In Sunlight and in Shadow (53 page)

“When?”

“Now. Leave from here.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“I don’t have a ring,” Harry told her. Of course he hadn’t.

“We’ll stop at Woolworth’s, or use a blade of grass. It doesn’t matter.”

As they waited for the check, they looked out the tall windows at a sky crowded with moving clouds. One over Turtle Bay looked like England, Scotland, and Wales, and one to the east of the Empire State Building was a bit like Ireland. Though reversed in a mirror image, they were quite accurately drawn. The winds aloft were so unsettled and strong that the mountains of white were blown toward one another, the Irish Sea in cerulean blue lessening in width at a stately pace, and the broken fingers of Land’s End moving toward a fictional spur south of Cork like two hands reaching out to touch, not to mention India and Pakistan ready in waiting where Novaya Zemlya was supposed to have been. Had it been a gray day it could not have been so arrestingly beautiful, as great things on a massive scale occurred modestly and silently above the city.

As they drove up to Egremont, Massachusetts, theirs was almost the only car on the Taconic. Not far north of Manhattan, on a rise just outside the Bronx, Harry looked in the rearview mirror and saw the towers of midtown veiled in a mist that crossed them like smoke. He pointed to the mirror, and Catherine rose slightly in the passenger seat and leaned toward the center to see. There in a rectangle of glass were her life to date and her life to come. There, hidden deep in the stone, were her parents, and the theater where at curtain time the next day she would on command rise above the profane. There was the war that her husband-to-be had chosen to fight. And there, perhaps, her children would be born and she would die. All in a smoky gray rectangle, sparkling at times, and jiggling with the rough surface of the road.

When people love one another, conversation is not a necessity but a pleasure, and when they reach, as at times they do, deep into the immeasurable part of what holds them together, everything can pass between them without a word. Even gestures become unnecessary. In a vast, continuous exchange, they need do nothing but glance at one another occasionally as if to remark on the miracle of so much transpiring so invisibly. That was how it was on the day they married. Each knew what the other was thinking. The car seemed to be in on it, too, as naturally as a dog. They never looked at a map, but somehow took the right exit off the Taconic, went up into the Berkshires, and found Egremont, although they weren’t looking for it in particular.

They drove through the town in half a minute and stopped at a small cape covered in weathered brown shingles. Of crushed stone and wide enough for two cars, the driveway was empty. Only after Harry had sharply turned the wheel and the sound of tires on gravel rose from the skirts of the black Chevrolet did they see the sign that said
Town Clerk.
Harry turned off the motor and yanked the emergency brake. In childhood, the sound this made had always seemed to Catherine like that of a crocodile clearing its throat. They both looked up at the sky, and then, at the same time, opened their doors, knowing that they could leave the top down because it was not going to rain. And they knew—or perhaps they didn’t but just counted on their luck, which was running more strongly than ever before—that the house would be open and the clerk would be in.

A tall New Englander in wire-rims, he seemed both intelligent and kind. “You made it just in time if you want the whole package,” he said, not getting up from his desk. “You don’t have it in your hand, so my guess is that you need a blood test.” They did. “Across the street. The doctor’s in. He can do it on the spot. Leave your driver’s licenses here and I’ll start on the copy of record. I can do the ceremony if you hurry up.”

It was almost as if they were deaf-mutes. At the doctor’s they had no need to say anything, having come into the office rolling up their sleeves, and they filled out their forms in silence. He told them it would take half an hour.

“You can do it that fast?” Harry asked. “Don’t you have to culture. . . .”

“I don’t culture anything,” the doctor said. “Just come back in a half hour.”

They rolled their sleeves back down, giddily crossed the street, crunched over the gravel near their car, and, screen door slamming behind them, quickly filled out more forms before they went outside to wait on a bench in the sun. Shortly after that, the doctor appeared at his door, summoned them over to him, and asked them in. Standing in the waiting room, they received their certificates and paid for them. As they signed, by habit of observation the doctor took Harry’s strong pulse by sight in his wrists, and Catherine’s by the slight flutter of her lightly stretched blouse. Having many times before seen couples about to wed, he understood why they didn’t speak.

