by Mark Helprin
Into the light and brass, parting the action onstage like the Red Sea, emerged Catherine, stepping out from the portals of Penn Station. With perfect timing she accomplished the inhalations that had made Sidney fall in love with her, and they went straight to the hearts of the audience. Harry was proud that these sweet and powerful breaths had come from a mouth that he had kissed, that he had inhaled them deeply into his lungs, and that she had taken his.
The stage cleared as she surveyed the city. Harry realized that as she peered stage right, took a step forward, peered stage left, looked up, and raised her left hand as if to shield herself, that, though it was short and tight, this was a carefully accomplished dance. In just a few moments, her wonder at the city was transformed into an incipient mastery over it. As she was pleased by what she beheld, she relaxed. And as the music beat through the air, she moved to it almost imperceptibly, and smiled. She had arrived. She had beheld something magnificent, as if it were her first glimpse of the world, and she had learned to love and master it all in an instant. The focus could not help but shift from the vastness and power of the city to the eyes of the girl who had come to it, and the lights now left the others in darkness and shone upon her until the stage was enveloped in silence.
In this silence, she had them, and she knew it. So she stretched out her cue, withholding it from the conductor himself, wanting to stay longer, driving the hook deeper. And when the time was right she began to sing her heartbreakingly beautiful song. The musicians, rallied by the long caesura, played more than the music. It became one of those great moments, a triumph. Catherine’s singing was so magnificent, far more than in any rehearsal, her presence so arresting, that time was vanquished. Well versed in just about everything, the audience knew—even if, to protect themselves in a complicated and atrophied social system, hardly any one of them would have admitted it—that Catherine Sedley’s simple song was on a par with the “Ma di’” of Norma, the “Deh! Non turbare,” of La Gioconda, and the “Soave sia il vento” (perfectly mirroring her introduction) of Così Fan Tutte. They could not contain their honest emotion or their enthusiasm, and when Catherine finished, there was a brief breathless silence followed by a thunder of applause and the rising to a standing ovation that would last two full minutes and more.
As the rafters shook, she remained absolutely still, finally acknowledging the great tribute to her with an almost sad smile that bound to her forever anyone there in that moment. For as high as she herself had been lifted, she had carried along with her more than a thousand people.
By the time she sang her two other songs, one a duet that had been added only in Boston, the momentum of the play had made standing ovations inappropriate, but at the end she had so many curtain calls, and applause like a deafening waterfall close up, that there was no question of either the play’s success or hers. Harry was so proud he could hardly rise from his seat, but when he did he found himself borne along on a current of satin and topcoats until at the exit he almost rammed into Billy and Evelyn, who were both furtive and aglow. “Harry!” said Billy. “Wasn’t that spectacular! My God, my own daughter. I didn’t realize who she was. She’s got everything ahead of her. She’s the one who will make our name, not anyone but her.”
“She will,” Harry replied, certain that it would be so.
“Don’t tell her you saw us,” Evelyn said excitedly, kissing Harry as she spoke. “We promised not to be here, but we had to see her, so we sat way in the back beneath the balcony. It didn’t matter. She came through as clearly as starlight.” As they were separated by the crowd and the distance increased, Harry heard, “Don’t tell her. We’re going back to New York. We’ve got to get the train. God bless.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” Harry heard himself say, and then they were gone. Eventually, he would tell her, but only much later. How could he not? And then, as the tides thinned and he found himself outside, relatively alone on a stretch of black pavement, he took in a deep, satisfied breath of cold air and began to walk to Locke-Ober, where with Catherine and the others he would wait all night for the morning papers. Sidney had reserved Locke-Ober with the last of the production funds. Now, that money would seem like nothing at all.
Winter Place was cold and black, the lights of Locke-Ober so dim that the vast amount of silver within hardly seemed to shine, but the calm would shelter and stabilize the cast as they waited. Had things gone badly, the brown darkness of the interior would have been insufferable, but now they needed to be tranquil, as far as they could be. They would enjoy their success no less if their euphoria were countered than were it accelerated, quiet triumph being infinitely stronger, as Harry had learned time and again in the years just passed.
The first to greet him was George Yellin, who was happy for perhaps the only time in the last twenty years. “How did it go?” George asked, knowing full well how it went, which was betrayed by his expression as sharply as the pencil mustache he had once again forgotten to remove.
Catherine was trapped in the voluble crowd, and when she and Harry caught sight of one another they felt the peculiar rush of feeling that two people in love feel when they are politely separated and cannot wait to be close. Nonetheless, the time until they came together stretched out pleasurably, and when finally they embraced and were swept into the restaurant, they said what they needed to say in their eyes and in their touch.
Seated at a table that ran the entire length of the wood-paneled downstairs room, which women ordinarily were not allowed to enter, Harry noticed in the corner of his eye several figures passing outside, clothed in tweed and caps. Their speech was faintly audible as it vibrated the glass. He knew them instantly, as he always had, and felt that he almost belonged with them more than with his own. Locke-Ober, he thought, was dimly lit so that those privileged to be inside would be able to see others not so fortunate passing in the cold, and so that those in the cold would not have so pretty a picture engraved upon their eyes by too strong a light. So many bottles of Champagne were uncorked that, though no one would ever know, one of the youngest girls in the chorus actually looked around for a popcorn popper. Catherine quaffed two glasses like a tonic. She was thirsty, used to it, and she knew she had earned it.
