In Sunlight and in Shadow (79 page)

“The Mafia knows how to protect itself, Harry, doesn’t it? This kind of thing is their business.”

“Not like it’s ours. We’re not going to do it their way. We don’t know how to do that. We’ll do it our way. We’ll have heavy weapons—bazooka, light machine gun, explosives. They have, at most, a few Thompsons. Before the war, who would have known how to do something like this? Now it’s like brushing your teeth.”

“It would be the softest target we ever had, but where would you get the weapons?”

“From the government.”

“The government? I don’t understand. They won’t do it, but it’s okay if we do? What is it, a do-it-yourself thing where they lend us the tools?”

“I can’t explain. I hardly know myself, but it’s true. We don’t go without them, and it’s not the FBI.”

“Then what is it?”

“Some sort of offshoot of the OSS, but I really don’t know. It’s forming now.”

“This is not going to be a regular thing, is it?”

“One shot.”

“A year from now, maybe six months,” Johnson said, “and I don’t think I would have done it. Now it seems kind of natural. I need to know the details, but it feels more like reality than what I’ve been living of late. It would have to be my last shot, though. I mean, it’s crazy, but I’ll do it.”

“Why don’t you sleep on it?”

“I don’t have to. Many times, my life was in your hands, yours in mine. It’s a habit that’s hard to break. You knew that.”

“I did, and I don’t feel good about it.”

“You don’t have to feel good about it. That’s the point.”

“I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here,” Harry said. “I couldn’t tell you on the telephone.”

“Hey,” said Johnson. “I love Chicago. I gotta get outa Bayfield now and then. And think of what I’m going to do to that doorman.”

“No,” Harry said. “Fire discipline.”

Johnson thought for a minute. “No, Harry. If I’m going to help you possibly kill half a dozen mob soldiers, you’re going to help me tackle an officious doorman.”

“You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” Harry told him. “I’m sorry. But I want to be able to see it. The taxi should be where I can witness the impact.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

“I forgot to ask you,” Harry said. “Did you remarry? Because I’m not going to risk breaking up any families—other than my own.”

“No.”

“Do you have someone?”

“I tried to have a girlfriend but I couldn’t give her enough. It was as if I had reins and someone was pulling on them. It wasn’t fair to her or to anybody. She got married and moved to Menomonie. It’s better for her. She weighed about ninety-five pounds. She was very pretty. Petite. I’m all right. I won’t ever love anyone but Ann.”

T
HOUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
was choked with soot and sulfur, and everything was black but for an underbelly of orange billowing from fires in the mills along the lake, the town was alive with spring. The air that trapped the smoke was also saturated with a clean mist that was winning a battle with the blast furnaces. Like a wrestler, it pushed down its antagonists, and nature prevailed. The reason that on a spring night in 1947 life was lit up in Gary, Indiana, and the streets were as active as Times Square, was that even at midnight they were making steel.

After taking the steps of a brick boarding house, Harry knocked on the first apartment door. A giant melon of a man in an undershirt appeared, and, without speaking, lifted his eyebrows. Inside the apartment, a mother and daughter were sitting together at the dining room table, working on something. The girl, whose face was from a Botticelli, was nonetheless tough and raw, with pulled-back hair and skin blotched with acne, all of which somehow made her more alluring than someone softer. Harry had to speak or the door would shut in his face.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he began.

“No, not disturb,” said the man, who hadn’t been in the country long, or had lived only among his own.

“I’m looking for Sussingham. Sussingham.”

“Not here.”

“He doesn’t live here?”

“On shift. Work now.”

“When does he get off? Finish.”

“Morning.” The man pointed toward the U.S. Steel works, miles away but so huge that they seemed like a cliff face of hell. “You can go. Tell them at gate. They send man with you sometime. Sometime no.”

As the door shut, the girl smiled. Harry guessed that she worked very hard in a factory or a bakery, someplace where there was heat and sweat, where things were made in great numbers in production lines or on conveyors that set the pace for the makers, challenging them to keep up or die. On the surface she was tough and coarse, and yet she had, as much as anyone he had ever seen, the kind of beauty that can come through fire day by day. As he walked toward the mills that stood beneath ropes of dirty smoke twisting in agony as they rose, he couldn’t stop thinking of her.

