In Sunlight and in Shadow (66 page)

“I don’t want to be a neurologist.”

“An internist.”

“I don’t want to be an internist.”

“What do you want to be, Jack Johnson?”

Harry paid an Irish kid named Dennis O’Rourke ten cents a week to teach him how to fight. Dennis O’Rourke didn’t know how to fight either, but for ten cents a week he gave it some thought, and between what he and Harry could think up together, learn from watching prizefights, and discover in practice, Harry did learn to hold his own, and could do so at times against three or four opponents at once, which, after the first time he did it, changed his life forever.

Then he began to exercise by running around Central Park on the bridle paths. Mocked and cursed by the aristocracy on their horses, he knew that his running six—and, later, twelve—miles was better than their riding the distance. When he was in high school he went over to Yorkville and learned to fence. He kept that up in college, where he also rowed and boxed. Although he was a welterweight, and then a middleweight, he trained with heavyweights. He was fast and powerful enough to do so, but as this was always to his disadvantage, the Harvard boxing coach once asked him why he kept it up. “In life,” Harry had replied, “when you fight, you don’t get to exclude the heavyweights.”

After college, he stopped boxing. At the gyms where he might have continued, real prizefighters of much greater skill would have hurt him badly, and he knew it. But he did everything else that he had done, including rowing from the Columbia boathouse on the East River, which was unsatisfactory water. A college acquaintance whose full name was, truly, Allis Grosvenor Elliot Vliet Dukynk worked in an investment house that transferred him to London for two years. Harry had always dreamed of working in such a place, where the money was supposed to be, but being a humanities major he could neither be sure of nor imagine what kind of work they might actually require of him other than to wear the right kind of clothes. Because of the transfer, he was invited to use Allis’s single shell at the Dukynk estate fronting an arm of the Croton Reservoir. Allis Grosvenor Elliot Vliet Dukynk was under the impression that if unexercised a wooden boat would fall apart, and was relieved that Harry undertook the task of rowing it once a week during the season. A car would be waiting for him at Harmon, the Dukynk servants would give him lunch after he rowed, and the car would take him back to the train. Being relatively asocial, Harry refused the lunch but accepted the rest. Allis had taken him upstate and showed him where the boat was hidden among a copse of pines near the water—which is what he dreamed of as he slept in the snow in Germany.

Every Wednesday, into November, weather permitting, he rowed on an empty lake with hundreds of miles of shoreline, tranquil bays, and extensions of water as smooth as glass. In August of ’38, Harry was living at home and working in his father’s loft without pay. He would take the New York Central up the Hudson to Harmon and be out on the lake by eleven. Fishermen were allowed in rowboats, which had to be licensed, but there were very few of them and so seldom did they go out other than on weekends that Harry had never seen one. The Croton Reservoir system, one of several that supplied water to New York City, was so huge, so surrounded by undeveloped buffers of forest land, and kept so empty of people that it seemed to be not forty miles from Times Square but somewhere in Canada or Maine. A few grandfathered estates came right down to the water, but even they had to comply with restrictions in view of protecting its purity. Allis’s boat, because it was supposed to be a rowboat, had a serial number on its bows, and was thus perfectly legal. It glowed rose and yellow in the August sun and was almost as fragrant as the pines amid which it slept.

Harry woke it up by turning it over to prepare it for being hoisted onto his shoulders and carried down to the lake. In ninety degrees of windless sun there was no need for a shirt, and he had changed into a pair of khaki rowing shorts and hung his clothes on the stub of a pine branch. Through the trees was a prairie of blue water as still as a mirror. The heat had silvered its surface not with mist but with a diffusion of light. He carried down the boat and oars, then set it in the shallows and locked them into the oarlocks. Without a dock, entering the boat was not uncomplicated, but two strokes later he was in deep open water.

Felt through the oars, the smooth resistance as he moved across the lake was a beautiful thing not least because of its alliance with a steady cadence and the rise of the heart to meet it in propelling the boat at the speed of a man running. The oarsman was the motor, his steadiness and discipline of technique yielding a constant velocity. As the lake’s hypnotic surface and rugged shoreline passed by, they made for thought and recollection as nature put anxiety and ambition on holiday and substituted in their place the genuine coin of the world.

