In Sunlight and in Shadow (42 page)

As he walked up Newbury Street, beneath trees shuddering in the wind, their dry leaves as stiff as cymbals and shuttering the city lights like stars, Harry understood what she faced. With nothing to do but wait for the curtain and then sit and watch powerlessly, he was more agitated than Catherine herself, and began to know a little of what women felt when they had waited through the war for their men to come home: an anxiety that found no relief in action. He was thinking mainly of Catherine. But, with no loss of force, both love and prayer tend to embrace all those who are deserving. So, in the Boston autumn, on streets that seemed charged with life, Harry was moved as well by George Yellin, one of Catherine’s fellow cast members, whom Catherine had taken under her wing. George was a slight, short, older-than-middle-aged man with a minor role that required him to don a pencil-thin mustache. He performed this small part faithfully, never faltering, always going nowhere as he aged and others rose. He had almost been a star, though not quite. Now, everyone was careful to be kind to him. His face was a symbol of certain and inevitable decline. Harry had watched Catherine protect him, at times at her own expense.

Once, when the actors were gathered in a Romanian restaurant, consuming large amounts of wine as they waited for marinated steaks from a ten-foot grill, George Yellin, who had forgotten to remove his pencil-thin mustache, had said, “You know, now most Victrolas run off electricity, with a cord.” The shock of this statement, decades out of phase, reduced the gathering to stunned silence. It was as if he had announced that someone had invented an apparatus to replace the gaslight. One could feel a burst of mocking laughter on its way, with nothing to stop it but Catherine, who reflexively leapt in to cover him. “That’s true, George,” she said, a young woman protecting a man old enough to be her father, “and what I’ll bet no one at this table knows is something my father, who works with people who fund these kinds of things, told me: that they’ve begun looking into a way to make radios and Victrolas without tubes. Daddy said that they will, and that when they do, the radios will be so small you’ll be able to carry them in a purse, and so rugged you’ll be able to throw them out the window without breaking them. And you won’t need a cord, because they’ll use much less power and will be able to run on batteries.” She looked around the table, surveying all whose laughter she had dammed in their throats, and she said, “I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

Even though Sidney would explain why what Catherine had described was, given his knowledge of physics, impossible, George was saved, and this was but one reason of many why Harry loved Catherine as he had never loved and would love no other. Perhaps had his own circumstances been not as bleak he wouldn’t have been concerned, but, confronted with imminent failure, he was frightened by the possibility that Catherine might fail as well. The theater was full of terrors—of fashion, opinion, retribution, politics, and perversity. It was one of those things, like so much of life, that cut down many more people than it raised up. Catherine might protect George Yellin, but who would, or could, protect her?

Though Harry could not, he was comforted by the fact that God had given her a shield not only in beauty and talent inborn, but in qualities that far exceeded them and would last beyond them. So it was back through the darkened, star-ravaged streets to the theater where he could confidently witness at her turn the woman for whom his love was the closest thing he had ever known to a prayer directly answered. It was commonly agreed that such things did not happen. But, of course, they did.

The usual wearers of furs and topcoats had assembled beneath the marquee, stirring with excitement like a wave rocking between two yachts. Napoleonic ranks of incandescent bulbs rained down on them a certain gleam that made them seem larger in number and louder in speech. Amidst the automobiles dropping them off came a carriage or two laden with unchangeable dowagers and delicate male companions who carried canes and dressed in white shirtfronts with pearl buttons. The horses sensed the excitement, and, though silent and enslaved, they were the most expressive of all. Meyer Copeland had once said to his son, “I have often prayed that you will grow up to be as dignified as a horse. You could do a lot worse.”

“A horse!”

“Yes, Harry, your kingdom for a horse. Their temperaments are governed by God. They skip a lot of nonsense. They’re strong, gentle, and just. You’d be lucky. I think you will be lucky.”

“But they’re stupid.”

“Maybe they’re merely quiet.”

