A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  She nods yes. Octavian takes her hand, and she walks beside him on her unsteady legs toward the cluster of buildings on the western side of the field. The grass is warm and well beaten; she can smell its good greenness, the scent of summer. She loves the comfortable silence between them. She loves the weight of his fingers around hers, the way they tether her to the present moment, the present rectangle of sunlit meadow, instead of what lies beyond.

  It’s too hot to stay inside, so Octavian carries the coffee and sandwiches outside and they make a picnic on the grass, near the parked Ford, watching the airplanes drone past, landing and taking off and circling above in a delicate aeronautical ballet.

  Sophie swallows and says, “I wish we didn’t have to leave. I wish we could just stay right here.”

  “I know.”

  That’s all. I know. Sophie wants to ask him if he loves Mrs. Marshall, and if he does love her, why is he here with Sophie, holding hands with Sophie? And if he doesn’t love Mrs. Marshall, why the devil is he marrying her?

  Instead she says, “Your airplane. Is that what you want to do? Design airplanes?”

  “It’s the future,” he says. “Everybody will be flying soon. Getting inside an airplane will be no more strange than getting into an automobile.”

  “And you’ll be in the middle of it.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You will. It’s what you were made for. It’s why you’re alive.”

  He finishes his sandwich and pulls out his cigarette case. Beneath the peak of his flat cap, his eyes point east, across the runway, where a plane is just now touching its wheels to the grass, up the bluff to the second airfield. “He was a good man, Roosevelt. You’d think he’d be a bore, or a snob, growing up in the White House and all that. I thought he would. But he wasn’t. He was a smart fellow, a good pilot. The kind of fellow who’d draw off enemy fire to save the rest of the squadron, and not stop to think about it. He lasted about a month, once we started combat patrols. The Boche dropped a message a couple of weeks later, saying he’d been shot down behind their lines, and they’d buried him with full military honors. Better than getting blown out of recognition by a shell, I guess.”

  “I can’t bear to think about it. I can’t believe you survived.”

  He lights the cigarette slowly. “Do you know how long the average pilot stayed alive? About six weeks. Six weeks, Sophie. Every time I went up, I figured I wasn’t coming back. That my luck had run out.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “It didn’t. Then I stopped believing in luck at all. It was just chance.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?”

  “No. Luck’s a conscious thing, isn’t it? It means someone’s on your side. Fate’s on your side. Chance is just chance. A random play of numbers. And that’s all it is, a one-in-a-thousand chance that I’m sitting here with you, eating a sandwich, smoking a cigarette, instead of buried under a pair of crossed propeller blades on the French frontier.”

  “Well, I think you’re wrong. I think it is luck. There’s a reason you survived.”

  “No, there isn’t. Why should God choose me, instead of Quentin Roosevelt? He’s the better man.”

  Sophie sets aside the crust of her sandwich and leans back on her elbows, watching Octavian smoke his cigarette, squint-eyed and thoughtful. It must be five or six o’clock, but the sun is still high. It’s midsummer, they have hours yet before the day is over. Before the light is gone.

  “Because there’s something you’re meant to do,” she says. “Something you’re meant to be.”

  He turns to her, and his face is tender. “What about you, Sophie? What are you meant to be?”

  “I don’t know. At the moment it’s rather bleak, isn’t it?” She laughs dryly. “I’m the daughter of the murderer, the pathetic little girl who tried to wake her murdered mother. Forever notorious for an act I don’t even remember.”

  “You really don’t remember? Not a thing? You were almost three, weren’t you?”

  She shakes her head. “Julie says I’ve repressed the memory. That’s what your subconscious does, when you live through something awful. It buries the memory deep down, where you can’t find it.”

  “Well, I wish to God my subconscious would do the same for me.” He flicks ash into the nearby turf. “Instead, it’s the opposite.”

