In Sunlight and in Shadow (90 page)

“It’s someone else’s. I gave it to you by mistake.”

“What are you going to do, take it back?” Catherine asked.

“It’s not yours.”

Catherine took a large bite out of the sandwich and said, “Now it is.”

The waitress went for the milkshake, into which, after letting go of the plate post-conquest, Catherine stuck her left index finger. The waitress took it anyway. “They won’t know,” she said.

“I’ll tell them,” Catherine told her.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I will, and your manager, too.”

“Fuck you,” the waitress said quietly, and slammed down the milkshake so that a bit of it flew out of the glass.

“Dream about your tip,” Catherine commanded.

“People don’t tip at the counter.”

“
I
do.”

“I wouldn’t ever come back here if I was you,” the waitress said.

Catherine was preternaturally collected. “Because I don’t like eating food that has been touched by a monkey, I’ll wait until you’re dead.”

“Fuck you.”

“You said that.”

The waitress went to the other side of the horseshoe-shaped counter and traded places with another waitress, who upon taking her station asked Catherine, “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine,” Catherine said.

By this time, two women had sat down on either side of Catherine and were having a conversation behind her back, which for her was a very strange feeling. She asked the one on her left if she would like to exchange seats (the stools had backs). “Oh no, deah. We can stretch awah back muscles. It’s bettah than going to a chiropractah.”

“Okay,” Catherine said.

As she ate her sandwich and drank her milkshake she could not avoid hearing their conversation.

“She takes twice as lawng to type the wholesale invoices as Oiy do, and she gets a raise!”

“She’s new.”

“So whoiy should she get a raise?”

“Becawse, she’s new. It was too low to begin with. Then it’ll stay, like ahwas. I know it’ll stay fa-evah.”

“That my poynt, Dawris. That’s what Oiy’m saying. Nothing evah happens. It used to be that it did, in the olden days, but not now.”

“But the waugh. Theah was a waugh!” She looked at her friend in astonishment.

“Dawris, let me clue you in. The waugh’s ovah. Like Oiy told ya, nothing evah happens.”

Catherine finished her milkshake, and like all courageous people, made a huge noise with the straw as she pulled in the very last of it.

She hated doctors’ offices, for what they looked like, how they smelled, how they sounded, and Park Avenue had as many as there were berries on a holly. In suites of rooms where once families had lived, now the floors were covered with coarse gray carpeting or black linoleum, the moldings laced with the thin lines of indelible soot that embed themselves forever in New York paint even after it has dried. And when the heat was on, doctors’ offices were terribly dry. No one took showers there, washed dishes, or boiled water for spaghetti, so the air was never moistened except by the escape of alcohol from sterilization trays.

Where once there had been libraries, newspapers, drawers full of fliers and letters, now there were overthumbed copies of
National Geographic, Life, Time, Look,
the
Saturday Evening Post, and Gynecological Abstracts.
In what had been bedrooms, studies, and dining rooms, lovemaking, sleep, study, and family dinners were banished in favor of unpleasant and painful examinations for which one had to pay. The rooms held Prussian-looking white cabinets with glass fronts through which one could see kidney-shaped vessels of white enamel or stainless steel, in which rested sharp and unbending instruments—scalpels, probes, calipers, and spreaders. The furniture was born on the banks of the river Styx, with stirrups, and with rolls of white kraft that, for reasons of sanitation, extended over it like Brobdingnagian toilet paper. And on the walls were very bad oils or watercolors, which sometimes could not compete aesthetically with the pink and yellow renderings of viscera staring out from just above a drug company calendar.

Why did she have to come back? She had been through the indignity of putting her feet in the stirrups and wanted to be done with it for at least another year, when she would read about the Ubangis yet again in
National Geographic.
She already knew that despite the soothing light and bubbles in the water, the fish tank was bereft of fish. “The doctor will see you now. . . .”

