In Sunlight and in Shadow (11 page)

Bread, olives, a dish of olive oil, a bottle of mineral water, and a bottle of retsina were brought to the table. In a heavy Greek accent, the waiter who put them down said, “In how many minutes—hours?—tsall I come back to take your order?”

Harry looked at Catherine, who merely smiled, and he said, “Twenty.”

“Minutes or hours?” the waiter asked, knowingly. Harry didn’t answer. “If you want sooner, call me.”

After he left, he came charging back, beginning to speak as he was halfway across the flagstones. “Forgot. Spessal dinner tonight. Oktopadi on grill, kotopolou fornu, salat, very good.” He turned to go.

“Wait,” Harry commanded, and, turning to Catherine, asked, “Would you like that?”

“What is it?”

“Marinated octopus on the grill, chicken from a clay oven. The octopus, like many people, is better than either its name or its appearance.”

“Yes,” she said, and then, to the waiter, “I’ll have that.”

“Two, then,” Harry told the waiter, holding up two fingers, like Winston Churchill. “
Duo.
”

“When the waiter disappeared, Catherine asked, “You know Greek?”

“A little.”

“Demotic Greek?”

“Enough to get by as a tourist. I was in Greece before the war.”

“Doing what?”

“Supposedly studying.”

“Studying what?”

“I was a graduate student, what they call an ‘advanced student.’”

“Where?”

“Magdalen College, Oxford.”

“Aha.”

“What
aha?
”

“Just
aha.
What were you doing?”

“I wanted to write a doctoral thesis on the Mediterranean as a historical force unto itself. The civilizations that ring it have so much in common other than just the olive, and half of what they are they owe to the sea. It’s certainly worth a book, which would be interesting, beautiful, and sensual.”

“You wanted to write a sensual doctoral thesis?”

“I did.”

“You expected it to be accepted? I majored in music at a girls’ college in Philadelphia. . . .”

“Where?”

“Bryn Mawr.”

“Aha.”

“And I’m not exactly Ph.D. bait. But even I know that you could never get something like that through.”

“You think I didn’t?”

Her jaw dropped a little, but she kept on with her train of thought. “It would collapse the professoriate.”

“You say that because, you see, you’re a girl, and girls don’t have what boys have, which is a goat-like capacity to bang with the head against heavy objects that will not move.”

“Isn’t that pointless?”

“Yes, except that, once in a million times, it does move.”

“Did it?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“In general?”

“We have time.”

“I was the class of ’thirty-seven. . . .”

“Where?”

“Harvard,” he answered, like someone anticipating being struck. It was always that way.

“Oh no,” she said, very annoyed.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, but he knew why.

“Harvard boys think they’re semi-divine, and they aren’t. They used to ride down to Bryn Mawr like Apollos in their chariots.”

“I wasn’t like that,” he stated. And he wasn’t.

“I know.” Then it dawned on her, and she said, “You’re eight years older than I am.”

He did the arithmetic. “You were graduated last year?”

“Yes.”

She seemed much older than twenty-three, and she thought that he seemed much younger than thirty-one or -two. The shock, however, was only momentary. “To write on the Mediterranean that way, how many languages would you have to know?”

“One.”

“How many do you know?”

As he spoke, he counted on his fingers.

“That many?”

“All badly, except perhaps English. Unfortunately, I don’t know Turkish.”

“What a tragedy,” she said. “How can you possibly get around in New York?”

“I manage, but what I know is nothing. Your song. . . .” He had to stop and start over again. “Your song . . . in its few words. Your enunciation. The way you sang those words, the way you expressed them. Nothing I’ve ever done can compare. I’ve never experienced anything as perfect. Just the caesura in the second stanza is the most extraordinary. . . .”

“But it’s only a half-note,” she interrupted.

“It may be only a half-note, but it’s infinitely beautiful and it tells all.” He meant,
about you,
and although he did not say it, she understood it.

And she, of great self-possession, could hardly breathe, much less speak, because it was true, because she had not realized it, because of what had been sent to her. Rather than go deeper, she made for the surface. “You heard me?”

