A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  Not one of these women has earned a single penny in her life, has she? Her clothes, her apartment, her house in the country, her jewels, her shoes, the bottle of milk in her icebox: all of them have been paid for by the industry of some other person. She is beautifully, uselessly, benevolently beholden. Left to herself, she couldn’t possibly sustain this luxury. She couldn’t even sustain necessity.

  And Sophie’s the same. Her father’s money, her father’s hard-earned patents. He did it all for Virginia and Sophie, he says, so they would be comfortable. And they are comfortable! But they’re beholden. She and Virgo are in his thrall, just like every woman in this room exists in thrall, whether she realizes it or not. Whether she resents it or not.

  As for the men. Equally variable. Some have earned wealth, and some have inherited it. Some—like Jay himself—are required to marry it. But would Sophie want to marry any one of them? Exchange the thrall of her father for the thrall of someone else?

  There’s been a change of plans.

  Sophie is not going to marry Jay Ochsner. She’s not going to live under her father’s roof, spending her father’s money, marrying a man of her father’s choosing. No, not any longer. Not another minute!

  Sophie’s going to take an apartment with Julie Schuyler. She’s going to apply for a job in an engineer’s office, or a manufacturer of some kind, answering telephones if she has to, studying at night, taking on more and more responsibility, until she’s huddling over the sketches and blueprints herself. Until she’s designing and building things herself. She’ll be in thrall to her boss, maybe, but it’s a different kind of thrall. An honest, democratic thrall, with no hypocrisy attached to it.

  Everyone’s getting a job. Well, so is Sophie.

  She lifts her glass a little higher and thanks God there’s no sign of Octavian, no reproachful eyes to overturn her resolve. Instead, there’s Julie Schuyler, golden and smiling. She stands just to the right of center, waiting for her cue: not far, in fact, from the tropical figure of Mrs. Theresa Marshall, whose elegant face is now splattered with horror.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Sophie begins, and that’s all that anyone ever hears of Sophie Fortescue’s declaration of independence, because the crack of a gun echoes madly down the corridor and off the walls of Rio de Janeiro, setting the cocoanuts to trembling, and everybody just screams.

  The New York Herald-Times, June 2, 1922

  TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

  Well! It seems your humble correspondent still possesses the capacity to be surprised, after all. We all filed into the courtroom this morning, expecting to be regaled with blood and gore courtesy of the much-risen-in-the-world Mrs. Lumley, and instead the prosecution—with a decided air of triumph—called the splendidly named Mr. Giuseppe Magnifico to the attention of the court.

  Who is Mr. Magnifico, you ask? Why, none other than the gardener, about whom much has been rumored but never proved, for the simple fact that he could not be found. Well, he’s been found, dear readers, and I must urge you to dismiss any small children and otherwise delicate minds from the room, for the substance of his testimony proved more shocking and morally degenerate than we newspapermen could have dared to hope.

  He is a colorful character, Mr. Magnifico, and fully worthy of his name. He plays to type with extraordinary precision, down to his baroque black mustache and his extremely slick hair. He seemed, of all things, to desire the admiration of the court stenographer, a most stern and high-necked lady of perhaps thirty-five or forty, and bent himself to this task with utmost charm, though the lady (to her credit) gave him no encouragement whatever.

  Possibly she was too busy transcribing Mr. Magnifico’s sentences, for there were many of them, often long and tangled, and always entertaining. I am afraid I shall have to summarize, or I shall never meet the six o’clock deadline mandated by my long-suffering editor.

  Mr. Magnifico, I am sorry to report, was indeed engaged in a friendship of an immoral and adulterous nature with the victim, Mrs. Virginia Claire Faninal. I must admit that I cannot blame her entirely, when I compare the earthy—if rather viscous—charm of Mr. Magnifico with the charm entirely absent in the accused, he of the Wright Brothers ears. It was Mr. Magnifico’s belief (confirmed, so he claims, by Mrs. Faninal herself) that the child she was shortly to deliver redounded not to the credit of Mr. Faninal, but to that of his humble gardener, who, by virtue of his profession, apparently knew a thing or two about planting seeds.

