In Sunlight and in Shadow (6 page)

There were swings for older children, the kind with open seats suspended from chains, but the swings for infants were almost like cages: little wooden crates with safety bars, hanging from four ropes. On one of them a mother had placed her baby girl. In a camel’s hair coat, mittens, and a dark knit cap, the child was no older than eighteen months, quite chubby, and seemingly half asleep. But she awoke when her mother pushed her on the swing and it gained speed, gently rising higher with each push. Away from her mother, and back, but always rising, always returning, her eyes on the trees and sky. As she flew, with little wisps of her hair pressed back by the wind, she squinted, and as she rose it seemed that she easily apprehended something for which he had to strain and sacrifice to remember even as a trace.

That weekend, Catherine was not as sanguine as Harry, for although she might easily have had him at her door, by her side, or in her bed, merely by invitation or command, such power is not only the power of attraction but the cause of hesitation. In the automat they sat across from one another oblivious of everything else, except that, because it was too early on, they would break their easy silence with conversation. And then they would fall into it again. That as love commences all couples must make bowers is written in the blood. And in New York they make them invisibly in restaurants, where, surrounded by a shell of something like glass that mutes the sounds of the world and blurs and intercepts its light, they would hardly notice if Vikings or Visigoths sacked the adjoining tables and set the place on fire. This obliviousness she had tried to resist, and by nature, in an act written in the blood just as deeply, she put him off until Sunday.

Though he wanted to call her and was able to wait only because he knew that he could and would, she could not have called him had he not called her. Thus, she tacked contrary to her character, which was otherwise and notably hot and decisive, and waited as if disinterestedly until Sunday night at eight, the expectation of which, despite her purposeful discipline, lifted her incessantly. For her, it had not been a minor encounter. There was something about him, something in his eyes that led far beyond his shy and careful manner upon meeting her, something momentous and grave enough to lead to a great deal of trouble, heartbreak, and anger. For she was already betrothed.

To pass the time, she did what she ordinarily would do. On Saturday, she went swimming, and though the water that washed over her as she dolphined through it sometimes became his embrace, with almost every stroke she also swam away from him, and at the end of her mile as she lifted herself up from the pool onto the mosaic deck, removing the horrid bathing cap, dripping, lightheaded, and strong, as the water ran off her it was as if they had parted and she was alone. And then came sorrow, longing, and a contentment bought by the borrowings of optimism, which she knew would be paid back with interest and then some were he not to call. As she walked home, every sight and sound was intense. At the corner of 57th and Park, on Saturday afternoon in the sunshine, her right hand unconsciously over her heart, she stood through two lights, oblivious of the cars and people coming and going, surging forward, stopping, starting. She stared down the south-shadowed side of 57th Street toward the East River, watching flags and clouds in the wind, the former as rebellious as a wild horse on a rope, and the latter sailing like weightless galleons.

The servants who had not accompanied her parents to East Hampton, where she was supposed to have been as well, had been dismissed, and she was alone in the house. On Saturday night she descended the five flights from her rooms on the top floor to the kitchen in the basement, and on the wide marble stairs between the first and second floors she danced—because she could dance beautifully, because the stairs were challenging to the choreography, because she liked the sound of her shoes clicking against the glossy stone, and because she imagined that he was watching her, and, better yet, that someday, though it seemed impossible given the situation, he really would watch her as she descended these stairs. She wondered if, in what she hoped had been his infatuation, he had noticed her body, through which she could express a great deal both effable and ineffable. Then, still on the stairs, she paused, recalling that he had.

