She walks straight through the doorway into Mr. Faninal’s dark and stale-smelling sanctum, but she doesn’t look for the clock. (She doesn’t know where it is, anyway.) She heads to the first window and pulls back the curtain.
Just past dawn. The sky is an eerie soot blue, streaked with pink above the buildings to the east, and the streetlamps are still lit, a thick and sickly yellow in the morning haze. The street is deserted, except for the milk wagon trundling around the corner, jangling faintly through the glass, and . . .
And a dusty green Ford Model T parked along the curb next to the house.
Sophie’s hand crawls upward to her throat and rests against her windpipe. She closes her eyes, opens them, closes them again, and when—slowly—she raises her lids a final time, the car is still miraculously there.
The roof shields the interior from view, and she can’t see through the windshield either: the angle is too acute.
But he’s there. How long has he been parked there, keeping watch? Her cavalier. After his dinner with Mrs. Marshall? All night?
Sophie starts to breathe again. Her fist curls around the thick damask curtain and drags it to her cheek.
Telephone.
She remembers now. Mr. Manning, her father’s defense counsel. Why would he telephone her at this early hour?
She gives her forehead a last damp stroke with the linen cloth and lets the curtain fall. Before she leaves, she catches sight of the clock on her father’s small tin mantel:
5:42.
CHAPTER 20
There’s so much saint in the worst of them, and so much devil in the best of them, that the woman who’s married to one of them, has nothing to learn from the rest of them.
—HELEN ROWLAND
THERESA
The Pickwick Arms, around the same time
AT LAST, the damned telephone stops ringing, but I’m afraid it’s too late. I am irrevocably awake, and it’s not even morning, at least by my standards.
I have slept remarkably well, all things considered. I don’t generally sleep well in someone else’s bed, but the Pickwick people have done themselves proud in the matter of mattresses, bless them, and at least there’s no one to disturb me. No one to disturb the pattering of my own brain. The linens are fresh, the furniture painted to harmonize with the flowers on the curtains.
The telephone rests at the side of the other bed. At my bedside perches a neat little white vulture of an alarm clock. I roll to my side and lift it away. My eyes seem to be having a little trouble in this gray light; I can’t imagine why. It’s either nearly six o’clock or half past ten. Either way, the hour’s later than I thought. Those chintz curtains must be thick.
I swing my legs from the bed. My guest will be arriving soon, and I’d like to bathe first.
THOUGH I DON’T PARTICULARLY ADMIRE the new shapelessness in fashion—the dropped waist, the straight, roomy lines—I suppose I should be grateful. In the bath, the roundness of my belly is obvious enough.
I squeeze a washcloth over the slight and gentle summit and admire the way the soap cascades downward in luxurious runnels. The doctor says late October. I suppose he’s right; after all, I was able to provide the date of conception with reasonable precision. Congratulations, Mrs. Marshall, he said, without irony. Couples at your stage of life are seldom successful in conceiving. I presume he doesn’t read the gossip pages.
I suspect it’s a girl, though maybe I don’t remember the particulars of pregnancy well enough. The differences between them. It’s been so long since Billy was born. I’ve forgotten how sleepy you are, how your veins ache. I’ve never been that sick, early on, but I’ve been sick with this one, let me tell you. That’s how I knew. First I thought it was a germ of some kind, and then I thought it was the immense strain of everything. When they discharged the Boy from the hospital, he was so distant and distracted. He wouldn’t stay the night; he wouldn’t go to bed with me at all. Observing the proprieties, he said, until the divorce came through, fair and square, but I knew it wasn’t the divorce he was waiting for. It was her. It was the trial, the Faninal trial. The damned Faninals and their love affairs.
Eventually, I put two and two together and went to the doctor. Congratulations, Mrs. Marshall. You now have a trump card, a final surefire piece to play in this little match. If all else fails.