When the brass doors were opened, the sounds of an orchestra warming up came through them so entrancingly that the crowds were drawn in as if by a vacuum cleaner. Professional musicians do not limber up with scales, but with quick remembered passages and cadenzas as impossible to resist and sometimes more beautiful than the compositions from which they are drawn or upon which they are based.

Almost before he knew what was happening, Harry found himself in his seat, surrounded as if in a jewel box by cushiony furs and satin, by matrons from Marshfield, accountants from Newton, dyspeptics from Natick, and Harvard undergraduates and the girls at their sides from Wellesley and Wheaton. In the real boxes sat the dowagers and their men who looked and dressed like ringmasters, Irish gangsters and their molls, and young Brahmins looking handsome, impatient, and drunk. The Porcellian had a box. This Harry knew by their youthful pink faces, their dinner jackets, the way they threw back their heads when tippling, and the little flashing pig of gold tied to the chain of a pocket watch that one of them kept pulling from his vest because he thought it was a flask. Harry had lived next to their club, and although he had never shot any of them, he knew them the way a gamekeeper knows his pheasants.

Time was kept by orchestral riffs growing fuller and fuller as they skated by like puffs of smoke; by the thump of ropes and wood muffled by the heavy curtain as scenery was adjusted at inhuman speed; by lights that blinked ascendingly; the filling of seats; the sounding of chimes; and, finally, by the falling of darkness.

This darkness mixed with silence for a breathtaking moment until music cascaded inversely with the quick rise of the curtain—part of Sidney’s brilliance was his disdain for darkened overtures—and the appearance of a set radiating daylight that, no matter if it is supposed to be as white as June sun, in the theater cannot avoid a touch of incandescent yellow. The beginning was auspicious and strong.

Though they were in Boston, New York appeared in chaos and perpetual motion. The skyscrapers and bridges the set designer had launched almost to the peak of the proscenium arch were only backlighted canvas, but as envoys of the real thing they claimed the theater for New York. Brass, bells, horns, and a sudden flooding of the stage with dozens of people, yellow and checkered “taxis,” “horse”-drawn carts and wagons (some horse: the man inside was named Irv), policemen blowing whistles, criers hawking their wares, and a canvas subway train inching across a box-girdered bridge in the background, all came at once. It would have been nothing had it been nothing but chaos, but it was as choreographed as the ballet of real life it represented.

Into the light and brass, parting the action onstage like the Red Sea, emerged Catherine, stepping out from the portals of Penn Station. With perfect timing she accomplished the inhalations that had made Sidney fall in love with her, and they went straight to the hearts of the audience. Harry was proud that these sweet and powerful breaths had come from a mouth that he had kissed, that he had inhaled them deeply into his lungs, and that she had taken his.

The stage cleared as she surveyed the city. Harry realized that as she peered stage right, took a step forward, peered stage left, looked up, and raised her left hand as if to shield herself, that, though it was short and tight, this was a carefully accomplished dance. In just a few moments, her wonder at the city was transformed into an incipient mastery over it. As she was pleased by what she beheld, she relaxed. And as the music beat through the air, she moved to it almost imperceptibly, and smiled. She had arrived. She had beheld something magnificent, as if it were her first glimpse of the world, and she had learned to love and master it all in an instant. The focus could not help but shift from the vastness and power of the city to the eyes of the girl who had come to it, and the lights now left the others in darkness and shone upon her until the stage was enveloped in silence.

In this silence, she had them, and she knew it. So she stretched out her cue, withholding it from the conductor himself, wanting to stay longer, driving the hook deeper. And when the time was right she began to sing her heartbreakingly beautiful song. The musicians, rallied by the long caesura, played more than the music. It became one of those great moments, a triumph. Catherine’s singing was so magnificent, far more than in any rehearsal, her presence so arresting, that time was vanquished. Well versed in just about everything, the audience knew—even if, to protect themselves in a complicated and atrophied social system, hardly any one of them would have admitted it—that Catherine Sedley’s simple song was on a par with the “Ma di’” of
Norma,
the “Deh! Non turbare,” of
La Gioconda,
and the “Soave sia il vento” (perfectly mirroring her introduction) of
Così Fan Tutte.
They could not contain their honest emotion or their enthusiasm, and when Catherine finished, there was a brief breathless silence followed by a thunder of applause and the rising to a standing ovation that would last two full minutes and more.

