In Sunlight and in Shadow (48 page)

As if by instinct, and like a pilot checking his gauges, Billy directed his eyes to the bar to see the number of the station. He was a good driver, and had looked ahead. The long, straight road was empty as far as he could see, and he would have noticed lights a mile off. He was comfortable and relaxed, as one is in driving on a straight and empty road even at dusk. Billy was the only one who had not been able to identify the music almost instantly—it took Catherine two bars—and as he narrowed his eyes and listened, trying to pick out patterns and the characteristic use of various instruments, the car drifted toward the side of the road. It was a very big car, and although the right wheels had yet to touch the sandy shoulder, the body of the automobile was planing a six-inch strip through air where it should not have been.

Evelyn was the one who grabbed the wheel and sent the Rolls veering over the center line so as not to hit the dark form of a man they would have killed as he walked right next to the pavement. It would have been hard for him to have heard them. The wind was high and the Rolls’s large engine, which did not have to strain, was exceedingly quiet.

“Son of a bitch!” Billy screamed, bringing the car back to its lane as the adrenaline coursed through him so that he could hear every note coming over the airwaves. “I knew it was Beethoven. That son of a bitch, what was he doing walking in the road like that?”

“We were almost off the road, Daddy,” Catherine said severely.

“But we weren’t,” Billy replied. “We weren’t. You don’t walk right on the road, where you can get hit by a car.” Billy was expecting a male-female division in this debate, and waited for Harry’s support, but Harry had turned around in his seat and was staring out the back window.

“Stop,” Harry commanded.

“For Christ’s sake, Billy, you hit him,” Evelyn declared, out of panic.

“I did not. I didn’t hit anybody.” Still, he braked as if he had, and the car came to a stop. “Why stop?”

“His tunic is from the Hundred and First,” Harry announced. “He doesn’t have any shoes.” The figure was just visible in the darkness, coming toward them in what the ocean wind and rain made to seem a threatening, discomfited gait. Billy pressed the accelerator, and the car moved silently back onto the road.

“Wait,” Harry called out, as if to the man outside.

“What do you propose?” Billy asked.

“Let’s give him a ride.”

“To where? The last train’s already left.”

“The village.”

“An immediate arrest for vagrancy.”

“Maybe he knows someone there, or lives there himself.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Billy said. “I’m not having him in my car. I saw him in the mirror. Forgive me, but he looks like the kind of person who would slit our throats to get the contents of the picnic basket.”

“But he’s from the Hundred and First,” Harry said, realizing that, to others, and since it wasn’t even his own division, this was hardly a powerful argument.

“I don’t care if he’s from the Million and Tenth. The war’s over. He should get a job and wear shoes.”

“The war isn’t over yet,” Harry said, “not for him. And it’ll be a really long time, Billy, before it is. Eighteen months ago he was fighting in Germany. What does that say to you?”

“Not enough, Harry. I’m not going to risk my family by picking up a stranger on a dark road.”

“But he isn’t a stranger,” Harry insisted. He knew this was weak, that anyone could be wearing a paratrooper’s tunic.

“I’m sorry, Harry, to me he is.” Billy accelerated, and soon they ran up the hill to Amagansett and left the area that was subject to inundations when hurricanes pushed the sea over the dunes and joined it with the Sound. There, a few miles back in the dark, James George Vanderlyn continued his unvaried pace.

Billy and Harry had never had words, with Harry always respectful not only of Billy himself but of his age and his position as Catherine’s father, and with Billy trying hard to avoid the thoughtless and weak-minded tyranny that so often seduces fathers-in-law. But rather than worry about alienating the Hales, Harry was concerned about the man walking along the lonely stretch of road between sea and sound. As the rain had strengthened, the wind had come up cold.

Although Catherine had been for a while fairly distant, she surprised him. Arriving at the pool house, where Harry had gone to allow Billy to cool off, she said, “Oh, he’ll be all right. His point is well taken, but still, I think about that man out there. I wouldn’t have last year, I just would have let it go.”

“He’s a brother in arms. We could at least have given him a ride into town, and a few dollars. Yes, there’s a risk, but he’s got no shoes. It could be me.”

“Why don’t you bring him here?” Catherine asked.

