The Lucky Ones

by Anna Godbersen

  “You’re not going to do it?” she said.

  “Of course I am. I could beat that boy with a blindfold over my eyes.” He put his elbows on the table and smiled until she had to smile back, too. “I’ll beat that boy easy, and then everyone will have to take me seriously again. You’ll see.”

  Lowering her chin and holding his gaze, she replied: “I believe in you.”

  “Good.” Max pulled a bill from his pocket and dropped it on the table. “Now come on, I want to show you my new apartment.”

  “It’s going to rain again.” Astrid was standing so close to the glass that her words formed a misty screen that blurred the greenery.

  “Doubt it.” Victor was sitting on a folding chair just outside the door of her bedroom, where he had stood watch since they returned from the city. When Charlie had called the St. Regis first thing that morning, wanting to talk to Cordelia, they had discovered that she’d disappeared to see Max in the night. He’d insisted that Astrid come home immediately, despite her protestations that Cordelia would be back soon. Of course Charlie was nowhere to be found since she had returned. Now her suitcase was splayed open on the bed, the clothes that she had thought she would wear during her city escape spilling across the bedclothes, disappointing reminders of the fun she’d thought she was going to have. “It was on and off all last night, but I think it’s over.”

  “Well, just in case, I think I had better take a walk now, before it gets so bad I can’t be outside. Ever since we drove back through those gates I’ve felt like a caged bird!” Astrid spoke just as carelessly and irreverently as she always used to, but Victor didn’t laugh or even smile. He’d heard her, though. She knew because he stood up when she walked past him, and followed her down the stairs at a respectful distance.

  “Don’t you think you had better put some shoes on?”

  They had reached the front entryway, and Astrid paused on the threshold. The motorcars that were usually parked down the hill, in front of the garage, were all gone or put away, and the lindens that flanked the gravel driveway bowed in her direction. Overhead, the clouds were heavy and dark. Without the cars the landscape looked timeless; it might have been a scene from any old Victorian novel, the kind where a tortured heroine makes the mistake of walking on a moody heath to clear her mind and comes back with a fatal cold.

  “No,” Astrid replied as she stepped into the stone porch and began down the switchback of carved stone steps. She was wearing white linen pajama pants and a white linen blouse—which was exactly what she was wearing when Charlie had gone ballistic and ordered her home—and she couldn’t think of any shoes suitable to such a costume. “I don’t think so.”

  By the time she reached the grass, he had caught up to her, and they walked out across it side by side. She wondered if Victor knew where Charlie was, and what he’d say if she asked him to tell her.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  A long pause followed. “Why would you ask me that?”

  They were coming up to the hedge maze, its plant walls rising, bluish, over the trim lawn, with the two stone sphinxes that sat on either side of the entry like the sentries of some lost civilization. It had never occurred to Astrid what a lonely thing a country estate was, how underpopulated and far away from the rest of life. “I mean, is it a very normal kind of thing? Does one get used to it? Do you think I’m a very pampered, silly girl to be so shocked by it all?”

  Victor clasped his hands behind his back and sighed as they glided past the topiary flourishes and into the maze. “No, you shouldn’t have seen it, that’s all.”

  “But I did see it. I’m married to a man who—who does that sort of thing, so why shouldn’t I see it?”

  “If you were my girl—” Victor broke off. The maze had turned, and they were standing in an empty corner, and it was suddenly very quiet. Neither moved, and though Astrid turned her heart-shaped face up in his direction, he wouldn’t meet her eyes. His gaze went up to the sky in a tortured arc and back down to his feet. “Then it wouldn’t have happened like that,” he concluded, his voice breaking a little over the words.

  “But I’m not your girl.” She said it simply, as though this were neither a good nor a bad thing. There was no invitation in her voice, but even so he moved in her direction and put his hand against her hip.

  “No,” he replied, with equal simplicity. Then his eyes flicked up to meet hers.

