In Sunlight and in Shadow (27 page)

“That’s not so,” Harry insisted.

“Maybe not, but Macy’s cut back on their order. We’re going down a little bit at a time, no blow unbearable, just down, down, down, nothing fatal until the end.”

“I don’t understand,” Harry said to both older men, hoping for assurance that he knew would not come. “We make a wonderful product. It’s finely crafted of the best materials. We work hard. We don’t let imperfections pass. We should be prosperous.”

“People don’t want it as much as they used to, and then there’s Europe,” Cornell said.

“All right, that’s one thing, but why do all these people impinge upon us? They don’t make anything themselves. Their whole energies are devoted to tricking and forcing money from other people.”

“That’s human nature,” said Bernstein. “It was never different. Look, I have a house in the Catskills. My wife and I killed ourselves and spent a lot of money to make it nice—great view of the mountains, quiet. Last spring a neighboring farmer put sewage all over his fields. He didn’t ask, he didn’t care. The smell is impossible, you can’t drink the water, you can’t eat. Forget guests. I asked him about it, and he said he’d switched to this kind of fertilizer, and would use it every year. We’re going to have to sell the house, almost give it away. Guess who’s gonna buy it. And guess who’ll mysteriously stop using the new kind of fertilizer.”

“So what do we do when these people despoil us, just sit here and die?”

“That’s what you do,” said Ludwig Bernstein, whose work had overlooked the busy streets of Manhattan since the nineteenth century. “You play their game or you die, or sometimes you play their game and you die anyway.”

“What about,” Harry asked, “not playing their game, and not dying?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Bernstein. “I’d love to see that. I’d give anything to see it. But it doesn’t happen. What you said are the words that young men speak before they go down. Some die literally. Most just die a little inside.” And then he added, with a quivering smile, “Like me.”

I
N THE HEAT
of July, the ocean was cool, and after a day in the moist glare of Amagansett beaches it was possible to believe that this was all of life and ever would be. For the talent of the sea in monopolizing perception is not limited to its empty reaches, but spills over and inundates the shore. The waters of lakes, streams, or the ocean bring contentment enough to tranquilize even someone who has always moved at the speed of New York—that is, walking as if chased, talking like a tobacco auctioneer, eyes darting, heart racing, skeptical and alert even as he sleeps. But take him out to East Hampton in July and he becomes a peasant with neither clock nor calendar, whose temperament is calibrated at the speed New Yorkers know only when they’re dead. There, on the beaches, away from what he thinks he treasures, he is truly happy for a week or a month, until he makes the mistake of going back, although it is true that the city itself can make someone happy if, like the ocean, it is seen with awe.

At three o’clock, Catherine and Harry came in from the beach. For seven hours they had walked, they had swum in the bracing, boxing surf, and now they were burnished with sun and throbbing with health. Whatever reservations the Hales may have had because they still did not know Harry, his background, or his prospects—this was only the second time they had met him—these were held in abeyance as the young couple stood before them, a gift of nature in its prime, their youth, strength, and love enlivening the house like the summer colors that drifted through the rooms in yellows and blues.

“Will you stay for dinner?” Evelyn asked. Billy was content to remain mute. “We haven’t really had a chance to see you. Unfortunately, the Holmeses are coming, but because you went out last night and are leaving tomorrow we have no other time. They’ve been on the calendar since April, and since Rufus may die at any moment we really can’t cancel.”

“That’s fine,” said Catherine. “They’re horrible, but maybe he’ll fall asleep like last time, and we’ll all eat in absolute silence, hoping that he hasn’t slipped away. I suppose some people think that’s fun.”

“Rufus has some sort of mucous condition,” Evelyn said to Harry. “His heart goes to sleep and so does he. He can’t drive.”

“He’s a real live wire,” Catherine said, “like Pancho Villa.”

“And he has emphysema,” Evelyn added, “which makes him hard to hear, and when he talks he does so very slowly, especially when he’s smoking.”

“He’s a veritable amusement park,” said Catherine, “and when he’s awake his chief enjoyment is to stimulate a bitter argument among everyone around him.”

