The White Rose

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The Song of Songs

  Sophie,” Barton Ochstein says, “your shirt is open.”

  Sophie looks down. Her shirt is indeed gaping open between the misaligned buttons, and she notes the white flash of abdomen visible. She sets down the vase of roses and straightens up. Instead of undoing the rogue button and refastening it, she grips the flannel shirt, closing the hole. Her fingers are cold against her skin.

  “Oops,” she says.

  Her father and her fiancé look at her uncertainly.

  “They’re beautiful, Barton.”

  Barton glances at the flowers. Then he brightens. “Oh! Yes! Good,” he says. “I’m so glad you like them. I took advice, you know. I asked around for the best flowers.”

  “Well, they’re lovely. I don’t think anyone’s ever sent me white roses.”

  “From now on,” says Barton grandly, “I’m going to send them every week. Every week until we’re married, and every week after that.”

  “Barton,” Sophie says and shakes her head. “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to,” he assures her. “It will give you pleasure. And I hope you noticed the name of the shop.”

  “Yes,” she says, with enthusiasm. “It was so sweet of you. How did you find a flower shop called the White Rose?”

  “The shop is called the White Rose?” says Mort Klein. He is in his work clothes, but with his tie loosened and his customary bourbon in hand. Both men, Sophie notes, are drinking bourbon, from identical Baccarat tumblers.

  Barton turns to Sophie. “Through my cousin, Marian Warburg. I stopped in to see her last Friday night. I asked her, what is the best place in the city for flowers now, and she told me. She has exquisite taste,” he says to Mort. “Like her mother. Exquisite.”

  “Mimi Warburg,” Mort says. Since acquiring his prospective son-in-law, he has become fluent in the various branches of the Warburg family.

  “We were having a drink in her apartment,” says Barton. “I understand she teaches at Columbia. In your department,” he tells Sophie.

  “Really?” Sophie considers this information. “I don’t know anyone named Marian Warburg.”

  “Ah. Well, it’s strange she changed her name when she married, but she did. Her husband’s name is Kahn.”

  Sophie feels her breath catch. “Are you serious? Marian Kahn is your cousin? Barton, why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugs. “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “But”—in frustration she looks at her father—“Marian Kahn is incredible. She wrote a book two years ago about an American woman in the eighteenth century, and it just took off. I mean, everybody read it, not just historians. She’s one of the best-known eighteenth-century scholars in the world!”

  Two blank faces. Polite, engaged, but blank.

  “I’ve never talked to her,” says Sophie. “She has her own grad students to TA her sections, and I’m in my own little niche with the twentieth-century European history people. But I’d love to meet her.”

  “Then you shall,” says Barton magnanimously. “I’ll set it up for you. And of course she’ll come to the wedding. I’m her only first cousin!”

  “Sophie, is that dinner?” Mort says. “It smells delicious. But you might want to change,” he says, rather pointedly.

  “Oh, of course,” she takes a step back, self-conscious again. “I’m sorry, I was getting dressed, and I kept hearing the doorbell, so I ran to get it. And there was this guy waiting outside the service entrance with the flowers.”

  “Well, I hope the delivery boy didn’t see you like that.” Mort is a bit sharp.

  “He wasn’t a delivery boy. I think he was the owner. Of course I had to ask him if he named his shop after the White Rose, but he’d never heard of them. Which is kind of a disgrace, don’t you think?”

  “I think it’s almost dinnertime,” says Mort. “Or doesn’t it matter to you anymore that the sun is about to go down?”

  “Okay!” she says. “I’m going. Where’s Frieda?”

  “She’s just gone up to change,” says her father.

  From something elegant into something more elegant, thinks Sophie.

