In Sunlight and in Shadow (91 page)

Mike Beck said, “Start with a professor at Wharton. He’s a Saltonstall. You know the Saltonstalls?”

“Some of them,” she replied.

“I don’t mean personally. You know them personally?”

“A few.”

“Do you know
him?
”

“A professor at Wharton? No.”

“Anyway, a New York paper, which I know you know, as do we all, hired this guy to write a major piece to explain the Bretton Woods agreements to the general public. During the war, no one was interested. But now that whatever they decided there is beginning to shape the economies of the world, people are, but no one can understand it, and no one ever will, really.”

“Except economists,” Catherine interrupted.

“No. Economists are paid to pretend they understand such things so that people will think the world isn’t riding a wild horse, when in fact it is. And, okay, maybe a few actually do understand it, but I don’t.”

“I was joking, Mr. Beck. I grew up with economists.”

“Oh. Anyway, this guy was supposed to be one of the ones who really did understand. He wrote his article and sent it in. They could make neither hide nor hair of it, so they brought him up here and put him in a hotel, with instructions to rewrite it so it would be clearer.

“He struggled to do so all night, walked into their offices in the morning, and gave them a revised piece, words counted to the exact length. ‘What the hell is this?’ says the editor. ‘Did you write this with a quill?’ The guy had eighteenth-century handwriting. ‘You gotta type it,’ the editor tells him.

“He’s a Saltonstall, he doesn’t type, but he’s got honor, so he assents without protest, swallowing the indignity. What do they do? They take him to the Week in Review section, which works on a different schedule because it comes out on Sunday, and on the day he was there it was completely deserted. They set him up with a typewriter, at which he pecks away. But he gets tired after a few hours and falls asleep in his chair. No lights. Dusk. He’s resting against a glass partition, like a passenger on a train.

“He awakens to a telephone conversation taking place on the other side of the partition, and although he can hear only one party, what’s going on is quite obvious even to an economics professor. The guy on the other side, who thinks the whole place is empty, is whispering nonetheless, low. But it goes right through the wall. The desk lamp on the other side is burning, and the Wharton professor sees the silhouette moving in the wavy glass.

“It’s the theater critic, taking instructions. Protesting that he can’t do exactly what they tell him, but agreeing to come close, and asking for more money. There are organizations that are our competitors. On the other end of the line was one of them.

“The next day, literally, the professor reads this guy’s review of our just-opened show and recognizes the phrases he heard the evening before. We were panned. It cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, and for the playwright and actors it was heartbreak and misery. He understood this, so he came to us.”

Catherine was speechless at the unbidden workings of justice.

“We knew this guy had been biased against us: Malan—oops, I shouldn’t have said it.”

It was as if lightning had struck Catherine. His was the most influential review of her show, in which all had been praised but her.

“Keep it under your hat. It’ll come out.

“We didn’t know what to do,” he continued. “It was the professor’s word against Malan’s, and although in Boston Malan wouldn’t have stood a chance, this is New York, where most of the eight million people would think a Saltonstall is a place where you keep a horse, or some sort of machine used in the manufacture of pretzels. We really didn’t know how to approach this.

“My wife solved the problem. She said, It’s simple, bring in Malan’s wife. We did. It turns out she’s what we call, forgive me, a society dame.”

“I know,” said Catherine. “That’s what I’m supposed to be when I grow up.”

“I guess so, but it’s up to you.”

“It is. And I see that woman sometimes at the Colony Club. I mean, I pass her. I’ve never met her. My mother probably has.”

“It turns out that her family thinks of Malan the way you might think of a particle of food that gets stuck between your teeth. He was taking money because he wanted to impress them. Of course, he couldn’t do that, no matter what. They think show business is for the Irish and Jews, who, they think, are lower than apes. She doesn’t think that, but they do. He’s Irish for Chrissake, Catholic. He’s drinking as well. Their marriage is almost finished, but she loves him, so when we told her she said, really and truly, ‘You wait here, and I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ She meant business, this dame. As she saw it, she was saving the honor of her family, her children, her name, herself.

