In Sunlight and in Shadow (8 page)

Passing through the mitered beams of spotlights that convened upon the stage, she was now ready to take up her task. “So fast?” the director asked as the musicians walked sideways to their places amid a forest of metal chairs. The happiness of her expression betrayed her answer and her certainty.

“Okay,” he said, “from the top, and when you’re ready. Remember, what you see is the streets, the traffic, the mass of buildings—not a nineteenth-century drawing room.” He had described the set that would be there months later, after they had opened in Boston and if they were fortunate enough to get back to New York. They had the theater in the daytime on days without matinees, and the play that was running in the space they hoped eventually to occupy at night was a drama about what one critic had called “the discovery of physics.” The set in which Catherine was to represent the miracle of a city was at the moment displaced by a London drawing room in which, by nine that night, fake German accents would contend with fake English accents in arguments about the atom: “I have izolated zeh atom in zeh zspecial zserum!” “Bloody not!”

His front bathed in lectern light, the conductor took up a white wand and, without a tap, quickly lifted and depressed it to make his musicians ready. Then began a coordinated rush: a blast of brass, a piano tremolo, a horn, bells, and Catherine’s marvelous breath, the finest note of all, and so full of life it was like God breathing into Adam, a woman in the midst of love, a cry of astonishment, or the sound made by a swimmer who bursts into light and air. For in her quarter of a second she outdid the instruments, the plan, the setting, the lighting, the book, the music itself. That she could do this so readily and so well, stunned her listeners, but then came the song, so different from the brassy start, so terribly moving and entrancingly slow. It was, at least in that very moment, the most beautiful song in the world.

“That was . . . ,” the director said, unable to find words when the music ended. “That was. . . . Can you do it again, just like that?”

“Yes.”

“From the top,” he commanded.

The conductor lifted his baton a second time, the music started with the same professional consistency, and at the right instant Catherine came in, playing a note that, though it was common to everyone who had ever lived, here was played astonishingly well. When she finished her song, the director, thinking of Boston and Broadway and his apotheosis, spoke as if from the thrones of Hollywood.

“It couldn’t be better,” he told her. “Keep it just like that. And the beginning. . . . God, I was looking at this
fahkahkteh
set, but I saw Madison Square.”

“I have a suggestion,” Catherine said, though not because she was taking advantage of the quick rise in her stock, for she would have spoken up anyway. “I arrive at Penn Station from God knows where. . . .”

“Chickens,” the director filled in. This was his opinion of anything west of the Hudson and east of Santa Monica Boulevard.

“Yes, you said that, but where?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Why Pennsylvania?”

“Are you arguing with the book, Miss Sedley?”

“The book doesn’t specify.”

“So we can supply anything we want. You can’t be from the South, you don’t speak that way. Most of Pennsylvania is rural, and you really are from Pennsylvania.”

“I’m from New York,” Catherine said. “I went to college in Pennsylvania.”

“Where’d you learn to speak that way? Don’t ask me for a raise, but it’s gorgeous.”

“Thank you. I don’t know.”

“Bryn Mawr,” the director said, pointing at her with the index finger of his left hand as if he had solved a mystery.

“No, Sidney,” she replied. “New York, with possibly a little Bryn Mawr, although I doubt it.”

“New York City?” he asked, pointing the same finger now at the floor. Her voice and manner of speaking were so aristocratic that he looked at her for a long moment as he realized that he didn’t really know who she was. He might have resented her refined mien and speech, but he didn’t, because he knew that though the country had long before given the forbears of people like her their chance, and that obviously they had taken it, it was now giving him his. “Whatever your speech,” he said, “keep it.”

“I arrive from Pennsylvania,” she stated, moving on. “I set the scene. The audience sees the city through my eyes and in the breath. Then I meet Wilson in the automat.”

“Who the hell is Wilson?”

