In Sunlight and in Shadow (76 page)

“And yet your reading, your education, what you have seen and learned, have shaped you. Although the exact form falls away almost immediately, the essence remains. In what you read, the difference between the great and the pedestrian is something very subtle that rides above the static form. The clarifying spirit can’t be memorized, and the essence is in what’s elusive, which is why those who can’t grasp it other than willfully tend to deny it, because they can’t see it.”

“Go on.”

“To know what you have read isn’t necessarily to understand or to benefit from it immediately, as its central qualities exist above its mere form. If you and a cow listen to Mozart, you both know exactly the same sounds, the same notes, but you and presumably not the cow would hear a lot else, beyond the sounds, meaning, and meter. You would hear something the cow would not, and that the cow, if he could, would strenuously deny—I imagine.”

“
He?
” Vanderlyn inquired.

“I like to refer to a cow as a he. Cows don’t seem to me like shes.”

“That’s—almost—sane,” Vanderlyn stated.

“What I’d like to know,” Harry asked, “is who you are other than someone who spends his time on languages, sailing, and parachuting into France.”

“I haven’t parachuted into France for a while, and apart from work, I don’t do much at all. I take very little pleasure in things. Either it’s a sickness or part of growing old. With a few exceptions who are incomprehensible to me, and whom I envy, I find that happy older people are happy because they’re idiots. Frankly, I’d rather be dead than go to a sing-along with Mrs. Buford at the piano and a dozen geriatrics who can neither remember lyrics nor clap in time. Have you ever noticed that the vigorous young talk to old people as if they were dogs?”

“No.”

“You will.”

“But you’re not old.”

“I’m forever old. My son, before he died, had begun to pull away from us, as I suppose he should have, and as I suppose is natural. Our job with him was done, my friends were dying, my wife and I sensing more and more the envoys of mortality that begin to visit you at a certain point whether you want them to or not. By nature’s command and to protect his heart, my son had to put distance between himself and me. But, unlike Charlie, who had a full life to look forward to, it left my wife and me in a very lonely place.

“During the war, I convoyed over to Liverpool. I didn’t have to—I had been taking a flying boat—but I felt that I should. We were hit at night in the North Atlantic. It was in the summer, but it was still miserably cold. Nineteen ships went down. Everything was in chaos. We tied the lifeboats from my ship together, but as the weather worsened we had to cast off the lines. We tried to stay in sight of each other’s lights, but it rained, we soon lost sight of anything, and in the morning, when the sky cleared, we saw that we were alone in the middle of an empty sea.

“That’s what happens when your children leave, but it’s bearable, because you know they’ll continue. When you know they won’t, you know as well that you’ll be on the sea forever, and that for you the sea has had no purpose. My son was estranged from me when he died, and I was waiting for him to come back.

“So now I work. I don’t really care about it, but, just like you, people depend upon me—not only the living but the dead, to whom I owe a certain conduct and constancy. It’s odd how people struggle for position and spend a whole life building a résumé that no one will read. A résumé follows you into the grave, a piece of paper that jerks like a moth. We get them at my company from seekers of employment. I never look at them. I find them offensive. If I can talk to someone for an hour, and watch his face, his hands, his eyes, I don’t care what he’s accomplished or what schools he’s attended. Every second, you start over, and I want people who, second by second, can hew to the good and break the mold. That’s what I see or don’t see in their presence.”

“And you?”

“I have no future. What I want to do, second by second, is that which is worthy in itself, that which I would do even if no one in the world were living, that which I would do at the cost of my life, in return for nothing, with great difficulty, and against terrible odds.”

“Which is like war.”

“Whatever it is, Harry, there’s always plenty of it without my having to make it. As long as blood never cools, I’ll have a place. I was in both world wars. It’s time for me to retire, but there would be no point, so I’ll step into the breach and perhaps spare someone else from having to do so. You’re welcome to come along if you feel the need. Or you can run. Nothing wrong with running. Most people do. Perfectly honorable if that’s what you decide, especially if you never want to kill again. You’d be entirely right.”

Harry walked to the window. Water went on streaming down the panes. “Sometimes,” he said, “my wife, who is twenty-four, and still like a young girl in many respects, has more sense and courage than almost anyone I’ve ever known. In very difficult conditions, she keeps at what she does steadily and without complaint. There’s something in her that’s admirable and instructive, inbred from so far back that it’s breathtaking. As for me, this terrible thing is hanging over us, someone has been killed, the dead have been dishonored, and I’m going to clear the air.”