  “You shouldn’t—”

  “I know.” He withdrew his hand and fitted his thumb in his belt buckle. She had thought this would be a relief and was unprepared for how overwhelming the disappointment was when his touch was taken away. “I know I shouldn’t. But I keep thinking about that kiss and…”

  Before he could finish Astrid began walking farther into the maze. “Well, don’t,” she said, putting on a careless tone, even though she was now thinking about that kiss, too. How much she had wanted it; how airy and wonderful it had felt. “I don’t imagine your odds would be very good if you decided to play that game.”

  “It’s not a game.” She was walking fast now, but he kept pace with her as the path curved and took them deeper in. “I kept thinking—”

  “Nobody saw, Victor.” Her eyebrows swung together and away as she went, and her words got faster and her heart kept ticking ever more rapidly. Her feet were moving so quickly she was almost running. “You’d be dead already if anybody knew.”

  “Oh, believe me, I know. I’ve thought about all that. But that’s not what worries me. I’m not worried for myself. I’m worried that—”

  “Damn!” Astrid exclaimed with a furious stomp of her foot. She had come around a corner and found herself staring up at a dead end, its high wall overgrown with vines. A vein in her forehead twitched, and she glared at that wall, as though if it were only a little more accommodating, she might be able to climb over it and into some other life. With a slow shake of her head she turned around. “I’m sorry I kissed you, Victor, I’m a selfish, impulsive girl, and I oughtn’t to have put you at risk like that and—”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t take it back.”

  She wished he wouldn’t stare at her that way, with those serious, shrouded dark eyes, like a peasant boy who has just seen the queen for the first time and can’t quite believe her splendor. “Oh, Victor, what? What would you have me do?”

  “Listen to me.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m not worried about what could happen to me. I’m worried because I keep thinking about that kiss, and I don’t know that I’ll be able to stop myself from kissing you again. I’m worried because Charlie Grey is a violent man, and I’m in love with Charlie Grey’s girl.”

  “Love?” Her insides felt woozy and her throat itched. She wanted to reach for him, but he was too far away. He was just standing there on the grass, so tall and slender. When she compared him to Charlie in her mind he looked almost feminine, and she thought about what Charlie had done to that other man and what he could do to Victor, who was slighter of body and so much more thoughtful.

  “Do you think you might love me, too?” he said eventually.

  “I don’t know!” She put her hands over her eyes. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Neither said anything for a while, but the quiet didn’t calm her. Her chest kept heaving and her face felt hot and her heart wouldn’t unclench.

  “Because either way I’d better go. You see that, don’t you? And if you love me, you should come, too.”

  “Oh, goddamn!” Astrid took her hands off her face and balled them into fists at her side. She gazed at Victor with a washed-out, desperate expression and wished that he would just come toward her. That he would pick her up and press her against the soft, leafy wall, and she could wrap her legs around his waist and run her hands down his spine and pretend she wasn’t married, like she wasn’t Astrid Grey, that she could still do anything and none of it would matter. But he didn’t move. “Damn,” she said again, this time a low, w
hispered curse.

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know, Victor. I don’t know anything. It all sounds so crazy.” She took a step toward him, but her legs were as unsteady as a fawn’s, and she knew that he would have to come forward to catch her. Already his watchful gaze had registered something wrong with her. “I might,” she went on as she sank against his chest and looped her arms around his neck. “The only thing I know is that I want to be held. Could you hold me? Just for a little while? Please?”

  It couldn’t have been the answer he hoped for, but he put a delicate kiss on her hairline anyway. “All right,” he said as she rested her whole weight against him.

