A Certain Age

by Beatriz Williams

  Peter turns his eyes upward to inspect the ceiling. “This happens twice a week, you understand.”

  “Oh, but this time it’s real, Peter. I haven’t stopped thinking about him.”

  “Really? That’s—oh, three whole hours?”

  “Applesauce. Haven’t you heard of love at first sight?”

  “You haven’t even met.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t be such a wet blanket, Peter. You’re making me anxious.” She finishes her drink, snatches the cigarette from Peter’s fingers, and stubs it out in the ashtray. “Dance with me. It’ll settle my nerves.”

  “You haven’t got any nerves,” he says, but he stands up anyway and allows her to drag him off to the few square yards of linoleum flooring in front of the musicians, which is packed with frenetic dancers: feet flying, hands splayed. Sophie looks after them for a stunned few seconds, until Julie’s blond head is swallowed whole, leaving only a single erect black feather to shimmy above them like a periscope.

  Sophie returns her attention to the table before her, and the several glasses standing atop it, reminding her of downtown itself: all those buildings perched on such a tiny speck of land. The great weight of the Woolworth tower, reigning like a colossus. She picks one up and sniffs the rim. A medicinal smell assails her nostrils, like a hospital disinfectant.

  And that’s the drink that Julie’s already finished.

  She tries another one—an untouched glass—and extracts a little sip, just to prove she’s not afraid of it. Her tongue sizzles. Stiffens in shock. Goes a little numb. And then she looks up, because a shadow has just darkened the table, and it can’t possibly be Julie and Peter, can it? The music’s not over.

  The funny thing is, she’s had a premonition all along. She’s had the feeling that something’s coming, something unexpected and secretly delightful, or else she wouldn’t have abandoned her fiancé at the Schuylers’ party uptown. She wouldn’t have climbed into a taxi with Julie Schuyler and left for parts unknown if she hadn’t felt this waggling in her stomach, this tingling in her fingers beneath the satin and the rose-shaped engagement ring. Something’s arriving at her door, something marvelous, and she remembers—just as she turns from her highball glass, choking a little—where she’s felt this familiar anticipation before.

  So it’s not a surprise, is it, when she lifts her gaze to find Mr. Rofrano’s shadowed face staring down at her.

  “Hello, there,” she gasps, just before the coughing fit strikes.

  BY THE TIME JULIE AND Peter return, damp and scintillating, the coughing has died away, though the blushing has not. She knows her cheeks are pink—she suffers the telltale scorch of her own blood, right there under the skin—and probably her nose and neck, as well. Such a terrible blusher. Mr. Rofrano has drawn up a chair and offered her his handkerchief, which she’s just handed shyly back to him, and now he leans forward to ask her a question.

  As his black head bends to hers, Sophie turns to hear him better, and who should swing her head and meet Sophie’s gaze at that exact instant? Julie, that’s who. (Uncanny, isn’t it? How animals know when someone’s watching.) Julie stops dead, and her eyes move back and forth, cavalier and Sophie, and from the expression on her face, she’s just been murdered for the second time this evening.

  Mr. Rofrano rises politely from his chair. “Peter,” he says, nodding at Julie’s partner.

  “Rofrano. Glad to see you.” Gladness is not the tenor of Peter’s voice, however. “This is Julie Schuyler. You know Philip, of course? She’s his cousin.”

  Julie draws near and holds out her hand. “My goodness, Sophie. Do you two know each other?”

  “I met Miss Fortescue last week, when I had the honor of presenting her with a—a token from an admirer.”

  “You’re Sophie’s cavalier?”

  “Isn’t it amazing? Such a small world,” Sophie trills.

  “Yes, it is.” Julie leans over and snatches a drink. “I don’t think there’s more than two dozen people in it, sometimes.”

  “Four hundred, isn’t that right? The capacity of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom,” says Mr. Rofrano.

  “Oh, that’s just a story. Anyway, her house is long gone, and the ballroom with it.” She slings back the entire drink, all at once, and blinks her eyes furiously to keep it down.

  Peter places one hand at the small of her back. “Careful, now.”