After he talked his way in, they put him in a place where, although Sussingham didn’t know it, he could watch him work. It was as if Sussingham were still at war. The noise of the steel furnace was like the roar of tank engines or bombers. Sirens, claxons, and engines, and the wind blowing through as if the enormous shed were a mountain range, made a counterpoint that stood up the senses.

Harry could not suppress his awe when a bucket as big as a building glided through the darkness, tipped, and spilled out a waterfall of molten steel redder than lava. In the confusion that followed—rollers rolling, traveling cranes passing above, little locomotives dashing about, huge electric motors spinning to move the machines that cradled and formed the steel—glowing rectangles began to course like ice floes in a river, dangerous things that had just been born. Sussingham stood on one side of the river of rollers and, like a logger, guided the nearly molten slabs with a long steel pole hooked at its far end. Though everything about them was deadly, they went helplessly to their execution in immense machines that cut and compressed them.

Currents of heat lifted in serpentines and seared the air. Smoke rocked back and forth fifty feet above the rollers before it was carried upward through giant fans in a long row at the peak of the roof. The men on the floor moved like soldiers, and Harry ached to join them not because he was oblivious of the danger but rather because his life had taught him to run to it.

In making steel, as their strength flowed out, it also flowed in. It happens to soldiers, girls who work in bakeries, and sailors on an undulating sea, and it was happening to Sussingham in the mill. He had not resigned from battle and probably never would. Someone there has to be who carries on for those who are forever silent. That was Sussingham, of all of them the one who was still at war and unaware, the one who would not let go.

In the morning, spring sunshine gave its silvery-white veneer to towers and sheds hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet long. The fires of the night before were washed out by the light, which now illuminated the structural complexity of what in darkness had seemed to be solid cliffs. Beams, trusses, cables, and buttresses cloaked the soot-blackened buildings and shone delicately against the blue lake. The donkey engines and their tooting were hardly something from hell, and Harry noticed that there was plenty of green, even if not a single tree, as nature marched grasslands right up to the concrete aprons of the mills, and that the roads crossed the surrounding fields as if on a prairie that had never felt a footstep. Gulls soared over the stacks and spinning ventilators, lifted by masses of bracing air that had traveled half the world before shooting unobstructed down the length of Lake Michigan. Colliding with Chicago, a rude shock, they then arched over and punched through it on their way to becoming motionless and water-laden in New Orleans.

“I’m stuck,” said Sussingham, entirely unbidden.

“You’re not stuck, you’re exhausted,” Harry told him.

“Not yet. On this shift I usually can’t fall asleep until ten or eleven in the morning. It throws you off.”

“Why do you do it?”

“Work rules. I have no seniority, and the money’s good. Demand for steel isn’t consistent, but we’ll be making it forever. It’s secure, and I feel trapped.”

“Then why don’t you”—here Harry stopped and made a freeing, tossing-something-away gesture—“free yourself?”

“What am I going to do? In the war I knew what to do. Get to Berlin, move forward, dislodge the enemy, kill him if necessary. As difficult as it was, it was clear. After all that”—he meant North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany—“it got in my blood. Nothing less will make me feel alive.”

“So re-enlist.”

“Making steel is more exciting than the peacetime army. So is watching concrete dry. I think about the last four years all the time. I can’t see settling down, which is funny, because when I was in, all I wanted was for the war to end so I could go home.”

“What about becoming a cop or something?”

“Cops don’t invade Normandy and smash through the
Westwall.
They don’t jump out of airplanes into enemy armored divisions. They rattle doorknobs of dry-goods stores at night and yell at kids for opening fire hydrants or smoking corn-silk cigarettes.”

“Become a pilot in Alaska.”

“That might be something.”

“What you’re talking about is like swimming in a cold river,” Harry went on. “When you swim through cold, active water, you’re on fire with life. Every one of your senses is elevated, you feel things you don’t otherwise feel, the world is fresh and promising. But when you get out and get warm, your heart stops beating so fast, your breathing slows, your muscles relax. That’s normal. You object?”

“No.”

