In Sunlight and in Shadow (16 page)

“Victor,” Harry said, “has no rights in the matter.”

“Of course he doesn’t. He’s her fiancé. Why would he?”

“Even if he had rights, they would terminate tonight.”

“Don’t they begin tonight?”

“Same thing. The last person to leave the ship is also the last person not to leave the ship.”

The transport pilot struggled. “That’s right,” he said. “How did you figure that one out?”

“I figured it out as I was waiting at the door to jump out of a Dakota.”

“Do you think, do you, that as the war recedes, that five years from now, or ten, things will be less insane?”

Harry considered this carefully. “No.”

A bell called everyone to dinner. In the stream of people heading toward rooms of which he had not been aware until unfolded doors revealed flower-laden tables, she was nowhere to be seen. Had the transport pilot not mentioned that this was the engagement party, Harry would have thought he had come either to the wrong place or to the right place at the wrong time. In a dining room to his right he saw a table with a chair leaning against it, and a place card folded so that the outside was blank. He pocketed the place card, righted the chair, and stood behind it, ready to assist any ladies who might appear. Scanning the place settings, he saw that four people were due, and shortly they arrived.

One was a woman in her thirties, who, depending upon her expression, was either not attractive at all or excruciatingly so. Another was a dowager of profound visual neutrality. And the third was a young woman who was heavily made up, which can be magnificent if it is done well, but it wasn’t, and unfortunately for her and everyone else it looked as if she had been dipped in flour, and her lipstick made her lips into red bicycle tires. Some men liked this, Harry did not. He and a bald man with glasses pulled out chairs for the women and exhibited the required deference. All was well as they began to talk and eat. Harry longed for Catherine, and, wondering where she had gone, hoped that he wasn’t too late.

“We came all the way out here,” said the older woman, “because my husband says that this presages the formation of the largest firm on Wall Street.” She was clearly resentful and willingly indiscreet. Necessity may be the mother of invention, Harry thought, but liquor is the father of indiscretion.

“We have a house here,” the woman in her thirties said. “It was no trouble.” In wrestling, this was called a
smackdown.

“I’m out of school,” the youngest said. “I don’t care where I am. What about you?” she asked Harry. “Do you care where you are?”

“Of course I care where I am.”

Discovering him sexually, she said nothing except everything that could be said with an averted glance.

“I came to see Catherine and I have yet to see her,” Harry said.

“I saw her,” the youngest woman offered. “Then she disappeared. But she’s here. How could she not be here? What about you?” she asked the bald man with the glasses.

“I own taxi fleets,” he said, not taking his eyes off his salmon. “You’ve ridden in my taxis.”

“I didn’t ask what you did.”

“I know you didn’t,” he said, still not looking up. “I know what you meant, but I’m just a friend of Willie Marrow, which isn’t very interesting, so I skipped to the good part. What work do
you
do?” he asked Harry. It was impolite to ask the women what they did. If they did anything, which was unlikely, they would probably be brassy enough to volunteer it.

“I’ve been back for only a few months,” he said. “Demobilized. I’m not really doing anything.” It was, in this circle, an answer neither unexpected nor unadmired.

“Demobilized? Weren’t you an officer?”

“I resigned my commission.”

“I resigned my commission at Sweet Briar two years ago,” said the young one, and then, like a pack of hunting dogs making a sudden turn upon a scent, the conversation turned to Sweet Briar, horses, and hounds. Harry, who liked horses and dogs, though he rode neither, listened with the detachment of an anthropologist. What his dinner companions knew about animals could have filled an encyclopedia. They had a real connection to nature and the land. Even the owner of the taxi fleets, who had houses all over and took taxis between them, spent long days in high boots, in reeds, blinds, boats, and brush.

Then another bell rang, melodiously but with the timing of troopship claxons dictating shifts in the dining halls and on deck. Dinner was over—all nine hundred carefully wrought calories of it, including a chocolate mousse in a cup the size of a half dollar—and the dancing was about to begin.