  “Don’t be silly. I think I’d like to dance some more, darling, if you don’t mind?” She turns her head briefly to Mr. Rofrano. “A pleasure to meet you. Take good care of my little Sophie while I’m gone, won’t you?”

  LATER, AS MR. ROFRANO SEES her home in a taxi, Sophie can’t quite decide what Julie meant by that. Did she suspect some sort of attraction between the two of them, Sophie and Mr. Rofrano? Or had some other piece of knowledge fallen into place, from that jigsaw of ephemera that constituted the habits and customs of the New York upper class?

  Sophie hadn’t danced with him, after all. She’d steered her eyes scrupulously away from Octavian’s face, because she was engaged to another man, and Julie was smitten. They had chatted stiffly, conscious of this awkward thing between them, this fiction of impartiality. But you couldn’t fool Julie, could you? And Julie had obviously not been fooled.

  Sophie stares at the gloved hands in her lap and says, “I hope I haven’t put you too far out of your way.”

  “Of course not. Anyway, I’m not about to send a girl home by herself in the middle of the night.”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Kindness has nothing to do with it,” he says, almost under his breath, and then: “If you don’t mind my asking, shouldn’t your fiancé be around to do this kind of thing?”

  “We left him uptown at a party.”

  “Oh, of course. The Schuylers.”

  “How did you know that?”

  He hesitates. “Well, I was there, too, for a bit.”

  “Oh. You should have said hello.”

  “I didn’t see you, or I might have.”

  Sophie frowns, because there’s some fatal hole of logic there, but she’s too sleepy and too tipsy to locate it. The sleepiness has come over her like a blanket, since stepping into the taxi with Mr. Rofrano, and all she wants on this earth is to boldly lay her head on his woolen shoulder and plunge into an abyss of sleep from which she wouldn’t climb out for days. Already her eyelids are sagging. “Oh, of course you were there. How silly of me. That’s where Julie spotted you.”

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. You murdered her from across the room—”

  “I certainly didn’t mean to.”

  “—so she was forced to ask Peter to introduce you.” Sophie pauses. “How do you know Peter?”

  “I stayed at his family’s place in Long Island a couple of summers ago. I was just back from France. Not too sure what I wanted to do with myself. Whether I wanted to do anything at all.”

  “And did you find out? What you wanted to do, I mean?”

  “I guess I did. I thought I did, anyway.”

  The streets are passing quickly, too quickly. In a few minutes they will arrive on Thirty-Second Street, and Sophie will bid Mr. Rofrano good-bye and resume her life as the fiancée of Jay Ochsner. Planning a wedding and a honeymoon and a home together. “Selling bonds, you mean?”

  “It’s a living, I guess.”

  She doesn’t reply. Maybe if they don’t speak, the time will pass more slowly, and she can simply relish Mr. Rofrano’s presence beside her, aspect by aspect. Very solid and warm, smelling like cigarettes and the sweaty, alcoholic dankness of the establishment from which they’ve recently emerged. (You’ll see my Sophie home, won’t you, Mr. Rofrano? Julie said, sporting as only Julie could be, falling sideways into Peter, and Mr. Rofrano said of course he would.) His upper leg lies about a foot and a half from her upper leg, but she can feel him anyway, can perceive his presence on her skin as if they’re actually touching. Or maybe it’s just the cocktails? She onl
y drank one, but the effect is far in excess of any old glass of champagne, blurring lines and skin and clothes and borders until she can’t quite locate the territory where Sophie ends, or where Mr. Rofrano begins.

  Mr. Rofrano doesn’t speak either, and in some strange way—much like the imagined touching of their bodies, when there is none—the silence itself seems to speak for them, querying and replying back and forth. Until Sophie asks, a little too forcefully: “But what do you really want to do, then?”

  “Now that’s a funny question,” he says slowly.

  “What’s so funny about it?”

  “For one thing, no one’s ever asked me before.”

  “Nobody? Not your parents or anybody?”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “Oh!” Sophie squeezes her hands together. “I’m so terribly sorry. How stupid of me.”

  “That’s all right. You had no way of knowing.”

  “But you never talked about them, so I should have realized . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter. It happened a while ago.”

  “My mother died when I was a baby, and I haven’t stopped missing her.”