  She leaves them and goes back upstairs, clutching her slightly odorous flannel shirt and feeling the rasp of her legs as they brush each other in their unaccustomed pantyhose. Dressing up falls short of torment for her, but she avoids it when she can. Of course, she would like to have been born effortlessly chic like Frieda, or with the purported exquisite taste of Marian Kahn and her Warburg mother, but for Sophie dressing up for pleasure died with her mother, and—Frieda’s and her father’s efforts notwithstanding—she cannot seem to revive it. All she can manage is to dress beyond obvious reproach: wearing clothing that matches and is without stains or other blatant flaws, satisfactory underclothes, and classic jewelry in moderation.

  Sophie retrieves her silk blouse and undoes the buttons, then pulls the flannel shirt over her head and finds a clean bra in her old dresser. Fitting the bone buttons on the silk blouse into their slots makes Sophie think of the skin she had unwittingly revealed to the man in the kitchen, and now it strikes her that his awkwardness might be attributed to this unintended revelation. When a person embarrasses herself, she thinks defensively, fastening Felicia Litkowitz Klein’s gray pearls around her neck, people are supposed to inform the embarrassing person of the fact, so that she doesn’t go home and discover she’s got salad in her teeth or an open fly. But if the person who sees the embarrassing thing doesn’t really know the embarrassing person, he can’t say so, because it’s too awkward to say so, and this man in the kitchen didn’t really know her. Which is why it is so odd—it comes to her now, as she takes the elastic off the end of her braid and eases it apart—that he said that strange thing, about how he would tell her why he named his shop the White Rose, but only when he knew her better.

  But he won’t know me better, Sophie thinks, because I am never going to see him again, and besides, I’m about to get married.

  She brushes her hair, which, unbound, reaches the small of her back, and places matching barrettes behind each ear. Sophie’s hair is near-black and thick, tending to waviness except that its weight pulls the waves straight. She is not very creative with it. By default, there is the braid: ropelike, lying neatly between her shoulder blades. On those rare occasions when she appears in public with her father, Sophie coils it in a low bun and pins it with the heavy black pins made for old-fashioned rollers. But on Sabbath evenings and in her own apartment, she tends to wear it loose and long, only occasionally with barrettes, to placate her father. “You look like one of Tevye’s daughters!” Mort once told her, with affection, and Sophie—deflated, now, as she recalls it—thinks, Yes, but which one?

  Chava, who falls passionately in love with a Christian?

  Hodel, who falls passionately in love with an iconoclast?

  Tzeitel, who falls passionately in love with a nice Jewish boy who is unfortunately not the nice Jewish boy her father wants her to marry?

  Sophie has never fallen passionately in love with anyone. She is too Jewish to marry a Christian. She is too conventional to marry an iconoclast. And she is, in fact, within weeks of marrying precisely the man her father wants her to marry.

  A young intelligent woman who reaches the age of twenty-five without ever having been in love will quite likely have subjected herself to thorough self-examination, and Sophie is not an exception. True, it was not difficult for her to feel superior to her Dalton friends with their histrionic romances, but by the first year of college it had begun to trouble Sophie that she had never felt remotely histrionic herself. Her romantic history has been one of contrived enthusiasms and falsified ardor, with sex serving as a pretense of intimacy. She has felt no hunger, no longing for the quick of another person. She has not experienced even one of those astonishing moments when two people own the desire between them and lunge for each other. Fortunate in so many ways, Sophie understands that she has not been gifted in this
one, and as a result, over the years she has compiled a commonsensical list of her requirements in a partner and reached the following conclusions about herself:

  That she is not a very sexual person.

  That she is unlikely to experience, in the future, the kind of rapturous attachment she has not experienced in the past.

  That she enjoys the company of men.

  That she wants to be a mother, and fairly soon.

  That apart from becoming a mother, which will of necessity alter everything about her life, she does not wish to alter anything about her life.

  It may be because she is rich—very, very rich—that she can think this way, but Sophie has given up imagining her life without the cushion of wealth. Yes, she can afford to be a graduate student—even for the rest of her life—though she has no intention of doing so, and would not be doing so for a single day if she did not feel her work was useful. She can afford to have many children and raise them in one of the world’s most expensive cities, without the financial input of their father, whoever he might turn out to be. She considers herself fortunate that such a suitable individual has come, first into her father’s life and then into her own. She considers that the match has all of the virtues of an arrangement and—given that her own passions are not engaged elsewhere, nor engaged at all—none of its flaws.