Once, in the middle of October, when the sun was low, the open water, normally windblown, was flat except in his wake, which sparkled with a kind of light he had never before seen. Its flashes were triangular, their bases resting upon the surface. In a long line back, it seemed as if a group of sailboats were following his shell. But more remarkable still was that when a patch of water in the distance was disturbed by a gust of wind, the blinding triangular flashes, miniature sails bursting with fire, moved as if in an electric regatta. Turning, weaving, tacking, coming about, slowing, accelerating, rocking in the breeze and bouncing almost into the air, they possessed the speed and chaos of those swarms of white moths that sometimes hover over a field or take possession of a clearing. Each blinding flash was a perfect reiteration of the sun, each only instantaneous, its life too short to note much less to follow or record. Nonetheless, when and though it would disappear, it would appear again, or others like it would arise upon the same course resurrected, marvelously nimble and impossibly bright. Against a background of parti-colored foliage and a deep blue sky, this regatta of golden suns racing at high speed was so striking and hypnotic that Harry had almost rowed straight into the shore. Catching himself in time, he rested his oars and watched the hundred million flares, a world unto themselves and more joyful than swallows. With every power within him, and against sadness he could not deny, he had hoped that these were souls, that they were free to come with the light, and that they could rise at will and hover in the air to overlook all that they had never left.

Now he would row eight miles, entering just before the midpoint an extraordinary extension of the reservoir, accessible only over a hundred yards of six-inch shallows pouring across a bed of small glistening stones. To row past this obstruction and against the current, he could not dip his oars as deeply as usual, and had to increase his stroke to the point where it looked panicky. Then he would glide off the bar and into a long, narrow lake rounded at its far end and encompassed by granite ledges and stands of pine. The trees were uniform, dense, and dark. All the land around the lake was owned by the City of New York. There was no access road to it; fishing boats could not get in over the bar; there were no predators, no people; and the water, issuing from deep springs, was purer and fresher than that of the pristine reservoir itself. This Eden was Harry’s destination every time he rowed. At the end of the hidden lake, before he would start back, he would turn the boat and sit, listening to his heartbeat. In great heat, he would lift the water in the cup of his hand and drink, allowing it to cool him as it spilled through his fingers.

Now he raced toward the lake and its inlet, increasing speed as he closed, covered in sweat, burning up, and yet he was hardly exhausted, and each forward sweep invited the next as if with the easy assist of the wind. But the only wind in his final sprint to the bar was the ten-mile-per-hour breeze from the bow as a result of his forward momentum, which vanished as he glided over the shallows and was slowed by the exit current.

He always rowed slowly on the hidden lake as his reward for reaching it. Eyes stinging with salt, the heat from his body sometimes pulsing so that it felt hotter than sunlight, he turned in his seat to align the bow with the center of the lake’s far end. His oars dropped protectively of his balance and rested on top of the water, but without turning back, he kept looking. Halfway up and in the middle was a commotion of white foam. At first he thought it was a drowning deer thrashing the surface with its antlers, but it was moving forward a great deal faster than a deer could swim. Low to the water, steady, at half the speed of a single shell going at a good clip, it was too small to be a rowboat and had no oars projecting from it. But it was moving and agitating like some sort of mechanism, impossible to identify. He decided to catch up, and began to row hard.

After a minute or two of speed, he turned again to look. Closer to it now, he could see that the object projected alternately from about a foot and a half to about three feet above the water. He still didn’t know what it was or what it could be, and rowed furiously for a hundred strokes, counting them and afraid that he might overtake and collide with it. Having denied his curiosity during the hundred strokes, he turned again. Now he was close enough to see that it was a person, entirely unaware of him, kneeling on some sort of board and paddling violently. Fifty more strokes and he saw that it was a young woman. Twenty-five more and he glided past her. She was so surprised that she almost fell off her board, but then resumed, just as violently and as if to race him.

