A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  “Ox?” she inquires, in a voice like the drizzling of cream over dessert. “Whatever are you doing in a respectable drawing room on a Saturday night?”

  Jay releases Sophie’s hand and places his fingertips in the small of her back. “Sisser,” he says, like the cat that swallowed the goose that laid the golden egg, “I have the honor of presenting to you your future sister-in-law, Miss Sophia Fortescue.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.

  —HELEN ROWLAND

  THERESA

  Manhattan, later that night

  YOU KNOW, if it weren’t for Man o’ War, the Boy and I might never have found each other again. Imagine that: a racehorse decides your fate.

  I think it must have been about a week after our unsuccessful encounter at the van der Wahls’ swimming pool, the one that nearly reduced me to tears. Naturally I put the whole episode behind me and plunged into a relentless week of—well, of whatever it is I did, before the Boy and I became lovers. I visited friends, I read books, I swam in the ocean, I went to every damned cocktail party between West Hampton and Montauk Point. I believe I competed in a horse show—if memory serves—on my favorite mare, Tiptoe. We won second place over the jumps. The ribbon’s hanging in the stable somewhere.

  Anyway, we got to talking afterward, me and the horsier set, and the subject of Man o’ War came up. Had anyone seen him race yet? It turned out nobody had. We consulted the evening edition and discovered, lo and behold, that the champion was due to start in the Dwyer Stakes at Aqueduct the next day. Or rather—since dawn was nearly breaking—today.

  So we went home to our respective houses and slept and changed clothes, and then we drove west in Ned van der Wahl’s Buick all the way to Queens, arriving just in time for the third race on the day’s card. The Dwyer was the fourth.

  The place was jam-packed, as you might imagine. I later heard that forty thousand souls occupied the stands that day. The clubhouse was already full, so we proceeded through the sweaty and unfamiliar grandstand instead, past the long lines of common folk at the betting windows until we hit the fresher air—I speak in relative terms—on the other side. The entrants for the third race were just then emerging from the paddock to parade onto the track, and the bugle called crisply, making my blood stir. As the last notes floated over the heat, someone said, “Hello, isn’t it that kid staying with the van der Wahls?”

  And it was.

  The Boy stood not twenty yards away, leaning his elbows on the rail by the finish pole, visible in flashes as the crowd shifted between us. He wore a light, wrinkled suit and a boater of pale straw low on his forehead against the burning July sun. A folded Racing Form dangled from his left hand, and a cigarette from the right, and he had fixed a ferocious concentration on the animals now jogging down the track.

  We called him over, and he straightened and stared at us in perfect astonishment. Even twenty yards away, I noticed the paleness of his eyes against his tanned face. He tucked the Racing Form under his arm and forced his way to where we stood, adjoining the winner’s circle, and my blood, already awakened by the call of the bugle, just about boiled in my veins.

  He kept away from me at first. He told me later that he was afraid to come close, because he thought the others would notice something. Because I was, after all, Mrs. Sylvester Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, and he was nothing but a Boy just back from France.

  But Nature will have her way, I’m afraid, and by the time the horses had assembled behind the long elastic webbing that marked the starting line, we stood somehow next to each other by the rail, a few yards short of the finish pole, while our friends talked and laughed nearby, not the least bit interested in the race about to begin. Ned van der Wahl’s patrician voice floated out confidently among the broad Brooklyn vowels turning the air blue around us. The Boy had put out his cigarette, and the Racing Form now occupied both hands, though he was really looking at the horses. His cheeks were pink. I thought of his abrupt departure when I saw him last, and I wondered if perhaps I’d misread the reason.

  “Do you have a favorite in this race, Mr. Rofrano?” I asked.

  “I put ten dollars down on Number Four to win.”

  “It sounds as if you’re a regular.”

  He fiddled with the Racing Form. “My dad used to take me to the track on weekends, when I was a kid. I saw Colin win the Belmont in the middle of a rainstorm. That hooked me.”