“Here?”

“Feed him, clothe him, give him shelter, a place to sleep, and some money, and then set him on his way.”

“What if he kills us?”

“Hales don’t like to be murdered in their sleep,” she said matter-of-factly, “which is why Copeland will revert to his military self and stand watch all night if this guy seems even slightly dangerous. If not, locked doors will do.”

“If your parents found out, they’d never speak to me again.”

“Yes they would, because it’s my idea. But they won’t find out. He’ll stay in the pool house, and you’ll stay with me.”

“I hate sneaking around.”

She looked at him with not a little heat. “I kind of like it,” she said, and thereafter nothing could have kept him from her room that night, where they would make love as if in a silent movie—except that there would be no piano.

“They’ll hear the car,” Harry told Catherine. “How am I supposed to retrieve him? We have an hour and a half until dinner. I can’t walk to him and bring him back in that time. If dinner ends two and a half hours from now he’ll be gone. He may be gone already, sheltering in the dunes.”

“Come with me,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

Moving like conspirators, they crossed the gardens quickly, unseen from the house, which glowed in the rain. The garage was dark and musty, but the cars, parked in a neat row like cows at milking gates, smelled of fresh wax and leather. Catherine held his hand and moved slowly, feeling her way to the back, where she pulled at a white porcelain knob on a paneled door. It was one of those doors that always sticks and that when it comes open vibrates like a reed. She threw a switch that lit a clear lightbulb. There before them, amidst mildewed badminton nets, surf-casting rods, and sports equipment of the twenties and before—varnished Indian clubs, rings, a mechanical horse—were three French bicycles.

“I’ll bring him back.”

Some rain was still driven on the wind, and it was cold and dark, but beneath the dripping trees of Further Lane Harry’s spirits rose as he rode toward the Montauk Highway. Shepherding the second bike alongside, he held the yoke in his left hand. Sometimes the front wheels of the two bicycles left the parallel, but he brought them back and pushed on. The bicycles were solid and heavy, the kind that, in peacetime, postmen ride and that in war are used to carry packs and ammunition.

He glided down the big hill that descended east from Amagansett, the wind in his ears, the breakers barely audible to his right. He must not either miss his target or smack into him. Thinking of this man in the 101st jacket, with no shoes, he had a vision of himself in what had been the most vivid part of his life before Catherine. Perhaps he would have reason to fear a former soldier, were this man indeed that, but nevertheless Harry was a trooper of the 82nd on his way to aid one of the 101st. There was something very important about this, something he would neither deny nor forgo, not now, not yet, because it was written in him still that this was what one did even if it meant dying.

He sensed motion ahead, a slight turbulence in the black, which persisted and strengthened, the faint glimmer that a paratrooper had learned to extract from virtually nothing with the corner of his eye, the relaxation of focus and of expectation allowing whatever was there to make itself known more strongly than an image that preconception overlaid upon the field of view. Within a few seconds he had passed Vanderlyn.

They could barely see one another. Harry turned the bicycles around and came up alongside. He stopped, wheeled the free bicycle a few feet forward, and then looked at Vanderlyn with an expression unmistakable even in the dark.

Surprised, Vanderlyn surveyed the bicycle and asked, “
Pour moi?
” in a perfect accent.

“
Oui, pour vous,
” Harry answered, amazed that he was conversing in French on the Montauk Highway in the dark.

“
Merci bien,
” Vanderlyn said, mounting the bicycle. And then, with some amusement, “
Puis-je vous demander de m’aider? Pourriez-vous m’indiquer le chemin de Meudon?
”

“What?” Harry asked. “Are you French? What’d you do, swim the Atlantic?”

“No, but the last time someone handed me a bicycle, a French bicycle, no less, I said those exact words.”

“The last time
I
was on a bicycle,” Harry told him, “I was in Holland.”

“It was a password,” Vanderlyn said, “a pass-
phrase.
I knew he was all right when he said . . . what did he say? He said, ‘
Nathalie a vu écraser sa maison par une énorme roche.
’ Yes.”

“Nathalie saw her house destroyed by an enormous rock?”

“Didn’t you have passwords?”

