A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  He shrugs.

  “I’ll bet you were really good, weren’t you? I’ll bet you were the best pilot in your squadron.”

  Mr. Rofrano finishes the cigarette he’s smoking and tips the stub into the draft. They’re approaching a village of some kind, a few tired clapboard houses huddled against the edge of the turnpike. “Yes,” he says, slowing the car, bouncing over the frozen ruts, and then, “Could you open up the basket in the back? I could use a ham sandwich.”

  BY THE TIME THEY RETURN to the Boston Post Road, the afternoon is turning middle-aged and the ham sandwiches are all gone. Mr. Rofrano stops at a service station for gas. He checks the oil and the tire pressure. They had a flat a while back, and Sophie helped him patch it up. “You know something about cars, do you?” he said, and Sophie smiled and said A little.

  But she took in his admiring smile and thought, Mr. Rofrano is the kind of man who likes girls who know something about cars. That’s something, isn’t it?

  “Where are we now?” she asks, peering out the window. The persistent sunshine has warmed the air a few degrees, and the low fieldstone wall rimming the roadside has lost its bluish cast. (Real cold—not thirty degrees or twenty degrees but even lower, that genuine frigidity that visits New York only a few times each winter—has a special color all its own.)

  “Just outside of Stamford.”

  “And where are we going? If I’m allowed to ask.”

  “Sure you can ask. Doesn’t mean I’m going to answer you.”

  She pulls her head back in and looks at him. Possibly there’s a smile curling up the corner of his mouth, but it’s hard to tell. She reaches out to take his chin and get a better look. “Oh, you’re joking, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’ve got a bit of ham, you know. Right there under your lip.” She brushes it away. “Am I allowed to guess?”

  He turns back to the road. “Go ahead.”

  “Is it in Connecticut?”

  “Yes. Barely.”

  “Greenwich?” she guesses. (Greenwich lies close to Stamford, doesn’t it?)

  “Yes. A part of Greenwich.”

  “Near the water, or away?”

  “Near the water. It’s where I grew up. Since I was eight years old, anyway.”

  “Your childhood house! Does your family still own it?”

  “No.” He pauses. “My aunt had it sold when Mama died. Some family from New York bought it. They use it as a summer place.”

  “So nobody’s living there now?”

  “I guess not.”

  The road’s paved all through Stamford and into Greenwich, and the Ford runs reliably up and down the hills, past the farms and houses and the clusters of storefronts. Here and there, in the hollows and in the lees of the buildings, piles of crusty gray snow still linger from some earlier storm. Sometimes Long Island Sound flashes into view, in between the brown slopes and the barren trees, and Sophie says something about how you can see things better in winter, without all the leaves.

  “That’s my favorite part,” says Mr. Rofrano. “That’s what we get in return for the cold. You can see all the hidden things.”

  “Yes!” Sophie says eagerly, because when she tried to explain this to Julie Schuyler one afternoon, walking through the park, Julie only laughed and told her she was a funny thing. Julie said that she hated winter, that she was going to marry an extremely rich man just for the purpose of having a house to move to during the winter, somewhere south where it never got cold.

  “In France . . .” Mr. Rofrano begins promisingly.

  “Yes? In France?”

  He leans one elbow on the edge of the doorframe. “I missed the autumns here. The good old New England autumn. You don’t get all the colors there. The maples and the birch and the elm. But especially the maples. I missed the maples.”

  “Maybe that’s why you came home,” Sophie says. “For the maple trees.”

  “Maybe so.” But his tone is too thin, too agreeable, and Sophie knows he’s not telling her the truth. Not all of it, at any rate.

  “Well, whatever the reason, I’m glad you did. I’m very grateful you came back home.”

  He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t say a word, in fact, until they turn off the post road and onto an unpaved street, lined with elm trees at perfect intervals, leading south toward the water. They pass under the railroad tracks—the New Haven line, Mr. Rofrano tells her, when she asks—and then up a winding hill that flattens out into a straight and empty street. Each enormous house is set at the center of an immaculate dun lawn, and the boxwoods have been tucked under burlap for a long winter’s sleep.

