Rufus was unaffected by this, or at least he did not respond to it except to pop like a firecracker, and when he popped he said, “Moneylenders, they keep to themselves, and they’re dirty. Don’t you know? You can tell by looking at them. Their faces aren’t clean. Haven’t you ever been on the Lower East Side? They flooded into this country and ruined it. It will never be the same again, and because you don’t know what it was like before, you can’t know exactly what I mean.”
Perhaps from a desire to defuse the situation, or simply to put an end to this kind of talk, Catherine said, “Well, don’t worry, Rufus. I won’t marry one.”
18. The Whole World
VERY OFTEN AT the end of summer and sometimes briefly in July, the air in New York, which for weeks has been dulled by haze and mist, suddenly clarifies and cools into a shock of well defined lines and vivid color. Wind from Canada streams down through the blue-green corridors of the Hudson Highlands to snap flags, jingle halyards and hardware against their staffs, and push the harbor waves into whitecaps. While spring can at times last only a day, the heat and haze of summer come as gradually as cataracts, until one morning when the wind turns clear you realize you’ve been blind. Then the view is sharp all the way out to Staten Island, its battlements suspended above water as if on clouds, and from high buildings it is possible to see as far as the north country.
On a day when the July haze was briefly clarified, Harry and Catherine, in her car with the top down and the sun flashing warmly against the chrome, crossed the Hudson on the George Washington Bridge. As the wind gusted, she held down her ribboned straw hat, slightly turned her head, looked to the north over the great expanse of river, and waited for the breeze to subside.
“They were the whole world to me,” Harry continued as they drove so high above the pale blue Hudson that it was as if he were piloting a plane. “The whole world.” He was speaking of his mother and father.
“It was that way for me, too,” she said, regarding her own parents. “I love them so much, even though something keeps me from expressing it, and even though I’m not much like them anymore . . . yet.”
“You know the photograph to the left above the fireplace?” he asked. She did. She had once studied it when he was not in the room, and had wanted to take the child in it into her arms. “That was the three of us when I was about four. I had no idea, no conscious idea anyway, that it would be only temporary. Time seemed not to pass. But, of course, they knew. You can see it in their eyes.”
“They seemed happy,” Catherine said, “in the way a couple with a small child should be happy.”
“It was before my mother got sick. I’m not sure we were happy, but we were where we were supposed to be, and not one of us wanted anything else.”
“That’s what I would call happy.”
He elevated his left arm straight in the air to signal a right turn. “Yes, even if you suffer through the days. Difficulties don’t preclude happiness. You really come to understand this only when those you love have died. Catherine, if we marry, you should know some things about me beforehand.”
“I know enough already, unless you rob banks.”
“I don’t, but you should know more.”
“Like what?”
“Three things in my life I’ll never get over, that won’t heal, that I don’t forget. I keep on going back, even if it makes no sense and brings me nothing. I would rather be destroyed for the sake of these things than abandon them and prosper: you, the war, and my parents. I love you. The war will always haunt and puzzle me despite our having won it. And I lost my parents. It all mixes together, and each of these things has a deep hold on the other.”
“But you have to live,” she said.
“I know. I try not to shrink from much.”
“That’s for sure. You’re the first person in the history of my family, that I know of, not to think it inappropriate for two people to lie on the same chaise.”
“No one saw,” Harry assured her. “They were still on the beach.”
“Did you see that?” Billy had asked Evelyn as they went in to change for dinner. “They think they’re invisible.”
“So did we.”
“Not like that.”
She looked at him as if to differ.
“No, I wouldn’t have done anything like that in front of your parents.”
“But you did, exactly that.”
“I did?”
“The bathing costumes weren’t as brief. . . .”
“Brief? She’s practically naked.”
“It was the same thing. We didn’t know what we were doing either. They’re really in love. What could be better than two people equally in love and without limit? She didn’t love Victor, and Victor didn’t love her. Now she’s been saved from that.”
“I suppose so, but at least Victor’s prospects are assured. We don’t know about Harry’s.”
“Don’t count him out. You wear his belts, carry his wallet, and put your papers in his briefcases. And you’re not the only one.”
“That’s small stuff, Evelyn.”
“Our families, Billy, started with nets and fish hooks, with little sacks of seed, and reused nails: small stuff. It’s good enough, and he has his whole life ahead of him. He’s a brave man. He’s devoted to her. They’re the most handsome couple. And she’s happy, Billy.”
“How long will it last?”
Evelyn thought for a moment. She was not in public, and not playing a role. She did not have to entertain with malapropisms or verbal mysteries. Most people weigh carefully what they say in the open and speak with less consideration in private. She did more or less the opposite. “I hope it lasts for the rest of their lives,” she said, “but, as we know, even when the silver wears away and you’re left with copper, if you attend to it every day it has a gleam all its own.”
Harry and Catherine rolled through the streets of Englewood as if in the excitement of fall. Though it was still weeks from the heat-kill of August and not a leaf was down, it seemed like the end of summer. Descending the ridge from the Palisades, they drove toward the first of several valleys and rivers to cross, the final one being the Saddle River, on the banks of which, near Lodi, Harry’s family was buried in the cemetery to which his aunt in Staten Island found it difficult to travel.