  Now, these revelations are not altogether surprising in themselves. You will remember that we, the curious public, suspected as much, following those hints that made their way into the fact-hungry press when some enterprising reporter first obtained notes from the interviews given to the Greenwich police department by the now-Mrs. Lumley, in the days after the murder itself. (Let it be a warning to all persons contemplating the sin of adultery, that the kitchen maid will inevitably know your secret.) But Mr. Magnifico has now confirmed before the court what was previously mere speculation, on the part of Mrs. Lumley and the investigators themselves, and what is more, Mr. Magnifico explained, shaking his head, he did not believe that he was the only person enjoying the favor of Mrs. Faninal’s fair company.

  At this, the accused himself did not wait for his attorney, but rose to his own feet and objected to Mr. Magnifico’s claims as speculation.

  No, Mr. Magnifico insisted. He himself had witnessed Mrs. Faninal so engaged while Mr. Faninal was away from the house, though, out of respect, he would refuse to name publicly the occasion or the man. But he would say this: that he believed Mrs. Faninal was neither morally corrupt nor weak-willed, and that her actions were the result of some sickness of her mind. He had, in fact, ended the liaison for that reason, and he was afraid for Mrs. Faninal’s health when he did, so dramatic was her reaction to this dismissal.

  Mr. Magnifico said much more, of course, but those were the points most relevant to this case, and as I still have the contributions of Mr. and Mrs. Lumley to relate, I am afraid I must refer you to the rest of this newspaper for a more comprehensive account of Mr. Magnifico and his testimony.

  After such exhausting entertainment, I suppose we were grateful for the evidence of the next witness, Mr. Lumley, the husband of the one-time kitchen maid, whose ascent into respectable matrimony and motherhood should be applauded as the very apex of the American Dream.

  A small, plain man, Mr. Lumley seemed to have been called by the prosecution to vouch for the respectability of his wife, an office he performed admirably, if rather snorishly. Under questioning, he asserted that which we already knew: that he met her some two weeks after the murder, when she dined alone at the Bluebeard Restaurant in Scarsdale, an establishment owned by him at the time. As he had not followed the case in the newspapers—he is not, it seems, a man interested in sensational news, preferring instead to fix his attention on the business pages, poor fellow—he did not recognize her face. He was, however, struck by the air of fetching distress that surrounded her (her pretty face, one presumes, had nothing to do with it) and upon learning of her role in the affair, was moved to do the chivalrous thing and marry her. (His face, as he regarded his wife, contained a commendable trace of tenderness, which did him much credit in the eyes of the courtroom.) Had she ever spoken of the events of that day? the prosecution delicately inquired, and he said that of course she had, at the outset of their friendship, but she had scarcely ever referred to it since. She had wanted to put such a distressing affair behind her, and he had quite understood her reluctance. A terrible affair, he said, shaking his head, and I believe I caught an extremely quick glance directed at the accused: one sharp with rebuke.

  He seemed to be speaking the truth, too, for Mrs. Lumley, who made her entrance after the noontime recess, appeared reluctant in the extreme to discuss her recollections of that fateful day. She glanced often in the direction of the accused, though under her brow and in such a manner that communicated her unwillingness actually to meet his eye. Nonetheless, s
he answered the questions put to her without additional prompting, and so we learned how, on the morning in question, after cleaning the upstairs rooms, she came down to discover the body of Mrs. Faninal lying on the kitchen floor, and the pathetic figure of the youngest Miss Faninal, smeared with blood, kneeling next to her mother, urging her to wake.

  Mrs. Lumley maintained her composure throughout this description, though her face was pale, and I believe her fingers shook. Her husband, now sitting in one of the rear benches, fixed a sympathetic eye on her throughout. She confirmed her suspicion that Mrs. Faninal had indeed seduced the gardener, Mr. Magnifico, into an adulterous association, but she would not speculate on the parentage of the unborn child. She insisted, however, that Mrs. Faninal was an excellent mother in all respects, almost too doting, especially on the younger child. At this point, she seemed to seek out the faces of the accused’s daughters in the crowd, and her expression of agony is impossible to describe, leading one to comprehend some inkling of the dreadful scene in the Faninal kitchen that morning.

