“Oh,” she says miserably. The car moves forward again, another few feet.
“The thing is, Theresa’s expecting me for dinner.”
“Of course.”
“I’m already late.”
“Then you should hurry back.”
“Sophie, don’t be sore. I can’t just—I can’t be cruel. I owe her everything. There’s—well, there’s more to her than you think.”
“I don’t want you to be cruel. Didn’t I say that already?”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have kissed you like that. I’ve been regretting it ever—”
“Don’t! Don’t regret it. It’s just a kiss. She has to give us something, doesn’t she? She doesn’t get to keep all of you.” She stares down at her lap, her rumpled navy skirt, her stained white gloves clutched miserably atop. The necessity of Octavian’s leg right up against hers, on the narrow seat of a Model T.
He brings his fist down on his leg and swears under his breath.
The lurching seems to be making her a little sick. She turns her head again and looks out the side, where a flower shop is just closing for the evening. A man in a dirty apron rolls in a green-striped awning. Roses are in season, blooming inside every inch of the rectangular plate-glass window, and a sign in the corner reads WEDDINGS GLADLY CATERED FOR. INQUIRE WITHIN.
“Horse and airplane,” Sophie murmurs to herself.
“What’s that?”
She turns back and reaches for his hand. “I’m not going to make you choose. I’d never do that to you. You were meant to make some other girl happy, some woman, and I’ll just take off and soar into the sky, and no one will catch me.”
He doesn’t reply, and the rest of the drive is just like that, New York talking around them, life going on, stopping and starting, noisy and arrhythmic, and Sophie thinks, So this is good-bye.
BY THE TIME THEY REACH the house on Thirty-Second Street, the sky is purple and the sun has fallen behind the buildings to the west, and Julie Schuyler has taken possession of the topmost step, wearing a beaded dress that catches a glitter or two from the streetlights. A sparkling clip adorns the side of her bobbed hair, sagging a little, as if she’s just returned from a night out. Or maybe desecration is the intended effect? She rises to her feet when the Ford pulls up to the curb.
Octavian peers across Sophie, through the passenger window. “Who’s that?”
“Julie Schuyler.” Sophie tugs ferociously on the door handle. “There might be news.”
But Julie just brushes down her dress as Sophie climbs out of the car. Her smile is crimson and insincere. “I thought you shouldn’t be alone tonight. I can see you’ve already had the same bright idea, however.”
Behind Sophie, the other door slams shut. Octavian, revealing himself. Julie’s gaze lifts, takes in the sight, and returns to Sophie. Her eyebrows, freshly plucked, are high and delicate on her forehead.
“Mr. Rofrano was just taking me home,” Sophie says.
“I’m sure he was. And now that I know you’re in good hands, I’ll be on my way.”
Sophie turns her head. Octavian’s still standing by the driver’s door, watching them. His hands rest lightly on the frame, dressed in leather driving gloves. His flat cap is drawn low over his forehead.
She turns back to Julie. “He wasn’t staying, though.”
“No?”
“No. Just took me for a drive. I needed a little air.”
“Is that so?”
Sophie holds up her hand. “Word of honor.”
The crimson lips part a little. Maybe it’s a smile, maybe not. You never really know with Julie; you never know exactly where you stand with her. That’s part of the thrill, isn’t it? Unpicking the threads of her costume.
“Well, then.” Julie Schuyler lifts one bare hand and makes a shooing movement toward the Ford, sending a tangle of gold bangles to crash around her elbow. “We’ll just send him back to Mama, won’t we.”
JULIE SCHUYLER ALWAYS KNOWS WHERE the skeletons lurk in the closet, and she likewise always knows where the bottle of liquor lurks in the cabinet. She produces one now and holds it high, examining the label against the light. “Kentucky bourbon, by God. Where did you get this?”
Sophie shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s my father’s.”
“Nothing more suitable to zozzle us tonight, then.”
“I don’t want to get zozzled.”
“Try,” says Julie, and voilà, they’re sitting on the parlor sofa, trading the bottle between them while the passing headlamps trace, at irregular intervals, along the cracks in the drapes. Julie lights a cigarette and asks what Sophie’s planning to do now.
