Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near.
—HELEN ROWLAND
SOPHIE
Thirty-Second Street, Saturday noon
THE SOUND of the doorbell reaches Sophie’s ears while she sits cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, unscrewing the front plate of an old De Forest Audion receiving cabinet.
She’s been wanting to get her hands on one for years, not because she’s passionately interested in radio transmission, but because she wants to know how the thing works. Well, not quite. She already knows how it works, of course: the basic principles by which the radio signal is detected by a wire wrapped around the housing of the glass Audion tube, and the disturbance in its electrical current creates noise in the attached headphones. But she wants to see how it works, to take apart the circuits and examine the tubes, and you can only do that if it’s sitting right in front of you.
Of course, a device like this would have cost a hundred and fifty dollars when it was first built eight years ago, and Sophie’s never had that kind of money at her personal command, not even in her prosperous here-and-now. But a month ago, she spotted a small classified advertisement in the latest issue of Electrical Experimenter magazine, offering a used Type R J 6 De Forest radio receiving cabinet for only twenty-five dollars, and while twenty-five dollars is still a great deal of money, she was able to scrape it together from the odd ends of Father’s recent largesse. It arrived this morning by special delivery—Father, thank goodness, was in his workshop—and Sophie’s been toying with it ever since. Examining each dial, running her fingers delicately along the round glass Audion tube. Like a surgeon, preparing to make an incision in a beloved patient.
In the old days, her room was littered with the carcasses of various machines—a Marconi transmitter, an electric iron, a pop-up toaster, too many Western Electric telephones to count—that kept her brain and her hands occupied during the long hours of the afternoon, when school was finished and Father was in his workshop and Virginia was in France. And then Virginia came home, and Sophie graduated from high school, and in some subtle and invisible way, like the transmission of radio waves across the atmosphere, Sophie came to realize that it was time to put away childish things. And she had. One by one, the devices made their way to the kitchen or the trash heap, depending on their states of usefulness (or, in the case of the electric dynamo, under Sophie’s bed, because you never knew when you might need a dynamo!).
But this! A real De Forest receiving cabinet! Too tantalizing to resist, and wasn’t it wonderful, really, to immerse yourself once more in the innards of a nice solid useful machine, operating on scientific principles, impervious to emotion and whimsy, doing exactly what you told it to do? A perfect puzzle, for which a perfect solution existed, and a new puzzle at that: a territory she’s never explored until now, a miniature world just zinging with the thrill of discovery.
But the ring of the doorbell interrupts all this thrilling symmetry. Sophie raises her head, screwdriver poised in the air, and listens in bemusement to the noises below. Virginia’s voice. A male voice.
And the smell, now that she’s paying attention, of well-cooked food.
She glances at the clock. Fifteen minutes past twelve!
Sophie scrambles to her feet, tosses the screwdriver on the bed, glances in the mirror on the chest of drawers. Horrors! Her hair all undone, her pinafore still attached. She whips off the pinafore and pins back her hair and flies down the stairs to the dining room, calling out desperate excuses, but her late arrival doesn’t seem to bother the two people just settling to the table. One is her sister, and the other, rising politely to his feet, is her cavalier.
“Oh!” She stops and grips the back of the nearest chair. Her brain, still occupied with triodes, makes a sort of confused electrical twitch inside her skull.
“Good afternoon, Miss Fortescue. I hope you’ll forgive me, intruding on your Saturday lunch like this.”
“Of course not!”
“Mr. Rofrano stopped by to speak with Father,” says Virginia, from the opposite side of the table.
Sophie gathers herself and smiles at Mr. Rofrano. “I guess you didn’t know that Father’s always in his workshop on Saturday mornings.”
“So I asked him to lunch,” Virginia says.
Mr. Rofrano pulls out a chair for Sophie. “And I can’t tell you how grateful I am. A bachelor’s Saturday lunch isn’t usually so civilized.”
“Ham sandwiches?”
“If I’m lucky.”
“When we were poor,” Sophie says, flicking her napkin to her lap, triodes fizzling and receding into the distance, “Virginia used to make soup from the bones of the Sunday roast.”
