until the pistons smooth out into a contented rumble. His hand goes down to release the parking brake, and then, just before touching the lever, makes a U-turn instead, crossing over the small divide between his body and hers, taking her softly by the cheek. The kiss is fervent and awkward. She tries to turn sideways and so does he, but his legs are too long and their mouths come apart.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be.” She takes off her gloves and picks up his hand, which has fallen on his thigh, and she places it on the placket of her blouse. He unbuttons the top button, the second, the third, and his fingers ease between the two edges to lie against the damp, delicate crepe de chine camisole that covers her chest. The top of the Ford is open; anyone can see them. She leans recklessly forward and kisses him, and this time it works better, because they’re both ready. He kisses her beautifully, quite slow, gentle as the tide; his mouth is warm and tastes of tobacco. Better than Jay, better than anything. His fingers slip inside the camisole to touch her breast, to examine the curve and the weight of her, the texture at the very tip, minute and thorough, until she’s staggered by her own audacity, by the way a man’s fingers feel upon your naked skin, when you actually want them there. Hot and fizzy. He breaks off first, panting a little, and there is a moment of perfect wonder, staring at each other.
“I don’t want to stop,” she confesses.
He closes his eyes and pulls his hand free, and she holds the back of his neck and leans into his chest. Well, his pulse is certainly faster now, she thinks, listening to the eager contractions of muscle. Thump-thump! Thump-thump! His breath is humid in her hair. She laughs against his shirt and murmurs, “At least that’s over, anyway. At least we can’t regret we never even kissed.”
He says, “Are your servants living in?”
“I think so. They’re supposed to be.”
He strokes the back of her hair. She thinks maybe she’ll lift her head and kiss him again, just to see what’s next; and then, belatedly, she realizes what he meant about the servants and her blood goes whoosh in her veins. Is it really possible? Of course it is. There’s nothing to stop them, is there? No parents and chaperones, no unhealthy repression of the sexual instinct. She’s almost sick at the prospect, dizzy with either daring or anticipation or fear. What would Father say? Father doesn’t matter anymore. Father doesn’t exist. This kiss—this act—a declaration of independence.
She lifts her head. “Are you going to kiss me again, or are you going to take me home?”
He reaches back and unwinds her arm, kissing the inside of her wrist as it passes by. “Take you home, I guess,” he says, and he releases the floor lever with his left hand and presses the reverse pedal with his right foot.
THEY HEAD WEST, TOWARD QUEENS Village and Jamaica Avenue, and the sun is starting to fall, casting a glare across the windshield. The empty roads fill suddenly with traffic, and Octavian steps gently on the brake and slips the engine back into low gear.
“What’s the matter?” Sophie asks.
“I think it’s the racetrack,” he says. “It’s Belmont day.”
“Belmont day?”
“The Belmont Stakes. Big race for three-year-olds. The track’s right over there. Belmont Park.” He lifts a single index finger from the steering wheel to point north.
“I didn’t know you followed the races.”
“An old hobby.” He pauses. “I saw Man o’ War win the Dwyer Stakes a couple of years ago, over at Aqueduct. That was some race.” Another pause. He rubs the wheel with his thumbs and adds, “That was the last time I went, actually.”
“Horses and airplanes.” She laughs. “That’s you, exactly.”
“Is it?”
“The past and the future, running inside you like parallel lines. And you want to straddle them both. You see the beauty in both. Horses and airplanes.”
The car ahead lurches forward. Octavian moves the throttle, and the Ford follows, into a skein of dust, growling with effort.
“Maybe,” he says.
They’ve stopped at a drive. A long line of cars waits to emerge from the beaten earth of a parking area. Octavian sticks out his head and addresses the driver of an elderly electric Columbia runabout. “Hey, buddy! Who won?”
“Pillory!” the man calls back. “Beat the favorite by three lengths.”
Octavian pulls back in and turns to Sophie, smiling perhaps as wide as she’s ever seen him, smiling like a hungry crocodile, teeth aligned in perfect order. “Well, that’s something, anyway. I just won a hundred and forty bucks.”
BUT SOMETHING HAPPENS, AS THEY cross the Queensboro Bridge and crawl back into Manhattan. The mood shifts and falls, like the sun dropping behind the buildings to the west, and the echoing metropolitan noise petrifies the air between them. Sophie, thinking for maybe the hundredth time about the kiss at the airfield, feels for the first time that they have done something wrong.
“I don’t know . . .” she begins as they turn down First Avenue.
“Know what?”
“Whether you should stay the night!”
