In Sunlight and in Shadow (22 page)

And Park Avenue and its environs—granted, the Hales, nonconformists, had decamped for Sutton Place—were full of caked and powdered reptilian women and florid, panting men who lived to shop and eat, with muscles evolved mainly for approaching a maitre d’, lifting a poodle, or carrying glistening packages. At home these people did not breathe. There was no air, no room to move, no space to stretch out an arm without shattering Lalique, no sunshine, no water, no waves, only a coffin-like
bella figura
of life as still as a wax dummy.

How surprised he was, then, as Evelyn came into view. For although she was done up as if she had just walked out of the Colony Club, she was girlish as she descended the steps gracefully and fast, and beneath the mature and knowing planes of her face was a softness and kindness that bloomed in the presence of her daughter, whom she adored. Immediately, his apprehensions fled, although he knew just as instantaneously that though he might get along with her and develop a kind of affection, he would never, ever, understand her, no matter how perfectly and naturally he could know Catherine.

After all, he had never been a woman. He had never been a mother. He had never been middle-aged. He had never been a socialite. He had never been a Christian, a debutante, or had cellulite (although she didn’t either). He had never been trapped in the delicacy and inadequacy of a woman’s clothes and shoes. Because of their clothes and shoes they could hardly take a step in rough terrain, running was out of the question, and God help them if they had to throw a punch. He hated what he called “little pea-brained sandwiches sized for canaries”; he thought a dog was something you should be able to wrestle with rather than use to dust a Fabergé egg; and he had never been an aspirant to, much less a member of, either the Georgica Club or the Four Hundred.

On the other hand, she was the child of a prominent theologian, and had grown up—without radio, without movies—with much of her entertainment the complex disputes of moral and religious philosophers, in contrast to whom and as a gift of nature and her sex she was much wiser. Wise enough to absorb and comprehend—eventually—all of what they said, wise enough seldom to comment, and wise enough to reject it in favor of a knowledge that, exactly according to her father’s ideals, came directly from God and without intermediaries—though at times intermediaries might be advantageously consulted.

Catherine remembered an evening long ago, and her mother sitting by a fireplace in their house on Sutton Place. A silk gown, of a color hard to describe except that it glistened slightly Roxburghe in the firelight, surrounded her like a soft throne. All the dinner guests were men. They were talking about bridges and steam pressure and electricity. The first to leave was Evelyn. Then Catherine could not take it any longer, and found her mother. “Don’t worry,” Evelyn told her. “It’s all very interesting, what they’re talking about. . . .”

“I don’t think so,” said the child.

“You will. But, Catherine, everything that’s true despite us—the things they’re talking about, natural laws—will always remain true despite us. What matters is what’s true because of us. That’s what’s up for grabs. That’s where the battle is. One remembers and values one’s life not for its objective truths, but for the emotional truths.”

“What do you mean?” the child asked.

“I mean the only thing that’s really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that’s fixed in the heart. That’s what we live and die for. It comes in epiphanies, and it comes in love, and don’t ever let frightened people turn you away from it.” Though Catherine had not understood the words precisely—she was still too young—the meaning had been conveyed, and it stayed with her for the rest of her life.

So if Catherine did not entirely understand Evelyn’s lesser pronouncements, she did the greater ones. Nature does not require children to understand their parents, and may require that they don’t. Still, just like Billy—who although he was fifty-eight was older than that when he was born, and yet seemed in many ways to be much younger, perhaps because of his fondness for practical jokes (most of which were incomprehensible to anyone not an enthusiast of croquet)—Evelyn was as mutable as the ocean weather but as solid as Manhattan bedrock.

When she greeted Harry, she said, “The only other person who’s ever done to the Marrows what you did was Al Smith, who went after Victor’s grandfather like a rabid dog, bit his buttocks, and threw him from his golden den.”

“What?” Harry asked, his hand still in hers.

“A stock scandal when you were too young to remember or care. Long over.” She turned to her daughter. “Catherine, take Mr. Copeland to the guest house. I don’t mean to hurry you, but we’ve been roasting a tuna that your father caught this morning and I don’t want it to dry out.”