“Only when we were lucky enough to have Sunday roast at all.”
“And then when Virginia was in France with the Red Cross—”
“You went to France?” Mr. Rofrano turns to her sister.
“She met her husband there,” Sophie says. “A medical officer. Very dashing.”
“Really? Which army?”
Virginia says calmly, “The British one. He was a surgeon in the Medical Corps.”
“Good man. I hope to have the chance to meet him.”
For a terrible instant, Sophie can’t think of a word to say, and even Virginia’s immaculate composure seems to have failed her. Mr. Rofrano, noticing the silence, looks up from his soup with a stricken slant to his eyebrows.
“Oh, he’s out of town at the moment,” Sophie bursts out, a little too shrill, “but I’m sure you’ll have the chance before long.”
“At the wedding, I hope?”
“The wedding?”
“Your wedding to Mr. Ochsner.”
Sophie reaches for the water glass. “Oh! Of course. I’m afraid I haven’t gotten used to the idea yet.”
“Give her a week,” says Virginia, “and I doubt she’ll be talking about anything else.”
Sophie hopes this is true. She woke up Thursday morning having entirely forgotten that she was engaged to be married at all, until the maid came up and said that Mr. Ochsner was waiting below, and even then she wondered, for several minutes, why on earth the man would call at such an ungodly hour. She washed and dressed, and she was just pinning her hair when she remembered that little word Yes, uttered under the sublime influence of the cavalier’s blue eyes, and she realized that Mr. Ochsner was, in fact, the man whose hand she had accepted. Mr. Ochsner was her fiancé.
Not Mr. Rofrano.
“But darling, it’s perfect,” Julie Schuyler said the next day, as she and Sophie made their way along the bridle path in Central Park, a habit recently introduced to Sophie’s Friday mornings. “He’s just the kind of husband a girl wants. Young enough to walk unaided, old enough to let you do as you please. You’ll have a visiting card to strike everyone dead, and your money will make everything jolly.”
“And Father loves the idea.”
“Of course he does. Most daddies would do murder to see their little girls so well-placed. The important thing is, do you like him?”
“I adore him.”
And it’s true! It isn’t just that Father pushed the idea so forcefully. She does adore Mr. Ochsner—call me Jay, he said on Thursday morning, and she tried the syllable out in her head, Jay Jay Jay—yes, she does adore Jay. How can she not adore him? He’s handsome and dashing and funny. He’s jolly, to use Julie’s word, and more importantly, he’s kind. A bit ribald, maybe, but she likes that about him. She likes his irreverence, which is both youthful and sophisticated at once. She likes the flattering intensity of his interest in her. She’s under no illusions about his intelligence, but you can’t have everything, can you? And she will be free. Even Father said so: You can do what you like, Sophie, married to a man like Ochsner. That name is like gold. A glorious future stands right before her. Soon, as Mrs. Edmund Jay Ochsner, she can go out and meet people. Anyone she likes! She can make friends, like Julie Schuyler, and quench her thirst for things like riding in Central Park on a Friday morning, hearing Julie’s stories, stopping to talk with Julie’s friends, who are so brash and witty and free and modern. They’ve rarely had guests in her father’s house.
Except this one. Mr. Rofrano. Twice in one week! Sophie’s mouth heats up with all the things she wants to say, the questions she wants to ask him. He sits next to her, while Virginia sits across, and he eats his soup the way he did on Wednesday, like a man who knows his manners. Over that first lunch, he told her he was raised in Connecticut, near the shore, until he went away to prep when he was fourteen. His father was a stockbroker. He had flown airplanes in France for the new United States Army Air Service, once America entered the war. That was about all she knew, for he liked to turn the conversation away from himself, and they soon discovered a shared passion for the new art going up around all the galleries in town. (Father hates it, naturally, she said, sending a sidelong glance in her father’s direction, and Daddies usually do, he answered, just like Julie had.)
And now he’s back. He’s right here, sitting by her side, full of mystery and undiscovered detail. “What did you want to ask Father?” she says, almost too thrilled to eat.
