In Sunlight and in Shadow (86 page)

“Casualties,” he said.

“I would hope we can do this safely,” Harry answered. “We’ll have surprise, superior armament, cover, darkness, and whereas we’re practiced in assault they have no experience in defense. But if there are casualties, we have medical kits, we evacuate the wounded, bring him, or them, here, where they will be treated by a surgeon who will be waiting.”

“And killed?” Johnson asked.

“We’ll bring him out. I have cards for you to complete: next of kin, where you want to be buried, that kind of thing.”

“I want to be buried in Arlington,” Bayer said. “Do they take Jews?”

“Of course they do,” Sussingham said, “but not you. You’re too big.”

“And your wills,” Harry said. “Informally. Nothing will see a judge.”

“I don’t need a will,” Sussingham declared. “I don’t have anything to leave or anyone to leave it to.”

“You’re insured,” Harry told him. “We all are.”

“They thought of everything,” Bayer said. “How much?”

“Thirty thousand.”

“For all of us together?”

“Apiece.”

They were astounded. “That’s three big houses, Harry,” Bayer said.

“Six in Wisconsin,” Johnson added.

“I told you, I don’t have anyone to leave it to,” Sussingham insisted.

“What about the pretty girl in the apartment on the first floor? She’s apparently all you think about.”

“Yeah, I’ll leave it to her. That would make me feel. . . . It would almost be like kissing her, which I always wanted to do.”

“Then kiss her,” Harry said.

“I’d leave it to my sister,” Johnson announced.

They looked at Harry. “My wife, Catherine. She doesn’t need it, but as you said, it would be like kissing her. She’d be moved, I know. It would be as if, for a second, I was there.”

Then they all looked at Bayer. “No one,” he said. “Absolutely, no one.”

They met twice more in Newark, going over the details again and again; stripping and cleaning their weapons so that they would feel wed to them once more; and getting back to what they had been. In the eyes of a soldier whose life may end at any time, the things that weigh upon him heavily are vivid in proportion. If much is lost, much is gained.

They were going to go on Thursday, the thirtieth of October, arriving in Newark at two and driving north an hour later, but it didn’t work, because there was a fire in the Hudson Tubes and they couldn’t get across on time. When Johnson and Bayer got to the station it was closed off and smoke was issuing from the doors. This was just as well, as heavy rain might have thrown them off schedule anyway. High tides and street flooding paralyzed traffic, shut down air operations at La Guardia, and made Friday uncertain in terms of both what they could do and the effect upon Verderamé’s usual punctuality. Also, Friday had been ruled out in general not only because they wanted a business day for the day following their strike, but because it was more likely that on Friday Verderamé might stay in town for dinner or go to a show. And had they set out that Friday they would have been frustrated yet again. The Tubes were flooded at times and the ferries backed up, their crossings made difficult by high winds, and boats that had broken from their moorings and were running unmanned on unusually powerful currents.

They decided to go on the first good day of the first week in November. Everyone except Harry went back to his routine. Sussingham went to a lot of movies and ate repeatedly at the White Turkey, alternating from one to the other out of embarrassment that despite the thousands of restaurants in New York, all he wanted to eat was turkey. Johnson settled into the library and ate mostly at the automat. Bayer went back to work on Thursday, again on Friday, and, receiving various clients, noted that their umbrellas held so much water that as the owners sat talking to him the umbrellas would drip for half an hour, that water ran off people’s hair onto their shoulders as if it were raining indoors, and that his windows streamed perpetually as sideways rain was swept against the glass. Everything was gray and wet, and when darkness came it was worse.

Harry and Catherine had agreed that she would stay with her parents and not return home until it was over. He told her, and it was true, that if she were with him beforehand he might not be able to come out safely. He had to leave behind her world and everything feminine. To do what he had to do, he could not think at all of things that were tender or of what he loved. He had seen too many men disengage from the rhythm of war and then die for their want of ferocity and fighting grace. Though the best of them fought to return to love, to return to it they had to put it out of their minds.

