Soriah goes back to work on her frozen hot chocolate. “Hey,” she says, “you can drink it now.”
Marian tries to smile. “Told you.”
“It’s good! It’s better than an icee.”
“So do you get to see your mom? Do you visit her?” says Marian, stirring her own drink with the straw.
“Well, I’m allowed, but my granma can’t take me, so I have to wait for the social worker. Maybe every two months.”
Marian nods. “That must be very hard.”
The girl gives her a look, distracted or evasive. “Well, yeah. Because I miss her more when I see her, which is kind of strange. And she’s sad to see me. I mean,” she corrects herself quickly, “she wants to see me, but it makes her sad. Because there’s no way she’s getting out, you know?”
Marian does know. Though the mandatory drug sentencing guidelines have been roundly considered a failure, they remain entrenched.
“Why can’t your grandmother take you?”
“Because,” Soriah says, “she’s sick. She’s got to stay at home, because of the oxygen.”
“Oxygen? She has emphysema?”
“No,” the girl shakes her head. “Bronchitis. It’s a little bit different. She has a home health, and she uses oxygen.”
“Do you mean,” Marian says, “that she can’t leave your house at all?”
Soriah finishes her hamburger and nods with her mouth full. “Except with the home health. She likes to go sit outside.”
“But who takes you to school? Who takes you to the library to see your tutor?”
“Oh,” Soriah says, “Professor Reynolds picks me up at school and takes me home after.”
“Who does the shopping and cooking?”
“Well, sometimes the home health. And sometimes me.”
“But you’re only eleven!” Marian says sharply. “You shouldn’t have to do that!”
It is, Marian knows, even as she says it, a ridiculous thing to say. Of course Soriah Neal should not be doing the cooking and shopping for her grandmother and herself. Neither should she have a mother in jail nor be living alone with her chronically ill grandmother. Clearly, this girl is dangling above the maw of the foster care system. For all her promise, Marian thinks, she is within a filament of being lost.
“Soriah,” she hears herself say.
The girl looks up from her slush.
“Can you tell me why you wrote me that letter? I know you said that you didn’t really understand Charlotte Wilcox. Did you want me to tell you why I think she was the way she was?”
Soriah looks at her decimated frozen hot chocolate. “I talked about it with Professor Reynolds. I really liked the book until the part where she goes to jail, but after that I just didn’t get it. I kept thinking about the little girls. I mean, I knew they weren’t her actual daughters, but they were like her daughters. So wouldn’t they have been sad that she was in jail? And how come she just kept being so happy when all these bad things happened?”
Marian sighs. Herein, after all, lies the crux of Lady Charlotte: the separation of personal happiness from outward good fortune. It is as baffling to Marian as it is to this eleven-year-old.
“You know,” Marian starts, faltering, “I think it must go back to what happened to her, when she was so young, and she was attacked by the Indians. It might have ruined her life, seeing her family destroyed like she did. But for some reason, Charlotte seemed to decide that she was not going to be sad about it, or let herself be sad about anything else that might happen to her. Maybe she thought that she’d already experienced the worst possible thing, and after getting through that she could survive anything else that life could throw at her. Like Mary Jemison, you know? She had a pretty good life with the Indians, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” Soriah agrees. “She got married and had kids, and all. She didn’t want to go back to the whites.”
“And I think Charlotte just decided as a little girl that she would take whatever happiness was on offer, at any given moment of her life, whether it was with one of the richest families in England or in one of its poorest jails. If she had gotten too attached to the idea of happiness coming from wealth or status, she would have spent most of her life feeling that she’d lost her chance to be happy, but she never linked those ideas together.” She fixes the girl with a smile. “You know what I think? I think if the rest of us could be more like her, we’d be happier, too.”
Soriah, unconvinced, merely shrugs.
“But it isn’t easy,” Marian continues. “I mean, there are things in my life I’m sad about. There are things in your life I’m sure you’re sad about. It’s hard to just get up in the morning and say, Everything’s great! I’m going to go out and be happy all day! But then again, if she could sit there in that awful jail and write letters about how good her life was, then surely we can look around for things that make us happy, too.”