  That these pretty roses have appeared does not surprise her; Barton’s manners are courtly. They make her feel cared for, and they remind her of wooing from another time. They suit her own formality. Barton may not be very vocal, nor at all physical—he had not even kissed her until they were engaged!—but his little gestures, the notes and the gifts, have been constant. After their first meeting he sent her a letter on stationery that bore a line drawing of the house he was restoring near Rhinebeck. It said that he thought she was a marvelous girl and was sure she had many more interesting things to do, but if she thought it might be amusing to attend a benefit at the Jewish Museum in two weeks’ time, he would be delighted.

  “How old is he?” she had asked her father.

  “Not too old,” he answered.

  The following week, Mort received his diagnosis.

  Sophie had phoned Barton soon after that, mainly to put him off, but she found herself accepting, lulled—she would later think—by his evident delight at hearing from her, and the almost anachronistic elegance of his manners. The event at the Jewish Museum? Nothing, really, only he was receiving a small honor. No, nothing special. He ought to do more, really, only he was so very involved with the restoration in Rhinebeck, just now. But his friends in the museum guild, they seemed quite determined to do this silly thing, and for such an inconsequential gesture on his part. A little matter of his donation of some Warburg family documents. He was a Warburg—had he mentioned?—on his mother’s side.

  In the end, Sophie and her father had both gone to the event that evening, walking the short distance from the Steiner mansion to the museum—itself a former Warburg residence—arm in arm. It was Mort’s first social outing since the confirmation of his illness. He was not in pain, but he was unsteady, and Sophie felt him tighten his arm in hers as they climbed the stairs to the lobby. Immediately, Barton had loosened himself from a knot of people at the far end of the room and come surging over, shaking her father’s hand, kissing Sophie on both cheeks. Barton took them through the crowd, alternately protecting them from some people and introducing them to others, making sure that they met the museum directors and his fellow honorees, bringing them to their seats at his table. Mort, Sophie remembered, had been elated to find himself placed beside a great-granddaughter of Jacob Schiff. Sophie had been seated beside Barton. He was almost inexpressibly kind to them both, it seemed to her then. Not just entertaining, not just ritualistically polite. It was as if he knew what they knew, what they had been told only days earlier, and was so solicitous, Sophie thought, seeing to Mort’s comfort, making sure that she was enjoying herself, which she found that she was. A kind man, she found herself thinking, watching him as he stood beside her father’s chair, leaning forward to hear what Mort was saying, listening through the noise of the crowd, one hand on Mort’s shoulder. She could do a lot worse.

  Barton wasn’t handsome, but he grew on her. He had good hair and strong brown eyes. He was without objectionable features—warts or moles, extra chins, that sort of thing—and unappealing personal habits. He had surprisingly nice legs—thin but strong. He was unfailingly interested in whatever she had to say. What’s more, he struck her as utterly a grownup, something she had not realized she was looking for until she was faced with it. With him. She had never felt particularly young herself.

  There was no passion, per se, but there had never been passion with any of the men she had dated. Passion, Sophie suspected, was in reserve for her children—they would be the loves of her life, and she could not wait for them. This man seemed content enough with what she was able to offer. She fell further and further into the relationship, until they were spending part of each weekend together and going out during the week in Manhattan. My life, she found herself thinking, could always be this agreeable. And then he proposed.

  When Sophie goes downstairs to the Sabbath dinner, the aroma of her meal fills the kitchen. The chickens are brown and crackling, and she leaves them in the oven to stay warm while she makes a salad dressing. In the dining room, she is touched to see that Frieda has indeed set the table, and rather beautifully, with some of the old Audubon silver and the simple china of her mother’s trousseau, a sentimental favorite. The challah has been placed on a platter and covered with a cloth, and there is a bottle of Burgundy uncorked. The strictly correct moment of eighteen minutes before sundown has passed, but there are still streaks of light in the sky: the spirit of the Sabbath will be honored.