  Here on the rail, you could actually hear the faint shouts of the jockeys and the starters, as the horses milled around behind the webbing. It looked like Bedlam. I didn’t know how they were going to make a race of it. A minute passed, and another, and the Boy and I didn’t say anything, just stood there side by side along the rail, pretending absorption in the spectacle up the track while the sun beat down on the brims of our hats and the crowd hooted and spat. And then, for a strange and pregnant instant, all went still.

  The barrier went up.

  We kept quiet as the contest took shape. It was a mile, a stakes race for two-year-olds, and it didn’t take long, a minute and a half, but it seemed longer. It seemed epic, horses taking the lead and falling back, someone else surging up. As the pack shifted its way down the backstretch, I felt the gradual increase in the Boy’s state of tension, nerve by nerve. They rounded the final turn. The rumble of hooves drew nearer and larger, and as the flashes of colored silk clarified in the haze, my own fingers tightened unconsciously into fists, and the Boy’s body, arranged by my side, coiled into a live wire. The gamblers roared behind us. The horses thundered by in a fleshy cloud.

  I turned to the Boy, a little breathless. “Did he win?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Marshall.” He smiled. His cheeks were still pink, but this blush had a different fundamental quality to the one before it. “Yes, he did. Shall we go collect my winnings?”

  Apparently there’s a euphoria associated with winning a bet on a horse race, a kind of invincible glee. I think that’s why the Boy made me this reckless offer, at this particular minute, when he had tried so hard and so sternly to stay away before. He wasn’t stern now, nor even diffident; he couldn’t be stern or diffident when he had just won a ten-dollar bet on a horse at eleven-to-one odds, and I got all caught up in the smoke of his elation and smiled back.

  “That sounds divine,” I said.

  We slipped invisibly past our friends and pried our way through the grumbling grandstand crowd to the betting windows, where the Boy collected his hundred and ten dollars and secured them with a plain silver clip in the inside pocket of his jacket. He looked at his watch. “They should be getting ready in the paddock now, Mrs. Marshall. Do you want to take a look at him?”

  “At whom?”

  “Why, Man o’ War.”

  I had forgotten all about the big red racehorse. Can you believe it? I followed the Boy through the grandstand gates to the paddock, which was thick and crowded and buzzing. I held my hat and craned my neck, trying to see above all the heads before me, but it was no use, and I shouted in the Boy’s nearby ear that we should go back to the track and wait for the great horse there.

  “Now, Mrs. Marshall, that’s no way to get things done,” he said. “Come with me.”

  He dragged my arm around his elbow and proceeded to slice his way through that crowd, person by person, earning us any number of angry looks and spiteful ejaculations, but I didn’t care. The Boy’s arm was young and strong beneath my hand, like a green oak, and euphoria still drenched us. By the time he landed against the paddock rail, dragging me with him—or rather against him, because there really wasn’t room—we were both laughing. And I don’t think I’d laughed (a real laugh, I mean, not those brittle false laughs drawn out of you by cocktails and by the merciless demands of the social contract) in two whole years.

  The Boy extracted his arm from between our compressed bodies and pointed his right index finger at the open sta
lls before us. “Look, there he is.”

  There he is. I don’t know if there’s been a more magnificent horse, before or since. If there has, I haven’t seen him. That beautiful ruddy animal could make you forget anything, could make you forget the war and the communists and the Boy wedged against you. On this hot July day of his fourth year, nineteen hundred and twenty by the Christian calendar, he was a giant. He held his head at an improbably high angle, king over us all, and his chestnut coat was built of fire. He didn’t want to be saddled, but saddled he must be, and they got the leather on him, I don’t know how. He settled down a bit then, just kicking out a hoof now and again, to remind everyone not to get too friendly. It didn’t even occur to me to look at the other horse.

  “Isn’t he a beauty?” said the Boy, very soft, next to my ear.

  He stood right up against my back, pressed there by the crowd around us, so that we couldn’t help the indecent proximity, could we? I felt all shameful and electric, like a radio crackling with static. My buttocks fit neatly into his thighs. I could smell his perspiration.

  “He’s magnificent,” I agreed.