  Sophie’s hand, lying on the ground, starts to play with the grass. She plucks out one blade, and another. “It’s been the strangest thing, sitting there in court every day. Hearing this thing described, this little girl described, and she might as well be a stranger. And she’s me. I sat there on that kitchen floor, I saw it all. I saw my father murder my mother.” She lowers herself all the way back and stares at the sky. The grass prickles her ears, the back of her neck. “Is that why you took me there? Hoping I’d remember something?”

  “My God, no. What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just been wondering.”

  “Sophie.” He moves beside her, and she turns her head, just enough to see him. “No. You were the one who wanted to go inside, remember? I just wanted—well, I’m not sure what I wanted, exactly. I already knew who you were. I didn’t have any proof, but I felt it. I knew it. You just—you fit. There was this hole”—he brushes his sternum with his thumb, the thumb holding the cigarette—“and you fit there. And the house was where I first found you. So I just—it was an impulse. A stupid impulse. If I hadn’t taken you there, your father wouldn’t have suspected—”

  “We don’t know that for certain.”

  “Yes, we do. I do. I know what he said to me, that night at Theresa’s apartment, while everyone was giving speeches. He thought I was going to expose you all.” He lifts the cigarette, what there’s left of it. “You know the rest.”

  “He threatened you, and you fought him off, and he took out his pistol, his stupid pistol he always carried around.”

  “Don’t fret. I don’t blame him. I might have done the same, if I had you to protect. You and your sister.”

  If I had you. But he doesn’t have her, does he? He has Mrs. Marshall to protect. Mrs. Marshall to love.

  Sophie turns back to the sky. “Tell me. When are you getting married?”

  A pair of men walk by, a few yards away, talking in loud nasal voices. Something about a man named Carter who’s a terrible pilot, going to kill himself, and for some reason this is a good joke. Octavian waits until the nasal laughs have faded before he replies, in a flat pitch, “As soon as the divorce comes through. That’s the plan, anyway. Then we’re heading out to California. A lot of pilots out there these days, plenty of opportunity.”

  “That’s wonderful. I expect to hear great things from you.”

  Her tone is too bright, and she knows it. How false she sounds, how brittle. Aren’t they supposed to be honest together, at this point? What does it take anymore, for two people to say what they really mean?

  “Listen,” he says. “For what it’s worth—”

  “Don’t.”

  “You have every right to be angry. You should be angry.”

  “I was angry. I was so angry, that night I found out. Over the telephone!” A dry little laugh. “Now it doesn’t matter.”

  He doesn’t reply, and Sophie closes her eyes. A drowsiness has begun to creep over her, a kind of relief after all the strain and exhaustion of the preceding months. The strain and exhaustion that await her when she returns. She hears the faint drone of an insect, or maybe it’s another airplane. There is a rustle, a sigh. A weight coming down, as Octavian settles back in the grass next to her.

  “As I said. For what it’s worth. I meant to end things with Theresa, after I met you. I hated what we were doing together, but I couldn’t stop, because I needed what she had to give me. And then you danced in, and I knew—I thought I knew—”

  “Please don’t.”

  “She lost a son in the war. Awful thing. And then her husband, that same day we drove to Connecticut together,
he told her he wanted a divorce. He wanted to marry his mistress. That very same day I found you, after all those years. So if you want to talk about luck—”

  “Then we were never meant to fall in love, I guess.”

  Above them, or maybe across the field—lying here in the grass, Sophie can’t really tell—an engine sputters, coughs, and then catches again. She listens carefully to the reassuring buzz. The sign of life.

  “No,” he says. “It’s too late for that. At least on my side.”

  “Then God is cruel.”

  “Or it’s just chance again. Dumb, random chance.”

  Sophie rolls over to face him. His nose points straight to the sky, tipped with sunshine. His arms are folded behind his head, and the cigarette is gone. He loves her. He just said so, didn’t he, unless she misunderstood. She says quietly, “No. It’s not chance, it’s who you are. She needs you, and you’re too good to leave her.”

  “What about you? Do you need me?”

  “About as much as you need me, I guess.”

  He closes his eyes. His chest rises and falls. “I hope not. I hope you don’t.”

