The Lucky Ones

by Anna Godbersen

  “Oh, dear!” Astrid’s hands flew to her face. By then her mind was ticking with fear. The sight of that car upside down with its top bashed in made her insides go quiet.

  Before she could peel her hands away from her gaping mouth, Charlie was out of the car, charging toward the wreck. She thought he must be going to see if the man was all right, and that she had better help, too. But as she came to the upside-down car, she knew that Charlie wasn’t going to help him. Charlie was waving a pistol in the air.

  “Charlie—”

  But he wasn’t listening. “You threaten me in front of my wife?” he shouted. “In front of my wife?” he repeated like a skipping record. “In front of my wife?”

  The man’s reply was just a low, agonized groan. Astrid heard him before she saw him, and when she saw him her stomach did a flip. He was trying to crawl through the shattered window. The brawny confidence he’d exhibited in the parking lot was gone. His teeth were clenched, and his eyes were wild. The rain that had been off and on all day was a downpour now, and he slipped when he reached the overgrown grass.

  “I’m just a messenger,” the man wheezed. He was having a hard time getting the words out, as though his ribs had been knocked into his lungs. He was reaching under his lapel, but he was too slow to get a good grip on the gun.

  “A messenger?” Charlie kicked the gun away. His arm drew a long, furious arc through the still night air before the butt of his own pistol met the man’s temple. Blood spurted from the man’s forehead, and Astrid instinctively covered her face with her hands. The next time Charlie spoke, an uncommon ferocity had taken over his voice. “That’s what I think of your message.”

  After that Charlie started kicking him. She knew because of the way Charlie grunted and the sound of his hard shoes against the man’s soft body and the way the man groaned. Finally she couldn’t stand the groaning anymore, so she forced her hands away from her face and rushed forward. “Charlie, stop it!” she wailed.

  “Stop it?” Charlie was kicking the man more savagely now. Strands of hair had come unglued and were hanging in his eyes as he went on swinging his leg with full force. “They thought they could humiliate me! They thought they could humiliate me in front of my wife!”

  The man’s eyes had closed, and though he was still groaning he seemed to have gone beyond pain somehow.

  “You’re going to kill him!”

  She reached for Charlie’s arm, but he spun around before she got hold of him. When he was facing her he seemed magnified, like a giant. His eyes were as shiny as an animal’s, and his face was sleek with rain.

  “Charlie,” she whispered, but she knew that somehow it wasn’t really him. “Charlie, if you don’t stop, you’re going to kill him.”

  “You want me to kill him? You want me to kill him?” he shrieked. His eyes were fixed on her when he took the first shot. Though he hadn’t looked where the gun was pointing, the bullet hit the man in the middle of his blue suit jacket. The man screamed, and the smell of burning gunpowder mingled with the metallic odor of blood.

  “No, Charlie, don’t kill him.” Astrid used as much force as she could muster to get the words out, and still it was the voice of a small, frightened child.

  “Now I have to kill him,” Charlie replied, almost irritably, as though he were talking about a workhorse ruined by a broken leg. She stepped toward him, but it was too late. Charlie’s back was to her when he fired the second shot, but she was close, and when the man’s head erupted, blood splattered all over her white lace dress. She couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t even remember what it was like to hear.

  Neither she nor Charlie said anything as they got back in the car. Charlie was driving fast, but she knew it wasn’t possible to go as fast as they seemed to be going. It was like in the pictures, when the action gets sped up and everyone does everything in double time. But that was usually for comic effect, and Astrid couldn’t imagine ever laughing again. The blood was seeping through her dress, and she was afraid to glance down for fear of what she might see there.

  They came through the gates of Dogwood at a reckless speed, and the wheels shrieked and sputtered against the wet grass as they came up the hill. Already the lawn was beginning to flood. Charlie put his hand against the car’s horn, three long insistent blasts, as Astrid tumbled out the passenger-side door.

