In Sunlight and in Shadow (50 page)

“You yourself said that was his chief weapon, and that it was to be ignored.”

“But not as a sentence of death, Catherine.”

“But what about Verderamé? You always say, in regard to what’s happening to you, ‘If you take my livelihood, you take my life.’ ‘The props that do support my house. . . .’”

“
Merchant of Venice,
” Harry said. “‘You take my house when you do take the prop / That doth sustain my house. You take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live.’”

“That’s what I mean.”

“And what have I done about it?”

“Nothing. You’ve done nothing.”

“And why?”

“I don’t know. Because ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’? Why? You tell me.” She was twisting her pearls dangerously. He imagined them clattering onto the terrace floor and rolling out the drains to rain down on the garden below.

“Electric chair,” he said, beginning the list. “Being caught by the mob. Not being caught by the mob and hiding for the rest of my life. Being caught by the police. Being in a cell with Louis Lepke. Not wanting to go back.”

“To Sing Sing?”

“To the war,” he said, now serious. “If there’s no difference between the battlefield I left and here, what was the point of fighting? I’d love to snap my fingers and make Verderamé disappear. Snap twice and Victor goes too. But if everyone just killed whoever persecuted him, the world would be constantly at war.”

“The world
is
constantly at war.”

“Not on account of me.”

“So, you’ll surrender?”

“Not surrender.”

“No, just lose, because he’s willing to do what you’re not. You’re ethical, and he’s not. So you’ll disappear and he’ll stay. He’ll take from you, and you’ll let him.”

“Now the Hales are coming through,” Harry said. “Somewhere not that far back there was a test like this, and some Hale—who knows who, maybe even Billy—was pure steel, and did God knows what, and won. It must be in the blood.”

“Is that bad?”

“No. In fact, I love it.”

“And I love you, Harry,” Catherine said, “and if you want me, if you want to mix your blood with mine. . . .”

She didn’t know where to go from here. A serious conversation that he had tried to lighten had become instantly grave. This was their past, the present, their future, and that of their children and their children’s children. All he could do was comfort her. Once again he could see her heart moving against the mother-of-pearl iridescence of her silk blouse. For him there was nothing more powerful than the small touches of beauty a woman might not think about but that are regal, absolute, and appealing. And then, as if from nowhere, he said, “Catherine, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen is when you lift your arms to tie back your hair.”

“It is?”

“Yes. And the
most
beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is when a small patch of your blouse or your camisole—gray, pearl, and slightly blushing with red from your color beneath—will on occasion move with the beat of your heart. Do you understand that? Do you understand how unreasonably and completely I’ve fallen in love with you?”

She nodded.

“Now,” he said, “listen. For a Jew, which is what you are as well, even if you’re a Hale, even if you didn’t know it, glory lies in something other than victory.”

“Not in the Bible. I know the Bible,” she said.

“Yes, in the Bible—unless you’re moved by the slaying of Amalekites—and for thousands of years after the Bible.”

“But look what happened to the Jews,” she said, bearing down. “There’s no glory in that. The murder of whole populations? Processing families as if in a slaughterhouse, the children butchered as casually as chickens? You think that’s glorious? If that’s glorious, it’s time to end it. In big ways and in little ways. That is, it’s time to make a stand.”

“At risk . . . ,” he started to say.

But she interrupted him. “Yes, at risk. At risk of everything.”

The blouse behind which her heart beat so truly had pearl buttons captured by loops. The top two were unbuttoned, the loops white and lavishly disengaged. The blood that had risen to her face had raised her color, and the heat of her convictions had raised her perfume. He slowly unbuttoned the rest, traveling downward, the progress of the loops falling away toward the side like a steady and sparkling fuse.

Vanderlyn called in early October. He asked Harry to meet him on the overlook at Weehawken. “Weehawken?” Harry had repeated. “Why Weehawken?”

“For one,” Vanderlyn replied, “I like to hear it when people say
Why Weehawken?
It sounds like they’re calling a pig. And then, there’s the magnificent view of Manhattan.”

“I know.”

“I think you need it.”

“Do I?”