“Don’t you want something to drink?” Sidney asked Harry.
“I want it, but I shouldn’t have it, so, luckily, tonight I don’t need it.”
“You should be jealous of your girl,” George Yellin said. “She’s on a rocket to the moon.”
“I’m not jealous, George,” Harry said tranquilly.
“Why not?”
“George, if you were lucky enough to be betrothed to Athena, would you be jealous of her?”
“Athena who?”
“Goldberg,” Harry said.
George was panic-stricken. “I thought, I thought. . . .”
“The goddess.”
“Oh!” he said.
Catherine blushed, and surveyed her fiancé with “such war of white and red within her cheeks” that her deeper commitment was betrayed.
“Well,” George Yellin said. “Now I see, now I see. Catherine, you’re an angel. I don’t know how you did it, but you saw me through this, and I feel good about tonight. I’ve always been afraid of Boston. They slaughtered me here once, you know, and you never forget.”
In New York, many theatrical people have cardiac crises when, coming out of the theater, they see and rush for the next day’s paper and discover no review of their year or two of work, in that the review will run in a later edition. This is because in New York newspapers are launched upon an immense mass of readers and they spread their weight over the waters in confusing multiple runs, assaulting the public in waves that, like the oceans’, never cease. Not so in Boston, a city where the rich strive to make do with less, and those who have enough proudly disdain the luxury of sufficiency. In Bostonian eyes, to have only one edition was to flirt with excess. So all the reviews would come that morning, and the wait stretched until five, but most of the c
ast was young and bohemian enough not to feel it.
As they descended from the charged heights of opening night they began to entertain their doubts. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Sidney announced at four. “As you know, theater critics are capable of anything. Criticus may leave his house one evening with the unquenchable desire to see a play about a talking lobster. When the production he is to judge is instead about Pope Innocent the Tenth, he may be disappointed, insulted, and outraged.”
“That’s right,” said someone who, slumped in his seat with a bottle, fluently supplied an excerpt from the review: “‘The author has failed to impart to the Pope a redness of color, the touch of vitality, and the briny wit we expect. Nor is his Innocent capable of the immensely powerful grasp, pinching the life out of his enemies, that he is reputed to have had. And where is the depiction of the New World fishermen, risking their lives to gather their pots and traps, which so sustained Europe and the papacy at the time? All in all, a grave disappointment from a writer whose previous play, Gloucester and the Cape St. Ann, I found first rate.’”
“Is that what he wrote?” George Yellin asked. “How dare he!”
“But the audience,” Harry protested.
Sidney was glad to be able to bring his experience into play. “Not disoften”—he knew this was not a word, but thought it should have been—“critics will take the opposite tack of an audience just to show who’s master. Word of mouth may reach ten or twenty thousand people over a period of weeks. The critic speaks to half a million the next morning. I’ve seen critics delight in their power to bring the audience itself to a different view, simply to see if it can be done. It can.”
And then everyone, having responsibly considered the worst, went back to expectations of glory. In the still black shades of morning, Locke-Ober became as quiet as an opium den. Catherine leaned into Harry and slept. There were only murmurs now, and few of those. Intermittent snores dueled as nasally in the air as Sopwith Camels.
The spell was broken by the explosive thud of a bundle of papers thrown at the doorstep of a building across Winter Place. One of the boys in the cast rushed out, lobster shears in hand, to steal as many as his pounding heart would allow. They watched him cut the twine and run back in with three papers under his arm as if they were a football in the crucial moments of the Harvard-Yale game. He almost forgot to open the door as he was about to sail through it. The Boston Herald was slapped down in front of Sidney. He opened to the right page as if it had been bookmarked, and, trembling slightly, he read.
First, the headline: “‘A Triumph of the Postwar.’ Wow!” he said, as everyone sat straight and awakened. “‘Only a few times in the life of the theater comes a play, or, even less frequently, a musical, that is so powerful and moving that when it ends you are heartbroken to leave it and step back into your own life. Very seldom does one come to love the characters so much as to long for sleep and the opportunity to dream oneself back into their midst.’”
The review continued in this vein, unreservedly praising every aspect of the production—the music, the book, the staging—and the actors, who bathed in one or two glorious sentences as if they were Cleopatra bathing in milk. But after progressing euphorically, Sidney stopped short.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “This can’t be. I don’t understand it.” He read something over, silently. As his expression changed, Catherine, who had not been praised, felt the floor beneath her fall away.
“Read it,” she said.
“You don’t want to hear it,” Sidney told her.
“No,” she sighed, “but read it.”
He looked down slowly, and read: “‘The only wrong note in all this perfection is one Catherine Sedley, whose performance, fortunately not essential, is so overburdened with lack of talent as to serve as a kind of obstinate anchor. Blame nepotism, for this Catherine Sedley is none other than Catherine Thomas Hale, who likely got the part because her father, namesake of the famous investment house, is rumored to have backed the production.’”