We are required, Sylvo and I, to be separated for a year before a suit for divorce may be launched in court. (You can get it done faster in the state of Nevada, I’ve heard, but we want to do this in a respectable, dignified fashion.) We’ve decided I’ll be the one to file the lawsuit, citing adultery. Again, very proper and gentlemanly of Sylvo, taking the blame like that, when the facts clamor that we’re both adulterers. That’s what the Boy called it, anyway, the very morning after I paid my first call upon the van der Wahl guesthouse. He made breakfast, as I said, and sat down at the little table with me, but his face wasn’t so gleeful as it seemed during the night. He hardly spoke. I asked him if anything was wrong, had I done anything wrong, and he looked up at me and said—I remember the exact words, the exact miserable tone of voice—I guess I’ve committed adultery now.
I pointed out that I was the adulterer, not him; he was merely my accomplice. A garden-variety fornicator. A fornicator of a married woman, the Boy said, staring at the crowded surface of his plate, and I set down my coffee and climbed into his lap. I said he wasn’t to worry about that; the sin was mine. Mine, do you hear me? You have nothing to atone for, silly Boy.
Well, he’d never had a woman in his lap before, that much was obvious, and after a little persuasion he put his hands under my bottom and lifted me up and carried me into the bedroom, before I could explain that the kitchen table might prove even more amusing, for a change. I don’t know how he managed, after such a night of dissolution, but he did. Youth, I suppose, and all those years of suppression, and the simple act of turning our bodies to find the mirror on the dresser, exposing the lascivious angle of our joining into perfect view, his flesh disappearing into mine, until we had no choice. No choice but to strive on for the pinnacle, hard and ecstatic and eviscerating.
But the melancholy returned right afterward—it usually does, with the Boy, as I soon learned; I think there’s a Latin term for the condition—and he detached himself and lit a customary cigarette and declared that, on the contrary, he had plenty to atone for, that he was now utterly damned. That we would have to get married, that was all there was to it. I said he was crazy. You don’t marry your mistress. Is that what you are? he asked the ceiling, and That’s what I am, I confidently replied.
He turned to me and asked what would happen if I became with child.
I won’t, I said, and What if you do? he insisted.
The possibility seemed so remote. I had miscarried twice after Billy, both early on, and then nothing. Not that I had much opportunity, at the time; Sylvo and I were just reaching that placid, friendly, sterile stage of our marriage when I was occupied with the children and he was . . . well, otherwise occupied. The idea of pregnancy had blurred away into the past, like debutante parties and trousseau fittings. Something that younger women did.
I crawled, naked, to where he sat at the head of the bed, smoking his cigarette, propped up by a crumpled pillow, looking far too sunlit and fresh-cheeked for either activity: sex or cigarettes. But his eyes were old and blue, and his skin reeked marvelously of debauchery. Of me.
Then I guess I’d have to get a divorce, in that case, I said, but I didn’t mean it. I had no intention, ever, of ceasing to be Mrs. Theodore Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue. I just said it to please him. The Boy, I thought, would be my little secret, for as long as I needed him. For as long as he still wanted me.
MRS. LUMLEY ARRIVES AT PRECISELY six forty-five, just as I requested. Her knock is timid, her hat brim wide and low on her forehead. She’s dressed respectably, in a neat suit of forest green, and I ask her if she’s had breakfast.
She removes the hat with trembling hands a
nd says she isn’t hungry.
“Well, I’m famished,” I say, and I lift the telephone receiver and ask for room service.
Though terribly nervous, Mrs. Lumley is an attractive woman. Her hair is smooth and dark, not a single gray hair, and her eyes are large and brown. When she was eighteen, and a fresh new housemaid in the Faninal house, she would have looked so appealing, like a young doe. She removes her gloves and places them alongside the hat. I invite her to sit on the sofa, and she obeys me, stroking the wings of her hair with those trembly little fingers.
As she sits, the telephone rings again. Mrs. Lumley darts me a frightened look with her wide brown eyes, and I wave her concern away. “It’s not for me. I’ve taken the room from someone else,” I explain.
“From whom?” she asks, suspicious.
“From Mrs. Fitzwilliam. She left yesterday afternoon with her daughter.”