“I was thinking of applying for a job in an engineer’s office,” Sophie says, swishing the bourbon in the bottle and wishing she liked the taste. She thinks, Octavian’s having dinner with her now, remember? Octavian’s kissing her now, and you told him he could, you little fool, you stupid noble little girl. You sent him off to her.
Sophie draws breath, tilts back, and forces the burn down her throat.
“A job? What about your money?”
“I don’t know. It’s Father’s money.”
“Well, it’s yours now, isn’t it? I mean, once he’s—well.”
Once he’s dead. Obviously, Father will shortly be sentenced to death, won’t he? For the crime of capital murder. And soon after that, they will carry out the sentence. Swift, efficient justice. A life for a life. One man to the gallows, another man to Mrs. Marshall. Sophie all by herself.
She lifts the bottle and swallows again.
“That wasn’t very tactful, was it?” Julie says. “My apologies. I know it’s dreadful. He’s your father, after all.”
“Yes.” Sophie’s eyes are stinging. She blinks and says, “I don’t know about the money. I haven’t thought about it.”
“What a good girl you are. Thank goodness you’ve got me to think about it for you. All that lovely dough, divided into loaves between the two of you. You could open your own engineering office, if you like.” She swallows, much more luxuriously than Sophie, cigarette balanced between her fingers, and hands back the bottle. “You could do whatever you want.”
“I don’t know how I can touch his money.”
“You’ll find it in you, I’m sure. We always do.”
The third swallow isn’t so bad. Sophie feels she’s getting the hang of this. She wipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb and asks Julie if she can try her cigarette.
“Have your own,” Julie says generously, and she reaches for her pocketbook and rummages inside. Her cigarette case is enameled in a giddy red-and-white design, edged with gold. She produces a long, new cigarette and sticks it between Sophie’s lips. “You really need lipstick to do it properly,” she advises.
“I left my lipstick behind at the hotel.”
“I’ve got some.” Julie paints Sophie’s lips, working around the unlit cigarette. Her eyes narrow in concentration, and Sophie notices she’s got blacking on her eyelashes, and a very thin line of kohl articulates the shape of her eyelid. When she draws back to judge her handiwork, she looks adventurous and unnaturally wide-awake, as if her blue irises are jumping from her face. “There. Much better,” she says, and she sets aside the lipstick and lights Sophie’s cigarette with a match struck from the side of her red-and-white enamel case.
LATER, WHEN THEY’VE FORAGED FOR dinner in the icebox and both servants have failed to turn up, Sophie invites Julie to stay for the night. She glances at her slender gold wristwatch, and then at the plain black-and-white clock on the kitchen wall.
“Well. Since you so obviously need me.”
“I don’t need you.”
“Yes, you do. Someone needs to take your mind off the fact that your beau is having dinner with another woman at this very moment, and probably more than dinner.”
“He’s not my beau.”
“But you’re in love with him.”
“It doesn’t make any difference, does it? N
othing makes any difference.” Sophie shuts one eye and stares at the inch or two of bourbon remaining in the bottle, which stands in the center of the table, like an honored guest. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
“That’s Shakespeare.”
“Yes.”
Julie wags a finger. “You’re not allowed to go flinging around Billy-boy at a time like this. Willy-nilly.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. You can jus—you can justify anything with a little Shakespeare. Give yourself a nice glossy shield of—cleverness.”
“But we are clever, darling. We’re awfully clever. Look at us!” Sophie opens her arms. “You’re going to start an engineering firm with me, and we’re going to share a grand apartment and have lots of lovers and never, ever get married.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. That’s what I’m going to do.”
Julie shakes her head. “You can count me out, sister.”
“Oh no you don’t. You’re brave enough to get me into this, but you won’t see it through?”
“But it’s different with you. It’s your money. Or will be yours, when your father—well.”
“You have money, too.”
