In Sunlight and in Shadow (13 page)

“You lived there?”

“We did, for a time.”

“And this is a strong and durable feeling?”

“This is the root of my life.”

“I want, more than anything else,” he said, “to know you.”

“In the biblical sense?” She was embarrassed, but excited, to have said that.

“Yes, but that isn’t what I meant.”

“You can’t,” she said, “because I’m going to marry Victor. Last weekend, when you and I met, he was going to take me on the boat to East Hampton—his house is in Southampton—where he was supposed to announce our engagement at the Georgica. It’s a club, on the beach. There was a gale off Norfolk and he had to run into the Chesapeake. The reception was canceled, but it’s on for Sunday, a second time: two hundred people. We can’t cancel. He’s got the ring, a diamond the size of a ping-pong ball. He didn’t give it to me, because he thinks I might lose it.”

“You can end it with the flick of a finger,” Harry said. “There’s no law. You can at least postpone it. He’s young, you’re young, it’s allowed, even expected.”

“He’s thirty-eight, closer to thirty-nine. His birthday’s in September.”

“He’s got as many years on me as I have on you.”

“And more if you count his character and his health. He seems much older. I’m supposed to like that.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Catherine, do I have a chance with you?”

“Of course you have a chance. But I have to marry him. Everyone expects it. I’m more or less married to him already.”

“No, you’re only twenty-three.”

“Since I was thirteen . . . ,” she said, sorry that she would have to change the course of things this way.

“Since you were thirteen, what?”

She didn’t answer.

“When you were only thirteen?”

“Almost fourteen.”

“And he was thirty.”

“Twenty-nine.”

“You were a child.”

“Not for long.”

“Do your parents know?”

“When I started in the theater, my father took me aside. He walked me out into the garden, where he explained to me that theater people have different mores than we do, and that actresses are expected to be loose, but that I should not be ashamed of, and should guard, my virginity.”

“You don’t owe Victor anything. He should be imprisoned. He should be shot. You certainly don’t have to marry him.”

“There are other reasons.”

“Like what?”

“I’m an ingénue. Do you know what happens to ingénues?”

He didn’t.

“Most of them,” she said, “not being strategic thinkers, don’t either. By the time you’re twenty-five, they drop you. One in a thousand make the transition to leading lady, and the rest live the remainder of their lives in thrall to the brief period when they were in full and fragile bloom. But no one else in the world remembers, and no one cares. I don’t have illusions about my career, even if I have hopes.”

“I don’t see the connection.” He understood that she might be enchained by a number of things that he could not simply dismiss, but it seemed that the prospect of her freedom, and her right to it, had never been simply stated. “You don’t have to marry so soon. You don’t have to worry about finding a husband. And, God knows, you certainly don’t have to marry Victor.”

“My clock is different than yours,” she told him, “and I’m not exactly fresh.”

“That’s absurd. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“It does. It does to most people. It does to me.”

“It doesn’t to me, and I’m right here.”

“I know you’re right here.”

“Postpone it.”

Her expression darkened. As she spoke, she trembled from emotion and anger. “You want me not to marry a man who has been . . .
fucking
me . . . for ten years, since I was thirteen years old, who everyone in the world thinks is going to marry me, who has bought the ring, invited two hundred people, hired the caterers, reserved the club, and told the goddamned, the goddamned
New York Times
? And this, this you want, on our first date?”

“I do,” he said, as if it were a vow, which it was.

H
E REMEMBERED HER
song in every particular, how she carefully pronounced each word, and that each word was like a work in itself. He had never heard English or any language spoken with such lucidity, care, and dignity. The skillful enunciation and timing rode on the river of her voice, a voice that was so arresting because although it was of her body it was almost as if her soul were carried on it for an excursion in the air. It would not fade along with youth. Nor was it corruptible. Nor was she, in contradiction of her own opinion, corrupted.

