In Sunlight and in Shadow (80 page)

Having already been to East Hampton a few times that summer, she went with Harry to California to recruit Rice. Recruiting Rice would be either successful or unsuccessful in only a day or two, or perhaps just half an hour, and then they would have the rest of the time together.

Harry had never been to California. She would show it to him, having been there as a girl at an ideal age and in an ideal season, discovering a Garden of Eden in Pasadena, where from her parents’ capacious suite she could see the great expanse of a green valley splashed with the reds and saffrons of hibiscus and date palms and backed by a steep mountain range laden with shining snow. The light alone was a barrier to the sorrows of the Old World.

In sun unfiltered and uninterrupted by cloud, they stood on the bone-white tarmac at Idlewild in a breeze coming off the sea. Harry was in a blazer. Catherine was gorgeous and overdressed. To left and right were two identical planes of polished aluminum buffed by sand and hail into a semi-golden sheen that embraced the fuselages and rested lightly upon the wings. The landing gear was so leggy it elevated the planes high off the ground, and their streamlining was such that both aircraft seemed like starved swans. Harry noted that the engines were oversized and the aerodynamics better suited to a fighter than a transport.

The people boarding the aircraft to the left were headed to Cuba, and some already had straw hats. Those on the right were flying to San Francisco. Stewardesses in navy blue, their hair up under jaunty caps with white piping, guided the passengers on the steps and into the planes. As ocean wind swept through the reeds at the edge of the field, Catherine asked Harry if he missed his parachute and rifle, and he said no, though it would forever be unnatural to board a plane without both. Blinded by the dazzling airliners even though both Catherine and Harry were in sunglasses, their hair lifting in the wind, they filed slowly toward the stairs and then up them. Briefly turning at the cabin door, they saw over Brooklyn and the marshes the great towers of Manhattan as waves of morning light broke against their iridescent stone and glass.

During the war, because it was for many couples the last place they would know together before the men went to fight in the Pacific, the Mark Hopkins had, and would keep for years thereafter, a special significance that made it more than just a high tower on a steep hill. In the somewhat indelicate idiom of the bellboys, there was a whole lot of fucking going on, nineteen storeys of it, day in and day out, as if the hotel were a station on a conveyor belt that led to the troopships and fighting vessels parading from the bay into the banks of North Pacific fog, and then into a world of azure seas, and green hills riddled with Japanese machine-gun emplacements. The bellboys, being boys, misunderstood, for the tower they served was like a cathedral, and its sacrament, which they called fucking, was the deepest and at times the last expression of love between a man who might not come back and a woman charged with the especially difficult task of waiting for him.

How many times had her whitened body, resting upon turned-back sheets a thousand feet above the ethereal blue of the bay, been offered to husband or lover perhaps to leave behind the last of his life in her charge? Where ordinarily desk clerks would enforce the code of marriage, here, during the war, they did not, lest they deprive a man of his continuation or a woman of her love. And these nineteen storeys were indeed more church-like than the cathedral up the street, magnificent as it was. Here they parted, and here they conjoined, in an altar of the Pacific war, leaving without a living father many a child who did not know his elegant and vertiginous origins.

And here Harry and Catherine made love as if he, too, were departing for the Pacific. It was not simply having sex in a hotel, and they understood this. The way they held tight as if in a struggle, the way they looked into one another’s eyes, and the sadness they felt were almost as if they were spending their last hours together. And yet, as had others, lying together exhausted and totally united they felt that a knot had been tied forever and that everything that had unraveled had been knit back up.

As it got dark, Catherine led Harry upstairs to dinner. They watched the lights coming up and the bay darkening to indigo, and looked calmly over the world with no fear of leaving it, having, although they did not know it, fulfilled the task for which they had been born.

It took an hour to go from San Francisco—where the ocean was a frigid blue and the light was cool—to the Sacramento Valley, where, to the left and right of kiln-fired yellow prairie, dry mountains stood in long golden lines. The wind was hot, and carried the smoke of burnt fields and the scent of things growing. If the coast belonged to the Pacific Northwest, the valley clung stubbornly to Mexico—in its shimmering dryness, the supremacy of the sun, and its emptiness of nearly everything but agriculture, light, color, and heat.

