In Sunlight and in Shadow (37 page)

Verderamé looked up and turned his head quickly, snapping it in anger and disgust. Harry knew exactly what it meant. The bodyguards knew exactly what it meant, and at the south end of the square two cops who knew exactly what it meant turned away as the four of them began to beat Harry, who, had he attempted to fight back, could not have prevailed without a weapon, and, knowing this, sought only to escape. When he couldn’t, he tried to protect himself with his hands, arms, and pulled-in legs. They took long, considered, well aimed strokes, choosing a target on his body and thrusting for it as if they were splitting wood or hitting a golf ball.

Circling like a tiger, Verderamé held up his hand to signal a pause. They stopped. Harry struggled on as if they were still landing blows, a cry emerging from lungs filling with fluid. Verderamé said, “When I get out of that restaurant, I don’t want to see you on this sidewalk. So no matter how you feel, no matter how unconscious you wanna be, walk off. That’s my answer to your fuckin’ question.”

Then they resumed. Even had they the hands of pianists it would have been a terrible beating, but their fists were thick and hard, and at the end each one got in one last kick and a laugh, like children playing soccer with a ball they had not yet learned to control.

Harry tried hard to remain conscious, but he couldn’t, and the last thing he remembered as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk was his fear that he would still be there when Verderamé came out. He could neither move nor stay awake, and he just let go.

The two cops walked over, tapped Harry with their feet, and, when there was no response, one went to a call box to summon an ambulance. The ambulance drivers were told, and the police report said, that an unruly drunk had attacked passersby, fallen, and injured himself. Eventually, Cornell found him in Bellevue, unconscious and filthy with blood, and when Catherine came she took him up to St. Luke’s. After a while, by the time he could walk, he could converse, although he couldn’t do both simultaneously.

Now, as someone else’s hot water ran richly, it was also clear. It was possible to lose everything in an instant or over time. It was possible to be confronted by forces, natural or otherwise, that one could not overcome by virtue. Courage, greatness, honesty, all could be defeated. He had understood this on the field of battle as it was illustrated by the way death chose among the soldiers. But after such a war, in which scores of millions had died, how could anyone tolerate corruption? How could Verderamé’s tiny army rule a city of eight million? How could such a thing, after so much sacrifice, in a country where millions of men were now hardened soldiers, be allowed? There was no good reason, and yet it was so, and as the hot water cascaded over the lip of the overflow and into oblivion, so would his money and so eventually would the water of his life.

When Catherine arrived at ten he had had his long bath and was very tired. She had never been seriously ill or wounded, and did not understand the weakness and alteration of time with which such things are accompanied. Impatient for him to recover, she had no idea that once he did he would need space in which to catch up, and that in some ways he never would. As lonely and kind as she had been, always, she had known mainly victory, even (eventually) over Victor, and she assumed that for Harry it would have to be the same. He found her conversation rapid.

“We’re going to open at the Schubert in Boston on the twenty-third.”

“Of August?” he asked, as if it could be possible.

“September, Harry. Sidney says it’s perfect, because everyone is back from vacation, including the college students, who are just starting their courses and have very little anxiety.”

“Where does anxiety come into it?”

“Because they’re not worried about grades or falling behind, they go out a lot.”

“I suppose they do.”

“Didn’t you?” It was clear that he hadn’t. In the condition he was in, he looked like he never could have. Still, she pressed. “Why not?”

“At the beginning of each term I worked as if my life depended upon it. I used to work for the first five or six weeks the way people work before exams.” Tired, he stopped.

“Why?” she asked gently.

“For the foundation.”

Thinking reflexively of her family’s foundation, she was momentarily confused. “Of the course work,” she said, clarifying for herself.

“You master a subject at the beginning or not at all. I would read all the required readings and take volumes of notes—not précis, but questions, arguments, answers—all above and beyond the call. I would read the suggested readings, too. I would memorize passages, tables, equations. . . .”

“Was there a particular reason?”

“Had to get all A’s.”

