In Sunlight and in Shadow (28 page)

“Why do you drink so little?” he asked Harry in a tone both benevolent and accusatory. “You haven’t even had half that. Are you planning something?”

“Even a little alcohol can make me ill, Billy.”

“A hillbilly? What?”

“
Ill,
Billy.” He thought Billy might take him for a Cockney. “Anything more than half a glass, sometimes just a sip.”

“That’s worse than being allergic to water.”

“My father was the same way. I live dangerously if I have a glass of wine. In a social situation, just the obligatory little bit can make me look as if I’ve drunk myself under the table. Unfortunately, I like Scotch. I like the smoky taste. Sometimes I have some, but then I pay for it.”

“It must be unbearable. How do you unwind?”

Harry looked down at the floor.

Billy didn’t comprehend, and said, “Well?”

Then Harry said, “Exercise.”

“Don’t tell that to Rufus, who thinks exercise is the leading cause of death. He’ll have another heart attack. I remember him when he was so skinny the doctor told him to drink cabinets—that’s what they call milkshakes in Rhode Island, where he’s from. We were at Groton together. He added rum and drank a lot of them.”

“What else does he do?”

“Bank notes.”

“Bank notes?”

“He prints money for chickenshit countries all over the world that can’t even stand up a press. Do you realize the potential of that? He does. Put it this way: sometimes it’s necessary, for technical reasons, to keep samples. He inherited the business from his father in the days when things were loosey-goosey. When we were kids, we found an unusual room in his barn. It was behind heavy wooden doors that were padlocked, but we were small enough to squeeze through the hay chute. Instead of hay, that room was filled with money. Wonderful, colorful, wrapped in packets. We rolled and swam in them and couldn’t get to the bottom. The pile was at least eight feet high and it lapped up against the walls. There must have been a hundred million dollars in that barn. I mean, wouldn’t you?”

“I might.”

“Depending on how much he put aside, the effect would be to elevate prices a bit in Bolivia or Mongolia. If their governments had an inflationary monetary policy, which they usually did, he was just helping them along. It was sweet, but I wouldn’t mention it. And no one can prove it.”

“He prints money.”

“He does. Everyone’s dream, and it’s legal.”

“How long can that last?”

“Forever, Harry, in one form or another.”

A car moved slowly up the driveway, through sea air that was salty and flashing with fireflies. When it stopped, nothing happened. It was as if it had driven there by itself, turned off its lights, and gone to sleep. Head cocked, Billy said, “I can guarantee you that they’re not necking. Rufus has yet to wake up. Give it a couple of minutes.” He listened. The waves sounded close in the silence. And then a car door opened and closed. “That’s Bridget, getting out.” There was a faint crunch. “She’s walking around the car. The other door.” A minute later, they heard people coming up the steps. Evelyn met them. Bridget and Rufus fell through the front hall into the living room. She guided Rufus to a chair, and he collapsed into it with a single wheeze.

He wasn’t that big, but he was shaped like a buoy, and his threadbare gray hair was arranged in lines across the splotched but glossy top of his head. With eyes that were jaundiced and red, he looked at Harry, and then turned to Billy. “Who the hell is that? Is that Victor’s replacement?”

Rudely ignoring Harry, Rufus started to talk to Billy in short, incomprehensible exchanges that, almost a code, were ungrammatical and heavily laden with names, terms, and grunts. But just as this was heating up, Catherine appeared on the porch and beckoned to Harry. A second later the screen door banged shut, and they were walking through the garden.

In a gray silk skirt and a white, pleated blouse with closed collar, she glowed in the incidental light from the house, and as they moved he heard the skirt rustling about her legs. Perhaps because so many theater people came out to East Hampton—the stars and producers to almost stately houses, the rank and file to little cottages in Springs and shared lodgings in the village—and because, at parties and other gatherings where there was a piano, impromptu performances easily erupted, with the beat of the waves in counterpoint, and singing more poignant than anyone might expect, Broadway was so near that if you listened you could hear the creaking of the boards, and if you looked you could see as if by stage light.

