A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  Octavian runs his fingers over his head, as if he’s surprised not to find his hat resting there. His polished black shoes stand a little apart, preparing to carry him to the door if she tells him to leave, knowing he’s got no reason to stand there. No right to stand there. And she should tell him to leave. She will tell him to leave. In just a few more seconds, when she can summon the will.

  “What will you do now?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. My father’s just been convicted of murdering my mother, Mr. Rofrano, by an impartial jury of his peers. He’s not planning to appeal. I suppose they’re going to sentence him to death shortly. We are to hold ourselves at the court’s pleasure. No doubt the lawyers will telephone me when I’m needed.”

  “But you can’t be staying here alone!”

  “Why not? The servants are here.” She moves at last, sinking into the sofa, and it feels unexpectedly luxurious, to sit on a sofa instead of a hard bench. She takes a deep breath, and the air tastes of dust. The sofa cushions, apparently, haven’t been so well tended as the plane surfaces. “Anyway, I’m tired of people. I don’t want to talk to another human being, as long as I live.”

  “I’m sorry.” He puts the hat on his head, this time with decision, and steps away from the armchair. “I shouldn’t have come. I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “No!”

  He pauses.

  “I’m sorry. I mean, you can leave if you wish. If you need to leave now.”

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  Now that she’s used to it, the room doesn’t seem cool anymore. An intolerable warmth squeezes her temples. Her fingertips, pressed together in a web over her knees, stick damply in place. She imagines a glass of lemonade, tall and choked with ice, sweating into her hand. She imagines the springtime she’s missed, the tulips she never noticed, the blue sky outside that beckons everyone but her.

  “I—I don’t know.” Sophie looks, at last, into Octavian’s face. He’s tanned, and more tired and lean than before, but his eyes are large and soft with compassion. Real compassion, not the synthetic kind that squishes the faces of all those people in the courtroom, as they steal glimpses of her, snatches of her, the tragic Daughter of the Accused. A compassion that’s really curiosity, morbidity, the way you manufacture sorrow for someone struck by a streetcar, or someone two houses away who has just received one of those awful War Department telegrams. A compassion that makes her sick to her stomach.

  But Octavian’s compassion isn’t sick-making. His compassion knows her, understands what she’s suffering, comprehends the dangerous state of her nerves. Octavian’s compassion makes her veins rustle, makes her heartbeat double. Restless. Reckless. She wants to ask, Where is Mrs. Marshall? But instead she shrugs. “If you want to stay . . .”

  “No. I don’t want to stay here.”

  “Then you should go.”

  He holds out his hand. “But you shouldn’t stay here either. Come with me.”

  Sophie begins to laugh, high and hysterical. “Come with you?”

  “Why not?”

  “After what happened last time?”

  “Nothing happened last time, did it? Nothing would have changed, if we had or hadn’t gone.”

  “But it was wrong of us. I had Jay, and you had—you had someone, too. I fooled myself into thinking we were just taking an innocent ride together, but it wasn’t innocent. I was innocent, that’s all.”

  But Octavian is shaking his head. “You’re still innocent, Sophie. You don’t know what corruption is, and that’s why there was nothing wrong with what we did. There still isn’t.”

  Something about the firmness of his voice. She wavers.

  He curls his fingers invitingly. “Come on, now. You could use a little fresh air.”

  “There isn’t any fresh air, not between here and the equator.”

  But she rises anyway and, after an instant’s hesitation, places her naked hand against Octavian’s naked hand, and it seems, despite the firmness of his voice, he’s just as damp as she is. Just as afraid.

  ONCE THEY’RE UNDER WAY, RUMBLING eastward along Thirty-Second Street in the familiar Ford, Sophie inquires, as a matter of duty, after the whereabouts of Mrs. Marshall.

  “Theresa’s back at the apartment, I believe.”

  “Yours, or hers?”

  Octavian slows the car to negotiate the crossing of Second Avenue. “Hers.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  “Yes. I told her I was going to look in on you. Make sure you were doing all right, after what happened today.”