  Sophie puts her hand at the meeting of his ribs. Her white cotton glove is smeared with dirt and oil. “If you ask me,” she says, “what’s worse is not feeling anything at all.”

  “Well, then. What if I am asking you?”

  Her hand looks so proper there, encased in cotton, resting on Octavian’s shirt. “When I realized there was something between you two, you and Mrs. Marshall, of all women, I was furious. I was madly jealous. And it was exhilarating. It was almost as good as falling in love with you. And then Father was arrested, and I stopped feeling either one. I was so numb and shocked I didn’t care. You could have married her the next day and had a dozen children, and I wouldn’t have cared. The most terrible thing of all, like your heart is stricken inside your body.” She curls her finger around a button. “I would rather hate you again than go back to feeling nothing.”

  He removes one arm from behind his head and traps her hand against his chest. “So you don’t hate me anymore?”

  “No. Well, I never really did, did I? I was just angry. Every time I closed my eyes, those weeks before the party, I thought of the two of you together, like lovers, and I couldn’t stand it.” She stares at his profile. At his eyelashes, of all things: thick and dark against the bridge of his nose. Lighter at the tips, or is that the sun? She whispers, “I still can’t.”

  There is no answer to that, and Sophie doesn’t expect one. The sky is warm on the crown of her head—she’s taken off her hat, and so has he—and the drowsiness returns, along with a sense of slow rupture, as if she’s cooking from within, and the drowsiness is just a symptom of her malady. His voice stirs her, just as her eyes are closing.

  “What if I tell you—Sophie—what if I tell you that we aren’t lovers? Theresa and—that I haven’t—that we haven’t . . . not for some time.”

  “Some time?”

  “Since the night of the party.”

  She opens her eyes. His cheeks are stained with raspberry beneath his tan. “Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  His sigh moves her hand. “It wasn’t honest. She’s married. It never felt honest, even at the beginning, when I thought I was in love with her.”

  “Then why didn’t you ever stop?”

  “Because I was afraid I would go back to what I was before. What I was when the war ended. When everyone was dead.”

  His heart beats under her hand. The rhythm communicates through his shirt and her glove, and echoes back through the pulse in his fingers. It’s a slow pulse, so slow it frightens her. She keeps longing for the next beat. The spaces between them are almost unendurable.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “I have stopped. At least until her divorce comes through. Until . . .”

  Thump-thump.

  Thump-thump.

  “Until what?”

  His head turns. His eyes are quite blue now, reflecting the sky. A shadow passes over his skin, gone in a flash, in the mad drone of another airplane.

  “You tell me,” he says.

  IN THE CAR, HE KISSES her. One minute he’s sitting there, hands on the wheel. He’s just cranked the engine; he pulls down the spark retard until the pistons smooth out into a contented rumble. His hand goes down to release the parking brake, and then, just before touching the lever, makes a U-turn instead, crossing over the small divide between his body and hers, taking her softly by the cheek. The kiss is fervent and awkward. She tries to turn sideways and so does he, but his legs are too long and their mouths come apart.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t be.” She takes off her gloves and picks up his hand, which has fallen on his thigh, and she places it on the placket of her blouse. He unbuttons the top button, the second, the third, and his fingers ease between the two edges to lie against the damp, delicate crepe de chine camisole that covers her chest. The top of the Ford is open; anyone can see them. She leans recklessly forward and kisses him, and this time it works better, because they’re both ready. He kisses her beautifully, quite slow, gentle as the tide; his mouth is warm and tastes of tobacco. Better than Jay, better than anything. His fingers slip inside the camisole to touch her breast, to examine the curve and the weight of her, the texture at the very tip, minute and thorough, until she’s staggered by her own audacity, by the way a man’s fingers feel upon your naked skin, when you actually want them there. Hot and fizzy. He breaks off first, panting a little, and there is a moment of perfect wonder, staring at each other.

  “I don’t want to stop,” she confesses.

