In Sunlight and in Shadow (70 page)

She had been done an injustice by the press, or so it seemed to her, although she could not be sure, and she believed at times that her singing and stage presence were simply not worthwhile. Nor could she be sure of or separate the involvement of Victor Marrow. Perhaps he had been the instigator, or perhaps not. It was possible that every critic failed to notice her, failed even to dislike her, or thought she was not quite untalented enough to attack. The way the tendrils of all such possibilities intertwined left her with no means to judge either herself or others. Deprived of bearings, she suffered a kind of motion sickness, a continual nausea the effect of which was rapid corrosion.

She fought this as best she could. Except for George Yellin, the other cast members now took obvious if unstated delight in her fall—which had cleared the way for them—and expressed the kind of sympathy they might have for a great racehorse that had broken its leg. They said their piece with as much politeness as they could, and then, only as quickly as did not appear ruthless, turned away and instantly forgot. George himself, who was in the last effulgence of his life, could not endanger his good fortune by allowing his sympathy to cast him too far back toward what he had just escaped. Sidney no longer thought she was as desirable, and now that she was not an asset, seemed not so sure of his high opinion of her singing. Everything changed in the great currents of fashion, and Sidney had to put on plays to suit the public taste. He had investors to please and actors to sustain, not to mention himself. Like a statesman or a general, he had learned to move forward unaffected by the people who were left behind.

At first she was puzzled as to how one might fight complete disregard. But when she thought on it, she came up with a strategy. She understood that no matter what audiences might feel directly, they could be made to ignore their own convictions. Such was the social power and that of the press. She had seen it time and again. So she could not rely upon the natural reaction she had elicited at the beginning of the run. As attention gravitated to the new stars, she noticed that this reaction changed. Within weeks, the ovations for her went from the wind-driven downpour of large hail upon a metal roof, to the obligatory drizzle reserved for those whose appearance is an opportunity to rest the hands between more emphatic bursts of applause. It is not just that actors who live with the polite drizzle eventually die inside, but that their performances then conform to what is expected.

Determined to avoid this, her method of resistance was to recognize that she could not for long overcome the currents of fashion—not one young woman, not alone—and that no matter what she did, she had only a limited time. Given that, she need not conserve her energy as any wounded animal or person might, and she could be reckless with emotion, technique, and conviction, for her own pleasure if nothing else. Though she might be forced to retire, when in the field she would move with all her strength.

She could not rely upon opinion at all, even that of those whom she loved and who loved her. Of course Harry and her parents would tell her that she was wonderful, as Evelyn put it time and time again, but if she could no longer trust her own view, how could she trust theirs? She was out on a ledge. She would take her cues only from the music. All she could have, and ever have, was this, and if it took her up, and lifted her as she sang, that would have to be enough. Suffering throughout the day and after her performances, she held through with determination so that when the orchestra was struck her singing would be cut loose from the things of the world, and the song itself, fragile and evanescent, could spar with the background of silence.

She opened the book in front of her. It had just been delivered from the stacks:
A Survey of Flowers and Floral Ornamentation in European Painting, with Identification According to Biological Principles.
You could not major in music at Bryn Mawr without taking required courses in art and aesthetics. Because she had often sat in libraries with this kind of book, which had elicited intricate observations and comparisons, she looked at it unintimidated.

The page to which she had turned was in the section on lilies and irises. They were depicted in French and Italian paintings, in patterns on cloth of blue and gold, literal, abstract, or emblematic. Immediately she saw that the hierarchy of virtue in flowers was the opposite of what human intervention might create. The fleur-de-lis of Louis XIV was as dead as a horseshoe nail no matter how many courtiers subjugated themselves to it. As an emblem, it was lifeless. In a Botticelli or a Monet (although Monet was left out of this survey) flowers were beautiful, of a much higher rank than those that served as stilted emblems. Of a higher rank still, though hardly recognized and celebrated, were those in someone’s garden. She imagined a woman tending them on a summer’s day, lifting them in the sun, arrested by their color and scent. But of the highest rank were those that were never celebrated or seen, blooming by themselves in a corner of woods or at the edge of a field, never to be beheld. Distinction had no more effect on their essence or their glory than love or remembrance have upon the resurrection of the dead. In the few hours when flowers catch the sun, she realized, all are equal, then all are done. And in the reading room crowded with anonymous scholars amid long rows of sea-green lamps and in a dull murmur like that of the ocean in a shell, no one looked up but Catherine, whose face was upturned, as always when seeking courage and faith.

