Had Mr. Schuyler, at any time, felt that there was anything more suspicious behind Mr. Fortescue’s lack of identifying paperwork?
Mr. Schuyler paused before he answered. No, he told the court firmly. He had not.
At this point, Mr. Schuyler’s testimony came to an end, and upon cross-examination he revealed nothing new.
So it is left to Mr. Octavian Rofrano, ladies and gentlemen, to provide some fireworks for our entertainment tomorrow. As one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, he is expected to electrify us, much in the manner that he seems to have electrified the lovely and discerning Mrs. Marshall.
That is, if tonight’s expected thunderstorms don’t anticipate him in the task.
CHAPTER 7
The woman who appeals to a man’s vanity may stimulate him, the woman who appeals to his heart may attract him, but it is the woman who appeals to his imagination who gets him.
—HELEN ROWLAND
SOPHIE
Sunday morning, bright and early
TOO BRIGHT, really. Last night’s paltry fall of snow has given way to a sky made of blue ice, and a brilliant sun fixed at its eastern end.
But Sophie is looking west, not east: down Thirty-Second Street toward Third Avenue at thirty-two minutes past nine o’clock in the morning, the sun at her back. Her leather half-boots clatter along the sidewalk, echoing the clatter of her heart, which seems to be in the grip of some sort of irrational worry. Some kind of panic. Two minutes late! What if he’s one of those punctual military men who can’t abide tardy women? What if he’s like her father, whose silence has just blighted the entire Sunday morning routine of breakfast and church, because Sophie arrived in the dining room—bleary but clean-scrubbed—at four minutes past seven o’clock instead of six-fifty-nine?
But then she sees her cavalier, standing between a lamppost and an old Model T, dressed for the countryside in a brown Norfolk suit and a wool cap pulled down over his forehead. He lifts his arm and waves, and Sophie thinks, Whatever you do, don’t run to him.
She runs anyway.
“I’m sorry for being late!” she gasps, holding down her hat with one hand, so she won’t try to touch him. “Father always insists on sitting down together after church, and I had to make a ridiculous excuse to get away, since it’s Sunday and the shops are closed. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Not too long.” He opens the door for her—the car is pointing north—and goes around front to crank the engine. “Mind switching the ignition for me? Where the key’s sticking out, by the wheel.”
Sophie knows how to start an old Model T. After all, her father only got rid of theirs a couple of years ago, trading it in to buy a secondhand Oldsmobile, which he parks in a garage across the street from his workshop—it used to be a livery stable—and pays the boys there a dollar a week to keep it shined up and away from the other cars. But that old Ford was Sophie’s responsibility. Father had shown her how to clean the paintwork, how to change the oil and the tires, how to keep the engine running, how to drive it. (In comparison to the boys at the garage, she received only a dime a week for these services.) In consequence, Sophie’s something of an expert when it comes to the pre-war Model T. She reaches over and pulls out the choke, and turns the ignition switch as Mr. Rofrano’s shoulder pumps up and down, priming the engine. At his signal, she turns the key in the starter to magneto. Another quick movement of Mr. Rofrano’s shoulder. The engine coughs twice, hovers precariously, and then catches.
Mr. Rofrano lifts his head and sticks up his thumb in victory, and beneath the shadow of his cap brim his smile is wide and happy. Sophie’s absurdly proud of herself. She slides back over to the passenger seat and returns his smile when the door opens and he swings into place beside her, bringing with him the smell of fresh soap and cold air. His left hand eases the spark retard lever, until the pistons purr happily.
“Off we go,” he says.
“But where?”
“Connecticut.”
“Oh.” Sophie’s elation ebbs just a bit. Connecticut—well, there’s nothing wrong with Connecticut, she’s heard it’s a perfectly pleasant place, but it’s not exactly known for adventure, is it? (She almost adds the word romance, until she remembers, just in time, that she is someone else’s fiancée.)