“I’ll take him,” said Catherine.

“Don’t stay too long. Dinner at six-thirty. Come as you are.”

The guest house lay beyond the pool and was encased like a jewel in a crucifix of shell paths dividing up a garden about to come into bloom. Before he was established there he put down his suitcase and they passed through a gate in a waist-high stone wall and onto a cedar boardwalk that led to the beach. No guest except those who arrived in a squall could resist the ocean. To settle in at East Hampton without looking at the ocean, even at night, was the sign of a crippled soul.

The boardwalk crossed the hump of the dunes to a small deck with benches and an outdoor shower. Overlooking the water from this spot, they saw fast flights of gulls and terns sweeping parallel to the strand and colored by the setting sun into half a dozen shades of deepening red. The breeze was steady and the sea roared with unimpeachable authority. Every board was heart of cedar, and its scent mixed with the salt air. “This is magnificent,” he said.

“Not as much,” she replied, “as when you come from the sea and lie on the cedar as it bakes in the sun. Two of my favorite places in the world are this long run of boards and the Esplanade in the park. The way their straightness aims you down their lengths I find pleasurable and comforting.”

“What’s the Esplanade?” Harry asked.

“You know, in the park, with the trees on either side meeting high above in the middle?” She illustrated with her arms upraised.

“You mean the Mall?”

“I’ve always called it the Esplanade. So has everyone in my family.
Mall
sounds like
maul,
the horrible verb, or something you split wood with.
Esplanade
is beautiful.”

Thenceforth, Harry was content to call it that. What he did not yet know was that the Hales substituted, changed, or eschewed many words at Evelyn’s behest. Often she was proved right by logic and history. An esplanade, for example, was originally the flat plain between a castle’s battlements and the city that had grown up around it. In Europe, esplanades were the parks and greenswards, the epitome of peace, where people paraded in their finery and even the poor could pretend luxury. And yet they had been the battlefields and siege grounds of previous ages. The Mall in Central Park pointed like an arrow at the Belvedere, a replica Scottish castle on a hill to the north, separated by a lake as if by a moat. The fletching of the arrow was midtown Manhattan, the city. The Mall, according to Evelyn, was therefore the Esplanade.

Sometimes, however, her word preferences—dictated to or unknowingly inherited by Catherine from early childhood—were less substantiated and perhaps a touch idiosyncratic. “I will not say the new and disgusting word that purports to represent a combination of breakfast and lunch. Nor will I say the disgusting, coy, and contemptible word that rhymes with the aforesaid disgusting word and pertains to the chewing and eating of crisp foods, often, unfortunately, slowly. Nor will I say the P-word.”

The P-word was
popcorn,
which Evelyn hated. She went to the movies only at private screenings or premieres, where popcorn was
verboten.
She didn’t like the smell. She didn’t like the sound. And she didn’t like exiting a theater in a crowd of people whose hands and lips were covered with rancid butter. If young Catherine said
popcorn,
Evelyn would look at her with the expression of a hawk mulling its options in respect to a mouse dancing in an open field. This resulted in Catherine, at age six, briefcase strapped to her back, walking to school through the Upper East Side while chanting “Popcorn, popcorn, popcorn.”

Alone for ten minutes in the guest quarters, Harry looked over the length of the pool, now almost black, at a shingle-sided house every window of which glowed with a different color—red, dark green, gray, peach, chalk, blue, yellow—set off by luminescent white millwork. He had seen no servants, but (to take the chill from the night air by the ocean, even in June) fires were burning in several fireplaces, including his own; huge arrangements of flowers had not a single dead petal or any leaves lying by them; and to someone who, although he knew little about keeping up an estate, was good at estimating required labor for any task, the gardens appeared to have received the attentions of many more than one full-time gardener.