Then across the street again, pulses rising higher, into the dark study where the clerk attended to his records. The forms were signed and dated, the seals affixed. “You want the ceremony,” he did not quite ask. He could tell from her eyes misting up and his deep breathing that they did. They nodded, they paid. He moved them into a corner of the room where many lives had been joined, and asked if they were ready. Clearly they were. He knew that they would hear but not quite hear what he said. He knew that his words—old language, formal and legal—would move them more than any poetry.

“We are gathered here to unite”—he looked at the papers—“Catherine Thomas Hale and Harry Copeland in marriage, an institution founded in nature and ordained by the state. It is a solemn and binding contract uniting a man and a woman. It is a cause of joy and celebration. For on this occasion Harry and Catherine join one another and embark upon a new life, not as two individuals, but as one.

“Theirs is a union that is not to be entered into lightly, but, rather, discreetly and with due respect. For it is indeed the beginning of a new life. Do you, Harry, take Catherine to be your lawfully wedded wife, from this day forward, to have and to hold, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?

“And do you, Catherine, take Harry to be your lawfully wedded husband, from this day forward, to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?

“Do you both enter into this union and contract of marriage of your own free act and will, both fully knowing and accepting the responsibilities and obligations of marriage which will be imposed upon you by the laws of this Commonwealth of Massachusetts? If you do so agree, then both say ‘I do.’”

As they said “I do,” they shook with emotion.

“Will the groom place the ring on the bride’s finger and pronounce these words: ‘With this ring, I take you as my wife, and seal this bond and contract of marriage.’”

“We have no ring,” Harry said, but Catherine lifted her hand and, taking it, he put on it an invisible ring that would outlast any ring of gold.

“Will the bride,” the clerk said, “place the ring on the groom’s finger and pronounce these words. . . .”

Remembering that he hadn’t repeated the oath, Harry said it at the same time she did, as she put the invisible ring on his finger. Her voice, of course, was very beautiful and distinctive, and, with his, normally deep but now even deeper, in the background, the sentence became a kind of music. She didn’t sing it, but it had the beauty of song.

The clerk somehow understood that here was not only great love, but peril. This was an exceptional marriage, and he wished them well. Hesitating for a moment, and then breaking the silence, he said, “In accordance with the authority invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

It was almost five o’clock. The ferries would soon be choking the harbor, and the winds tangling their smoke.

W
ARFARE ON THE MARGINS
of Manhattan, troops marching in and out, battles fought in ancient Brooklyn, and sad news from many fronts over centuries, even if redeemed by victories in or on the main, confirmed that war was something from which, with nothing to lose, only the dead might be sure to profit. And this was especially clear in 1946, so soon after so many letters and telegrams announcing the deaths of fathers and sons had been received in so many dwellings that retained the memory as if they were alive, Childe Hassam’s pointillist flags notwithstanding.

Almost every day had a touch of battle already. There was no need to fight Germans or Mongolians after having managed to conquer a taxi in the rain at five in the afternoon on a weekday, or facing down a six-foot-eight litigator expecting everyone on the sidewalk to jump out of his way. And that is not to mention surviving the terror of being transported to the wilds of the Bronx by a subway that the devil has made race through its customary stops. A day in the garment business or the commodity pits was equivalent to a day on Parris Island. Plains Indians and New Yorkers always survived best the rigors of war, the former as tough as snow-crusted buffalo, the latter as wily and indomitable as rats.