“Stay the night?” He sounds stunned.
“Didn’t you mean . . . ?”
“What?”
“When you asked about the servants.”
The uptown traffic is sweating and impatient, all eager to get home after a long day’s toil. The Ford has rumbled to a stop. In the face of this banal detail—people navigating the city’s dirty, crowded, eternal grid—Sophie is overcome with embarrassment. Octavian’s hand on her breast—how shameful! When, just that morning, her father was deemed guilty of her mother’s murder.
“Sophie,” Octavian says, “I didn’t mean . . . What I meant was that you shouldn’t be alone. All by yourself in that house. I meant that we would find someone to stay, if the servants weren’t there when we got back, because the reporters might find you, or some crazy fellow who’s fixed on the trial, or God knows what else.”
“Oh,” she says miserably. The car moves forward again, another few feet.
“The thing is, Theresa’s expecting me for dinner.”
“Of course.”
“I’m already late.”
“Then you should hurry back.”
“Sophie, don’t be sore. I can’t just—I can’t be cruel. I owe her everything. There’s—well, there’s more to her than you think.”
“I don’t want you to be cruel. Didn’t I say that already?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed you like that. I’ve been regretting it ever—”
“Don’t! Don’t regret it. It’s just a kiss. She has to give us something, doesn’t she? She doesn’t get to keep all of you.” She stares down at her lap, her rumpled navy skirt, her stained white gloves clutched miserably atop. The necessity of Octavian’s leg right up against hers, on the narrow seat of a Model T.
He brings his fist down on his leg and swears under his breath.
The lurching seems to be making her a little sick. She turns her head again and looks out the side, where a flower shop is just closing for the evening. A man in a dirty apron rolls in a green-striped awning. Roses are in season, blooming inside every inch of the rectangular plate-glass window, and a sign in the corner reads WEDDINGS GLADLY CATERED FOR. INQUIRE WITHIN.
“Horse and airplane,” Sophie murmurs to herself.
“What’s that?”
She turns back and reaches for his hand. “I’m not going to make you choose. I’d never do that to you. You were meant to make some other girl happy, some woman, and I’ll just take off and soar into the sky, and no one will catch me.”
He doesn’t reply, and the rest of the drive is just like that, New York talking around them, life going on, stopping and starting, noisy and arrhythmic, and Sophie thinks, So this is good-bye.
BY THE TIME THEY REACH the house on Thirty-Second Street, the sky is purple and the sun has fallen behind the buildings to the west, and Julie Schuyler has taken possession of the topmost step, wearing a beaded dress that catches a glitter or two from the streetlights. A sparkling clip adorns the side of her bobbed hair, sagging a little, as if she’s just returned from a night out. Or maybe desecration is the intended effect? She rises to her feet when the Ford pulls up to the curb.
Octavian peers across Sophie, through the passenger window. “Who’s that?”
“Julie Schuyler.” Sophie tugs ferociously on the door handle. “There might be news.”
But Julie just brushes down her dress as Sophie climbs out of the car. Her smile is crimson and insincere. “I thought you shouldn’t be alone tonight. I can see you’ve already had the same bright idea, however.”
Behind Sophie, the other door slams shut. Octavian, revealing himself. Julie’s gaze lifts, takes in the sight, and returns to Sophie. Her eyebrows, freshly plucked, are high and delicate on her forehead.
“Mr. Rofrano was just taking me home,” Sophie says.
“I’m sure he was. And now that I know you’re in good hands, I’ll be on my way.”
Sophie turns her head. Octavian’s still standing by the driver’s door, watching them. His hands rest lightly on the frame, dressed in leather driving gloves. His flat cap is drawn low over his forehead.
She turns back to Julie. “He wasn’t staying, though.”
“No?”
“No. Just took me for a drive. I needed a little air.”
“Is that so?”
Sophie holds up her hand. “Word of honor.”
The crimson lips part a little. Maybe it’s a smile, maybe not. You never really know with Julie; you never know exactly where you stand with her. That’s part of the thrill, isn’t it? Unpicking the threads of her costume.
“Well, then.” Julie Schuyler lifts one bare hand and makes a shooing movement toward the Ford, sending a tangle of gold bangles to crash around her elbow. “We’ll just send him back to Mama, won’t we.”
JULIE SCHUYLER ALWAYS KNOWS WHERE the skeletons lurk in the closet, and she likewise always knows where the bottle of liquor lurks in the cabinet. She produces one now and holds it high, examining the label against the light. “Kentucky bourbon, by God. Where did you get this?”