  She could hear again. She could hear, but she wished she couldn’t, because that just meant the awful sound of Charlie’s voice speaking urgently and callously to his goons about what they were going to do with that man. Her hands clung to each other as she moved up the switchbacking flights of stone steps, into the pooling yellow light of the house. Her hair and clothes were soaked, but this didn’t seem to matter very much. It occurred to her, as she went up the main indoor stairwell, that she might be a ghost, so little did she feel and so barely did her feet touch the ground. But when she reached the second-floor landing, she knew that she was alive because her stomach turned inside out and the steak she had eaten for dinner was all over the floor in tiny, revolting, half-masticated pieces.

  14

  THE STORM MADE LANDFALL AFTER MIDNIGHT, although by then most people were indoors. On the east end of the island, windows had been boarded up and the electricity shut down. The old two-lane road that ran back toward the city was impassable, and many of the houses that had been built close to the shore or in low-lying areas were flooded. Trees had been ripped out and tossed around and woke up in new positions with their roots exposed. Very little business was done in the places that made a nightly mint selling illegal liquor, although there were a few, in Manhattan, where people were forced to stay all night and the reserve stocks were completely wiped out, and everyone present left with shameful smiles and forever after asked new acquaintances where they’d been during the hurricane of ’29.

  The famous pilot Max Darby and the bootlegger’s daughter Cordelia Gray watched the storm come and go from the mostly empty ballroom of the Grand Marina Lodge out at Montauk, whose seaplane Max had borrowed to scoop her up. He had done aerial exhibitions for them when they first opened, he explained, and the manager had remained a friend, even after Max’s patron dropped him. That, plus the fact that they still owed him for the last time he had scrawled a marriage proposal for one of their important visitors in the sky, had gotten him the use of the plane—plus a dinner of fried clams, which they’d eaten off red-and-white paper plates on the beach before the real rain arrived. Most of the guests got out in time, before the electricity was shut off and the last ice shipment started to melt. The staff were forced to eat the oysters, which otherwise would have gone bad; they did it with a cheerful sense of duty and brought out old stores of white wine to wash them down.

  The band had stayed, and their playing got louder as night gave in to morning and the chambermaids started dancing with napkins on their heads. They could see the waves beating against the rocky shore, and the dark clouds charging toward them from the south, but to Max and Cordelia none of it seemed to hold any real threat. They sat side by side in low-slung canvas chairs that usually lived on the deck, and they held hands through the storm and drank cola. Later, the staff of the lodge grew sentimental and began telling each other sweet lies. The band played slow, and Cordelia convinced Max to stand up with her.

  “I can’t dance at all,” he told her four or five times, before she put his hands in place and rested her head against his shoulder. He couldn’t, that much was true, but she didn’t mind. She liked just moving vaguely to the music in his arms.

  By dawn the storm had passed. The shore was strewn with wreckage, but the sky was a delicate pink where the sun nudged against the pale gray. The staff of the Grand Marina were sleeping on tables, those who had not returned to their own quarters, and Max and Cordelia drowsily watched the colors change out on the horizon.

  They talked to each other in quiet, honeyed tones. Max’s voice was slow, and for a few moments she thought he must be on the verge of sle
ep. She put her hand up to his chest, to comfort him. That was when she felt the tension in his muscles, and her eyes opened again.

  “Before I met you, all I ever thought about was flying. It’s really the only thing I’ve ever liked.”

  “It’s a nice thing to like,” Cordelia murmured.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever cared about someone’s good opinion as much as I care about having your good opinion.”

  “You have it.”

  The sun was really up now. The big glass windows magnified its rays, and she could feel the heat on her skin and through her eyelids, and she was smiling vaguely to herself.

  “Cordelia…,” he began, but his voice was like a car that won’t turn on. He shifted in his seat and exhaled hard through his nose. “When we leave, when we drive back to the North Shore…when I drop you at Dogwood.” He exhaled again and swung his head away from her. “I want to know for sure I’m going to see you again.”