Everyone had had a great deal to drink, and half the women now walked like beagles. Harry had gone far beyond his normal limit. So when the music swelled, it would be easy for anyone to find a willing partner provided he or she could stand up, and the ballrooms would quickly fill. The tedium of tight, confining clothes and small talk, which are to the soul what acid is to metal, would soon disappear, as ordinary mortals, if they could, seized upon the opportunity to move like angels.

As he was getting up, Harry saw that the dowager of profound visual neutrality was sharing something with the taxi-fleet man, and it was about him. “I think he’s a Goatly,” he heard her say.

“Which Goatlys?” was the response.

“The ones with the dean of St. Michael’s.”

“You think he’s Warren Goatly, Edmund’s son?”

They drifted off.

Harry imagined that he might see Catherine dancing. He both dreaded and desired this. He had seen her dance to a bar or two during rehearsal, just a twirl, really, as a transition from her song, and what he saw in those brief moments was what dance, when not too studied, not too disciplined, can accomplish as if by nature and in defiance of it—the movement, by the deepest commemoration, to another plane; the transcendence of the body by its own art; the giving over of oneself to the invisible wave that runs through all things.

He imagined her dancing to the music coming from the ballrooms, her movements both poignant and irresistible, as impossible not to love as when the wind slightly lifted her hair. And what would he do if she was paired with Victor? He feared witnessing them in the greatest and most intense intimacy that is both allowed and takes place mostly in public.

With little scope of what was going on, who was who, or what he himself was going to do if faced with Catherine across a room as time stopped still, he began to move toward the sound of the music, a route that took him through the main dining room. As he was wending his way past tables that waiters had begun to clear, he saw at what appeared to be the head table five people in animated conversation and distressed withdrawal, with speech and silence alternating in a tapestry of disconsolation. The scene was anchored by two older men who had the restfully stiff bodies of those who, even if still athletic, paid the price for it. And yet their wives, handsome women beyond their prime—one still comely—seemed to direct whatever action there was. These he took to be the Marrows and the Hales, the more attractive and younger couple, who were also physically smaller, being the Hales. The third man, who looked to be in his forties, with little hair and a big, square face, he took to be Victor. It seemed that they didn’t know where Catherine was, either.

Victor looked like a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. At this moment at least he was so stolid and gray that he could easily have been mistaken for a post office. He seemed neither cruel nor kind, intelligent nor unintelligent. He, too, was distressed, but not so much as the others. Nor did his presence give Harry any clue of attack, and Harry could think of nothing to say should words become necessary. The anger that had sometimes grown to storm subsided, and he feared that he might laugh.

As he observed from a standstill and as if from invisibility (for they would hardly be aware of a stranger amid the waiters), Catherine stepped from the path onto the boardwalk and increased her speed. When she crossed the terrace, its hard surface made her realize that her shoes were filled with sand. She was breathing through her nose, as her lips were tightly closed lest they tremble, and her hands were gently gathered into fists. Although a few stragglers who were not by then dancing greeted her as she passed, she neither heard nor saw them. Her hair was slightly disheveled, and the sea wind had brought to it pearl-sized drops of clear water that sparkled in the many lights. The sequined top, which fit her closely and sent out dozens of communicative flashes, was like some sort of glorious feminine armor. Her arms and shoulders, which seemed capable of wielding a two-handed sword, were bare in a way that was not vulnerable but the sign of martial confidence and courage.

When she entered the dining room, the families rose. She was behind Harry and to his right. He saw her in the periphery as a fast-moving, sparkling orb, and as she went past he smelled her perfume. She glanced at him and continued forward as if he didn’t exist. About to follow her, he checked himself and remained in place.

Her father stood and took several steps toward her. Before anything was said, they embraced in the embrace that can exist between fathers and daughters, all-forgiving even as they fight. Her mother, having seen without doubt in the way Catherine moved that whatever was going to occur was inevitable, merely smiled.