Rather than come exactly as he was, he changed his shirt and put on a deep violet tie that he thought more appropriate to evening and darkness than what he had been wearing. He anticipated with growing pleasure the sight and presence of Catherine, though she had been absent for only a few minutes. And the Hales seemed quite approachable. Probably the dinner would be painfully conventional and quiet—fish and roasted potatoes ladled out by servants speaking occasional pleasantries. Correctness above all. At the Dickermans’ and like households, he had always had to rein himself in and adapt to the quiescence, like a dinosaur bumped ahead a few eons, lest he terrify them with the comparatively loud rough-and-tumble of his own background, lest he eat more than nine peas, or stare with disbelief at the one-ounce cutlet of beef centered on his plate like Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific. He had been only partially polished and contained during his years at Harvard, and had often broken from his confines while there. But tonight he wanted to be at his most diplomatic and dull.

As he walked past the pool, the black water enticingly alive, he straightened his tie. At first he couldn’t find the right way in, and walked into the kitchen, where four servants—two men and two women—were working smoothly and fast. After backing out, he found the correct entrance and, like someone reinserting the pin of a grenade, gingerly closed the door behind him.

The Hales were in the living room, in front of the fireplace, arranged like a family portrait. Evelyn sat expectantly at the edge of a white, satin-covered chair, her hands placed royally together and resting on one of the thick arms. Billy was standing by the fire. None of them had changed clothing: Billy was in the navy polo shirt he had been wearing. Catherine, leaning against a brocade wing chair, had the self-effacement of a stage actress who must stay relatively silent in a scene that belongs to someone else, but whose presence is the essence of the play. The part she played in her play required this of her, and she vibrated with life even when she had no lines.

At first it was rather awkward. No one knew how things might or should proceed in the new constellation in which they found themselves. To break a silence that grew more brittle with each second, Evelyn said, “Does your family own Copeland China as well as Copeland Leather?” In every Hale household were plenty of both.

“No,” said Harry. “No connection. Only leather.”

“Each is the best of its type,” Evelyn offered.

“Thank you. That’s kind of you.”

“It really is, really.”

Breaking this rhythm, Billy said, “You changed your tie.”

“The other one doesn’t behave at meals.”

“I have ties like that.”

“Harry,” Evelyn asked, “can Billy get you a drink?”

“Not if you’re not. . . .”

“Oh, but we will.”

“Then straight Scotch, please.”

“Single or blend?” Billy asked, gesturing toward a huge silver tray resplendent with single malts, crystal glasses, sterling ice buckets, and bar things, and backed by an ebullient, almost blinding floral arrangement that Harry could smell from all the way across the room.

“Single.”

“You have a preference?”

“Surprise me.”

The surprise was that Billy handed him a tumbler with at least four shots of Glenlivet. It was practically overflowing. “Here, take it in to dinner. You know, Scotch is the second cousin of the potato.”

“I didn’t know that.”

No further explanation was forthcoming. Billy poured himself a Scotch of equal size, and Catherine and her mother were provided with gin and tonics that Billy dressed with some sort of sweet, pinkish-yellow syrup that foamed slightly pinker.

“What is that?” Harry asked, somewhat crestfallen because he seemed to have nothing to say.

“I have no idea. It was brought to us from Africa in the thirties, and I’m trying to use it up.”

“What does it say on the label?”

“It’s in Arabic,” Billy said, enjoying the stop this statement would put to subsequent investigation, as it always had.

“I can read it.”

“You can?”

“Yes, although I may not understand it.”

Billy brought him the bottle. After a minute or so, Harry looked up. “It’s for malaria,” he said. “It’s a pharmaceutical made in the Sudan in nineteen seventeen.”

“I didn’t think it had a date. I looked for one.”

“Arabic numerals,” Harry told him, “are not what we think of as Arabic numerals. For example, the zero is just a dot.”

“The poor things,” said Evelyn, taking a sip from her tumbler, “they must be so confused by freckles.”

“Are you sure you want to drink that?” Harry asked.

“We’ve been drinking it for a year now,” Billy said. “We broke it out on V-E Day, when supplies were scarce. I thought it was for a Tom Collins. It’s delicious.”

Catherine took a long draught. “It hasn’t hurt me,” she said, “up to this point. And I haven’t gotten malaria, either.”

At this, Evelyn rose and suggested that they go into the dining room. They followed her and took their seats, although Billy cracked open a pair of French doors that appeared to lead to a sun porch, and made a pronouncement into the darkness: “At the second bell.”