A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  And now look. Mr. Marshall has gone and followed us all the way here, has taken the trouble to track down Mrs. Marshall and her Boyo to a little love nest above a carriage house a hundred miles from the city, an act of jealous possession that was entirely out of character, made no sense at all, unless—

  “The children!” I exclaim, and run to the window.

  The Boy’s eyes must be better than mine, or maybe it’s youth. Under the trees below, I can just discern a shadow that might or might not be a car, and when I press my fingertips against the old glass and narrow my eyes to a painful focus, I see something more: a masculine figure leaning against the hood, possibly smoking a cigarette.

  Behind me, the Boy is making noises. “Can you see him?” he asks.

  “He’s out of the car now. I think he’s smoking. Oh God.” I turn around. “Where’s my coat?”

  The Boy is dressing himself, rapid and efficient. “You’re not going out there. It’s too cold.”

  “Oh yes I am.”

  “The kids are fine, Theresa.”

  “How do you know?”

  He takes my shoulders. “Because he would have gone straight in if something was wrong, wouldn’t he? Let me handle this.”

  “No, please. Please. Go in the cupboard.”

  “There is no cupboard, remember?”

  “Under the bed. Let me—”

  A knock sounds on the wood below.

  The Boy’s eyebrows lift a little. “That’s polite of him.”

  It has taken me decades of marriage to learn the sangfroid the Boy acquired in his paltry few months in France—or maybe he always had sangfroid, maybe he came out of the womb a cool, collected infant—and I’m still not as serene as I’d have you believe. My insides are all flighty, all riddled with fear and instinct. The children! Once you bring forth a baby into this world, God help you, the terror instinct takes up residence in your blood, like a chronic disease, and never leaves. When my Tommy quit Princeton to join the army in the spring of 1917 and had the nerve to turn up on Fifth Avenue a fait accompli in his second lieutenant’s uniform, I nearly vomited into a Ming vase. Nearly. But I didn’t! I held out my hand and shook his, and said he had better get a valet to look after those shiny buttons, and he laughed and promised to maintain his buttons as the shiniest in the service. Which was all our fond little Fifth Avenue way of saying how much we adored each other.

  So I am more than capable, despite my shredded interior, of maintaining a purposeful calm as I pluck my lover’s hands from my shoulders while my husband pounds and pounds on the door downstairs. “Get under the bed, Boyo,” I say. “Now. And stay there.”

  His eyebrows are still up, and the brain behind them turns furiously, like an engine running fast under a placid hood. You can’t see the color of his eyes, the air is too dark, but let me assure you they are a most engaging shade of pale blue-green, equally capable—depending on the light and his mood—of Mediterranean warmth or arctic frigidity. I can imagine which climate prevails now.

  The pounding stops, the doorknob rattles—it isn’t locked—and the hinges release a long and cantankerous squeak.

  I point to the bed. “Now, Boyo.” Or we’re through. (I don’t actually say those last three words, of course—no one likes an ultimatum, least of all the Boy—but you can feel them there, sharp-edged, dangling off the end of the sentence.)

  The Boy shrugs his long, ropy shoulders and turns away. “If that’s what you want,” he says.

  And that sound you hear, beneath the ponderous rhythm of a man climbing a set of high wooden stairs, is the hairline cracking of my heart, straight through the calcified left ventricle.

  BUT THE MAN STANDING IN the doorway isn’t Theodore Sylvester Marshall, after all, enraged or otherwise.

  “Ox?” I exclaim. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  My brother strides up to me, takes me by the shoulders, and kisses both cheeks. “Happy New Year, Sisser! Look at you. Haven’t aged a minute.”

  “Oh, stop.” I shove him away. “You gave me such a fright.”

  He steps back obediently, casts his eyes along the walls, and sends forth a slow whistle. “Sylvo said I might find you here.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “I thought he was crazy. What are you, hibernating?”

  “Well. Perhaps it’s time for a little chat with my husband.”

