In Sunlight and in Shadow (41 page)

Graciously resigned to the force of the wind, Billy pushed the tiller over hard and the
Crispin
came about with a huge shudder, waking Catherine and Evelyn. Having come about, they all headed home over the open sea.

W
HEN CATHERINE, FOR
a brief oment upon awakening, returned to the world of mother, father, and child, Harry looked on at the fleeting equilibrium of a family as once it was, sorry that he, no less than time, had broken and would yet break it. As surely as the
Crispin
drove north, a trail of sea singing quietly behind it before softening into the depths, the forward momentum of things would break apart all families, as it had broken his own, and as in the future it would break it yet again. Watching Catherine make her way astern, he knew what would be revealed to her, and that it would change her life.

Moving along the deck and followed by her mother, she was as happy as if while she slept all her cares had been washed away. Kneeling on one of the benches, she seized a pair of binoculars and began to track birds gliding above the water near the entrance of the bay. “Two gannets,” she announced.

“Take the tiller, Harry,” Billy commanded, rushing to join his daughter and his wife. The Hales knew a lot about birds, and could identify them when others saw just specks in the sky.

Harry took the tiller.

“We don’t have to tack yet.” Billy lifted his own pair of binoculars and lapsed into silence.

After a while, Catherine said, “See the yellow? A remnant of breeding.”

One of the gannets’ head-and-neck plumage was yellow. The other’s was so intricately checked as to be an optical illusion. They were fishing near a beach littered with driftwood silvered by Maine winters. Their nearly divine economy of movement, their speed above the waves, their darting, their effortless suspension and decisive plunges were evidence that they had received their instruction from the angels.

Billy was the first to break off, because finally he did have to tack. He gave his binoculars to Harry, who then saw his first pair of gannets, and as the
Crispin
surged forward he watched them weave above the water in their primal state, a mated pair at their peak.

“I can’t think of a more perfect setting, Catherine,” Billy began, with surprising formality, “in which to tell you that, although it was not intended for the sea, and we just fell into it—not the sea—Harry has asked us to bless your intended marriage, and, having discussed it beforehand with your mother, I did.”

The passage of the
Crispin
between islands of rock cliffs and pine took place in the sun and in full air. Catherine closed her eyes. She cried easily, and didn’t want to. But every breath was an elevation she hoped would last forever. “Something else came up,” Billy said, “which Harry now knows and you don’t, although I should—we should—probably have told you long ago, and certainly in advance of Harry, because it concerns you foremost. I hope you’ll forgive me, although if you don’t I’ll understand. We kept it from you for many reasons, not least because it’s a difficult and complex subject that’s best dealt with by an adult. And we kept it from you, to be truthful, because we didn’t want it to come between us as you were growing up.”

“What?” she asked, apprehensive but unafraid.

“We didn’t want to introduce. . . .”

“Am I adopted?” she interrupted, almost stridently, slightly losing her composure, and, for some reason, amused.

“No, nothing like that. Well, a little like that.”

“I’m a little adopted?”

“Of course not. You’re our child entirely—biologically, legally, historically, completely. A hundred percent. Not a problem.”

“But you’re Jewish, dear,” Evelyn said in a preternaturally Episcopalian way.

Catherine laughed. She didn’t think it was a joke: she knew it was serious, but, still, she laughed, because it, whatever it was, was so much a shock as to be incomprehensible. “But I’m not adopted.”

“No.”

“So,” she said to Billy, “you’re Jewish, too.” This struck everyone as funny.

“No,” said Billy, “I’m Episcopalian.”

“I always thought so, Dada. I always thought you were.” She hesitated. Seconds passed. “That means, Mama . . . that means, that. . . .”

“Yes,” Evelyn told her.

“Oh God. You were adopted by Grandfather Thomas?”

“My mother was adopted. She was born a Russian Jewess, and never converted. That means that I, which means that you. . . . You see? Had you married Victor we might never have told you. But when you chose Harry, how could we not have?”

“It’s the strangest thing in the world,” said Billy. “My grandson, for Christ’s sake, as I understand it, will be a hundred percent Jewish. The Hales, in one fell swoop. . . . I mean, had my classmates known what was to happen, they would have ostracized me. Had my grandfather known, I hesitate to tell you. One wants one’s children to be at least a little like oneself. To carry on. You want your grandchildren to be like you, too.” He looked at his daughter and her fiancé, and said, “And I think they will be, no matter what the world may say.”

