The Lucky Ones (14 page)

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 sleep. 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.

Max looked at her and returned her smile. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

“Only a little,” she answered, eyes sparkling. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought.”

The harbor was littered with boats of every size—pleasure cruisers and tugs and the kinds of ships that carry rich people across the oceans and the kinds that carry freight. As Max pulled the plane higher they erupted, blowing their horns in loud celebration, as though they had heard the news already of Max’s feat and knew what they were witnessing. Of course that wasn’t possible, and Cordelia was happy with the knowledge that she was the one with him when he piloted his aircraft under all four East River bridges.

“You know, it’s funny,” she said, once they were turned back in the direction of White Cove.

“What is?”

“All this time I thought you were such a serious, secretive sort, but now I see you’re just a showoff, really!”

“I don’t have any secrets anymore.” He glanced at her and shrugged. “I guess I don’t have much to hide now.”

Cordelia nodded and sighed. It seemed to her at that moment that nothing could go wrong, ever. “I hope you don’t regret it. Asking me to be your girl, I mean. I know you want to be the greatest. And I know you are. I just—I’d hate it if I were the reason you don’t become what you most want to be.”

“Don’t say that.” Max was quiet a minute, but then he turned to her and his face was open and soft with understanding. “Anyway, you want to be the greatest, too.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true.”

Below them the packed grid of streets had given way to greenery, and they were quiet, listening to the roar of the engine slowly sinking through the clouds. When Cordelia saw the hangar squatting on the vast airfield, her stomach felt woozy and she wished she didn’t have to come back down to Earth yet. She wanted to keep going, out over Long Island, toward the ocean, or wherever Max would take her. Up in the air it was easy to feel that everything was clean and perfect. But that notion faltered when she saw the crowd that had formed near the hangar. Shiny black automobiles were parked at all angles, more than on any normal Sunday. They touched down—the ground meeting them with sudden impact—and sped across the grass. She watched through the glass as the crowd by the cars grew larger, and she began to make out the details of their clothing and to see that some of them were holding cameras.

“Oh, dear,” she said as they rocked to a stop.

Max’s jaw was set in a hard line. Cordelia’s eyes darted from him to the crowd and back again. She knew he was thinking of all the things that had been taken from him, the harsh words written. She remembered what he had said—that they would eat him alive for being a black boy with a white girl, and she was afraid that despite all he’d said to the contrary, he would regret this public coming out. But when she let her eyes rest on his, he gave her his brilliant smile, and she knew for sure that the public wouldn’t be able to stay out of love with him, even if they wanted to. “If I hadn’t been trying to impress you, all those people wouldn’t be here now.”

“You were trying to impress me?”

“Yes.”

She flushed with pleasure at this admission. Max pushed his flying goggles back away on his forehead, showing her his eyes before he pressed his lips to hers.

“Consider me impressed,” she whispered when he drew back.

The crowd was coming toward them now, cameras aloft. “Ready?” Max said, grabbing for her hand.

She undid the strap of her leather flying cap and shook out her waves of tawny hair. The crease of a smile appeared on one side of her face. “Ready.”

Max nodded and turned. He undid a latch and pushed on the door so that it opened upward, letting in the humid air as well as the clamor of the crowd. She watched him, heart aflutter. He was the same Max, serious and taut, but there was something new about him, too. His movements were freer, and his eyes didn’t avoid contact. Then he pushed open the door on her side, and she felt the breeze in her hair and the exhilaration of a great many people inching in her direction.

She didn’t look at them. She looked at Max as he raised his arms to catch her. They shared one quick, private wink before turning and moving forward so that the wall of bodies had to part for them. The sight of Max and Cordelia so confidently and publicly together momentarily stunned the crowd, but once they believed what they were seeing they turned and followed them in a herd. She wasn’t sure where she was going until she recognized one of the Greys’ Daimlers and her bodyguard Anthony standing at the edge of the embankment of cars.

“Miss Grey, were you in Max Darby’s plane when he flew under all four bridges?” It was a dry male voice, scratchy from cigarettes, and when she turned toward it she recognized Claude Carrion.

“You’re up awfully early, Mr. Carrion.”

“Boy pulls off a thing like that, I’ll drag myself out of bed. Anyway, sleeping isn’t my thing.”

He was hurrying along next to them, wheezing a little in the humidity, and Cordelia was secretly thrilled to think that the famous columnist was chasing her.

“Yes, I was with him.” By then Cordelia was close enough—she gave Anthony a significant expression, and he jumped from the front seat and opened the back door for her like a proper chauffeur. “That’s how we celebrate,” she said as she slid into the backseat of the Daimler.

