At the top of the stairs was a door. After pushing it open and stepping out she found herself high above the street, with neither rail nor parapet to guard her from falling. Because of what she saw from the roof of the theater she did not need to practice as she had thought she would. For as she beheld what lay before her, the sharp infilling of her lungs, divided into a short beat and a slightly longer one that followed and concluded, was as lovely a sound as any living being has ever made. She had had no idea that a single breath could be so magnificent, that it could outdo the clearest notes of the greatest soprano, or the perfection, down below, of a brass section manned by balding and ever-hopeful rejects of the New York Philharmonic.
She had mastered her part in an instant, but, still, she stayed, held by the time and place, for although she was only twenty-three, she had a history of looking into the heart of great scenes and busy prospects as if she were at the end of life and these were something that she had yet to decode.
Down long streets in a hundred shades of gray, in clouds of fast white smoke and in flights of pigeons that with the twitch of a thousand wings were like the turning of a skyscraper’s worth of venetian blinds; at the foot of piers where ferries skated-in over silver water, their top-hat stacks billowing smoke that trailed across a whitening page of sky; in the tangle of the streets; in the traffic autonomous, fighting for complete independence, yet ever moving as a herd; amidst sound too broken and complex to interpret except as a twin of surf perpetually effervescent on the beaches of Long Island; and in the miracle of faces, to which even the greatest painters cannot do full justice; there was the city almost at midcentury, as one age had begun to elide into another, and the innocent forms of the past, though numb from the deep cut of war, were still alive.
She felt so strongly what she saw that she tried to hold its impress in memory until she was able to puzzle it out, even if that would be never. To see things and long for them, shadows in gray, people who will never return, days of sun and clouds that vanish like smoke . . . this was what she wanted.
What she saw was not random, and not chaos beyond the deepest power to make clear, for the threads of beauty and meaning that ran through it shone brightly in the dark, the whole a work greater than art, its consistency assured. This she knew because she had seen it and felt it since infancy, and would not be turned from her faith and trust even by all the war and suffering in the world, even were the suffering her own, which, although in her view it had never been, she knew eventually it would, in that it comes to all. All souls, she believed, blinded and blown into the air like dust and tumbling without gravity, can nonetheless find their bearings and rise as intended into the light. But despite this glimpse of the years to come in a vision of the ceaseless shuffling, transfer, and transaction in the streets below—like spangles of light on a sunlit river—she had to go back down into the theater to play her part, and she did.
She had taken the breath as instructed, and night after night would reproduce it onstage. Though she did not have the lead, in a quarter second she would have to supply the transcendent moment upon which the production would rise or fall. From her lungs and breast would come a gasp, a cry, the beginning of a song that would bring into view in a dark theater the machinery and friction of one era breathing its life into another, of light mixing with light, and sorrow with sorrow. And all conveyed in one sweet breath of Catherine Thomas Hale.
Which was not, however, the name by which they knew her. Her stage name was Catherine Sedley. They were unaware that she had chosen to call herself, professionally, after a mistress of James II. This was not because the original Catherine Sedley was virtuous but because this Catherine Sedley loved the sound of the name, because it took her family out of the picture, and because from a scandalously young age she had understood the travails of being a mistress.
She was, in her way, although not everyone thought so, very beautiful. It was not a soft beauty but, rather, sharp and delicate, with a backing of unseen strength that was not quite fully developed as she came into womanhood. In isolation, the pure, heartbreaking beauty of her face, though hardly perfect, could almost be an object of worship. Her body was strong and vibrant, and when she moved, or laughed, or settled back into a chair, she became sexually radiant. It is possible to have eyes that are carelessly unobservant, that in failing their task betray a listless soul. In contrast, the hazel eyes of Catherine Thomas Hale (or, if you wish, Catherine Sedley), though neither large nor opalescent, which would have made them commonly beautiful, were clear, alert, and ever active. They seized at a great rate upon the details of images that most eyes overlook even in things that appear in plain sight.
Though glasses were off limits onstage and there she was slightly myopic, other than when she was in the sea or in the shower she often wore a pair of round lenses held in delicate black metal frames that her father had brought from Paris before the war, and that seemed as thin as the locks floating at her temples, where these had escaped from a mass of reddish-blond hair, the color depending upon the light and sometimes as dark as auburn or as bright as gold, kept exquisitely up and partly braided at the back in a magical combination that was both classically arranged and randomly loose, almost windblown, as if she had come in from a deck or a beach.
The lenses, plumb-set and perpendicular to the plane of the floor, were a foil to the sharp assertiveness of her nose, which was small, perfectly formed, gracefully projecting. Her upper lip was larger than the lower, which suggested imminent speech protected nonetheless by careful reticence. Her teeth, unnaturally white in the glare of the spotlights, were even, straight, and large, in alluring palisades that cried out to be kissed.
As a rule, her bearing was uncompromising, and she held her head as if her name had just been called. Her breasts, not large, had as a result of her long, firm back and superb posture a perpetually attractive thrust. When she sat at table she had the habit of lightly grasping the edge with both hands, thumbs beneath the tabletop. This aligned her in a way that was ravishing. Even had her hands not been so beautiful, had her hair not been so glorious, had her face not been of breathtaking construction, had her youth not enveloped her like a rose, had her eyes not been so lovely, even had all this been different, the way she held herself, and her readiness to see, her fairness of judgment, and her goodness of heart would have made her beautiful beyond description. She was, like many, though not everyone by any means could see it, beautiful, just beautiful, beyond description.
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.
6. In Production
OTHER 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, wha
t 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.