In the kitchen, dangerously happy as she listened to the radio, she made herself a light dinner, which she ate standing up at a limestone island beneath a huge pot rack. On a bed of lettuce, greens, and cherry tomatoes, she put two enormous prawns, two sea scallops, and some crabmeat. This she dressed with olive oil—no vinegar, she did not like vinegar—a pinch of salt, pepper, and a sprinkling of paprika. To the left of her plate she placed a linen napkin and silverware—she did not like to put silverware on the right, without a napkin upon which it could rest—and to the right a wine glass three-quarters filled with Champagne. Champagne seemed to follow Catherine wherever she went. She opened the metal bread drawer in front of and below her, took out a roll, put it on a small bread plate, and stepped back. The bubbles in her glass seemed to rise and dance in synchrony with the songs on the radio. She was so happy she was silly, and she sang her version of a song that, even after she sang it, she could not get out of her head:

Picka you up in a takasee honey,
See-ah you abouta halfa past eight!
Picka you up in a takasee baby,
Donah be late!

She would not have eaten while standing up and moving to music had she not been overbrimming with expectation. “Goddammit,” she said out loud, encouraged by just a little Champagne, “if I have to throw him over, I’ll throw him over.” Then she stopped, two feet from the plate, staring at it as if it were a calculus problem. “No one,” she said, “has ever thrown Victor over. He doesn’t throw over.” And then she said, “But I will!” and she was happy again, lightened, confident.

The next day, Sunday, she walked from Sutton Place to the tennis courts in Central Park to meet a friend and college classmate, a beautiful, unpredictable, Cuban blonde who was scandalously married to a Jewish neurologist, the scandal being not that he was Jewish, for so was she, but that he was a neurologist, which by her family’s standards was insufficiently dynastic. Her mother had once said, “To live without chauffeurs is to live like an animal.”

Catherine and Marisol in tennis whites turned so many heads that they were embarrassed. The male tennis players, sometimes missing their shots, could not refrain from glancing at them, first at one and then at the other, like spectators, rather than players, at a tennis match. Had Harry been home and looked out his windows fronting the park, he could have seen them, distant but dazzling. Instead, he was half searching for her on every street in the city. As he was walking home, they were finishing their game, and as he passed the playground and came out onto Central Park West, Catherine was a few hundred feet to the east.

On her way home, she continued to hear in memory the tennis balls that, struck by earnestly wielded rackets, sounded like a continual and uneven popping of corks. When she crossed the bridle path literally in the shadow of the San Remo, two horses trotted by, high and handsome. On one was a man perfectly attired in riding boots, jodhpurs, a tweed jacket, a tie, and a very fine hat. With a carnation at his lapel, and an expert seat, he was turned in the saddle, speaking to his daughter, a girl of seven or eight, just as elegantly attired but in miniature. Though her horse was somewhat smaller than his, she was confronted with the universal terror of rich young children, a terror that Catherine herself had faced and mastered, that of sitting on a spirited horse proportionately two and a half times higher, faster, and less amenable than her father’s horse, with her legs having no chance of gripping its sides to keep her steady. The father had seemed as fixed in the saddle as a fact of gravity, but his daughter just rested there, balanced only by her grace and that of God. She was, however, unafraid, for she trusted him, and as they rode he gave good and learned advice, and by his love and by the grace of God, she stayed on.

A majestic staircase, with shiny white balusters and a red-brown chestnut rail, was set against the Sutton Place wall of her house, rising in switchbacks from the second floor to the sixth, past large windows that looked out onto the street. Thus she had been told, ever since she had been moved from the nursery to the sixth floor, never to take the stairs while dressed immodestly, lest the “poor people” who lived in the cooperative apartments across Sutton Place catch a glimpse of her
déshabillé.

Once they reached their destination, these stairs opened onto a generous landing that ran the width of the building south to north. A left turn would take one along a gallery lined with lighted paintings to an architraved door at almost the north end, the entrance to her rooms. A long hall led into the depth of the building, and off this were a bathroom and dressing room, a study, and a bedroom together taking up less than half the floor. The major part and major room, into which the hall spilled as naturally as a brook, was an immense living area that led two steps down to a terrace. From this room, with a fireplace, grand piano, and American and French impressionist paintings glowing like jewels, one could look easily out over the river to Queens. The view was industrial and grim, but the water was wide and the sunrises almost blood red. The ships and barges that raced by, their speed doubled by the fast current, were close enough so that it was possible to see the color of the helmsmen’s eyes.

