In Sunlight and in Shadow (44 page)

“And what did you do?”

“We discovered that we were not good.”

Now the streets were filling up with workers in gray, secretaries getting off streetcars, people walking to take their places in offices, factories, and shops. Ships were heading out to sea, and steamers coming in. Trains from the western suburbs and the North Shore clattered east and south to the stations, and shadows continually wheeled with the passage of the sun. As they advanced like a tide, light followed in exact and equal measure. All was at risk and nothing would stay the same. The flowers in Catherine’s room at the Ritz would glow and stop glowing as the sun changed position and its rays shot through one window and then another.

They spent much of the morning tight in one another’s arms. It comforted her. And when he left to make the one o’clock train to New York she was ready to go onstage again with neither fear nor apprehension, though she knew that everyone who came to the theater would be eager to see a great production and primed to wince when she appeared. As difficult as it might be, she would hold steady. She would make them forget. That was her task now, to hold through, with no guarantee, like all those in gray who filled the streets on the way to their jobs, anonymous from birth to death and thereafter, the little people, so called, who so often were as brave as soldiers and as great as kings.

W
HEN THE NEW HAVEN
and Hartford train from Boston pulled into Grand Central, Harry stepped onto a platform in air humid with the remnants of summer heat. On the great Sargasso Sea of the main concourse, where rush hour had already begun beneath the twinkling constellations in the ceiling, late-afternoon light cut shafts through animated dust beneath the vault. Harry felt at home among the ten thousand racing creatures in gabardine, with newspapers and portfolios under their arms, and the grim, penetrating expressions of New Yorkers in the battle of market, office, and street. The portraiture of the thousands and millions who might someday overleap mortality was never-ending. For perhaps with the ignition of eternity every single vanishing moment and the blessedness of each man, woman, and child lost to memory would awake to be engraved on the black walls of time by joyful Niagaras of light.

He stood on the marble floor of Grand Central, turning as slowly as a tourist, while on the eastern side of every block the lights of Manhattan came up as day slid into evening. Through cascading armies of commuters, he fought his way up the Vanderbilt Avenue stairs. Outside, the streets were golden with sunset, crowded with taxis, and flashing with doors opening and closing as office buildings emptied faster than if they were on fire.

Rather than move only up avenues and across side streets, he took a complicated route through lobbies, atria, arcades, and alleys. It was almost possible to go from Grand Central to the park along these back ways that mercifully scaled down the city, especially if one were not shy about opening a door or two or leaping a fence.

As he walked through a long hall beneath a gilded ceiling, the arcade of an office building in the Forties not far from where he had started, he passed a reweaving shop. Though he had been aware of its existence, he had never given it a thought. Because he didn’t smoke, there were no holes burned in his suits. And moths were rare on the upper floors of Central Park West, perhaps because of the rent. As he sped by, he merely glanced to his right.

But before he was able to slow his pace he was whipped around as if he had run out of rope. He slid on the polished floor after he turned, and came to a stop in the dim glow of alabaster chandeliers dirty with soot and dust. Drawn to movement in the window of the reweaving shop as if he were a cat in front of a goldfish bowl, he looked in and saw a woman he hadn’t seen in going on fourteen years. He had loved her when they were both young, and perhaps because he had never told her, never touched her, never kissed her, the love had inconveniently survived. Her name was Eugenia Eba. It was not the most beautiful name, unless you knew her.

Two fields of black were painted on either side of the window, each with three clear ovals exposing a lighted shelf with before-and-after samples of cloth that had once been holey and then were redeemed. In the window itself, next to an ebony-and-gold sewing machine, Eugenia Eba was bent over the sleeve of a man’s jacket. It was rust-colored tweed with a touch of blue, and she was intently holding it at a remove and then sliding it beneath a goosenecked magnifying glass before choosing from a little tray of fibers to match those to which she would join them. Except for what he took as a weariness and patience she had not had as a girl, she seemed the same as she was at eighteen, and because he could not see himself, which might have been a check on transportation to another time, her appearance threw him back as if nothing had changed.