  “Something like that.”

  “This place have a lamp or something? I can’t see a thing. And boy, is it frosty.”

  I turn to the sole piece of furniture in the room, other than the bed: a beaten-up pine dresser wedged between the window and a diagonal roof beam. The matchbook lies next to the base of the kerosene lamp. “I thought you said I hadn’t aged a minute.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, how could you tell a thing like that if you can’t see?” I set the dome back on the lamp, and the room illuminates slowly, chasing out the frozen dawn by concentric degrees. The smell of burning kerosene enters the air, and it makes me yearn for the Boy’s nakedness, his coiled-rope muscle under my hands, lit by an oil lamp.

  “All right, now, Theresa. Lay off a fella. How are you? What the devil are you doing in this old shack? You gone crackers or something?” He frowns. “Say, you’re not here with some sheik, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Yeah, I guess not. Old Sylvo wouldn’t stand for it.”

  He’s such a dunce, my brother. A sleek, good-looking, bachelor dunce.

  “Of course he wouldn’t. I’m just hibernating, as you say. Taking the edge off the New Year with a little simple living.”

  “Simple’s right.” He cast another look, shivered, and burrowed deeper into his overcoat. “Think of lighting that old stove, maybe?”

  “It is lit.” I push away from the dresser and make my way to the ancient cast-iron stove in the room’s final corner, the relic of some long-gone coachman. A few small lumps lie overlooked in the scuttle, and I lift the stove’s lid and drop them in. “I just forgot to bring in more coal, that’s all.”

  Ox doesn’t reply, and I rub my hands inside the feeble bubble of heat rising from the top of the stove, until his silence begins to unnerve me. I turn my head. “What is it?”

  “You,” he says. “You’ve been acting strange for a while now. Haven’t seen you out much. When I do, you’re not yourself. And now here you are, freezing to death in a shack in the wilderness—”

  “Hardly that. I just wanted a little peace and quiet.”

  “You can have peace and quiet and central heating, too. What are you doing for food?”

  “I’ve got a little something tucked away.”

  He shakes his head. “Sisser, Sisser. Let’s drive into town and have breakfast. Ham and eggs and hot coffee.”

  “No, I’ll stay here, thank you. I’m not hungry.”

  “But I’ve got something to tell you, and I don’t want to do it on an empty stomach.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  He grins a wolfish, ecru-toothed grin. “Both.”

  We are not entirely unprepared, the Boy and I, despite appearances. In the picnic basket next to the dresser, there are a dozen dinner rolls tied up in a napkin, a large flask of gin, a hunk of cheddar cheese, half an apple pie, two oranges, and a sandwich made of thick slices of leftover Christmas ham. Everything you need to shack up for the night in a Long Island attic, except the coal to keep you warm, and really, who needs coal when you have a magnificent self-heating Boy occupying your bed? I bend over and untie the napkin and toss my brother a dinner roll, which he catches adroitly. “Bon appetit. Try not to drop any crumbs on my nice clean floor, will you?”

  “This is stale.”

  There’s also a shawl in the basket, the lovely thick crimson shawl of India cashmere that the Boy gave me for Christmas. I settle it over my shoulders and step back to the stove, missing the roof beam by a slim quarter inch. “Tell me why you’re here, Ox, and it had better be good.”

/>   My brother bites his roll, chews, swallows, and smiles, and when he parts his lips to speak, he says the last thing I’d ever expect to hear from the mouth of Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner, confirmed and eminently successful bachelor.

  “I’m getting married, sis.”

  “Really?” I fold my arms. “Who’s the lucky broodmare?”

  “Not mare, sis. Filly. Such a gorgeous, fine-limbed, Thoroughbred filly. The prettiest girl you ever saw. I’m in love, Theresa. I am one hundred percent, head over heels, goofy in love.”

  “I see.” A craving for tobacco strikes my brain, but the cigarettes lie on the floor next to the bed, an inch or two from the sardine-tin ashtray and from the Boy’s head resting on the floorboards, and I can’t risk drawing Ox’s attention in that direction. “Can I assume the poor child feels the same way about you?”

