In Sunlight and in Shadow (82 page)

“I’m a stage actress,” Catherine replied rather painfully, remembering every bad review and every review that should have been better, and every review that might have been written and was not.

Rice could see her shame, and didn’t know what to say, but Harry immediately filled in. “She has a good part, a strong part, in which she sings beautifully. The play’s been running for almost a year, with no end in sight.”

“Where?” said Rice, hoping that it would not be someplace like Trenton but assuming that it would. “I don’t even know where you live.”

“It’s a Broadway play,” Harry told him. “We live in New York.”

Relieved, Rice said, admiringly, “That’s really something.” The conversation continued, until Catherine Rice served the dinner, and, conquering her shyness, at the sound of plates being set upon a marble table in the center of the kitchen Hulda appeared and took Gordon, now fast asleep, from Catherine Copeland’s arms. It was hard for Catherine to let go.

“This was a baking surface,” Rice said. “You spread flour on it and it’s possible to roll dough without it sticking. They did a lot of baking then. We still do, if not as much, and we eat most of our meals right at this table. I put that light in.” He pointed to a translucent cone of green glass, lined with nacreous white, from which came the light of a shielded bulb. It hung over the table and lit the marble without glare.

Catherine Rice served a dinner that although it was centered around slices of the steak ubiquitous in the ranchlands, was otherwise Southeast Asian, with dipping sauces, rice, and some things that neither Harry nor Catherine could identify. The hostess explained. “I was in the South Pacific,” she said. “Most of the time we set up in villages at some remove from the battles, where we had the local foods as well as our own.” This was familiar to Harry. “When we had them, theirs were fresher, and we learned not only how to cook the way they did, but how to treat what we were issued as they would. So what you have here is a mixture.”

“Not Chinese,” Rice added, “although people think it is.”

“How long were you there?” Catherine asked.

“Late ’forty-two through May of ’forty-five, the whole time: it was too far away to come home. We started in Australia and went almost to Japan, and never knew whether we had a lot of rest punctuated by war or a lot of war punctuated by rest. I was quite young when I went in, and not young at all when I got out.” She said this with an air of deep, earned authority, and ruefully. As if to set a seal on this, as Catherine Copeland moved her hands her woven bracelet with the jeweled signets clinked and reflected the light that Rice had hung above the table.

The war had not really touched Catherine. She had been young and safely far from combat. Hardly unaware of the loss, she had not, however, been damaged by it, and here she was the only one of the four who had not been on a front. “What kind of work did you do?” she asked the other Catherine, hoping that the answer would be that it had been something auxiliary and removed from the fighting, not too much unlike what Bryn Mawr girls did when they rolled bandages.

“Recovery,” Catherine Rice answered. “After surgery, they were sent to us. Although there had to be triage, we were generous with surgery even for those for whom surgery was just a gesture. Because there were supply ships right offshore and we were never far from the coast, we could afford to be less frugal than the field hospitals in Europe, and for the most part we were. When the surgeons tried to save those who could not be saved, we had to struggle to keep them alive, though we knew they were not going to live.

“The surgeries were often very fast, and then it was up to us—doctors of course, but mainly the nurses—to see them through. And so many of them didn’t come through. This lasted, periodically, for more than three years. There was so much death the hospitals were churches. I feel very bad because I can hardly remember their faces, and there were thousands, and each one. . . .” Here she stopped, overcome, but she recovered.

“Each one . . . was a soul. Each one had been a child. Each one was loved. Perhaps coarsely, perhaps not well, but loved. And they died out there, without their mothers, their fathers, their wives and children. Not a single one wanted to go. Everything was regret, I saw so much regret. If only they had been near their families: they missed them so much. Especially for those who died on the battlefield, something was opened that can never be closed.

“Every time a soldier died, we were taken, for a moment that seemed never to end, on the very same wave. In Australia, before it all started, I used to swim in the surf. Sometimes it was so powerful, the waves so fierce, that you couldn’t move your arms or legs to try to guide yourself. That’s what it was like at each death. Defeat. You cry, you hang your head, your heart breaks, you see what we are, and it shows you that the only thing we have, though we may imagine otherwise, is love.”

