A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  But no. He’s just sighing, or maybe it’s a groan, swallowed by the noise of the train. He takes her gently by the arm and navigates them both through the steel and the snowflakes to the open air, where his hand falls away.

  THE WHOLE STORY IS THIS: They met at the millinery department in Bergdorf Goodman two months ago, and that was when everything changed: Sophie’s days before Julie, and her days After Julie.

  Virginia was there, too, though not altogether willing. She’d wanted to visit one of the more modest millinery shops nearby, but Sophie had never been inside Bergdorf’s and begged her sister to go, with a ferocity that made much more sense in the aftermath. So they had walked together from Thirty-Second Street, weaving crosstown and uptown and into the burr of traffic and shoppers that was Fifth Avenue, and Virginia had gripped her pocketbook and looked up the grand six stories that comprised the department store and—well, she hadn’t quite crossed herself, but she looked as if she wanted to. And Virginia had driven ambulances in France!

  “Oh, come along,” Sophie said, taking her by the arm and dragging her through the revolving doors, and it was like entering another universe, wasn’t it, a universe that contained every possible luxury and nothing but luxury, and smelled opulently of perfume and shoe leather and money.

  Money. They had loads of money now: exactly how much, Father wouldn’t say. Virginia had a better idea, but she wasn’t talking either. All Sophie knew was that her sister’s pocketbook contained five hundred dollars, a sum almost beyond the reach of her imagination a single year ago, and that these five hundred dazzling dollars represented no more than a crumb or two of the daily bread that was now theirs, thanks to the ingenious simplicity of Father’s pneumatic oxifying drill. Sophie didn’t know how they could possibly spend five hundred dollars on something so ordinary as clothes and hats, but as she unwound her scarf—the hall positively shimmered with reckless heat—she thought it might be great fun to try.

  In order to reach the millinery department, they had to wind their way through a vast emporium of pocketbooks and gloves and perfume and shoes, through a gentleman’s haberdashery and a collection of lush fur coats, until they realized they had missed their destination altogether and doubled back to the elevator, where a uniformed attendant opened and closed the grille and announced the floors in the same stately tone as the elevator attendant at the Paris Ritz had done, last summer. (Except in French.) In fact, Sophie had felt more at home then than she did now, because she spoke French fluently but this language—the language spoken by the two ladies murmuring behind her in the car—seemed beyond her grasp, its points of reference too far uptown, inhabiting a separate physical dimension altogether.

  They arrived on the third floor, and the attendant called out Millinery! Ladies ready-to-wear! in his voice of ceremonial boredom. Virginia and Sophie stepped obediently out, and so did the two women behind them, who were joined also by a quiet girl of perhaps eleven or twelve whom Sophie hadn’t noticed until now.

  “Go off and find your hat, then,” said one of the ladies, in a voice that made Sophie think of a mouthful of marbles.

  “Lily?” said the other one. “Come with me and look at lovely hats?”

  “Do you mind, Mother?” asked the girl, far too politely for someone her age, and Sophie didn’t hear Mother’s response because Virginia was already pushing forward toward the millinery in her resourceful way, and Sophie had no choice but to lope on after her.

  But never mind, because a few moments later the second woman joined them among the racks of hats—the young girl had evidently gone with her mother instead—and Sophie, settling a wide-brimmed hat over the crown of her head, heard her voice just to the left.

  “Not that one, please. Unless you want to look like your mother.”

  Sophie removed the hat and spun around, and there she was! Julie. Hair of blond, eyes of blue, mouth of mischief (and decidedly of lip rouge as well). She was smiling, taking the edge off her words, and she couldn’t have been older than Sophie, though her sophistication radiated outward in luxurious waves.

  She lifted another hat from the stand and handed it to Sophie. “Try this one instead. It’s close-fitting, frames your pretty face. You’ve got too pretty a face to hide behind an enormous old brim like that.”

  Sophie placed the hat on her head and turned to the mirror, and goodness me if the young woman wasn’t dead right. The hat surrounded Sophie’s face like a picture frame, so that her previously shadowed eyes now looked large and gamine. The mossy color made her hazel eyes greener and her lashes blacker, and suddenly she could see her eyebrows! And they were beautiful! “It’s marvelous,” she said, turning one way and then another.