Catherine was stoic. She neither dropped her head nor, as she easily might have, and as many would have, cried. She said only, “It’s not true.”
“Not a penny,” said Sidney. “Her father had nothing to do with it.”
“It’s a freak,” said George Yellin. “Wait for the Globe and the American.”
“The American’s a Hearst paper,” someone said, negatively.
“So what?” Sidney replied. “Their critic won’t be the critic of the Herald.”
Two thuds, one closely following the other, and the boy with the lobster shears ran out and came back almost instantly with the Globe, the American, and the Boston Daily Record. These three, with the Herald, would be decisive. With the Herald’s stunning praise, all they needed was one merely good review from amongst the three others. They got more than that. All were ecstatic. Sidney read them, assuming that the Globe, which was the first, and the other two would treat Catherine fairly.
They did not. Each and every one slighted her performance. The Globe said, “I couldn’t wait for her to stop spoiling the production and leave the stage. Her voice is so peculiar, her movements so strange, and her appearance that of a not very pretty society girl, which is what she is and reportedly why she got the part, when she is supposed to be a country girl. Her presence throws an otherwise glorious production off track every second she appears. Perhaps New York will not have to suffer through this if the producers are wise, although they probably dare not trample upon the paternal affections of their investors.”
After making Sidney read them all, Catherine stood, the silver light of Locke-Ober gleaming onto her hair. She said, “I want everyone to know that, first, I truly am happy for you: congratulations. Congratulations, George.” She smiled at him. (The papers had noted his performance. One had said, “Even George Yellin, who has not appeared in Boston—with good reason—since 1924’s The Empress Eugénie, is wonderful, if small.”) “And, second, I’ll go. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone else.”
“No you won’t,” Sidney said, followed by strong murmurs of agreement. “No you won’t. You were superb. There’s no explanation for these reviews, except that sterile imaginations and closed hearts never forgive those unlike themselves. You’re going to open in New York. We’ll all be together. Fuck them and fuck the money. You come with us.”
“But Sidney,” Catherine said, “I don’t need the money, and everyone here does. It’s not. . . .”
“Do you know why?” Sidney interrupted. “Do you know why all these crazy Jews in the theater, and me, and the Nebraskans and Alaskans, and Irish Catholics, and George Yellin, whatever he is, don’t have any money?”
“I’m Jewish,” said George. “Why am I a special category?”
“Because when it comes to this kind of thing we always say fuck the money, and the money goes away. It goes away, but, listen to me, Catherine,” he said, and paused, “it’s worth it.”
And Catherine, who until that moment had been composed. . . .
The next day, bright and warm, brought back a touch of summer, flooding its light upon the Public Garden as the sun filtered through the trees and then rose above them, burning away shadow. Catherine’s room looked east over the Common. On the desk and tables were a dozen vases of flowers, some from people she didn’t know, with unread notes praising her performance, wishing her good fortune, asking her to dinner. She sat on the edge of the bed, still in her elegant clothes, still in makeup, with hardly a sign that she had been up all night. She drew for this upon nothing but her youth.
The sun illuminated the flowers from behind, infusing them with the kind of glow that cinematographers induce with fine gauze. The colors intensified with the light, pulsed as the sun strengthened, and seemed almost as if they were moving. “Did you see the look on George Yellin’s face,” Catherine asked, “after he said it wasn’t over until the reviewer from the Evening Transcript had his say, and Sidney told him that the Transcript had folded at the
beginning of the war?”
“I did. How can a living human being be so continually surprised by the present?”
“It’s because he’s so sad,” Catherine averred. “Because he’s been moving down for so long, he doesn’t want to move at all, so he lives in stilled time. It reminds me of my cousins, little girls—Hales—who hesitate at doorways. They don’t cross thresholds until they check with their parents. They love what they have and are suspicious of change. I don’t know why George touches me so, but he does.”
“Because he’s old, he failed, and he can’t afford to quit the field. He has to eat, so he struggles through one beating after another until, not so long from now, he won’t ever get a part again. He’ll become theatrically extinct, and no one will ever think of him or his descent from a profession in which one is always courting adoring eyes.”
“Then what?”
“He’ll live in an apartment the size of a steamer trunk, surviving on a tiny bit of food. He’ll spend the day on a bench in the Broadway median, watching pigeons, and go home to the little apartment, where on summer nights he’ll sit by the open window listening to a baseball game on the radio, drinking one Rheingold, looking out at windows across the courtyard. He’ll do this for five or ten years, maybe twenty. Then he’ll become ill, struggle with that for a while like a fish trapped on deck, and then he’ll die. The Times will give him one and a half inches, no picture. ‘George Yellin, a bit-part actor.’”
“And his mother and father?”
“His mother and father, long dead, loved him perhaps as he should have been loved—I hope so—and as the world has not. That is, without regard to his success. In the end, that’s what you come back to, the only thing that matters, those who love you though you have failed.”