Other than at commencement, the last time he had been near her had been at the class picture, in June of 1933, when ninety-two seniors were arrayed in front of a wall roughly the color of the jacket Eugenia Eba was now repairing. For years, whenever Harry had looked at this picture in black and white at the center of the yearbook, his eyes had bounced between his own image and hers, and with each transit came realization and regret that she was impossibly beyond him.

Knees drawn up and hands casually clasped, in suit and tie, with a handkerchief in his breast pocket, he sat on the ground, in the center of the first row, and she was seated on a chair in the row behind him, over his left shoulder. How could he have been so small, so tense, so pale? How could his chin have appeared so weak, his skin so smooth, his frame so diminutive and childish? To the fully developed man, now virile, powerful, and magnetic, his seventeen-year-old self seemed eleven or twelve, despite the hints in his brooding expression of gravitas to come, unrelieved by the lightness that also came with it. He remembered that this expression was a result only of the fact that she was near and he was aware that he meant absolutely nothing to her.

For her part, it was as if she were of a different species, or a goddess among lesser beings. No one who did not know her had ever thought, upon seeing the picture, as his eyes moved instantly to her and stayed, that she was anything but a teacher among her students. She seemed at least ten years older than anyone around her, and so much larger, even if, although of handsome proportions and noble height, she was not nearly as large as some of the girls whom somehow she appeared to dwarf. And whereas almost every other girl wore a broad lace collar, with or without a kind of sailor’s tie, she wore what looked like a Gibson Girl’s formal jacket, with long, crossed lapels, their velvet a deep and seductive black. Resting against the top of her chest, halfway to the plunging neckline, a necklace cascaded over bare flesh. Her hair shone in the sun like hammered brass in blinding light. Her expression, unlike that of very beautiful women who because of their beauty are receptive and kind, had an edge. It said that she knew she was different, and that she would, though graciously, hold herself apart. It was the inimitable expression, Harry realized many years later, of royalty.

And now she was working in the window of a reweaving shop in a midtown arcade that never saw the light of day, repairing a man’s suit at six in the evening, when everyone else was on the way home but she had to stay so people could drop off or claim their garments. It was a shock to see her at her bench, her hair still golden as if she were yet in the class picture and trying not to squint against the sun.

This was deep, unfinished business, and simply to speak with her would hardly betray Catherine, whom he was not able to betray. He had to know where Eugenia Eba had been, although it seemed not far; what she had done, although it seemed clear; and what she felt. He wanted to hear the sound of her voice, to see if now she wore perfume (for her to have done so then would have further stopped his education in its tracks), and if she would remember him. He wanted to see if over the years their powers had come into balance, if she would react to him—not differently but at all. It was dangerous, but he opened the door anyway.

A sleigh bell that was sprung on a metal strip snapped in announcement, and Eugenia Eba raised her head in a way that she would not have had a woman walked into the shop. Her hands settled as if in slow motion, she breathed in, her eyebrows lifted ever so slightly, and she smiled. It seemed that the seconds beat longer and harder.

“Eugenia?” he asked.

Her eyes narrowed. She tried to place him. “Yes?”

“Are you Eugenia Eba?”

“I was.” She had a wedding ring that, though he had seen her hands before, he now saw for the first time. “I am.”

“Harry Copeland.”

She looked at him uncomprehendingly, struggling to remember the name. He said it again, and when she showed no affect, he said the name of the school. “Oh,” she replied, as if to cover herself. But it was clear she didn’t know him.

For a moment, he looked down in defeat, but then, in a deliberately light and reportorial tone, he said, “Every sport that I played, every catch I made, was with the patient hope that you would be watching. I would walk home, way out of my way, so that I could pass your house—with the idea,” and here he paused, “that you might choose to look out the window.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” She was not overjoyed to be held to account for something, decades before, of which she had been totally unaware.

“No, no,” he said. “Boys do that. I did, at least.”

“You were in love with me?”

“Everyone was in love with you. You must know that.”

“I do. It wasn’t fair.” She shrugged her shoulders, as if to say that it didn’t matter now, which it didn’t.