“The trouble you’re in requires it. You might want to see things as if from the outside, or looking back—as if you’re gone, and danger isn’t dangerous anymore.”

“Do you want a job?” Harry asked. “This is a strange way to ask for a job. It’s still open if you need it. Why don’t you come here?”

“I have a job. I want you to cross the river.”

So he did, and waited, because although Vanderlyn was late, it was a good place in which to pass the time. The benches were empty, the trees beginning to turn, leaves scattered in red and orange—some from early heat-kills and some from cold nights—like leaves pressed in a book. The overlook at Weehawken was one of those places from which everything can be seen in grand exposition and yet nothing that can be seen sees back, as if the vantage point were hidden or invisible, which it was not. Though in plain sight, it was positioned so that eyes were never drawn to it. Thus, to stand there was to look on as unseen as a narrator.

Harry was anxious about many things. He wondered why action was in real life so recalcitrant, when in films and books it always took place when it was fitting. Everything appeared to move but his plans and desires, and as if paralyzed he watched the seasons change and his lot stay the same or worsen. But on the overlook he forgot his anxiety as he watched the river, the ferries in constant motion, the busy commerce of barges by the hundreds lashed together in eights and tens, and oceangoing ships waiting shyly in the roads to be nuzzled by one of the eight hundred agile tugs that populated the harbor, tooting about like illustrations in a children’s book the size of a city. As quick as water bugs or shuttlecocks, with each vessel leaving traces and trails of smoke carried on the winds and lofted to the clouds, all things waterborne crowded the bays and rivers.

The city was a perfect place in which to have fallen in love with Catherine. Not only was she, by speech shaped over two hundred years and by familiarity since early childhood, a part of it and as settled there as is the image of Liberty on the back of a coin, in Manhattan, with so little of nature and the little there was so expertly suppressed, the person one loved became the emblem of life. And now here was Manhattan under his eye, somehow innocent and unknowing. So much had happened there, so many interweavings, actions, and echoes, that it was easy for him to go back. All he had to do was to seek some high and lonely place from which to look across the water at the shoreline, the streets telescoping into infinity, foreshortened, compressed, and crowded with noiseless movement. It did not matter the weather or the hour, the frame and foil of towers and piers were armature enough and never fading. All he had to do was close his eyes and breathe deeply, and the past would glide forward like a warm breeze—plumes of smoke silvered in the sun, ferries sliding gracefully to land, their decks crowded with souls long gone but somehow still there as if nothing were lost or ever would be. It was loved too much to be lost, which is why it could rise long after, vivid, beautiful, and real, an emissary of eternal life. That was the challenge from which many turned away in fear, comforting one another in shared disbelief though many an agency made more than clear that the permanence of love could be etched even upon quicksilver.

It is remarkable what the eye can do, absent a telescope, by training and deduction alone. Concentration, practice, and thought can impart to anyone the power to see far into the distance. A flash of color, a speck, a contrast hardly visible, or a dream-like wavering can magnify a nearly invisible image and bring it up uncannily sharp. Halfway across the river from the Jersey side, the Weehawken Ferry, its stacks issuing floods of smoke and steam, was almost empty. Some cars and trucks, a bread van, and a slat-sided wagon drawn by two white horses had taken up the forward deck. Above, there were so few passengers that from the cliffs they might have been impossible to report. But Harry spotted one of them. The tall figure at the rail, staring west, was illuminated by the October sun as if he had been only a tiny brushstroke, a mere impression of what might have been a man, yet Harry recognized him. The movement of the ferry and the changing light made clear that he was wearing a suit. And not just a suit but—Harry could tell as if by magic at half a mile—a pinstriped suit. Although he couldn’t see this across the wide stretch of spangling water, the suit fit well, loosely, lightly, and gracefully, and there was a handkerchief in the breast pocket.

The transformation of an indigent fisherman into a man whose excellent tailoring projected across most of the Hudson River suggested that something was going to happen. Coming onto the overlook, Vanderlyn had a magisterial air. “I don’t think,” Harry said when Vanderlyn arrived, “that Fred Astaire could dress better.”