Sophie shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s my father’s.”
“Nothing more suitable to zozzle us tonight, then.”
“I don’t want to get zozzled.”
“Try,” says Julie, and voilà, they’re sitting on the parlor sofa, trading the bottle between them while the passing headlamps trace, at irregular intervals, along the cracks in the drapes. Julie lights a cigarette and asks what Sophie’s planning to do now.
“I was thinking of applying for a job in an engineer’s office,” Sophie says, swishing the bourbon in the bottle and wishing she liked the taste. She thinks, Octavian’s having dinner with her now, remember? Octavian’s kissing her now, and you told him he could, you little fool, you stupid noble little girl. You sent him off to her.
Sophie draws breath, tilts back, and forces the burn down her throat.
“A job? What about your money?”
“I don’t know. It’s Father’s money.”
“Well, it’s yours now, isn’t it? I mean, once he’s—well.”
Once he’s dead. Obviously, Father will shortly be sentenced to death, won’t he? For the crime of capital murder. And soon after that, they will carry out the sentence. Swift, efficient justice. A life for a life. One man to the gallows, another man to Mrs. Marshall. Sophie all by herself.
She lifts the bottle and swallows again.
“That wasn’t very tactful, was it?” Julie says. “My apologies. I know it’s dreadful. He’s your father, after all.”
“Yes.” Sophie’s eyes are stinging. She blinks and says, “I don’t know about the money. I haven’t thought about it.”
“What a good girl you are. Thank goodness you’ve got me to think about it for you. All that lovely dough, divided into loaves between the two of you. You could open your own engineering office, if you like.” She swallows, much more luxuriously than Sophie, cigarette balanced between her fingers, and hands back the bottle. “You could do whatever you want.”
“I don’t know how I can touch his money.”
“You’ll find it in you, I’m sure. We always do.”
The third swallow isn’t so bad. Sophie feels she’s getting the hang of this. She wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb and asks Julie if she can try her cigarette.
“Have your own,” Julie says generously, and she reaches for her pocketbook and rummages inside. Her cigarette case is enameled in a giddy red-and-white design, edged with gold. She produces a long, new cigarette and sticks it between Sophie’s lips. “You really need lipstick to do it properly,” she advises.
“I left my lipstick behind at the hotel.”
“I’ve got some.” Julie paints Sophie’s lips, working around the unlit cigarette. Her eyes narrow in concentration, and Sophie notices she’s got blacking on her eyelashes, and a very thin line of kohl articulates the shape of her eyelid. When she draws back to judge her handiwork, she looks adventurous and unnaturally wide-awake, as if her blue irises are jumping from her face. “There. Much better,” she says, and she sets aside the lipstick and lights Sophie’s cigarette with a match struck from the side of her red-and-white enamel case.
LATER, WHEN THEY’VE FORAGED FOR dinner in the icebox and both servants have failed to turn up, Sophie invites Julie to stay for the night. She glances at her slender gold wristwatch, and then at the plain black-and-white clock on the kitchen wall.
“Well. Since you so obviously need me.”
“I don’t need you.”
“Yes, you do. Someone needs to take your mind off the fact that your beau is having dinner with another woman at this very moment, and probably more than dinner.”
“He’s not my beau.”
“But you’re in love with him.”
“It doesn’t make any difference, does it? Nothing makes any difference.” Sophie shuts one eye and stares at the inch or two of bourbon remaining in the bottle, which stands in the center of the table, like an honored guest. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
“That’s Shakespeare.”
“Yes.”
Julie wags a finger. “You’re not allowed to go flinging around Billy-boy at a time like this. Willy-nilly.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. You can jus—you can justify anything with a little Shakespeare. Give yourself a nice glossy shield of—cleverness.”
“But we are clever, darling. We’re awfully clever. Look at us!” Sophie opens her arms. “You’re going to start an engineering firm with me, and we’re going to share a grand apartment and have lots of lovers and never, ever get married.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Julie shakes her head. “You can count me out, sister.”
“Oh no you don’t. You’re brave enough to get me into this, but you won’t see it through?”
“But it’s different with you. It’s your money. Or will be yours, when your father—well.”
“You have money, too.”
“My parents’ money, Sophie. It’s a trem—trenem—it’s a great difference.” She frowns, looks around the room, and discovers her cigarette case lying on top of the icebox. Bracing herself carefully on the table, she rises to her feet. “And they won’t stand for this.”
“For sharing an apartment with me?”