“Is this true?” Catherine asked, not waiting for an answer. “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s such a shock, such a shock, to find out that so important a part of you was unknown to you. I don’t know what to think.” She stood up and made her way to the bow.

There she sat at the root of the bowsprit as the boat flew forward and sometimes, obliging a surge of air, pitched gently into the swell. Harry was content to wait amidships, watching the wind blow through her hair as she stared outward, until she would call or come to him.

They had long passed the island where they had first seen the gannets, but now, on the port side, many more appeared—dozens, perhaps scores—the lords of small green isles, whitened driftwood, and pine, going about what they did with simplicity and the perfection of a hundred million years in which they had come to know the elements so well that it was as if they had never been cleaved from them, although they had, and that was the beauty of it, their separation from the wind and the sea, but their never having left them.

Instead of returning home, they found a cove and anchored there out of the wind. Evelyn cooked dinner while Catherine remained at the bow, as if in grief, but with an expression of concentration. At risk to his extremities in the numbing water, Billy took the dinghy to shore and walked about in the shallows, digging up quahogs. The meat of these enormous clams looked like boned chicken breast, and, cut up with potatoes and celery, made a buttery New England chowder more than a match for the Riesling that went with it.

Every once in a while, as the quahog chowder cooked in its pot, Catherine would turn her head. And when dinner was ready they didn’t have to call her. She was neither angry nor hurt, but had fallen into a deep rest in which speech had no place. Thus, as the
Crispin
kept its anchor line taut in a current that entered the east-facing cove on its south side and exited north, the dinner was silent. They felt the tranquility that comes of being close to the sea, a steady heartbeat that substitutes for activity and noise. It was what Catherine needed, and as they watched her, if only with glances, she seemed simultaneously subdued, wounded, content, and amazed. No one dared speak, until she said, “After dinner, I’d like to row to the beach, and cut some wood, and build a fire there next to a rock.”

“Who speaks?” asked Harry, “a cave woman or William Butler Yeats?”

“Be careful, Harry,” Billy said. “This reminds me of when I had had a bit too much to drink—which is always—and I called Evelyn
Elephant.
It took several years to get over that one.” He paused. “And a diamond necklace. The lesson I learned is that you can’t call even a svelte woman an elephant, even by accident.”

“That’s all right,” Catherine said. “I don’t mind if he calls me an elephant, or a cave woman. Flattery will get him nowhere.”

Billy and Evelyn stayed aboard to clean up and go to bed early, as one can do easily on a gently rocking boat, and Harry and Catherine rowed to shore. He was relieved that she had spoken. She didn’t have to speak in torrents. Out of sight of the
Crispin
they found a huge rock and built a bonfire against it. Sun-dried driftwood lit easily, and though it did not burn hot the fire was big enough and the backing reflective enough so that as night fell and the temperature dropped they remained warm. Shadows danced against the rock but the firelight was too weak to dim the Milky Way. By starlight undiminished, and yet able to see one another’s faces softened as if in candlelight, they listened to the waves, the wind in the pines, and the crack of the fire.

“What have you come up with?” he asked.

“How long has your family been Jews?” she inquired.

“Five thousand years or so, I guess.”

“And what have you come up with?”

“You got me.”

“In the last five hours I’ve been doing my best,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“You really want to know?”

“Or we could go bowling.”

She looked at the base of the fire, where the coals were already in agony. “It changed me instantly,” she reported, “neither completely nor because I wanted it. I didn’t want it. It was very sad to leave what I was—not in terms of belief, which, compared to what I’m talking about, is superficial, but in terms of what I am.

“I looked at my reflection in the water and didn’t get much back from the swell, but there I was, the light moving past me like a river, and everything obscure. I looked at my hands. I turned them slowly and opened my fingers. And at my legs. You may have seen me: I crossed my arms and held my shoulders as if steadying myself, holding myself, discovering myself. And I could see my hair in the periphery as the wind lifted it in and out of view. And I thought to myself, Who is this girl, whom I haven’t known, who’s come from someplace that I never thought about, ’til now?