On the night when snow fell in the Hudson Highlands for the first time that October, it had brushed lightly over Manhattan on its way. Fluttering like a veil, it descended in confused spirals that trembled on winds channeled by the high towers, the upper floors of which were drowned in cloud. As Catherine walked to the theater, snowflakes sparkled on her coat. At the lamp over the stage door they plunged into its light before the storm moved north and left the city pleasantly breathless with its first intimation of winter.

As Harry had once gone into battle, so Catherine had entered the theater. Upon her demotion, the confidence of many generations of Hales had vanished, and she was put to the test anew with each performance. It was not nothing to sing into darkness, blinded by light, with just a glimpse of the hundreds of judges trying to relax in stiff formal clothes. And although she was strong and courageous, blessed with the vitality of youth, quick of wit, seductively hot of temper, and could fight with great spirit in everything from sharp debate to the waves of the Atlantic, she was in essence tender, and all the fight that was in her was there to protect her faith in the gentle and the good.

When, trying to control the nervous trembling that these days would escape from her hands were they extended too long, she had put away her coat, changed her clothes, applied stage makeup, and donned the gloves she wore at her entrance, she had some minutes before she went on. Although she was given warnings—a rap on her door, and the calling out of time left—she told time by the orchestra swelling in its overture.

A few minutes before her cue, she locked the door, sank to her knees, put her hands together palm to palm and fingertip to fingertip, closed her eyes, and did not quite pray. This was what for thousands of years warriors had done before going into battle. Her lips moved, but she spoke no words and asked for nothing. Given her posture and expression, she might have been in armor or mail, and a sword might have been stuck in the ground before her, her forehead lightly touching it. She was no different from Harry when, before the jump, hands in the same position, head bent or upraised, he leaned into his reserve chute as the plane rose and fell on the wind and he, too, not quite prayed, asking for nothing. From Catherine and from Harry came absolute surrender, and to Catherine and Harry came the deepest strength. The current was strong and magnetic, the exchange electric and warm as everything came alight from what the blind of spirit took for darkness. Catherine felt her heart swell with strength and love, and then she rose and unlocked the door.

She hurried through the corridors and to the edge of the stage, and from the shadows she watched the lights come up as if in an explosion. She could never see much beyond them, for her song was sung in the brightness of day, when every effect was intended to carry the city into the theater. As soon as the lights went on the orchestra burst into action. Someone pounded on piano keys like the police hammering down a door, and then came the strings, bells, horns, whistles, flutes, brass, and drums. By this time she was already front and center. And because she never tired of the greatness of the city that her task was to convey, she never had to pretend to astonishment. It was always real. She had it in memory, from childhood on, in a hundred thousand scenes.

She took the crucial breath that the audience had to hear. The music rose in a minor key, and when the melody took over and began its riverine flow, this was where she was put to the test every night. For it was not enough for her voice to be beautiful, as it was; to be powerful; and to be pure. She had to embrace the song until it almost broke her heart, to devote herself solely to what was true, and to ignore the judgment of the world in favor of the judgment of heaven.

Their apartment overlooked the park through a bank of three double windows, each with a window seat. The Sunday after Harry returned from up the Hudson he and Catherine sat across from one another in the southernmost alcove. She looked out at the park, over the reservoir, and toward midtown, its towers dark at dusk with not a soul working in them, not even the cleaning ladies, who that night could sleep in Harlem. Harry’s view was to the northeast, where the lights of the Triboro Bridge, having just come on, had begun to sparkle with a slight blue-green tint. The pueblos of Fifth Avenue, which in noonday sun were as pale as the White Cliffs of Dover, had turned butter-colored and then deep red with the very last of the sun. This light broke the buildings into color planes of scarlet and black as darkness climbed them from the ground up. In the silent afternoon of late October the light would briefly glow like a coal and then go quickly. Strings of street lamps now decorated the park asymmetrically because someone, somewhere, had thrown a switch, and clouds, the last pale things, floated regally over Queens.

