In Sunlight and in Shadow (17 page)

“It makes me a little nervous, even though I do, too. I don’t knock down mailboxes.”

“Was that a mailbox? I thought it was a dead branch.”

“It may have been a branch, but it had a metal flag and it said
Lucastrino.
”

“I should send them a check. Would you like me to slow down?”

“I would. And you didn’t eat, did you?”

“I was having a crisis on the beach. When I have a crisis, I don’t eat.”

“We’ll find a place that’s open late, somewhere in Hop Hog. We’ll take it easy, we’ll go slow, I’ll drive some, and we’ll pull into Manhattan at dawn and see the sun reflecting from a million windows. I’ve seen that at the end of the day more times than I can count, but never at sunrise.”

“Nor have I,” she said. “You see, we look right into it.”

They took many wrong turns on roads that bisected huge fields of potatoes or hay, and they would come to unmarked junctions where great oaks were clustered after several centuries safe from the plough, and there in the dark, the new leaves choking the moonlight, they would have to choose. When they chose wrongly, they would still come to a beautiful end, overlooking a bay, inlet, or the sea itself, the waters ruffling in moonlight and summer wind.

Slowly, they made their way west, through a silent and benign landscape just sixty or seventy miles from the largest city in the world. The roads gradually became wider and less rural, and they had the sense that they were nearing a paved highway that was connected to the industrialized maze, as macadam always was. But they were wrong, for they came to yet another barrier of water, a dead end where the road disappeared into a bank of sand.

Braking to a stop, she said, “Less than a quarter of a tank.”

“Let’s see where we are,” he suggested, opening his door.

She turned off the lights and engine and joined him as he climbed the bank. When they reached the top they saw an immense bay, its little waves sparkling dimly in the moonlight. The wind blew through the sharp dune grasses and made them bend, and on the other side of the water two radio towers, black against a slightly bluer sky, blinked in red, their distant lights beating rhythmically. Beyond, somewhere invisibly to the west in an endless volume of darkness that its throbbing lights would make as pink as coral, was New York. “This reminds me,” she said, “of the kind of scene they light when they make a sunrise. They always start with dawn, and hold it proportionately longer than would nature. When I was a little girl I wanted to go into the theater because of the music and the light. I didn’t have many friends when I was growing up—none, really. But then my mother took me to a play, where the light and music seemed better than the world itself. I’m so stuck on that, that when I see the real thing it makes me think of the imitation. When you watch from the dark, as I did for so long, that’s what you get.”

The wind blew her hair back as she stared across the water—her posture, without deliberation, unrelenting, her arms crossed against the sequined top to protect her from the chill. At first, concentrating on her face, and watching the distant lights reflected in her eyes, he hadn’t noticed that she was cold, but as soon as he did he removed his jacket and laid it over her. She pinched closed the satin lapels and was relieved not to have the wind flowing through her almost insubstantial gown.

He put his arm on her left shoulder and turned her until they were facing one another. She thought—she was sure—that he was going to kiss her, as she wanted him to, and he did, only once. The shock of it was such that, for the moment, once was enough. Many kisses, days of kisses, would come. Now he pulled her close to him, and with his left hand he took her hand as it clasped the lapels of his jacket. And then he looked at her, bowed his head, and closed his eyes as if in prayer. By the time he straightened not long after, she had accepted him as she had never accepted anyone else in her life. “I wanted so much,” he said, “this evening at the Georgica Club, to dance with you for as long as we could. I really wanted to dance with you.”

“You will,” she said. “You will. Ten thousand times.”

The night now had a different quality. They were happy to leave the oaks, the silvery fields, and lights that beckoned from the other side of windy bays. You never reach the lights across the water, but their beauty on the summer wind is such that you never have to. The forward progress of the car homing in on Manhattan, where its engine would be like a bee in a hive of innumerable others, was as cheerful as being in love, which, of course, they were.