The girl nods, but distractedly, her eyes on the tabletop. The waiter comes to ask if they want dessert. Marian and Soriah look at each other. Marian rolls her eyes. “You’re kidding!” Soriah says.
“After two frozen hot chocolates?” says Marian.
“You’d be amazed,” the waiter says wearily, taking the plates away.
“I didn’t think you’d answer,” Soriah tells her.
“I’m sorry?”
“I didn’t think you’d answer my letter. Professor Reynolds said I should write to you if I had a question. She said you probably were really busy, because you were a professor yourself, and she thought you probably get lots of letters about your book.”
“It’s true,” agrees Marian.
“But there was always a chance, she said. So I did.” The girl smiles suddenly. “I never met anyone who’s written a book.”
“Oh,” Marian says, “I’ve got a feeling you’ll meet lots.”
For the first time since their meeting, Soriah looks elated. She beams, holding this slender illumination of possibility, and something inside Marian cracks open. She knows that none of it is her business, that a child with an incarcerated mother, evidently irrelevant father, incapacitated guardian, and inadequate teacher has nothing to do with her, is not her child, does not require the crossing of this boundary, but the transgression has already been made, and Marian knows that she will honor it. Perhaps it will all end badly, and pain her later, but now it is too late.
“Soriah?”
Still smiling, the girl nods.
“Do you have to go home right away?”
“Right now?” she asks. “No. Not really.”
“Can you come to Bloomingdale’s with me?”
Soriah cocks her head. “You buying me a present?”
“I’m buying you a bra,” says Marian. She signals for the check.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Flower Issue
Sophie oversleeps: flat on her stomach, her arms wrapped around the pillow, the blankets down around her ankles, where they habitually end each night. Her apartment building is a prewar pile that overlooks Harlem from the heights of Morningside Drive like a fortified castle, which, in a way, it is. Though he did not actively resist her intention to set up house near Columbia, Mort Klein set certain nonnegotiable conditions with regard to Sophie’s proposed apartment. These included discernible police presence on the surrounding streets and twenty-four-hour security in the lobby. Sophie’s apartment is a sky-blue perch on the uppermost floor, indifferently furnished and decorated. For a woman nurtured in a treasure house of Belle Epoque New York, Sophie is shockingly unconcerned by design. Her rooms are nouveau-IKEA, faithfully transplanted from Exit 13A off the New Jersey Turnpike to her four-room pad, with certain jarring notes of Mackenzie-Childs-ish excess left over from Roberta Sarnoff’s first, premature trousseau (Roberta—engaged twice but married once—took her Columbia B-School degree straight to Princeton, where she is raising towheaded twin boys, throwing fund-raisers for McCarter Theater, and having a grand old time) and an amateur but beloved
still life of irises by Felicia Litkowitz Klein. At least Sophie thinks they are irises.
She wakes with a start, freshly tense though lacking focus for her tension. It is Thursday, nearly ten, an outrageous time to be getting up, without even the excuse of a wild night behind her. (The night behind her, ordinary to the point of sheer forgetability, involved the library, a take-out falafel, a recorded tirade from Frieda on her answering machine—this pertaining to the omission of certain of her father’s Kaplan Klein board members from the wedding list—and David Letterman.) Now she is groggy and low, reluctant to begin her day and wildly unhappy. Sophie retrieves the covers from her ankles and pulls them up over her head. She wallows for a good five minutes, during which time she tries to think of someone to phone, but each of the few who come to mind are rejected in turn. Frieda is not to be taken on without a certain clarity of mind. Her father is, at this hour, at the busy center of a busy universe. Sophie does not want to listen to Roberta bemoaning the dearth of good restaurants in Princeton, and while it may be shockingly late in New York, it is still early in Los Angeles, where Philippe Labatt has gone to be homosexual beyond the ken of his mother. Sophie does not want to call Barton.