Although finding their bearings in the great north-south valley was not complicated, the roads were poorly marked, and in a rented convertible as big as a boat, the top down, they found themselves raising dust on dirt tracks that ran between fields stretching endlessly in every direction. To be lost in such intense sun-beaten color was a pleasure, and if they took an extra day to get up to Redding it hardly mattered, for they had no precise appointment. Still, after an hour or two of elated cruising with their radio supplying Mexican music that could not have been better suited to the terrain, they saw an ancient truck parked in a field ahead, where a man was stacking long irrigation pipes.

“Let’s ask,” Catherine said. Harry reluctantly threw the wheel over to the left as the car followed into a fallow field and crossed it like a tank. As they approached, the man loading pipe stopped and stood straight. A bracero the color of tanned leather, he had a broad mustache and kind yet cautious eyes. When the car came up even with the truck, Harry took it out of gear and, while still seated, greeted him with a little bow. “Can you tell me where the road is that will take us to the road to Redding?” Harry asked.

For a second the bracero stared at him, then widened his eyes and spread his hands casually and asymmetrically to the sky, to say that he didn’t speak English. That was all right, because Catherine spoke Spanish of a sort. Pulling herself out of her seat, she turned and knelt, so that now she looked over Harry’s head. The chrome fitting she grasped to hold herself steady was pleasantly hot. “Where is the road to Redding?” she asked in Spanish that, though it may not have been correct, carried the inimitable loveliness of her voice.

“Oh, the road to Redding,” the bracero said. And then, in the hot wind, he began a five-minute dissertation. Each time he mentioned a junction where they had to make a turn, Catherine counted on her fingers. At the end, she had gone through both hands and started over again, logging fourteen turns. “There are fourteen turns,” she said in Spanish. “It’s impossible.”

“I know,” the man said.

“Are the crossroads marked?”

He thought this was funny.

“How do you get out of here?”

“Me, I don’t,” he said. “I live here.” He smiled at their predicament. “It’s pretty.”

“Yes, it is,” Catherine told him. She looked west toward the line of mountains and shaded her eyes with her left hand, her right resting on the top of the seat back.

“Ask him if there’s a town near here where we can stay,” Harry said.

She did, and, still kneeling, reported back. “He says about ten miles that way—her right arm swung like a compass needle, clearing the top of the windshield—there’s a town with a hotel and a restaurant. He says that everybody goes there because they can get vanilla ice cream in a big glass of root beer. How does that sound?”

“It sounds like a root-beer float.”

“I can see that,” Catherine added.

They thanked him and drove off toward the root-beer float, Catherine still kneeling on the seat, facing backward and waving like a little girl.

They didn’t need to know the name of the town, and didn’t ask. And because everyone there knew it, it wasn’t written anywhere. “It’s like New York,” Harry said to Catherine as he watched her in the shower in the best room—it was clean—in the hotel.

“It is?”

“Because in New York there aren’t signs everywhere that say ‘New York.’ I’ve seen a sign at the northern extremity of the Bronx that says ‘City Limits,’ but it doesn’t say which city. My guess is that it’s there to keep out the savages of Yonkers.”

“Are you staring at me?” Catherine asked as shampoo foam ran down her body in streams of hot water.

“I am.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Do I enjoy it? Oh!”

“Even after all this time?”

“I could watch you for a thousand years, naked or clothed. Each is better than the other.”

“I have to confess,” she said, “that I enjoy it when you do . . . tremendously.”

Two hours later, having used up a great deal of hot water, they were sitting in a booth in the only restaurant in town, not surprisingly the Café Mexicana, where because it was so near closing time they had only one option: steak Mexicana, salad Mexicana, tortillas, beer, and root-beer floats. Their steaks were actually fajitas hot in temperature and otherwise. The salad, with hot sauce and chili, was such as they had never had, and they got the hang of buttered tortillas after the proprietor explained how to handle them.