“Yes we did. Things like
Oil Can,
and
Betty Grable’s Tits.
”

“Very elevated.” They were pedaling now.

“I was the Eighty-second. I didn’t think the Hundred and First was all that erudite.”

“It wasn’t. They dropped me out of their Dakotas but I was something else entirely, although I wore their uniform beneath my clothes.”

“Oh,” Harry said, “one of those.”

Vanderlyn smiled. Harry still could not see his face clearly. “And you?”

“Pathfinder,” Harry replied.

“What luck. Now, may I ask, where the hell did you come from with two bicycles?”

“We passed you in the car, almost hit you.”

“That was you. And where are we going?”

“We’re going,” Harry informed him, “up the hill into Amagansett and then down Further Lane, to get you a pair of shoes.”

After they replaced the bicycles, Harry led Vanderlyn through the back garden and over the tennis court to the pool house, so that even had Billy been looking out the window, and even had he been able to see in the dark, nothing would have seemed untoward.

Vanderlyn stood between the fire and the French doors, dripping slightly, his paratrooper jacket dark with rain, the pockets distinctively slanted, the belt hanging loosely, the eagle on the shoulder patch, laundered by hours in salt water and rain, glowing white. Although he was unshaven and disheveled, he seemed healthy and strong; and although he stood straight with a military bearing, he was relaxed.

An hour later, bathed and shaved, his clothes having dried by the fire and his hair neatly combed, he sat by the hearth completely at ease, the unease having been beaten out of him by the storm. The only discordance was that, his and Harry’s shoe sizes not being the same, he was in his stocking feet. He looked like a general, but his jacket had neither insignia nor rank. Waiting for Harry, who had explained the situation and promised to bring him dinner, he studied the room and the beautifully lit house beyond the pool, and was aware that whoever had saved him had no idea that there were half a dozen houses in East Hampton and a dozen like them in Southampton where he might have gone to sit by the fire and recount his adventure to people he had known all his life. This was better. He was grateful that Harry hadn’t known and still didn’t know him, and entranced by the fact that Harry thought he was some sort of impoverished, French-speaking vagrant.

Harry came in, with Catherine following. They carried stacked-cylinder food containers of the type made for invalids (and which the Hales used for beach dinners), and silverware rolled in a pressed linen napkin. Vanderlyn stood for Catherine, who was preoccupied with closing the door with her left hand while she held a thick porcelain bowl in her right. Although he bowed slightly when she appeared, the conversation had already started and turned practical, and there were no introductions.

“Here,” Harry said. “Corn-and-roasted-cod chowder, salad, bread. There’s a bottle of beer in the kitchen.” He went to get it as Catherine set an informal table.

“You really don’t have to do this,” Vanderlyn said to her. “I just need to get to the station.”

“The last train’s gone,” Catherine stated. She looked up. “Do you have a ticket, or money?”

Remembering that his wallet had been in the lost rucksack, Vanderlyn turned red in what Catherine thought was a deeper form of shame. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll take care of that.” And knowing about pride and honor, she would not slight his: “You can pay us back when you’re able.”

“Thank you,” he said, his head slightly dipping with his heartbeat.

They set the dinner before him, and as he ate they made sure not to interrogate but to converse. When he offered, they offered, and soon this courtesy proved revealing, even if everything, on one side or another, and for differing reasons, was deliberately shielded.

“I lost my boat and all my money,” he said, truthfully, but knowing that, coming as he had from the direction of the Montauk docks, what he said would be taken for what it was not.

“Your shoes, too?” Catherine asked.

“I’m lucky, Miss, not to be naked. And it wasn’t a poker game, it was something a lot more serious and demanding than poker.”

“Your family?”

“My wife and I live on the North Shore.” Here he spoke with crooked ambiguity. “She helps to take care of a very big house, and in season I sometimes work in the garden—when I’m not out on my boat.”

“Do they pay well?” Harry asked.

“Uhh!” Vanderlyn said. “The pay is nothing. I’m going to have to go into the city and really start to work. I prefer to be outdoors, you know, but I guess those days are over.”

“Where’d you learn to speak French with virtually no accent?” Harry asked, wondering how a gardener-fisherman had become a French-speaking agent of the OSS.