On the other hand, unless she was perhaps expecting Mr. Rofrano to whisk them off to an ocean liner waiting on the west side piers, there isn’t much choice for a Sunday morning outing within easy driving distance of the center of Manhattan. Long Island, maybe? New Jersey?
“What’s in Connecticut?” she asks.
“You’ll see.”
Even on a Sunday morning, the traffic has already cleared away the snow that fell in the night, and anyway, it wasn’t much of a snow. It’s too cold to snow properly, Sophie says.
“Well, I’m glad it didn’t, or it would have spoiled our plans. Are you sleepy?”
“No.”
“I thought you might be sleepy, going to bed so late. You can lie down, if you like. It’s going to be a couple of hours at least.”
Sophie doesn’t think she’s ever going to want to sleep again, not the way her nerves are dancing now. But maybe Mr. Rofrano’s right, maybe she should rest for an hour or so, so she’ll be fresh for whatever it is they’re going to do, up in Connecticut in the middle of the bitter January cold.
“All right,” she says, and she curls as tight as a kitten on the seat, just touching Mr. Rofrano’s woolen leg with the top of her head, and she must have gone straight to sleep, because the next thing she knows, the car is bouncing to a stop and the engine cuts off into silence.
AS FAR AS SOPHIE KNOWS, she’s never been to Connecticut. She’s been to Europe, but not Connecticut—isn’t that strange? Her life, until last summer, was circumscribed by a certain number of blocks around the narrow brownstone house on Thirty-Second Street, a realm that contained a butcher and several grocers, a bakery and a dress shop, a church and a magnificent public library: who could want for more, really? Until graduating two years ago, she attended a nearby girls’ academy, but her father never encouraged any friendships with her classmates, and expected her to return home directly after classes were finished, clutching Virginia’s firm hand.
Virginia had a little more freedom. Virginia joined the Red Cross at their church, and when a call went out for volunteers in France, Virginia had asked their father if she could go. To Sophie’s surprise, he had said yes, after a period of silent consideration. And Virginia had gone. For eighteen months, she had lived in France, and she came back pregnant, wearing a slim gold ring on her finger, and her husband was going to join them just as soon as he could settle his affairs. Then Evelyn had been born, and the husband hadn’t arrived. Only letters, and then even those had ceased, about a year ago. He was in Florida, Virginia said. In Florida with his brother, recovering the family fortune by the age-old method: land speculation. There’s a rush on, after all, and as soon as he can make things suitable for a wife and a child, he’ll send for them.
Well, Sophie hasn’t been to Florida, either, and she isn’t sure she wants to. But she did want to go to Europe, as Virginia had, and when Evelyn turned a nice safe two years of age, Sophie asked if they might go, and (again, to her surprise) her father said Yes. So off they went, in a pair of first-class cabins on the magnificent brand-new RMS Majestic, keeping to themselves, and they were gone two months and saw everything that wasn’t wrecked by the war. They went to Paris and Rome and Florence; they went to London, though for some reason they didn’t look in on Virginia’s husband’s family. And they came home and resumed their lives, but Sophie hasn’t quite felt the same since. She feels as if Europe has changed her a little, has made her impatient with her familiar twenty blocks on the eastern side of the island of Manhattan, and that was her state of mind when she met Julie Schuyler. That she hadn’t seen enough, not nearly enough. That there’s a beautiful, glimmering world from which she’s been shielded until now, and she wants to se
e it. She wants to see what glories it contains.
She wants to see Connecticut. Only thirty miles away from the middle of Manhattan Island, and she’s never been there, not once that she can remember.
“THERE IT IS,” SAYS MR. Rofrano, setting the brake.
Sophie springs up and peers through the windshield at a winter field, on the other side of a weathered gray-brown fence. The grass is the same color as the wood: dull and shorn, dusted by a thin film of snow that settled more thickly in the hollows. “Is this Connecticut?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“It looks bleaker than I thought.”
“Well, it’s winter, isn’t it? Put on your hat and mittens.”