She had insisted halfheartedly that he not see or call her, but she had allowed him to take her home. On the way, she said, “I’ve been telling you my stage name. It’s not my real name.” He then expected a multi-syllabic Eastern European name, or perhaps, given her accent, a name like Phelps or Horsey. “It’s not Catherine Sedley,” she told him somewhere in the Fifties, as they passed a French restaurant with a Chinese-red awning. “It’s Catherine Thomas Hale.”

Just the sound of her name was for him as beautiful as a wave slowly curling in the sun. Perhaps because he was so disarmed, he failed to make the connection to the Hales she had mentioned along with the Mellons and the Marrows. And, besides, he wasn’t thinking along those lines. She had had him walk her home because she wanted to stay with him as long as possible, and she wanted to shock him, to show him the house so that the battlements of wealth and family might make it easier for him to withdraw. When he saw it, he did see that there was a great deal to overcome and that he was on almost unfamiliar ground. But he wasn’t turned back, because although he was quiet, courteous, and contemplative, he had another side as well, to which he had been educated by jumping out of airplanes into battles with a most capable enemy.

After they parted, he hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do, but he had the happiness of someone who knows what he loves. And although she was nearly certain that her course was determined, and that for what had happened with Victor she would pay the price she was sure she owed, she too was unaccountably happy, oppressed and joyous in alternation, like the rhythm of a scythe sweeping to and fro in a field of wheat, or the pendulum of a clock as it clucked back and forth.

But they carried forward and did what they had to do—she at rehearsal, singing; he at his loft, the machines spinning—and for each the city was filled with the presence of the other.

On Thursday she was delayed because she had walked to rehearsal in a daze and stopped to look up at the racing clouds as she listened to the sound of buses, and watched horses pulling wagons, and knife sharpeners at work at their whetstones. The traffic, as usual, fought like charioteers at the Circus Maximus. As she blithely walked-in late without noticing him, the director yelled at her. And then she, like the all-powerful star she wasn’t, said, “Hi, Sidney,” and laughed, defusing his anger merely by showing it could not reach her.

Though at every go-round she sang without fault or imperfection, she was distracted; and though consummately professional and admitting no variation in technique, she seemed fragile nonetheless.

“Are you tired, Catherine?” Sidney asked, in fear that his question would unleash the tirade of an indispensable leading lady, though it unleashed no such thing.

“I’m not tired,” she said sweetly, and, of all people, when she said something, she could say it sweetly, firmly, seductively, authoritatively, mysteriously, or any way she pleased.

“How are you? Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine, Sidney,” she said, and then, with eyes closed and a slight smile, she turned her face up as if the beams of the spotlights were the warmth of the sun, and took in a long breath. She had the angelic expression of a mother nursing a baby. No one could figure her out, and the orchestra was silent, listening for something.

“Catherine, would you like a long weekend?”

“A long weekend?” she asked, coming partially out of her reverie.

“Would you like to take a rest tomorrow? You’ve had your song down for weeks. We can put an understudy in your place for the day.” He thought she might bristle at that, because understudies are to performers what colonels in dictatorships are to their chiefs of state.

“Okay,” said Catherine, and abruptly walked offstage.

“Catherine,” Sidney called out, “not now. Catherine? Tomorrow!”

She didn’t hear him.

“She didn’t have her glasses on, Sidney,” volunteered the playwright, who was there too much.

The director lowered his head and opened his hands as if releasing a pigeon. “She can’t hear without her glasses?”

“When I can’t hear something very well, Sid, I put my glasses on,” the playwright said, truthfully, if lamely. “Don’t you?”

“No, Barton, I don’t.”

Catherine was already on the street, having changed but having forgotten to remove her makeup. She walked as if above the sidewalk, in full faith and as if she knew the future, or as if she did not have to know it.