“I wanted to talk to him about airplanes, actually. I’ve been fiddling with a new engine design, and I thought he’d be able to help me. We discussed it a little last week.”
A tingle sweeps down Sophie’s spine, as if someone’s just attached a cathode to her neck. “Ooh! What sort of design?”
“Do you know something about engines?”
“A bit.”
Virginia laughs. “Don’t be modest, dear. Sophie’s a chip off the old block, you know, Mr. Rofrano. She’s got a wonderful knack for mechanics. I think she’d spend all day in the workshop with her father, if he let her.”
“Would she?”
“I just like tinkering with things, that’s all.” Sophie turns her gaze to her right hand, gripping the spoon a little too hard.
“I see. And where is this workshop?” asks Mr. Rofrano. He’s finished his soup already, and he sets the spoon neatly along the edge of his plate.
“When we were little, he used to work in the little shed in the garden. But once his patents starting making money, he found a shop a few blocks east, a real place, and got a real assistant to help him, instead of just me. I’m sure he’d be happy to discuss this engine of yours . . .” Sophie intercepts a warning look from Virginia and drags to a stop. “That is, if you ask nicely.”
“Tell us more about what you do, Mr. Rofrano,” says Virginia, and the cavalier obliges, while the soup is taken away by the maid and replaced with cold sliced chicken and mayonnaise. He speaks of interest rates and credit risk, and how business is really picking up again at last: almost as if they were two sensible people instead of a pair of young ladies. Sophie asks him about Mr. Morgan, and whether he really did save Wall Street during the Panic, and how you got to be such a man that others would follow you during a storm like that.
“Reputation,” says Mr. Rofrano, without hesitation. “You can like or dislike Mr. Morgan, but when he says a thing, he does it.”
There’s no sign of Father, even when the cake is brought out for dessert, and as soon as Mr. Rofrano sweeps the final crumb into his mouth, he checks his watch and says he really must go.
“Let me walk you to Father’s workshop,” Sophie says. “It’s only a few blocks away, and I know he’d be delighted to see you.”
He laughs. “I’m not so sure.”
“Sophie,” says Virginia, in her warning voice, but Sophie pretends not to hear and jumps up to fetch her coat, even though they now have a maid to perform such errands.
“It’s no trouble,” she says, “and I like walking.”
“Then I’d be delighted.”
They strike out, side by side, at a pace decidedly more measured than Sophie’s usual quick stride, neither one pushing the other for greater speed. As if they’re mutually reluctant to reach their destination too quickly. Sophie’s mouth is dry. She licks her lips and says, “How long have you known Jay?”
“Jay?”
“My fiancé.” The word tastes new and fragrant on her tongue.
“Oh. I don’t really know him at all, actually. I’m a friend of his sister.”
“My goodness! I thought you were pals.”
“Pals?” He laughs. “No, we run in different circles, Jay and I.”
“Except for his sister.”
“Yes. Except her.”
Their shoes make a neat, irregular rhythm on the pavement: Sophie’s light and clicking heels, Mr. Rofrano’s reassuring bass soles. The wind burns her cheeks and smells of snow. “What circles do you run in, then?”
“None, really. I work too hard, I guess.” He slides his hands into his pockets. “I play hockey, some evenings.”
“Hockey? Really?”
“I used to play at school, before I left for France. Hockey and flying.” He laughs. “I guess they’re not so different, in some ways. Anyway, when I first got back from France, I didn’t want to see another airplane as long as I lived, so when autumn came I took the hockey back up.”
“When do you play?”
“A couple of nights a week, during the winter. Tuesdays and Fridays.”
“How exciting! I don’t even know how to skate.”
The corner of Second Avenue approaches relentlessly, loud and black under the looming El. A northbound train rumbles up, a block away, and Mr. Rofrano raises his voice. “It’s a little tricky starting out, but you get the feel for it. I’ve been skating since I was a little kid.”
“That’s the best time to start, isn’t it? I’ve been learning to ride horses with a friend of mine lately, and it’s taken me weeks to get the hang of it.”
