In Sunlight and in Shadow (95 page)

In the entrance hall, she looked at the tall-case clock, not because she could not have avoided it but because she had decided not to avoid it: 10:23. Breakfast was out of the question, even had she had time.

The strength of the sun seemed such that after walking a little she would not need a coat. She took one last look at the empty house, opened the door, and went out to the stoop. There she hesitated, her hand still on the pull. Eddies of air entered the house. She closed the door and listened to the brass click as the bolt sprang shut. Walking down the few steps, she left her childhood behind. Now she was on the windy street.

This wind combed through the blocks of Manhattan, sometimes gusting cold, sometimes dying down as if to let the sun warm the sidewalks and trees as in spring. Catherine knew that, even in the shade and the wind, as the day progressed she would be glad not to have worn a coat. For the wind would subside, and in walking everything would come right.

Just after leaving the house, she went west through streets that seemed by law to be open only to maids and to old ladies in mink. The maids walked half as fast as they might have had they been happy, and seemed never to look up, to the side, or far down the street. They were shopping for foods of which they would eat the leftovers, and flowers that would not show up in their minute quarters until they had wilted. And, as Catherine knew, because she had once been a little girl who had eaten with them and listened to their stories and complaints, they bore the burden, entirely within themselves, of reconciling a true affection for the employers whom they knew so well and who treated them, almost, like family, and the natural desire to steal their jewels and slit their throats, or at least to walk out, slam the door, and run to children and families just as precious, just as holy, just as deserving, with whom they could not be, for the sake of others whom they were serving.

The old ladies in mink were equally to be pitied as they walked slowly and looked down to guide their timid steps. Bent with age, they could not fight the cold with bodies that could no longer grow hot. Catherine felt the strength of her own body, its extraordinary balance, the straight shot from the top of her head down to the sidewalk, every muscle, tendon, and joint in perfect order, yearning for strain and challenge and overflowing with energy. Her breathing was slow and deep, her stride long, vision sharp, voice strong.

She might grow old, but, like her mother, she would swim, she would strain, she would walk great distances, lift things that were heavy, and dig in the garden. Even were she to die early because of the physical discipline to which she had been bred, she would never abandon it. Struggle was necessary to self-possession. Even from a wheelchair it was possible to struggle against the natural forces that eventually always win. “Spit in their eye,” Evelyn had said, cheerfully but with the tranquil acceptance of her own fate. “Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as He would, with neither fear nor respect.”

Once, when Catherine was eight or nine, they had gone to a Long Island beach club as the guests of friends of her parents, people whom she had never met. They were very famous and owned a movie studio, and had arrived in a chauffeured limousine with their daughter, who was a few years older than Catherine and who ignored her and spent the hours of the visit with a gymnastics coach who looked at Catherine, sized her up, and then turned away as if she didn’t exist. Catherine went swimming, played in the sand, and was left lonely enough to go sit with the adults. She remembered nothing of the conversation except one thing that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Speaking to his friend, or, perhaps better, acquaintance, her father got up from a cushioned wicker chair, went over to her mother sitting opposite, and said, “Look.” He traced the gracefully curved line between the top of Evelyn’s neck and her shoulder. “I believe this is called the trapezius muscle,” he said. “In some people, it hardly exists. In Evelyn, who swims, it’s so beautiful. Isn’t it, Catherine?”

At that moment, the daughter of the other family was exercising on a motionless trapeze. Billy had been aware of how Catherine had been treated, and now he was defending her. He was telling her that she would be like her mother, that in time she would grow into a splendor that would far overshadow what she felt now of powerlessness, awkwardness, loneliness. This she remembered as she walked through the quiet, tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side, because Billy, after delicately and provocatively holding up Evelyn’s strength and beauty as a challenge, had kept his eye on Catherine, never looking away, speaking to her rather than the somewhat stunned couple he was addressing: lovely in remembrance, perfect in execution. She had received a lifetime of confidence almost as if by magic.