“Where’s she going?”
“To Florida, I believe. To join her husband. She was terribly eager to be away, not that I blame the poor woman. What a dreadful ordeal for the two of them.”
Mrs. Lumley looks into her lap. “Yes.”
“However, as I told you yesterday over the telephone, Mrs. Fitzwilliam was good enough to discuss the case with me before she left, inserting a few details she didn’t see fit to air in a public courtroom, if you understand my meaning.”
“Yes.”
“You can speak in perfect confidence, Mrs. Lumley. The case is obviously closed. Mr. Faninal has been convicted, and I understand that no appeal is planned. There’s no danger to you, even if I were the sort of person to reveal secrets, which I most assuredly am not.” I laugh comfortably. “I have enough secrets of my own, believe me!”
She presses her thumbs together. “I’m sure you do,” she whispers.
“Because, if your husband were to find out—”
“No!” Her face flashes up, so white. “You won’t say a word to him, will you?”
“Of course not. Husbands should never be privy to one’s secrets, I’ve always thought.”
“He simply can’t know I’m here.”
“Of course not. Of course not.” I reach between armchair and sofa and pat her tangled hands. “It’s none of his business, is it?”
She’s starting to weep. I rise and recover a handkerchief from my pocketbook. “We never did it, I swear,” she says, dabbing at her eyes.
“Did what, my dear?”
“You know. We only kissed a few times, that’s all. He was a gentleman. I only felt sorry for him, because of—because of—”
“Because of his wife.”
“Yes.” She takes in a deep breath, collecting herself. “She was always nice to me. I felt awful, what we were doing to her.”
“What you were doing to her? My goodness, you’re generous. She wasn’t exactly a saint, herself.”
“But it still wasn’t right.” Mrs. Lumley looks up with her watery eyes. “It’s been killing me ever since.”
“Secrets have that effect. And now the trial is over, and Mr. Faninal has been convicted and will probably hang in short order, which should spare you any further embarrassment.”
“I don’t know what to do! I’m going to die of it.”
“Calm yourself, my dear. We don’t die of guilt.” I lean forward and capture those tearful peepers with my own, firm and steely. “Even for adultery.”
“Adultery?”
“Yes, adultery.” I lift my eyebrows. “Good heavens. Do you mean to say there’s more?”
Her gaze drops hastily back into her lap. “No! My goodness. Of course not. Just—just that.”
“But I thought you said that the two of you didn’t actually—oh, what’s the phrase—do it.”
“We didn’t! I mean—dear me. I must be going. I shouldn’t have come.” She jumps from the sofa. “I have—my husband will be wondering—”
A knock strikes the door.
I put one hand on the arm of the chair and rise to my feet.
“Ah! There we are at last. I confess, Mrs. Lumley, I do enjoy a good breakfast.”
NOW, I DON’T MEAN TO bore you with all my stories about the Boy. Maybe it’s the pregnancy, turning me all sentimental, or maybe I simply want to do him justice. You can skip them all if you like. I don’t care.
Except this one. It’s too important.
We had been lovers for a few months, I believe. Long enough that we were at ease with each other, attuned to each other’s habits. I knew that he liked fish over meat; he knew that I liked the opposite. I knew that he had nightmares, violent ones; he knew that I knew, and that I wasn’t going to speak of it. That sort of thing.
At the same time, we preserved a certain frisson between us, by virtue of only seeing each other twice a week, and by harboring our little secret in front of an obsessively secret-mongering society. We would walk along a street in Greenwich Village, or some other neighborhood safely out of the way of my usual crowd, and my attention, as we made our way along the sidewalk, hung utterly on him: his movements, the details of his dress, the few words he could spare.
The Boy, on the other hand, didn’t seem to pay me much attention at all. His eyes never roamed my face and figure; they roamed the streets and buildings, the passing vehicles, the nearby men and women: a fact that caused me no end of agony. If I could just get him to notice me. To answer my questions with genuine sentences. Then I would know he loved me; I’d have proof of his devotion, wouldn’t I?