  He closes his eyes and pulls his hand free, and she holds the back of his neck and leans into his chest. Well, his pulse is certainly faster now, she thinks, listening to the eager contractions of muscle. Thump-thump! Thump-thump! His breath is humid in her hair. She laughs against his shirt and murmurs, “At least that’s over, anyway. At least we can’t regret we never even kissed.”

  He says, “Are your servants living in?”

  “I think so. They’re supposed to be.”

  He strokes the back of her hair. She thinks maybe she’ll lift her head and kiss him again, just to see what’s next; and then, belatedly, she realizes what he meant about the servants and her blood goes whoosh in her veins. Is it really possible? Of course it is. There’s nothing to stop them, is there? No parents and chaperones, no unhealthy repression of the sexual instinct. She’s almost sick at the prospect, dizzy with either daring or anticipation or fear. What would Father say? Father doesn’t matter anymore. Father doesn’t exist. This kiss—this act—a declaration of independence.

  She lifts her head. “Are you going to kiss me again, or are you going to take me home?”

  He reaches back and unwinds her arm, kissing the inside of her wrist as it passes by. “Take you home, I guess,” he says, and he releases the floor lever with his left hand and presses the reverse pedal with his right foot.

  THEY HEAD WEST, TOWARD QUEENS Village and Jamaica Avenue, and the sun is starting to fall, casting a glare across the windshield. The empty roads fill suddenly with traffic, and Octavian steps gently on the brake and slips the engine back into low gear.

  “What’s the matter?” Sophie asks.

  “I think it’s the racetrack,” he says. “It’s Belmont day.”

  “Belmont day?”

  “The Belmont Stakes. Big race for three-year-olds. The track’s right over there. Belmont Park.” He lifts a single index finger from the steering wheel to point north.

  “I didn’t know you followed the races.”

  “An old hobby.” He pauses. “I saw Man o’ War win the Dwyer Stakes a couple of years ago, over at Aqueduct. That was some race.” Another pause. He rubs the wheel with his thumbs and adds, “That was the last time I went, actually.”

  “Horses and airplanes.” She laughs. “That’s you, exactly.”

  “Is it?”
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  “The past and the future, running inside you like parallel lines. And you want to straddle them both. You see the beauty in both. Horses and airplanes.”

  The car ahead lurches forward. Octavian moves the throttle, and the Ford follows, into a skein of dust, growling with effort.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  They’ve stopped at a drive. A long line of cars waits to emerge from the beaten earth of a parking area. Octavian sticks out his head and addresses the driver of an elderly electric Columbia runabout. “Hey, buddy! Who won?”

  “Pillory!” the man calls back. “Beat the favorite by three lengths.”

  Octavian pulls back in and turns to Sophie, smiling perhaps as wide as she’s ever seen him, smiling like a hungry crocodile, teeth aligned in perfect order. “Well, that’s something, anyway. I just won a hundred and forty bucks.”

  BUT SOMETHING HAPPENS, AS THEY cross the Queensboro Bridge and crawl back into Manhattan. The mood shifts and falls, like the sun dropping behind the buildings to the west, and the echoing metropolitan noise petrifies the air between them. Sophie, thinking for maybe the hundredth time about the kiss at the airfield, feels for the first time that they have done something wrong.

  “I don’t know . . .” she begins as they turn down First Avenue.

  “Know what?”

  “Whether you should stay the night!”

  “Stay the night?” He sounds stunned.

  “Didn’t you mean . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “When you asked about the servants.”

  The uptown traffic is sweating and impatient, all eager to get home after a long day’s toil. The Ford has rumbled to a stop. In the face of this banal detail—people navigating the city’s dirty, crowded, eternal grid—Sophie is overcome with embarrassment. Octavian’s hand on her breast—how shameful! When, just that morning, her father was deemed guilty of her mother’s murder.

  “Sophie,” Octavian says, “I didn’t mean . . . What I meant was that you shouldn’t be alone. All by yourself in that house. I meant that we would find someone to stay, if the servants weren’t there when we got back, because the reporters might find you, or some crazy fellow who’s fixed on the trial, or God knows what else.”