In Sunlight and in Shadow (89 page)

B
EFORE HARRY SAW
Eugenia Eba in the arcade, and Vanderlyn recast his will, and four pathfinders converged on the warehouse in Newark, Catherine awoke in her childhood room. The East River was shrouded in gray, and pigeons cooed on the terrace. She felt thrown back in time as surely as if someone had lifted a tone arm in the midst of a song and set it upon the smooth and soundless rim of the record. Though she had great affection for times past, to relive them would be the saddest thing, if only because she would know exactly the way they would end.

But soon, in an almost painfully hot shower, with the water singing through the taps, she returned to practical matters. The night before, after an unusually strong performance at the beginning of the week, she had faltered, and was unsure that she could get back. Everything in this regard had always come naturally, with labor merely to confirm it. Whence it arose she did not know, and now as things that had always seemed effortless collided in chaos she had no access to their origins for repair. It had happened in the theater not twelve hours before.

First, she had hurriedly put on her costume in such a way that it ripped and had to be patched together with safety pins and tape. Whatever had distracted her grew in strength until it seized her entirely. In the dressing room, after her dress had been jury-rigged, she knocked over a bottle of rubbing alcohol, which cracked the glass top of her makeup table. The corridors refused to impart the customary momentum that enabled her to burst out onto the stage as if she really had come from the interior of a railroad station into the light and cacophony of New York. Instead of traveling them like someone riding down a flume, she was hypnotized and held back by the friction of what she saw—a folded fire hose in a glass box, electrical switches, a bucket of sand for cigarettes, a statement from the New York State Department of Labor.

In the opening, which she had never done other than masterfully, she proved slow and uninterested, as if she were not her character but only someone playing it. Unable to convince herself of where she was supposed to be, her singing was uninspired. The other actors knew, the chorus knew, the musicians and of course the audience knew. They almost stopped breathing. George, who was like a horse that has been broken and gratefully draws the plough, watched from the wings in pained distress. How could Catherine fall? How could she fail?

After her last song, she left the theater, so upset that she neglected to take off her costume or remove her makeup. She explained to the puzzled guard at the stage door that she would have the dress fixed the next day, since she would have to be in it anyway while it was pinned. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he agreed that it was a sensible idea. The taxi that picked her up had the mid-performance luxury of gliding across town on empty streets before intermission, when the crowds drinking gin and tonics or chilled orange juice would spill from sidewalks lit by a hundred thousand bulbs onto streets as black as ebony. She wept in the cab. Because she was in a ripped dress and heavy makeup, the taxi driver was reluctant to offer comfort, seeing that what ailed her was too complex to fathom on a crosstown ride.

In the morning, simultaneously as weak and as strong as someone emerging from an illness, she left the house, carrying the dress in paper wrapping, and an umbrella for the intermittent squalls. One of her mother’s dressmakers, on First Avenue, was pressed into emergency service. The woman was an expert, and for her it was nothing. After pinning it, she told Catherine it would take no more than an hour. Catherine waited, trying to read a magazine, staring out at traffic as if her heart were broken, occasionally checking her watch. She would drop the repaired costume at the theater, have lunch, go to a doctor’s appointment, return home to rest, and then go back to the theater again, where, while Harry did something that not long before she would not have dreamed of, she would sing to redeem herself.

Catherine had never arrived so early except during the period when they were rehearsing and the theater was rented to them on the condition that each day they vacate promptly in favor of the real play. She remembered how deferential she and the rest of the cast had been when encountering anyone associated with the ongoing production, even though it was a play about physics. Their deference was that of the aspiring to the successful, the untried to the tested, the amateur to the professional, the young to the old, and even the short to the tall, the poor to the rich, sometimes the rich to the poor, and just about everyone to a cop.

