A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  DEDICATION

  To Greenwich, Connecticut, and its marvelous cast of characters

  for sheltering our dreams for ten years

  (and keeping us stuck in traffic for at least one of them) . . .

  Keep striving.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Beatriz Williams

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The New York Herald-Times, May 29, 1922

  TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

  At last! It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for, dear readers: the opening of the latest and greatest Trial of the Century, and I don’t mind telling you it’s as hot as blazes inside this undersized Connecticut courtroom. You’re much better off reading about it from the comfort of your own armchair, believe me. Oh, the suffering I endure on the sacred altar of journalism.

  And now, after all these months of fuss and hysteria and delectable details—the Patent King, his beautiful heiress daughters, the downstairs tenant, the kitchen-maid-cum-tearful-Scarsdale-housewife and her munificent husband, the turret window, the missing gardener, the exact length and serration of the blade used to murder the victim—here we all sit, waving our makeshift fans before our perspiring faces, and it turns out these mythical figures are human after all! The Patent King is smaller than you’d think. He doesn’t say a word, sitting stiff as a wire by the side of the defense counsel, and the daughters huddle next to each other in the front row, so pale and haggard that their much-ballyhooed beauty is, I’m afraid, purely conjecture.

  A number of well-known society figures populate the benches around me. Chief among them is that perennial mainstay of the social calendar—and this column, naturally—the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, Long Island, as exquisitely dressed (and as exquisitely fashioned) as ever. I’ve had the privilege of visiting Windermere, the Marshall family estate down there by the shore, and I admire Mrs. Marshall’s fortitude in enduring this untoward inferno when she might be reclining among the dunes, or riding her famous jumper, Tiptoe, around the ring at Lake Agawam.

  The reason for Mrs. Marshall’s sacrifice is quite clear, however. He sits by her side, and he’s a fine specimen of manhood, as judged by the expert eye of yours truly. Mr. Octavian Rofrano will soon figure as one of the key witnesses in this case, and given his newfound fame and undoubted allurements, I don’t blame Mrs. Marshall in the least for her vigilant oversight of his person, though I can’t help wondering what poor old Mr. Marshall thinks of all this devotion.

  So much for the man on Mrs. Marshall’s left side. To her right sits another well-known Manhattan Thoroughbred: none other than the lady’s brother, Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner, famed bachelor-about-town and not so far past his considerable prime to lay claim—so rumor has it, anyway—to the lesser of the two Patent Princesses. As to whether rumor has their engagement right, neither principal is talking, and I certainly don’t see a ring glittering on the telltale finger. So, as always, I’ll let you decide the truth for yourselves, dear ones.

  As for me? Hold on to your hats. I’ve got the Trial of the Century to watch, if I don’t melt away into the benches by the end of the morning.

  CHAPTER 1

  In olden times, sacrifices were made at the altar—a practice which is still continued.

  —HELEN ROWLAND

  THERESA

  Long Island, New York, on the second day of 1922

  DURING THE night, I dream that my husband arrives unexpectedly from Manhattan, in a plume of sultry exhaust from the engine of his Buick Battistini speedster, and let me tell you, the intrusion is most unwelcome.

  To be sure, outside of feverish dreams, the possibility’s remote. I have no doubt that, at the instant my dream-husband’s wheels disturb the dream-gravel outside, the genuine Mr. Marshall lies in cetacean slumber on the bed of that jewel-box apartment on Sutton Place he’s bought for his mistress, this being the second night of the New Year and one conveniently placed on the calendar for adulterous pursuits. In any case, he’s not the sort of man to storm down a frozen highway at dawn. Mr. Marshall’s manners are impeccable.

  Still, the very suggestion is enough to awaken me, lathered and breathless, from a state of abandoned repose. The room is heavy with that charcoal light that arrives just before dawn, and since it’s a small room, unheated, unpainted, perched above the dusty remains of a pair of carriages made redundant by the ilk of Mr. Ford, I can’t quite decide where I am, except that the place feels like home.

