In Sunlight and in Shadow (36 page)

W
HATEVER THE OPIATES
he was given, they confounded gravity and time and relaxed him with glimpses of eternity that slipped through his fingers before he was fully conscious. When the evening dose wore off in the morning, the hot, irritable feeling beneath his skin was as welcome as a cool rain, for it meant that, even if not for long, he was about to come into the clear. Though in August the city was half emptied, at eight o’clock the buses crowded Amsterdam Avenue, the bells of St. John the Divine banged out the hour, the sun was still low enough in the east to be not entirely white, and the eastern face of every block was propped up by a wedge of black shadow.

Slipping in and out of relaxed memories and dreams, he couldn’t tell one from another. Though the sun had begun to bake the western façades of every avenue in the city, Harry was with Catherine at Amagansett, where it was a July night, the sand and the wind were cold, and the waves were thudding at the shoreline. To the left the ocean was surging and black. To the right, running on its straight track through the dunes, the New York train sounded its whistle in a mournful note before it shot through the crossings, its light blinding whatever lay ahead. They reclined on the slope of a dune. Sometimes a summer night speaks longingly of the clarity of winter and the hardness of things, from which respite is only temporary. As they warmed in one another’s embrace, they knew this.

He was alone. The walls of the room were beige. A Protestant cross—wood without Jesus—was hanging on an interior wall facing two large windows filled with the sun, which would soon climb above the clouds and spend the day diffused as if by cotton, but now was like a dam-burst of white gold. Most hospital rooms do not have airy spaces, flowers in Chinese vases, or fine English furniture. He had had no idea that such accommodations existed, until he had awakened in one at St. Luke’s, to which Catherine, after a telephone call to her father, had had him transferred.

When he was able to speak, he told her that most of the hospitals he had seen were in humid tents where forty men, many of whom would die, lay in undistinguished rows. Rain leaked through frays in the canvas and was caught in buckets that nurses and orderlies tripped over and kicked. The dead had no mourners, and were taken out in sacks. Wind shook the walls, and the thunder of artillery echoed back and forth in duels that helped to keep the tents always full.

“When you endow a hospital wing, you get to have a room like this,” she said, “with the payment of an extra charge so modest it’s basically fraudulent. When the people who endowed it aren’t in it, South American dictators are.”

“I didn’t endow anything.”

“Neither did I. Neither of us deserves it, but we’ve got it. You can worry about the inequity when you recover.”

Every day she came at ten
A.M.
, and with the exception of three half-hour breaks in which she walked briskly around the Columbia campus, she stayed until five unless she had rehearsal. He felt strength and energy whenever he would awake. Then it would quickly drain from him and, unless diverted, he would drift back to sleep. Even with Catherine there, he slept while she read on the sofa beneath the cross. It was back far enough in the room, and the room was big enough, so that in storms when the light disappeared as if in an eclipse she would have to switch on a lamp to read by it as sheets of rain lashed the windows.

Such steady, heavy rains, which in August were plentiful, would put him to sleep like nothing else, and because her practice was to leave without waking him, she seemed to appear and disappear supernaturally. He wanted to get more of a grip on things, but his body’s insatiable need for rest, the opiates, and the tranquility of his room won out.

The door opened and a day nurse entered, a matronly Irish woman with green eyes, gray-blond hair, and the distinctive speech of a woman one generation away from an unadulterated brogue. It cascaded upon itself like water spilling down rocks, full, echoing, and clear. “The young lady comes at ten. Who is she, then, that sits with you like an angel? You’re a lucky one. And you should have a bath, if only for her. Can you walk by yourself today?”

“I think so.”

“There was a gas leak on the street side, so the kitchen will be an hour and a half late with breakfast, but that has nothing to do with the hot water, which is made by the boilers, oil-fired I’m told. I’ll have the sheets changed and the room done while you’re at it. You don’t run Argentina, do you?” she asked, used to dictators with heart ailments.