“No. I don’t think they’d care as much about that.” With some difficulty, she lights the cigarette, and then—apparently exhausted by the effort—collapses back against the icebox, puffing quietly. “It’s the rest of it. Making my own money.”
Sophie frowns. So hard to concentrate, when the world is so beautifully muddled. “But you were going to get a job anyway, weren’t you? With me. We were going to get an apartment together and find work and be indepen—dependent and modern.”
“Oh, a job! But that’s nothing, darling. You can’t make a real living on a mere job. My kind of living, I mean, the kind that will keep me in the style to which I’m tragically accustomed.” She waves her hand, butterfly-like. “As long as I need my allowance, they’ve got me in the end, right? I can only stray so far, like a little doggie on a leash.”
“But you’ll be with me.”
Julie shakes her head slowly. “I can’t take your money, dearest. Not even for the sake of eman—enamci—freedom. The creed, you know.”
“What creed?”
“The creed that says we don’t sponge off our dearie-wums.”
“But I need you!” Sophie wails. “I can’t run my firm without you! You know so much more about—managing people—and economics!” (She says it carefully, so as not to embarrass herself: e-co-nom-ics.)
Julie’s smooth face takes on a bit of wrinkle at the forehead. “But engineering’s so grubby. Can’t you run a department store instead?”
“But I don’t know anything about that.”
Julie reaches down and takes off a shoe, fumbling with the buckle until it slides free from her stocking. She holds it up before her. “You see this?”
“I think so.”
“What is it?”
“A shoe?”
“Exactly! It’s just a shoe, darling. You don’t have to know everything about it. You just have to know if you like it. You have to have the guts to say, I like this shoe, damn it, and every woman in New York is going to wear it next season. And you have that kind of guts, Sophie. You do.” She wobbles. Braces herself against the icebox. A bit of startled ash drops from the end of her cigarette. “I don’t, though. I have the guts to bob my hair and smoke in public, but I don’t have the guts to scratch for my own worms. That’s a special kind of brave, my sweet, and Julie doesn’t have it.”
Sophie leans her cheek into the palm of her hand and thinks that Julie looks awfully brave enough to her. She stands teetering on the pinnacle of the present sleek moment. Her breasts are flattened by a state-of-the-art brassiere. Her waist doesn’t exist. Her skirt hovers dangerously at the middle of her shin. Her lips are round and rosy, her hair short and curled and burnished. In her modern costume, she makes you think of a juvenile, fresh and unspoiled and yet utterly naughty: a girl who will give you all the good times you crave, without all the messy grown-up consequences. Julie blazes a fearless new trail, just by standing there in her glittering, straight-edged best, trailing a cigarette from her hand.
Sophie rises from the table and staggers toward the blurry image of Julie, leaning against her icebox. She takes the shoe and kneels down to replace it on Julie’s slender foot, encased in its delicate stocking of daring flesh-colored silk. The beaded dress, which looked gray outside in the streetlights, is actually the color of moss.
“I think you do, though,” Sophie says. “I think you are brave enough. Just go out there and do it. You don’t need all the dresses and the luxury. You just need spirit. You need a soul.”
“But I’m afraid I haven’t got that little thing.” Julie kneels next to her on the kitchen floor. “It’s not so bad, though. I’m having the time of my life. It’s just absolutely ripping, isn’t it? A smashing success. Eventually I’ll have to get married, I guess, when my parents lose patience with me, but I think I’ve got a few years left. A few years and a lot of fun.”
Sophie stares at Julie’s eyes, which are now ringed in soft charcoal smudges. “I don’t understand. You’re the bravest girl I know.”
“God, no. What a thing to say.” Julie giggles quietly and settles her head in Sophie’s lap. “Don’t you see how conventional I am? I’m never going to bite the hand that feeds me. Maybe a nibble from time to time, just to keep them on their toes. But give up this?” She lifts a section of dress. “No.”
“You can if you want to.”
“But I won’t. That’s your kind of courage, not mine.”
Sophie runs her finger along the waving golden line of Julie’s hair, until it ends in the diamond clip. Actually, it’s not diamonds. It’s rhinestones or some other costume jewel, very up-to-date, glittering with irony. Julie’s eyes are closing. The cigarette sags against the floor.
“And our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Sophie whispers.
Julie’s faded pink lips create a tiny smile. She lifts her hand—her left hand, not the one with the cigarette—from the hygienic linoleum floor and curls it around Sophie’s fingers, atop the rhinestones.
“O brave new world,” she whispers back, “that has such people in it.”
TELEPHONE.