So she drags herself up and makes coffee and drops her aged Dalton T-shirt atop the teetering mound of laundry at the bottom of her closet and puts on one of her many (but one of her few remaining clean) Olga minimizer bras, a green flannel shirt, and her last pair of laundered jeans, which feel undeniably snug at the waist. (The falafel, thinks Sophie, with regret—so fattening, so irresponsible with that expensive Vera Wang awaiting her. And it hadn’t even tasted that good!) She drinks her coffee, which does revive her. Sophie then addresses the New York Times with her habitual scorecard of “That’s good news…” or “That’s bad news…” Today, surprisingly, the good news items on the front page (announcement of new cancer drug, unremarkable free election in Third World country, cautiously optimistic economic forecast) outnumber the bad (dismissal of lawsuit against manufacturer of assault rifles, intention of Jesse Helms to run for reelection), and Sophie tries to harness the resulting buoyant feeling for her personal use, but with limited success. Something is not right, she thinks, eyeing the most recent of Barton’s now weekly flower deliveries: white roses again, and just as lovely as the ones last week, and the week before. Or they had been, when they came. The water, she notes, is now cloudy from lack of attention, and there is a definite air of fatigue about the flowers, as if they, too, had eaten unwisely and overslept. Sophie notices a petal tinged with brown, then plucks it away. She picks up one of Roberta’s abandoned mugs (chipped), and holds it between her palms, absently blowing across the surface of her coffee. Something is not right. And it is not Frieda, nor the omissions from the wedding list (not quite accidental, though she will claim accident when she returns the call), nor the fattening effects of second-rate falafel, nor even the fact that she has grown undeniably apart from her two closest friends, to the point that she cannot phone them and merely whine the way good friends can.
Beyond this, Sophie does not wish to speculate.
Instead, she proceeds to do what she always does, which is gather her books and her keys and the bag of garbage from beneath the sink (a one-time infestation of mice has made her scrupulous in this practice) and her elderly leather Coach purse, and leave her apartment, bound first for the garbage chute and then for Butler, where another day in the company of Sophie Scholl, her chosen ghost, awaits her. Ordinarily this prospect is a meaningful, if not exactly cheery one, but by the time she reaches the library, Sophie is struggling to allay a sense of aversion. She has heard of this type of thing. It is the fear of any scholar: the sudden loss of passion, the craving for avoidance of what had yesterday seemed thrillingly obscure. But she is overreacting, she thinks as she begins to climb the stone steps. These moments happen. They are the equivalent of hitting the famous wall in a marathon and a necessary evil to any worthwhile pursuit. Besides, Sophie can’t indulge such whims today. The wedding has already significantly disrupted her work, and the weeks ahead promise only increased distractions. Tomorrow she goes to Millbrook for the weekend, and she will stay on until Monday to meet with the caterer—that’s four days lost—and next week is already peppered with once-in-a-lifetime, make-a-girl’s-heart-race appointments. And she is within striking range of finishing her chapter on the first leaflet, a goal she fervently wishes to achieve before the wedding.
All the more reason to put her head down today, Sophie thinks, hauling open the heavy door. She has organized her thesis into chapters that correspond to the six leaflets of the White Rose. (There were seven, really, if you count the final one, retrieved in shreds from Hans Scholl’s pocket at the time of his arrest, pieced and taped together by the Gestapo, and claiming that a German surrender would not be a surrender of the people but of a corrupt and in any case doomed political power. Sophie intends to add an epilogue on this embryonic leaflet, the movement’s own epilogue.) She is using the pamphlets to deconstruct not only the group’s ideological positions but its biographical information, burrowing into each of the members’ lives—so German, so young and passionate—to try to answer what seems the most obvious and ultimate of her questions: not “Why did these few citizens rise in protest?” but “Why didn’t it happen everywhere?”