  “You’re the one who’s marvelous; the hat just lets everybody see it, which is really the point, don’t you think?” The other woman put out a leather-gloved hand. “I’m Julie Schuyler, and you can thank me later.”

  Sophie took that hand. “Sophie Fortescue.”

  An instant later, Virginia swooped in, but it was already too late. The spark was struck, and when they had purchased their hats Julie forced everybody downstairs to find a pair of matching gloves in mossy leather, and then they had sat down in the café for tea. At which point, mid-sentence, Julie straightened in her chair and covered her mouth. “Gadzooks! I’ve forgotten my sister,” she exclaimed, but before she rushed back off to the third floor she had slipped her visiting card into Sophie’s hand and said to come by for lunch tomorrow, because she was having a little party and needed a new face.

  At the party, Julie introduced her to Jay Ochsner, who came calling on Thirty-Second Street the next day. Her father, bemused and suspicious, had taken Mr. Ochsner aside, and to Sophie’s surprise they had emerged from this meeting of one mind. I would like you to encourage this man’s suit, Sophie, were Father’s exact instructions, later that evening, and Sophie had. She would do anything to please her father. She had encouraged Mr. Ochsner, and discovered how much fun it was, having a handsome suitor all to yourself, eager to please and flatter you, allowed to escort you to places you’d never been allowed to go, all under the approving eye of a father whose approval came so rarely.

  And so it went, for two whole months: shopping and tea and occasional clandestine adventures with Julie, courtship and tea and occasional clandestine kisses from the well-bred Mr. Ochsner. A new world. Maybe even a new Sophie.

  SO THAT’S THE WHOLE STORY. That’s how, in a nutshell, a few hours after bidding Mr. Rofrano good-bye beneath the Second Avenue El, on a bitter Saturday evening in the middle of January, the formerly seraphic Sophie Fortescue possesses an elegant and slightly daring wardrobe to match her elegant and slightly daring fiancé, and no one seems happier than her own father.

  “It’s how your mother would have wanted it,” he says, the absolute and final word on the matter, as Jay settles her coat over her shoulders while a taxi putters outside, waiting to whisk them uptown to a party at the home of Julie’s Schuyler cousins: Sophie’s first party as an engaged woman.

  Of course, Sophie will have to take her father’s word for that, because she never knew her mother. Mrs. Fortescue died when she was just a baby.

  ABOUT THOSE KISSES.

  There were only four of them, really. The first one arrived in the library of the Ochsner house on Thirty-Fourth Street, a room of such stupefying riches that Sophie wandered the walls in a kind of trance, running her fingers over the leather bindings, gasping softly to herself. Later, she learned that the rug beneath her feet was a rare Kilim, bought by Jay’s grandparents in Istanbul on their wedding tour, and that the pair of Delft urns on the prodigious mantel had been given to his great-grandfather by the Prince of Orange himself, for some obscure reason lost to family legend.

  At the time, however, only the room itself enchanted her: the shelves that reached from the floor to the delicately gilded ceiling, the books that filled those shelves. As a child, she had had few options for outside recreation, so with Virginia as her guide, she h
ad explored vast and intricate worlds from the worn cushions of the parlor sofa, only to return those worlds to the nearby public library a week later. Books, after all, were expensive, and it was better to eat than read. So the little shelf in Sophie’s bedroom contained a selection of volumes amassed lovingly over successive birthdays and Christmases, and the idea of an entire gilded library, old and venerable, covered with the fingerprints of one’s ancestors, never needing to be returned to its rightful owner—why, it stole her will!

  So she moved around the room in a slow clockwise rotation, trailed by a smiling Mr. Ochsner—he wasn’t Jay yet, not quite—emitting little gasps from time to time, until she reached the end of one shelf and turned.

  “Are all these really yours?”