“Only weeks?”
“Only weeks?” Sophie has to shout above the clatter of the El.
He takes her by the elbow as they start perilously across the avenue. There isn’t much traffic, but none of the few vehicles seems inclined to pause. “It can take a lot longer. But you seem like an adventurous girl.”
“I don’t know about adventurous. But I do like to try new things, when I can.”
“Yes, I’ll bet you do.”
They race past an omnibus just in time and duck under the thick steel girders supporting the tracks. “Why do you say that?” Sophie asks.
“What, that you like to try new things? I don’t know. The things you’ve told me. Tinkering around with machines.”
“Oh, I don’t do that so much any more.”
“Why not?”
And just what does she say to that? The truth?
She shrugs. “Too busy, I guess.”
“Anyway, you didn’t hesitate when I handed you that ring and asked if you’d like to get married. That’s adventurous.”
Sophie stops and wheels around to face him, right there under the thunderous El. He’s standing before a girder, and his face looks down at hers from the exact center of a pair of parallel lines of rivets. “That’s because you made it sound like such an adventure,” she says.
“Well, marriage is an adventure, I think. Or should be.”
“That’s what I’ve always thought. I hope so, anyway. More exciting than this.” She points upward to the railroad tracks.
Mr. Rofrano smiles, a lovely warm smile that broadens his face. “What, more exciting than an elevated train?”
“More exciting than being on a rackety old track, going to the same place every day, passing the same stations, never really talking to anybody. Never really going anywhere. Locked between your same two rails.”
The day is overcast, and anyway it’s a New York day, yellow-gray and poisonous with the smoke of a million coal fires, a thousand smokestacks retching prosperity into the air. But a dollop of light still finds Mr. Rofrano’s face, through the complicated skeleton of the elevated railway, and as his smile fades, millimeter by millimeter, like a plant left to die by neglect, Sophie notices the true shape of his jaw, the angularity of his chin, and wonders whether he’s considered handsome by his friends, or if it’s just her.
“And now you want to get married,” he says, and Sophie notices another thing: the lightness of his eyes, which examine her in a very grave way that makes her feel just the smallest bit defensive.
“Well, is there anything grander than that? Vowing to love someone for the rest of your life? When you’ve found the right person, I mean.”
Mr. Rofrano rests his shoulders against the steel pillar behind him. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? Finding the right person.”
For some reason, God knows how, Sophie finds the nerve to lean forward and cup her mittened hand around his elbow, and it’s larger than she expects, solid and woolly, filling her entire palm. “Oh, you’ll find someone, Mr. Rofrano. I’m sure of it. Your perfect girl is just waiting for you, right around the corner. You’ve just got to find each other.”
If he’s taken aback by her nerve, he doesn’t show it. All the curiosity, all the movement in his face seems to have died away with that smile, and he might almost be a waxwork, fixed in concentration at a point just past her right ear. He stands so still, she’s almost afraid to breathe. Only the pinkness of his cheekbones suggests life.
A snowflake whirrs past her nose, and another. She lets her hand drop away from his elbow, just as the steel begins to vibrate under the stress of an approaching train. But she doesn’t look away. Oh, no. She keeps her sights stuck bang on the fascinating color of his irises, until he can’t help himself. He meets her gaze.
“Have you always been so brave?” Mr. Rofrano asks.
“Not always. Just the past couple of months, really.”
His lips part, and Sophie thinks he’s going to ask her what brought about this recent surge of courage. Or who. And she hopes he will, because she’s dying to tell him the whole story, dying to tell him all she’s seen and learned, and why. The new world opening before her.
But no. He’s just sighing, or maybe it’s a groan, swallowed by the noise of the train. He takes her gently by the arm and navigates them both through the steel and the snowflakes to the open air, where his hand falls away.
THE WHOLE STORY IS THIS: They met at the millinery department in Bergdorf Goodman two months ago, and that was when everything changed: Sophie’s days before Julie, and her days After Julie.