  “Did she? Well, I’m sorry for that.” He sets his hands on his knees, fingers spread. His thumbs rub against the sides of his trousers. “Do you mind if I ask how she died?”

  “I—I don’t know exactly. A sudden sickness of some kind. I don’t think they knew what it was, really. What about your parents?”

  There is a brief hesitation before he answers. “My father shot himself over some sort of bad investment when I was fourteen—”

  “Oh, Mr. Rofrano!”

  “And my mother died of the ’flu when I was in France.”

  “How terrible for you. I’m so sorry.”

  “It was a blow, I guess.” His fingers flex on his knees. “I got the news in December of 1918. My aunt sent the telegram. The war was over, but I hadn’t gotten my demobilization papers yet. They held the funeral without me.”

  “Oh, Mr. Rofrano.”

  “Anyway, I guess that’s why I stayed around Paris for a while, afterward.”

  “Because you had no one to go back to,” Sophie whispers. She reaches bravely across the eighteen inches and lays her hand—the left hand, the one hiding an engagement ring under the glove—on his, and begins a sentence that she regrets an instant later. “How I wish . . .”

  “Wish what?”

  “Nothing.” Twenty-Fourth Street. Only a minute or two left. Eight blocks of frozen pavement. Sophie withdraws her hand and says, hurriedly now, “You didn’t answer my question. What you really want to do.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you must know, deep down. You must know what’s missing.”

  He lifts his hands from his knees and folds his arms against his chest. “I used to love flying, until the war.”

  “But you don’t anymore?”

  “I didn’t, for a long time. I didn’t want to see an airplane ever again.”

  “But you can’t do that. You can’t turn your back on the thing you love most.”

  “I didn’t say I loved it the most.”

  “Still, it was a passion of yours, wasn’t it? There was a reason you loved it, there was a reason you loved flying that had nothing to do with shooting down other airplanes and killing people. So that reason must still exist inside you, waiting for the—the—the tide to go back out.”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”

  They lapse again into silence, and Sophie thinks that maybe she shouldn’t have spoken so eagerly and so passionately. A fault of hers: her reckless enthusiasm for romantic causes, so out of temper with the times. Nobody believes in romantic causes any more, especially not people who fought in the war, like Mr. Rofrano. In fact, it’s telling and even absolutely symbolic of the modern cynicism that he has gone from jousting in the sky, like a medieval knight, to selling government bonds from the security of his telephone in his tiny office (or so Sophie imagines it) on the corner of Wall and Broad.

  The taxi lurches into Thirty-Second Street, and Sophie, jolted to the present, opens up her pocketbook to hunt for the fare.

  “Don’t be silly,” says Mr. Rofrano. He reaches over and closes the pocketbook, and for just an instant their fingers tangle up, before Mr. Rofrano withdraws to open the door.

  He walks her up the steps. Sophie thanks him and asks if he has the time. He looks at his wristwatch and says it’s nearly two o’clock, and is anyone up to let her in? She tells him she has a latchkey and produces it from her pocketbook as proof.

  Mr. Rofrano waits to make sure that the key works, that the lock isn’t frozen and the door opens under her hand. “Thank you,” she says again, turning to face him. “I suppose it’s good night, then.”

  He takes her hand. “Good night.”

  They stand there a moment, holding hands, peering at each other. The wind whistles against her left ear, and then dies away.

  “Look,” he says softly, “what about going somewhere tomorrow?”

  “I—I’m going to church with my family in the morning. Eight o’clock.”

  “After that? Say, nine-thirty? I can meet you on the corner of Third Avenue, in my car.”

  “I—” She glances up behind her, at the windows of the house. “I don’t see why not, as long as I’m back for dinner. Where are we going?”

  He releases her hand and makes a little sigh, as if he’s been holding his breath all this time. “It’s a surprise,” he says, and turns to leap down the stairs to the sidewalk, and the taxi waiting by the curb.

  The New York Herald-Times, May 30, 1922

  TIT AND TATTLE, BY PATTY CAKE

  They like to start these things off with a bang, these Connecticut prosecuting attorneys, and regular readers of this column know that you can’t get much more bang for your dollar than Miss Julie Schuyler. Or simply JULIE, as we like to call her, in big bold typeface, with or without an exclamation point.

