In Sunlight and in Shadow (7 page)

He reshelved the thousands of books on the newly painted bookcases that lined the south and west walls of the living room, and had shelves built in what had been his father’s bedroom, which he made into a study. He refinished the dining room table, replaced the icebox with an electric refrigerator, and made his old room at the back austere, with, however, a double bed.

He lived quietly, with almost no visitors, waiting on events. Deciding not to take any important steps until he had passed at least a year in civilian life, he had spent nine months without the need for action or decision. At work he did little, leaving almost everything to Cornell Wright. He attended to his health, read, and spent a lot of time sitting in the park or in his apartment, thinking and remembering. He knew that his capacity for action could be unleashed in a flood, that the world could instantly become demanding and dangerous once again. But this was his holiday and his rest, for which he was grateful even as he knew it could not last.

Contrary to her every impulse but with complete certainty that it was the right thing to do, at eight Catherine rose, walked to the table that held the instrument of which she had been thinking for two days and at which she had been staring for half an hour, removed the handset from its cradle, and rested it on a notepad beside the phone. Then she opened wide the French doors, crossed the terrace, and stood at the railing, the glossy leaves of a potted orange tree touching her on one side and those of a lemon tree brushing against her on the other.

A ship moved fast in the current, riding from Hell Gate at speed and under lights. It came into sight like charging cavalry, passed as fast as cars on a highway, and rushed downriver into the gathering darkness. She followed it with her eyes. When it had passed, she went in, picked up the telephone, and took it out to the railing, handling the long cord carefully because she didn’t like unnecessary tangles. Before replacing the handset, she crushed a lemon leaf in her fingers, closed her eyes, and inhaled the scent. Now ready, she mated handset and cradle. Checking her tiny watch, which was never accurate despite the several times each year it was repaired, she saw that almost fifteen minutes had passed since the appointed time.

Uptown and west, Harry sat in his living room. The park was visible through four large windows, its lights twinkling as new leaves put them in and out of view according to the wishes of the breeze. Over the reservoir the canyon-front of Fifth Avenue and the higher buildings behind it began to come alight, a red sun having left the stone in shadow and the lights dim but rising. In the corner of his eye was the blue Manet framed in gold and shining like the sea. He had determined not to call until 8:20, but it was difficult to hold fire.

Overcome with the sudden conviction that he had already waited too long, he dialed at 8:15 exactly. The switching and relay took long enough so that Catherine’s phone rang a little after, a great relief to her, as even the short time she had waited after freeing her line had filled her with apprehension that he had tried to call and would not call back, or that he hadn’t called and never would. She let it ring six times, picked it up, and, as if she had been surprised and had no idea who might be calling, casually said hello.

“Is this Catherine?”

“Harry?”

“Where are you?” he asked. “I always ask, when I don’t know, where the people are to whom I’m speaking on the telephone. It makes them less disembodied and abstract, and brings them closer.”

“East Side,” she said. “Fifties.”

“Near a window?”

“Looking out.”

“What do you see?”

She said, “I see a park: flower beds, trees. There are white, pea-gravel walks.” She had deliberately tilted her head down so as not to see the river and Long Island on the opposite bank, and she had omitted to mention that this was a description not of a public park but of the largest private garden in Manhattan.

“I have no idea where that is. I thought I knew every inch of Manhattan. Is it a corner of a park, or a park that I missed? It’s not Bryant Park, which is west of Fifth Avenue, and isn’t in the Fifties. Where is it?”

“You’ll see, someday. What about you?”

“I see Central Park as if from the bridge of a ship, a hundred and ten feet up—which is high enough to remove you from the noise of the street but low enough to keep the expanse of the park immense and the leaves visible one by one. Because it’s dusk I can see the lights glowing in the mass of buildings on Fifth Avenue.”

Her heart beat fast as she waited for what would come. As he looked out at the cliffs, now shining, and she at swift ships backlighted by the newly risen moon, Harry Copeland said to Catherine Thomas Hale, through the copper lines that tied together with electric current every cell in the body of Manhattan, the words—which though simple were excitingly charged with many meanings—“May I see you?”