“Carmichael . . . ,” Mike Beck went on.

“I’m Carmichael,” the secretary said, giving a little bow to Catherine, at whom he had been trying not to stare.

“. . . was perspicacious enough to get our lawyers here, because he guessed what was coming. The paper’s around the corner, but she had to fish him out from Sardi’s, where he had evidently had double his normal overage of alcohol. That was lucky for us. He was teary and afraid, and by the time he was ready to give the full account, we had lawyers, a stenographer, and witnesses in the conference room.

“He kept saying, ‘It’s like an execution! My career! My career!’ And every time he would say that, his wife would say, ‘Shut up, Irish shitbird! This is America and this is New York. Nothing can ruin a career, because no one cares about anything that anyone else does, and no one remembers anything, and no one has standards anymore.’ And he would say, ‘But Nancy . . . ,’ and she would say, ‘You just tell the truth, you stupid bastard, and the truth will set you free—or I will.’

“It was dramatic. He’s Catholic, so he confessed like a pro. Trained to do it. The drinking, the womanizing, everything. Including that he took five hundred dollars from Victor Marrow after Victor Marrow tried and failed to persuade his editor to get him to pan
you.
In fact, he wanted a thousand to pan you—a man of principles—but Victor settled for five hundred if he would just leave you out.

“When Victor and he met for payment, overlooking the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center, Victor told him that he liked the idea of just ignoring you, and had adapted it for the other critics and editors, though Malan was the first one he went to. Neat, huh? And we’ve got it all down. With witnesses. Notarized.”

“But it’s his word against Victor’s,” Catherine said.

“Nope. Like the royalty he is, Victor doesn’t carry cash.” Catherine smiled. She knew this, and foresaw what was coming. “He wrote Malan a check. He actually noted on it what it was for, which numbs me, I’ll tell you. Malan, being a drunk, neglected to cash it. We’ve got the check. What a scandal,” Mike Beck said, leaning back in his chair. “We’re going to make it the publicity narrative of the opening. It will set the newspapers back on their ass. The only way you can push those behemoths, to the extent you can, is not to sue them but to embarrass them. It will shame Victor Marrow and damage Willie Marrow’s company and standing with the press. And it will redeem you, Miss, because you deserve it, and it’s the kind of story the public loves. They’ll come to hear you because you’ve been wronged, and then, when they do hear you, they’ll keep coming for the rest of your life.”

“So I do have a song,” she said.

Mike Beck and his secretary, Carmichael, were moved by the modesty of her expectations. As gently as if he were telling her that someone she thought had died was in fact alive in the next room, Mike Beck said, “Miss Hale, Mrs. Copeland, I’ve never heard a better singer, and indeed you have a song. You have more than one song. Catherine, I apologize. I haven’t been clear. I’m offering you the lead.”

Shaken, she could hardly believe she had heard correctly. “How could that be? You said there were big stars.”

“Yes,” he said. “The royalty of Broadway.” He named them. “Big egos. Big salaries. They’ll draw everyone in during the advance ticket sales, and the critics will come to see them, although they’ll wonder why you have top billing. Then, after the opening, they’ll know.

“We’re not going to pay you what we’re going to have to pay you next time. We’ve got one free ride. Then you’ll break us.”

“I don’t care about money.”

“I know. And I know another thing. I’ve been listening to singers since—if you can believe it—the eighteen seventies. I was a kid, but my mother was a costumer, and by the time I was ten I was an old hand in the theater. I’ve heard Caruso, Nellie Melba, Jenny Lind. Very few people alive today have heard Jenny Lind. Now, don’t let this go to your head. I don’t think anyone will ever equal her—except maybe you. You don’t have her range, you never will, but your voice is as beautiful. It isn’t mature yet, but when that happens I think you’ll probably leave the musical theater and go to opera.

“It’s not just that you don’t have to do any acting, because nobody believes the acting in opera anyway, but that as powerful as a musical can be, there’s something much higher, almost ravishing, about the great operas. In my case I went blind before I could really see it, but in general you learn it when your heart is broken. You should stay in the theater, Catherine, as long as you can. It’s your youth. Only later, as you grow older in the world, will you see light in darkness, and that’s the most beautiful thing, the saddest thing.”