“Then you went to the Brenau College Conservatory?”

“Now I remember,” she said. “You went to Harvard. How could I forget? It was very difficult . . . for Jews. As far as I know, it may still be. You seem so different.”

“You seem much the same,” he told her.

“I’m not.” She turned her head to direct his glance to the area above the sewing machine. Because it was dark in contrast to the worklighted reweaving table, he hadn’t noticed it. Hanging from a tack fastened to the edge of a shelf was a miniature flag with a gold star.

“Your husband.”

“Missing, presumed killed, on Saipan.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be, because although they presume, I wait. And although I don’t have him, and may never, the waiting is sacred. It’s been a while. I’m not unhappy. Do you know what it feels like?”

“No,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear.

“Like being in love.”

He nodded. “Children?”

“Unfortunately not,” she said. Only silence could follow.

Then she looked at him, in an unexpected reversal, with compassion. She was more out of his reach than she had ever been. “I’m still a married woman, but perhaps, sometime, you could stop by, and we could cross the street to the tearoom, and have tea.”

“I’m going to be married myself,” he said, to put things right, “and I would like that very much.”

In the golden arcade, in a wash of indistinct sound saturated with murmurs, the whir of motors, and heel clicks coming from nowhere and sadly fading to nothing, she glanced at the star behind her, and then turned to Harry. Moved by her own words, but resolute, steady, and defiant, she said, “I believe . . . that when all is said and done . . . love that won’t quit is more important than triumph, than time, than life itself.”

Billy and Evelyn had been out when he had called, so the housekeeper in charge had smoothly connected him with Billy’s executive secretary, a woman with an extraordinary presence over the telephone and everywhere else, one of those elegant, self-possessed, and inexplicably unmarried women who was so obviously efficient and intelligent that had she not been a woman, Billy would have been working for her. Sensing the importance of the matter before Harry had a chance to state it, she said that though Billy had meetings all morning, both Billy and Evelyn would be in the office for lunch, and would he care to join them?

Perhaps it was just a style left over from the thirties, but the Hale offices from the lobby all the way up to the forty-sixth floor exuded a certain shine that Harry, who had never been to either place, could associate only with South America. On the forty-sixth floor every piece of furniture was English or eighteenth-century American, the paintings American or French, the porcelains Mings. The decor being entirely Episcopalian, there were no colors or shapes that said, for example,
Brazil,
and yet the wood-paneled rooms with masses of flowers lit from above by recessed reflectors faintly tipped everything south. Almost blinded by the silver-blue harbor mist through which ferries were sweeping at remarkable speed, Harry supposed that the South American part was the result of the luxury, the color, and the airy view, with the coup de grâce supplied by Art Deco elevator fixtures that, quite mysteriously, looked like Carmen Miranda. All in all, although it may not have struck everyone the same way, entering the Hale offices was as relaxing and exotic as flying down to Rio. And then Harry remembered, drawing in a quiet whistle, that Billy had been born in the harbor there. As he waited in the reception room, he did not have to close his eyes so as to see nothing but blue sky and a monocoque plane heading south, its slipstream sparkling white in the sun.

Soon the capable woman to whom he had spoken that morning appeared and welcomed him. She would have been just as gracious even had she not known that he and Catherine would someday own the Hale Company. She took him into Billy’s office, which was fifty feet long and almost as wide. A wall of windows glowed sapphire. One could see ships beyond the Narrows, moving as silently as clouds. Billy sat at his desk, his back to the windows, talking on the telephone. He gestured to Harry as if to say, I’m on this call, but you’re more important: I’ll be off in a minute.

Evelyn was ensconced in a wing chair covered in Williamsburg-blue jacquard. She was dressed, as he had never seen her, for Manhattan, but seemed harried and tired. She smiled, having accepted not only Harry but the new era he would bring. She looked over at her husband, then at Harry, and patted the air as if to say that he would finish soon, as he did. A waiter in a white jacket was setting up lunch in another part of the room. They rose and went to the windows, where they looked down at traffic and pedestrians moving noiselessly on the street far below. “What a beautiful place,” Harry said.