In Sunlight and in Shadow (52 page)

Once again, Billy and Evelyn were astonished and proud. They believed that the quality of Catherine’s singing, her magnificent presence, and her financial independence would allow her to outlast whatever difficulties Victor or anyone or anything else could throw her way. She was only a year out of school, and at the curtain call she had summoned that special burst of applause for which actors live. And this was not on a college campus or in Providence, it was Broadway.

Catherine, however, was not as sanguine. She understood what everyone told her, but she was the one who had to sing, and she had as well some of the impatience of youth. Even Billy had some of the impatience of youth. Perhaps because half his friends and associates were now dead, he was uncomfortable about wasting time.

Rather than await reviews as she had done in Boston, Catherine decided to follow the lead of nineteenth-century presidents on election nights and go home to bed. Billy proposed a stop at “21” to ease the transition, but she refused. In fact, she had little of the euphoric elevation that keeps the minds of actors spinning at high speed after their performances and long into nights often made quiet only by alcohol. Having decided that it might be years until she could collect the rewards of her labor, or perhaps never, she was all business. They went home, dropping Harry on Central Park West. By now Billy and Evelyn were used to seeing their daughter in his embrace, used to seeing them kiss. They knew by the quality of the touch that she had done right and was lucky, and at twelve-thirty, as the doorman at 333 Central Park West held the door open longer than he had thought he would have to, Catherine and Harry embraced in air that was now midnight blue.

The Hales drove off, and Harry rode up in the elevator, as always, almost stunned by Catherine’s absence. It was unnatural not to be next to her, to be looking at her, to be kissing the side of her face. It was especially painful now because he knew that were he to decide upon what Vanderlyn had in mind, it would be dangerous for them both no matter how carefully he insulated her from what he would do, and that it promised long absences.

Before the Hales reached Sutton Place, Harry was able to fall asleep. Sleep was doubly magic. It would cut by half the time he would be away from her before they were to meet for lunch the next day, and as he slept he would dream of her. When you are in love, you dream about the person you love. After ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years, the dreams are so clear and real they shake you to the core. And if love be denied or suppressed, they are so vivid as to burn.

Early in the morning, as the sunlight invaded over the bridges from Long Island, though the cast was by now exhausted and asleep, Catherine was fresh and awake, up before anyone else, on the third and last day of the Indian summer. She dressed quickly and walked to the newsstand on 57th and First, and then hurried home with a stack of papers for which, impatient to wait for her change, she had paid too much: the
Times,
the
Trib,
the
Post,
the
Journal-American,
the
Daily News,
and one or two others that probably could not afford to send someone to write a review.

She opened them one by one on the massive kitchen island and read them at high speed. Then she read again, more carefully. When she finished, she stepped back and looked at the mass of papers spread out as if they were the white wings of dead swans or geese limp across the stone. All the reviews were good, some spectacular, but in not one line or phrase of any one of them was she mentioned: not her name, not her character, not the allegations that had failed to escape a single Boston paper.

She had been erased. It was worse than being attacked. It did not engage the emotions, but extinguished them. Silence was the cause of silence. She stood in the kitchen, staring at the newspapers as if, without shock or pain, her heart had simply stopped.

“It seems perfectly natural, doesn’t it?” she asked. He was seated on her right, at a little square table covered with blindingly white cloth. His place had been set across from her, but he had moved closer, taking the heavy china and silver with him.

“What does?” They were many storeys up, as if flying, and the midday sun, now fairly low, was powerful enough to make things clear but not so powerful as to wash them out. The harbor was the color of the Mediterranean at Malta. Flimsy clouds of translucent mist sped above, at eye level, and beneath them. Sunlight glinted off glass and stone all the way to the Battery, and the wind was wonderfully cool.

“Being here, at lunch, all dressed up, looking as if we haven’t a worry in the world. You’ll go back to your business and tonight I’ll perform in a theater on Broadway. It’s New York. It’s perfect to a T. Why do I feel this way?”