  He wore an expression she hadn’t seen before, at least on him: a look of heartfelt wonder. The room was large, taking up an entire half of the grand first floor, and the winter light flattened against the side of his face. “Aren’t you a doll,” he said, laying one hand against the side of her face, and he had leaned forward and kissed her, Sophie Fortescue, her first kiss ever. His lips were soft and confident and left her deliciously breathless, and even though she knew he’d probably never lifted a single one of those books from its shelf, she didn’t mind the kiss at all. She thought it was strange and wonderful. In fact, she thought she might like another, and he obliged her a few days later when he came for lunch and presented her with a first edition of Daniel Deronda, one she’d especially admired, as a Christmas present.

  The third kiss was more daring, arriving on Thursday morning while they sat together on the parlor sofa, admiring the rose-shaped engagement ring on her finger, unexpectedly and temporarily alone, and he had actually pressed her into the cushions then, kissing her lips and chin and neck, springing away just in time when the floorboards creaked outside the door.

  And the fourth kiss is happening right now! Right here, in the back seat of the taxi, tasting like gin, more sloppy than she remembers, and not nearly so exciting. Jay smells of peppermint hair oil tonight, and the scent of peppermint always makes her feel sick and slightly terrified. His left hand has just entered her hair, and his right hand unbuttons her coat. She shoves his fingers away and jumps back toward the window. “What are you doing?” she demands, even though it seems perfectly obvious what he’s doing. (She hears those words in Julie’s voice—perfectly obvious! Perfectly obvious what a gentleman’s after, now that they’re engaged. Julie told her about that, during their ride this morning, and of course Sophie hadn’t quite believed her. We have all got the sex-instinct in varying degrees, Julie said, ever so matter-of-fact, and you shouldn’t try to suppress it, that’s the first requirement of a healthy mind.)

  Jay’s face flashes in and out of view as the streetlights slide by. “Darling, we’re engaged,” he says, just like Julie said he would, and Sophie can’t help but laugh, if only to cover the vertiginous state of her stomach.

  “What’s the joke?” Jay asks, a little injured.

  “Nothing. Just behave yourself. We’re engaged, but we aren’t married.”

  He reaches for her again. “And what do you know about that, Sophie dear?”

  “Just enough to know that you should stay on your side of the taxi for now.” She picks up his searching hand and winds it securely into her own, in order to slow her jiggling pulse. “There, that’s better.”

  “Now, Sophie. Don’t you trust me? I’m a gentleman. I just want to give you a little taste of married life, that’s all, so you know what’s coming. Nothing to be afraid of.” The taxi stops right under a streetlight, exposing a terribly wicked smile on the face of Sophie’s intended. His pupils are a little unsteady. The waft of peppermint strikes her again, making her stomach turn. She tries to breathe through her mouth instead of her nose. Anything to quell this unseemly surge of uneasiness in her viscera.

  “A taste of gin, more like it.”

  “Aw, don’t run cold on me, Sophie.”

  “I’m not cold. But a little birdie told me to beware of impromptu petting parties in the back seats of taxis, even when the gentleman in question is the man you’re going to marry.”

  “And what little birdie is that?”

  “A very wise birdie.” She puts his left hand back in his lap and keeps the right one where she can see it. Julie didn’t actually say Beware, exactly. She just said that while inhibitions were dangerous to your mental health, a girl still had to choose the right time and place, or she might end up in a pickle.

  A pickle. Of course! That’s why Sophie’s so uneasy just now, in the proximity of the man she’s supposed to adore.

  The taxi begins moving again. The traffic is noisy and urgent, and Sophie likes the way they’re cocooned in sound, crawling atop mad Manhattan Island in company with such a crowd. Thank goodness for Julie, explaining the fundamentals of bachelor management over tea and horses, or who knows what might have happened just now? A pickle, that’s what.

  Petting. She’s heard the word—who hasn’t?—but the reality isn’t quite what she thought. The kissing itself isn’t quite what she thought, either, now that the novelty has worn off, the slightly nauseous thrill of someone else’s mouth on yours, and anyway Jay’s face looks so unaccountably tired and blotchy and sort of heavy. Was it always so tired and blotchy? Or is it just the light from the streetlamps, not nearly so flattering as the light in the Ochsner library?

  Or is it the sick-making hair oil?

  Or Julie’s worldly advice?

