In Sunlight and in Shadow (43 page)

“Athena who?”

“Goldberg,” Harry said.

George was panic-stricken. “I thought, I thought. . . .”

“The goddess.”

“Oh!” he said.

Catherine blushed, and surveyed her fiancé with “such war of white and red within her cheeks” that her deeper commitment was betrayed.

“Well,” George Yellin said. “Now I see, now I see. Catherine, you’re an angel. I don’t know how you did it, but you saw me through this, and I feel good about tonight. I’ve always been afraid of Boston. They slaughtered me here once, you know, and you never forget.”

In New York, many theatrical people have cardiac crises when, coming out of the theater, they see and rush for the next day’s paper and discover no review of their year or two of work, in that the review will run in a later edition. This is because in New York newspapers are launched upon an immense mass of readers and they spread their weight over the waters in confusing multiple runs, assaulting the public in waves that, like the oceans’, never cease. Not so in Boston, a city where the rich strive to make do with less, and those who have enough proudly disdain the luxury of sufficiency. In Bostonian eyes, to have only one edition was to flirt with excess. So all the reviews would come that morning, and the wait stretched until five, but most of the cast was young and bohemian enough not to feel it.

As they descended from the charged heights of opening night they began to entertain their doubts. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Sidney announced at four. “As you know, theater critics are capable of anything. Criticus may leave his house one evening with the unquenchable desire to see a play about a talking lobster. When the production he is to judge is instead about Pope Innocent the Tenth, he may be disappointed, insulted, and outraged.”

“That’s right,” said someone who, slumped in his seat with a bottle, fluently supplied an excerpt from the review: “‘The author has failed to impart to the Pope a redness of color, the touch of vitality, and the briny wit we expect. Nor is his Innocent capable of the immensely powerful grasp, pinching the life out of his enemies, that he is reputed to have had. And where is the depiction of the New World fishermen, risking their lives to gather their pots and traps, which so sustained Europe and the papacy at the time? All in all, a grave disappointment from a writer whose previous play,
Gloucester and the Cape St. Ann,
I found first rate.’”

“Is that what he wrote?” George Yellin asked. “How dare he!”

“But the audience,” Harry protested.

Sidney was glad to be able to bring his experience into play. “Not disoften”—he knew this was not a word, but thought it should have been—“critics will take the opposite tack of an audience just to show who’s master. Word of mouth may reach ten or twenty thousand people over a period of weeks. The critic speaks to half a million the next morning. I’ve seen critics delight in their power to bring the audience itself to a different view, simply to see if it can be done. It can.”

And then everyone, having responsibly considered the worst, went back to expectations of glory. In the still black shades of morning, Locke-Ober became as quiet as an opium den. Catherine leaned into Harry and slept. There were only murmurs now, and few of those. Intermittent snores dueled as nasally in the air as Sopwith Camels.

The spell was broken by the explosive thud of a bundle of papers thrown at the doorstep of a building across Winter Place. One of the boys in the cast rushed out, lobster shears in hand, to steal as many as his pounding heart would allow. They watched him cut the twine and run back in with three papers under his arm as if they were a football in the crucial moments of the Harvard-Yale game. He almost forgot to open the door as he was about to sail through it. The
Boston Herald
was slapped down in front of Sidney. He opened to the right page as if it had been bookmarked, and, trembling slightly, he read.

First, the headline: “‘A Triumph of the Postwar.’ Wow!” he said, as everyone sat straight and awakened. “‘Only a few times in the life of the theater comes a play, or, even less frequently, a musical, that is so powerful and moving that when it ends you are heartbroken to leave it and step back into your own life. Very seldom does one come to love the characters so much as to long for sleep and the opportunity to dream oneself back into their midst.’”

The review continued in this vein, unreservedly praising every aspect of the production—the music, the book, the staging—and the actors, who bathed in one or two glorious sentences as if they were Cleopatra bathing in milk. But after progressing euphorically, Sidney stopped short.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “This can’t be. I don’t understand it.” He read something over, silently. As his expression changed, Catherine, who had not been praised, felt the floor beneath her fall away.