  The jockeys went up; the horses headed out to the track. There were just two of them, because Man o’ War, four races into his three-year-old season, had already scared away everybody else and won each contest under what the Racing Form called a “stout pull,” or “eased up,” or some other form of sportsmanlike restraint. (How they managed to restrain the colt at all, I couldn’t imagine; as he charged furiously into the tunnel, he reminded me of a locomotive.) Today, his lone challenger—so the Boy informed me, as he released me from my intimate prison—was a talented chestnut colt named John P. Grier.

  “The poor sacrificial lamb,” I said, as we pushed our way back under the grandstand toward the track.

  “Well, he’s got a fighting chance. He’s only carrying a hundred and eight pounds, and Red’s carrying a hundred and twenty-six.”

  “And that makes such a terrible difference?”

  “As a rule of thumb, Mrs. Marshall, the track handicappers generally figure a pound of extra weight equals about a length lost in speed, so I guess you could say that Red’s giving Grier a head start of eighteen lengths. He’s a Whitney colt,” the Boy added, as if that made a difference.

  “Oh, does Harry own him?”

  “Bred him, too. By Whisk Broom, out of a Disguise mare. Care to place a bet?”

  I let him put down ten dollars on Man o’ War for me, and he put down the rest of his winnings on John P. Grier, just to give the little colt a break. By the time we fought our way back out to the track, the horses had reached the starting line on the other side of the infield. Or so we presumed; we couldn’t see a thing, and we hadn’t a hope of reaching our earlier position on the rail, let alone finding our friends. The crowd was so densely packed, you couldn’t move an inch, except the Boy somehow did: shoving one person aside and then another, selfishly winning us closer to the action.

  A roar swept the throng: they’re off.

  “But I can’t see!” I shouted, and the Boy actually elbowed a man off on a nearby bench.

  “Say!” the man said angrily, lifting a fist.

  “Make way for the lady,” said the Boy. The man took one look at the two of us—vigorous Boy, lady of a certain age—and turned away, smashing his hat down on his head until his crown nearly burst through the straw.

  The Boy put his hands around my waist and hoisted me up.

  Well, I can tell you, that unexpected and gallant action nearly took my breath. I gripped the Boy’s steadying fingers with one hand and shaded my eyes with the other—the sun was full on my face—and strained to see across the infield to the galloping horses beyond.

  “What’s the story?” the Boy shouted.

  “I can’t tell! I don’t see the other horse. It’s just Red, I think—no, wait!” I rose on my toes, swaying wildly, clutching the Boy’s fingers. “It’s the two of them! They’re running together! They’re coming into the turn, they’re side by side! My God!”

  The roar around me was like a wall, like I could have flung out my arms and supported myself by sound alone. Strange that so many lone voices could amalgamate into a uniform frantic din. I realized that my own shout was among them, that I’d given up on sentences and begun screaming a primitive Go! Go! into the barrage, and I didn’t even know which colt I was urging on. Both of them, maybe: the great red horse and Harry Whitney’s scrappy challenger, barreling around the turn toward the long, smoky homestretch, flinging themselves recklessly forward and forward, as closely matched as if they were pulling a single carriage.

  They say it was one of the greatest races ever, that Dwyer Stakes run in the first year of the new decade after the war. I haven’t been to many horse races, so I can’t really say one way or another. All I remember is that I came back to life in those last thirty seconds or so: that my cold little heart burst free from its ribs and climbed all the way up my throat to the roof of my mouth, as John P. Grier hung gamely on, taking perhaps two strides for every one of Red’s, and they bobbed closer and closer and no one was winning, neither colt had beaten the other, and they couldn’t possibly keep this up. They would kill themselves. They would kill me.

  On and on, back and forth, my heart throttling my breath, and just as they flashed past the eighth pole (or so I understood later, for I didn’t notice that pole at the time) Grier stuck his head out in front.

  You wouldn’t have thought it possible for that crowd to yell any louder, but it did. We screamed and screamed. The little colt’s nose poked out bravely from behind Man o’ War’s big red body, just about the only thing you could see of him—just that game, game head, taking the lead from the immortal champion.