Virginia was there, too, though not altogether willing. She’d wanted to visit one of the more modest millinery shops nearby, but Sophie had never been inside Bergdorf’s and begged her sister to go, with a ferocity that made much more sense in the aftermath. So they had walked together from Thirty-Second Street, weaving crosstown and uptown and into the burr of traffic and shoppers that was Fifth Avenue, and Virginia had gripped her pocketbook and looked up the grand six stories that comprised the department store and—well, she hadn’t quite crossed herself, but she looked as if she wanted to. And Virginia had driven ambulances in France!
“Oh, come along,” Sophie said, taking her by the arm and dragging her through the revolving doors, and it was like entering another universe, wasn’t it, a universe that contained every possible luxury and nothing but luxury, and smelled opulently of perfume and shoe leather and money.
Money. They had loads of money now: exactly how much, Father wouldn’t say. Virginia had a better idea, but she wasn’t talking either. All Sophie knew was that her sister’s pocketbook contained five hundred dollars, a sum almost beyond the reach of her imagination a single year ago, and that these five hundred dazzling dollars represented no more than a crumb or two of the daily bread that was now theirs, thanks to the ingenious simplicity of Father’s pneumatic oxifying drill. Sophie didn’t know how they could possibly spend five hundred dollars on something so ordinary as clothes and hats, but as she unwound her scarf—the hall positively shimmered with reckless heat—she thought it might be great fun to try.
In order to reach the millinery department, they had to wind their way through a vast emporium of pocketbooks and gloves and perfume and shoes, through a gentleman’s haberdashery and a collection of lush fur coats, until they realized they had missed their destination altogether and doubled back to the elevator, where a uniformed attendant opened and closed the grille and announced the floors in the same stately tone as the elevator attendant at the Paris Ritz had done, last summer. (Except in French.) In fact, Sophie had felt more at home then than she did now, because she spoke French fluently but this language—the language spoken by the two ladies murmuring behind her in the car—seemed beyond her grasp, its points of reference too far uptown, inhabiting a separate physical dimension altogether.
They arrived on the third floor, and the attendant called out Millinery! Ladies ready-to-wear! in his voice of ceremonial boredom. Virginia and Sophie stepped obediently out, and so did the two women behind them, who were joined also by a quiet girl of perhaps eleven or twelve whom Sophie hadn’t noticed until now.
“Go off and find your hat, then,” said one of the ladies, in a voice that made Sophie think of a mouthful of marbles.
“Lily?” said the other one. “Come with me and look at lovely hats?”
“Do you mind, Mother?” asked the girl, far too politely for someone her age, and Sophie didn’t hear Mother’s response because Virginia was already pushing forward toward the millinery in her resourceful way, and Sophie had no choice but to lope on after her.
But never mind, because a few moments later the second woman joined them among the racks of hats—the young girl had evidently gone with her mother instead—and Sophie, settling a wide-brimmed hat over the crown of her head, heard her voice just to the left.
“Not that one, please. Unless you want to look like your mother.”
Sophie removed the hat and spun around, and there she was! Julie. Hair of blond, eyes of blue, mouth of mischief (and decidedly of lip rouge as well). She was smiling, taking the edge off her words, and she couldn’t have been older than Sophie, though her sophistication radiated outward in luxurious waves.
She lifted another hat from the stand and handed it to Sophie. “Try this one instead. It’s close-fitting, frames your pretty face. You’ve got too pretty a face to hide behind an enormous old brim like that.”
Sophie placed the hat on her head and turned to the mirror, and goodness me if the young woman wasn’t dead right. The hat surrounded Sophie’s face like a picture frame, so that her previously shadowed eyes now looked large and gamine. The mossy color made her hazel eyes greener and her lashes blacker, and suddenly she could see her eyebrows! And they were beautiful! “It’s marvelous,” she said, turning one way and then another.
“You’re the one who’s marvelous; the hat just lets everybody see it, which is really the point, don’t you think?” The other woman put out a leather-gloved hand. “I’m Julie Schuyler, and you can thank me later.”
Sophie took that hand. “Sophie Fortescue.”