“Your father has known him since they were boys. You don’t turn your back on someone because they’re in ill health. There are many things about him—one thing in particular—that we find difficult, but we just let them pass. Souls are complicated things. No one is perfect, Catherine. Your father sees him as he knew him when they were children.”

“What thing in particular?” Catherine inquired.

Evelyn glanced at Billy, who said, “It has to do with your mother, but it’s ancient history.”

“Were you involved with him?” Catherine asked, alarmed.

Evelyn found this amusing. “No. Not Rufus. Really, Catherine, what do you think I am, a wildebeest?” Then, changing the subject, she said, “The lobsters were just delivered, but will you and Harry pick up the clams and the corn? Our corn isn’t ready yet, but the corn from further inland is. Because it’s hotter away from the ocean, the corn is sweeter.”

“Doesn’t Frank usually pick up the dinner things?”

“Yes, but his license was suspended last week—going too fast on the Montauk road again because he didn’t want the lobsters to die. We tell him that they’re hardier than that, but he grew up in an era before refrigeration.”

“Strange to see a Mercedes without bullet holes,” Harry said as he guided Billy’s open car through the lanes that led into town in paths of beige macadam, “and stranger yet to be driving one. I’ve actually shot at these a few times. This one’s in really good shape.”

“It’s an American citizen,” Catherine said as they pulled up to the market, “and it sat out the war. With the Bund and everything so close it had to keep a low profile, so it stayed in the garage and out of the salt air.”

“Are you selling it to me?”

As they kissed before they got out, a little boy saw them and it made his heart beat fast and his face turn the color of lipstick.

Extremely busy on a Saturday in July, the market was tense with class. Those who came in a particular kind of car and were dressed in a certain way were addicted as if to heroin to the need to assert their position. They did not so much want to be envied as they wanted their rank to be known. For many it was the reason for living, and for some there was nothing else. Harry knew the facts of his position here, which in some respects was unassailable. He had come from a house of great wealth, with a woman of extraordinary elegance, vitality, and beauty. Physically, they outranked everyone in the crowded store. People looked at them, but they themselves did not look back. His academic credentials and military record, although unknown to others, were known to him. And they had arrived in a car that some might criticize but that he could justly claim as the spoils of war.

And yet he felt kinship only with the grocer and the Puerto Rican assistants who stood behind the counters or were stocking shelves that investment bankers and their wives, or delegated servants, were stripping like locusts. He had neither money nor a profession. The business he had inherited was on the verge of bankruptcy. And in the eyes of the people who surrounded the Hales, Harry’s father, his uncle, and his grandfather would be viewed, if they were lucky, as servants, assuming that one might have Jewish servants, which was unlikely.

It was an old and intractable problem with which he was never comfortable and which he suspected would not and could not be solved. But it was one of those problems that came and went in one’s life, and could be forgotten as one lived.

“It makes my flesh crawl,” Catherine said as they spoke about this on the drive home, “when I think of the lengths people go to, to keep themselves puffed up so they don’t feel bad when in the presence of someone with more diamonds on her bracelets.”

“It’s the nature of man,” Harry said, “and baboons.”

“Snobbery is human nature?”

“Insecurity and competition. I guess snobbery is different—the profit and joy of invidious comparisons. It’s cowardly. Like contempt, it’s always directed downward. It comes from lack of experience and lack of generosity. You can think you’re superior to others only if you’re blind to their inner lives, and, by extension, to your own—assuming you have one. Though they’re educated differently, the men with whom I served and the workers on my factory floor are just as intelligent and capable as my classmates at Harvard. And yet my classmates at Harvard, for all their fashionable egalitarianism, think they’re truly better than everyone else, as some of your father’s friends undoubtedly think that, because they’re wealthy, they’re better than everyone else.”

“And my father?”

“You tell me. I’d imagine not.”

“He’s not like that, which might be viewed by some as quite remarkable.”

“Not in view of you. You’re above all this. But take, for example, a Wall Street magnate—call him Chase—who needs to have a painting authenticated. He calls in a professor—call him Salmon. Chase thinks of Salmon as an impoverished, blinkered, powerless, naive, super-specialized tool without the dynamism to meet moving challenges or weather a fight. To Chase, Salmon is a glorified clerk or butler. He needs him, but he may also need a truss.