Though stunned and moved, Catherine, the daughter of many generations of brave men and women, maintained her composure, as did Catherine Rice. “Did they fall in love with you?” Catherine asked. “You’re a beautiful woman.”

“They were going to die. They were apart from their families. And I was the woman who was there. Because of childbearing, a woman is more than half of life. Their strongest impulse was not to survive, but to love, so that even as they died they might live. They would come to us by scores and hundreds, and when they became conscious and in not too terrible pain, they would fall in love so strongly and purely, each and every one of them. And then they just vanish. They’re gone. They don’t appear again, or write letters from beyond. Silence. And then forgetting.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t ask this,” Catherine said. “Forgive me. But did you fall in love with them?”

“I did,” Catherine Rice said weakly, and bowed her head.

“You helped them,” Catherine asserted. “You did help them.”

“Yes, I did.” She lifted her eyes to the others. “On Guadalcanal the Pacific is turquoise and blue, and the tents of the field hospitals were dark green, with red the only occasional contrasting color. It was way too heavy, a lousy way to die. There was a boy, a marine, and he was just about to go. I could see that he was oppressed by the heaviness of the canvas, and the red was no good—the red crosses that were on a lot of things. So I said, Would you like to see the Pacific, the blue? And he moved his head to say yes.

“I rolled up the sides of the tent and turned his bed around. You could see the sea straight out, empty except for warships riding at anchor, which looked very small. Beyond the surf, heat waves welded the sea to the sky in a kind of border. He stared at it. It was where he was going, and he felt no fear, as if he had said to himself, That’s where I’m going, it’s beautiful there, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. It was so much better than some shitty olive-drab canvas that in the shadows inside is so green it’s almost black. I opened the flaps and turned the beds whenever I could. We all did. The blue comforted them. They went with less suffering, less fear, when the sea took them. That’s what I did. That’s all I did.”

Catherine then embraced Catherine Rice, resting her left elbow on the smooth white marble, as Catherine Rice did the same with her right. “Now I have a baby,” said Catherine Rice, “a husband and a baby.” She took a sharp, involuntary breath in.

Harry had already had a bond with Rice that could never be broken, but now they were all united in a way that time and distance could not defeat. After a long evening easily talking about everything, Rice insisted upon driving them back to their hotel, until they stepped out of the house, and the moon was so huge and close, the air so perfect, that he said driving them would be a sin. After they parted, Catherine and Harry walked down the road toward the lights of the town.

“We could move here,” Catherine said. “They’re wonderful people. They would be our friends. We’d have them; we could buy a ranch; San Francisco isn’t that far: for pearls, books, and ocean liners to Japan. After a war you have the right to start fresh. You can leave everything behind and make a new life.” She paused. “You didn’t ask Rice, did you?”

The two men had been alone for a while, looking over maps of the valley that Rice was someday to own with his wife.

“No. Married, with a newborn?”

“
We’re
married.”

“Catherine, the time for something like this comes, and this is mine.”

“It was yours during the war,” Catherine argued, thinking about the baby she had cradled. Now she could almost feel his weight, and the sad lightening of her arms when she had given him up.

“I know.”

He stopped and pulled her close. They always came together easily. With building affection he felt her hair and breathed the sweet air that rose from her body. “Look at that,” he said, meaning the town resting on the silvery ridge, its strings of lights still glowing.

The wind was soft, and they were happy and unafraid. Then the strings of colored lights over the dance floor were switched off. The moonlight brightened, the town receded, and in the quiet on the silvered black road, Catherine said, “Just like the theater, except that in the theater there was never so much art.”

J
OHNSON WAS THE
first to arrive, on Tuesday, the twenty-first of October. Compared to Wisconsin, New York was like Miami, and when he stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central he had to remove his coat because the air on the platform was so humid and hot. By the time he got to the cavernous great hall, he was sweating as he hadn’t since summer. Crossing the marble floor at speeds so high it seemed as if they were being chased were the first New Yorkers he had seen in their native habitat. They put their feet down like campers stamping out a fire, launched themselves forward like divers off low boards, and seemed not to see anything, by reason of having seen it before. It was as if they possessed such a dense registry of memories that they could fly through reality on instruments, thinking their thoughts, solving their puzzles, and doing their sums while seeking Lexington Avenue on autopilot.