“I’m working on it,” Harry said. He began, exhaustingly, to get himself out of bed. As she opened an armoire to his right, he felt the breeze made by the door. Swaying slightly as he stood, he let her help him into a robe of navy-blue cashmere, a gift from Catherine after he had told her that he had never owned a bathrobe.

“Are you capable?” the nurse asked.

“I’ll go slowly.”

After she left, he sat in a chair and laboriously put on his hospital slippers. Then, getting up, he shuffled across the floor until he reached the door, breathing heavily, his heart pounding. He knew from previous experience that it would be all or nothing, that when recovery took hold it would seem unbelievable that he had been so weak. Using the wall for support, he made his way to the bathroom, turned on the light, closed the door, and breathed as if he had just run up every flight of stairs in the Empire State Building. Then he went to the tub and twirled the faucet handles. Water gushed as if from a fire hose. While the tub was filling, to save his strength he closed his eyes as he undressed. A bulb behind a frosted glass fixture made the light in the bathroom pearly, and when the tub was half full he grasped scored handles on the wall and lowered himself into the hot water. Then, in a half sleep, he heard a stream coursing through the overflow.

Thought and dream came together as he lay in the bath. He saw a stream of black water, choked with flowers and green stems. It was busy, slow, and quiet, with a life of its own. He thought of things, like seawater or a clear lake, obviously featureless, inert, and pellucid, that in strong light show upon the bottom a motion-filled gray marbling like a silent after-action report of desperate goings-on above—the battles of currents, eddies, fronts, and waves in three dimensions even a small patch of which all the physicists in the world could not analyze precisely, but that the light makes easily apprehensible.

Taken all together, the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, and rivulets, even water dripping off eaves or rain upon a tin roof, but especially the surf and the wind out on the open sea that whips the tops of whitecaps and spreads them back in spray with a sound like that of gently shattering icicles, but softer. . . . Taken all together, the insistent lapping of little waves on inland lakes as if protesting imprisonment by the land, the roar of hurricanes across the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific, and the breaking of waves all over the world. . . . All this, in volume and variation too great to imagine, is the earth singing unceasingly, giving off not just light reflected from a star to mark its existence in the void, but also a lovely, comforting, continuing song.

In strong incandescent light that made the water sparkle, he took stock. His left knee was swollen and purple, with a dozen black stitches projecting in ugly knots as if from a rotted fishing net. His right thigh, unevenly mottled and red, was the color of a split pomegranate. Above four broken ribs distributed with a bias for the right side were fields of bruises and a stitched laceration ragged with more black thread. The marks on his arms and shoulders were inconsequential except over contusions of the bone, which ached deeply. His right eye was blackened, three tiny stitches held the left lower lip together where it had been split, and the dental lab was fabricating crowns for two back molars on the left, which had been painfully shattered. And he had a fever.

As he moved his arms in slow motion to carry water for splashing on his face, breathing hard from exertion, he wondered whether anyone who made movies had ever been beaten. No artistic license could justify the immediate leaps back into action of heroes who had sustained the equivalent of half a dozen fatal beatings. Beyond the will of its speakers, the English language had conflated two meanings in a single word, and whatever the final outcome, to be beaten, if not actually then to be beaten, is to feel beaten, and for a long time afterward.

Now that he could hardly move, he sought refuge in unprotected sleep, and was aware every moment that by their not coming for him and not having killed him, his enemies were merciful and had powers far beyond his own. As long as a slow, careful shuffle across the room would leave him breathless, or he might die from an embolism or an infection, the idea that he might take retribution would seem impossible.

Hospital water ran from huge boilers in the enormous quantities needed every day for washing, cleaning, and bathing. No one anywhere would know the difference if he turned off the tap or he did not. The sound of the inrush, the outflow, and the stirring of the water was pleasant. Their action aerated his bath and made it bearable despite its high temperature.