He opens the door and climbs out, and Sophie finds her hat and mittens and wraps her muffler snugly about her neck. Mr. Rofrano opens the passenger door and helps her out, and the blast of air that accompanies him is so bitterly frigid that she gasps.
“All right?” says Mr. Rofrano, and his breath makes clouds in the air.
“It’s awfully cold!”
“Do you want to stay in the car?”
She takes her hand from his and shoves it inside the pocket of her coat. “Well, of course not.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
As compliments go, it’s rather spare—hardly even recognizable, to the naked eye, as a compliment at all—but Mr. Rofrano smiles as he gives it to her, and his eyes are so warm with approval that the atmosphere itself seems to thaw by several degrees, and the wind blows more gently on her cheeks.
Sophie turns. “Where are we, exactly?”
“We’re in Avon. See this field in front of us?”
“That’s a field?” she says disdainfully.
“In the summer, it is. It’s the infield of a racetrack. We’re parked on the track itself, if you haven’t noticed.”
Sophie looks around them in surprise, and discovers that he’s right. The dirt under her boots stretches in a track on either side, before curving around the fence and disappearing. Behind her there’s a small wooden grandstand, mournfully empty.
“But why are we here? There can’t be any races.”
Mr. Rofrano nods at the field before them. “That’s where I saw my first airplane. They held a big air show here, back in 1911, when I was a kid, just before I left for school. Poppa took me. It was September, a gorgeous clear blue-skied day. You could see for miles. They took off from the infield right here”—he nods again—“and went up in the air and did all these acrobatics. Looping the loop, that kind of thing. I just stood there by the fence with my mouth open.”
“My goodness.” Sophie tries to picture this barren landscape covered with green grass and clean white airplanes, with spectators in sunlit dresses. Those beautiful big hats everybody used to wear, before the war shrunk everything down, hats and dresses and lives.
“Poppa asked if I’d like to go up in one, and I said, Boy, would I.” He laughs. “So Poppa went up to the man who was promoting the thing and asked how much it cost to take a ride. I don’t know how much, but Poppa was pretty flush back then. Came out all right after the panic, somehow. Anyway, up I went. It was only about ten minutes, but it changed my life. I thought I’d never been so happy. I looked down at the earth beneath us, and it looked so small and pretty, the people on it so inconsequential. And yet somehow, you know—this is the paradox, I guess—it was all the more dear and precious for being so tiny. You couldn’t see the flaws. You felt protective of it all.”
“Like a child with a dollhouse.”
“I don’t know. Something like that. Anyway, I fell in love, not just with the beauty of it but the freedom, too. The speed and the wind and the elemental thrill. The summer before college, I got a job as a mechanic at an air field, and I learned from the inside out. By then it was nineteen seventeen, we were in the war at last, and I couldn’t wait to get out there. I was in college for about a month before I turned eighteen. I quit the next day.”
“And you enlisted in the Air Service.”
“Yes.” He draws in a long breath, and as it comes out, bit by bit, he reaches inside his pocket and brings forth a shiny cigarette case, an expensive one. “Mind if I smoke?”
“No, of course not.”
He lights the cigarette and smokes quietly for a moment. Sophie’s toes are frozen inside her boots. She stamps her feet a couple of times, trying to get his attention, to wake him out of his trance. When that doesn’t work, she takes his arm. “Show me the place,” she says.
“What place?”
“The place where you stood, watching the airplanes.”
He nods. “Right over there.”
“Come on, then.” She tugs his arm and drags him to the fence—drags, because his steps are reluctant—and when they arrive she removes her hand from the crook of his elbow and leans against the topmost board. “Lean with me, like this,” she says, and he obeys her. “Now close your eyes and pretend.”
“Pretend?”
“All right. Imagine. Is that a better word? Imagine you’re ten or eleven again, and you’re watching an airplane go up into the sky for the first time. Imagine you’re climbing inside for the first time—”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Because it’s so cold out?”