An instant later, Virginia swooped in, but it was already too late. The spark was struck, and when they had purchased their hats Julie forced everybody downstairs to find a pair of matching gloves in mossy leather, and then they had sat down in the café for tea. At which point, mid-sentence, Julie straightened in her chair and covered her mouth. “Gadzooks! I’ve forgotten my sister,” she exclaimed, but before she rushed back off to the third floor she had slipped her visiting card into Sophie’s hand and said to come by for lunch tomorrow, because she was having a little party and needed a new face.
At the party, Julie introduced her to Jay Ochsner, who came calling on Thirty-Second Street the next day. Her father, bemused and suspicious, had taken Mr. Ochsner aside, and to Sophie’s surprise they had emerged from this meeting of one mind. I would like you to encourage this man’s suit, Sophie, were Father’s exact instructions, later that evening, and Sophie had. She would do anything to please her father. She had encouraged Mr. Ochsner, and discovered how much fun it was, having a handsome suitor all to yourself, eager to please and flatter you, allowed to escort you to places you’d never been allowed to go, all under the approving eye of a father whose approval came so rarely.
And so it went, for two whole months: shopping and tea and occasional clandestine adventures with Julie, courtship and tea and occasional clandestine kisses from the well-bred Mr. Ochsner. A new world. Maybe even a new Sophie.
SO THAT’S THE WHOLE STORY. That’s how, in a nutshell, a few hours after bidding Mr. Rofrano good-bye beneath the Second Avenue El, on a bitter Saturday evening in the middle of January, the formerly seraphic Sophie Fortescue possesses an elegant and slightly daring wardrobe to match her elegant and slightly daring fiancé, and no one seems happier than her own father.
“It’s how your mother would have wanted it,” he says, the absolute and final word on the matter, as Jay settles her coat over her shoulders while a taxi putters outside, waiting to whisk them uptown to a party at the home of Julie’s Schuyler cousins: Sophie’s first party as an engaged woman.
Of course, Sophie will have to take her father’s word for that, because she never knew her mother. Mrs. Fortescue died when she was just a baby.
ABOUT THOSE KISSES.
There were only four of them, really. The first one arrived in the library of the Ochsner house on Thirty-Fourth Street, a room of such stupefying riches that Sophie wandered the walls in a kind of trance, running her fingers over the leather bindings, gasping softly to herself. Later, she learned that the rug beneath her feet was a rare Kilim, bought by Jay’s grandparents in Istanbul on their wedding tour, and that the pair of Delft urns on the prodigious mantel had been given to his great-grandfather by the Prince of Orange himself, for some obscure reason lost to family legend.
At the time, however, only the room itself enchanted her: the shelves that reached from the floor to the delicately gilded ceiling, the books that filled those shelves. As a child, she had had few options for outside recreation, so with Virginia as her guide, she had explored vast and intricate worlds from the worn cushions of the parlor sofa, only to return those worlds to the nearby public library a week later. Books, after all, were expensive, and it was better to eat than read. So the little shelf in Sophie’s bedroom contained a selection of volumes amassed lovingly over successive birthdays and Christmases, and the idea of an entire gilded library, old and venerable, covered with the fingerprints of one’s ancestors, never needing to be returned to its rightful owner—why, it stole her will!
So she moved around the room in a slow clockwise rotation, trailed by a smiling Mr. Ochsner—he wasn’t Jay yet, not quite—emitting little gasps from time to time, until she reached the end of one shelf and turned.
“Are all these really yours?”
He wore an expression she hadn’t seen before, at least on him: a look of heartfelt wonder. The room was large, taking up an entire half of the grand first floor, and the winter light flattened against the side of his face. “Aren’t you a doll,” he said, laying one hand against the side of her face, and he had leaned forward and kissed her, Sophie Fortescue, her first kiss ever. His lips were soft and confident and left her deliciously breathless, and even though she knew he’d probably never lifted a single one of those books from its shelf, she didn’t mind the kiss at all. She thought it was strange and wonderful. In fact, she thought she might like another, and he obliged her a few days later when he came for lunch and presented her with a first edition of Daniel Deronda, one she’d especially admired, as a Christmas present.