  The prosecution then gently steered her toward the facts of the discovery: the kitchen door left ajar, the kettle left whistling on the stove. Mr. Faninal had left for his workshop early that morning, as was his habit, and to her knowledge he had not returned, though as she was upstairs, in the rooms facing away from the street and the front drive, it was, she agreed, possible that she hadn’t noticed.

  The defense then climbed to its feet. In her opinion, asked the accused’s attorney, was Mr. Faninal aware of his wife’s adultery? Did he ever display any hint of jealousy?

  Mrs. Lumley’s plump face softened into compassion. She had no way of knowing, for Mr. Faninal was in all ways solicitous of his wife and her welfare, and his obvious grief upon learning of the tragedy had struck Mrs. Lumley’s heart with deep force.

  You may well be astonished by this revelation, for the court certainly was. Until now, we had heard nothing—and seen nothing—to dispute the notion that Mr. Faninal was a cold, determined, charmless man, and a father who kept his daughters under the most rigorous control. But Mrs. Lumley, as she spoke, regarded the accused with true feeling, though Mr. Faninal sat with bowed head and did not make any sign that he comprehended her.

  We were thus left, on this extraordinary day, with the most extraordinary surprise of all: the possibility that Mr. Faninal might not prove the cold-hearted murderer we imagined.

  Or perhaps he will. In a week or two, I suppose, we’ll have the final verdict.

  CHAPTER 17

  Between lovers, a little confession is a dangerous thing.

  —HELEN ROWLAND

  SOPHIE

  East Thirty-Second Street, the thirteenth of June

  FOR SOME reason, Sophie’s surprised to find that the latchkey fits the lock, and the door to her childhood home glides open beneath her hand. Not even a creak. “Hello?” she calls, but there’s no answer from Dot or Betty. They’re probably out. Why would they hang about the house all day, with no family to take care of?

  The hallway is strange in its familiarity. The black-and-white floor presents the same checkerboard she used to count when she was small, the same chipped and missing tiles, the same dark lines at the corners that no amount of scrubbing will lift. To her left, the old hat rack stands empty, except for a lingering umbrella beneath. The mirror hangs beside it, forming the same small oval, disfigured by the same pattern of tarnish to its silvering, and its dustless surface suggests that someone, at least, is doing her job faithfully.

  Sophie removes her hat and gloves and puts them in their accustomed places: hat on the hook, gloves on the table. She isn’t wearing a jacket—the heat returned like a bludgeon the other day—so the key goes back in her pocketbook, which she also leaves on the table. She takes in a deep breath—home!—and it smells different somehow, too much wood and not enough smoke, too bright with lemon polish to be its ordinary self.

  But none of us is her ordinary self, anymore, she thinks. We will never be ourselves again.

  In a way, she’s glad to find the house empty. She came here to be alone, after all, even though today is the kind of day you’re supposed to share with your sister, with your dearest friend. You are supposed to commiserate, to mutually console, to hold each other’s weeping hearts, to pour each other syrupy glasses of cordial and discuss—if you can bear it—What Is To Be Done.

  Instead, Sophie has come here. Alone. And though Virgo didn’t say so—of course she wouldn’t—Sophie suspects that her sister is just as relieved not to have to support any company tonight. We are both hollow, she thinks, examining her wide and uninhabited eyes in the mirror. We are drained of words. We are drained of cordial. We are sans everything.

  The eyes stare back, not blinking, until Sophie turns away.

  The air is cooler than she expects, defying the immense and slow-moving heat outside. Dot and Betty must be keeping the curtains drawn, the lamps off, the oven unlit, the doors shut. At the end of the hall, the stairs tilt invitingly upward, padded by the stylish blue runner Virginia ordered last year, but Sophie cannot face her bedroom yet. Cannot face the tidy abandonment inside. Too many relics of the Sophie left behind. The half-assembled De Forest radio receiver, shoved under the bed. The inner workings of a clock decorating the surface of the bureau. The few well-thumbed issues of Popular Mechanics hidden among her books. The rose-shaped engagement ring in its box inside the drawer.