The word tears across Sophie’s mind, leaving a wide and painful gash. Or maybe it’s the noise itself, the persistent brring-brring that will not be denied. The word keeps tearing, and the noise keeps brring-ing, but she can’t put the two ideas together.
She lifts her head. “Come in!” she gasps out.
Brring-brring.
Sophie opens her reluctant eyes and thinks, Telephone. This time she remembers what a telephone is. But where is the telephone? Where is Sophie? A parlor, well appointed. Her well-appointed parlor! New York? Head. Oh God, head! What’s happened to her head? She’s having a stroke. Where’s the—
Brring-brring.
—telephone?
Sophie rolls to her side and falls unexpectedly from a sofa. A vague memory wafts past: Julie and a bottle of bourbon and not wanting to climb the stairs. Because Father. Because Octavian. Octavian and Mrs. Marshall.
“Julie?” she calls hopefully.
Brring-brring.
The hall. Sophie stumbles to her feet and crashes into a wall. She’s still wearing her navy skirt, her untucked blouse. At one point, there was a cigarette. And a phonograph. The rest is silence.
Brring-brring.
Sophie’s staggering down the hall now, toward the stairs, wincing in agony. On the half landing, the telephone sits in its cubicle of shame, outlawed from any civilized room. Brring-brring, stabbing her temples with a pair of lead pencils. She snatches the earpiece—it’s a dreadfully old-fashioned telephone, that’s Father for you—and puts her lips to the mouthpiece, and just that same second she realizes she needs to vomit.
“Hello?” (Greenly.)
“Hello? Miss Faninal?” (Crackling.)
Sophie hangs there in confusion, and then she remembers that Faninal is Fortescue. Faninal is Sophie.
“Yes. Speaking.”
“This is Mr. Manning.”
Sophie is hot and cold and hot. Her tongue is coated in wet flour. A small, succulent rodent seems to have died at the back of her throat. She moves her head—a mistake—and rests it against the plaster wall. “Manning?” she repeats.
There is a slight hesitation on the other end. “Your attorney, Miss Faninal. Your father’s counsel. I apologize for the early hour. I’m afraid something’s come up . . .”
“I’m sorry. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
“Miss Faninal, this is a long distance—”
Sophie sets down the earpiece and bounds up the remaining steps to the bathroom on the second floor, where she bends over the toilet and empties an improbable quantity of poisonous yellow-green bile into the bowl. This takes some time. Every last speck of bile, apparently, must be evacuated, or her stomach won’t rest. When she raises her head at last, she doesn’t recognize the image in the small mirror above the sink. She reaches for a square of linen and runs it under the faucet. The coolness helps. Reminds her skin it’s alive. When her face is clean and pink, she turns away and walks unsteadily out of the room. There’s something pressing downstairs, isn’t there? Something she needs to do, and doesn’t want to do.
Her father’s room lies at the end of the hall, fronting the street. The door is open, a strange thing. Father always closed his door. Even the maid had to ask permission before cleaning it. What time is it? Feels awfully early. There’s not much light showing at the edges of the curtains. Sophie’s not wearing a watch. Father’s room? Father’s room has a clock, probably. And if she goes into Father’s room, she won’t have to do that thing downstairs, that thing she’s trying to ignore, even though it’s kicking the back of her brain, urgent and unsatisfied.
She walks straight through the doorway into Mr. Faninal’s dark and stale-smelling sanctum, but she doesn’t look for the clock. (She doesn’t know where it is, anyway.) She heads to the first window and pulls back the curtain.
Just past dawn. The sky is an eerie soot blue, streaked with pink above the buildings to the east, and the streetlamps are still lit, a thick and sickly yellow in the morning haze. The street is deserted, except for the milk wagon trundling around the corner, jangling faintly through the glass, and . . .
And a dusty green Ford Model T parked along the curb next to the house.
Sophie’s hand crawls upward to her throat and rests against her windpipe. She closes her eyes, opens them, closes them again, and when—slowly—she raises her lids a final time, the car is still miraculously there.
The roof shields the interior from view, and she can’t see through the windshield either: the angle is too acute.
But he’s there. How long has he been parked there, keeping watch? Her cavalier. After his dinner with Mrs. Marshall? All night?
Sophie starts to breathe again. Her fist curls around the thick damask curtain and drags it to her cheek.
Telephone.
She remembers now. Mr. Manning, her father’s defense counsel. Why would he telephone her at this early hour?
She gives her forehead a last damp stroke with the linen cloth and lets the curtain fall. Before she leaves, she catches sight of the clock on her father’s small tin mantel:
5:42.