  “Welcome to Greenwich,” Mr. Rofrano says, and there is just enough irony in his voice to make Sophie wonder.

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, MR. Rofrano parks the Ford under the far-reaching skeleton of an oak tree and points to a large white clapboard house. “That’s it,” he says.

  “Your old house?”

  “They’ve painted the trim green,” he says. “It used to be black.”

  “It’s very pretty. Who had the turret bedroom?”

  He drums his thumbs against the steering wheel. “I did.”

  Sophie opens the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To walk around, of course. Nobody’s here.”

  Sophie marches forward across the lawn, without looking back, and a moment later the car door slams shut behind her. She smiles and tucks in her muffler. A set of wicker furniture remains on the porch, although the cushions have been removed. She settles herself in a chair and nods at Mr. Rofrano as he climbs the porch steps and comes to a stop before her, hands on hips. “Join me? I’m afraid there’s no lemonade.”

  “There’s a better view out back, you know. Clear across the sound to Long Island.”

  “Oh, why didn’t you say so?”

  She springs back to her feet and follows Mr. Rofrano around the side of the house—the porch is wide and continuous, containing all the artifacts of summer living, down to a swing that creaks in some faint current of air—until they turn the corner and find the capacious terrace. More wicker. Mr. Rofrano pulls out a chair with flourish. Sophie nods her thanks and sinks into her seat. Before her, the lawn swoops straight down to the water, and the wind hits her hard enough to hurt.

  “It’s a bit nippy,” she admits.

  Mr. Rofrano sits down beside her. “Well, that’s what makes it such a great summer place. The breeze off the water. Right down there, now, that’s the boathouse. Poppa taught me to sail in that harbor.” He pauses. “Well, that’s not true, exactly. He had a fellow come out from the club, a sailing instructor. He taught us together.”

  “But that must have been wonderful! Learning how to sail with your father.”

  “You think so? The club instructor didn’t think much of it, that’s for sure, a gentleman who couldn’t sail. But we weren’t like the other families around here, the society families. My grandfather was born in Italy. He came here with his family in the seventies, when he was about thirteen or fourteen. They started a shop, made some money, and then Nonno met my grandmother on the El one morning. Fell in love. She was Irish.”

  “Oh, my. I’ll bet your great-grandparents didn’t like that.”

  He chuckles. “The families weren’t too happy about it, but it seems Poppa was on the way already, so they got married and made the best of it.”

  “I can just picture the wedding. All those disapproving parents scowling at each other, and your grandparents dancing together in the middle.” Sophie laughs. “Did they live happily ever after?”

  “More or less. That’s how I remember them, anyway. Smiling at each other. Arguing and then making up. Nonno took over the grocery, and then Poppa landed a job as a runner at Sterling Bates, right out of school, and worked his way up to stockbroker by the time he was twenty-two.”

  “Ambitious?”

  “I’ll say. My mother, she was one of the partners’ daughters. That’s how we ended
up in Greenwich, you know. Poppa didn’t want her to have to leave her own kind, if you know what I mean. So we moved out here, and he did his best to fit in. The sailing, I mean, and tennis and all the rest of it. They sent me to prep in Massachusetts.”

  “How did you like that?”

  “It was all right. My mother’s family kept up the school fees after Poppa died. They set up a trust for us both.” He takes out a cigarette. “It wasn’t the same, though. Summers weren’t the same without him. Quiet and awful. The summer before college, it was just like . . .” He fumbles with his lighter, which turns shy before the wind, and at last he turns his back to the sea to shelter the flame.

  She waits until he lights the cigarette, until the smoke streams confidently from the tip and the smell of tobacco reaches the roof of her mouth. He is so lean, she thinks. Lean and bony. Obstinate jaw and cheekbones covered by fresh new skin, made ruddy by the cold. Her fingers are numb inside her mittens, and the wind bites her nose. “Could you see the sea from your turret window?” she asks.