“I can’t ignore them, all the people who came before me, who lived in hovels in Eastern Europe—in Poland, the Ukraine, Moldova, Russia. . . . I thought we came from Scotland. Well, my father did. But I’m more deeply like my mother, and I can’t forget the people from whom she came, even though I’ll never know them, because they’re me—rabbis in caftans and fur hats, their wives, the children dressed in black, with sparkling, tragic eyes, it’s unbelievable. And, Harry, I’m them. Whatever I had thought about them before, now they’re with me forever. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to believe anything, as far as I can tell, though deep inside it’s all working as if on schedule. Today I became as rooted as a tree, with no voice of its own except the wind that moves through it. It’s an extraordinary thing, what I’ve just learned, which is the patience of five thousand years. For the past few hours I’ve been motionless but time has been moving through me. Am I talking nonsense?”

“No.”

“Those skeletons in the newsreels, the children stacked dead at the sides of ditches, their legs like firewood. . . . They’re me.”

“They are.”

“It changes everything. It really does.” She held her head high, refusing to collapse beneath the weight of emotion while tears rolled down her cheeks. Catherine, she cried easily.

“T
HIS IS NOT A
goddamned college production of Gilbert and Sullivan,” Sidney said with simultaneous anger and joy as he led Catherine and the other stars of the play across the Public Garden and through Boston Common toward Washington Street. “We are the American musical theater. We are Broadway. Others look to us, aspire to be us. We’re professionals.” They were walking four abreast with stragglers of the cast grouped behind them, the rhythm of their step in keeping with people who habitually worked at singing and dancing, and at this moment Sidney was their general. It was cold and dry for late September, and as the lights came on in buildings that flanked the Common they sparkled in place as if in winter.

“Catherine, are you anxious? I hope not. You’ve got it down. All of you have it down, and it was that way before we left New York. In the weeks here, it’s been almost flawless.”

“I am anxious,” Catherine answered, “but I can’t wait to go on. The only daunting thing is the time between now and then.”

Though everyone but Sidney would change into costume, they were dressed beautifully, and they could hear music so faithfully that it was as if they were already in the theater and the orchestra lay in wait in the black space between the audience and the stage, bridging with music the gap between them. If the production were half as good as the Boston rehearsals had been, the audience would be sure to be delighted most of the time and now and then know bliss. Sidney was in a double-breasted greatcoat and Liberty of London scarf. Charles—handsome, strong, and as dumb in real life as onstage—was in Harris Tweed, ready for his heiress. Amanda, the heiress who was not an heiress, was coatless and dressed as a leading lady should be, in a gown too flimsy for the cold, too high at the knee, too low at the bosom, and just right for the party. And Catherine, the simple girl from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, who really was an heiress, and who, every night, would lose Charles, was in a French dress so wonderfully tailored and arresting to the eye that as she walked across the Common everyone turned to her as if slightly startled. Her colleagues—people of ceaseless and merciless charisma, directors and Broadway performers—were made to seem like postilions.

But as they marched forward in natural light giving way to galaxies of electricity shining through the trees, Catherine didn’t know. At the stage door they encountered a group of people who had assembled an hour before curtain to see Amanda but who either missed Amanda or thought Catherine was the lead. Amanda smiled royally at glances directed past her. Then, the power of opening night having propelled them, they were pulled into the theater as if through an airlock, the cold of New England pouring onto the busy and expectant stage like some kind of magical fuel.

Just being in the theater began to change their voices into the powerful and perfectly calibrated instruments that project strongly and, as in the mechanics of seabirds riding on the wind, are elevated as they push against resistance. For the singers, this was the echo of their own voices. Catherine had said to Harry that one of the most wonderful things in the world was to meet her own voice and adjust to it as if in a duet, so that something there was, that was not she, that would sail above the audience and astound both the actress and her listeners. Yes, she wanted stardom, from the vanity that she was too honest to deny; and, like every child of wealth, she wanted to earn money on her own; but most of all she wanted this—to be able to project her soul outside herself for those moments, enchanted and free, when it would play among the beams of light flooding down through the proscenium. If she could do this seven or eight times a week now and then in productions yet to be born, it would be well worth all the tortures of the theater.