Like the trained dancer she was, Catherine walked with a controlled grace that emanated from her whole body. When she turned and spoke, only to say when dinner would be ready, he fed on every vibration of her voice. Putting his left hand against her back, he placed his right hand flat against the top of her chest. “Speak,” he said.

“Speak?”

He unbuttoned two pearl buttons hidden among the pleats, and gently rested his palm against her bare skin. “What are you doing?” she asked, not displeased.

“I fell in love with your voice the first time you spoke to me, with the very vibrations in your chest as you speak. When you say a one-syllable word I hear five or six variations in it that are so beautiful each makes me fall in love with you more. There’s nothing you can do that drives me deeper than that.”

The wind made the fruit trees sway and strain. In the dark the house was lit like a marvelous set. “In every word I speak?”

“Or sing.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’ve never been adored.”

He felt the words as they arose within her, and then he withdrew his hand and stepped back to look at her in the dark, to be away from her for a moment so he could return. When they came together they kissed, revolving on the lawn, one step at a time. He was in love with every part of her body, every stray hair, every plane or curve as much as he loved each individual part of every word she spoke or sang, and he was sorry for the years he had spent in the grip of lesser enthusiasms. Dropping to his knees, he lifted her skirt and pulled her to him. She tilted her head back as far as it could go and closed her eyes, for never had she been so adored and never had anything been more loving or pure.

After Evelyn called them for dinner, Catherine came in, scarlet and red and wholly unconcerned. Everyone else had already been seated, with Rufus breathing like a cross between a Komodo dragon and a steam engine on the Holyhead–London run; Evelyn fussing with this and that and especially the little bell that signaled for the first course; and Billy trying to diagnose the soft, out-of-focus gaze in his daughter’s eyes, and noticing that she and Harry, as if they were fifteen, were holding hands beneath the table. He had never seen her touch Victor, much less insist that the touch not end.

Bridget had learned long before that she did not have to double her conversation to make up for Rufus’s lost consciousness, but commenced nonetheless, and despite his unusual animation (he was still awake), with a question to Catherine. What was she doing now? Hadn’t she been graduated from Bryn Mawr a year ago, or was Bridget mistaken?

“I’m in a play,” Catherine said.

“Summer stock?”

“No, Broadway. At least that’s where we rehearse and where we’re booked to open. We’re trying out in Boston in September.”

“How wonderful,” said Bridget, “for one so young.”

Catherine smiled her gracious smile, and Rufus, like a geyser, as if he were a machine into which someone had put a nickel, as if he were speaking to the gods of the air but not to the people in the room, said, “Lots of Jews in the theater.”

Harry saw Billy and Evelyn wince. Then he focused again on Catherine, who took a spoonful of consommé, returned the spoon flaccidly to the bowl, and said, “Lots of Jews.”

“And in the movies, too.”

“Lots of Jews in the movies,” she said.

“You’re not going to make it a career, are you?” Rufus asked.

“The theater?”

“Yes.”

“I already have.”

“You don’t want to spend your life in that kind of society. Even Gilbert and Sullivan were Jews.” To the pained laughter that this provoked, Rufus answered, “They were! You see, the theater is saturated with them. You don’t want to pick up their habits. You don’t want to accustom yourself to that kind of degeneracy.”

“Why don’t you just leave off, Rufus,” Billy said.

“Well, it’s not your table, Billy, it’s Evelyn’s table. What says the hostess?”

With no hostility but rather a complex gravity that Catherine had never seen in her and that Harry could not interpret, Evelyn said, “Rufus, you may say whatever you wish.”

“I told you,” said Rufus, as triumphantly as a child who has won five hundred baseball cards.

“What habits?” Catherine asked. “What degeneracy?”

“Oh,” Rufus said. “I can see that you’re a real liberal.” (The Hales had been Republicans since before the Civil War.) “I don’t want to generalize, but as a class the Jews are associated with particular behaviors.”

“Such as?”

“Such as . . . reading and writing all the time, excessive cleanliness, hoarding, grasping, pushing, stealing, bullying. Stealing not openly, mind you, but with trickery, always with trickery. Highly distasteful.”