  Mr. Rofrano’s hand halts at his lips, and for an instant Sophie catches a stricken expression on his face. He lowers the cigarette, without inhaling, and says, “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, it’s just a dream of mine. When I was a little girl, I used to wish I had a turret window, overlooking the sea. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? You could sit and read there, and when you looked up, the sea would be right there. You could daydream for hours.”

  Mr. Rofrano leans forward, resting his forearms on his knees, and knits his hands together. The cigarette sticks out between his knuckles, flaring orange in a sudden gust. Sophie follows his gaze, out past the shoreline, and for the first time she notices an island, about a half-mile out to sea, and a stone lighthouse squatting at one end, its tower sticking up like an overgrown chimney from the plain square house of the lightkeeper. She opens her mouth to ask Mr. Rofrano about the island and the lighthouse—did he ever land there in his sailboat, has he ever been inside?—but he speaks first.

  “Yes. Yes, I could see the sea from my room.”

  Sophie stands up. “Can we go inside?”

  “Go inside?”

  “Why not? Nobody’s there. And you lived there once; it belongs to you.”

  “I don’t think the police would see it that way.”

  Sophie lifts her hand to her brow and makes a show of looking around them. “I don’t see any police, do you?”

  Her hat catches the distant afternoon sun, and as she looks down at Mr. Rofrano, she feels as if she’s bathing in it. Bathing in warmth, surrounded by a halo of sunshine. Look up, she thinks. Look up at me. Look at Sophie in the center of her irresistible sunshine halo.

  But he doesn’t.

  He sighs, drops his cigarette on a flagstone, and rises to his feet. “Crazy dame.”

  THERE USED TO BE A wobbly window, he tells her. A sash, warped by the sun, that didn’t fit perfectly in its frame, so the latch wouldn’t slide into place.

  “Where was it?”

  He sighs again and looks up at the blue sky. “The breakfast room. But I’m sure they’ve had it fixed by now.”

  They haven’t. With a bit of muscular persuasion, the sash jerks right up. It’s a nice big window, spacious and summery, and Sophie, lifted to the opening between Mr. Rofrano’s two large hands, wriggles easily inside and tumbles to the floor.

  “I’m all right!” she says brightly, and picks herself up. She unlocks the French door to the right and lets Mr. Rofrano inside. “It’s cold, though.”

  “Of course. They would have turned off the boiler when they packed up in September.” He looks around, sliding his gaze up and down the walls, frowning. “This is a rotten idea.”

  “It’s a wonderful idea.” Sophie takes in a deep breath, filling her chest with the smell of wood and dust and camphor. “Show me your room. I want to sit exactly where you used to sit, looking out to sea. This is why you brought me here, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Rofrano’s gaze falls on her, and in the dim and unlit room, designed to catch the morning light, Sophie loses the color of his eyes. She finds herself longing for this missing detail, the way you long for the saltshaker when it’s disappeared from the table.

  “I guess it is, after all,” he says quietly, and he takes her by the mitten and leads her out into a hallway and up the wide staircase. The house is whisper-still around them, except for the creak of the floorboards beneath their feet, and decorated sparsely with white paint and watercolor seascapes.

  “Does it look the same?” Sophie asks.

  “Not at all. My mother loved her flocked wallpaper and her oriental rugs. It’s like a different house.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Actually, it looks better now. Lighter.”

  If the house looks lighter now, Sophie thinks, how dark was it before? But she follows Mr. Rofrano obediently down the creaking hallway to the very end, past closed white doors and yet more watercolors, until he comes to a stop and rests his hand on a brass doorknob.

  “Go on,” she says.

  He straightens his shoulders and opens the door, and Sophie pushes past him and gasps. “How beautiful! Oh, Mr. Rofrano! How lucky you were!”

  She rushes to the round turret at the far corner, rimmed by a creamy window seat topped with blue cushions, and presses her nose to the window glass. The view reaches right across the lawn and the shoreline, encompassing Long Island Sound and the island with the lighthouse, until it lands on the faint winter-brown strip of Long Island and the blue sky above. A few white waves curl on the top of the water, appearing and disappearing in the cadence of the wind and current. Sophie lifts one leg and sinks her knee into the cushion.