Until the evening we were walking toward some new club or other, a little joint I’d heard about from certain quarters, in an insalubrious spot near Chinatown. Chattering on about the day’s news, about our plans for the night. An ordinary Tuesday. And a man came up, as men do, and produced a gun and begged that we should do him the favor of relinquishing our money and our jewelry into his keeping.
Rather foolishly, I had on a pair of diamond earrings and a ruby bracelet—well, a lady likes to show off a bit, from time to time, especially when she’s in want of a little personal attention—and I’m afraid I disgraced myself. Screamed in terror. The shock, I think.
Not the Boy. Oh, no. Cool as you please, he kicked the gun out of the man’s hands, drew back his fist, and delivered our poor thief a piece of chin music that very nearly killed him. I thought it had killed him. He crumpled to the ground without a sound, and for a second or two—notwithstanding the blood dripping from his split knuckle—the Boy stood over him, gazing down, like a lion claiming his kill.
Then he turned and held out his elbow. “Come along,” he said to me, and I, stunned, just took his arm and stepped around the body. A minute or two later, when I could speak, I asked if the man was dead, and the Boy said no, still breathing, and I asked why we hadn’t called the police and the Boy laughed—not a civilized laugh, I assure you—and said because it wouldn’t make any difference. The Boy had delivered justice himself; what was the point in summoning the law to finish off the man for good?
We walked a little farther, heels smacking on the pavement. I was going to ask how he learned to fight like that, how he learned to knock a man senseless and not even care, but I already knew the answer to that, didn’t I? I already knew the source of the darkness inside him; there was no need to drag it out into the light and dissect it into its endless component pieces, and then oil up the parts and put the Boy back together again, like Humpty Dumpty. Instead, we continued on to the club and got ourselves all pie-eyed, and then we continued on back to his apartment and fucked, splendidly and desperately, for what remained of the night. Voilà! All better again.
But I did ask, a few days later, how he had remained so calm, when I had been paralyzed with fright. I wanted to know the trick, you see; I wanted to know how I could laugh in the face of danger, or at least to deliver danger a solid punch to the kisser.
Well, there were two ways, he said. The first is that you’re born cold-blooded. The second is that you learn.
How do I learn? I wanted to know.
&nb
sp; (We were lying in bed, nice and snug, listening to the midnight rain batter the window.)
Trust me, said the Boy. You don’t want to learn.
ANYWAY. BACK TO BREAKFAST, ARRIVING at my door this very instant. But—surprise! It’s not breakfast.
Well, to be perfectly fair, the breakfast is there on its tray, all right: coffee-scented, strengthfully borne by a slight, wiry man. Beneath his low-slung cap, however, his face is rather familiar, and not at all servile.
Mrs. Lumley lets out a cry.
“Monty!”
CHAPTER 21
Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can’t be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half the time.
—HELEN ROWLAND
SOPHIE
The lobby of the Pickwick Arms, that same instant
MISS SOPHIE Faninal, poised at the familiar Pickwick front desk, wearing yesterday’s navy suit and a fresh pair of white gloves, curls her fingers around her pocketbook and attempts to master a growing sense of panic.
“But I don’t understand,” she says. “Why hasn’t my sister answered her telephone? Hasn’t anyone bothered to check on her?”
“We are not in the habit of disturbing our guests unnecessarily, Miss Faninal,” says the man behind the desk.
“Except to telephone them.”
“That was the police.” He glances at the men standing at Sophie’s shoulder, dressed in uniform, and then at the man standing quietly at her side. He clears his throat. “In any case, Mrs. Fitzwilliam rang down at approximately six forty-five to order breakfast, so I believe we can rest assured that she is alive and well.”
Sophie holds out her hand. “Then you’ll be so good as to return my key, won’t you? My sister and I were sharing the suite, after all.”
The man coughs and glances again at the policemen behind her. “Of course. But I’m afraid these gentlemen must wait in the lobby. It is not our policy to disturb our guests—”
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