  “I hope so. I’ve asked her father for permission, and he said yes.”

  “But the girl, Ox. What does the girl say? It’s more or less the crux of the whole business, isn’t it?”

  “Well, I haven’t asked her yet. But I think she’ll agree.” He gnaws another chunk from his bread. “I’m sure she’ll agree. She’s the sweetest thing, sis.”

  “And blind, obviously.”

  “Now, sis—”

  “And rich. She’s got to be rich.”

  “Sis.”

  From the downcasting of his eyelashes, I can see I’ve hit the nail straight on its bent old head. I say tenderly, “She’s got to be rich, hasn’t she, or you’d just do what you always do, when the love beetle nibbles.”

  “No, no. This time I really mean it.”

  “Of course you do. I’m sure she’s a sweet, lovely girl, and her money has nothing to do with it.” I pause. “How much has she got?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.” He leans against the wall, on the other side of the roof beam that slopes away from the dresser.

  “Oh yes you do. Down to the plug nickel, I’ll bet.”

  The coals have begun to catch on, and the stove is getting hot, though not so much that my icy bones are inclined to step away. Ox is examining the floor now, and his arms are folded, the way he used to look when we were children and he’d been caught in some kind of mischief. The slope of his shoulders suggests confession. “Her father’s got a patent on something or other, something that speeds up the manufacture of industrial . . . industrial . . .” He screws up his eyes.

  “Don’t hurt yourself. I’ve got the general idea. How much are we talking about? Thousands?”

  He looks up, and his eyes are a little sparky. “Millions.”

  “What?”

  “He licenses the design out, you know, and the revenue from that alone is one and a half million dollars a year, give or take a hundred thousand—”

  I clutch the roof beam.

  “—which is pure profit, you know, because he doesn’t have to make the—the thingamajig himself. They just pay him for the design. It’s patented.” He pronounces the word patented with triumphant emphasis, as he might say gold-plated.

  “Yes, Ox, darling. I understand what a patent is.” In the midst of my beam-clutching shock, the shawl has sagged away from my shoulders. I resume both balance and composure and tuck myself back in while these extraordinary numbers harden into round marbles and roll, glimmering, back and forth across the surface of my mind. How could a man invent a single object and then vault—vault with such marvelous, casual ease!—over the accumulated wealth of no less than Mr. Thomas Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue, whose father once supplied the entire Union Army with canned ham? A wealth that had dazzled me at seventeen. The company had naturally been sold in the seventies—canned ham being incompatible with the social aspirations of so keenly ambitious a woman as Mrs. Thomas Sylvester Marshall, my mother-in-law—and the proceeds invested in such a manner that a passive two hundred thousand dollars—give or take ten thousand—still drift gently into the Marshall coffers each year, enough to keep us all in silks and horses and ennui. But two hundred thousand is not one million five hundred thousand. A patent: well, that’s a different kind of capital altogether. A patent suggests activity. Suggests having actually earned something.

  I take the soft fringe of the shawl and rub it between my thumb and forefinger, in much the same way that the Boy caresses my hair. “Gracious me. She’s quite a catch, then. Pretty and sweet and loaded. Does she have anyone to share all this lovely money with?”

  “An older sister. Virginia. She’s already married.”

  “I see. And how old is your little darling?”

  He hesitates. “Nineteen.”

  “Oh, Ox. She’s just a girl!”

  “She’s a very old nineteen,” he says. “And you were married at eighteen.”

  “So I was.”

  “And Sylvo was thirty-six at the time, wasn’t he?”

  “So he was.”

  “Well, there you are.” He nods and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his overcoat. “Smoke?”

  “Thanks.”