It was as if her future had been laid out for her by an oracle, and it seemed so real that her heart began to pound.

He brought her back. “But don’t think about that now. You’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“The composer? And the lyricist?” she asked. “Don’t they have to approve?”

“They approve. They’ve heard you. I brought them with me several times.”

“They were in the audience? If I had known. . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Here’s a trick I learned when I was younger than you and I could see. From the beginning, from the first dress rehearsal, even before, as soon as you’re blinded by the light and the theater goes black”—he tapped the bridge of his glasses—“convince yourself early on that in the audience are the Pope, the president, the king of England, William Shakespeare, Helen Hayes, Enrico Caruso, Archimedes, Abraham Lincoln, and, not least, your parents. If you get used to this before opening night you’ll never have stage fright, and when the curtain goes up you’ll rush out there eager to begin, because all those guys and Helen Hayes and your mother will be like old friends, and you’ll want to sing for them as you’ve done for months.”

“Oh,” she said. It was a rather long
oh.

“You have the part if you want it. The lead.”

Trying not to cry, she was barely succeeding. With a voice that despite all its training she could not keep from trembling, she said, “That’s because nothing ever happens.”

“Is that a yes?” Mike Beck asked.

She closed her eyes and nodded her assent. The secretary said, “It’s a yes, Mr. Beck.” It was a yes, but she was frightened, frightened for herself, frightened for Harry, for what he was doing, and for leaving him behind.

In the hours between the interview with Mike Beck and dressing for the curtain, Catherine wandered, overwhelmed and astonished. It was as if now she had assumed the part she sang almost every night. Everything was in flux and at risk. A new life was within her, and if all went well would carry on for her and for Harry long past the end of their lives in a future she would not know. The constriction of her early twenties was about to end. She had been born to wealth and success, then had been forced to earn it, and it seemed that she had, although she was wise enough to know that struggle never ends but always comes in new forms.

She was frightened but euphoric. The natural course and alternation of things meant that a heart lifted to the empyrean was then cast down. It never failed. And yet the liveliness she felt because of her success and the promise of a child deepened her emotions and sensations into art. She saw things, and she longed for them—shadows in gray, people who will never return, days of sun and clouds that vanish like smoke. . . .

As Harry had wandered only hours before, so did she, taking in faces and forms, not that she was a stranger to this, to seeing in the city a portrait arising with great energy as if random, but then becoming with momentary shock and telltale beauty a poignant composition that fled upon the winds. She could freeze these images and hold them forever, even as they vanished. Although she could never quite understand them, she knew that they all pointed to one thing and had come of one origin, and that should she never give up trying to penetrate their meaning, should she never relinquish them from memory, should she hold them in her heart until she died, perhaps then she could relate one to another and hear with piercing clarity the song they were singing in silence.

She wandered, overwhelmed by images—by thousands of faces, each telling of deep or despairing lives; by clouds garlanding the great buildings; by the engines of the city’s commerce; the wind lifting briefly the hem of a woman’s cream-colored coat as she glided south at the edge of Madison Square; the sun in blinding flashes upon a hundred thousand windows; bridges sailing high above blue waters and whitecaps; pigeons rising in almost exact synchrony from sidewalks darkened by rain, banking in a mathematically perfect curve, wings still, their perfection the gift of the omnipresent and invisible air.

With the gravity and concentration of a bullfighter adorning himself, Catherine dressed and applied her stage makeup, the lights of her mirror fusing in peripheral vision into a ring of suns. North on the Hudson, four men guided their boat unseen across the broad reach of Haverstraw Bay. No other boats were anywhere near on a November evening, and the only lights those of Haverstraw, High Tor, and the muted glow of towns on the east bank. As trees swayed in the wind and the rubber boat bobbed in small swells, street lamps and the lighted windows of individual houses appeared to blink. But it was mainly dark, for what moon there was, was largely hidden by cloud. The November waters, their boat, their weapons, as in the war, were black.