The third kiss was more daring, arriving on Thursday morning while they sat together on the parlor sofa, admiring the rose-shaped engagement ring on her finger, unexpectedly and temporarily alone, and he had actually pressed her into the cushions then, kissing her lips and chin and neck, springing away just in time when the floorboards creaked outside the door.
And the fourth kiss is happening right now! Right here, in the back seat of the taxi, tasting like gin, more sloppy than she remembers, and not nearly so exciting. Jay smells of peppermint hair oil tonight, and the scent of peppermint always makes her feel sick and slightly terrified. His left hand has just entered her hair, and his right hand unbuttons her coat. She shoves his fingers away and jumps back toward the window. “What are you doing?” she demands, even though it seems perfectly obvious what he’s doing. (She hears those words in Julie’s voice—perfectly obvious! Perfectly obvious what a gentleman’s after, now that they’re engaged. Julie told her about that, during their ride this morning, and of course Sophie hadn’t quite believed her. We have all got the sex-instinct in varying degrees, Julie said, ever so matter-of-fact, and you shouldn’t try to suppress it, that’s the first requirement of a healthy mind.)
Jay’s face flashes in and out of view as the streetlights slide by. “Darling, we’re engaged,” he says, just like Julie said he would, and Sophie can’t help but laugh, if only to cover the vertiginous state of her stomach.
“What’s the joke?” Jay asks, a little injured.
“Nothing. Just behave yourself. We’re engaged, but we aren’t married.”
He reaches for her again. “And what do you know about that, Sophie dear?”
“Just enough to know that you should stay on your side of the taxi for now.” She picks up his searching hand and winds it securely into her own, in order to slow her jiggling pulse. “There, that’s better.”
“Now, Sophie. Don’t you trust me? I’m a gentleman. I just want to give you a little taste of married life, that’s all, so you know what’s coming. Nothing to be afraid of.” The taxi stops right under a streetlight, exposing a terribly wicked smile on the face of Sophie’s intended. His pupils are a little unsteady. The waft of peppermint strikes her again, making her stomach turn. She tries to breathe through her mouth instead of her nose. Anything to quell this unseemly surge of uneasiness in her viscera.
“A taste of gin, more like it.”
“Aw, don’t run cold on me, Sophie.”
“I’m not cold. But a little birdie told me to beware of impromptu petting parties in the back seats of taxis, even when the gentleman in question is the man you’re going to marry.”
“And what little birdie is that?”
“A very wise birdie.” She puts his left hand back in his lap and keeps the right one where she can see it. Julie didn’t actually say Beware, exactly. She just said that while inhibitions were dangerous to your mental health, a girl still had to choose the right time and place, or she might end up in a pickle.
A pickle. Of course! That’s why Sophie’s so uneasy just now, in the proximity of the man she’s supposed to adore.
The taxi begins moving again. The traffic is noisy and urgent, and Sophie likes the way they’re cocooned in sound, crawling atop mad Manhattan Island in company with such a crowd. Thank goodness for Julie, explaining the fundamentals of bachelor management over tea and horses, or who knows what might have happened just now? A pickle, that’s what.
Petting. She’s heard the word—who hasn’t?—but the reality isn’t quite what she thought. The kissing itself isn’t quite what she thought, either, now that the novelty has worn off, the slightly nauseous thrill of someone else’s mouth on yours, and anyway Jay’s face looks so unaccountably tired and blotchy and sort of heavy. Was it always so tired and blotchy? Or is it just the light from the streetlamps, not nearly so flattering as the light in the Ochsner library?
Or is it the sick-making hair oil?
Or Julie’s worldly advice?
Or is she simply inhibited? Cold, like Jay said. What’s the word? Suppressed. Her libido all shriveled up and brooding, a danger to her mental health. But how can that be? It wasn’t shriveled up before, was it? It wasn’t shriveled up when he first kissed her. Just now. Tonight. Suddenly, in the back seat of this taxi, kissing her fiancé seems all wrong, when it should be more right than ever before.
