In Sunlight and in Shadow (38 page)

The dominant shades of blue and silver on the bay were compressed by the heat into an opalescent mist, and by contrast any touch or smattering of gold was breathtaking and hypnotic: the stewardesses’ gold earrings, rich in the sunbeams and shadows of the salon; the distant skyscrapers, some yellow-gold; and the ordinary, highly polished brass cabin fittings. Their effulgence in the blur of silver light made a glowing fume around them not in halos but in orbs. And although Catherine’s earrings were diamonds the size of buttons, her hair was gold and it glowed.

The plane pivoted and then strained forward, throttles open, engines deafening. A ray of sunlight tracked steadily through the cabin, seizing upon a rose in a gimbaled flute that slowly turned as if to meet the light that warmed the rose to the color of a fire engine. As the enormous plane lifted from water into air, everything was aglow.

With military timing, the stewardesses unbuckled at the same instant, one moving briskly toward the galley and the other offering her two passengers Champagne. Catherine declined, sure that Harry would follow suit, but he surprised her.

She signaled to the stewardess that she would join him. “But you don’t really drink.”

“There’s no way I could forgo it now.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m sitting on a web bench, weighed down with parachute, carbine, pack, ammunition, flares, food, and all kinds of other things. My harness is so tight it compresses my body painfully and makes me even more claustrophobic. I have to wear my lousy helmet because there’s no room for it on my lap. My carbine keeps slipping into a tilt because of the vibrations. The sound is deafening. I’m surrounded by scores of men, the cabin smells, we’re about to jump into battle, the flak has started, the evasive maneuvers, the nausea. I’m doing my best not to throw up, and some people are not as successful as I am, and I see only a devilish red light, the black gleam of oiled weapons, and blinking eyes.

“So, if now, two miles above the ground, a beautiful woman with hair that shines in the sunlight offers me a glass of Champagne, there’s no way that I’m not going to take it, because you don’t look an angel in the gift eye—whatever that means. I don’t really know what it means.”

“But I do,” she said, and then the clipper banked.

It followed the Sound for a few minutes before making a chevron across Long Island at Islip, gaining altitude for a short time only to begin its descent over Westhampton. It flew parallel to the beach, as if after many years of spanning the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans it was impelled to strike out for Europe. As they descended, the surf came more clearly into view. From a high altitude it had looked steady, deliberate, and slow: it crawled. But from near its own level it was like herds of horses galloping toward the beach. It had from this perspective a persistent, wide-fronted, and purposeful urgency. To see it frustrated on the shore and pushed back in cataracts of foam was like witnessing the frustration of an invading army.

A relatively calm sea state allowed them to land on the ocean rather than the bay. Their first bounce came at the Georgica inlet, the second far past the Georgica Club, and then a series of closer and closer touches, the distance between them diminishing as it does when a stone is skipped across the surface of a pond, until the plane ploughed a steady white furrow deeper and deeper as it slowed. They came almost to a stop opposite the Hales’ beach. Then they turned left ninety degrees and taxied toward the path that led through the dunes to the house, halting about a thousand feet offshore and idling the engines as the waves slowly pushed them toward land.

From the air as they approached, and then at each upward skip, they had seen the house. Beyond the dunes, sheltered from wind and surf, the gardens, fields, and pool—a clear sapphire—looked even better from afar than from close up. For her it was home, but for him, because he knew he would have to earn it and that he might never do so, it was especially beautiful in the foil of its inaccessibility.

What they saw next was Billy and Evelyn and one of the gardeners dragging a light rowboat across the beach and into the water. In a sundress and carrying her pumps, Evelyn waded to the stern, climbed in, and made her way to the bow as the boat rocked and yawed at the edge of the surf. The gardener, in Montauk fisherman’s khakis and visored cap, stepped into the boat from amidships and took the oars. Then Billy, in a blue pin-cord suit with the pant legs rolled up above his knees, threw his shoes and socks onto the floorboards, loosened his tie, and pushed the boat over the shallows, keeping its prow pointed at the waves.