“Not because it’s cold out. Because I’m not eleven years old any more. Because it’s not September, it’s January. Because . . .” He allows the word to hover there, in its own little cloud of vapor, containing any number of obstacles. Any number of heartbreaks that Sophie, living quietly and predictably inside her twenty square blocks of Manhattan Island, knows nothing of.
“Then why did you bring me here?” she asks.
“I don’t know. Why did you come?”
“Because you asked me to. You needed me for something.”
The cigarette is nearly finished. Mr. Rofrano drops the end in the dead grass and grinds it thoroughly with the toe of his shoe, and then he turns to face her, propping his lean body on the fence with his right elbow. “Maybe I did. But that doesn’t mean you should have agreed.”
“Why not?”
“You’re engaged to Jay Ochsner, for one thing. For another, you hardly know me. You get into a car with me and let me drive you off alone, without a chaperone or anything like that, for hours into the countryside. I might be anyone.”
“The Big Bad Wolf?”
“I’m not joking. Do you make a habit of this kind of thing?”
“I’ve never done this kind of thing. But you’re my cavalier, Mr. Rofrano. You’re here to watch over me, isn’t that right?”
He looks down at her with shocked eyes and doesn’t reply.
Sophie puts her hand on his, there on the fence rail, her thick woolen mitten on his leather glove. “I’m not stupid, Mr. Rofrano. I’m not as sheltered as you think. I know what a good man is. I know whom I can trust. I wouldn’t get into a car with just any old fellow, would I?”
He glances down at her hand on his, and then—a little slowly, as if the act requires courage—returns his gaze to her face. He looks so somber! Sophie wants to wrap her arms around his waist and lay her head on his chest. She wants to pour comfort between his ribs, to anoint his troubled forehead.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he says.
He’s wearing a peculiar expression now, one that Sophie can’t fathom. His lovely straight nose is red from the cold. So are his lips. His eyes, out here in the winter sun, have turned the most beautiful shade of arctic blue, like the water beneath an iceberg, and Sophie loves all these colors in him. Isn’t it marvelous, Sophie wants to say. Isn’t it simply marvelous being here in this January field with you. Isn’t it marvelous just to be alive with you, breathing in all this bracing air, blinking our eyes, beating our hearts, alive, alive.
“You’re sensational,” he murmurs, so softly that Sophie isn’t quite sure she heard him properly.
She leans forward. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” He picks up her hand a
nd kisses the back of the mitten, right before he tucks the arm back inside his elbow. “Come along, Miss Fortescue. I think I have something else to show you, on the way back to New York.”
THE ROADS ARE QUIET AND empty as they curl their way southwest. The shoreline makes a sharp right turn at the New York border, Mr. Rofrano explains, and if you stand on a Connecticut beach and gaze out to sea—Long Island Sound, that is—you’ll be facing due south. Not until Massachusetts does it all straighten out again, everything in its rightful place, the foam-topped Atlantic Ocean stretching eastward to the brink of Europe.
“To France,” Sophie says. “Do you think someone will ever fly across in an airplane?”
“I expect so, eventually. If we want it badly enough.”
“Did you ever want to try?”
“I don’t know. I guess I never really thought about it.”
“Not even when you were young?”
He laughs. “I’m not that old, am I?”
“I mean before the war.”
Mr. Rofrano quits laughing and rubs his leathery thumb against his forehead. The air inside the Ford is close and smoky, filled with human scent. “Maybe I did. I guess we were all full of dreams, then. But it was all a tin-pot fantasy. The airplanes we had then, they were just wood and glue and canvas. Then the war came in and the airplanes got better. They got a lot better, real fast—that’s war for you, I guess. But we lost the nerve. We stopped dreaming. All we dreamt about was fighting. Fighting and surviving the fight. Flying across the ocean, well, there wasn’t much object in that.” He pauses. “And then all the good pilots got killed.”
“Not all of them. You weren’t killed.”
“I got lucky.”
“And you were good, too.”
A Certain Age Page 13