In Sunlight and in Shadow (18 page)

“I would like to, if you’ll let me.”

“Out of charity?”

“Charity!” He was amazed. “My God, not out of charity. I would like to show up at your door, in my best suit—not a tuxedo—and take you out. I would like to meet your parents, and get you back before midnight, or one, or whatever, gently.”

“They don’t care.”

“I do.”

“You’re not bloodless, are you? Are you?” she asked.

“Oh no, Catherine, hardly, but I know when to hold, to go slow, and I really want to court you as you have not been courted. Every little thing. Every touch. Every word. I felt that the first time I saw you, as you were walking onto the ferry, before I had any reason to.”

“How did you know?”

He shrugged.

“We were told,” she began, “that courtly love. . . .”

“Told by whom?”

“By our professors . . . that courtly love is twisted.”

“How so?”

“Demeaning. Controlling.”

He straightened in his seat, lifting himself until he seemed taller, unconsciously positioning his upper body as if for a fight—not with Catherine, but with an idea. His eyes narrowed a bit as they seemed to flood with energy. “I don’t know who told you, but I do know that whoever said this was a fucking idiot who must never have seen anything, or risked anything, who thinks too much about what other people think, so much so that he’ll exterminate his real emotions and live in a world so safe it’s dead. People like that always want to show you that they’re wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me—who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing—have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . . The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw . . . the more I knew that women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time. And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be to misjudge the highest qualities of man while at the same time misreading the savage qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child—what else is there? Everything pales, and I’ll stake what I know against what your professors imagine, to the death, as I have. They don’t have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them.

“And then, you know, I’m not talking about Sir Lancelot. It’s different now. What I mean is deep consideration, devotion. That’s hardly demeaning, and not controlling,” he said, falling back in his seat. “I’m sorry. All I want is to be with you.”

“And you are,” she said. “And it’s four-thirty in the morning and we’re in a diner in—where is this? Commack?”

“I think it’s Commack. It looks like Commack.”

“You know what Commack looks like?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Come on,” she ordered, “we can time this for sunrise.”

“You drive even faster than I do,” she told him from the passenger seat.

“I’ve never had an accident.”

“Neither have I, apart from things.”

“Oh, things. Who cares about things? Did you ever knock down a house?”

“No, not yet.”

“And you’re only twenty-three.”

“Well, you were gone for four years.”

“But I drove.”

“You did?”

“Sure. Sometimes I had a jeep. I took them all over Germany. I told you. And half the time it wasn’t on roads but through open country. I got to know jeeps so well I could use them to take out a splinter. You would hit fewer mailboxes if you didn’t move in bursts—foot on and off the accelerator. It’s not a potter’s wheel. And you don’t have to whip it. Hold it steady and it’ll run steady. That would give you more hope of survival. Would you like me to drop a few miles an hour?”

“I feel perfectly safe with a dullard driver like you.”

“Catherine, when you were driving I could look at you, and that compensated for any peril.” It was true.

“Today,” she said, “I’ll sleep until noon and then go to rehearsal. But tomorrow there’s a matinee of the physics play, so we can’t use the theater and I’ll be free. Call me.”

“I will.”

“Next weekend, can you come out to East Hampton? We won’t go anywhere, just stay in the house and at the beach. I don’t want to humiliate Victor any more than I have. In a few weeks, no one other than Victor will care, but next weekend all the mousetraps will be set.”

“I’ll pick up the clothes I left at the station.”

“Do you play tennis?”

“Not really.”

“Good. I’ll beat you. Then I’ll train you. Chess?”

“Not too badly, but you have to practice. My chess is dormant because in the army everyone played cards.”

“Good, my father can beat you.”

“Why is that good?”

“Give him something. You’ve already beaten him in that you’ve got the future, and he worked for Bernard Baruch in the First War and was too old for the Second.”

“But he’s your father, one of the leaders of the economy. I don’t even have a profession.”

“No matter what anyone else may think, he’s not very impressed with himself. No one who inherits can be. And when he looks back, he’s unhappy. That binds me to him as nothing else.”