  The dream that she came out of was a pleasant one, but Cordelia’s brain began to tick as soon as she realized that the room around her was unfamiliar. She lurched up, pushing the covers aside, and saw that she was still wearing clothes. A simple black dress with a long, slender tank bodice and a scalloped hem that fell just below the knee in the front, and slightly longer in back. Then she remembered: She had put it on to go dancing on the St. Regis roof, and later she’d worn it to the all-night diner with Max, and he had driven her out to Long Island as the sun was coming up. He had seemed so happy and proud of himself, and he had wanted to show her his apartment. Try as she might, she couldn’t recall arriving at the apartment—he must have carried her in. With a sigh, she closed her tired lids and fell back into the pillows. Sooner or later, she and Max were going to have to learn to get to bed at a reasonable hour.

  But she didn’t fall back asleep, and after a few moments passed she climbed out of the narrow bed—which, besides a three-drawer chest, was the only piece of furniture in the room—and tiptoed through the open door. The second, larger room was nearly as spare. Two chairs were pulled up to a square table in the center; a gas-station calendar hung from the wall. The floorboards were wood, but they had been painted a light grayish blue that had been worn thin in places. Under the window was a basin sink and next to it a small stove, and that was the whole kitchen. But it was impressive, for all that. Though Cordelia had run away to live in a mansion, she knew that even a room like this would have felt like a castle after she left her aunt Ida’s, so long as it was really and truly hers.

  Twisting her hair over her shoulder, she stepped around the table to the sink. She wondered where Max had gone, but it didn’t trouble her particularly. Perhaps he had gone out for the newspaper, to see if Eddie Laramie had made any new public insults, or maybe to get them breakfast. She might have gone on smiling privately to herself had a voice not whispered in her ear: Cordelia, look up. She twirled around, but there was no one in the room with her. Was she still asleep, or was she hearing things? But when she turned back to the window, she knew that she was wide awake, and she was grateful to whatever strange magic had called out for attention.

  The view was of the airfield, a great expanse of half-ruined grass, and though the bad weather appeared likely to return before long, there was a patch of blue above the hangar. It was big enough to highlight the red biplane making loops in the sky, leaving behind puffy white lettering that she was coming to recognize. The plane had completed the C and O and was beginning on the R, and then the D.

  By the time he completed the A she felt that she was beaming with her whole body, with every inch of skin. She could hardly believe that Max—who had been so stoic and resistant when she first met him—was capable of this grand gesture. It was as though he’d climbed to the tallest mountain he could find just to shout her name into the clear, thin air. Even with no one there to see her she blushed a little, and she couldn’t wait until he came down so that she could throw her arms around his neck and tell him she felt the exact same way.

  19

  “PERFECT! PERFECT!” MR. BRANCH EXCLAIMED AS HE scurried into the brilliantly lit center of the vast studio. From her place in the shadows, Letty had determined that the little man wearing the panama hat was the famous director Lucien Branch.

  It had taken her some time to wind her way through the vast studio and find the enclosed stage where The Good Lieutenant was filming. But once she arrived she stood still, watching intently as Valentine did take after take. He was positioned on a fake hill next to a fake tree in front of a painted backdrop of a countryside populated by windblown orchards and houses with thatched roofs. After he finished his lines, a pack of people would descend upon him—adjusting his coat, fixing his makeup, moving the big camera around. He would remain composed through this routine, and then when they fell away, his shoulders would draw back and he would gaze off into the distance, exactly like a man haunted by the sorrows of war. To Letty, observing the goings-on with a swiftly beating heart, that bright, busy set was just how she’d always imagined heaven would be.

  Now Valentine stepped down off the artificial turf-covered mound and in so doing shrank back to human size.

  “Perfect!” Mr. Branch repeated. “I’ve got my shot.”

  “Do you really think so?” Valentine asked.

  “You were a man without hope. A man without joy. It was fantastic!” Mr. Branch enthused as he led Valentine away from the set to the high folding chair with the name MR. O’DELL stenciled on the back.

  She might have stood there forever, quietly taking it all in, had Valentine’s polished head not rotated in her direction. “Oh, Letty!” he almost shouted. “Come over here.”

  “Hello!” she called as she came darting forward from behind a giant plaster cannon. “I’m right here.”