“And are you sure that it’s not just that you haven’t come down from work? My wife’s an actress, and when she comes home from the theater she finds it impossible to sleep. She gets a little crazy, thinking of all kinds of things to do and places to go. She wanted to go riding at two o’clock in the morning, not in the park, which would have been one thing, but through lower Manhattan, which was dead still. There’s something very attractive about thundering on a horse down the middle of Fifth Avenue at three
A.M.
”

“You did that?”

“We did. We also rode across the Brooklyn Bridge, on the boards, raced through Brooklyn Heights, and crossed back. At dawn we ended up at Ratner’s.”

“What’s Ratner’s?”

“It’s a dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side, famous for its early breakfast, onion rolls, and sour cream, none of which I like, but you can appreciate them for being the best of what they are. My wife . . . well, women of a certain temperament and class sometimes do things like this.”

“Galloping horses around New York in the middle of the night? Whose horses?”

“Hers. And, given what she can do, they might have been zebras. When we got to the restaurant, she goes up to an astounded cop who doesn’t know what to say because the horses are so beautiful and the woman is breathtaking, and you know what that does to you. And she says, ‘I’ll give you ten dollars if you hold these horses while we’re in Ratner’s.’ And he says, ‘Ma’am, I can’t do that. It’s illegal.’”

“Not in Chicago,” Sussingham said.

“Not in New York either, really. And she says, looking at him straight, with her paralytic beauty, and not missing a beat, ‘Apiece.’”

“Did he take it?”

“Of course he did. I don’t live that way. Neither, most of the time, does she, but on occasion what she can do slips right past what she should do. It makes me love her even more, as if for the first time. All over again, you get a shot of whatever the hell it is—happiness, elation. What about the daughter of your landlord?”

Sussingham stopped, looked at Harry, and started walking again. “You noticed.” They were on a long stretch of dry macadam whitened by sand from the Indiana dunes. Someday it would crumble, but now it shone in the sun. “He’s not my landlord. I know who you’re talking about, though: first apartment on the right. She works in a factory that makes window glass. Her face is always red from the furnaces, like mine, but her skin is more sensitive, so she broke out. She’s young. Doesn’t speak English very well, but her accent is beautiful. She’s a Slovak. When she sees me she gets as red as a tomato.”

“You could teach her English.”

“I could,” said Sussingham. “I could teach her a lot more than that, and I think she’d be a willing student. I think that in a short while she’d be teaching me, that’s what I think.”

“I’m serious,” Harry said.

“So am I. That’s a girl that loves. You can tell from the blush. Bad people don’t blush. When a woman does, you know she’s pure inside, she has a conscience, and she can love.”

“I saw the same thing in that girl’s smile and in her eyes,” Harry said. “I may be crazy, but when I saw her in the apartment, I thought you should marry her.”

“If I can get past her father. Then I’ll learn to fly, and we’ll move to Alaska.”

“I apologize,” Harry told him, thinking he had overstepped.

“No. Really. I mean, what the hell, I’m up for anything. You got me at just the right moment. If you asked me, I’d jump off the edge of the earth, if it had one.”

“Didn’t we just do that?”

“Yeah,” said Sussingham. “We did.”

A
LMOST A YEAR
of steadfast work had given to Catherine’s voice and her stage presence a depth exceeding even that which came naturally. But as rumors could not be withdrawn and reviews were set and printed, she had to prove herself performance by performance. There was no coasting, the way some actors did, allowing reputation to outshine defects. As much as this took from her, it gave more, for as her voice filled the theater she herself was filled, from what source she did not know, but it had never failed. When the song flowed through her in notes of incandescent beauty she experienced the physical sensation of riding a stream. And although grateful for the applause, she never could understand why she was applauded. Sometimes, to the storm of sound when it was directed toward her, she would silently mouth the words “It’s not me, it’s not me,” and although they couldn’t hear her, the onlookers saw in her expression a modesty that could not be feigned, and then they would make the theater sound like a box holding a hurricane. She discounted the praise, because that was the way she was, it would not carry beyond the moment, and it was anything but the general impression of the world. At each performance she made the same extraordinary transit, and by August, with a full heart and the gravitas and power of a woman much more than her age, she was ready for a vacation.