Vanderlyn waited for what he thought would be inevitable, and it was.

“You’re a fisherman who lost his boat,” Harry said, cuttingly.

“I do fish,” Vanderlyn said.

“I haven’t read about an America’s Cup racer going down.”

“Ah!” said Vanderlyn. “I would have been in quite a different mood had I lost that.”

“Was it just an eighty-footer?”

“A Winabout.”

“Do all you people have Winabouts?”

“I don’t know what you mean exactly, but Winabouts are very popular now. It’s a great little boat.”

“You have the other one as well.”

“I do, safe in harbor.”

“And I don’t know your real name, do I?”

“No, and you don’t want to.”

“Why is that?”

“I can help you, but I would prefer to do so from afar.” Vanderlyn sat down on one of the benches facing out across the Hudson at 42nd Street, which was shrouded in smoke and mist.

“Why would you want to help me?”

“Why? Look out there.” He lifted his right arm in a gesture to Manhattan that was part salute and part permission for it to carry on. As he surveyed what was before him, his eyes narrowed affectionately, leaping from spire to spire, focusing tightly on distant details. Something electric was flowing between the man and the city, something to which Harry himself was hardly a stranger. “You were born here, I take it?”

“In Weehawken?”

“No, not in Weehawken. Weehawken doesn’t count. There.”

“Yes.”

“So was I,” Vanderlyn said. “We’ll probably die there, too. I hope so—I wouldn’t want to die in New Jersey. No offense to New Jersey, but over there is our entrance and our exit. The portals of infinity spit us out there, and there they’ll take us in. Meanwhile, what have we got? You know those Russian Easter eggs that you look into? I have a few, excessively bejeweled. When people come to dinner parties at our house, like an x-ray machine looking into their brains I can see who considers quietly pocketing one. When you look into these things—not the brains of my dinner guests but the interiors of my Fabergé eggs—you see something perfect, rich in color, mysteriously deep. As a child I wanted more than anything to be able actually to go inside them and enter another world.

“And there it is, self-contained, gold at sunset, red at dawn. And in between run all the blues, greens, and grays of every sea in every condition of light. An isle in the water, infinitely complex and forever giving, the hive of millions. Everything happens there, just and unjust, beautiful and hideous, joyful, painful, powerful—and it’s all there for you threescore and ten if you can make it. Then it’s gone.

“Thus, for me, the only thing that matters is the proper closing of the loops. Now, I realize that this is an idiosyncratic way of putting it, but. . . .”

“I know what you mean,” Harry said in clipped fashion, not curtly but so as not to disrupt the natural rhythm of Vanderlyn’s explanation.

“Making sure,” Vanderlyn continued, “that any one of the infinite number of stories into which you might stumble . . . ends properly.”

“
Properly
meaning . . . ?”

“Strongly. Justly. And perhaps tragically, but always beautifully,” he said, gesturing again across the river. “That’s what keeps the fires burning and the wheels spinning. That’s what keeps what you see there alive, and what keeps it alive is what keeps us alive.

“You were plucked away by the war. When you came back, didn’t all this strike you as a magnificent surplus, as if you had come back from the dead, and here was your second chance?”

“Yes.”

“It’s happened to me twice. Looking down upon all this from afar, privileged to enter the scene wherever I wish, I feel like a ghost. When I wake up, and when I step out onto the street, my interest is in the story, in closing the loop gracefully and beautifully. I have to do this. Otherwise, I can’t live and I can’t die. And you, Harry, if I may, are a very special case.”

“Definitely,” Harry said, mocking himself.

“You are,” Vanderlyn insisted. “It’s not that you helped
me.
I was half an hour from any comfort I might want. It’s that you helped the person you thought I was. You and that lovely girl. You didn’t know what you were doing. You had no idea that as you did one thing after another, putting yourself at risk, giving generously to someone you took as having nothing, you were building in me, with jolt after jolt, an irrevocable devotion. I knew then. I had no doubt or reservation. And then, unknowing of what I was feeling, when you told me what you yourself were facing you enlisted me to your cause—which seems to me like a loop that should be brought to a just and decisive close. A small story, but a big loop.”