He knew that the water came from holding reservoirs in the city and the vast lakes upstate that in times of drought he had seen with their banks advancing and the ruins of farmhouses suddenly emerging after many years. Those reservoirs now were full, so he fixed his attention on the oil that fueled the boilers. To sustain the river of hot water, a fire had to burn hard, and for that, oil had to be drawn from the ground, refined, shipped to New York, distributed, stored, and paid for. If all the taps at St. Luke’s were left open, would it be only a matter of time until, without intervention, the hospital would go bankrupt? It was privileged with the immortality of institutions; with the loyalty, participation, and resources of thousands; and with a tax exemption. How many years might it go on if the taps were opened full? He tried to calculate an answer, but for lack of pertinent facts he could not.

In his own case, however, the facts were available. He had no contributors, no endowment of any magnitude, no institutional immortality, no multiplicity, no freedom from taxation. Eventually and soon at his rate of flow there would be no more money, water, or blood. With their vast reservoirs, the Hales had at any moment much more coming in than going out. The excess grew every day of every year, and there was so much left that to be decent they could only give it away, which they did. Here, for example, they had paid for a great deal more than all the water the hospital could use even had the taps been left open all year. What a feeling—more coming in, always, than draining out. The rich are different, he understood, not because they have more things or more freedom, but because they are not confronted with the perpetual metaphor of death by exsanguination. Our time runneth out always, but theirs doesn’t, until it does. Of course, most people, by discipline, hard work, or, at the very least, self-denial, could adjust the balance and create equanimity. In this sense, the chief treasure of the wealthy would always be available via simple modesty of desire.

The admirable basis and sound practices of Copeland Leather would ordinarily have been able to see it through at least a decade of difficulties, but not now. They had a year at most, after which the business would fail and he himself would have nothing. What was the difference, he wondered, between him and the Hales and the Marrows? Success begat success, optimism begat optimism, cheerfulness begat cheerfulness, and all begat confidence, which incestuously begat them over and over again. Were they brought to this state solely by luck? He would not allow himself the luxury of believing that, if only because he was horrified by the prospect of relying on luck alone. Work, discipline, suffering, fortitude, brilliance, courage, risk—all these were to luck as tugs are to the docking of an ocean liner.

Thus, when purely by accident one evening while making his way through Madison Square he saw Verderamé, he found it impossible not to try to talk to him once more. It wasn’t a matter of thinking. The instant he beheld him dressed to go out on the town he was struck by a rush of optimism, and immediately ran toward him, leaping over an iron fence, crossing a flower bed, and closing—from behind—before the bodyguards were aware of his presence. Harry could run very fast, and he took obstacles like a hurdler.

“Jesus Christ!” Verderamé exclaimed, startled, then embarrassed to have been startled. Shamed and irritated, the bodyguards surrounded Harry and immobilized him. Two had drawn pistols, and held them, cocked, against either side of his gut.

“Mr. Verderamé,” he said, not having had the time to be frightened, but breathing hard from his sprint. “I saw you from over there. I just want to talk to you. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t mean to scare me,” Verderamé said, weighing the words. “You didn’t mean to scare me.”

“No.”

“You didn’t scare me.”

“I just got excited because”—Harry tried to find the right words—“we may not mean anything to you, but you’re very important to us. You have the fate of a lot of people in your hands.”

“Who are you?” Verderamé asked.

Harry looked at him not in disbelief but with the feeling that comes just before despair, and he told him.

The guards stepped back a foot. Verderamé no longer looked like someone just missed by a bullet. Turning his left hand in the accompanying gesture of an exasperated question, he asked, “What do you want? You’re making your payments, what do you want?”

“I wanted to ask you,” Harry said, “why we’re the only ones in the building who pay you rather than Gottlieb, and why we pay ten times what everyone else pays, and if maybe you think we’re a different business, or another kind of business, or bigger—much bigger—than we really are, and if it’s all a mistake.”

“A mistake? It’s not a mistake.”

“But, then,
why?
” Harry pressed, tempering his argumentative recklessness with a deferential way of speaking that was so unnatural to him that not only was he ashamed of it, but it didn’t communicate deference as much as it did defiance.