  A mattress sags beneath my hips, and the sheet is flannel, musty, like an Adirondack cabin. I’m borne down by the weight of a thousand wool blankets, and someone is smoking a cigarette.

  I roll on my side. “Boyo?”

  The Boy stands by the window, matched in color to the smoke that trails from his hand. His shoulders are the exact width of the sash, and just as level, from clavicle to humerus. I have forgotten the substance of my dream, or why it terrified me; my breathing returns to normal at this indisputable proof of a male companion. Without turning, without even twitching—he is absolutely the stillest man I’ve ever known—he says: “I keep wondering, are you going to call me that when I’m sixty?”

  Yes, the room is dark and cold, and the blankets are heavy, and underneath those blankets I’m as naked as an innocent babe, though the resemblance to both babes and innocence ends there. I sit up anyway and hold out my arms. “You’ll always be my Boyo. My lovely laddie.”

  He steps to the bed and sits down on the edge, entering obediently into my embrace. His skin is icy, the flesh underneath as hot as blazes. “There’s a car outside,” he says, after kissing me, as if this piece of information is of no consequence whatever.

  I sort of startle. The Boy’s arms, which are planted on either side of my hips, prevent me from startling too much.

  “A car?”

  “Yes.”

  “What make?”

  “Can’t tell. It’s too dark.” He picks up my arm and kisses the skin of my inner elbow.

  “Saloon or coupé?”

  “Coupé. Sit still, will you?”

  I struggle to drag my arm away from his lips, and he won’t let me. “For God’s sake, Boyo, have you gone loony in the night? Where are my clothes?”

  “Why? He’s not getting out.”

  I swear. The Boy, who doesn’t like me to take the name of his Lord in vain, applies the pad of his thumb to the center of my lips. I open my mouth and bite him.

  “Ouch!”

  “It’s Sylvo. It’s got to be Sylvo.”

  “So what?”

  “So what? My husband’s at the door, and you have to ask?”

  “He’s not at the door, Theresa. He’s sitting in the car. Smoking a cigarette. Probably lit.”

  “But he’s going to come out eventually.”

  “Maybe.” The Boy shrugs. “No need to rush him, though.�
�

  There is little purpose to stirring up the Boy when he won’t be stirred. His cold nerves kept him alive in France, and I guess they’ll keep him alive now. It’s Sylvester I’m worried about now. I sink back into the pillows. The Boy follows me. “You have to hide in the cupboard when he makes up his mind,” I tell him.

  “I’m not hiding in any cupboard.”

  “Yes, you are. I don’t want a scene, Boyo.”

  The Boy finishes the cigarette at his leisure, exhaling the smoke directly from his mouth into mine, and crushes out the stub in the sardine tin on the floor next to the bed. (The Boy is awfully clever at improvising ashtrays from the raw materials at hand.) He knows exactly where the target lies, and his gaze remains on my face throughout this little operation. I think that’s one of the little tricks that drew me in, all those months ago: his concentration. His refusal to be hurried. “There’s only one reason your husband’s here,” he says, “and that’s because he knows I’m here. So there’s no point hiding in cupboards, even if we had a cupboard, and even if I were inclined to hide. Which I’m not.”

  “Why do you want to make things difficult for me?”

  “Why do you make things hard for me?” He takes a piece of my hair between his thumb and forefinger, rubs it once or twice, and curls it tidily behind my ear. “I play by your rules, don’t I? I do what you want.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “All right, then. So let me handle this one.”

  He lowers his head to my neck. I place my two hands on his shoulders and push, without much result. “How can you kiss me at a time like this?”

  “Because I’m your Boy, aren’t I? You’re my baby. Kissing you is what I do, after a hard day’s work. It’s what makes me tick. It’s who I am.”

  The Boy is built like a reed, or maybe a rope—that’s it—coiled neat and tight into a knot you can’t break. If he wants to sit here kissing me, I’m not going to stop him, at least not by force. You can’t force the Boy into anything, you have to uncoil him first. Only his lips are soft.