“Let’s see,” he said, which meant he would have to think about how most delicately to state the obvious. Meanwhile, it was not silent. A wash of sound came from the bar and joined indistinguishably the settling of crushed ice and the rhythmic brushing of a drum. There was a single red rose in the center of the table, the oil in its petals refracting a direct ray of sunlight into moving and uncountable flecks of gold, silver, red, and blue. Even without alcohol, it all seemed hypnotic. “Our food supply hasn’t been interrupted.” He said this in the tone of lists. “We have water. We’re alive. None of us is wounded”— he wagged his finger—“physically. We’re healthy. We’re clean. We’re free. And we’re young.”

“True. Why do I feel oppressed? I shouldn’t,” she said, lowering her voice modestly as the waiters set down before them a “bouquet” of shellfish, two glasses of the Hales’ customary white Haut-Brion, and a basket of bread that had arrived from Paris that morning on a Pan Am Clipper.

“Because you’ve been told repeatedly and from many directions that you’re no good. That would oppress even the Pope, and especially someone who has hardly ever been told anything like it. Have you?”

“Directly? I haven’t. I mean, if you count Victor and the way he treated me, yes. But otherwise no, not really.”

“That may explain part of it,” he said. “In this regard there are two kinds of people. One extrapolates the unfortunate present far into the future, takes warning, and feels oppressed. The other fails to extrapolate, never knows what’s coming, and stays happy until struck down. But if in extrapolating because you’re in a difficult situation you dare not assume that you’ll have some luck, because you’re responsible by nature your projections become grimmer and grimmer. But, Catherine, you will have luck. There’s no way to account for all the things that will happen and of which you have no inkling. Things will let up. Everything moves in a wave. Until the end, you never stay down and you never stay up. And at the very last, who knows? You might be launched like a rocket.”

“I guess I believed, despite what I knew, that I was going to be the toast of Broadway, and then, look, I became the ghost of Broadway. It’s because I’m so goddamned rich. I hate it. My father once said to me, ‘At times in my life I’ve been so desperate that I behaved like a normal person, and I liked it, but then they threw me out. They always do.’ Harry, does all the money get in the way?”

“Of us? Doesn’t mean a thing, except that sometimes it’s hard for me to keep up with you. Like this,” he said, meaning where they were and how much it would cost. “But the starch and gleam of the tablecloth alone is worth it, not to mention my napkin. In June of ’forty-four I would have traded a month’s salary for this napkin. The British, of course, have a different understanding of the word, and might find that quite funny.”

“I’ll take care of this,” she assured him.

“No you won’t.”

“That’s what I mean. The imbalance.”

“There’s one thing—I take it back—there’s one thing that I do love about your being rich.” She was pleasantly surprised by this. “You wear new clothes more than anyone I’ve ever known, including people in the garment business. I like the smell of new clothes. Whether its from mercerizing, or the scent of close-to-the-row cotton, or whatever makes silk new, I don’t know. But, like bread baking or new paint, it has a lot of promise: starting fresh just by putting on a new shirt. When I was a child I loved when we were given our books on the first day of school. The smell of ink and paper still makes me feel that the world is open, that my mother and father are alive, that the summer heat has just broken and the suddenly clear September air is pouring gently through the windows.”

“You can tell when I’m wearing something new?”

“Always.”

“I can’t say I’m not pleased. I just thought of coming here,” she said, “because my mother would take me here for lunch when I was little. Once, there was a really strong wind, and a biplane struggling against it was perfectly motionless relative to the ground. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away. I could see the pilot’s mustache. He finally gave up and fled, but after that I was always looking up on windy days, when sometimes you could hear a droning like that of an insect. On occasion when this happens, you see people unconsciously making swatting motions. But the war killed that. Now that the planes are more powerful, the city can’t trap them. I wanted to come here because of what I remember. I didn’t think of the expense. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s worth it. Even the urinals. Instead of staring ahead at a dirty wall with phone numbers and bad sketches of body parts, you look through a little window at the clouds. Lindbergh didn’t have as good a view, you know. He couldn’t see out the front. So don’t apologize, really.”