When a breaker would hit, he would push down with his hands on the top of the transom, lift himself high enough not to be soaked, and kick like a hysterical frog, his swimming motions acting as a rudder to stop the prow from being swung around by the waves. Then he would drop down and run forward, pushing the skiff ahead of him until the next wave. When finally the water was too deep, he threw himself into the boat and took a seat and an oar amidships, and he and the gardener rowed hard through the surf to reach open water. Then the gardener took over. He had been born a fisherman and was a gardener only because of fate and change. It would be easy for him to keep the lightened boat straight when speeding back to the beach and cresting the waves.

When they came alongside they were helped into the plane by the copilot, who stood by the door, carefully watching the rise and fall of the sea. Evelyn’s dress was half wet from the waves and foam that had been battered into the air above the prow, her hair slightly disheveled. Billy was dry only from the waist up, and the triangle at the bottom of his tie was as dark with brine as if it were a strawberry dipped in chocolate. They were pleased that they had rowed out in such a way and with such skill that it seemed like something they did every day.

One could not fail to note not only that they took things in stride, but that they possessed immense resources of all types, and that Evelyn, though her dress was half wet and her hair disheveled, like her daughter and like any woman, looked more beautiful in the wind than she did in perfect presentation. The door was closed before they knew it, and the plane took off southward, climbed, and banked north. They would fly over the inner Cape, with Boston to the west shielded by its many islands and peninsulas, and then dash above the sea to Mount Desert Island.

While the sun was still high, the huge plane landed on Blue Hill Bay and taxied to within a hundred yards of Seal Cove. Engines idling, it sat gently rocking as its passengers were rowed to shore in two trips of a rubber dinghy. Then it turned around, brought itself to full power, and skimmed the top of the sea until it lifted and disappeared southward. A few hours before, Harry and Catherine had been in a taxi on the East River Drive in heat that seemed eternal, and now they were in Maine, with only the sound of a cold breeze in the pines. They started walking against the wind, with Evelyn clasping her arms together, as if in the pose of refusal, to warm herself.

Along the empty road it was fresh in a way that only the northland can be. Billy bent down and pressed his palms into the earth, inviting the others to do so. They did. It was cold. “The soil in East Hampton,” he said, “and certainly in Central Park, is still hot. By the middle of September it’ll be just warm, and not like this until the end of October.” It was fine dirt, reddish black, and it muted their steps as they moved between thick walls of trees.

At the northern tip of Seal Cove Pond was a large cabin that for sixty or seventy years had sat on eighty acres at the end of a long, winding road. It had four bedrooms, four baths, and a lodge-like center room in which could be found the kitchen, a woodstove, a huge fireplace, a dining area, and wooden cabinets, some sturdily locked, keeping everything from bedding to rifles, provisions, jackets, fishing gear, books, lanterns, and games. Other than the food, half these items had descended from the nineteenth century, but as they were all of the highest quality, their age was only an asset.

The floors and walls were unfinished wood, there was no electricity, and the water came from a cistern in summer and, in winter, a hand-pumped well. Light came from lanterns, and the heat, hot water, and cooking depended upon fired wood, which meant a great deal of work and constant tending. From a southward-looking porch, the pond below was visible down its length of about a mile, a narrow and even stretch of water far warmer than the sea and now, though quickly fading, at its warmest. On both sides, walls of granite were fragrant with pines rooted like mountain climbers clinging to crags.

A jeep stood by the house, fueled and maintained by a caretaker who was seldom seen and who had stocked the pantry with groceries and fresh food. They threw open the doors to let in the air, which seemed to carry oxygen better than air in the city, perhaps because it came off the ocean and was free of the many millions of rooms, tunnels, and cul-de-sacs that in the city captured, tortured, and enslaved it. Billy built a fire in the woodstove while Harry was tasked with starting a medium-sized blaze in the fireplace as a primer for the larger one that would come in the evening. Billy watched him discreetly, wanting to see how he would make a fire, and thinking that he might not be very good at it after having been brought up on Central Park West. To the contrary, Harry quickly hatcheted some split logs into kindling and tinder, built a structure expertly, and brought it to an almost explosive conflagration with just one match and not a single breath.

