CHAPTER 28

Love, like a chicken salad or a restaurant hash, must be taken with blind faith or it loses its flavor.

—HELEN ROWLAND

SOPHIE

Somewhere in Oklahoma, four weeks later

WHAT SOPHIE loves most about the open road are the stars. In Manhattan, only the very brightest ones are visible, and those usually turn out—disappointingly, somehow—to be planets. Here, in the middle of Oklahoma, there are millions of miraculous dainty suns, a dazzling array. You can lie back on your blanket, next to your sleeping husband, and count all night.

But you don’t. All that open air and exercise means you’re usually fast asleep by the time you reach a hundred or so. Still, the plenitude is reassuring. It’s good for the imagination.

Tonight, sleep hasn’t come so quickly, and not even the stars are helping. That happens, too, and Sophie knows what to do. Another quarter hour of fruitless counting, and she slides out from beneath the blanket—Octavian stirs, but doesn’t wake—and finds the notebook in which she keeps the letter she’s writing to Virginia.

Letter. It’s really more of a diary, since she’s received only a single communication from her sister—a postcard sent from Miami three and a half weeks ago, promising to send a forwarding address that hasn’t yet arrived. Sophie will send her the letter (forty-six pages and counting) when there’s somewhere to send it.

Or maybe she won’t.

Sophie lights the kerosene lantern and carries it away from the sheltering hollow in which they’ve set up their camp, to the boulder that’s served as a table, and sometimes a sofa. She takes out a pencil stub and writes: Still in Oklahoma. We love our little campsite here too much to leave, I guess. There’s a lake nearby, where we bathe in the morning, and the weather’s been terrific, nice and hot and dry. We haven’t put up the tent in days. Of course, we’ve got to leave sometime, but we don’t have to be in Los Angeles until the middle of August, when Octavian’s new business partner returns from Europe.

She pauses, chewing on the pencil, because she’s repeating herself, isn’t she? Telling Virgo all the facts she already knows. And this letter isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s not supposed to be about facts.

I miss Father

The pencil hovers. Sophie adds a period.

Isn’t that funny? I miss him awfully. I have so many questions he can’t answer, so many things I want to tell him. I wish I could tell him that I’m doing fine, that I’m building a brave new future, and I’m not quite happy yet—at least the way I’ve always understood happy to mean, the way I used to be happy—but I’ve got something close to it, something maybe even a little better than simple joy. Or at least, it will be. Octavian says

She stops again. She hasn’t written for a few days, and she’s conscious that her words are stiff, the way words sometimes are when you haven’t spoken with a person in some time. She’s forgotten how much she already told Virginia, how much she’s kept to herself.

And that single word: Octavian.

She looks over her shoulder, at the bed they’ve made for themselves in the grass, covered by a tarpaulin and a blanket and a sheet—that’s the mattress—and another blanket to cover them, just one, because it’s July. The moon is thin and distant, shedding only the faintest amount of light, and she can’t really see her husband. But she doesn’t need eyes to know he’s there, does she? His presence is like a magnet, like a gravitational center, communicating itself to her as a current of electricity along some invisible primordial wire. His arm is a faint gray smudge atop the blanket, where Sophie should be. She can almost feel the weight across her breast. That’s how connected they are, these days.

She turns back to the notebook on her lap.

Octavian says we’ll have plenty of time for walls and roofs when we get to California. (And clothes, ha ha

She scribbles that out.

For now, it’s the best honeymoon a girl could ask for. It’s just us, getting to know each other, and as far as I’m concerned, I never want to see another human being. (Except you and Evelyn, of course.) No doubt that will wear away in time—wanting him and only him—but right now it’s perfect, because I think he’s the only one in the world who understands, and that understanding ebbs and flows between us in this beautiful and astonishing way, every time we touch each other, every time we speak. What I mean, I guess, is that we both need this freedom at the moment: to kiss and touch and be man and wife whenever we want, without anyone else to see or care or intrude on what we are saying to each

The lead breaks. Sophie’s writing too urgently again. She takes the penknife out of her pencil case and sharpens the end, by the oily yellow light of the kerosene lantern. Around her, the peeps and hoots and rustles of the nocturnal world go quietly on, not regarding her at all. The prairie wind has died down, and the air is warm and still, smelling of sweet July grass. When she sets down the pencil case, she writes the word other after each, and puts a period after it.

Anyway, married life is grand and we are making more plans every day. Octavian works on his airplane designs and I’m learning how to draft, because I want to be a part of this, too: a real partner, and not just a financial one. (Octavian won’t have it any other way, really, because he hates the idea that’s he’s somehow “taking” my money to build his airplanes.) We’re going to find ourselves a pretty cottage in the middle of an orange grove. Octavian seems to want about twenty kids and I think I’d be happy with two or three, so I guess we’ll have to compromise somewhere, although at the rate we’re going

She smudges that out and puts a period after somewhere. Smiling to herself.