  It’s who I am, he says. But who are you, Boyo? I’ve been puzzling that for a year and a half, and I could go on forever, at this rate.

  So I think of something. “I’m no baby. When you’re sixty, I’ll be eighty-two.”

  “Well, now. Here’s what I figure. As long as I’m your Boy, you’re my baby.”

  As long as he’s my Boy. But then who am I, Boyo? What am I doing here, puzzling over you? How did I—Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue, Manhattan—become one half of you-and-me?

  I don’t think I know the answer. Something is lost. Something has gone missing inside that you-and-me, and I suspect it’s me.

  HE IS TWENTY-TWO YEARS OLD, my Boy, and therefore a man, in the eyes of his almighty Lord God and of the law. He looks like a man, all the more now than when I first saw him. That was the summer of 1920, a year and a half ago, and he was a man in a boy’s skin, let me tell you, a perfect pink-cheeked Boyo, young lips and old eyes. How he fastened on me. It’s a heady thing, you know. And it was July, a late-night Long Island Fourth of July party, warm and slow and syncopated, dark and dreamlike, the sweat melting off the highball glasses and entering your palms. Someone told me he flew airplanes in France, had only just returned, the sole man in his squadron to survive, but then they always say that, don’t they? The only man in his squadron to come home alive! He’s never one of three survivors, or ten. All the other poor sons of bitches have to die, in order to render the cocktail conversation more breathless, the chitchat tip-top, the midsummer ennui less oppressive.

  He was standing near the swimming pool. I thought he was much too young for me, but maybe that was why I was interested. As I waded through the air in his general direction, I became conscious of his puncturing gaze, and the wavelets glimmering on the skin of his face, the exact size and shape of a leopard’s spots. This general impression—the Boy as predatory cat—aroused all my early interaction with him, and it was not until much later that I realized just how wrong I was.

  By then, of course, it was far too late.

  HE DOES HAVE A WAY of making me forget things, important things, like the fact that a man sits in an automobile outside our window, smoking a cigarette, possibly drunk, and that this man is very likely my husband. Or maybe it’s part of the thrill, this terror of imminent discovery? Maybe I’ve been wanting a showdown like this all along, ever since I transformed that boy by the swimming pool into a fully grown lover, and I stopped sleeping with anyone else, including my own husband.

  When my baby smiles at me, he croons.

  “You’re a terrible singer.”

  “That’s why I only sing for you.”

  “Sweet boy, I want you to be serious.”

  “I am serious. I only sing for you, Theresa, and you only sing for me. I think maybe it’s time Mr. Marshall understands that.”

  Oh yes. He’ll say things like that, my Boy, from time to time: statements of permanence that no civilized lover is supposed to make. Permanence is not what lovers are for, is it? But the Boy never does anything the way the others do. He packs more intention into a single word than the president drizzles into an entire inaugural address, and that’s what snaps my bones when he enters a room, or a bed, or a car headed across the Queensboro Bridge at midnight. I stare a moment into those steady eyes and think about all those airplanes he must’ve shot down, the ones he never talks about. I think about a pile of lumber and shredded white fabric, smoking softly atop a frozen brown field, and the Boy’s eyes looking down, circling, taking the whole mess in.

  “I won’t have you making scenes, Boyo, do you hear me? No scenes.”

  “I’m not going to hurt him. I’m just going to explain things.”

  “Explain what, exactly? He’s my husband. He’s got a right.”

  The Boy seizes my face in his hands. “He’s got no right. How does a man keep a mistress, from the day he’s married, and still call himself a husband? He’s got no right at all.” A soft bang rattles the window sash, but the Boy doesn’t stop. He’s got something to say to me. His thumbs make dents in the apples of my cheeks. “I’m the one who sleeps with you. I’m the one who dies in your bed at night.”

  “Did you hear that?”

  “It was nothing.”