The delay was not propitious. It is true that had Catherine been with him he would have been thrown off, but in her absence he could not help but think of her, and the more he thought of her, the more he missed her. As he read, he saw her on the page, more beautiful than anything that was ever written. And when he slept, he dreamt of her.

At the beginning of the week, when the weather was still a problem, he was sitting in the living room at dusk. Lights across the park came on a score at a time until thousands lit the stone cliffs of Fifth Avenue. They twinkled gently, as they were for the most part just table lamps, shaded in silk, glowing in warm apartments. A burst of sun beneath the clouds momentarily washed the off-white façades with an orange-tinged red the color of molten steel. Behind this, the sky was blued as purple and black as a gun, and the trees in the park, leafless and thin, were for a moment like flames the color of white gold.

Although he had always been unwilling—so as not to tempt fate—to have his picture taken or write a farewell before going into battle, he decided to write to Catherine. He had in mind a short note, like that which would have announced that he was going out to buy groceries and would be back at such and such a time. But though it would be short, he thought to leave something rather than nothing. He wanted it to be almost breezy, certainly informal, and not too serious. He wouldn’t be away for long, and would see her on the Esplanade at eleven o’clock on the day after the action. That was set in stone. He didn’t want her in the apartment. It wasn’t safe. They would meet in the park and then see how things played out, what the papers said, how it felt. He would be seeing her soon enough, so just a paragraph or two, if only because writing it would be as if she were there.

He searched the house for the right paper upon which to write. Though it might be casual, it couldn’t be like a telephone message or a grocery list. On the other hand, stationery was too somber and out of the question. At first he searched mentally, thinking about what could be where, and then he got up and started opening drawers. Since Catherine had moved in, these held many surprises. She carried things from home or from elsewhere, and, being neither as neat nor as organized as he, simply threw them into anything that might hold them. In one of the compartments of a breakfront she had installed in the hall, Harry found a half-depleted pad of musical notation paper. Six by eight and stiff enough to fold into a card that would stand on the marble-topped table in the entryway, it was printed with staffs only on one side, and he would write on the other. Whether it was from the music department at Bryn Mawr, a long-ago voice teacher, or the theater, didn’t matter: it was a small part of the many things that had made Catherine’s song.

He sat down to write, intending not to touch upon anything too grave, and aware that were things to turn out well, he and Catherine would return to the apartment together and there would be no need for a note—a note that, despite Harry’s wishes, and though by necessity it was short, became a letter.

He folded it in two and stood it up on the oval marble top of the table that had been near the front door since Harry was a child. She couldn’t miss it, especially because she had left a bracelet there, abandoning it on the way out perhaps because she discovered that it was not right for her outfit. Or perhaps because the clasp had broken. It lay as she had left it, open and empty, the fragile safety chain of almost gossamer gold links lying bereft on the cold marble, not quite glowing in the light that came from over the rooftops and across the deeply shadowed courtyards.

P
HILOSOPHERS, MATHEMATICIANS
, and logicians would not have given it a thought. But dyslexics, those with right-left confusion, women whose sense of direction was not quite equal to that of a carrier pigeon, and men who could not fathom the idea of a Möbius belt were stopped for at least a moment by the fact that 28 West 44th Street was also 25 West 43rd Street. How could this be? The post office had long before reconciled itself to the paradox. People who wanted to put on the dog could write: “Please send to me at my offices either at 28 West 44th St., or at 25 West 43rd St., and my staff will see that I get it, even if I’m in Paris.” And visitors who walked through the arcade, entering at one address and leaving by another while in only one building, sometimes found it pleasing.

This was the arcade in which Eugenia Eba worked beneath the symbol that apart from memory was all she had left of her husband, a gold star to which she would be faithful—which would inspire within her a feeling of holiness as if he were in her embrace—for the rest of her life. Reweaving was an art that soon would be lost, but all day long it is what she did, working amid travertine walls beneath a vaulted ceiling and separated by her little window from a constellation of highly polished fittings that gave off a golden glow. She had always loved how, hour after hour, the brass arrow of the elevator indicator moved like a weathervane in the wind.