  “How did you ever leave this?” she says. “It must have been awful.”

  There is a clink of metal and the elegant scratch of a matchstick, quite distinct in the undisturbed air of the turret room, as Mr. Rofrano lights another cigarette. He must be running out by now, surely? He crosses the room in slow footsteps that make the floor groan behind her, and comes to a stop just to her left, not quite touching her shoulder. If she concentrates, she can detect his breath on the lobe of her ear, on the edge of her jaw.

  “There was a story about this house, you know,” he says softly.

  “Really? What kind of story?”

  “Not a nice one, I’m afraid.”

  “A ghost story?”

  “Something like that.”

  “How awful.”

  “It was. It was pretty awful,” he says. “It was a murder.”

  “My goodness! Not while you were there, I hope?”

  “No, no. It was the owner before us. The family who sold us the house, although they’d moved out a while before. It sat there for a couple of years. No one would buy it, until Poppa came along. By then the price was so low, he couldn’t resist the bargain. And he wasn’t a local, he wasn’t one of them, so no one told him until later.”

  “Of course they wouldn’t, the rotten snobs.” She turns around and sits on the window seat. “What happened?”

  Mr. Rofrano joins her, a decorous foot or two away on the dusty blue cushion. “They never knew, exactly. I finally heard the story from the neighbor boy. A servant found the mother dead one afternoon. She was on the floor, covered with blood. Her throat was slit.”

  “How horrible! Was anyone else in the house?”

  Mr. Rofrano lifts the cigarette to his lips. “Yes. Her daughter.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “She was two or three years old, I think. She was actually inside the room, with the body. According to the servant, the girl thought her mother was sleeping. She was trying to wake her up.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no. The poor thing.”

  “Yes. The other daughter was older. She was still at school.”

  “And her husband? He was at work?”

  “That’s what he claimed at the time, though as he worked alone, in a garage, for hours on end, no one could actually vouch for him.”
Mr. Rofrano says all this deliberately, in a dispassionate voice, as if reciting evidence in a courtroom.

  Sophie waits for him to continue the story—Did the husband do it? Was there an arrest, a sensational trial?—but he only goes on smoking quietly, staring at a collection of framed photographs hanging from the opposite wall, which is painted in buttercup yellow and trimmed with cream. She nudges him with her elbow. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “What happened next?”

  Mr. Rofrano rises from the window seat and walks to the washstand. He tips a long crumb of ash into the soap dish. “They disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “The entire family. They just disappeared. Left the house and the furniture inside it, about a week after the funeral, and nobody heard from them since.” He turns around and leans against the washstand, crossing one leg over the other, studying Sophie carefully.

  “But that’s crazy! Why would he disappear, if he didn’t do it?”

  “A good question. I always wondered.”

  Sophie looks around wildly. “My goodness! It wasn’t this room, was it?”

  “No, no. It happened in the kitchen. The neighbor boy told me this was the little girl’s room. She’d just been moved out of the nursery, you see, because the mother was seven months gone with another baby when she died.”

  Sophie covers her face with her hands. “Oh, no.”

  The floorboards groan again, and Sophie feels the cushion stretch to accommodate Mr. Rofrano’s bony frame, back in place beside her.

  “The neighbor kid told me it was a baby boy,” he says, “but I don’t know if that’s true. Sometimes kids make things up.”

  “But the rest of it is true?”

  He nods. “I looked it all up in the newspapers. It was big news around here. But then it settled down eventually, when they couldn’t find the family.”

  “I hope they’re all right,” Sophie whispers. “Those poor sisters.”

  “I always hoped so.” He leans his head back against the window and examines the ceiling. His hands curl around the edge of the window seat, one on each side of his legs, as if he’s holding on for balance. When he speaks, his voice is hardly more than a whisper: just clouds of frosty breath dissolving into the dry winter air. “I used to lie in my bed here and think about that little girl, you know? The one who found her mother’s body. The one who slept in this room. Sometimes I almost thought I could feel her with me, like she was still playing there, with her toys. Waiting for her mother to wake up again.”