The appointment had been quick and her parents’ house was close enough that she went there to rest before going to see Mike Beck. No one was home, not even the servants, who had their day off. No longer shocked, with neither a welling up of tears nor fairly heavy breathing, she climbed the stairs to her room, closed the door behind her, and sat where she had sat as a child and a girl, though at the beginning the furniture and other things had been different. She remembered her crib in the nursery before she moved upstairs. She remembered using her weight to rattle the sides by holding the rail with both hands and pulling and pushing, pulling and pushing. She remembered the toys, the dolls, the pictures of penguins, and then horses. The things of childhood were all gone except for a few books she could not part with, and one doll, whom she loved.

At some point the furniture and paintings, too, would go and the room would be empty, awaiting someone else. Although Billy swam in high surf, could walk for twenty miles, and was as strong as a man half his age, he often didn’t remember things that had happened only a short time before, and Catherine sometimes found him, in the middle of the afternoon, sleeping upright in a chair, a book or newspaper splayed on the floor where it had been dropped. His laugh had changed. It was an old man’s laugh now, awkward, almost insincere, as if he were trying to pretend that he could still laugh. At least half his friends and contemporaries were dead, and in East Hampton on the most glorious days, when Catherine and Harry never stopped moving in the waves or on the sand, he now sat quietly and looked out to sea as if a fleet were passing in review, even if nothing was there but a fine blue emptiness and a beckoning horizon.

Evelyn had no problems with memory, and her friends were mostly alive and would live forever, as dowagers tend to do. But she grew increasingly delicate. Handsome, commanding, and still beautiful, she seemed at times as fragile as a chrysalis. She now walked in smaller steps, and instead of rushing down the stairs, like Catherine incapable of losing her balance, she held the banister every time and moved deliberately. And although she kept up to some degree with fashion as the garnishing ornament of her timeless dress, it was more and more the fashion of the previous decades, as with every advancing year she earned the privilege of paying no attention to the present.

Catherine now felt this in herself. That is, being content as the world passed by, without the urge to join in. The house was empty when she left, and it would eventually pass to others as generations stood and fell. Until this very day she had not known how wonderful, steady, and implacable the rhythm of this was, how comforting, how it made sense of everything, and how it quieted one’s fears.

Though she knew her appointment was with Mike Beck himself, she was somewhat taken aback to be ushered into his office. She was used to the eminent and the powerful at her parents’ dinner table, yet she was still nervous, for whatever was intended and however it had come about, here she would be judged solely on her own merits.

Everyone knew that Mike Beck was blind, but it was strange to see a man with hardly any hair, dark glasses, and a cane, his head cocked as if he were staring at the joint between the ceiling and the wall. It had something to do with hearing, or another sense not known. “Come in,” he said. “You know, I’m blind, so don’t hesitate to speak. I can’t see your reactions but I can hear them, and I’m neither deaf nor a foreigner, so you don’t have to shout or carefully enunciate.”

“People often do,” his secretary, a man, told Catherine.

“And you are?” Mike Beck asked. “I can’t see you.”

“Catherine.” That she said only her first name was lovely. If she hadn’t had him already, she had him right there. He smiled when he heard the quality of her voice.

“Shall we call you Miss Sedley or Miss Hale?”

“My stage name is Sedley, my maiden name is Hale, and my married name is Copeland,” she said. “Frankly, I don’t know who the hell I am. Just call me Catherine.”

“And on the billing? You’re not a porpoise or circus bear.”

“Am I hired?”

“Not yet. But if you are . . . ?”

She thought, and, under her breath, tried out her names. “Catherine Sedley, Catherine Thomas Hale, Catherine Copeland.” She decided. “I like Catherine Copeland, and I think people would remember it.”

“It’s a beautiful name,” Beck said. “They’re all beautiful names.”

“Is there a part available?” Catherine asked.

“There is a part,” Beck told her, “in a new musical.” When he named the composer and the lyricist their magic enveloped the room. They had never failed. Even their least was better than others’ best, although the critics compared them only to themselves, which was fair but misleading. “We hope it will be the kind of show that can run for ten years, clean up on the road, and then go into revival and high school productions forever. What you’re in now is terrific, but not like this. The theater will be twice as big—we own it, and we’ve booked it—and the ticket prices much higher. If we hit, it’ll sell a million phonograph records and there’ll be a movie. Of course, it could close on the first night. It’s that danger that makes this business what it is. You have the part if you want it.”