H
ER INSTRUCTION WAS
that as the music came up she was supposed to take a breath, the kind of breath, as if in shock, that signals great emotion. It had to come just before the percussionist sounded the automobile horn, which elided into a trolley bell, which then became a torrent of music that transformed the dark theater into the streets of Manhattan in a blaze of light.

“Can you do this?” the director asked. “Think of yourself as, remember, the girl from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, or somewhere, somewhere where they have chickens. You step out of the station, and there all at once is the city. You’ve never seen anything like it. It’s overwhelming. It takes your breath away. That’s what we want.”

“They have chickens in New York, Sidney,” she said.

“Live ones?”

“Yes.”

“Not in the restaurants where I eat. I’m asking, can you do it?”

“I can do it,” she said, “but I’ll have to practice.”

“Practice taking in a breath?”

“If you want me to express what you want me to express. . . .” She paused, and looked up at the darkness beyond the blinding spotlights that pinned her onstage. She waved her hand in a questioning spiral. “The whole city. If you want me to convey the life of the city, on this stage, in a single breath—I mean, really—you’ll have to have a little patience.”

“The music has something to do with it too, dear,” the director told her condescendingly. She was the youngest member of the cast, and it was her first part.

But, with one great exception, which she had not overcome, it was both easy for her and in her blood to hold firm. “The music, Sidney, has more than just a quarter of a second with which to work.”

He relented. “All right, everyone take a break so she can practice breathing. At Bryn Mawr, didn’t they teach you to breathe?”

“That’s not what they do at Bryn Mawr. It’s a college. You learn to breathe way before that.
Capisce?
I need fifteen minutes.” This was just the beginning of her song, as hard as it was, and the song itself, arrestingly beautiful, would have to follow with just the right tone, the right pacing, and the right gloss.

She hurried backstage to stairs that rose to the grid, and as she ascended she realized that, never having been there, she didn’t know if she could reach the roof this way. Even if she could, the view might be blocked, and even were it not, would she find enough in what she would see, because in Manhattan after the war the great and the heroic had given way to tranquility and rest. She drifted up through the darkness, unsure. The higher she climbed, the more the activity below, seen through a black matrix of ropes, bars, wires, and flats, seemed like a miniature of the city itself. Lighting technicians brought up crazily timed sunsets and sunrises in orange and gold, and replicated the terra-cotta-colored rays that in late afternoon make the high façades of city blocks into cathedrals of light. The people moving in the wash of the kliegs seemed to flutter like masses of wings, and in the flare of tungsten fair hair looked like the gold that sparkles in sunlit rock.

At the top of the stairs was a door. After pushing it open and stepping out she found herself high above the street, with neither rail nor parapet to guard her from falling. Because of what she saw from the roof of the theater she did not need to practice as she had thought she would. For as she beheld what lay before her, the sharp infilling of her lungs, divided into a short beat and a slightly longer one that followed and concluded, was as lovely a sound as any living being has ever made. She had had no idea that a single breath could be so magnificent, that it could outdo the clearest notes of the greatest soprano, or the perfection, down below, of a brass section manned by balding and ever-hopeful rejects of the New York Philharmonic.

She had mastered her part in an instant, but, still, she stayed, held by the time and place, for although she was only twenty-three, she had a history of looking into the heart of great scenes and busy prospects as if she were at the end of life and these were something that she had yet to decode.

Down long streets in a hundred shades of gray, in clouds of fast white smoke and in flights of pigeons that with the twitch of a thousand wings were like the turning of a skyscraper’s worth of venetian blinds; at the foot of piers where ferries skated-in over silver water, their top-hat stacks billowing smoke that trailed across a whitening page of sky; in the tangle of the streets; in the traffic autonomous, fighting for complete independence, yet ever moving as a herd; amidst sound too broken and complex to interpret except as a twin of surf perpetually effervescent on the beaches of Long Island; and in the miracle of faces, to which even the greatest painters cannot do full justice; there was the city almost at midcentury, as one age had begun to elide into another, and the innocent forms of the past, though numb from the deep cut of war, were still alive.