With Catherine looking on, Billy asked, “Where’d you learn to do that? You make a fire like an arsonist. Bring me a brand so I can get this going.”

Harry put a burning brand in the cast-iron shovel used for ashes and carried it across the floor to the woodstove. As Billy positioned it and blew until he was dizzy, he asked, “In the army?”

“No, when I was ten my mother died, and after that my father and I fled into the wilderness as often as we could, usually in a canoe. We started on the Hudson and went all the way up to the Adirondack chain of lakes. We did the Connecticut River, then Lake Champlain, and as time went by we went into Canada. I think we were probably Abercrombie’s best customers who didn’t go to Africa. Sometimes we’d be out for two months at a stretch. My father spent his youth on a farm and worked with his hands all his life. You couldn’t have anyone better or smarter to take you through the wilderness.”

“How could he have left his business unattended for so long?”

“He had a partner to help him run it, who still does, and manufacturing leather goods doesn’t require split-second timing like trading on Wall Street. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway: we had to get away, and we did. I’m not skilled at the social graces—as you may now know—but all we had and all I wanted day after day were paddle, rod, rifle, ax, and book. If you’re out for months, when you make a fire you make your home.”

“It must have served you well in the army,” Evelyn said from the couch.

“On occasion.”

“What’s for dinner?” Catherine asked. And then, opening the icebox, she answered herself: “Half a dozen lobsters. Not again!”

“We’re in Maine, Catherine. What would you expect, enchiladas? Oh, and I forgot to bring the bread from the plane,” Evelyn announced. “They never have decent bread here.”

“Oyster crackers will do,” Catherine said.

“Only,” Billy added, “if you like them. I don’t, really.” He was disappointed. “I’ll bet that tonight it drops into the thirties. If the weather holds, we can sail tomorrow, or the next day. No rush.”

“Where?” Harry asked.

“Just out into the Atlantic, beyond the sight of land. Ever since Catherine was a child she’s loved to be on the sea. And if the weather’s bad we can sail on the pond. A Winabout in a gale can give you a hell of a ride.”

“And what does one do here at night other than read?” Harry asked.

“Games,” said Billy, “and dinner—which takes a long time to cook and eat, and you have to boil water to wash the dishes. If our minds have slowed enough, as they tend to do up here—which is the whole point—we’ll turn up the lanterns and play Monopoly. When Catherine would bring one of her friends or if her cousins were here we always used to play board games and do charades on the first night. Once, Honoria—quite a name—a very Mediterranean-looking girl for a Hale, lost a diamond as big as a golf ball as she was swimming in the pond. Well, not a golf ball, but children shouldn’t have such things. It’s still there.

“We didn’t finish those games, because the children would fall asleep and we would carry them to their beds. We would try to preserve the board for the next night, but with three or four kids, a dog, and the wind, good luck. Once, the money blew into the pond, I guess to be with the diamond, and for years thereafter the game was much harder, but that seemed appropriate as the Depression dragged on. We probably won’t finish tonight, either, because we’ll have too elaborate a dinner and start too late. But the main thing is that we’ll sleep a sleep such as no one in New York has ever slept. The air will be cold and it will be bitterly quiet. No appointments to keep tomorrow, no taxis, no garbage cans making a symphony at four
A.M.
All in all, the effect is like that of anaesthesia.”

“I think I’ve outgrown Monopoly, Daddy,” Catherine averred.

“Nonsense,” said Billy, slyly. “No one ever outgrows Monopoly. What do you think I do all day?”

“Yes,” Evelyn added, in the same self-deprecating tone, “for people like us, it’s like looking at a family album.”

While Billy and Evelyn sat on the porch in the sun, Catherine and Harry went through an unmowed field to a dock from which they swam (gently, for his sake) a mile down and another mile back up the pond. The water was comfortable, sweet, and slightly rippled by the wind. Had the distance been shorter or the surroundings less entrancing they might have increased their speed, but swimming slowly past the granite walls, determined to get to the end and back, their pace was as leisurely as if they were drifting on a slow current. They were in the water for almost three hours.