  For a moment, Sophie continues to stand in the hallway, facing the stairs, hand resting on her pocketbook. She isn’t conscious of the passage of time, only of the cool air on her cheek, and the blessed, invisible quiet. The way the contented motes of dust hang in the atmosphere, undisturbed, because no one is moving, no one is talking, no one even exists except Sophie. If she stands still enough, she can almost believe it. She can believe—like Prospero—that the entire course of the last four months is just a vision of her imagination, an elaborate play enacted by her subconscious. An insubstantial pageant. Our revels now ended.

  But the revels weren’t ended. Outside these walls, the farce continued, and Sophie must play her part, mustn’t she? Like everyone else. She must wake up again.

  She gives her pocketbook a last pat and opens one of the double doors into the parlor. The drapes are closed to the afternoon sun, and the room is dark and smells of beeswax. Sophie pauses at the sofa table to pick up a photograph of Virginia in her Red Cross uniform, taken just before she left for France, and a throat clears in the corner of the room.

  Sophie gasps and spins. The photograph slips from her fingers and lands softly on the rug.

  “Miss Fortescue,” says Octavian.

  He’s standing before Father’s favorite armchair, as if he’s just risen from its comfort. For a shocked instant, Sophie imagines he really is her father, that today’s events really were all a great mistake, an illusion, and Father’s been released from prison and is somehow already home, wearing a pale suit and a striped necktie.

  But the mirage ends in the next tick of the mantel clock, because the figure is too tall and youthful, and the voice—well, she knows that voice, even if the face is covered by shadow. She bends down and lifts Virginia’s photograph and brushes the glass with her hand, not because it’s damaged but because she doesn’t want to look up.

  “The maid let me in,” continues Octavian, when she doesn’t reply. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

  Sophie looks up and lets out an astonished breath that might once, in an earlier Sophie, have been a laugh. “Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing?”

  “I’m sorry.” He reaches for his hat, resting beneath the lamp. “I’ll go, of course, if you want me to. But your sister told me you were coming home this afternoon, and I thought—well, I haven’t had a chance to speak to you since January.”

  “I didn’t think we had anything to say to each other.”

  The brim of the hat beats softly against his chest. “Sophie—Miss Fortescue—”

  “Faninal,” she say
s coldly.

  “You have every right, I guess, to be angry with me. But I want you to know that all this—the way things turned out, what happened today in that courtroom—it’s the last thing I wanted. I would have taken it all to my grave, if I could have.”

  Sophie fixes her gaze on the rhythm of that hat brim over his heart, the nervous flex of his finger joints. Her eyes are growing accustomed to the dusky light, so that the details become visible, one by one: his suit is gray, the stripes on his necktie are blue, the pressed creases of his trousers are softened by the heat. She thinks his fingers are more tanned than before, but they’re otherwise familiar in each tiny hair and crescent nail; more familiar than the room around them, more familiar than the house itself. Except that they’re moving, beating that uneasy hat, a most peculiar feature.

  “I know that,” she whispers.

  The hat stops moving. “I was hoping you would.” A deep pause. “I knew you would.”

  “Of course I knew. But I can’t forgive you for it.”

  “No. I suppose that’s fair.”

  He gives the hat a spin, puts it on his head, takes it off again. A bizarre flurry of moment. By contrast, Sophie feels as if she’s turned to stone. If she wanted to move, if she wanted to step toward him or away, if she wanted to turn and open the curtains and flood the room with hot summer light, she couldn’t. Even her eyes are disinclined to blink.

  He bursts out, “What happened today in court—”

  “No! I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I just want to say how shocked I was. I thought things were going the other way. We were all convinced about the gardener. Your father’s lawyers did a brilliant job of—”

  “Please, Octavian.” Sophie lifts a tired hand, palm outward. “I can’t even think about it.”

  “Sophie—”

  “Please, Octavian. Mr. Rofrano.”