But I suppose that’s the point of all this, these weeks we are taking to get to know each other, in the privacy of the Great Outdoors. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, the two of us, it’s that marriage isn’t always easy, and there will be times that try us without mercy. We will sometimes—maybe even often—disagree, and things and people and events will come along that test our courage and resolve, and that’s when we will turn to the memory of this precious time together, and the knot we are weaving to bind us into one. This language we are creating that belongs only to the two of us. Sometimes, when we are lying together at night, Octavian whispers in my ear a single word: Wife. And I know that word doesn’t just mean I love you. (We hardly ever say that anymore, because it’s so small and insufficient and unnecessary.) He means that I am his entire family, the source of his earthly happiness, the object of all the loyalty in his dear and faithful heart. That he will protect and adore me to his last breath. (The strength of his emotions sometimes awes me, and I think how strong I must be to receive and return them. He is not for the faint of heart, my Octavian.) You might say that all of our marriage vows are packed into that one marvelous little word.

And, in return, I tell him: Husband. And that’s that, really. It’s all we need to say before we go to sleep.

Sophie rests the notebook against her knees and lifts her arms to the night sky, stretching and stretching, linking her fingertips above her head. There is a continuous and friendly ache in her muscles these days—Octavian’s not for the faint of frame either—but she doesn’t mind that. She relishes this new awareness of her own body, the faint and decadent echoes of physical love. They remind her of her wedding night—or perhaps elopement is a better word—eighteen days ago, in an otherwise unremarkable hotel room outside of Philadelphia, and the gentle, patient way by which her new husband coaxed her into the intimacies of marriage. As it turned out, there was nothing at all the matter with her sex-instinct. It was all just a question of honing it properly! What a relief that was.

Sophie looks down at the page again, the careful and small-written lines in the light of the kerosene lantern. Does she really mean to send this letter to Virgo, after all? Or is it just for her, for Sophie: an ecstatic diary of her unconventional honeymoon, so she can read it one day and remember what it was like to be newly married, embarking on the open road in a forest-green Model T, starting a life and a business and a family together? Embarking from the abyss of grief, inch by inch, toward a new and promising future.

She puts the pencil back to the paper.

We held another funeral today. I don’t think I’ve mentioned those yet. Actually, I don’t know if funeral is really the right word. We did the first one somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Octavian was talking about France and one of his friends who was shot down and died behind enemy lines, the last day of the war, and I could see he was growing more upset, until he stopped talking altogether. So I said, let’s hold a service for him, and I got out the Bible from one of the trunks in the car and that’s what we did, and it seemed to help a great deal.

Sophie reading the service. Octavian sitting there on a rock with his head bowed, the moonlight spilling over his bare shoulders—it had been awful, though she didn’t write that down, my God how silent and upset and shuttered away—and when she closed the book he just took her in his arms and wept, and eventually they crawled under the blanket, into the most beautiful silence in the world, full of pain and joy and intimacy, the most astounding night, and afterward Octavian slept until nine o’clock the next morning, a thing he had never done before.

Tonight we had a funeral for Quentin Roosevelt. Octavian only knew him for a few weeks, but I think they had a kind of sympathy together. I think they were men of the same substance, though Octavian won’t have it, because he never believes himself to be nearly so good as he really is. I suppose

“Scribbling again?”

Sophie startles all the way to her feet, pencil flying.

Octavian laughs and hauls her into a bearlike embrace. “Sorry. I thought you heard me coming.”

“I usually do,” she says, into the skin of his chest, thinking how much she loves the sound of his laugh, and how much more often he’s laughing now. How much freer his movements now—imagine that bear hug on their careful and tentative wedding night!—and his words, too. “I was writing about the funeral.”

“Mmm. Come to bed.”

“But I’m not finished yet.”

“I can’t sleep alone.”

“Lies.”

He growls in her ear—hungry bear!—and lifts her off her feet.

“The lantern!” she exclaims, and he swoops it up, too, pretending to drop her as he does, and they stagger, laughing, to the blankets, where he drops her right smack in the middle and collapses by her side.

LATER, WHEN THEY’RE SETTLED IN, and Octavian’s arms hold her securely in place—No more running off tonight, now—she tells him that she was writing to Virgo about the funeral for Quentin Roosevelt.

“We can drive into Tulsa tomorrow, if you like,” he says. “See if there’s any word from her.”

“All right.”

“You’re not worried, are you?”

“Not yet.” She hesitates. “Are you worried?”

“I guess I am, a little bit. She’s my sister now, isn’t she?”

“Yes, she is,” Sophie says firmly, snuggling deeper.

Octavian breathes into her ear, a terribly slow respiration.

“You know, if you want to do one for your father . . .”

“One what?”

“You know. Like we’ve done for my buddies.” (He doesn’t like the word funeral either.) “So, if you want to do it, I can read the service for you. The way you have for me.”

She finds his hand on the wool before her.

“Let’s wait for Virginia,” she says. “Virginia should be there, too.”

“All right.” He kisses her temple. Touches the parting of her hair. Adds, quietly: “Wife.”

She closes her eyes and tucks his fingers close, right where they belong.

“Husband.”