The door closes behind her on creaking hinges. Sophie stops. In the vestibule before her are her thesis advisor, Chaim Bennis, and a woman in a long tweed skirt who stands, head cocked, pretending to listen to what he is saying. This woman, turning slightly, proves to be Marian Kahn. Sophie stands awkwardly, unwilling to pass them, terrified to be noticed by them, though she has had a call in to Chaim for two days and needs to reschedule their next meeting. Behind her the door continues to groan open and groan closed, with people parting around her and whooshing into the library. Within seconds Sophie regresses from competent grad student to uncool adolescent. Chaim natters on, oblivious, and Sophie notes the impatient jittering of Dr. Kahn’s right foot in a soft leather boot with a little buckle at the ankle. The buckle glints as the foot taps, taps the marble floor. Sophie is riveted by this, by Professor Kahn’s boot in general, really by all of Professor Kahn’s clothes. They are precisely the sort of clothes Sophie occasionally tells herself she would like to buy—beautiful and sort of basic and well made—except that when she does drag herself into a department store all she ever sees are flashy, insubstantial things made for women without breasts. Marian Kahn’s skirt is deeply brown with flecks of red. Her black sweater is simplicity itself, but looks expensive. Where did she get that sweater? thinks Sophie. If I had ten sweaters like that, I would throw away my flannel shirts and be done with it.
This makes her think of Frieda, then of her father, then of the wedding, then of the reason she has to cancel her meeting with Chaim.
“Yes,” says Marian Kahn. “I think you’re right.”
Chaim looks across the vestibule, noticing Sophie, who gapes back, mute. “Oh,” he says. “You called me.”
She nods. Marian Kahn turns, looking relieved, as if she might now flee.
“Do you know Professor Kahn?” he says.
Marian and Sophie look at each other. Marian nods, gracious and professional. Sophie’s mouth is dry. It is her cue to rush forward, hand outstretched, and say she does not, but that they are about to be related by marriage, can you believe it? All these years in the same department and now this coincidence, except that for most of those years she was only an undergraduate, and no reason Dr. Kahn should be aware of someone working in the twentieth century, but she is happy to meet, finally! And Bart has told her so much! Et cetera.
She says none of these things. She is pathetic and only nods. Of course she knows Professor Kahn.
Professor Kahn, seizing her chance, says good-bye to them both, with an ego-stroking comment to Chaim about some departmental fire he has tamped, and a smooth “nice to have met you” for Sophie. Then she moves away and into the library proper, her beautif
ul skirt lifting behind her, her soft boots making soft sounds on the marble floor.
“You called me?” her advisor says, newly gruff.
Sophie, deflated, manages a nod. “I need to reschedule Monday. I’m going to be out of town.”
“Fine,” he says. He begins to turn away, not so much brusque as distracted.
“And the AHA took my paper. I heard last week.”
This stops him. Chaim had primed her for failure. He had advised her to begin with a smaller conference, a more specialized conference, and not the mighty American Historical Association’s annual summit. This, moreover, is her first attempt. And she isn’t even on the job market yet.
“Well,” says Chaim. “This is news.”
Sophie nods. “Yes. I’m pleased.”
“But your wedding. You won’t have time to prepare.”
“No, I’m all right. I’m going to do leaflet three. That chapter’s already finished. I just have to pull an excerpt that meets the length guidelines.”
He considers. A moment too long.
It occurs to Sophie that he is searching for something else, some other problem or impediment she hasn’t thought of, and that he wants very much to find it but can’t. Finally, he backs up against the door to the reading room, pushing it open. “Fine,” says Chaim. “You coming in?”
Sophie looks past him. She can see the reading room with its long tables and glowing terminals, the undergraduates and grad students, a hive of sweat and concentration and pheromones and competition, all grindingly familiar. It is the scene of her year, and last year, and the last six years. She thinks of Marian Kahn, already in there, already at work, most likely, far off in her own chosen century. Sophie feels herself step back.
“No,” she says.
Chaim turns without another word and leaves. Sophie is not even important enough to be considered odd.
She stands there for another moment, uncertain, the foot traffic parting around her. Someone actually walks into her and veers off without apology. It is incredibly hot in here, she thinks. Why does it need to be so hot? For the books?
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