It was different for Harry. Although he did his best to ignore the many ways in which he was broken and weakened, he had lost his mother early, he had lost his father and not been there to bury him, he had been forced away from his studies enough times to make it for good, into a business that he was not born for, and a war that no one had been born for. She could only imagine what he had seen and done, and she knew that he had carried into it not only the strength of a man but the delicacy of a child. Where she herself had observations, visions, and ambition, he had unanswered questions and sorrows. That he forged ahead as he did, and had in the face of death all around him come out with his ability to love unbroken, was perhaps why she loved him so much.

She knew that all the busyness of the world, its infinite mechanical actions in city, in surf, in molecules rising in light, in machines and speech and clouds of sparkling dust, and trains and sounds and crowds and blades of grass that dance in the sun, all pass into silence, leaving only the soul, which cannot be proved and cannot be seen. And she knew that the brightness of day and the passions that flare within it are just a flash of light to fix the soul into an afterimage that will last forever.

This she had known, without knowing that she had known it, since infancy. It was what she was supposed to see in the play when she emerged from the station, the source of her breath and her astonishment. And it was what she was driving toward—walking in such a way that it turned men’s eyes to her magisterial beauty so that some of them would never, for the rest of their lives, forget the sight of her as she made her way to the Esplanade.

Crossing Lexington Avenue, she had seen arrayed in front of one of the little green huts that served as newsstands a fan of papers, each and every one announcing what she knew Harry had done the night before. She could hardly bring herself to look, but could not help but read the huge headlines in the tabloids. “Gang War,” was what they thought. There was a photograph, on one front page, that she had seen from the corner of her eye. Though she had quickly averted her gaze, what she saw was horrible enough to make fear rise from the places where she had forced it to wait, and now Catherine’s gait was not quite steady, and she felt, though her body had warmed, the sun had strengthened, and the wind had lessened, a coldness rising within her from just above her waist all the way through to her shoulders and back.

Surely she would not now be brought down by the most unlikely chance. It was the kind of thing that could happen, but, to her, never had. It wouldn’t. He would be there, as promised, and the fear and despair that almost brought her to a halt, that made her want the ground, and to lie down scandalously on the sidewalk somewhere in the Sixties between Park and Madison (it had probably never been done), would serve only to bless the joy of the moment with contrast and relief. Had anything happened, they would have contacted her by now—if it had been in the plan, if they had known how, if the timing had been right. Perhaps the phone was ringing at that very moment in the empty house.

She resolved to banish such thoughts and move forward. The Esplanade was not far, either in time or distance. The Esplanade, between the castle and the town, once a battleground, now a place of ease, was where war and peace conjoined, each colliding with the other and sinking back, like two waves, into still water that vibrates with the power of both. This was the Esplanade, where everything came together, and the story came to its close.

In the midst of her fear and uncertainty, she thought of how close she was to Harry in feeling and in thought, and that this would never depart. They both had had a vision of the ferries on a summer’s day, the women in white, the men in boaters, hats everywhere like moths in a meadow. And together they had once seen a woman in Grand Central as they walked through the south waiting room, a deeply troubled, elegant woman, with a sadness they could not name, trapped in a beam of light, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes fixed upon a horizon far beyond the walls. Perhaps from some wound or incident of childhood, or by inheritance or accident or ineffable command, both Harry and Catherine had a deep and abiding love for all those who have been and vanished, who were left behind, expectant and surprised, trapped in time that will not die and is lost to a blind world yet as full as our own because it is our own, or soon will be.

Within sight of the park, on a street of many mansions of the type that were being felled by the wrecker’s ball to make way for more efficient high-rises, Catherine passed the small garden, soon to be buried beneath layers of steel and brick, of a house that seemed almost uninhabited, so resigned and faithful was it to the beauties and emotions of an age that had passed.