  “What did she say?” Sophie asks relentlessly.

  “If you’re asking whether she cares we’re together, I suppose she does. But she understands. She agreed I should go.”

  “I see. We have her permission.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Octavian falls silent. He doesn’t want to fight with her, she thinks, but maybe he understands why she does want to fight. Why she’s spoiling for a bit of spat. Sophie turns her head and watches the houses slide by, the little striped awnings above the shops, the pavement blistering under the sun. The leaves on the trees are still pale and new, drooping in exhaustion. Summer has begun too early. The draft blows hot against Sophie’s face, filled with exhaust and rot. She holds her hat brim to keep the shade steady over her face.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Long Island. A little place I’ve been visiting lately. I hope you’ll approve.” He speaks loudly, belting his words over the draft and the engine’s roar, and Sophie thinks how stupid this is, stupid and reckless, driving to Long Island with another woman’s fiancé. Look what happened the last time.

  But that was another Sophie, another girl, innocent and undamaged. This Sophie has so much less to lose.

  OVER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE. THROUGH the ragtag streets of Brooklyn, then the orderly rows and yards of Queens, then open space, the air a little fresher, the smell a little greener. Sophie has lost interest in any possible destination. Whatever it is, she never wants to get there. Just ride and ride, the wind blowing in your face, the silence long and comfortable between you and your driver.

  Maybe he’s taking her to the beach. Maybe he’s taking her to a seaside hotel. Maybe they’re going to have a love affair, discreet and smoky, ending badly, like a modern novel. Sophie doesn’t care. When your father has stood up in a court of law that very morning, all smart and polished, eyes heavy and unslept in, and received a verdict of guilty on a charge of murder in the first degree; when the crime is of a most bloody and nerveless nature; when the victim in the case is none other than your own mother . . . well, why on earth would you ever care about anything, ever again? The shock. Yesterday the final statements were made, the defense had outlined once more its minute and carefully wrought rebuttal to the prosecution. The jury was supposed to head into the deliberation room piled high and thick with reasonable doubt, and the newspapers were supposed to report the wan yet optimistic expressions on the faces of the accused and his family. Acquittal: you could almost smell it in the air.

  Now this. Driving away, away, not caring where you were going as long as your destination was another world from a sweaty marble courtroom, from the rows and rows of people who wanted to know how you felt.

  “Stop the car,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  “STOP THE CAR!”

  He throws back the throttle and hits the brake pedal, and the Ford shimmies to a halt by the side of the road. Sophie yanks the door handle and springs from her seat, away from the smell of the engine, the hot leather, taking large gulps of air into her chest, and when she opens her eyes she discovers she’s standing on the edge of a pasture, inches from a fence of old split rails. The grass is luxuriously green, nourished by a series of recent downpours. About fifty yards away, a pair of horses grazes in a kind of fevered delirium, tearing mouthfuls of tender blades from the earth. One is a bay, the other a luminous
chestnut. Their tails whisk away the flies in a strange and unexpected rhythm that reminds Sophie of the beat of a jazz band, long ago.

  She places her hands on the topmost rail and the panic recedes, bit by bit, into the long, flicking tails and the idle rattle of the engine behind her.

  Octavian comes to a stop at her left shoulder. The corner of his jacket brushes her sleeve. “Look at the fat, shiny things.”

  “They’re in heaven. All this lovely grass.”

  He puts his hands in his trouser pockets and sets one foot on the bottom rail. “It used to amaze me, you know. Up there in the air, you could see the armies, the wrecked towns and the trenches, the craters and the mud between them. And then, a few miles away, pastures like this. Cows grazing. Not many horses; the armies took every poor brute they could get their hands on. But cows and stable yards full of geese and pigs, and crops growing in the fields. Just as peaceful as could be, and yet you could hear the shells screaming, the boom of the guns.”

  “It must have been extraordinary, to fly up above the battlefield like that.”