“I did.”

After turning her eyes toward the tablecloth, a silence, and a few deep breaths, she looked back at him and said, “I majored in music and studied voice. I have a rich midrange. Seems to be expanding. I can’t do opera, yet. I’m barely good enough to sing one song in a careless Broadway musical. No one has said to me, about my singing, what you said.”

“The director thought it was perfect.”

“How long were you in the theater?”

“I got there early and the idiot at the stage door invited me in.”

“He is an idiot. We’ve got to get a new one. Did you pay him?”

“No.”

“Usually, people do. That’s his racket.”

“He let me in for free.”

After Harry had said what he had said, she could hardly look at him, and could not believe that her emotions were so strong. It frightened her, so she tried to slow the momentum. “Why didn’t you write that book? What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love?”

“I was in England for two years. I spent a lot of time in the Mediterranean and I got an M.Phil., but my father got sick—my mother died a long time ago—and I had to take care of him and the business. I was going to go back, but there were a lot of problems here—he never really got well. And then the war. I enlisted in ’forty-one, before Pearl Harbor.”

“That was early. A lot of people were waiting to see, even after.”

“I had an English sense of the war. My father died soon after we breached the Siegfried Line. I got out last year. I’ve been involved with the business since then.”

“And what business is it that has a leather punch? Oh!” she said, making the connection, if late. He watched as it unfurled, knowing what was coming. “Copeland Leather. You’re Copeland Leather.”

“Actually, I’m just Harry,” he said, waiting for what he knew she would do.

She held up her purse as if it were the golden fleece, looking at it in astonishment. “This,” she declared, “is Copeland Leather.”

“I know.”

“I was carrying your purse. Why didn’t you say something?”

“I was thinking of other things.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you. So are you.”

They dipped some bread in oil, and had some water and some wine. They were already in love and both of them knew it, but for both it was too fast. “What’s the greatest mystery of the universe?” he asked.

All she could do was ask what.

“That Popeye’s girlfriend is called Olive Oyl. What insanity led to that? Who can ever say? It’s a question that, by its nature, probably can never be answered.”

“By the way,” she said, “we split this.”

“I understand.”

“You said you did, and you may be the only man in New York who does. Why?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Do you think I’m rich?”

“That would be a short story. And, no, I think you went to Bryn Mawr, you speak magnificently, and you wear very expensive clothes from another era because you may be living in reduced circumstances. Maybe you were rich, but not now. That means you don’t envy the rich or have contempt for the poor, and it means you know a great deal even though you’re young. Maybe it explains the depth of your song. I don’t know. It has to come from someplace, an understanding, a compassion. You see very clearly. You feel deeply. You’re older than your years.”

“All right,” she said, moving the candle that was dead-set between them to her right, so that nothing was between them, and then leaning forward a bit, “so tell me why I pay.”

“As I said, it’s a long story.”

She shrugged, which said,
I’m here, I have patience, tell it.

“When I was in France, in the war—and it seems to me now, as it did when I was a child, that Paris was and is the center of the world, and as if I’m dreaming now and if I wake up that’s where I’ll be—when I was a soldier, I would see women on the street, many of whom were young and attractive. I would make an instant connection with them, through the eyes. When you’re in the army, fighting, you get that way. There are many men who are very crude, and they get cruder. They always thought of women as sort of prey, and in the absence of women, apart from civilian life, apart from civilization, that is, it gets worse, much worse. But, for me, suddenly coming into a city in France or Holland . . . a woman became as beautiful and venerable as. . . . I mean, why were we fighting if not . . . if not to protect. . . .”

“I understand.”

“That June, the weather was magnificent. I used to look up at the moon at night, at rest, in battle, wherever I was. It was weightless, satiny, the color of pearl, feminine. It saved me. But, anyway, I would see women on the streets of liberated towns, and because everything had broken down, and for a while there were no supplies, and the soldiers coming in had money, food, and chocolate. . . . Love can’t exist in servitude.”

“If you bought me dinner it wouldn’t be servitude.”