He stood in the middle of the floor, slightly east of the information booth, astounded by a room so big it had its own constellations. The sky is not green. How did they know that virtually no one would say, “Why is the sky green? Because it isn’t.” He could hardly believe the speed at which everything moved. The lines at the ticket windows advanced and spit out ticket holders the way Coca-Cola plants put the caps on bottles. The stairs from Vanderbilt Avenue were like a waterfall down which people cascaded long before rush hour. In Chicago’s Union Station, the biggest he had previously seen, early afternoon was a mausoleum. But in Grand Central it was as if someone had set off a thousand rockets and they were bouncing crazily against the walls.

As he had on the train to track things of interest as they flew past, he fastened now on a woman who was almost leaping over the people ahead of her on the stairs. He stuck with her so tightly that the rest of everything became a blur. You could not say she was pretty, but she had a strong face, with a thrust-out nose that matched her thrust-out breasts, except that her nose was not restrained by a brassiere and the top of a dress striped like a candy cane in white and off-white. A belt around her waist was as thick as a cummerbund and at the back it was a bow. Her hair was chestnut, swept from her face, shoulder length. She wore wire glasses, her heels clicked on the travertine like a machine-gun belt ejecting links, and her crazed forward motion, like someone running after an escaped rabbit, was stabilized royally by a disc-like, aerodynamic, white hat three times the size of a pie plate.

She seemed to be coming right for him, as if she knew him, as if she loved him, as if she were about to attack him. Because he knew her in part already, having concentrated upon her, he thought that maybe she did know him, and that she would suddenly stop and say, “Where were you?” or “I love you” or “What’s playing at the Roxy, and if we don’t get there in time for the afternoon show we’ll miss Velez and Yolanda, the world’s most exquisite dancers.” Or perhaps she would say, “This is my time, and I’m bearing down hard upon it, which is why I walk so fast and why you should, too. Come out with me, walk down the avenues, look across the river at the steam clouds rising for a mile and looming like mountains. Take off my hat, stare at me, touch me, kiss me.”

But she said nothing. She didn’t even see him, or if she did she gave no sign, and she blew past, a foot away—her guidons of striped taffeta flapping—like the mail train in Wisconsin. Said train does not stop, but pushes on to Chicago, dropping off and picking up with its deadly hook the wasp-waisted sacks of mail with letters that could come from Mozambique, its stamps green, coffee-colored, and red, the tropics made miniature to tempt the souls of snow-covered stamp collectors. She was gone in a puff, but when she was gone it was indeed as if she had kissed him. And that, he discovered, was New York.

Already changed and left standing like a rube, he then humiliated himself by asking where his hotel was. It might have been less humiliating had he not asked at the information booth, which sat in the center of the marble sea, encased in brass, beneath a giant turnip that thought it was a clock. At the information booth, questions were suffered indignantly. “Excuse me,” he said, his first mistake. “Can you tell me how to get to the Waldorf-Astoria?” What he should have said was, “Ha-doo’wai geh tu d’Wawldawf?” Because he didn’t say it that way, the man in charge of the western front thought that he was being mocked, despite the fact that Johnson was carrying a suitcase. Sometimes college boys, and Johnson looked young for his age, went to elaborate lengths to torment the prisoners of the information booth, asking, for example, “How many balls are there in New York?”

“Track seventeen, leaving two-oh-seven.”

“The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel?”

“Step aside, there are real people out there.”

“I’m real,” Johnson said.

“In your dreams, big ass.”

Dumbfounded, Johnson eventually asked a policeman, who was, if abrupt, not impolite. Then he emerged somehow onto Park Avenue—another name for the rocket-launching rails to Westchester and beyond, ornamented on either side by people who rode horses and tried to send their sons to Princeton. The policeman said the hotel would be on the right, five blocks north, look for the flags. Johnson did, and it was. Another deal like the Drake: all paid for; peacocks, jewels, and gold; a piano being played elegantly in the bar; an elevator that popped his ears; a room that looked out upon the smoothest, most relaxed view he had ever seen, a city stretching languidly to infinity, dotted with parks, lakes, and trees that even at the end of their autumnal haze were explosively yellow and rusty scarlet (who was playing the piano at the bar).