“Salmon, on the other hand, thinks of Chase as a lucky, vulgar idiot who runs after money and can do nothing himself, who must rely totally on others who can actually do things while he merely directs. People like Salmon are necessary to explain the world to people like Chase, and making money is for corrupt simpletons. Salmon thinks it’s so easy he won’t even try. It’s too far below him.

“They deny the virtues, necessities, and realities of the other, and thus they deny the world and blind themselves to it,” Harry said. “Sorry. I tend to speak in aphorisms when I’m driving a fancy car.”

“Would you prefer to drive a less fancy car?”

“In a way. It wouldn’t make me think, I’m driving a fancy car, I’m driving a fancy car. It’s like that with hotels. I don’t like cheap ones, but in the super-luxurious ones your attention is commanded far too much by the details.

“I’d rather be working in the kitchen of an expensive restaurant, or as a waiter, than to sit there and be served porcupine gelées. Really. Luxury not only makes me uncomfortable, it frightens me.”

“It frightens you?” Catherine asked. She had taken such things for granted since birth, had never wanted them in either sense of the word, and preferred—when she was able to tell the difference between the rough and the smooth, which her background made sometimes a difficult task—to do without them. But they had never frightened her. “How can you be frightened by a watercress sandwich at the Brook Club?”

“I’m frightened, for example, to be entombed in stiff, expensive clothes that make it impossible to run, jump, climb, fight, or swim, or engage with half of the things in the universe. I don’t want to be a fancy person, because fancy means you can’t lie on the ground to look beneath something, or to rest: there is no ground anywhere near anyway; you’ve forgotten the ground. You have to sit relatively still because the presumption is that it’s better to let other people do things for you. Your muscles get croquet-weak, your nerves and reflexes, all bottled up, get lazy and unpracticed. You don’t strain or sweat, or ever work with your hands, so you don’t get to stretch beyond yourself. And then you have no reserve capacity. You’re in a semi-exquisite paralysis, far too aware of how other people regard you, separated from nature, from human nature, challenge, storm, sun, rain, life. I’d really rather be in the kitchen, or a mounted policeman in the park, or coiling rope on a tugboat speeding through Hell Gate.”

“The upper class pays a price,” she said, “of vertiginous paralysis. But there’s a kind of thrill to it. It’s dangerous.”

Harry’s expression showed that he found this strange. “That thrill is totally alien to me. Were we immortal, I might try it. But time is limited and I don’t want to let go of the texture and feel of things. I don’t want to watch as other people serve me. The war pounded into me that you have to be as alert and independent as you can be, or you die one kind of death or another.”

“Why don’t you come along with me sometime?” she asked. “Are you sure that the habits of a thousand years make certain things impossible for you? That it’s not just a question of blind loyalty?”

“Even if I marry up,” he said, turning to her rather dangerously given that he was driving, “I don’t want to live in that kind of breathless, delicate world.”

“Hold on, Harry,” she insisted. “Tell me what’s dead about running across a gleaming sea on a sailing yacht that you’ll race to Bermuda at risk of your life, conscious every second of a change in the wind, a jibing boom, or a rising storm? We do that kind of thing, too.”

“That,” Harry admitted, “I could get used to.”

“You see, we can make deals. It doesn’t have to go just one way. I’ll give up the watercress sandwiches—I won’t give up watercress entirely—if you’ll take the yacht. We’ll split our own wood and tend the fire if you’ll accept complete financial security. I’ll shoot with you, if you don’t mind a Holland and Holland. I understand. Real life must be classless. Friction, motion, risk. I know. I want that, I always have. The Hales, actually, are as tough as cypress or ebony.”

“What about hickory?”

“What about it?”

“Are you as tough as it?”

He loved how this animated her. “Tougher,” she said, like a five-year-old, but it was true.

Billy spent an hour or two preparing for the arrival of his oldest friend by enlisting the aid of gin and tonic. In the midst of the greatest comfort and security—on a hundred safe acres by the sea, in a house that glowed like a jewel, in a room filled with paintings, and on a chair that with a football field’s worth of satin damask banished every touch of arthritis—he sipped from a crystal glass for the purpose of freeing his mind from his body, something he had done from an early age and that he no longer could do without.