S
OMETIME AT THE END
of April, when the whine of distant lawn mowers had returned to the parks, Harry had a two o’clock appointment with Bayer at his office in Madison Square. With everything garlanded in light green, it was neither too hot nor too cold, and now and then the wind billowed gently, carrying the scent of new grass. All morning, Harry and Catherine had left the windows open and lain together, sheets peeled back and trailing on the floor like a wedding gown. Their nightclothes discarded, her satin and lace splayed on the bed, time vanished until they heard the one o’clock bells from a church on Columbus Avenue.

After bathing and dressing at high speed, Harry passed the doorman, jumped the wall, and ran across the park until he disappeared into the haze of taxi horns and jackhammers that rolled out of the East Side like a fog bank. If he didn’t have to wait long at 96th Street for an express, he might make it. He didn’t want to be late for Bayer, whom he respected immensely, and arriving at even 2:01 would not be right. Long before any noise, the light of an express appeared far up the tunnel, jerking slowly and silently from side to side, yellowish white with traces of electrical red. Then came the cool air and the sound, pushed forward by the first car as if by a ramrod. Harry would be able to make 14th Street and then walk the nine blocks north to Madison Square, but with only minutes to spare.

Carrying Harry and remnants of winter air, the number 4 train squealed into the 14th Street station of the Lexington IRT like a screaming harpy, made a dead stop, gave up, and opened its doors. Harry exited into the harsh light between the rows of steel columns at the edge of the tracks and a food stand tucked against a wall of white tile. As layers of air fell from the gardens of Union Square through many open grids, people ran to throw themselves into the downtown express and then sat breathing heavily as the doors stayed open and the train, humming tensely, did not move. All that time to spare was both embarrassing and like money in the bank.

With the rumble of idling electric motors in the background and the scent of their metal-infused oil issuing from under the train, Harry stared at a machine in which a dozen hot dogs were trapped on stainless steel rollers and spinning like torpedoes. “What is that?” he asked a squat, sweating man with a mustache and distressed eyes.

“What is what?”

“That machine.”

“It for hot dogs.”

“If it cooks them,” Harry said, “aren’t they terribly overcooked? And if it’s just holding them at a warm temperature, isn’t that dangerous after a while?”

“No one is ever been sick.”

“How would you know? They take them, and then they get on a train to Brooklyn.”

“Not just Brooklyn. And if they sick, they come back, and no one come back.”

“You don’t come back if you’re dead.”

“Mister . . . what you want? You want hot dog?”

“Are you kidding?” said Harry.

“Orange drink?”

“If it had anything in it related to an orange, which it doesn’t.”

“You crazy. You don’t want nothing.”

“Yes I do.”

“What you want?”

“I want you to change the name of this place to Angel of Death Hot Dog Stand.”

“Where you live, Los Angeles?”

“No.”

“Yes. Everybody Los Angeles. Always talk. Tell you who they are. Lazy!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Go back to there!” The proprietor moved to the western extremity of his empire, near the cheaty, pointy-bottomed cups and the giant, dangling pretzels coated with salt crystals as big as snails, and would not look at Harry. Harry took the stairs and found himself once again in the sweet air of April, when all is in balance and the world, like something tossed into the air and hesitating at the top of its arc, is momentarily ardent, motionless, and perfect.

With every step he took toward Madison Square he grew less and less certain not only of the chances of recruiting Bayer or anyone else to his plan but of the plan itself. “My enemy is not the law,” he found himself saying under his breath as he walked—talking to himself was not a good sign—“but the enemy of the law, against which the law is too weak to defend itself. If the law is complicit in crime, is it the law? If, when not complicit, it not only fails to protect but proscribes self-protection, then it is not law but fraud. Anarchy arises not from those who defend themselves by natural right, but from officials who fail in their calling, look the other way, succumb to threats and blackmail, or who are themselves criminal. If without defending me the law says I can’t defend myself, it is no longer the law, and I have to defy it.”