Now she discovered that there was another aspiring production making use of the theater during the day, which Sidney had not bothered to mention. As she passed its hopeful cast, they slightly lowered their eyes. They admired and envied her. And, yet, when she came to her dressing room, closed the door, and felt the thunder of the chorus line pounding the floor with their taps, and the brass piercing the darkness like a golden ray, she envied them, for as they were rising all the life in rising was theirs. For them, nothing was certain, and she, who had a role, had by definition begun to fade. As she unwrapped her dress and placed it on its hanger, the music from above saturating through the boards, she took an irrevocable step in growing up, recognizing and embracing the duty to step aside for those who follow, as others had stepped aside for her.

She looked at the little watch that no one but a hawk could see well, and suspected that the hands were somewhere close to noon. Then she clicked shut her door and was halfway down the corridor on her way to lunch when suddenly she stopped. She didn’t know why, but she stood in place, tapping her right foot to the music raining down from above. She hadn’t forgotten her umbrella, which she held in both hands. She had intended to leave the dress behind: it wasn’t that. Then she realized. On the makeup table, on the newly cracked glass, was something that had briefly caught her eye for being out of place. Whatever it was it couldn’t have been important, and anyway she would see it when she returned in the evening.

She started forward, but then stopped and turned around. “Don’t stoop when you turn,” she heard from long ago. A choreographer had said, “Just because you’re dancing doesn’t mean you have to make yourself small. Dance tall.” When she switched on the light in the dressing room she saw a Western Union telegram wedged into the crack of the glass. In show business, they called it a cable, and in no business was it ever ignored, if only because it was the messenger of death, birth, windfalls, and disappointments.

Without closing the door behind her she walked to the makeup table, grabbed the telegram, threw down her purse and umbrella, and opened the envelope as if she were starving and it was the wrapper of a Swiss chocolate bar. She had heard from her father and mother that morning: it was not likely about them. It could not have been from or about Harry. Whatever might happen, Harry would not announce it in a telegram. And the war was over.

On the white tape glued to yellow paper were her stage name—Catherine Sedley—and her address at the theater. The message was short:
WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU AT YOUR CONVENIENCE STOP PLEASE CALL PL
9 2472
STOP MIKE BECK
. She stared at the message written on what looked like the name tapes on her tennis whites at camp. The Beck Organization—which at any one time had half a dozen shows on Broadway—was four blocks away, and they had sent a telegram. Her father had told her of how, once, when he was having lunch with a producer (who, like all producers, wanted to borrow money), the producer had called for a telephone and dictated a cable to be sent to a colleague whom he could clearly see at another table across the room. Ten minutes later, a Western Union messenger had appeared, handed the cable to a waiter, and the waiter had brought it to a bald man with a pipe—as opposed to thirty or forty bald men with cigars. Opening it immediately and reading it gravely, the bald man with a pipe had called for a telephone. Ten minutes after that, Billy’s lunch companion ripped open a yellow envelope and threw the cable down in front of him. When Billy picked it up, he read: None of Your F-----G Business Stop Mel. So it was in show business.

She put the telegram in her pocket and left for lunch. Only when she was on the sidewalk did she remember to call the Beck Organization. Once again, they asked to see her, and would not say why. “I can come late this afternoon,” she said, adding unnecessarily, “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

The secretary left the line and returned a minute later. “Mr. Beck will be delighted to see you then. What time?”

“Four?”

“We look forward to it.”

Other productions had tried to raid everyone in the cast except Catherine. She often thought that this would be her last part, and was reconciled to it. But many different parts on the lower rungs were hard to fill well, so perhaps her time had come. She worried that her father had pulled strings to get Mike Beck himself to call her. Every father wants the best for his daughter, but it was not likely to work out that way if now he had done what before he had only been accused of doing.

Already at noon, Times Square, which made night day and day night, was beginning its tawdry and energetic celebrations. Catherine had always wondered who it was who went to nightclubs in the daytime. Whoever they were, there were enough of them to keep clubs and bars full at all hours. From a dozen establishments came the sounds of saxophones, drums, and dancing. Boys who should have been in school and were too young to go inside stood in small groups at the doorways of such places, straining for a glimpse of strippers, frightened that someone they knew might see them. To camouflage themselves should their headmasters or priests pass by, they pretended to be tying their shoes, or reading—by happenstance, just beyond the entrance of the club featuring Miss Gloria Seins and Her Nude Mesopotamian Snake Dance—the
Christian Science Monitor.