Jay flops back in his seat and begins to sulk—again, just as Julie warned!—and Sophie looks out the window and counts the blocks until they arrive at their destination, a beautiful new apartment building on Park Avenue, and Jay revives just enough to pay the driver with a crumpled dollar bill.
“You haven’t told me their names,” she says, as he pulls her like a parcel from the taxi to the sidewalk. The cold air blows past her nose. Washes away the stale, peppermint interior of the taxi. She inhales deeply.
“Whose names?” (Jay’s still sulking.)
“Our hosts.”
“Oh.” He looks up at the building, as if the sight of the facade will somehow jog his memory. “Schuyler. Philip Schuyler. Julie’s second cousin. He got married last year to his secretary.”
“What’s her name?”
They’re sweeping past the doorman now, and Sophie’s hand is wound through the crook of Jay’s elbow, and her sensational new engagement ring—an old ring, actually, but new to her—slides loosely around her fourth finger, under the glove. Two months ago, she was almost a schoolgirl; now, it seems, she’s fully grown, sweeping into a Park Avenue apartment building on the arm of Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner, who will soon be her husband. And isn’t that why she encouraged Jay to begin with? Because it was time to grow up. To grow up and escape.
“Lucy.” He snaps his fingers. “That’s it. Her name is Lucy. Lucy Young Schuyler.”
BUT THE NAMES OF THEIR hosts don’t seem to matter, at least at first. Nobody receives them at the door, except a sort of expressionless housekeeper who accepts their coats and turns away down a service hallway. (Maybe manners aren’t important among the rich, Sophie thinks.) The light indoors is more golden and less harsh than the streetlights on Park Avenue, and Jay looks transformed: his shirtfront is as stiff as a board and as white as the moon, and his hair is brushed back in a shining metal helmet, streaked by tarnish.
Sophie, her pulse settled, her viscera back in order, a little mortified now at the unexpected failure of her sex-instinct during the taxi ride, tells him how splendid he looks—she leaves out the tarnish, of course—and at last the sulky expression starts to perk back up.
“Splendid, am I? That’s good news, at my advanced age. You’re looking pretty smashing yourself, now that you mention it.” He lifts her hand and kisses the satin that covers her palm.
That’s better, isn’t it? At least they seem like a newly engaged couple now, winding their affectionate way through the crush of bodies, hand in hand. An instinct rises between Sophie’s ribs—maybe not the sex-instinct, but something just as primitive—at the smell of cigarettes and perfume, the musk of human skin. Something she wants but cannot quite identify. A waiter passes by, bearing glasses of foaming champagne. She follows him longingly as he goes. They had champagne the other day, a vintage bottle that Jay brought over from the Ochsner cellar to celebrate the engagement, and Sophie thought it was the nicest thing she had ever tasted. Maybe that’s what she wants? Not sex, but champagne.
She turns her head to Jay, who’s craning his neck this way and that. “Can you find us some champagne?” she shouts in his ear.
“What’s that?”
“Champagne!”
“Sure! But first I want to—oh, there she is!”
“Who?”
Never mind. Off they go, winding back through the crowd, past a fireplace and a buffet table and maybe a thousand cigarettes. Sophie’s finding it hard to breathe, but she follows him gamely, hoping there will be champagne at the end of the journey. Champagne! Champagne will make it all better.
There isn’t champagne, however. Jay falls to an abrupt halt in front of a milky half-dressed back, on which a beaded jet necklace dangles like an aboriginal tattoo above a swoop of black satin.
He reaches out with his left hand and taps the matching shoulder.
The woman—naturally, the owner of this mesmerizing rear spectacle belongs to the female persuasion—the woman turns her head and registers elegant surprise in one eyebrow.
“Ox?” she inquires, in a voice like the drizzling of cream over dessert. “Whatever are you doing in a respectable drawing room on a Saturday night?”
Jay releases Sophie’s hand and places his fingertips in the small of her back. “Sisser,” he says, like the cat that swallowed the goose that laid the golden egg, “I have the honor of presenting to you your future sister-in-law, Miss Sophia Fortescue.”