“Celebrate what?” she heard Claude Carrion shouting.

“What does it look like?” Max replied before climbing in next to her.

By the time Letty was ensconced in the backseat of a taxicab, her shyness was gone and her eyes had begun to glitter. She had used every one of Sophia’s tricks as she got dressed and made herself up, and in every movement of her fingers, every pigment of makeup, was a whispered
Valentine
.

“It’s here,” she told the driver outside the little Italian place. Through the windows she could see the white tablecloths and the candlelight and knew it was the spot Valentine had chosen for their first real date. It was the perfect set for a romance. He had said that Frankie’s was out of the way enough that they wouldn’t have to worry about people speculating on their being out together. Some part of Letty knew that this ought to make her ashamed, but by then everything unfurling between her and Valentine had come to seem so entirely right that she didn’t want to think too much about his wife, whether or not this made her his mistress. Through the taxi window she gazed at the scene and let her heart open with happy expectation.

“You sure?” the driver asked her. He had one of those peculiar accents that add two extra syllables to even simple words.

“Yes.” For once in her life, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind, and her voice was loud and clear. She handed him a bill and told him to keep the change.

With drama and confidence she stepped onto the sidewalk. Her chin was lowered, her eyebrows raised, her hair still. She had slicked it with oil so that it looked almost like a glossy headpiece, short enough to reveal her earlobes.

Just outside the restaurant, Letty caught a glimpse of Valentine through the glass. He was sitting at one of the small round tables off to the side, a lit candle in a tall brass candleholder and an untouched bread basket before him. She was gratified to see that the red dress didn’t make her
over
dressed—he was wearing a tuxedo, just as she had hoped he would. He was staring off and his hand was tense on the table, and she realized that despite all his charisma and success, he was nervous to be meeting her, alone, like this. The straight, strong line of his nose was illuminated by the candlelight, and she could see the beautiful skin of his neck underneath the high white collar of his dress shirt. Her bottom lip dropped, and her knees went weak. She forgot the practiced, elegant walk she had learned over the last few weeks and went rushing in toward him.

When he saw her, he blinked, and a smile overtook his face. Standing, he opened his arms. She fell into them and turned her face up for a kiss, but his eyes were closed and he only pulled her against his chest, pressing her closer as though he had just crossed an ocean in the hope of seeing her and could not quite believe she was real.

“Letty,” he whispered, and released her.

They sat down, smiling moonily at each other.

“Doesn’t it feel like absolute ages?”

“Yes!” She bit her lip. In her old life she might have blushed at this moment, but she didn’t feel at all embarrassed by what was transpiring between them. “It was almost…
painful
…wasn’t it?”

“Yes, isn’t that peculiar?”

They stared at each other a few moments, and then he had to look away, as though overwhelmed by his good fortune.

“It
is
.” Letty took in a sharp breath. She wished that she had words for all the explosive color inside her, but it frightened her a little, too, trying to articulate such wild emotion. But she was feeling brave, and she decided to try. “I think it’s that everything just seems perfect when I am with you, so that even an hour away is a dreary, too-long time before I am with you again and all is as it should be.”

“I know just what you mean,” Valentine said simply as he lifted her hands and began to kiss her knuckles.

If there were other people in the restaurant, Letty had forgotten them. It was like the movies, when the camera shows you first the whole room, and then the man’s face, and then the woman’s, and then the man’s again, and then the woman’s, until you have forgotten that they are in a room at all.

The candle between Letty and Valentine flickered, and the spell was briefly interrupted by the appearance of a waiter at their table. He was wearing a long white apron, which hung below his knees, and his dark hair was parted down the middle and polished to his ears in the old-fashioned way.

“A bottle of mineral water for the table?” His arm was folded elegantly behind his back.

“Yes, please.” When he was gone, Valentine leaned back in his chair and sighed. The mahogany disks of his eyes blazed as he gazed at Letty. “Where did you come from?” he asked eventually.

Letty set her elbows down on the white tablecloth and rested her chin against her hands. With Valentine’s eyes upon her, she knew what she was—all red dress and white skin and thick eyelashes. Union, Ohio, seemed like a faintly remembered children’s story. “It was called Union, and they had plenty of churches but no movie theater. There wasn’t much to do, so I lived for the movie theater the next town over, and used to save all my money so that I could go there whenever I had time off from the dairy farm. The theater was in a town called Defiance, which sort of makes sense, because Father hated the movies and told me I was losing faith with God, going to them so much. Father had very strict rules, and he made all of us wear black, even after our year of mourning Mother was over, and we girls always had to wear buns, and my brothers always had to wear jackets, even in the summertime…”