“My parents’ money, Sophie. It’s a trem—trenem—it’s a great difference.” She frowns, looks around the room, and discovers her cigarette case lying on top of the icebox. Bracing herself carefully on the table, she rises to her feet. “And they won’t stand for this.”
“For sharing an apartment with me?”
“No. I don’t think they’d care as much about that.” With some difficulty, she lights the cigarette, and then—apparently exhausted by the effort—collapses back against the icebox, puffing quietly. “It’s the rest of it. Making my own money.”
Sophie frowns. So hard to concentrate, when the world is so beautifully muddled. “But you were going to get a job anyway, weren’t you? With me. We were going to get an apartment together and find work and be indepen—dependent and modern.”
“Oh, a job! But that’s nothing, darling. You can’t make a real living on a mere job. My kind of living, I mean, the kind that will keep me in the style to which I’m tragically accustomed.” She waves her hand, butterfly-like. “As long as I need my allowance, they’ve got me in the end, right? I can only stray so far, like a little doggie on a leash.”
“But you’ll be with me.”
Julie shakes her head slowly. “I can’t take your money, dearest. Not even for the sake of eman—enamci—freedom. The creed, you know.”
“What creed?”
“The creed that says we don’t sponge off our dearie-wums.”
“But I need you!” Sophie wails. “I can’t run my firm without you! You know so much more about—managing people—and economics!” (She says it carefully, so as not to embarrass herself: e-co-nom-ics.)
Julie’s smooth face takes on a bit of wrinkle at the forehead. “But engineering’s so grubby. Can’t you run a department store instead?”
“But I don’t know anything about that.”
Julie reaches down and takes off a shoe, fumbling with the buckle until it slides free from her stocking. She holds it up before her. “You see this?”
“I think so.”
“What is it?”
“A shoe?”
“Exactly! It’s just a shoe, darling. You don’t have to know everything about it. You just have to know if you like it. You have to have the guts to say, I like this shoe, damn it, and every woman in New York is going to wear it next season. And you have that kind of guts, Sophie. You do.” She wobbles. Braces herself against the icebox. A bit of startled ash drops from the end of her cigarette. “I don’t, though. I have the guts to bob my hair and smoke in public, but I don’t have the guts to scratch for my own worms. That’s a special kind of brave, my sweet, and Julie doesn’t have it.”
Sophie leans her cheek into the palm of her hand and thinks that Julie looks awfully brave enough to her. She stands teetering on the pinnacle of the present sleek moment. Her breasts are flattened by a state-of-the-art brassiere. Her waist doesn’t exist. Her skirt hovers dangerously at the middle of her shin. Her lips are round and rosy, her hair short and curled and burnished. In her modern costume, she makes you think of a juvenile, fresh and unspoiled and yet utterly naughty: a girl who will give you all the good times you crave, without all the messy grown-up consequences. Julie blazes a fearless new trail, just by standing there in her glittering, straight-edged best, trailing a cigarette from her hand.
Sophie rises from the table and staggers toward the blurry image of Julie, leaning against her icebox. She takes the shoe and kneels down to replace it on Julie’s slender foot, encased in its delicate stocking of daring flesh-colored silk. The beaded dress, which looked gray outside in the streetlights, is actually the color of moss.
“I think you do, though,” Sophie says. “I think you are brave enough. Just go out there and do it. You don’t need all the dresses and the luxury. You just need spirit. You need a soul.”
“But I’m afraid I haven’t got that little thing.” Julie kneels next to her on the kitchen floor. “It’s not so bad, though. I’m having the time of my life. It’s just absolutely ripping, isn’t it? A smashing success. Eventually I’ll have to get married, I guess, when my parents lose patience with me, but I think I’ve got a few years left. A few years and a lot of fun.”
Sophie stares at Julie’s eyes, which are now ringed in soft charcoal smudges. “I don’t understand. You’re the bravest girl I know.”
“God, no. What a thing to say.” Julie giggles quietly and settles her head in Sophie’s lap. “Don’t you see how conventional I am? I’m never going to bite the hand that feeds me. Maybe a nibble from time to time, just to keep them on their toes. But give up this?” She lifts a section of dress. “No.”