Though she wanted to be, Catherine would never be released from the effect of her wealth. “In college, I had two roommates,” she said, “Marisol—whom you’ve met—who’s from Cuba and whose family is rich from sugar and tobacco; and Wendy, who’s from Port Jervis. Have you ever been to Port Jervis? Forest as far as you can see. Her father is a
deer hunter.
”

“Full time?” Harry asked. “It must be rough.”

“I believe so. She’s Marisol’s size, so she used to borrow Marisol’s dresses for dances and teas. She looked stunning. Everything was working out well. No problems. Once, before Christmas vacation, there was a tea with Princeton—very important for some girls. We went. Just before we left I saw that Wendy was putting perfume behind her ears and at the base of her neck—McCormick vanilla extract, straight from the bottle.”

“She was a Christmas cookie?”

“She was one hell of a Christmas cookie. We were out the door before I could say anything, but I called my mother the next day and asked if she could order one of those big bottles of Guerlain. ‘Like the one you brought to school?’ my mother asked. ‘How could you have used it up so fast? Did it break?’ So I told her, and without hesitation she said, ‘No. You and Marisol, you bring home your perfumes, and when you go back, you go back with a bottle of vanilla.’”

“She was right.”

“She was so right,” Catherine said. “When Wendy saw us putting on vanilla, she cried. The three of us embraced, and, I’ll tell you, that little bottle of vanilla that I got at Gristedes was more precious than ten thousand flagons of Guerlain or Jean Patou. There’s a bond now between the three girls, and it can never be broken.”

“And?” he asked, pleased.

“I want to come to you rather than trying to meet in the middle. If you’re poor, I’ll be poor. If you’re rich, I’ll be rich. It doesn’t matter.”

“And what will be the destination of all the money that’s aimed at you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was going to tell you today,” he said, “that I’m going to put to rest this problem of the business.”

“Verderamé?”

“Verderamé.”

“What are you going to do? I mean, how?”

“You shouldn’t be involved.”

She put down the teaspoon she had had in her hand, and at which she had been looking as they spoke, admiring the dull shine—it had been washed two thousand times—that emanated from its bowl, warm and slightly white. When she understood both the full import of what he had said, and that she could not press him to elaborate on it, she shuddered, and what seemed like an electrical jolt ran up and down her body. But she didn’t try to dissuade him from what she was sure he had decided. She knew the risk, that she could lose him, and lose her life, but she didn’t say no. By gesture, a tightly limited lifting and raising of her head, she assented. On the last day of the Indian summer, when the sky was a blue milder than Wedgwood and they were surrounded by dating couples and tourists who had come to dance, she felt what untold numbers of women had felt since the beginning of time. Her father had been safe at home, and the war had been abstract, but now that it was over it was as if she were in it, and it seemed almost to pierce her.

“You can’t know anything about this,” he continued, speaking in a restrained fashion that, even had a lip reader been observing him, would have given nothing away.

“You’re not leaving me?” she asked.

When they linked hands under the table, she squeezed so hard that were she stronger she would have broken his. “Marry me,” she said. She neither commanded nor begged, but simply stated it.

“Yes.”

Had tears come, which they didn’t, for she would not let them, she might not have been able to control them even with the blizzard-white napkin.

“We’ll go north,” she proposed, “to some place in the Berkshires or New Hampshire where they write the license by hand and record it in a ledger. No one will ever be able to find out until we want them to. Gangsters have no need for little towns with clapboard churches and mountain shadows that start in the middle of the afternoon. They’d stick out there like a moose at Toots Shor.”

He liked that, about the moose.

“But the wedding,” Harry said, talking beneath the noise of the restaurant. “I’ve been looking forward to the wedding. I thought that you would be so beautiful it would nearly kill me, that on that day I’d let a lot slip away and become someone new. I thought that even if there were a storm at sea it would be held at bay, that we could risk not having a tent.”

“It’ll be better than that,” she said.