She worked in a silence made soft by many sounds mixing in tranquility—footsteps and heel clicks on the marble floors; sewing machines whirring intermittently like orgasmic crickets; and lost voices rising invisibly to the ceiling. Murmurs, cries, or singing, their meaning was unintelligible but their import was felt as little explosions upon the heart.

When finally the beginning of November had hesitantly returned to fall, bands of rain remained nonetheless to sweep over Manhattan in alternation with sun and blue sky. As Eugenia Eba finished mending a particular English wool jacket she had fixed many times before, the streets were wet and dark or just as often sparkling with sunshine. Business was slow thanks to ready-to-wear, so she was grateful for the work, strange as it was, and it was not hers to question why the tear in the sleeve kept on tearing. The second time the garment was handed over to her, she recognized her own work, and offered to restore it for no charge. “I wouldn’t hear of it,” the owner had said commandingly. “It’s my fault. A hinge on the tiller of my boat keeps on catching there. I can’t change that. It’s a fast boat that wins races. You can throw over the tiller in such a way that it turns on a dime, coming about with the stern elevated rather than depressed. No. I wouldn’t hear of it. If you don’t mind fixing this, I’ll just bring it in when it tears.”

Knowing that the tear was made with a thread hook and not by a sailboat hinge, she acquiesced anyway. At first she thought he was interested in her. He was, but it was not the kind of interest that often stopped men at her window, as, young and old, they pretended fascination with reweaving but could not take their eyes off her, her hair shining in the light. He was wealthy and of an age when he might have been seeking a mistress, but the way he spoke to her, and his expression when he did, said that this was not the case.

It was at least the tenth time he had brought the jacket in, always cut in the same place. She knew no more about him now than the first time she had seen him, and he no more about her, as he was not eager to make conversation, and of all the things of the world, conversation was one of the foremost that Eugenia Eba did without. She was grateful and at the same time somewhat resentful, for over almost a year the work she did for him served to keep her accounts in the black month after month, even if not by much.

In January she never pointed out that he almost surely could not have been sailing, or, in July and August, when the sun came close to boiling the waters of the Sound, that he was unlikely to have been sailing in a wool jacket. It was understood that such things would pass without comment. For him, whatever he was doing was not a duty. Nor was it pleasure or displeasure, but only somehow written in. Time after time he would bring her the jacket he cut and she would gently reweave it. Perhaps he took pity on her. Perhaps he had lost a son and seen her star, or had been commanded in a way he did not know, or was simply generous, as some people are. Perhaps, after the war, he was a bit crazy, and thought that an exquisite woman sitting alone in a little shop was reweaving and repairing with gifted persistence not just the torn jackets, pants with cigarette burns, and coats with fraying edges upon which she worked every day, but the whole wounded and suffering world.

Harry stared out his windows high over Central Park and watched as bands of rain clouds would raid the city and then run from blue sky. The elements had begun to fuse. Sussingham and Johnson would leave their hotels, Bayer would flip the sign on his door early that afternoon and his clients would have to come back another time. Vanderlyn’s people were waiting in Newark, and the surgeon knew to arrive later. Verderamé was holding court amid walls of gray and green, sure of his role and the justice of what he did. He was what he was, he thought, because the world was unfair to him, and the license he had granted to himself because of this injustice was an endless source of enjoyment as he revenged his slights and struck at everything before it could strike him. Though the wheels on his Cadillac were still, they would roll at dusk. Everything was poised for what would happen, even if not everyone knew it was coming and no one knew exactly how it would occur.

Catherine told herself more than once that Harry had fought through the war with the 82nd Airborne, that he and the others were naturals to begin with and had learned all the lessons they might need as they had pushed the Germans into the heart of Germany, that they were used to hard combat and knew what to do, which would not daunt them.