Somewhere way to the west of Hop Hog they found an open gas station and filled up the car. Twenty minutes farther on, they were on roads blazing with neon and incandescents and crowded with tire shops, furniture stores, and huge cylindrical tanks the sides of which moved up or down as they filled or emptied, but only very slowly, so that many people and nearly all children were mystified by the empty steel frames where once solid tanks had stood, and then by the return of the solid tanks. Farther on, where the ground was shadowed by streetlights and split by railroad tracks recessed into the streets, and the overhead trolley wires were like bolts of lightning that had been stilled and straightened, cleaned and pressed, they saw a diner. It was elevated on a platform, with four wings in a cross, like the Georgica Club itself, glowing from within like a window at Tiffany’s, and open to serve policemen, cleaning ladies, and emergency returnees from the Hamptons.

“Stop here,” she commanded. He pulled in. As their doors slammed and they stood bathed in white light, she said, “This light reminds me of how we found out the war in Europe was over, just before it was announced. We were in East Hampton last year at the beginning of May. It was very warm one night, so we decided to walk home on the beach after we had dinner at the club. If you walk slowly it takes about half an hour. As we were turning toward the cut in the dunes that leads to our house we noticed a kind of glow, and we could see our shadows against the sand. The three of us turned at once. Not far from shore was a ship that had come up behind us from the west. The ship was ablaze, but not burning, as we had seen on the horizon many times during the war. It was close, with electric lights strung from the bowsprit to the masts and down to the fantail. It was so beautiful, for so many reasons. For years, everything had been blacked out. You could hear freighters, battleships, whole convoys—but at night you never could see them.

“My mother said, ‘Someone’s going to get a ticket,’ but my father told her, ‘No, no one’s going to get a ticket. That’s Henry Stimson’s yacht.’ I remember. He said, ‘
That’s Henry Stimson’s yacht, Evelyn
’—my mother’s name is Evelyn—‘
and if the secretary of war turns on his lights like a Christmas tree in the middle of the ocean, the war’s over.
’

“You’ve had dinner?” she asked as they took their seats in a booth. They wanted to sit side by side, but also to face one another. They ended up facing. It was three o’clock in the morning and they felt no desire for sleep.

“That was yesterday,” he stated as he scanned the menu, “and it was Champagne. I’m going to have a club sandwich and a milkshake, to bring me back to earth.”

“I’ll have the same.”

“Do you always do that? You did that the last time.”

“It’s a habit left over from Victor, but last time and just now it’s what I really wanted. Maybe we have the same tastes. We’ll see. Tell me, what were you going to do tonight? Were you going to disrupt the announcement? Punch Victor?”

“I wouldn’t have punched Victor, he’s as big as the
Hindenburg.
I had no plan. I thought that when I saw you I’d know what to do. Then I didn’t see you and I thought I was in the wrong place and had missed my chance.”

“I saw you,” she said.

“You did?”

“I did. As I was coming out of the ladies’ room. I was resigned to everything that was about to happen, and not too unhappy about it, either. I’ve been with him for so long I’m used to him. It would have been like an arranged marriage. There are worse things.

“And I hadn’t thought about you . . . for at least two or three minutes. I was putting you out of my mind. I could have. Maybe I would think of you every now and then for the rest of my life. Maybe, if I lived to be eighty, I would regret that I had not lived with you, and maybe not. If I had nothing to remind me of the past few days, my memory of them and you would eventually have been shorn of detail. . . . That’s what happens. People say, Think if we hadn’t discovered Emily Dickinson. I say, Think of all the Emily Dickinsons we’ve never discovered. The greater part of things is secret, lost, undone. I do believe that.

“And then, as they were playing that song—I would like to sing it; I think I could sing it very well—I stepped into the hall and nearly had a heart attack. There you were, awkward and out of place, a bottle in your hand, held by the neck. Even a waiter wouldn’t have done that. You looked like someone who had walked into the club from the beach to crash the party. People do it now and then, and it’s easy to spot them.”

“I was spotted?”