She felt so strongly what she saw that she tried to hold its impress in memory until she was able to puzzle it out, even if that would be never. To see things and long for them, shadows in gray, people who will never return, days of sun and clouds that vanish like smoke . . . this was what she wanted.

What she saw was not random, and not chaos beyond the deepest power to make clear, for the threads of beauty and meaning that ran through it shone brightly in the dark, the whole a work greater than art, its consistency assured. This she knew because she had seen it and felt it since infancy, and would not be turned from her faith and trust even by all the war and suffering in the world, even were the suffering her own, which, although in her view it had never been, she knew eventually it would, in that it comes to all. All souls, she believed, blinded and blown into the air like dust and tumbling without gravity, can nonetheless find their bearings and rise as intended into the light. But despite this glimpse of the years to come in a vision of the ceaseless shuffling, transfer, and transaction in the streets below—like spangles of light on a sunlit river—she had to go back down into the theater to play her part, and she did.

She had taken the breath as instructed, and night after night would reproduce it onstage. Though she did not have the lead, in a quarter second she would have to supply the transcendent moment upon which the production would rise or fall. From her lungs and breast would come a gasp, a cry, the beginning of a song that would bring into view in a dark theater the machinery and friction of one era breathing its life into another, of light mixing with light, and sorrow with sorrow. And all conveyed in one sweet breath of Catherine Thomas Hale.

Which was not, however, the name by which they knew her. Her stage name was Catherine Sedley. They were unaware that she had chosen to call herself, professionally, after a mistress of James II. This was not because the original Catherine Sedley was virtuous but because this Catherine Sedley loved the sound of the name, because it took her family out of the picture, and because from a scandalously young age she had understood the travails of being a mistress.

She was, in her way, although not everyone thought so, very beautiful. It was not a soft beauty but, rather, sharp and delicate, with a backing of unseen strength that was not quite fully developed as she came into womanhood. In isolation, the pure, heartbreaking beauty of her face, though hardly perfect, could almost be an object of worship. Her body was strong and vibrant, and when she moved, or laughed, or settled back into a chair, she became sexually radiant. It is possible to have eyes that are carelessly unobservant, that in failing their task betray a listless soul. In contrast, the hazel eyes of Catherine Thomas Hale (or, if you wish, Catherine Sedley), though neither large nor opalescent, which would have made them commonly beautiful, were clear, alert, and ever active. They seized at a great rate upon the details of images that most eyes overlook even in things that appear in plain sight.

Though glasses were off limits onstage and there she was slightly myopic, other than when she was in the sea or in the shower she often wore a pair of round lenses held in delicate black metal frames that her father had brought from Paris before the war, and that seemed as thin as the locks floating at her temples, where these had escaped from a mass of reddish-blond hair, the color depending upon the light and sometimes as dark as auburn or as bright as gold, kept exquisitely up and partly braided at the back in a magical combination that was both classically arranged and randomly loose, almost windblown, as if she had come in from a deck or a beach.

The lenses, plumb-set and perpendicular to the plane of the floor, were a foil to the sharp assertiveness of her nose, which was small, perfectly formed, gracefully projecting. Her upper lip was larger than the lower, which suggested imminent speech protected nonetheless by careful reticence. Her teeth, unnaturally white in the glare of the spotlights, were even, straight, and large, in alluring palisades that cried out to be kissed.

As a rule, her bearing was uncompromising, and she held her head as if her name had just been called. Her breasts, not large, had as a result of her long, firm back and superb posture a perpetually attractive thrust. When she sat at table she had the habit of lightly grasping the edge with both hands, thumbs beneath the tabletop. This aligned her in a way that was ravishing. Even had her hands not been so beautiful, had her hair not been so glorious, had her face not been of breathtaking construction, had her youth not enveloped her like a rose, had her eyes not been so lovely, even had all this been different, the way she held herself, and her readiness to see, her fairness of judgment, and her goodness of heart would have made her beautiful beyond description. She was, like many, though not everyone by any means could see it, beautiful, just beautiful, beyond description.