As the rafters shook, she remained absolutely still, finally acknowledging the great tribute to her with an almost sad smile that bound to her forever anyone there in that moment. For as high as she herself had been lifted, she had carried along with her more than a thousand people.

By the time she sang her two other songs, one a duet that had been added only in Boston, the momentum of the play had made standing ovations inappropriate, but at the end she had so many curtain calls, and applause like a deafening waterfall close up, that there was no question of either the play’s success or hers. Harry was so proud he could hardly rise from his seat, but when he did he found himself borne along on a current of satin and topcoats until at the exit he almost rammed into Billy and Evelyn, who were both furtive and aglow. “Harry!” said Billy. “Wasn’t that spectacular! My God, my own daughter. I didn’t realize who she was. She’s got everything ahead of her.
She’s
the one who will make our name, not anyone but her.”

“She will,” Harry replied, certain that it would be so.

“Don’t tell her you saw us,” Evelyn said excitedly, kissing Harry as she spoke. “We promised not to be here, but we had to see her, so we sat way in the back beneath the balcony. It didn’t matter. She came through as clearly as starlight.” As they were separated by the crowd and the distance increased, Harry heard, “Don’t tell her. We’re going back to New York. We’ve got to get the train. God bless.”

“I won’t, I won’t,” Harry heard himself say, and then they were gone. Eventually, he would tell her, but only much later. How could he not? And then, as the tides thinned and he found himself outside, relatively alone on a stretch of black pavement, he took in a deep, satisfied breath of cold air and began to walk to Locke-Ober, where with Catherine and the others he would wait all night for the morning papers. Sidney had reserved Locke-Ober with the last of the production funds. Now, that money would seem like nothing at all.

Winter Place was cold and black, the lights of Locke-Ober so dim that the vast amount of silver within hardly seemed to shine, but the calm would shelter and stabilize the cast as they waited. Had things gone badly, the brown darkness of the interior would have been insufferable, but now they needed to be tranquil, as far as they could be. They would enjoy their success no less if their euphoria were countered than were it accelerated, quiet triumph being infinitely stronger, as Harry had learned time and again in the years just passed.

The first to greet him was George Yellin, who was happy for perhaps the only time in the last twenty years. “How did it go?” George asked, knowing full well how it went, which was betrayed by his expression as sharply as the pencil mustache he had once again forgotten to remove.

Catherine was trapped in the voluble crowd, and when she and Harry caught sight of one another they felt the peculiar rush of feeling that two people in love feel when they are politely separated and cannot wait to be close. Nonetheless, the time until they came together stretched out pleasurably, and when finally they embraced and were swept into the restaurant, they said what they needed to say in their eyes and in their touch.

Seated at a table that ran the entire length of the wood-paneled downstairs room, which women ordinarily were not allowed to enter, Harry noticed in the corner of his eye several figures passing outside, clothed in tweed and caps. Their speech was faintly audible as it vibrated the glass. He knew them instantly, as he always had, and felt that he almost belonged with them more than with his own. Locke-Ober, he thought, was dimly lit so that those privileged to be inside would be able to see others not so fortunate passing in the cold, and so that those in the cold would not have so pretty a picture engraved upon their eyes by too strong a light. So many bottles of Champagne were uncorked that, though no one would ever know, one of the youngest girls in the chorus actually looked around for a popcorn popper. Catherine quaffed two glasses like a tonic. She was thirsty, used to it, and she knew she had earned it.

“Don’t you want something to drink?” Sidney asked Harry.

“I want it, but I shouldn’t have it, so, luckily, tonight I don’t need it.”

“You should be jealous of your girl,” George Yellin said. “She’s on a rocket to the moon.”

“I’m not jealous, George,” Harry said tranquilly.

“Why not?”

“George, if you were lucky enough to be betrothed to Athena, would you be jealous of her?”