  Or is she simply inhibited? Cold, like Jay said. What’s the word? Suppressed. Her libido all shriveled up and brooding, a danger to her mental health. But how can that be? It wasn’t shriveled up before, was it? It wasn’t shriveled up when he first kissed her. Just now. Tonight. Suddenly, in the back seat of this taxi, kissing her fiancé seems all wrong, when it should be more right than ever before.

  Jay flops back in his seat and begins to sulk—again, just as Julie warned!—and Sophie looks out the window and counts the blocks until they arrive at their destination, a beautiful new apartment building on Park Avenue, and Jay revives just enough to pay the driver with a crumpled dollar bill.

  “You haven’t told me their names,” she says, as he pulls her like a parcel from the taxi to the sidewalk. The cold air blows past her nose. Washes away the stale, peppermint interior of the taxi. She inhales deeply.

  “Whose names?” (Jay’s still sulking.)

  “Our hosts.”

  “Oh.” He looks up at the building, as if the sight of the facade will somehow jog his memory. “Schuyler. Philip Schuyler. Julie’s second cousin. He got married last year to his secretary.”

  “What’s her name?”

  They’re sweeping past the doorman now, and Sophie’s hand is wound through the crook of Jay’s elbow, and her sensational new engagement ring—an old ring, actually, but new to her—slides loosely around her fourth finger, under the glove. Two months ago, she was almost a schoolgirl; now, it seems, she’s fully grown, sweeping into a Park Avenue apartment building on the arm of Mr. Edmund Jay Ochsner, who will soon be her husband. And isn’t that why she encouraged Jay to begin with? Because it was time to grow up. To grow up and escape.

  “Lucy.” He snaps his fingers. “That’s it. Her name is Lucy. Lucy Young Schuyler.”

  BUT THE NAMES OF THEIR hosts don’t seem to matter, at least at first. Nobody receives them at the door, except a sort of expressionless housekeeper who accepts their coats and turns away down a service hallway. (Maybe manners aren’t important among the rich, Sophie thinks.) The light indoors is more golden and less harsh than the streetlights on Park Avenue, and Jay looks transformed: his shirtfront is as stiff as a board and as white as the moon, and his hair is brushed back in a shining metal helmet, streaked by tarnish.

  Sophie, her pulse settled, her viscera back in order, a little mortified now at the unexpected failure of her sex-instinct during the taxi ride, tells him how splendid he looks—she leaves out the tarnish,
of course—and at last the sulky expression starts to perk back up.

  “Splendid, am I? That’s good news, at my advanced age. You’re looking pretty smashing yourself, now that you mention it.” He lifts her hand and kisses the satin that covers her palm.

  That’s better, isn’t it? At least they seem like a newly engaged couple now, winding their affectionate way through the crush of bodies, hand in hand. An instinct rises between Sophie’s ribs—maybe not the sex-instinct, but something just as primitive—at the smell of cigarettes and perfume, the musk of human skin. Something she wants but cannot quite identify. A waiter passes by, bearing glasses of foaming champagne. She follows him longingly as he goes. They had champagne the other day, a vintage bottle that Jay brought over from the Ochsner cellar to celebrate the engagement, and Sophie thought it was the nicest thing she had ever tasted. Maybe that’s what she wants? Not sex, but champagne.

  She turns her head to Jay, who’s craning his neck this way and that. “Can you find us some champagne?” she shouts in his ear.

  “What’s that?”

  “Champagne!”

  “Sure! But first I want to—oh, there she is!”

  “Who?”

  Never mind. Off they go, winding back through the crowd, past a fireplace and a buffet table and maybe a thousand cigarettes. Sophie’s finding it hard to breathe, but she follows him gamely, hoping there will be champagne at the end of the journey. Champagne! Champagne will make it all better.

  There isn’t champagne, however. Jay falls to an abrupt halt in front of a milky half-dressed back, on which a beaded jet necklace dangles like an aboriginal tattoo above a swoop of black satin.

  He reaches out with his left hand and taps the matching shoulder.

  The woman—naturally, the owner of this mesmerizing rear spectacle belongs to the female persuasion—the woman turns her head and registers elegant surprise in one eyebrow.