“Read it,” she said.

“You don’t want to hear it,” Sidney told her.

“No,” she sighed, “but read it.”

He looked down slowly, and read: “‘The only wrong note in all this perfection is one Catherine Sedley, whose performance, fortunately not essential, is so overburdened with lack of talent as to serve as a kind of obstinate anchor. Blame nepotism, for this Catherine Sedley is none other than Catherine Thomas Hale, who likely got the part because her father, namesake of the famous investment house, is rumored to have backed the production.’”

Catherine was stoic. She neither dropped her head nor, as she easily might have, and as many would have, cried. She said only, “It’s not true.”

“Not a penny,” said Sidney. “Her father had nothing to do with it.”

“It’s a freak,” said George Yellin. “Wait for the
Globe
and the
American.
”

“The
American
’s a Hearst paper,” someone said, negatively.

“So what?” Sidney replied. “Their critic won’t be the critic of the
Herald.
”

Two thuds, one closely following the other, and the boy with the lobster shears ran out and came back almost instantly with the
Globe,
the
American,
and the
Boston Daily Record.
These three, with the
Herald,
would be decisive. With the
Herald
’s stunning praise, all they needed was one merely good review from amongst the three others. They got more than that. All were ecstatic. Sidney read them, assuming that the
Globe,
which was the first, and the other two would treat Catherine fairly.

They did not. Each and every one slighted her performance. The
Globe
said, “I couldn’t wait for her to stop spoiling the production and leave the stage. Her voice is so peculiar, her movements so strange, and her appearance that of a not very pretty society girl, which is what she is and reportedly why she got the part, when she is supposed to be a country girl. Her presence throws an otherwise glorious production off track every second she appears. Perhaps New York will not have to suffer through this if the producers are wise, although they probably dare not trample upon the paternal affections of their investors.”

After making Sidney read them all, Catherine stood, the silver light of Locke-Ober gleaming onto her hair. She said, “I want everyone to know that, first, I truly am happy for you: congratulations. Congratulations, George.” She smiled at him. (The papers had noted his performance. One had said, “Even George Yellin, who has not appeared in Boston—with good reason—since 1924’s
The Empress Eugénie,
is wonderful, if small.”) “And, second, I’ll go. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone else.”

“No you won’t,” Sidney said, followed by strong murmurs of agreement. “No you won’t. You were superb. There’s no explanation for these reviews, except that sterile imaginations and closed hearts never forgive those unlike themselves. You’re going to open in New York. We’ll all be together. Fuck them and fuck the money. You come with us.”

“But Sidney,” Catherine said, “I don’t need the money, and everyone here does. It’s not. . . .”

“Do you know why?” Sidney interrupted. “Do you know why all these crazy Jews in the theater, and me, and the Nebraskans and Alaskans, and Irish Catholics, and George Yellin, whatever he is, don’t have any money?”

“I’m Jewish,” said George. “Why am I a special category?”

“Because when it comes to this kind of thing we always say fuck the money, and the money goes away. It goes away, but, listen to me, Catherine,” he said, and paused, “it’s worth it.”

And Catherine, who until that moment had been composed. . . .

The next day, bright and warm, brought back a touch of summer, flooding its light upon the Public Garden as the sun filtered through the trees and then rose above them, burning away shadow. Catherine’s room looked east over the Common. On the desk and tables were a dozen vases of flowers, some from people she didn’t know, with unread notes praising her performance, wishing her good fortune, asking her to dinner. She sat on the edge of the bed, still in her elegant clothes, still in makeup, with hardly a sign that she had been up all night. She drew for this upon nothing but her youth.

The sun illuminated the flowers from behind, infusing them with the kind of glow that cinematographers induce with fine gauze. The colors intensified with the light, pulsed as the sun strengthened, and seemed almost as if they were moving. “Did you see the look on George Yellin’s face,” Catherine asked, “after he said it wasn’t over until the reviewer from the
Evening Transcript
had his say, and Sidney told him that the
Transcript
had folded at the beginning of the war?”