This upset her. It was against the ethos of the Ivy League, almost anti-social. She came to her reaction naturally, without knowing why, but her questions, though unspoken, were unambiguous: Why were you so driven? Why did you have to stand out? Wasn’t this somehow dark and aggressive, a kind of warfare that was uncalled for?

He read the questions in her eyes. “It was expected of us in the thirties. We weren’t really welcome. If a Jew didn’t shine academically, the implicit question was, Why do you think you deserve to be here? Where’s your ticket? I had to have a ticket, and I had to punch it myself.”

“Didn’t people hate you for working so hard?”

“Yes,” he said, remembering, “and then what could I do but work harder? I rowed and fenced with the same intensity, gained as much as I lost, lost as much as I gained.”

“But didn’t you ever do anything or go anyplace just for fun, without the fight in you?”

He thought for a moment. “Girls could make me forget—their goodness, and gentleness. They were sometimes so kind that I wondered what the hell I was doing. But it never was quite enough, as the world was rougher than they were, and I knew this, so I stayed in the fight. I worked the hardest in September and October. It’s a good time, however, to open a play. Sidney’s right.”

The talking had exhausted him, and his eyes closed. While he slept, she read the paper until he stirred, and then she virtually leapt out at him with the announcement that she would be staying at the Ritz: “The whole cast. You have to do it to impress the newspapers and put yourself on the highest level. We’re almost broke and we should be staying in South End boarding houses, but if the
Globe
comes to do an interview in your boarding house, they assume you’re not at the top of the game on Broadway, and write it into the article. The Barrymores don’t stay in rooms to let.
Bella figura.
” She came closer as he lay in bed. “We rehearse in Boston beginning after Labor Day. My parents have invited us to Bar Harbor for the weekend. If the weather’s good, which is always iffy in Maine, it’ll be perfect. You’ll be well enough by then to get around and to sail. No one else will be there. It’s more modest than East Hampton, no servants, and very quiet. My parents know that you’ve been ill.”

“Did you tell them why?”

“No, that’s for you.”

“I’m going to deliver a hell of a package.”

“They already know about the other thing.”

“They do?”

“Someone told them. Then they asked me, and I said yes.”

“What did they say then?”

“They didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing?”

“What should they have said?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re civilized people.”

“They are, I know, and I won’t approach them as I did Harvard.”

“Have you ever been to Maine?”

“I knew a girl in Maine once, on an island near Portland. It was in summer. We were both twenty, but she was nothing like you.”

“That’s good,” Catherine said only teasingly, “because, had it been the other way around, you’d be in hot water.”

S
OMETIMES IN THE WAR
, will exhausted, faith depleted, and death seemingly imminent, Harry had bowed his head, closed his eyes, and prayed. Not for victory, not for survival. He asked nothing. He just prayed. And having thus surrendered he was lifted and empowered, with a foresight of ensuing battles that then ran before him as if in slow motion, the enemy’s moves almost as still as a painting.

Now, as then, although on a lesser scale and in a lesser register, he waited to be shown the way ahead. Though his broken ribs would take months to heal completely, within a few days of coming home he had begun to run and swim, carefully. And though it was still hot, the declining sun announced that autumn was gathering somewhere beyond September.

Just before the Labor Day weekend, Catherine called to say that if he could be ready she would pick him up in a taxi (she had added “honey”), not at about half past eight but in an hour. Someone who had lived out of a knapsack for years and felt little privation even though half its weight had been ammunition, could of course be ready in an hour. “I’ll be out front,” he said, assuming that she had changed their reservations and booked an earlier train. As it had stood, they would not have arrived in Bar Harbor until the holiday was half over. Now they would have an extra day.

The taxi stood at rest across the street on the park side, facing north. He thought that the driver, instead of making a U-turn and cutting across at 86th, might want to gain an extra six blocks on the meter by using 96th. It could actually be faster, in that getting over to Park higher uptown would be easier, and shooting down Park rather than Central Park West would be better in that Park was wider and they wouldn’t have to cross at midtown.