  A warm shade spread across Valentine’s face, and she was gratified that he didn’t try to hide how happy he was to see her, even now that they were in public. “Mr. Branch, here’s the young lady I told you about—Letty Larkspur. Sophia and I have taken her under wing. She is a magnificent talent.”

  “How do you do?” Letty gave the director a shy smile and curtsied.

  “Ah, very lovely!” Mr. Branch’s shiny cheeks bulged indulgently. “What a beauty you are! I saw you perform, you know, the night The Vault opened. You are even more incandescent up close.”

  Letty wasn’t sure what incandescent meant, but she thought it sounded nice, and glanced at Valentine to see if he had heard the compliment.

  “Letty, did you think the scene was good?”

  “Good! I thought you were marvelous.” Marvelous was a word Sophia used frequently, and Letty was pleased by how sophisticated she sounded as it rolled off her tongue. “Really marvelous.”

  “A chair!” Mr. Branch squawked. “Will someone get Miss Larkspur a chair?”

  In seconds a man appeared with a chair. It was just an ordinary kitchen chair, hard and without the superior vantage of the director’s and star’s thrones, but Letty couldn’t help but thrill to the deferential way her seat was presented to her.

  “Did you think I was too much?”

  “No, I thought you did it just right. Why, you made me cry a little.” Letty was gazing up at Valentine and didn’t think to hide the look.

  Valentine beamed at this proclamation and then accepted a goblet of water from one of the many assistants scurrying around them. “She’s a wonderful actress, you know. We’ve been training her.”

  “Have you?”

  The two men glanced at each other and then down on the petite girl sitting before them. Valentine placed a thoughtful index finger over his lips and turned his head to one side. “Yes, singing, dancing, elocution. All with our own coaches. Sophia has taken such a liking to her.”

  “Yes, yes, I can see why. Well, we’ll have to find a little role for her, don’t you think?” Mr. Branch crossed his legs and clasped his hands over the higher knee and regarded Letty, as one might a prize pony at a state fair. “Will you do me the honor of auditioning for me, my dear?”

  Letty’s eyes popped at this suggestion. “I’d be honored,” she said.

  “You won’t be disappointed. Wait till you see what my Letty can do.”

  A thought clouded Mr. Branch’s eyes, and he shook his head, and Letty t
ried to keep her shoulders back even though she sensed that the dangled role was about to be taken away from her. “It’s a pity, really,” he began musingly. “You are so like my idea of Marie. So much more gamine than Sophia… Ah, well. Stay around, my dear, while we film the next scene? And perhaps if there is time afterward, you can read something for me.”

  When he turned back to Valentine, she was overcome by a tingling sensation, the same sensation she’d experienced that first night at The Vault as she hovered on the margin of the stage and knew that she already had within her everything she needed to succeed. All that was required was the courage to step into the spotlight. But now she saw that her moment of opportunity was slipping away from her—Mr. Branch’s attention had moved on and might not return—and she stood up, sending the chair away from her with a squeak, determined not to miss the moment.

  “The other night I helped Valentine with his lines,” she announced. Mr. Branch’s eyes returned to her, and though they gleamed with interest, he didn’t quite seem to follow. “I read Marie’s lines,” she charged on. “It’s a wonderful script—I mean, I really enjoyed it—I mean—”

  “What do you mean, Miss Larkpsur?”

  The way Mr. Branch stared at her, she wasn’t sure what she’d meant at all. She briefly experienced her body as though it were floating in a tank and she were speaking through water. But she reminded herself of her feet and felt them touching the ground. She lowered her chin, took a breath, and knew precisely what she’d meant. “Well, you said I looked just like your idea of Marie. I thought perhaps you’d like to see me and Val do a scene.”

  “It’s true.” A moment ago, Valentine’s face had been rigid with surprise, but now his words tumbled out. “She was exquisite as Marie. Why don’t we do the scene where the Lieutenant and she finally confess what they really mean to each other? If you get good closeups of me, you may even be able to use them later.”