Catherine whispered something to her father, who, looking as if he had just been hit by a bullwhip, wearily pulled back. Then to her mother, who as if pleased that whatever she had correctly foreseen was now about to come and go, smiled yet again, in resignation.

Victor was inert, but with the patience of a hunter. His parents stepped forward graciously to greet the young woman who was to be their daughter-in-law. They didn’t know what was coming, and had no impulse but that of kindness and respect. Seeing this, and hurt that she would have to rebuff them, she shook her head to warn them off. They understood instantly. And Victor, though inert, knew as well. As if the whole thing were unimportant to him, he said, so that it was audible to Harry and half a dozen waiters, “Oh crap.”

“That’s what you say?” Catherine asked, infuriated. “That’s what you say?”

She seized a half-full wine glass with her right hand and pitched it into his face. Although it shattered, brought up blood, and covered him with red wine, he hardly flinched.

“Oh, God,” her father said, not in distress but as he would have in reaction to a particularly garish pair of golf pants.

The Marrows were paralyzed.

A dozen guests were now looking on, having been drawn in by a sixth sense of scandal. As a covey of thrush in the fall woods suddenly rises, its wings mastering the north wind, so the Georgica Club would erupt that evening in the flutter of having found something to talk about other than real estate, horses, and problematic servants.

Catherine pivoted angrily and walked toward the exit. After a short distance she turned back and shouted, “That’s what happens when you do what you did, you bastard. It sleeps. But then it wakes.”

As she marched past Harry, she said to him, as if to a dog that had followed her down the lane and was going to make her late, “Go home!” As far as anyone knew, she was addressing all the onlookers, who had no idea that Catherine would never speak to a dog in that fashion, or care that it had followed after her, unless she loved it.

“I
SWAM HERE
,” he said, over the sound of the motor furling the roof of her convertible. Standing by the passenger side, he watched the top rise and fold.

“You swam from New York?” Even in her present state she could not help but think this was amusing.

“Across the inlet.”

“In a tuxedo?”

“I held it above the water. I was naked. I was almost swept out to sea. And now I need a ride.”

The top was down and tucked in, the motor silent. Victor watched from the main entrance. He had heard her laugh.

“How is it,” Catherine asked, “that when I’m most upset, you can make me laugh?”

“You know,” he said, “if your eyebrows were like woolly bears, and your lips were thick, and you spoke like a dunce and couldn’t sing a note, I’d still be in love with you. You know that.”

“And then you make me cry,” she said. “What are you trying to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Well you’re not succeeding.”

Quietly, he said, “I came out here and I was going to do something. I didn’t know what. But I didn’t have to. You did it. You didn’t see me until you were going full steam, did you?”

“Actually, I did,” she answered. And then, like a taxi driver, “Where’re you going?”

“Home.”

“Get in.”

After he had become accustomed to the shock of her driving—“That’s all right,” she had said, “I know this kind of road: I grew up here”—he asked if the car in which they were riding belonged to her parents.

“Not a Chevrolet convertible.” It was black and boat-like. “My mother wouldn’t have a convertible, because it would muss her hair, and my father has to have a Rolls or, before the war, a Mercedes. It’s my car. I keep it out here.”

“Where are we going?”

“You tell me. What direction are we headed in? You think I know?”

He looked up at the stars, and, unperturbed by the sea wind except to sparkle, they told him. “West-northwest.”

“That’s just because the road bends that way.”

“So, where are we going?”

“New York.”

“We won’t get there until three in the morning, if that. Do you know the route?”

“Past Southampton it’s anyone’s guess. No one knows. It’s like never-never land.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

“Then let me ask you this. How much gas do you have? Gas stations won’t be open.”

She looked at the gas gauge, moving only her eyes. “Half a tank.”

“That won’t get us to Manhattan.”

“It’ll get us to Hauppauge,” which she pronounced
Hop Hog,
“and past there it’s a kind of hell where gas stations and diners stay open all night, at least along the big road.”

“You drive pretty fast.”

“I always have,” she said.