They did take 96th, and when they sped across the southbound lanes of Park he then assumed that they would turn north and go to the 125th Street station to get on the New Haven and Hartford, but they crossed the northbound lanes as well and continued east. “Where are we going?” he asked, with the anxiety of someone, misrouted in a taxi, who knows he will have to pay both for the driver’s mistake and for correcting it. He looked at his watch as if he knew what time the train was leaving.

“Lunch,” she said, “at a great restaurant I know. It’s not crowded, but it’s a little noisy. I hope you won’t mind.”

“We’re not booked on an earlier train?”

“No.”

“But we do have reservations,” he said, suspiciously, as the taxi turned north onto the East River Drive. “In the Bronx?”

“No, Harry. They’re mostly in South Dakota and places like that,” she said, “where there are Indians.”

He knew something was up when she got like that. “Are we going to eat in Queens? Has it ever been done?”

“Wrong.”

“Westchester? Not Connecticut.”

“No.”

“Where? A nice German restaurant? They’re always popular after a war, because people love a light German lunch on a hot summer day—ten or twelve pounds of potatoes, a pound or two of wurst, sauerkraut, and a gallon of dark beer. Then we can play tennis.”

She had her family’s characteristic smile when amused. It was generous, restrained, and mischievous. “It’s not German.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s American.”

“What’s it called?”

“N-something, I don’t really remember. I’ve been there only a few times.”

“N-something? N-what?”

“Seven six two eight?” She looked at the roof of the taxi. “Seven six two four? Does it matter?”

“That’s a peculiar name for a restaurant.”

“I admit that.”

“Perhaps it’s Maison N—seven six two eight? Or Chez—seven six two eight?”

“No,” she said, “because it’s American.”

By this time they were speeding along the deck of the Triboro Bridge. To their right, over the East River, Manhattan formed a spectacular palisade of brown and gray, still glinting in the eastern sun. It was so immense and of such great mass and depth that they leaned slightly toward it as if by the command of gravity, and they felt as if they were flying above the river, now a cool gray tinted with the blue of the sky and flecked with gulls. The next thing they knew, after a shock of cool air on the bridge, and then a long, lovely embrace, was coming to a stop at the Marine Aviation Terminal. “I see,” he said, “but I’m really not used to getting into a plane if I don’t have a parachute.”

“Steel yourself,” was her answer. “It’s a new world.”

At the end of a wooden pier sloping toward and then projecting into a back bay of Long Island Sound, a huge gray clipper, its wings projecting into fine points far from the fuselage, faced outward toward a run of open water. Several men were working atop it, some now more than a hundred feet apart, inspecting the four enormous engines, the ailerons, and the flaps. In comparison to the plane they looked like the figures on a wedding cake, and, dressed in what looked like naval uniforms, they glowed in white.

“That’s quite a restaurant,” Harry declared, reading the black letters on the right wing, or perhaps, because it was a seaplane, the starboard wing:
NC 18604.

“I knew it began with N,” she said.

“Whatever it begins with, it’s a great way to get to Boston.”

They walked faster than they normally would have, and their heels knocking on the wood planks of the pier made the sound of departure.

“It doesn’t go to Boston until it drops me off on the trip back. It’s a charter. We’ll pick up my parents in East Hampton.”

The whole plane was for them. “I’ve never lived like this, Catherine. It’s unsettling.”

“Would you rather spend twelve hours on a train?”

“No.”

“Does flying bother you?”

“Only through flak.”

“Come on, then,” she told him. At the door they were greeted by two stewardesses in pale blue uniforms of French-tailored, superfine wool. Each of them had straight blond hair that seemed almost lacquered and was pulled back on the left side, and each was heavily made up.

Stepping into the cabin, Harry and Catherine saw a small room with leather banquettes and, at one end, a table covered with white linen. Vases of flowers were held on gimbals, and the interior was lit like an expensive restaurant on the Upper East Side. As soon as they sat together on a banquette and strapped on their seat belts, two men jumped down from a forward hatch, closed it after them, and went to the flight deck. The main door had already been shut and bolted. Engines were started one by one and brought up to equal tach. The stewardesses took to their folding seats, snapped closed their buckles, and the engines came alive, moving the plane out onto smoothly rippling water.