“Why is he not, if not impressed, at least content with himself? How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said, engaged in a way that showed him that when a beautiful woman speaks beautifully it becomes all the more devastating for one who is in love with her. “I’ve thought about that a lot. You don’t want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don’t want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never touch it. My father works not to get money but to work. But real work is valued in money, so he does work to get it—as a measure. But there’s always someone richer, always someone better at something than you are. We judge narrowly, by measures rather than by the soul. It wouldn’t matter if you were at the top of everything. You know why? I figured this out because so many people approach me with the idea that I’ve got it made. No. You see, everyone, no matter what his accomplishment, is made to feel insignificant by the scale of things. Not by nature, which is miraculously kind in this regard—but all the things that are done by groups of people and nations. The economy. War. Cities.”

“The economy? Cities?”

“Yeah,” she said charmingly, sweeping her hand to reveal the kingdom around them of small grocery stores and car repair shops. “People do little things, like making change for the sale of a muffin, sweeping up a tenth of an ounce of lint, putting a stamp on an envelope, or brushing a dog. Then they look about and see vast constructions and efforts: huge airplanes crossing the Atlantic at three hundred miles an hour; buildings that rise a quarter of a mile into the air; networks of roads that cover millions of miles, a single square foot of which a human being would be hard-pressed to lift; armies that invade and conquer continents; cities that stretch to the horizon; causeways; bridges; atomic bombs; huge buckets of molten steel, as big as locomotives, gliding noiselessly through the darkness of a mill; and money that sloshes in the billions past back-office clerks who worry about the next dollar.

“Every time you open your eyes, everywhere you turn, we’ve built immense cities to inhuman scale and thrown bridges across rivers and straits, and yet, individually, well, most people can’t even
draw
a house, much less build one, or the Empire State Building. No wonder everyone feels like an ant. So the ants, indomitable of spirit, set out to correct that disproportion, and wind up throwing their lives away in competition with the other ants. I’ve thought about it, you see, ’cause I had to.”

“You think about things a lot, don’t you, but not clothes, and parties, and jewelry, and shows. . . .”

“I think about shows. Are you kidding?”

“Movies, then. Like someone your age.”

“No.”

“You’re pretty serious, you know.”

“That’s what a lonely childhood does. It screws you up and makes you suffer forever, but it makes you think. Not that I ever came up with anything much.”

“But you’re driven to it. By what?”

“By memory,” she answered, turning away from the things on the road and toward him. “Love. I fight to hold some things in place, to keep them from being swept away. You can’t really win, but you can fight.”

“And this you know, at twenty-three?”

“I knew it,” she replied, not triumphantly but sadly, “before I knew numbers, before I could speak.”

It was a lovely moment that nonetheless she wanted to cap with sunshine, so she said, “And so did you, or you wouldn’t be driving my car, with me in it, at four in the morning, down the boulevards of Hop Hog.”

Quite happy, she longed for the radio, and when she turned it on she knew the song that was playing and sang along with it, in the proper key. When it ended and before the next one began, he said, “When I sing to myself it makes me happy but embarrassed. For you, it’s different. When you sing to yourself it’s a lot better than listening to the radio.”

She blushed. She was, after all, only twenty-three.

Ahead, the sky was pink with artificial light, and as they closed upon it, it grew less intense as the dawn had begun to rob it of its powers and would soon burn away the color like mist. Factories were changing shifts, and there was traffic on the roads. For a long time they paralleled a railroad track over which a freight was moving at their speed, its empty boxcars making a thunder like the thunder that echoes through the canyons of Utah. Airplanes, marked by lights that hung silently in the air like burning lanterns, rose and fell from a half-dozen fields and airports, and early commuter trains with sleeping passengers leaning against the windows rumbled west to a city sleeping in gray.

At first they saw the flash of the towers as distant flares or out-of-place pieces of the sun, but as they sped without cease and when they rose on ramps and viaducts and were elevated into the air as effortlessly as aircraft, a gilded city appeared as the sunshine dropped its rays from the cliff tops of Manhattan to the depths of its streets.