  Cordelia remained very still. Her legs stayed languidly crossed, and she left her hand where it was, just above Max’s heart. His words had been perfectly ordinary, but she knew that he was telling her something he hadn’t told her before, that it was a kind of declaration. She couldn’t look at him. Suddenly she knew how badly she’d been wanting him to make a declaration like that all along, and she was afraid that if she saw his face when he did it she’d burst into tears.

  “I’ll never find another girl I want to talk to as much as you, and I know that for sure.” He was talking fast, as though he was afraid she might say no to him if he paused long enough for her to speak. “Flying is all I’ve ever wanted. I want to be the best at what I do. I want everybody to know I’m the best. I think I’ve been afraid that if you were my girl I’d be thinking about you all the time, that my mind would get hooked on you, and I’d lose everything I’ve worked for. But now I have lost everything, and I know I’m going to get it back anyway, so I’m not scared anymore. Not of being distracted by you, nor what anybody will say about you being my girl…” His voice had grown hoarse again, but he pushed through: “Will you be my girl? For real, so that everybody knows?”

  “I’m your girl already, Max, and I don’t care who knows it.”

  When she heard herself saying those words an involuntary smile bloomed on her lips. Over on the other side of the ballroom people were waking up, talking to each other, making coffee. She could smell the coffee, and she knew the day was advancing. She was excited for the future days in which she would be known as Max’s girl, but she wasn’t ready for this private moment—alone with Max in a faraway corner of Long Island that was drenched in new-day sunlight—to end. “Only sit with me like this a while longer.”

  “All right,” he said, and laid his hand on his chest over hers.

  “How did your mother know to call you Valentine?”

  “What do you mean?” He was standing before the mirror in his dressing room, off the cream-and-gold master bedroom he shared with Sophia, adjusting the high collar of the knee-length gray coat that was to be his costume for The Good Lieutenant. It was Sophia’s room, and Sophia’s husband—Letty had not totally forgotten these facts. But she kept thinking of what Valentine had said, that something that felt this good couldn’t possibly be wrong, and anyway, since Sophia was off with Montrose, wasn’t Letty really in the position to do something quite selfless, by saving him from a loveless marriage?

  The studio had sent the costume over that morning, although neither Valentine nor Letty saw it until the afternoon, when Hector stepped off the elevator carrying it over one arm. They had fallen asleep late last night, curled on opposing couches in the sunken living room. The last thing Letty remembered was that Valentine had said he wanted to sketch her, just as she was, and asked her to stay still. She had tried hard to keep her eyes open, but her eyelids had been so heavy. On the radio they reported that there had been a storm in the night, but they had slept through all that. Now, sitting on the edge of the red velvet settee, all she could think was that he looked like the human embodiment of romance. That was what she meant, but when she realized it her cheeks flushed and she began to fidget with the hem of her skirt.

  “It’s such a perfect name for you,” she murmured. After the words came out she realized how fawning she had sounded, and a dark thought occurred to her. Perhaps their kiss didn’t mean much, perhaps they’d just gotten carried away in the moment, in which case she ought not to be so starry-eyed now. “That’s all I meant.”

  “But you’ve never known me by any other!” He was absorbed with correcting the arch of his left eyebrow with his right pinkie. “If you’d known me as Herman all these years, I would seem the perfect Herman!”

  “Herman!” Letty repeated, half laughing, half snorting. “You could never be Herman.”

  “You don’t think I’d be handsome if my name was Herman?”

  After he spoke he went on watching her in this hopeful way, which for some reason reminded Letty of Good Egg, how she gazed up at her mistress for approval, and when she saw that, she felt not so shy anymore and went over to him.

  “Letty.” He pronounced her name as though it were some beautiful, mythical land, which he was just glimpsing for the first time. With his index finger he traced the line of her chin. “Letty, what a lucky thing it was to meet you.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes.” His fingertip traveled from the tip of her chin down her neck and along her arm, until he had her small hand in his larger one. “Will you have dinner with me?”