“I know. There’s more. I don’t want to talk too much.”

“I want you to talk to me,” she told him. “I really do.”

“It’s a long story to make a point you already understand.”

“What I’m saying to you,” she said, “is that you can read me the telephone book if you want. And I would be perfectly happy.”

“How about the Yellow Pages?”

“I prefer the White.”

Smoke from the fire circled them like a veil. For a moment they sat in silence, but then he continued. “It was worse in Germany, much worse, although there were relatively peaceful islands in the war. We were southeast of Munich, pressing up toward the Alps in a country full of lakes and long roads through uninhabited stands of pine. I was with a guy who had been born in Germany and spoke German fluently. We had a jeep, and were supposed to make a reconnaissance all the way to the Swiss border. They wanted to know what was going on in the forests. G2 was obsessed with forests after the Ardennes, the Bulge, the Hürtgen. Who could blame them? And after Market Garden they put less faith in aerial reconnaissance, so they sent us and others through the allées in the pines.

“But there was nothing there, the forests were empty. This was one of those pockets that, except for a scarcity of goods, had been untouched by the war. You live for that, for the time you have when you pass through places like that, and there are lots of them, much more than people imagine. You find them in clearings and copses, and little groves of trees, and sometimes over a whole plain as far as you can see.

“It was the first really warm day in spring, and we were riding down what seemed to be an endless dirt road. Though we could have been shot at from the trees at any moment, we were happy. The air was a pleasure. I remember thinking how insistent it was. Most of the time it lets you forget it’s there, but on that day the breeze embraced us. And you could smell the pine needles. They exhaled everything they had held on to during the winter. It was sweet like you can’t believe.

“As we were driving between huge ranks of pines, we saw two figures up ahead. Off go the safeties, we slow, we go back to war—but they were girls. Who knows how old? Late teens? Early twenties? They had that peculiar charm. . . .” He looked at her, and smiled. She knew. “That explosive, happy, embarrassed charm that only a young woman can have.

“We offered them a ride. When they understood that we would not hurt them, that we would treat them with great deference and politeness, they were shocked and relieved. They were going to Munich, although they didn’t tell us at the time. Munich was still in enemy hands, and we were alone, relatively nearby, but it was almost as if we were in Switzerland: no feeling of war, no tension.

“We came to a restaurant and hotel in the middle of the forest, on a hillside that overlooked a reservoir and the fast stream that filled it. I’ve always loved rivers. . . .”

“I know,” she said. “You told me. And so have I. I don’t know why anyone leaves them, but they do. I don’t know why I leave them, because they’ve always made me very happy. Go on.”

“We were the first Americans they had seen since the beginning of the war. The place was filled with refugees who were trying to get into Switzerland. Switzerland was close, but they weren’t going to get in.

“There was a main dining room, with tablecloths and silver, and ninety-year-old waiters in black jackets like French waiters in a bistro, and then there was a bar in another room overlooking the river. In the disturbance created by the arrival of two armed American officers, the girls disappeared into the bar. We were led ceremoniously into the dining room, where everyone tried not to look at us, and the waiter came to take our order as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

“All they had was chicken, soup, and bread, which, then, was a lot. They had wine, too, but we couldn’t have more than half a glass. We didn’t know who would be around there. The German army could still shoot, we were in Germany, and the other half glass of wine was not worth dying for.

“After we ordered, my friend said, ‘Where are the girls? Why don’t we ask them to eat with us? The food will be better here, if it’s not poisoned.’ I jumped up. ‘
Bitte, essen mit uns,
’ I said to my friend, to see if it was correct and if it would do, and I left before he replied, because I knew it would.

“I passed through the dining room, saying ‘
Bitte, essen mit uns,
Bitte, essen mit uns,
’ and then through curtained glass doors into the bar overlooking the river. The girls were sitting at a wooden table, alone because the bar was closed. They didn’t have enough money to get anything to eat. When I looked at them, I loved them for what they were, what they had been through, and what they were going to go through. One of them had been badly scarred on one side of her face. I mentioned her when we met.”