In strengthening light, they sped over vast cities of the dead to the left and right of the raised roadways that kept them airborne. The crowded tombstones seemed to propel them upon their rising trajectory and to bless and condone every risk they might take. Amid the constantly working transfer of light, the unceasing shuffle of ships, trains, and traffic gliding and glinting silently along the arteries, amid lives playing out, clouds twisting and floating, tugs whistling, they were carried forward.

The top was down and the morning air was warm and promising of the heat and blue of a June day, and as the black convertible crossed the Queensborough Bridge a million windows flared with sun, and the sounds of the city came up as they descended into it. With the passing of each second, the gold and orange light of sunrise was refined to yellow and white.

Crossing the park was as splendid, because of the trees, as any part of the drive. They went up Central Park West, made a U-turn at 94th Street, and rolled to double-park in front of the Turin. The doorman didn’t come out. It was too early, or he was remiss. Harry pulled the brake and turned to Catherine. She had already moved toward him, but as they drew together a siren sounded from directly behind them. A police car they had forced to a halt was telling them, in the fashion of police cars that one forces to a halt, to move on.

So their kiss was a brush of lips that lasted no more than a quarter of a second, and when she drove off, the trees at the edge of the park swaying slightly in a stirring of the wind, he was left standing in the road as the police car slipped by and the traffic lights turned green and marched into the distance. He replayed her kiss as a wave of oncoming cars drove him from the middle of the street.

W
HEN HARRY WALKED
in at ten-thirty, Cornell said, “Hurry up. Let’s go for an early lunch.”

“It’s ten-thirty.”

“I want to get there before they run out.”

“Who runs out?”

“The counter at Woolworth’s.”

“Of what?”

“American cheese.”

“Cornell,” Harry said, his voice expressing disbelief, “when Woolworth’s runs out of American cheese it’ll only be because the universe has exploded. There’s no way I can eat lunch this early. I just won’t.”

When a few minutes later they sat at the counter at Woolworth’s, Cornell said nothing until the counterman took their orders: grilled cheese sandwiches, Coca-Colas, and chilled grapefruit salads, all of which Woolworth’s did surprisingly well, including the Coca-Cola, which could vary from fountain to fountain and was often either flat or too sweet.

“I wonder what the Negroes are doing today,” Cornell said, speculatively and as if he had just opened a newspaper, which he hadn’t.

“One, anyway, is obsessed with American cheese.”

“I just wonder how today dawned for us. Something’s going to happen, even if it’s little, somewhere, every day, because the world is not going to stand still. Do you remember when your father took you to Florida?”

“I was in high school. It wasn’t that long ago.”

“Before the Crash or after?”

“Before. High times.”

“And what happened at that hotel.”

“Which hotel?”

“Where you drove up. . . .”

“The one in Boca Raton? The sign?”

“Yeah.”

“I was driving. My father made me turn around.”

“Your father and I used to have debates about that sign. He said that because it said
No Negroes, Dogs, or Jews,
that Jews were at the bottom and therefore the least welcome.” Cornell slowly shook his head. “That’s not how it goes. I said that we were the least welcome, then dogs, then Jews. He said that that was impossible. They like dogs. Jews wouldn’t be more welcome than dogs. Then I told him,” Cornell said, rapping the counter, “if that’s so, why would we be more welcome than dogs? He said proximity. We were house slaves and servants. The dogs sometimes were allowed in, and sometimes not. Jews weren’t servants, so they aren’t used to them, and that’s why they were at the bottom—because they caused a kind of revulsion. Go to Darien or Scarsdale, he said, and you’ll see Colored people all over the place, working in the houses, taking care of the children. A Jew they think of as unclean, and they would be horrified to have one in the house, like a pig. It was hard to argue with your father, but well meaning ladies’ maids and cops never said ‘Here, boy,’ to him. I come from many generations of free men. Sometimes, the way people act, you’d never know it.