“I mean Charles. I fall in love with him, I go to work at Lord and Taylor, he falls in love with Amanda, the society girl, and I’m out, finished, smunk”—they wondered what she meant by
smunk
—“and I can be home by nine-thirty, despite my song, which is really great, and makes people cry even way at the beginning of the play. It should be at the end of the play.”

“You can’t rewrite the book, Catherine, and a lot of actors would die so they could be home at nine-thirty.”

“Wouldn’t it be better,” she asked, as if he hadn’t said anything and as if he hardly existed, “if I, and not Amanda, married Charles? Because, the way it’s written, Amanda is kind of a bitch, and I’m the underdog. She’s got the money, a mansion, a chauffeur, and she’s really a God-awful bitch, really. I’m a farm girl, from a chicken-keeping place in Pennsylvania, who becomes a shop girl. This is a play, Sidney. I should marry Charles.” She seemed dumbfounded at the injustice.

“You are going to argue with the book.”

“Well, yes.”

“Look,” said the director, “Charles is a returning soldier. The play is called
Homecoming,
right? He’s a poor Irish boy from Hell’s Kitchen. You’re right, this is a play.
He
gets the society girl. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, because that’s what people like.”

Knowing that she would not prevail, Catherine looked to the side as she spoke, which was what she often did when she knew that her words would be spoken in vain. “But what do I get?” she asked, as if she and her part were the same. “What about me? It would be a better play if Charles married me.”

“And you would have a bigger part. And we would have to rewrite the play, change the lyrics, and add new songs. It doesn’t work that way, Catherine. We’ve got investors.”

“All right,” she said, “though if you did, I would be happy to switch parts with Amanda.”

“No,” the director decreed. “Especially not after today. We need you for your song. We need you for that breath. We need you for that one note, Catherine. Catherine, on that one note, this play depends.”

She hadn’t been unhappy with his assessment. How could she have been? Still, she found it galling that he had his eye on her, and every time he spoke to her or looked her way she wanted to say, “Sidney, there are many buttons that never should be unbuttoned, and never will be, at least not by you.” In her dressing room, in front of an electrified mirror that bathed her in incandescent light, she tried to mark her position and think ahead through the confusion of Harry, Victor, and God knows what else. And she found herself struggling, hardly for the first time, against a competing image, a picture that was moving and yet somehow still, of a boy swinging on a rope tied to the girders of an elevated train platform on the East Side. It was somewhere near 100th Street. Moving from sunlight into shadow and shadow into sunlight, he made a perfect inverted arc. She had seen him sometime in the twenties, as she passed in a car that seemed as big as a room, on her way south to her house overlooking the garden and the river. He was older than she was, but it didn’t matter. Though she was only a little girl and had no hope of ever seeing him again, something had happened. She had looked through the glass and seen him just as he had come into the sunlight at the top of his arc, and for an instant, in a flash that to the conscious mind is incomprehensible—behind him, to his left, merely from the corner of his eye and through the window of a moving car—he had seen her.

As he reached the top of the arc his feet pointed gracefully but unconsciously to the path he would then follow. He had had no idea that she had seen him, and no idea that, as he flew from light to shadow and back, she had taken his image into her eyes as if with the decisive click of a camera shutter.

The boy on the rope, by her long, insistent memory, by what he was and how he had lasted, was fighting hard not to be forgotten. Somehow, he had seen her through shame and grief, and she had never betrayed him. She saw herself behind the polished glass reflecting the lace-like girders. She saw his face, and her own, and though she knew that he was long gone and she would never see him again, when he had flown silently from light to dark, and back again, rising and falling beneath the steelwork, he had come into her life forever.

O
THER THAN HAVING
to be there less, one of Harry’s chief pleasures in arriving late to work was to traverse the narrow blocks west of Fifth Avenue at midmorning. Here, industrial lofts were stacked twenty storeys or more in massive buildings that kept the street in shadow except when, rising or setting, the sun was low and its light golden red in rifle-shot alignment east to west or west to east. To a practiced ear, the noise of this district was divided and comprehensible. By listening as closely as if to birds in the forest it was possible to disentangle the weavings of sound and give each thread its due.