  In the next instant, Red’s rider reached back with his whip and struck Man o’ War’s side.

  He hadn’t been touched with a whip all season, I believe: not since a single dramatic race the year before, the only race he’d ever lost, and that one because he was boxed in throughout. He’d never been challenged; he’d won all his races handily, rated by his jockey so he wouldn’t win by too many lengths and humiliate the Whitneys and Belmonts and Astors who sent their horses against him. No one had ever looked Man o’ War in the eye, and now Grier looked him in the eye, Grier pushed his head out in front, and Red’s jockey went to the whip.

  A single blow, and Man o’ War shot forward. In a few strides, he was half a length in front; the jockey hit him again, and Grier was beat. I don’t think I’d ever screamed like that. I jumped up and down on the bench, yanking on the Boy’s firm hand. Six seconds later, Man o’ War streaked past the finish pole, a length and a half in front of gallant John P. Grier, setting a whole new American record for the mile and an eighth, and they say Grier was never the same. His heart broke right down the middle that afternoon, and while he was still a good colt, maybe even the second-best of his generation, he was never again a great one.

  Man o’ War went on to smash several more records that year, and won every race.

  Afterward, we couldn’t find the others, and the Boy offered to drive me back to Southampton in his secondhand Model T, though he expected it might be dark by the time we reached our destination, Mrs. Marshall.

  I said yes.

  AS SOMEBODY MENTIONED EARLIER, THE Boy was staying with the van der Wahls that summer, the summer he got back from France, right before he took the job selling bonds at Sterling Bates. Ned van der Wahl had once worked with the Boy’s father at Morgan bank, I believe, and though the Boy wasn’t quite of the same social caliber as the van der Wahls—too new, too dark—old Ned was always a gentleman, always the kind of man who’d offer to put up an old colleague’s war hero son in his guesthouse for the summer, without regard for the vowel at the end of his surname.

  So the Boy has a few connections in our little world, here and there, and I’m always a little anxious that we might bump into each other at some gathering or another, the way we did at the van der Wahls’ swimming pool,
the way we bumped excruciatingly throughout the rest of that summer of 1920 out on Long Island, pretending we were just the Boy and Mrs. Marshall, exchanging pleasantries regarding the weather and the quality of the company. Anxious and perhaps more, because it is a bit of a thrill, those accidental bumpings: an absolute nerve-zapping thrill, to see the Boy’s sleek head appear without warning in somebody’s drawing room, and his white collar against his golden skin. To talk about stock prices when we really want to talk about sex. Sometimes I think he does it on purpose, just to warm up my blood, to wind up the anticipation for what comes after the party, when we’ve left the rest of the world behind us.

  But he doesn’t appear this evening at the Schuylers’ Park Avenue apartment, even though I’ve dropped the details of the affair in his ear more than once. Instead, as I stir my way through the living room to bid farewell to my hostess—I’m a woman of the quaint old manners, you understand, and hostesses must be attended to, even if they were formerly secretaries—I find I am entirely alone, though surrounded by faces I’ve known my entire life, in drawing rooms and ballrooms and clubs and ocean liners, and the fact of my isolation presses against my temples and my chest in such a way that I’m finding it difficult to breathe. Or maybe it’s the smell of cigars drifting from the library.

  I discover my host first. “Philip, love,” I say, “I’m looking for your charming wife.”

  “She’s putting the baby back to bed. Apparently all our noise woke the poor little tyke, and she wandered into the dining room just as my aunt Prunella toppled into the punch bowl. Can I be of assistance, perhaps?”

  I like Philip Schuyler. I like him a great deal, in fact, for I suspect he’s a man of fundamental decency, for all that he’s nearly as fond of the sauce as he is of his pretty new wife. He has polished blond hair and a face poised handsomely on the verge of ruin, and should one arrive on his doorstep in one’s time of trouble, he would undoubtedly deliver up gin and sympathy by the bucketful. He crushes out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray and offers me a look of expectant impatience: a host with countless demands on his attention, but he still makes time for you.