That, she could not do, and at the end of the lake he dropped his oars, came to a stop, and watched her approach. She straightened up and coasted over the last stretch, drifting to within ten feet of his boat. She was deeply tanned and completely wet, not with water alone but with her own glistening perspiration, breathing hard, visibly relieved to be able to straighten her back after however long she had bent forward to paddle. Never had he seen a woman with a body like hers, and musculature so well and beautifully defined, though not at all like a man’s. He was immediately convinced that this was the way women were born to be, if only because the world offered resistance in all its aspects, and until the very end, opposition to resistance—life—creates strength. She was beautiful in many other ways as well, not least because of the heat that, though she was deeply tanned, made her almost scarlet.

“I’ve never seen anyone here before, anyone,” she said, almost angrily.

“Nor have I,” Harry responded.

She had said it to protect her dignity, because she was wearing only a robin’s-egg-blue, satin brassiere and panties, and they were wet, tight, brief, and, though not entirely transparent, clinging. She did not hunch forward as she might have to minimize the glory of her splendid physique, but remained as straight-backed as her board. To stay balanced on it when its forward momentum had ceased, she had had to straddle it, and thus was he drawn to the two tendons that ran up each inner thigh, creating graceful, rounded channels that were perhaps the most inviting things he had ever seen (though he had seen others before in lesser examples).

Practically naked, in a lake of sapphire-blue, still water, in the high heat of Eden, they were aware of every detail of one another, with hardly anything hidden. Despite the magnificent way she held herself, he was drawn mainly to her face, now framed with partially wet chestnut-colored hair that shone in the overhead sun. She had the self-possession that came from intelligence, and he thought it had to be a great deal of intelligence, as it was a great deal of self-possession.

Still pulsing with heat, they stared at one another until he understood that she was daring him to pretend that he could not look at her forever, and that her near nakedness required of him some sort of polite speech. “Is this a sport I’ve never heard of,” he asked, gesturing toward her board, and her, “or do I have heat stroke?”

She looked down and almost laughed, hiding it with a cough. “No,” she said, “you don’t have heat stroke. In my sophomore year we went to Hawaii for Christmas, and my father shipped this back. Hawaiians ride the waves on them.” Her hair descended in long, accidental curls, and her eyes were blue. He could not stop himself from imagining her in a dress, décolleté, or a sundress and a straw hat. “Forgive me,” he said, smiling, “but I’m dressing you with my eyes, and it’s beautiful.”

“That’s a change, I’ll admit. Do you also read from right to left?”

“Sometimes.” She had no idea of what she had just elicited. “You go really fast on that thing. I think it’s a lot more exercise than rowing.”

“When I go to Hawaii again,” she said, “I want to go out on the waves. They’re so big they can kill you. To maneuver, you have to have speed, know how to turn the board, and place yourself on it. That I can do, and I’ve taken it to Southampton. Atlantic waves break rather than roll, but it’s halfway there.”

“Are you still in college?”

She nodded. “Are you?”

“I’m done. Where?”

“Smith.”

“Senior?”

“In two weeks.”

“And then what?”

“I’m engaged. I’m. . . .”

Pushed below the waves, he managed to bob up. “Would that preclude having lunch in the city?”

“No.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“You would, or it would be precluded?”

“It would be precluded.”

The sun was too hot, they were too close, and she was too magnificent for him to give up. “Might you be tempted out of preclusion?”

“Oh,” she said, “I would certainly be tempted, pleasingly tempted, tempted so that I will think about it for a day or two, and perhaps even when I’m old, but I’ll resist temptation, which is what you’re supposed to do.”

“Your character must be as strong as your body.”

“Stronger.”

“Can I know who you are, in case you get disengaged?”

“No” was the answer, given kindly.

“Fair enough.”

The sudden infatuation and its definitive end was like being in a kind of car crash, and he didn’t know what to say or how to break off and leave her. “Let’s hope that neither of us,” he finally said, “is arrested.”