Spilling out onto the street, music inundated the barkers, bouncers, and truants. The doors to these places were like valves that sprayed out rays of light and flashes of sequins, and the colors within—purple, mauve, metallic silver and gold, lipstick red, ultraviolet, black velvet—were largely unnatural and unfailingly exciting.

Catherine hesitated at one of the doorways. The barker/bouncer was dumbfounded. As she was neither a potential victim, customer, cop, nor kid, he had no tools in his kit with which to deal with her. Her tailoring, bearing, and self-possession were entirely out of place in his world. Inside, an orchestra played as if it were Saturday night. Except for the bartender and a skinny sailor trying to keep up with the other dancers, everyone in the place, and the man at the door, was colored. Heretofore, they would have been confined to Harlem, but the war had brought them downtown. Women with immensely long legs were dancing to the blasts of trumpets, drums, and saxes. They wore flower-petal-like dresses, upside-down yellow roses that, like skaters’ costumes, stopped at the top of the thigh.

Thousands of sequins were dashed in the strong lights that shone upon the dancers and musicians. A mirrored ball revolved like a water wheel pushed by light. This was a portal to the south, which suddenly, in New York, had pushed up like a daffodil. It seemed that they were celebrating something that, though yet to come, would come unstoppably; something that, in truth, was already halfway there. In her childhood Catherine had been in the presence of many people who had in their own childhood been slaves. The climb out was slow, but it was steady.

“This is new,” she said to the doorkeeper, who had begun to get nervous.

Relieved that she had spoken, but still puzzled, he said, “Yes, Miss, this
is
new.”

She leaned slightly toward him and asked, “Do you have to be Irish to go in?”

He thought this was rather funny, and as she left he smiled at her and gave a thumbs-up. The women were still dancing, no more tired than locomotives running across the flatlands early in the evening, lights shining onto the straight track ahead.

Having added the appointment at the Beck Organization, about which she tried not to think, Catherine had to manage her time very closely. She had half an hour for lunch before arriving at the doctor’s office on Park in the low Seventies. After her annual checkup, he had called her back, which she hadn’t mentioned to Harry or her parents, being too young to think that anything might be seriously wrong. She thought less about this, in fact, than what kind of part might be offered to her—if indeed it were—by Mike Beck, and less even than about where she might eat. She decided on a Schrafft’s that she knew was on Madison somewhere in the high Fifties: she would find it.

The food would be light, the service fast, and no one would recognize her. It was not that she was ashamed of herself, but that she knew that many servile people of the upper class, with whom she was loosely acquainted, and who took their direction faithfully from newspapers whose truth and wisdom they did not doubt or ever question, might believe that she should be ashamed of herself. It happened often enough and she hated the way they enjoyed it. They would be at various restaurants and clubs that were definitely not Schrafft’s, so she went in and sat safely at the counter.

The trick of the place was that it was almost luxurious and neither expensive nor pretentious. Perhaps it was the name, which always made her think of the sound water makes as it flows through a weir. Perhaps it was the lighting, or the way they somehow muted sounds, unlike in most restaurants, where sound was sharp and aggressive. Here it was a cross between a low murmur and the sibilance of wind and water, with sometimes the sparkling clink of silverware or glass. The food was quite acceptable, no more, no less, and always the same. She did not have to look at the menu, for she always had a BLT and a chocolate milkshake, which, this time, came at her before she finished ordering it. She asked the waitress how this could have happened.

The waitress pulled out her pad, studied it, and seized one end of Catherine’s oval platter. Catherine grabbed the other end with her left hand, and half the sandwich in her right. “What are you doing?” she protested. She was tired of people taking, assuming, and attacking, just tired of it, and she wasn’t going to let it happen anymore.