And then there was the opposite pull, the luxuries and distractions of Manhattan. Whether dazzling or soft, glittering or seductive, they were present at every turn. What man would want to go to war after watching for just ten minutes the passage of gloriously dressed women on a single block of East 57th Street; or wending his way through the Met; or sitting in the white sound of one of the many fountains; or standing beneath the dark green leaves of a quiet Village street on a summer night when the rare but inevitable north wind descends like a fall of cold water through streetlight-washed emeralds?

All these things and a great deal more weighed against what Harry had to do, and yet, although the decision was his to make and his will to break, he knew he would do it. But to think it out, he would go to a more austere, more elemental place. An oratorio in stone, Manhattan was too possessive of too many things remembered and loved. For a while he had thought that he had come through, but when he dreamed now he was pulled back to when he was a soldier and peace was twenty minutes’ sleep between artillery barrages.

From the highest points of Manhattan—the roofs or observation decks of the tallest buildings, next to the bells of Riverside Church, or at Coogan’s Bluff—to the south was the sea, open and blue. To the east was Long Island, narrowing to a sandy spit of potato fields and summer mansions, and to the west, just New Jersey. But the north was different. There, distant mountains came into view. They began to rise at thirty miles and were fully risen at fifty, deserted highlands through which the Hudson wound, in winter often ice-choked and immobile, uplands so rough and wild that it seemed impossible for Manhattan to be so close. They might as well have been Labrador, though the fiery colors of October and the Hudson’s royal blue took far longer than Labrador to change into the gray and white of winter.

The difference between children raised in these highlands and children raised in New York was so enormous as to be unspeakable. To feel as natural in a place like this as if he had been born there had taken Harry an entire world war. And this was where he would go, where battles had been fought and cannon fired, in the crags overlooking West Point, on the high rock ledges, in the bays of the Hudson, along the long ridges where the scent and sound of war had never faded and never would. Many of the children brought up there were born to be warriors, and would never be understood by those who were not. Both inexplicably and irresistibly, the spark was seated in the terrain.

With a pack and in boots and a field jacket, Harry caught a nearly empty morning train that pulled out shortly after Grand Central had exhausted itself of half a million commuters who were by then taking off their coats and sitting down at their desks.

North of the village of Cold Spring, after a long climb to a granite ledge more than a thousand feet above the Hudson, he threw down the pack and allowed himself to take in a view to which all the way up he had forced himself not to turn. Pivoting south, he wondered how it was that such an open picture, which, like a painting on a scrim, he could only see and neither touch nor enter, could so easily strike down his doubts. And how the blue glare that burnished those surfaces of the river left unruffled by the winds could stop time. He had never known whether the few perfect moments in his life had occurred because the walls between past and present had fallen, or if those walls fall in deference to perfection. But he did know that perfection and the defeat of time ran together, and that they brought love, calm, and resolution as solid as the granite on which he now stood.

Southward, the last ranges of hills began to combine into disciplined ranks that eventually would become the tenement-like Palisades. One could tell that the ocean was somewhere near, even if it could not be seen. Ten miles or so to the south, the first ridges of the Appalachians leapt the Hudson. These ramparts, which can be seen from Manhattan on the other side, loomed large and high, their north cols and steeps in dark blue shadow, their lighted flanks slightly rust-colored in the midmorning air. Breaking through the mountain wall, the Hudson widened capaciously at West Point, then turned west and north into the narrow channel where the chain had blocked the ships of George III. The nearer the terrain, the more incendiary its colors. Trees flared in yellow. Marsh grasses and reeds swept back and forth like wheat in the wind. The sky was cloudless, the air bracing and cold even in the sun, and he was completely alone.

The outcrop where he halted was about six feet wide and twice as long, tapering to no width whatsoever at either end. Jutting from the south face of the mountain, it was well shielded from the north wind, though the winds at that height seemed to chase in a circle around the peaks. Toward one side of the ledge a crease in the rock made a shelter shaped like a lean-to or an attic without a knee wall, a right triangle about five feet at the base, five feet high at the peak, and almost seven feet along its hypotenuse.