“I did. How can a living human being be so continually surprised by the present?”

“It’s because he’s so sad,” Catherine averred. “Because he’s been moving down for so long, he doesn’t want to move at all, so he lives in stilled time. It reminds me of my cousins, little girls—Hales—who hesitate at doorways. They don’t cross thresholds until they check with their parents. They love what they have and are suspicious of change. I don’t know why George touches me so, but he does.”

“Because he’s old, he failed, and he can’t afford to quit the field. He has to eat, so he struggles through one beating after another until, not so long from now, he won’t ever get a part again. He’ll become theatrically extinct, and no one will ever think of him or his descent from a profession in which one is always courting adoring eyes.”

“Then what?”

“He’ll live in an apartment the size of a steamer trunk, surviving on a tiny bit of food. He’ll spend the day on a bench in the Broadway median, watching pigeons, and go home to the little apartment, where on summer nights he’ll sit by the open window listening to a baseball game on the radio, drinking one Rheingold, looking out at windows across the courtyard. He’ll do this for five or ten years, maybe twenty. Then he’ll become ill, struggle with that for a while like a fish trapped on deck, and then he’ll die. The
Times
will give him one and a half inches, no picture. ‘George Yellin, a bit-part actor.’”

“And his mother and father?”

“His mother and father, long dead, loved him perhaps as he should have been loved—I hope so—and as the world has not. That is, without regard to his success. In the end, that’s what you come back to, the only thing that matters, those who love you though you have failed.”

“Is that how you love me?” she asked.

“It’s exactly how I love you, although you’ve hardly failed.”

“I feel as if I have.”

“You haven’t. But even if you had, it wouldn’t matter to me, because what I love was with you the day you were born.”

She wasn’t really listening. Adjusting her hair exactly as her mother did—Harry noted this—and mesmerized by the glow of the roses, she said, “I’m going to quit.”

“Just because of nine bad reviews?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Nine out of nine, and what reviews! I was the only one.”

“Who said it would be easy? You work it through, as you told me yourself, for the few moments of almost divine grace. The rest is either monotony or agony.”

“Still,” she said.

“Still what?”

“You can’t argue with that kind of fierce unanimity. Every single one, and they were all so hateful.”

“But that’s your sword and shield.”

“How so?”

“Nine reviews.”

“Yes?”

“Each hateful.”

“Yes?”

“Each coming to the same conclusion.”

“And?”

“Each one, without exception, an angry reaction to the belief that you were bought into the part. Nine reviewers. Where do you think they live?”

She began to awake as if with anger. “Who, the reviewers?”

“The reviewers. Do you think they all live together in the same room? In the same building? I’ll bet they live all over the place. I’ll bet they live in Mattapan and Somerville and Swampscott. That’s only three. This is Massachusetts. They probably live in places called
Mooshacumquit
and
West Fishcake.
They’re theater critics. Maybe some live on Beacon Hill, maybe one lives in Back Bay. They don’t all read the same things, or talk together: they’re in competition; they probably hate each other.”

“If it’s like New York, they drink together while they think of nasty things to say.”

“No, it’s Boston. They’re too stupid to do that. Maybe the rumor appeared somewhere in the press, or maybe it didn’t. If it did, who put it there? And who made sure all the theater critics in Boston knew about it?”

“I can’t believe it,” she said. And then, upon only a little reflection, “No. No. I can.”

“He’s capable of it, isn’t he?”

“He is,” she said. “And what you don’t know is that at Marrow he’s responsible for financing newspapers, of which they do a lot. But we can’t be sure. We can’t know. We’ll never be able to prove anything. And even if we could, what could we do?”

Harry shook his head and pursed his lips, as if to say, This is something I know about.

“What?” she asked.

“They would hide,” he said, “in churches, hospitals, convents, schools. . . .”

“Who would hide?”

“Germans. They would shoot from these places. They wanted us not to be sure. They wanted us to die because we were not sure, and because we were good.”