  I accept the cigarette gratefully and allow him to light me up. He starts his own smoke from the same match, shakes out the flame just as it reaches the intersection of his finger and thumb. Like me, he closes his eyes as the virgin draft fills his lungs, and I am reminded of the first time we shared a smoke together, after the bon voyage party (if that’s the term) that Sylvo and I threw for Tommy. You look like you could use a smoke, he said, upon finding me alone on the terrace, staring across the dark wilderness of Central Park, and I agreed that I did, and we stood there smoking together at three o’clock in the morning, not saying a word, until I tossed my stub over the ledge onto Fifth Avenue and turned to him. This is our little secret, Ox, I warned him, and bless the idiot, he’s kept it ever since.

  “It’s not just the lettuce, though,” he says now. “I was falling for her already, before I found out about that.”

  I reflect for an instant on my brother’s extraordinary capability for self-delusion. “No doubt,” I say.

  “Wait until you meet her, sis.”

  “Oh, I can’t wait. When are you proposing? I’ll have to consult my calendar and throw you two lovebirds a smashing little engagement party.”

  “But, sis, that’s why I came. Don’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  He looks around for an ashtray, and his gaze finally alights on the little oblong tin on the floor. I watch him step confidently to the bed and bend over. He’s not quite the agile young sportsman he was in earlier days—everything takes its toll, and Ox has imbibed plenty of what constitutes everything—but he’s still bendable enough, under that fat Chesterfield overcoat, and his glossy blond hair picks up flashes of light as he moves.

  “Well, well.” As if he’s just discovered a second Sphinx hidden between the floorboards. “Hello, Sisser. Looks as if someone’s been a little naughty.”

  I choke back a cough. “What’s that?”

  Ox straightens and holds out the sardine tin in my direction. “Eight smokes already? That’s some hibernation.”

  “Give me that.” I snatch the tin and set it on the dresser, under the shelter of the lamp. “Now, then. You were talking about asking your young filly to marry you.”

  Ox follows the ashtray and leans against the edge of the dresser, nice and close, so I can examine the dark smudges under his eyes and the chapped skin of his lips, which are bent into a familiar self-assured smile. Underneath the Chesterfield, he’s wearing evening dress, which shouldn’t really surprise me. Nor, for that matter, that he stinks of moonshine.

  “I’m not the one who asks her,” he says. “Don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember a thing. I hope you don’t think I’m going to pop the question for you. I wrote all your college papers; isn’t that enough?”

  “The ring, Sisser. Don’t you remember?”

  “What ring? I haven’t the slightest—oh!” I spit out the cigarette. “Mama’s ring? The rose ring?”


  Ox pats my hand on the dresser. “That’s right. The old family tradition. I had it sent to the jeweler for a good polish, and now all that remains, all I need, which is why, of course, I came to you, Sisser—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Ox. You can’t be serious.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because it’s a farce. A medieval farce. Who sends a proxy to propose for him these days? Chivalry went out with the Armistice, Ox, didn’t you know? Chivalry went out when the Lewis gun and the chlorine gas and Picasso came in. This shiny modern world hasn’t got any knights left in it.”

  “It’s not a farce, sis. It’s a fine old family tradition. A cavalier presents the august family ring to the lady of one’s choice, the lady who will one day become the next Mrs. Ochsner, ruler of all New York—”

  “Darling, the Ochsners haven’t ruled anything for years, not since Mamie Fish took over from Lina Astor. And now it’s just anarchy. Actresses and artists and writers, God help us. The present Mrs. Ochsner commands a crumbling house on Thirty-Fourth Street and nothing else to speak of.”

  “Not true. Mama has pedigree, Theresa, she has history, which is more than you can say of some ink-stained penny novelist.” He pauses grandly, flicks his ash into the tin. “Anyway, I need a cavalier. A ring bearer.”

  I laugh. “Oh, Ox. Only you.”

  “I’m serious, sis. How about one of your boys?”

  “Absolutely not. They haven’t got a knightly bone in their bodies. Unless it’s a football you want delivered, they’re not interested.” I stub out the cigarette.

  “One of their friends?”