“You mean,” Catherine said, for she had heard the story of the barn filled with bank notes since she was four, “trickery like extending the press runs for pesetas and cruzeiros?”

Rufus was unaffected by this, or at least he did not respond to it except to pop like a firecracker, and when he popped he said, “Moneylenders, they keep to themselves, and they’re dirty. Don’t you know? You can tell by looking at them. Their faces aren’t clean. Haven’t you ever been on the Lower East Side? They flooded into this country and ruined it. It will never be the same again, and because you don’t know what it was like before, you can’t know exactly what I mean.”

Perhaps from a desire to defuse the situation, or simply to put an end to this kind of talk, Catherine said, “Well, don’t worry, Rufus. I won’t marry one.”

V
ERY OFTEN AT
the end of summer and sometimes briefly in July, the air in New York, which for weeks has been dulled by haze and mist, suddenly clarifies and cools into a shock of well defined lines and vivid color. Wind from Canada streams down through the blue-green corridors of the Hudson Highlands to snap flags, jingle halyards and hardware against their staffs, and push the harbor waves into whitecaps. While spring can at times last only a day, the heat and haze of summer come as gradually as cataracts, until one morning when the wind turns clear you realize you’ve been blind. Then the view is sharp all the way out to Staten Island, its battlements suspended above water as if on clouds, and from high buildings it is possible to see as far as the north country.

On a day when the July haze was briefly clarified, Harry and Catherine, in her car with the top down and the sun flashing warmly against the chrome, crossed the Hudson on the George Washington Bridge. As the wind gusted, she held down her ribboned straw hat, slightly turned her head, looked to the north over the great expanse of river, and waited for the breeze to subside.

“They were the whole world to me,” Harry continued as they drove so high above the pale blue Hudson that it was as if he were piloting a plane. “The whole world.” He was speaking of his mother and father.

“It was that way for me, too,” she said, regarding her own parents. “I love them so much, even though something keeps me from expressing it, and even though I’m not much like them anymore . . . yet.”

“You know the photograph to the left above the fireplace?” he asked. She did. She had once studied it when he was not in the room, and had wanted to take the child in it into her arms. “That was the three of us when I was about four. I had no idea, no conscious idea anyway, that it would be only temporary. Time seemed not to pass. But, of course, they knew. You can see it in their eyes.”

“They seemed happy,” Catherine said, “in the way a couple with a small child should be happy.”

“It was before my mother got sick. I’m not sure we were happy, but we were where we were supposed to be, and not one of us wanted anything else.”

“That’s what I would call happy.”

He elevated his left arm straight in the air to signal a right turn. “Yes, even if you suffer through the days. Difficulties don’t preclude happiness. You really come to understand this only when those you love have died. Catherine, if we marry, you should know some things about me beforehand.”

“I know enough already, unless you rob banks.”

“I don’t, but you should know more.”

“Like what?”

“Three things in my life I’ll never get over, that won’t heal, that I don’t forget. I keep on going back, even if it makes no sense and brings me nothing. I would rather be destroyed for the sake of these things than abandon them and prosper: you, the war, and my parents. I love you. The war will always haunt and puzzle me despite our having won it. And I lost my parents. It all mixes together, and each of these things has a deep hold on the other.”

“But you have to live,” she said.

“I know. I try not to shrink from much.”

“That’s for sure. You’re the first person in the history of my family, that I know of, not to think it inappropriate for two people to lie on the same chaise.”

“No one saw,” Harry assured her. “They were still on the beach.”

“Did you see that?” Billy had asked Evelyn as they went in to change for dinner. “They think they’re invisible.”

“So did we.”

“Not like that.”

She looked at him as if to differ.

“No, I wouldn’t have done anything like that in front of your parents.”

“But you did, exactly that.”

“I did?”

“The bathing costumes weren’t as brief. . . .”

“Brief? She’s practically naked.”

“It was the same thing. We didn’t know what we were doing either. They’re really in love. What could be better than two people equally in love and without limit? She didn’t love Victor, and Victor didn’t love her. Now she’s been saved from that.”