She didn’t want to break the silence, but she had a question. “Harry,” she asked, “what’s a nudnik?”

“How can you have lived in New York all your life and not know what a nudnik is?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

After a long silence, Harry said, “Why do you ask?”

“I went into a candy store on Columbus Avenue to make a phone call. While I was in the booth, fishing out change from my purse, a man came in with his son. The boy, who was about eight or nine, burst into the store, screaming ‘I want a monkey! I want a monkey!’

“Naturally, I noticed. I couldn’t help it. What he meant was one of those little plastic monkeys that slides up and down a red stick. If you put the monkey at the top, it takes a minute to jerk all the way down.”

“Yes. George the Sixth gives those out at state dinners in Buckingham Palace.”

“They’re very clever, actually. The father took one down, bought a cigar and a paper, and was about to pay when the kid showed up from the back of the store with another monkey on a red stick. ‘I have one,’ the father says. ‘Put it back.’ Then the kid says, ‘I need two.’ ‘Two?’ the father asks. ‘Why?’ ‘A spare.’ ‘A spare? Why would you need a spare monkey?’ ‘In case one breaks.’ ‘No, put it back.’ ‘No, I’ll take two.’ ‘Uh-uh, put it back.’ ‘No, I need two.’ ‘Put
it
back!
’ ‘I want it! I want it!’

“Then the father looked at him more than sternly, and said, ‘Cyril! Don’t be a nudnik!’ What’s a nudnik?”

“Cyril is a nudnik.”

“I know. I mean, I understand the context and I have a general idea, but I can’t fix it precisely. The West Side is new to me. Don’t forget, I grew up in the East.”

“A nudnik,” Harry said, as if lecturing the assembled French Academy, “is a person—male, usually below middle age—who is simultaneously annoying, demanding, irritating, preposterous, cloying, deeply limited, insistent, energetic, needy, innocent, crafty, amusing, clueless, destructive, distractive, disconnected, monomaniacal, totally without self-awareness, off-putting, magnetic, haunting, whiny, horrible, exasperating, and, most of the time, Jewish. That’s the short definition.”

“It’s Yiddish?”

“It could only be.”

“Can you point one out?”

“Look out the window.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“Really? Well, guess what. Cyril has a brother. The brother’s name is Irwin. He’s going to grow up to be a pharmacist and a mass murderer. He’s four years old but he looks like a miniature Harpo Marx, with curly blond hair and a crazed expression. On the scale of nudnikism, Cyril is a three. Irwin is a ten. When Irwin enters a room, he knows instinctively a thousand ways to make everyone insane in less than half an hour, and when he contemplates this he’s filled with joy, like the Pope or the Dalai Lama.”

“But Harry, how do you know?”

“It’s in the blood.”

Then Harry sniffed the air, raising his head progressively higher as one does when trying to catch a scent. “What is that?” he asked. Never having had much opportunity to cook, Catherine was daring to roast a chicken. She was quite unconcerned, because she was relaxed about household matters generally left to servants, and because for a while it had smelled good in the kitchen. But she had misread a digit in the cookbook, and the chicken, left in the oven for more than six hours, was getting fairly dry.

That day they had walked from the highest point of the city, in Kingsbridge, down to the Battery and then back up to 93rd Street, stopping in Chelsea for the most imprecisely named beverage in the world, the egg cream, which had neither egg nor cream, and at Fulton Street for clam broth and a salad. They were now so hungry that they had lost their hunger to a state of mild intoxication that made it all the easier simply to stare at one another as if in a trance. Just one look, just a touch, was like a strong surge of narcotic. On the rare occasions when instead of walking they took a subway, a bus, or a taxi, they would automatically and simultaneously reach out and take one another’s hand, which would make them feel levitated.