  The idea of sitting across a restaurant table with a man like Valentine, who had seen his name in the newspaper and traveled to Europe, whom women all over the world thought of when they were drifting off to sleep, was so overwhelming to Letty that she almost felt she should say no. Except she didn’t want to say no. She took a deep breath and told herself that last night had been real.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go separately, just so it doesn’t look strange to Hector…or any fans of mine. Is that all right?”

  She nodded. In fact, she wasn’t sure why this mattered, and she knew in some vague way that if she thought hard about it, she might come to the conclusion that she was doing something wrong. But mostly it sounded exciting—that they would be out in the world, around all kinds of people, but only they two would know of the feelings they harbored for each other.

  “Good—now go get dressed. And Letty?”

  She was on the threshold of the bedroom by then and had to look back at him over her shoulder. “Yes?”

  “Will you wear that dress you wore the other night?” Suddenly he was grinning at her like a boy. “The red one.”

  This sent a shudder of happy pride through Letty, and though she was tempted to respond with an enthusiastic affirmation, she first asked herself what Sophia would have done, and so it was with nothing more than a vague smile that she drifted away toward her own room to make herself pretty enough for a date with the star of The Hobo and the Heiress.

  15

  THE SKY WAS THAT WEAK BLUE THAT COMES AFTER A rain, and the fields below them were dark and waterlogged from the weather that had passed over Long Island in the night. It was cool high above the fields, even though Cordelia had replaced the yellow slicker with a leather jacket like the one Max always wore in his publicity photos. The Grand Marina Lodge’s little green-and-white biplane roared so that they would have had to almost shout to hear each other, but there was no need. Since their conversation in the ballroom of the lodge, they were easy in each other’s silence.

  Then, all of a sudden, New York City was before them. The sun was on the water, as well as on the skyscrapers, which jutted up from the island of Manhattan like the points of a particularly chaotic crown, pink with the morning. She glanced at Max and was glad that she had not blinked, that day in Union, when the urge to run was strong enough in her to pack a suitcase.

  It was about the time she saw Roosevelt Island—a narrow slip of land splitting the broad river
in half—that Max brought the plane down quickly. At first she was sure that something was wrong with the engine, or that he had made a terrible mistake, and her insides flooded with fear. The water, which was busy with boats at that hour, came at them fast. But when she glanced at him she saw he was not afraid. In fact, a hint of a smile lingered on his face. She looked straight ahead of her and held her breath as they went swooping down, close enough that she saw the green-and-white fuselage reflected on the glassy surface as they whisked by. Over their heads went the span of the Queensboro; to their left were the stern white buildings of the Roosevelt Island insane asylum; to their right was the road that circumnavigated Manhattan’s east side, where perhaps one of the passengers in one of those miniature cars was turning his head at exactly the right moment to see the airplane emerging improbably from under the bridge and ascending back toward the clouds.

  Cordelia’s heart lifted as they climbed higher. She wanted to say something clever and quippy, something like “I’ve been over the Queensboro, but only you could take me under it,” but before she could form the right phrase, she saw the Williamsburg Bridge growing large in the windshield. A little figure on the bridge waved, and the space began to fall away beneath them.

  “Woohoo!” she whooped, when she comprehended Max’s audacious plan, flattered that she was in on it. Her smile held until she heard the long, rude drone of the foghorn and saw the big barge that lay like a beached whale on the water, directly in their path.

  “Oh, God,” she muttered and closed her eyes.

  But the impact never came, and instead she felt her body turning sideways with the plane. Cracking one lid, she saw that Max had maneuvered so that they whipped by the barge, just barely, and then they were up again, watching the river curve along the bottom of Manhattan. As soon as her breath returned she realized that she trusted Max to take her anywhere. Anyway, she already knew where he was going, and when the plane dipped down under the Manhattan Bridge, scattering seagulls, she was neither surprised nor particularly afraid. She was smiling broadly by the time they came upon the Brooklyn Bridge, the fine spiderwebs of its cables rosy with the rising sun and its two proud towers urging them onward. They seemed to say: “Come on in.” Down went the plane, through the shadow of the span, and there was New York Harbor, gaping wide in the direction of the sea.