She stopped so suddenly, it was as if she had walked into a street lamp. In the garden, illuminated by morning sun that reached back into a deeply shadowed place, was a bronze relief, almost life size, a memorial of the First World War. A soldier, his life gone, his rifle and bayonet cast aside, lay motionless in the arms of an angel. Winged and strong, she looked upward, undisturbed, about to rise. For soldiers need angels to comfort and carry them up, and if they are lucky, the angels will be sent to them early, so that in one form or another they will know them for all the days of their lives.

This could only have been a cry and a prayer occasioned by the death of a young man who as a boy had played in that garden beneath the watchful and loving eyes of his mother and father. It was the truth of the world, that all the world’s busyness could not subsume, that all the world’s illusions and beliefs could not override or dim. Catherine could hardly breathe. For a moment, she managed only the short gasps that come to small children after they have cried, a breathlessness that though it should have a name, does not.

She crossed Fifth Avenue and went through one of the entrances into the park. The stone wall was black with the soot of a century, for some of the smoke of a hundred million fires, risen to be carried away with the wind, had curled long enough near the ground—perhaps on a winter’s night many years before Catherine was born—to leave a part of itself before it disappeared. From the playing fields near the Sheep Meadow, to which private schools marched their elementary and middle school students, children’s voices rode on the wind, sharp, distant, and gentle. Once, Catherine had been marched there as well. Soon, on the Esplanade, she would tell her husband that she was carrying their child.

From its south end, the expanse of the Esplanade is both majestic and comforting. The trees in their raggedness and imperfect perfection are far more beautiful than the precise columns of a temple. They lean over the center, the branches on high reaching one for the other and sometimes succeeding, like clasped hands soon to be pulled apart. Their leaves were down, golden and red, playing in the whirlwinds that had dried them, and though the long walk was empty, the time was not yet eleven.

As she waited, it was as if her life were draining away. Why was no one on the Esplanade but she? Why were no latecomers on their way to midtown to work, no cops walking toward the precinct in the park, no nannies wheeling babies, and no Harry? Still, it was only a quarter after eleven.

She stiffened with courage. He had been late before. And when he came, she knew, he would not quite understand why she would cry. He would be philosophical, and she would forgive him. He would come up with something like what he had once said to her, out of the blue, in front of a restaurant—“There’s so much I look back upon with affection, but when I was there, I couldn’t quite grasp it. I didn’t love enough”—and she would guide him to look ahead, happily. What would they do now? How would they live through midcentury and beyond?

“You’ll see what comes,” she would say, generations of confidence and calm reaching out to heal a man wounded by war, elevating him, as if in the embrace of an angel, to float and glide slightly above the Esplanade, when walking was somehow a thing of the past, and to love him, and carry him up.

She thought of the relief, set into the garden wall, a soldier in the arms of an angel. “You’ll do what you’ve always done,” she would say. “We’ll do it together.”

In a generation or two, we vanish without a trace, and if against all odds we manage to engrave a line in the stone, to impress upon history an act or deed, we become it and nothing more, and so depart according to the original premise. This is why Catherine’s singing was so brave, and why Harry loved her for it so much. Day after day she went onstage and played her part, devoting herself to a song that disappeared even as she sang it, like the wake of a ship, a brilliant stroke that shines and sings and gently falls back into the quiet of the sea.

She knew he was gone, but he was there as well, as if he were with her, for everything within her called him forth, and for a precious minute or two that the practical might call hallucination and the faithful might call love, she pulled him back from the blind world and he appeared.

Neither spoke even the other’s name. Alone on the Esplanade, when they met they linked hands, turned, and began to walk north, whence he had come. It was a dream they had had since they were children, dreamt in loneliness and in war, in their best times and in their worst, when with others and when not, while flying through the air beneath the pillars of the El, or falling into the Battle of France, while riding in her parents’ car, powerless except to dream, or when onstage singing into the darkness. It was what gave him hope and courage and made her song searing to an honest heart, and now that they had it they would need nothing more.