As rationalization usually follows rather than precedes motivation, it was not likely that Bayer would be convinced by such abstractions. Harry faulted himself for seeking to lead his friends back into danger after they had come through so much of it, and by the time he got off the elevator on the ninth floor of a building on the south side of the square he was almost despondent enough not to knock on the door, except that through a frosted-glass panel upon which only a number had been painted he saw movement—of the friend to whom he had many times entrusted his life. This made him so happy he almost forgot what he had come for.

“Ha!” Bayer exclaimed when he saw Harry. North light flooded in through large windows overlooking the square, making Bayer, who was enormous, look like a crowned figure in a Flemish painting. “Have you had lunch?”

Harry said yes, though he hadn’t.

“How about a Scotch?”

“No. Don’t need it.”

“An orange drink?”

It could only have been a coincidence, Harry told himself.

“Straight peanuts, then,” Bayer said, going to a desk drawer from which he pulled out a small burlap sack of roasted peanuts. “How about these?” In one motion he moved a gray wastepaper can from beneath his desk to the space in front of them, and as if they were doing piecework they began to shell the peanuts and toss the husks, missing only rarely. Feeling a sense of joy merely in sitting with Bayer, whom he had seen blown into the air by a German cannon, but who now was alive, he felt that they were two schoolboys. All rationales fled from him.

“What are you doing now? Are you married?” Bayer asked.

“I am.”

“So quick. I’ll bet she’s beautiful.”

“She is. Not everyone thinks so, but for me every imperfection is like a sharp cut driving her in deeper—every time I think of her, and I think of her all the time. I think I’m crazy.”

“I wish I could be crazy like that.”

“I could marry her ten thousand times. She’s twenty-four years old. She has the charm of a girl and the wisdom of a woman. I’ve never seen such grace or beauty.” An awkward silence followed, during which Harry was embarrassed for having gone on about Catherine as if Bayer didn’t exist. “And you?” he said, now almost fearfully.

“Ah well,” Bayer answered, throwing a whole, unshelled peanut into the wastepaper can so that it sounded like a distant shot. “Marriages are made in heaven, but not mine. She left me.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry said.

“Yeah. It’s nothing new, either, although I found out about it only after I got back. In ’forty-four—can you imagine that? I could have died and I wouldn’t have known, which is maybe why she didn’t tell me—she took up with some Jewish fucker and they moved out to the Island.”

“
You’re
Jewish,” Harry said.

“Yeah, but my name isn’t
Jewish Bayer.
His is
Jewish Lucky.
”

“That’s his real name?”

“It’s at least his nickname.”

“Probably just a nickname, wouldn’t you think?”

“That’s what it is in the telephone book.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Check if you want. They have a kid. I know it’s Jewish Lucky’s kid, but somehow I think of it as my own. Even if it doesn’t know it, I’m a ghost in its life. It’s either a boy or a girl.”

“Right,” Harry said.

“It’ll probably grow up to be the president of the United States, and I’ll be ninety years old, living in a cold-water flat on Avenue D. On the day they light the White House Christmas tree, if that’s what they do, I’ll eat dinner alone at Horn and Hardart. On the way home I’ll slip on the ice and lie in the street for two hours before I die. My last words will be spoken to a Bowery bum who’s too drunk to understand them, and the president, who would have been my kid, will be waltzing in the White House, eating rondalays of beef. Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’ve got it all planned out,” Harry said.

“From the time we jumped into Normandy. . . . God, had I known, I almost certainly would have been killed. All that time, all the blood, and the snow: you can’t describe it—and I loved her, I yearned for her. Thinking about her saved me.”

“I’m sure that’s why she didn’t tell you.”

“You think she was that decent? I’ll tell ya, when I got home . . . there was a stranger living in the apartment where we used to live. He had forwarded my mail to her for a year and a half. She was gone. He told me that she was with this guy Jewish Lucky, and he was sorry to break it to me. He gave me her number. I called. She said it would be best for us not to see each other. ‘Ever?’ I asked. She said, ‘Ever.’ ‘What if I run into you on the street, like at the Macy’s parade or something?’ ‘You go to that? What, are you ten years old?’ ‘I mean in front of Macy’s, or
in
Macy’s.’ ‘Then you do, that’s all, but it’s over.’ I said okay, and she said goodbye as if I was talking to some sort of clerk in an office. She was very curt. She cut me off. Just after the line clicked, I told her I loved her.”