“I’ve been to Mexican restaurants in New York,” Catherine said, “but they’re so fancy that everything was unrecognizable. This, however. . . . If you brought it to the East it would really take off.”

“After French rules for a while,” Harry offered. “All the soldiers coming back from France. It happened in the twenties as well.”

“Why didn’t it last?”

“The Depression.”

“You know,” Catherine said, “I like this restaurant better than any I’ve ever been to in New York. In New York, you go into a restaurant and everyone looks at you. Not here.”

“That’s because there’s no one here but us,” Harry informed her. “And look over there.”

She turned to see. The proprietors were staring at her as if hypnotized. “They want to go home, that’s all. But in New York, it’s like entering a contest. The other diners stare at you.”

“They stare at
you.
”

“Not just me. Everyone’s measure is taken. Even the waiters are engaged in a great, never-ending Olympics of station. I think that’s because, although they lose all the time, they can win if they spot a phony, of which there are many.” She looked around. “But not here.” She glanced again at the very dignified middle-aged man and his wife, both of whom seemed happy, but eager to close up. “
They’re
not in combat with us.”

“I may be out of my mind,” Harry said, “but I’ve been thinking about maybe living here. Pulling the plug in New York and coming here. I can’t run away, or can I? I could live with dishonor, guilt. I could stand knowing that I’d run away and let evil run its course. All I need is you.”

As Catherine put down her fork, it clanged on the plate. “I’ve been thinking that, too,” she said.

“Catherine, I had a vision while we were driving. We lived in a white cottage on the slope of the mountains, overlooking a sea of golden fields. I don’t know whether they were ours or not; it doesn’t matter. It was quiet, private, sunny. It was as if there were no people in the world, or it was not even in the world. You were in the garden, planting flowers. You wore a white blouse that was open quite far down, and you were a sort of light olive and tan color but with so much red underlying it and showing through because of the heat, though now and then there was a cool breeze. Sometimes you wiped the sweat from your brow with your forearm and you blinked. And there was a rhythm to your work. Your hands shaped the loam in a floating kind of way, quickly, sometimes thrusting down into the dark earth but then gently healing the wound, as if your hands themselves knew exactly what to do to cultivate and plant.”

“We can do that,” she said, “if we want.”

“No. It’s just a dream. It wouldn’t work.”

Catherine was young enough to say, “Why not?”

They stayed in the town, but because their rest had refreshed them they got in the car and drove as if they hadn’t driven all day. They might have driven all night, had they not suspected that at four in the morning their clarity and energy might desert them. So rather than pushing north they followed long, straight farm roads into the darkened valley, navigating by the stars, with no place in particular to go. They had done this before, coming in from East Hampton.

In the midst of the many paths that lay across the land and beneath the gliding stars was one that branched off in a curve. For a time it followed a huge irrigation channel. The water rushing headlong in the dark was so loud they could hear it over their engine. Then the road abruptly changed direction and climbed a projection in the valley floor, as out of place as a volcano and a hundred or more feet high, at the summit of which the road came to an end with hardly any room to turn around. They stopped here, facing south, stunned by the pellucid night.

Lined with blue at its western edge, the sky was heavy with stars that, sparkling gently, showed a barely perceptible hint of yellow. An uninterrupted horizon was visible in the direction they were facing, they were high up, and many stars seemed to be below them, others straight on. More like gentle lamps than stars, their blinking was not cold and quick like the disinterested stars of winter, but slow and seductive, as if they were speaking in a code that all mankind understood, even if it did not know that such a language existed, much less that it was following its benevolent commands. And along with the stars came the inexplicable illusion that the warm wind was visible in a procession across the valley floor. While Harry and Catherine were suspended among these stars, for three hundred and sixty degrees the world was as calm as if it had never known anything but peace and perfection.

“I didn’t know the world could be like this,” Catherine said. “I’ve never seen the sky in such a passion of kindness.”