“Like a leopard. They knew. I heard them, but you were too prepossessing, too good-natured, to kick out. You were wandering alone, it was obvious, until that idiot Ross Underhill got to you and you started talking to him. He’s a nice idiot who, like most idiots, doesn’t know he is one, but even other idiots won’t talk to him, because since he got back he’s been trying to raise money for an expedition to catch the Abominable Snowman—in Austria. It was very kind of you.”

“I thought he was just drunk.”

“He was. He always is.”

“And, besides, even idiots have souls. Even idiots can be loved.”

She hesitated, enjoying the seconds that passed as one enjoys time elongated in music. “Then I had to decide. It didn’t help that I had numbed myself with expensive alcohol, and that the ocean was close by. It made me think, This is what is important, this is what we live for. And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, You have only one life, you have only one life.”

Soon after they began to eat, she got up and crossed the empty diner to a telephone booth from which she called her parents, a sudden rush of love and regret prompting her concern that they might be worried about her. But they hadn’t been as concerned as she had thought, and had not only gone to bed but to sleep.

Her father told her that the garage at home in New York was full. She knew this already. “Don’t park the car on the street,” he said. “It’s a convertible; you can get into it with a penknife. Put it in the garage on First.” She would. They said nothing about what had happened. They would wait until she brought it up, as she would have to, but in saying nothing they had lifted a weight from her. When she returned from the telephone, Harry’s jacket casually draped over her shoulders, her purplish-black sequins an earthquake of elegance in the diner in Commack or wherever they were at four, now, in the morning, it was as if her life had opened up in the clear. She showed it. Her smile was almost as beautiful as her song, which was to say a lot.

“They’re all right?” he asked.

“They were sleeping.”

“No explosions?”

“No.”

“Reprimands?”

“None.”

“Got off easy.”

“Got off easy,” she repeated, “especially considering that this is the end of Willie and Billie.”

“Enlighten me.”

“My father is William Hale III, and Victor’s father is William Marrow III.”

“What happened to Victor?”

“His older brother was the Fourth, but he was killed in the war. People call my father Billy and they call Willie Marrow Willie. So the joke was that when Victor and I had a boy he would be William the Fourth, and the firm he would inherit would be Hale, Marrow—like Hail, Caesar—but otherwise known as Willie and Billie. I think that name would have stuck. Wall Street is like that. Don’t tell anyone, but my father hates it.”

“Hates what?”

“The Street.”

“Oh. But it was all planned out?”

“On a track.”

“How do you know Victor’s not following with a posse?”

“If he is, he probably went the wrong way. Besides, he doesn’t do things that aren’t carefully engineered. Insult him, and two years later you’ll find that your checks bounce. You know how some things are warm to the touch, like wood or wool, and some aren’t, like marble or steel? Victor is marble.”

“I’ll keep an eye on my checks. By the way, why Catherine Sedley?”

“My stage name.”

“I know, but why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted you to think I was poor. It’s a reflex we have, to protect ourselves from insincerity.”

“I didn’t think you were poor, just not rich.”

“But you didn’t think of me the way so many people do, did you? It’s disgusting when they do. In freshman year in college, it would make me cry.”

“I didn’t, and I don’t now. I never will. You blind wealth right out of the picture. Do you understand?”

“No,” she said, although she did.

“Catherine, I want to court you, slowly.”

“Court,” she echoed, thinking of the word and idea. She felt deep emotion, for what she had lacked and what she now might have.

“Victor certainly didn’t. Has anyone?”

“Harry?”

“Yes?”

“Victor raped me. Not figuratively.”

Taking this in, Harry was silent. Remarkably, she had said it unemotionally. “Then maybe I should kill him.”

“No. It was a long time ago. I can never put it behind me, but I don’t want to take it forward. And no, no one ever courted me.”

“During the war, when you were in college?”

“We danced with servicemen at the USO in Philadelphia, and some fell in love with me, but it was inappropriate. They were boys, and I didn’t meet the right one. The sailors got back on the bus and so did we. The Harvard boys had to go back to Cambridge to study and drink. And Victor managed to be there whenever we were free. I would meet him at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. I didn’t go in chains, Harry, and no, no one ever courted me.”