  I push the Boy away from my breast and leap out of bed. “He’s coming in!”

  “Let him come.”

  My dress lies on the floor by the door, my slip by the bed, my brassiere draped over a bedpost. I gather up these items while the Boy sits on the edge of the bed, hands braced on either side of his naked thighs, watching me like a Sopwith watches a Fokker. “What do you want me to do, Boyo? Get a divorce?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I’m not divorcing Sylvester.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no need.”

  “If we have a baby, there is.”

  My trembling hands will not operate the fastenings of my dress. I present my back to the Boy and say, “We are not having a baby.”

  “We might.”

  “I’m too old. Too old for a baby, too old for you.”

  He finishes fastening the dress and slides his hands around my middle. “Not true.”

  The Boy wants me to have his baby. He thinks a baby will solve all our problems. I don’t happen to think we have any problems, other than the fact that I’ve got a desperate, bone-snapping crush on a boy two and a quarter decades younger than me, but the Boy has something against adultery and wants us to get married. He wants us to get married and live together in some rinky-dink apartment on Second Avenue (he doesn’t come into his trifling inheritance until he’s twenty-five, poor thing, and I’m afraid a junior bond salesman is paid at the mercy of the partners he serves) and then somehow make miraculous new babies, one after another, while the snow sifts down like sugar outside our window. Like one of those O. Henry stories. Love and candlelight. Except I’m forty-four years old and have already borne t
hree healthy, legitimate, bawling children, the last of whom departed for Philips Exeter just as the war was staggering to its sepia end, and I’m about as suited to caring for a newborn now as I am for tending a rinky-dink apartment on Second Avenue.

  No, our present arrangement suits me just fine: trysts every Monday and Thursday, when I’m supposed to be playing bridge, at the Boy’s shabbily immaculate place in the Village, perched on the fourth floor of a building smack between an aromatic Italian grocery and a well-stocked speakeasy, so that a lady and a boy can enjoy a little hooch and a dance on the sly, before retiring upstairs to bed. During the summer months, we shack up here in the old carriage house, because while Sylvester and I have always occupied separate bedrooms here at the estate on Long Island, we do maintain a certain informal code about receiving lovers directly under the matrimonial roof. Mutual respect is the foundation of a solid marriage, after all.

  Sometimes, for a special treat, the Boy and I will meet out of town at this lovely grand hotel by the sea, one that won’t blink an eye at a boy and a well-preserved lady of a certain age checking into the honeymoon suite as a married couple. (The Boy always writes our names in large, neat letters in the register—Mr. and Mrs. Octavian Rofrano, Junior—and insists on paying the bill from his own pocket, the dear.) We stay for two or three nights, ordering room service and drinking poisonous gin and skinny-dipping in the ocean at two o’clock in the morning, sleeping and waking and sleeping, and most of all fucking. Sweaty, glorious, tireless, honeymoon fucking. Fucking two or three times a day, sometimes even four or five when the Boy is fresh and hasn’t drunk too much gin. We haven’t done that in a while, not since the end of summer. Autumn’s such a busy time, after all. But my God, when we do, I feel like a new woman. I feel irresistible. As we drive back to the city, my skin glows like a debutante’s.

  So really, taken all together, Village and carriage house and naughty hotels, it’s been most satisfactory, this past year and a half: the Year of the Boy, and then some.

  Until now. I don’t know what possessed us to jump into the Boy’s Model T and head out into the tundra last night. Maybe it was the endless racket of Christmas parties and New Year dos, maybe it was the champagne. Maybe our little affair has settled too comfortably into routine, and we need a taste of excitement. “Let’s go somewhere we can be alone,” said the Boy, leaning back against the headboard, and I lifted my head and said that we were alone, silly, and he said he wanted to be more alone: he wanted to go out to Long Island and breathe in a little clean air, you know, just make a little New Year whoopee without all the lights and people and sirens and smoke, just sunshine and frozen air and me. So what am I supposed to say to that? I said all right.