  Sophie walks to the parlor. Her new attire prompts the spoken approval of her father and fiancé, and Frieda’s terse nod of sanction. She brings them into the dining room. Sophie places her father at the head of the table, Barton at his right, and Frieda next to herself, then goes to the candelabra on the ornate sideboard and lights the two candles: zachor (remember) and shamor (observe). She waves her hands over the flames and then covers her eyes to recite: Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu, l’had’lik neir shel Shabbat. Amen.

  “Good Shabbos,” says her father.

  “Good Shabbos,” says Sophie, kissing him. She kisses Barton, too, and then Frieda, and sits down.

  Mort gets to his feet, pours wine for them all and performs the Kiddush, holding his glass of wine before him. Then he lifts the challah and recites the Ha-Motzi, tearing pieces of the loaf and passing them out. The challah, from a bakery up near Columbia, is not very good.

  “It’s not very good,” Sophie apologizes.

  “It’s very good,” says Barton, agreeably.

  “No, it’s okay. I didn’t make it. I was trying to finish something in the library today, and I didn’t have time.” She goes downstairs for the chicken and Frieda comes to fetch the salad bowl, into which she glares resentfully.

  “Looks good,” Sophie says.

  Frieda scowls. “Not good. I had to throw out a lot. You can’t trust them to send. You need to go, yourself.”

  “After I’m married,” Sophie says with a smile.

  “No. You won’t.”

  Frieda leaves, trailed by her perpetual huff.

  When Sophie returns to the dining room bearing her platter of chicken, Barton is telling her father that the upgrading of the plumbing at The Retreat has been unexpectedly delayed by the nonarrival of parts. This would be of little interest to Sophie, except that their rehearsal dinner is planned to take place at The Retreat.

  “Will it be done in time?” she asks. There are seven weeks to go before the wedding.

  Barton shakes his head. “I don’t think I can count on it. Naturally, I’m disappointed. I was looking forward to hosting everyone.”

  “We’ll have
to find something else,” Sophie says, cutting into her chicken, which falls apart, emitting a lemony fragrance. “What a shame.”

  “We can do it at the farm,” her father says, pouring a second glass of wine for himself. “It’s not a problem.”

  “It is, though,” Sophie tells him. “We’ll be setting up for the wedding the next day. It’s only a small group for the rehearsal dinner, and we can’t just throw them under that big tent. I think we need to go somewhere else. Maybe an inn?”

  Her father sighs. Like Barton, he is reluctant to lose the prospect of admiring guests.

  “I’ll look around this week,” says Barton. “There’s that little place in Stanfordville. The Black Horse? They do a nice dinner. And is it too late to add someone to the wedding guest list?”

  “Not at all,” Sophie tells him. “Who is it?”

  “That nice woman I met at Marian’s last week.” He turns to Mort. “She walked me over here, do you remember? She said hello to you at the door.”

  Mort considers. “I remember meeting her, but I don’t remember her name.”

  “Valerie Annis,” he says. “She’s a close friend of Marian’s. She writes some sort of social column. I thought it would be fun to have her.”

  “Are you kidding?” Sophie is horrified. “That woman’s a scandalmonger!”

  “No, no,” he says, shaking his head. “No, you’re quite wrong. She’s a very close friend of Marians’s.”

  “But she’ll write about the wedding!” Sophie says in frustration. “I really wouldn’t like that.”

  “It may not be avoidable,” Mort says. “We have to acknowledge, Sophie, that there is going to be interest in this wedding. After all, you’re marrying into a very prominent family. The Warburg name alone will always attract attention.”

  “Surely no one is going to make an issue of that,” she says.

  “Oh, but I think you’re wrong,” Barton says. “These things may not be of much interest to you, but to many others they are. Not,” he says to his prospective father-in-law, “that the marriage of your daughter would not attract attention for its own sake.”