Harry kept thinking about the ferry, that it had delivered her up to him, that everything had happened quickly, that everything seemed set so strongly. As she exited the theater on Thursday he was in the loft, a little more than a mile away. As he circulated from task to task, filling in where he was wanted, the windows were open and he could hear bells and traffic and the rumbling of the Els at a far distance rising and falling with the wind. Somewhere in the sea of sound she was walking or sitting, or perhaps looking in her dressing room mirror, with electric light flooding her face.

As Harry was helping to carry an anvil, Cornell glided up to him. Perhaps because he was tall and thin, and old enough to be respectful of arthritis, Cornell had a light step. “Could you come into the office?” he asked, as a command.

Having put down the anvil, Harry closed the door to the office, because Cornell’s expression seemed to indicate that he should.

“We just lost half of Saks Fifth Avenue,” Cornell said, referring to their long-established Saks account.

“We did?”

“They called on the telephone. Not even a letter. Just like that. Our display space is going to be cut by half, and, naturally, the orders, too.”

“They never liked that we have a store around the corner,” Harry said, beaming.

“What are you so happy about? Are you out of your mind?”

“No.”

“Well, what?”

“Nothing.”

“Did we get another account?”

“Did we?”

“What? Look at you,” Cornell said in exasperation. “We could save on electricity if we plugged a few lamps into you. It must be a woman.”

“It is. A woman.”

“Jesus. Are you going to go out of commission? This is a big account.”

“I think so.”

“You think what? That you’re going to be out of commission, or that it’s a big account?”

“Both.”

“Can you put it off for a while?”

“No. On Sunday she’s going to be engaged to someone she doesn’t love, someone who’s been sleeping with her since she was . . . very young, and who’s twice her age.”

“How’d you get mixed up with someone like that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m attracted to the lower orders of society.”

“It sounds like it.”

“I can’t stop thinking of her. She’s only twenty-three and yet she thinks and feels with neither feeling nor thought degraded but rather each elevating the other. Most people can’t begin to do that. It’s as if when they see they can’t hear, and when they hear they can’t see. We haven’t been educated into separating the senses, but we have regarding the heart and the intellect. I told her this. She thought about it. It was while we were eating dinner in a Greek restaurant. I thought she might not even have heard me, but then she looked up and said, ‘Without thinking, there’s no clarity; and without feeling, there’s no purpose. Why would I starve them of each other? Why would anyone?’

“Can you imagine what she’ll be like when she’s thirty?”

“Can you imagine you when you’re sixty?” Cornell asked. “You’ll be a moron, if you aren’t already.”

“And Cornell, she’s so much more than what she says. Every gesture, every adjustment of her body, every lifting of a brow or movement of her eyes. . . .”

Cornell interrupted. “God,” he said, “you’re gone.”

“I am,” Harry agreed.

“Fine, but you’d better come down if you don’t want to lose everything.”

“The business?”

“The business,
and
her. You don’t want to lose her, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“What can I do?”

“Who is she? How long have you known her?”

“I’ve only seen her. . . .” He thought about it. “Three times,” he said, counting the time he had seen her before having spoken to her.

“That’s not really a lot.”

“I met her on the ferry. We went out to dinner twice. The first time was at the automat.”

“Elegant.”

“It was great.”

“How much can you really love someone, Harry, if you know her that little?”

“I know her much more than a little. I fell in love with her a long time ago.”

“You fell in love with an image you’ve carried, an image of your own creation.”

“No. With her. When I saw her, it was very strong. I caught just a glimpse of her: she was walking away from me. And then I saw her later, and we met, and it was as if I had known her all my life.”

“Infatuation happens all the time. Sometimes it happens to me, and I’m sixty-one.”

“She’s an actress.”

“Oh boy,” Cornell said. “Here we go.”

“She trained in music, and she has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. When she speaks, I have no power of resistance. I went to the theater to meet her before dinner. Because it was early I went in and I heard her sing. Cornell, if I were married, I would have to leave my wife. If going to her meant that I would die, I would go to her.”

“You can’t judge a woman by her singing, Ulysses.”

“You
can.
You can, by her singing, know her absolutely.”