“You can if you want to.”
“But I won’t. That’s your kind of courage, not mine.”
Sophie runs her finger along the waving golden line of Julie’s hair, until it ends in the diamond clip. Actually, it’s not diamonds. It’s rhinestones or some other costume jewel, very up-to-date, glittering with irony. Julie’s eyes are closing. The cigarette sags against the floor.
“And our little life is rounded with a sleep,” Sophie whispers.
Julie’s faded pink lips create a tiny smile. She lifts her hand—her left hand, not the one with the cigarette—from the hygienic linoleum floor and curls it around Sophie’s fingers, atop the rhinestones.
“O brave new world,” she whispers back, “that has such people in it.”
TELEPHONE.
The word tears across Sophie’s mind, leaving a wide and painful gash. Or maybe it’s the noise itself, the persistent brring-brring that will not be denied. The word keeps tearing, and the noise keeps brring-ing, but she can’t put the two ideas together.
She lifts her head. “Come in!” she gasps out.
Brring-brring.
Sophie opens her reluctant eyes and thinks, Telephone. This time she remembers what a telephone is. But where is the telephone? Where is Sophie? A parlor, well appointed. Her well-appointed parlor! New York? Head. Oh God, head! What’s happened to her head? She’s having a stroke. Where’s the—
Brring-brring.
—telephone?
Sophie rolls to her side and falls unexpectedly from a sofa. A vague memory wafts past: Julie and a bottle of bourbon and not wanting to climb the stairs. Because Father. Because Octavian. Octavian and Mrs. Marshall.
“Julie?” she calls hopefully.
Brring-brring.
The hall. Sophie stumbles to her feet and crashes into a wall. She’s still wearing her navy skirt, her untucked blouse. At one point, there was a cigarette. And a phonograph. The rest is silence.
Brring-brring.
Sophie’s staggering down the hall now, toward the stairs, wincing in agony. On the half landing, the telephone sits in its cubicle of shame, outlawed from any civilized room.
Brring-brring, stabbing her temples with a pair of lead pencils. She snatches the earpiece—it’s a dreadfully old-fashioned telephone, that’s Father for you—and puts her lips to the mouthpiece, and just that same second she realizes she needs to vomit.
“Hello?” (Greenly.)
“Hello? Miss Faninal?” (Crackling.)
Sophie hangs there in confusion, and then she remembers that Faninal is Fortescue. Faninal is Sophie.
“Yes. Speaking.”
“This is Mr. Manning.”
Sophie is hot and cold and hot. Her tongue is coated in wet flour. A small, succulent rodent seems to have died at the back of her throat. She moves her head—a mistake—and rests it against the plaster wall. “Manning?” she repeats.
There is a slight hesitation on the other end. “Your attorney, Miss Faninal. Your father’s counsel. I apologize for the early hour. I’m afraid something’s come up . . .”
“I’m sorry. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
“Miss Faninal, this is a long distance—”
Sophie sets down the earpiece and bounds up the remaining steps to the bathroom on the second floor, where she bends over the toilet and empties an improbable quantity of poisonous yellow-green bile into the bowl. This takes some time. Every last speck of bile, apparently, must be evacuated, or her stomach won’t rest. When she raises her head at last, she doesn’t recognize the image in the small mirror above the sink. She reaches for a square of linen and runs it under the faucet. The coolness helps. Reminds her skin it’s alive. When her face is clean and pink, she turns away and walks unsteadily out of the room. There’s something pressing downstairs, isn’t there? Something she needs to do, and doesn’t want to do.
Her father’s room lies at the end of the hall, fronting the street. The door is open, a strange thing. Father always closed his door. Even the maid had to ask permission before cleaning it. What time is it? Feels awfully early. There’s not much light showing at the edges of the curtains. Sophie’s not wearing a watch. Father’s room? Father’s room has a clock, probably. And if she goes into Father’s room, she won’t have to do that thing downstairs, that thing she’s trying to ignore, even though it’s kicking the back of her brain, urgent and unsatisfied.
A Certain Age Page 28