The wind, above all, when it whistled past, moving in great volume through the high canyons and meticulously touching everything, provided a background of ascending or descending notes determined by the speed of the air, its temperature and density, what windows had been left open or closed, what chains were hanging, what ventilators revolved at what speed and with what squeak and shriek due to oil or its lack, or friction, malfunction, or rust. Adding to the roar were trucks by the hundreds, never in the same permutation, with different types of engines at various rates of idle, diesel or gasoline, shaking, jangling, or smooth, and parked in different patterns, and automobiles from limousines to motorcycles, not to mention carts, bicycles, and garment racks with little wheels that made more noise than locomotives.

Like the bleats of Tibetan sheep, the car horns of Manhattan echoed across the cliffs. Conversation and argument in a dozen languages mixed with cries, shouts, and commands to back or stop, load or drop. Freight elevators were in constant motion, surprisingly rising and falling, sometimes emerging magically and unfolding from the sidewalk, their steel frames sprouting like beanstalks. Their castled gates opened and closed, slammed and shut, in iron and wood, solid and grid. Presiding over this were hundreds of men and scores of women who passed in and out of building entrances and stood by their trucks or pushed racks and dollies loaded with boxes, clothing, tailings, and bolts. This was a society that only they could fully understand. On every block, hundreds of companies, each more or less unknown to the other, went about their complex work, the thousands of employees divided into sections and subsections, cliques, groups, and friendships. Cross-banded by ethnicity, language, and past acquaintance, they mixed together on the street. When they came out for lunch, left for the day, or arrived in the morning, it was like Coney Island in July as thousands jostled against thousands. But at other times it was less crowded, and most often when Harry arrived at the Copeland Leather loft on 26th Street he would pass the chiefs and capos, those workers who absent formal powers managed to stand in charge and run the action of the street.

Their networks were invisible, and they seemed to know one another whether they did or not. They inspected everyone who passed, and controlled their building entrances like guards at the White House. They worked sporadically, the casts they supervised changed every few minutes, and they could speak in concussive bursts that enabled them to carry on a conversation with someone across the street and a hundred feet down the block as if they were standing shoulder to shoulder. They greeted one another explosively. “Hey! Vinnie!” they might shout, as if Vinnie, whom they had seen half an hour before, had just come back from the dead. “Hey hey hey!”

He—Harry, not Vinnie, not yet—could have joined the Harvard Club, sat in its vast main room and, surrounded by crimson and gold and bathed in the cocktail light of late afternoon, listened to the ticking of the clock and the play of the fire. He could have gone there pretending to have arrived, the rough edges of the city smoothed and its sharp sounds muted. But each time he received an invitation from the Harvard Club to join he was seduced instead by the industrial lofts stacked one upon another, their society, their industry, and their vitality, and he postponed his application for the time when he could do little but rest in the kind of comfortable chair that is to the end of life what a cradle is to the beginning.

Although the unwritten code was that if you were in a suit you took the lobby elevators and pressed buttons, he preferred to ride with the freight. And now, because the freight elevator was waiting disengaged at street level, he seized the webbing strap with which to part the gates, pulled it down, and watched one rise and the other fall until he could step through. Then he cleared them and guided to the fourteenth floor the immense box in which, though it could have held the weight of three or four elephants, he was the only passenger. The whole fourteenth floor was his, not leased but owned by Copeland Leather, and other than Cornell he was the only one who had been present since its beginnings. Having played there as a child, he knew the place in microscopic detail as only a child can. Though it changed day by day according to the needs of the moment, though walls were put up and taken down, lights and machines moved, reorganizations accomplished, and though he had been largely absent for six years before the war and entirely so for four years during the war itself, it was imprinted on him as on no one else. He was aware of things there that adults skated over, having learned them in other places and filed them away. Despite the changes, he could have found his way in the dark, as one can in one’s childhood home, and he was as comfortable here in his early thirties as he had been at six.