  Now, we all know what she was doing there in the witness stand, and we all know the likely nature of her testimony. So let’s fix our attention on more important things: namely, how she looked. Why, ravishing, of course! She’s gone and bobbed her pretty blond hair—a bit of a cliché, at this point, but the style really does suit her, unlike many of the girls who try out a little barber-shop rebellion. I’ve heard from some quarters that Julie is a reluctant witness for the prosecution, but she didn’t look reluctant to me. Far from it. She answered the gentleman’s questions with nothing short of aplomb, and let me tell you, aplomb isn’t an easy thing to achieve when the mercury rises above eighty-eight degrees by ten o’clock in the morning. Even the judge was charmed, and in a race of digits between the mercury and the judge’s age, why, I wouldn’t want to lay down a bet.

  In between witty asides and some very elegant eyebrow-raising, Miss Schuyler managed to convey that she had become friends with the accused’s daughter in the hat department at the Bergdorf Goodman emporium on Fifth Avenue in October of 1921, and despite numerous luncheons, teas, shopping excursions, and goodness knows what else in the company of Miss Fortescue, she never met the Patent King himself. Why? Because he didn’t want to be met, apparently. In fact, Miss Schuyler believes herself to be the first friend of Miss Fortescue’s acquaintance, for Miss Fortescue was kept under strict lock and key for the first nineteen years of her life, in the manner of Rapunzel, and the far greater part of the Fortescue-Schuyler antics were undertaken without the knowledge or permission of the accused. Why? inquired the prosecution, and Miss Schuyler shrugged her elegant shoulders and said she couldn’t imagine. Try, said the prosecution, in so many words, and naturally the defense sprang to its feet and objected—Conjecture, Your Honor!—and His Honor stirred himself to agree. So. Off with Miss Julie Schuyler, to the great regret of the court.

  Next to be called was that far less bewitching, but more informative figure: the infamous Downstairs Tenant, Mrs. Kelly, she of the soda bread. You will not b
e surprised to learn that she Never Trusted That Man (here she narrowed her eyes and cast a steely one at the accused, who made no response) and feared very much for the safety of Those Sweet Girls (here a gaze of maternal softness at the Patent Princesses, also unacknowledged) under his care. In order to confirm her suspicions about his character, she crept one evening to his place of work, a small garage nearby where the great inventor did his incomprehensible things with his inconceivable gadgets, and she searched through his private papers. Instead of ordering her arrested on the spot for criminal trespass, the prosecution was moved to ask her what she discovered. Nothing of note, she replied, shaking her head, but she was interrupted in her midnight work by none other than the accused himself, who threatened her with a sharp instrument and swore he’d make her rue the day if she ever returned. Naturally, she ran home, packed her things, and gave notice by way of a basket of soda bread. (At this point in her testimony, she indicated a basket she had left behind her on the bench, with which she invited the court to refresh itself.)

  I shall spare you, dear readers, the remaining details of Mrs. Kelly’s hour in the witness box, and the recess which followed, because I should be very unhappy if you stopped reading at that point and missed what I have to say about the final witness of the day, Mr. Philip Schuyler, who (you may speculate, and you would be correct) is related in some way to Miss Julie Schuyler. They are cousins, and both handsome in that rakish blond Schuyler manner, but Mr. Schuyler is a lawyer of some repute, and his testimony was perhaps the most anxiously awaited of the day, not least because it was the last.

  By the time Mr. Schuyler took the stand, the temperature had reached its considerable zenith, and we—audience and jury—were not especially moved to tolerate a lengthy recital of unimportant details. The prosecution, perhaps sensing this collective mood, cut straight to the chase. In what capacity was Mr. Schuyler acquainted with the accused? He had done some legal work for Mr. Fortescue, some years before, when the first of his patents came to be registered. In particular, Mr. Fortescue was concerned about the legality of his patents, since he did not possess a legal birth certificate, nor proof of identification. They had been lost in a fire. Mr. Schuyler had then assisted Mr. Fortescue in reconstructing his lost identity, and helped him form a corporation by which his patents could be registered and licensed, without Mr. Fortescue’s personal privacy being disturbed.