Because the start of the day had seen most of their inhabitants drain east toward the cliffs of Manhattan backlit by the rising sun, the towns were strangely empty, the landscape in its way more deserted and tranquil than that of New Hampshire or Oklahoma. Leached out of their hills and dales and from Victorian houses with screen doors banging shut to signal silence until evening, legions of office workers magnetized to heat and light, crossed on ferries, and emerged from dark and choking tunnels into a city that made them as jumpy as crickets.
But in New Jersey it was quiet now. The little rivers moved languidly. At the top of a second ridge, Harry saw in the silver of his rearview mirror the upper halves of skyscrapers ranged like a row of tombstones. Closer, but in perspective equidistant, were the palisades of gravestones ahead, though the road did not lead straight to them but rather through a shaded valley where the river wound unpredictably. Once across, they would be there. They started down, and soon were on a level stretch.
Like the roof of a cathedral, trees arched over a long, deserted road so little traveled that grass grew in the cracks between the pebbled slabs. The river was somewhere beyond a line of evergreens to their left. They could hear the water and smell it and feel currents of cool humidity in the air. Not far away, pine branches were burning, and the fragrance of the smoke covered the road, sometimes turning the air white before the sky burst into blue.
“Why did you stop?” she asked.
“When I don’t have a car, I walk this road, so I’m used to taking it slowly. Not once have I ever met anyone on it.”
“It reminds me of the Via Appia,” she told him, “where you can go for miles, and there’s no one, and all you hear are ci
cadas in the dry heat.”
They fell naturally into an embrace, their heads touching the way horses nuzzle, all contact on the side. He looked down the back of her dress. Her taut shoulders were smooth and smelled fresh. The arch of her back was firm and tan, with the tiniest and most delicate of white hairs, invisible but for an irresistible silvery-white glaze. Although neither he nor she had intended to kiss in this place and at this moment, they kissed for a long time, stopping for less than a second to turn off the car. They might have made love had they not understood that someone could happen upon them, though all they could see were ribbons of white smoke drifting among the trees.
He had never entered the cemetery in an open car. There were willows by the river, and as the car passed through the gates, Catherine, looking down a long prospect running south, missed the sign with the cemetery’s name. “This is where your parents are buried,” she said. He hadn’t told her that he was taking her there.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. As we grow older I’ll become more like my mother and you’ll become more like your father. I would have liked to have met him, and your mother.”
He threaded the car around tight circles and turned sharply down narrow alleys between the tombs until he stopped in front of a plot near the cemetery’s western edge. Through a line of arborvitae that muffled the sound, they could hear the road that formed the closest boundary. Before she opened her door, she saw everywhere the Hebrew lettering that she had not seen on the way in. Her lips parted slightly and her eyes narrowed as she discovered this. “Oh,” she said quietly, almost in a whisper, “oh.”
He watched her as she moved toward the Copeland plot, which was marked by a huge cut stone bigger than the headboard of a bed, and he concentrated painfully upon her in case this would be the last time he would see her. It had happened twice before, with others, in the same way that he now feared, although they had been nothing like Catherine. How beautiful she was as she walked closer to the graves. What elemental mechanism was at play to give him such pleasure, even here and at this moment, merely at the sight of Catherine in a straw hat. The effect on her coloring, the enclosure of her face in a halo of shadowed, sun-glowing gold, and the scarlet ribbon with unpredictable twitches in the wind breaking the perfection of the circle, were attractions that arose in ancient reflexes of the body and spirit, part of the continuous play of small and vivid things that are the true action of the world.
The individual headstones were in English and Hebrew. She knelt at his mother’s grave, and said, “When you were ten. . . .”
Standing behind her and to her left, he nodded, knowing that she knew he had done so, though she couldn’t see him. She turned to read his father’s stone and then lifted her hand and traced the Hebrew that paralleled the English on his mother’s gravestone. “What does it say?” she asked.
“Esther, a daughter of Israel.”
After a long moment, Catherine, still kneeling, twisted her body and turned to Harry. She put her right hand on the ground to steady herself, her expression expectant but disciplined, giving nothing away. It was as if she were waiting for something from him even though now everything that mattered had to come from her. Never had he seen so neutral an expression. She looked tranquil, yet he thought that much was going on within her, that she was weighing past and future. And indeed she put everything in the balance, not just her life but the lives of those who had come before her and those who would come after, the weight of principle, belief, and love. And how marvelous it was, and an indication of her quality, that she came to judgment in utter stillness and without the slightest hint of difficulty. She said nothing for a long time, and then she smiled so softly, so subtly, that it was barely perceptible. And in this barely perceptible smile was a courageous declaration as wide as the whole world.
19. Spectacles
OTHER THAN CATHERINE, the only person in the room who, everyone knew, was not Jewish, was a lyricist from Nebraska, a young man with a red face and military haircut, who tried desperately to fit in to the society of blindingly demonstrative Jewish theater people, all of whom either wore spectacles or, when they didn’t, bumped into furniture, and some of whom habitually called one another dahling. Not a single one of them failed to keep a detailed journal of his own thoughts and speculations, in the unexamined yet invincible belief that future historians of the theater would painstakingly disentangle their loaf-like stacks of pages by the thousands, in beer, gin, or vodka handwriting, the fashions in liquor lasting each less than a decade and thus giving to their lives an almost geological stratification.