“Without audition?”

“We’ve heard you sing.”

“You have?”

“Of course. We go to all the plays. Among other things, it’s deductible. Why pay for an empty audition hall when you can audition people in full costume and makeup, with an orchestra, lights, sets, and a packed theater?”

“I have the part?” she asked, somewhat amazed, unconcerned about money, because she had never been concerned about money.

“We very much want you to take it. Who’s your agent? We couldn’t find out.”

“I don’t have an agent.”

“You should get one,
after
you appear for us.”

“I can’t accept,” she said. “There’s something I have to tell you. It’s very private. I haven’t even had a chance to tell my husband, because I won’t see him until tomorrow.”

“What?” Beck asked. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“I’m pregnant.” She was quite rattled. Too many things were coming at once. “I never thought of a Jewish name,” she said, to no one in particular, as if she were talking to the air. And then, apologetically to Mike Beck, “My husband is Jewish.” She dipped her head and brought it up again, as if breaking the surface. “I’m Jewish, too,” she said as if she had just found out. She looked amazed.

“Since when is Catherine Thomas Hale Jewish?” Beck asked.

“Since I was born, but I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, you got me,” said Mike Beck. “Name the baby anything you want. My name used to be Meyer Beckerman, and now I’m Mike Beck. I could have been George Washington if the judge had been a little more flexible.”

“I can’t take the part,” Catherine explained, “unless it’s a sort of constantly changing part in which the character gets pregnant and then has her baby and then isn’t pregnant anymore. That’s probably not what it is, is it, and I doubt that you can write it in.”

“It’s really not a problem.”

She found that hard to believe.

“It isn’t. I’ll tell you why. We have a spectacular cast. It could be a runaway. But they’re all such big stars that they’re committed, just as you are.”

“I have no contract,” she interrupted.

“They do. The earliest we can begin rehearsals is at the end of next year, when, unless you’re an elephant, your baby will already be crawling. And as far as being with a new baby, Wednesdays and Saturdays would be difficult but every other day of the week you can be with him all day long until eight.”

“I see.”

“I’m sorry,” Beck said. “Would you like something to drink? Tea? Coffee?”

“No, thank you. I don’t have to try out?”

“I’ve heard you sing.” He shook his head, smiling. “You don’t have to try out. We don’t manufacture drugs or bomb sights. It’s all in the heart, and we know what we have to know in about two seconds.”

“So it’s a singing part? I have a song?”

“Miss Hale,” Mike Beck said. “Mrs. Copeland. Miss Sedley, whoever you are or want to be, I’ve been told that you are very beautiful, that although you don’t have the wide planes of face that make stars of some, men find it difficult to take their eyes off you. That’s good.”

“If you believe it,” she said. He couldn’t see that she blushed.

“I believe it. I have it on good authority.” Now his secretary blushed, but Catherine wasn’t looking at him. “I do. But here I must confess that I myself went to hear you sing—seven times. The first time, I didn’t know who you were or anything about your part. Then I heard you, and I returned again, and again.”

“But the reviews. . . .”

“Victor Marrow screwed you.”

“I know,” Catherine said. The double meaning echoed within her. And then she realized, and she said, “How do
you
know?”

“You may not know in full detail,” the secretary said, adding to her amazement.

“You do?” she asked.

“Yes, we do,” Mike Beck said.

“How is that?” It hardly seemed possible.

“Since it concerns you, I’ll tell you. But since it concerns us, I have to ask you not to mention it to anyone—anyone—until it all comes out, as it will.”

Mentally excepting Harry from the prohibition, Catherine shifted in her chair, leaned forward a little, and smiled in a way that said, “I’m fascinated. What could this be? But I’m slightly wary.” This expression was conveyed in her eyes. Harry loved it so much that he would think of it when he was riding in the subway or sitting at his desk, and in recalling it he would feel much the same as when, wounded, he felt the first strong shot of morphine. “Tell me,” she said, only because Mike Beck could not see what Harry so loved. But the same quality was in her voice, and this he perceived exactly.