  “Yes. When you’re in a trench, there’s no reason to it. Passages every which way, mud and rats and general disorder. But from the air, you see the pattern. You see what a marvel it all is. Especially the German lines. Damned marvelous, you know? Just a remarkable display of human genius, when put to the test, when your life’s at stake. And it all looked so peaceful, up there. Like a game, like a kind of bizarre picnic. You couldn’t imagine there were men being killed down there.”

  “Until the enemy planes found you, I suppose.”

  “Yes, then it was all madness.”

  Behind them, the engine misses a stroke, catches, and then stalls out. One of the horses—the chestnut—lifts his head, as if noticing their intrusion for the first time. He remains quite still, except for the occasional whisk of his tail, and examines the two of them in drunken, brown-eyed tranquillity, before returning his attention to the richness of the meadow.

  “And then afterward,” Octavian continues, “you would land at your airfield, several miles behind the lines, surrounded by all the farms you’d been looking at from above, and you couldn’t believe you were still alive. There was just this unreality to it. They would take your plane back to the hangar, the mechanics would, and fix up anything that had gotten hit or broken, and I would go back to my commanding officer and make my report. Tell him if I’d seen anything unusual, who’d been killed, whether I’d killed anyone. Still unreal. And then, when I was dismissed, when most of the squadron went to the mess and drank, I would go out walking. They have these long, straight white roads in France, shaded by trees. I would look at the animals, at the women and children doing the chores, and I felt like an alien being. Like I didn’t belong in the world anymore, in the world of fields and cows and women and children. But I liked to watch them, anyway. It made me feel that something was still normal, that things still grew and thrived, even if I wasn’t one of them anymore.”

  “Yes,” Sophie says, a little like a sob, and his arm falls around her arm, and she turns her face into the hollow of his shoulder, and she doesn’t cry. Her eyes remain perfectly dry, against the flat, slightly damp weave of Octavian’s jacket, the solid muscle of his understanding. Like a pair of horses standing together, head to rump, flicking their tails in mutual relief of what plagues them.

  BY NOW, SOPHIE SUSPECTS SHE knows where Octavian is taking them, and she’s right. He parks the Ford in a lot of packed clay, along a neat row of other parked cars, and sets the brake.

  “The squadron came here for final training, a million years ago,” he says. “I nearly crashed over that bluff, once. Now it’s a civilian airfield. They’re building a golf course out of part of it, right over there, near the motor parkway.”

  “Can we go inside?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  He turns off the engine and gets out of the car. Sophie, rather than waiting, opens the door herself and shakes out her rumpled clothes. She’s still wearing her court suit, a neat skirt of navy blue and a high-necked ivory blouse, though she’s taken off the matching low-waisted navy jacket and discarded it on the back seat. Her hair is pinned low, just above her nape, and her shoes are square and low-heeled. Her hat, fashionably small, is really insufficient against the sun, and she holds her hand to her brow to obstruct the glare as she gazes across the field.

  “Why, it’s enormous!”

  “It was even bigger before, trust me. Swarming with planes and men. Come along. It’s getting late.”

  He takes her hand and leads her along the rutted pathway to the hangars, which rise up from the field in a series of white barrel roofs. Easily distinguished from the air, Sophie thinks. The low, busy drone of an airplane engine begins to build in her ears, and she looks up just in time to see a pair of pale wings pass overhead, wobbling back and forth, making for the wide plain of shorn grass to her right. She stops to watch. She’s never actually seen an airplane land before, and her body reacts as if the whole world’s at stake. Her pulse accelerates, her hand tightens around Octavian’s fingers. The machine looks so fragile, like a moth. She imagines that a single improper gust could send it tumbling through the air. Her breath stops. It’s going too fast, too fast, it will never make the runway, it will crash into the grass.

  And then it touches the earth. Bounces, touches again, rolls speedily away until the sound of the engine fades, and another one takes its place. Sophie turns, amazed, to Octavian. “I thought he was going to crash! How do you do it?”