Very few captains wanted to take their boats upriver when the current was running against them or downriver when it had shifted, but often they had to, and often they did. And when they did, vessels that at other times might appear and disappear in seconds would labor for five or ten minutes to move through the waters directly in her view. Where ordinarily when they rode on the current the pilots seemed breathlessly to guide them as they fell, pilots who guided them against the current were breathless as if from the exertion of climbing.

Immense volumes of foam in an oxygen-white avalanche were disgorged from straining propellers as they churned the river, which did not cease its resistance for a split second. The strain was so great and the force streaming against the prows so steady that the main task of the pilots was to keep the current dead ahead lest they be swung around and hurled sideways downriver or onto the rocks. Catherine had many times seen a barge and tug forced to come about. Mostly they had saved themselves, surrendering their hard-fought battle to run apostate with the current they had opposed, but more than once she had seen a panicked boat beach itself against the unforgiving banks.

And all this from the tranquility of her living room. Or from the terrace, which now that it was warm had a line of potted orange and lemon trees joining the evergreens that had remained outside through the winter. Cushions had been restored to chaises and chairs, and glass tops to wrought-iron tables. When she returned from playing tennis with Marisol, she closed the French doors to the terrace because a cool wind from the sea had pushed the warm air out of Manhattan like a croupier’s rake moving chips across a felt-covered table.

Although the sun had yet to set, it was low and all her views were by now in shadow. She left the lights off until shortly after eight, when she switched them on because she wanted to make sure that without knocking anything over she could get to the phone if and when it rang, and because she had to be able to see her watch so that she would not sit for hours bereft, unknowing, and like an idiot, if he failed to call. If he didn’t call, she would be very angry but heartbroken all the same. The lamp she switched on had been mounted on a Chinese vase. Though the shade was off-white and pearly, the white of the porcelain was absolute, and the blue like that of the ocean on a cold day.

Not having brought a key with him into the army, when he had returned from Europe Harry had to ask the super to make a new key for the apartment. During the time it took to find the super, go down to the workshop, and have the key made, he was stricken with grief, for he knew that his father’s death would come home to him with finality only when he stepped over the threshold. But as he turned the key in the lock, he was unprepared for what he would see.

Virtually nothing remained. Other than walls of books now stacked on the floor and covered with dropcloths, there were several boxes of files, letters, and photographs. Another box held a few cameras, some watches, his father’s folding knife, and a pair of binoculars, all familiar to him. Gold, silver, bank notes, stock certificates, and a small amount of precious jewelry were in a safe-deposit box to which the lawyer would give him the key when making out the papers that lawyers prepare in such circumstances.

But in the apartment itself, other than the boxes and books and a few pieces of good furniture, nothing was left. Even the curtains had been removed, and the walls were freshly painted white. He had to open windows to vent the paint fumes and, early in September, cool the air. His father had had warning and enough time to dispose of his clothes, the contents of drawers, and things that would be difficult for his son either to throw away or to keep. The message was clear: start over and anew. Harry might not have understood this as well as he did had he not just been through four years of war. Now he knew, and he was grateful to his father and loved him all the more.

One of the first things he did was something he had vowed to do if he came back alive. Having fought through France, he loved it immeasurably, and had always loved its painters. So, with a not inconsequential part of his inheritance, he went to an auction at Parke-Bernet and bought—for $6,000, the price of a house—a Manet: sea, sky, and flags whipping in the wind. It would have been frightening to spend that much money had he not just returned from North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Nijmegen, and the Bulge, where money didn’t mean much. He put the painting above the fireplace in his L-shaped living room overlooking the park. Well lit and deep blue, the Manet drew the room into a placid infinity. Every other thing—an English partners’ desk, sofas that he re-covered in damask, new drapes and carpets—seemed naturally to fall in place around it and become more beautiful because of it.