The cast had recently discovered, though no one seemed to know how, that Catherine Sedley was in fact Catherine Hale. Not only was she a Hale, but the Hale, in that she was the only child of William Hale. It was no crime, and stage names were more common than locusts in the Bible, but now that they knew she didn’t need her part as they needed theirs, and that she came from such great wealth as to be able to finance hundreds of plays like the one they were struggling to keep alive, they did not know quite what to think of her. She became at once both desirable and detestable. She threw everything off balance, and suddenly they tried to be careful when speaking to her, although, thanks to her natural kindness and wit, they would soon forget what they had intended.
Sidney, the director, had invited Catherine to dinner at his Bank Street apartment before the revelation of who she really was. When he found out, assuming that a society girl would have a thinner version of a Victor, some sort of aging St. Paul’s boy, to escort her, he had called her up and said as offhandedly as he could, given that he was himself in love with her, “and bring your beau.” This was poker. He wanted her to show up beau-less and thus, confessing the emptiness of an heiress, cleave to him, drink his wine, and perhaps stay the night. He thought that even were she to have brought a beau of her class—he pictured a tweed-covered bow of the kind that shoots arrows—Sidney would make quick work of him, because the person he imagined as Catherine’s escort would be so privileged as to be infinitely dull. Yes, he would be tall, strong, and blond, with a chiseled face flat of plane, because people like that, of a certain heredity and culture, played a lot of violent and invigorating sports, ate like canaries, and drank like goldfish. But he wouldn’t have a chance in a garret where he couldn’t fully stand, surrounded by lightning-fast, mercurial Jews who for two thousand years had been banned from sun and sport and exiled within the book, where in its confines and shadows they could swing and swoop with the speed and agility of orangutans. Not a chance had this tweedy bow of St. Paul’s against Sidney Goldfarb, orangutan of the theater, a man who could talk an octopus into a straitjacket.
But when he had buzzed Catherine in and she came up to the landing he was so overcome by her presence that he completely lost his wit. And when he saw the beau she had brought, he despaired, for she had betrayed her obligation to bring someone watery and weak. The man standing behind her shyly, and appropriately for a guest who knew no one, was immediately if not intentionally dominant. Though he wanted only to be inconspicuous, power issued from him unstoppably. The instant he was perceived by the others, their conversation dropped by decibels and its velocity slowed to a creep.
He was six feet tall and as solid as rock, with the build of an army Ranger lost in training for many months with no comforts and an increasingly difficult daily regimen. His physical power alone would have been impressive, but it was only a part of his presence. He was dark and angular, and he could look severe, although his kindness passed readily through the strength of his features. More to the point, he was one of those people from whose eyes it was possible to see that he might be thinking ten things as you were thinking one, and that his intellectual labor consisted not in generating an answer, something to say, a bon mot, but in choosing the best and most appropriate from an ever-proliferating stock of striking observations and ideas that came effortlessly to the fore.
And yet he was shy, and wanted to
listen rather than speak, which among theater people is a trait so rare as to astound. Catherine had had to maneuver him to the gathering by claiming that Sidney’s apartment was so small no more than a few people could be accommodated for dinner. In fact, there were eight. It made him very nervous, but she stayed close, which made anything possible—she, who governed the nature of things, but was too modest to know it.
Upon sensing that Harry was not only a soldier returned from the real war—it was undeniably apparent—but also a Jew, Sidney moved to ally himself with the lyricist. In Sidney’s calculation, were the Nebraskan to become his ally, which the Nebraskan would be glad to do, as he was otherwise bamboozled by Jews, Catherine might gravitate to Sidney and her coreligionist. And, undoubtedly, Catherine’s beau, a sort of Achilles, would have a soft spot that Sidney, who spent his days observing from the dark before darting to intervene, could readily recognize.
Sidney’s hopes were dashed once again, even if not absolutely, after Catherine introduced Harry, and Sidney was forced to announce, to murmurs that though unintelligible sounded vaguely Japanese, that Harry Copeland, whose name Sidney said as if it were Attila the Hun, was Catherine’s fiancé. The Hales themselves had not yet been formally apprised of this, though clearly they knew, if only through the agency of hardly perceptible smiles.
There is not much air on Bank Street because of its narrow gauge and the way it winds. The houses with their black roofs and brick fronts absorb the heat of blast-furnace days and echo it onto every living thing in radiative agony until midnight or beyond. All the windows in Sidney’s apartment were open and a tiny fan in the tiny bedroom moved the air only a little from the garden side to the street. Because they were on the top floor and under the roof, it was as hot as hell, but from the tiny living room with walls covered by abstracts and Buddhist line drawings a pair of French doors opened onto a deck, slightly bigger than a lifeboat, that looked over the ill-tended gardens in the back courtyard. “Walk gently,” Sidney said to every guest, “a violinist lives below.”