  “Oh, there’s nothing to it, as long as your plane is sound and the weather’s not too bad. Although you couldn’t pay me to fly an old tub like that Vickers Vimy.” He tugs on her hand. “Come along. I’m going to show you a real airplane.”

  ROOSEVELT FIELD. NAMED AFTER PRESIDENT Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who was killed in combat over France, one beautiful summer day. “Did you know him?” asks Sophie.

  “Yes.”

  He doesn’t elaborate. He’s walking briskly, a half step ahead, still holding her hand. Ahead of them, at the end of the narrow roadway, the row of identical plain white hangars catches the angle of the afternoon sun, much larger than they appeared from a distance. Each one is painted with the name of some optimistic aviation company. Octavian heads past a line of shining biplanes, propeller noses tilted eagerly to the sky, straight for the third hangar from the left. The doors are wide open, the atmosphere lazy and scented with machine oil: the smell of Sophie’s childhood, the smell of discovery. A man sits in a chair, just inside a triangle of shade from the roof, reading a newspaper. NO SMOKING, reads a large sign above his flat cap. He looks up, and his face, deeply tanned, stretches into a toothy young smile.

  “Why, Mr. Rofrano! What brings you here today?”

  “Afternoon, Taylor. Miss Fortescue here is curious about airplanes.” Octavian releases her hand and motions to the small of her back, not quite touching her dress.

  “Then she’s come to the right place with the right fella. Want me to show her around for you?”

  “Thanks a million.” (Heavy on the irony.) “But I think I’ve got this covered. Is the new Curtiss inside?”

  “No, she’s right out there.” Taylor nods to the row of biplanes. “Take her for a spin?”

  “Maybe later. Sophie?”

  She follows him into the shadows. The floor is beaten earth, the windows dusty and not very light. The place seems to have been baking in the sun all day, and without the breeze to cool her skin, Sophie feels as if she’s stepped into an oven. Except this oven contains airplanes instead of bread—two of them, in fact, each being operated on by a couple of sweaty, grease-smudged surgeons in dungarees and nothing else.

  Sophie stops and covers her mouth. “Oh, my.”

  “What’s that? Oh.” Octavian laughs. “I guess things can get a little masculine around here. I hope you’re not offended?”

  “Of course not.”

  But she says the words a little
too loudly, and the men all turn in a kind of astonished unison, hands still stuck on the wings and the engine parts. Someone whistles, so soft it’s almost respectful, and another one mutters something Sophie can’t hear.

  “Say that again,” Octavian calls out amiably, not breaking stride, “and I’ll knock your lights out.”

  There’s a chorus of laughter, which Sophie recognizes wistfully as the sound of a happy crew, a group of men working well together, engaged like the gears of an engine. The sound of purpose. Octavian has it, too, whistling a little as he leads her to a door at the back, a small hot office with a north-facing window that Octavian forces open. “That’s better,” he says, taking off his hat and tossing it on the corner of a wide, plain desk, stacked with papers. The room smells of pencil shavings.

  “But the airplanes are outside,” Sophie says.

  He looks up from the desk. “What’s that?”

  “You were going to show me a real airplane, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.” He holds up a stack of papers, bound together. “Right here.”

  “There?”

  “The airplane I’m designing. Enclosed cabin, six-seater. Aluminum skin. Two wing-mount engines. She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

  Sophie’s blood starts in her veins. She moves to stand next to him, before the desk. She stares down at the image on the page, the elegant bird crisscrossed with razor lines and small, sharp notations in capital letters. She flips a page: the front perspective. “You designed this?”

  “Yes. I’m on leave from the bank at the moment—too notorious, my supervisor said, in so many words—so I’ve been coming out here instead.”

  She looks up into a face she doesn’t recognize, an Octavian transformed from famished into fed. His eyes are warm and happy. “You were put on leave because of me?”

  “Not because of you. Because of the whole thing.”

  “Because of me.”

  He turns back to the drawing. “Anyway, I had to do something. I couldn’t just hang around the city, bored and useless. And I kept thinking about what you told me, driving back from the Christopher Club, that first night.”