In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  After her last song, she left the theater, so upset that she neglected to take off her costume or remove her makeup. She explained to the puzzled guard at the stage door that she would have the dress fixed the next day, since she would have to be in it anyway while it was pinned. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he agreed that it was a sensible idea. The taxi that picked her up had the mid-performance luxury of gliding across town on empty streets before intermission, when the crowds drinking gin and tonics or chilled orange juice would spill from sidewalks lit by a hundred thousand bulbs onto streets as black as ebony. She wept in the cab. Because she was in a ripped dress and heavy makeup, the taxi driver was reluctant to offer comfort, seeing that what ailed her was too complex to fathom on a crosstown ride.

  In the morning, simultaneously as weak and as strong as someone emerging from an illness, she left the house, carrying the dress in paper wrapping, and an umbrella for the intermittent squalls. One of her mother’s dressmakers, on First Avenue, was pressed into emergency service. The woman was an expert, and for her it was nothing. After pinning it, she told Catherine it would take no more than an hour. Catherine waited, trying to read a magazine, staring out at traffic as if her heart were broken, occasionally checking her watch. She would drop the repaired costume at the theater, have lunch, go to a doctor’s appointment, return home to rest, and then go back to the theater again, where, while Harry did something that not long before she would not have dreamed of, she would sing to redeem herself.

  Catherine had never arrived so early except during the period when they were rehearsing and the theater was rented to them on the condition that each day they vacate promptly in favor of the real play. She remembered how deferential she and the rest of the cast had been when encountering anyone associated with the ongoing production, even though it was a play about physics. Their deference was that of the aspiring to the successful, the untried to the tested, the amateur to the professional, the young to the old, and even the short to the tall, the poor to the rich, sometimes the rich to the poor, and just about everyone to a cop.

  Now she discovered that there was another aspiring production making use of the theater during the day, which Sidney had not bothered to mention. As she passed its hopeful cast, they slightly lowered their eyes. They admired and envied her. And, yet, when she came to her dressing room, closed the door, and felt the thunder of the chorus line pounding the floor with their taps, and the brass piercing the darkness like a golden ray, she envied them, for as they were rising all the life in rising was theirs. For them, nothing was certain, and she, who had a role, had by definition begun to fade. As she unwrapped her dress and placed it on its hanger, the music from above saturating through the boards, she took an irrevocable step in growing up, recognizing and embracing the duty to step aside for those who follow, as others had stepped aside for her.

  She looked at the little watch that no one but a hawk could see well, and suspected that the hands were somewhere close to noon. Then she clicked shut her door and was halfway down the corridor on her way to lunch when suddenly she stopped. She didn’t know why, but she stood in place, tapping her right foot to the music raining down from above. She hadn’t forgotten her umbrella, which she held in both hands. She had intended to leave the dress behind: it wasn’t that. Then she realized. On the makeup table, on the newly cracked glass, was something that had briefly caught her eye for being out of place. Whatever it was it couldn’t have been important, and anyway she would see it when she returned in the evening.

  She started forward, but then stopped and turned around. “Don’t stoop when you turn,” she heard from long ago. A choreographer had said, “Just because you’re dancing doesn’t mean you have to make yourself small. Dance tall.” When she switched on the light in the dressing room she saw a Western Union telegram wedged into the crack of the glass. In show business, they called it a cable, and in no business was it ever ignored, if only because it was the messenger of death, birth, windfalls, and disappointments.

  Without closing the door behind her she walked to the makeup table, grabbed the telegram, threw down her purse and umbrella, and opened the envelope as if she were starving and it was the wrapper of a Swiss chocolate bar. She had heard from her father and mother that morning: it was not likely about them. It could not have been from or about Harry. Whatever might happen, Harry would not announce it in a telegram. And the war was over.

  On the white tape glued to yellow paper were her stage name—Catherine Sedley—and her address at the theater. The message was short: WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU AT YOUR CONVENIENCE STOP PLEASE CALL PL 9 2472 STOP MIKE BECK. She stared at the message written on what looked like the name tapes on her tennis whites at camp. The Beck Organization—which at any one time had half a dozen shows on Broadway—was four blocks away, and they had sent a telegram. Her father had told her of how, once, when he was having lunch with a producer (who, like all producers, wanted to borrow money), the producer had called for a telephone and dictated a cable to be sent to a colleague whom he could clearly see at another table across the room. Ten minutes later, a Western Union messenger had appeared, handed the cable to a waiter, and the waiter had brought it to a bald man with a pipe—as opposed to thirty or forty bald men with cigars. Opening it immediately and reading it gravely, the bald man with a pipe had called for a telephone. Ten minutes after that, Billy’s lunch companion ripped open a yellow envelope and threw the cable down in front of him. When Billy picked it up, he read: None of Your F-----G Business Stop Mel. So it was in show business.

  She put the telegram in her pocket and left for lunch. Only when she was on the sidewalk did she remember to call the Beck Organization. Once again, they asked to see her, and would not say why. “I can come late this afternoon,” she said, adding unnecessarily, “I have a doctor’s appointment.”

  The secretary left the line and returned a minute later. “Mr. Beck will be delighted to see you then. What time?”

  “Four?”

  “We look forward to it.”

  Other productions had tried to raid everyone in the cast except Catherine. She often thought that this would be her last part, and was reconciled to it. But many different parts on the lower rungs were hard to fill well, so perhaps her time had come. She worried that her father had pulled strings to get Mike Beck himself to call her. Every father wants the best for his daughter, but it was not likely to work out that way if now he had done what before he had only been accused of doing.

  Already at noon, Times Square, which made night day and day night, was beginning its tawdry and energetic celebrations. Catherine had always wondered who it was who went to nightclubs in the daytime. Whoever they were, there were enough of them to keep clubs and bars full at all hours. From a dozen establishments came the sounds of saxophones, drums, and dancing. Boys who should have been in school and were too young to go inside stood in small groups at the doorways of such places, straining for a glimpse of strippers, frightened that someone they knew might see them. To camouflage themselves should their headmasters or priests pass by, they pretended to be tying their shoes, or reading—by happenstance, just beyond the entrance of the club featuring Miss Gloria Seins and Her Nude Mesopotamian Snake Dance—the Christian Science Monitor.

  Spilling out onto the street, music inundated the barkers, bouncers, and truants. The doors to these places were like valves that sprayed out rays of light and flashes of sequins, and the colors within—purple, mauve, metallic silver and gold, lipstick red, ultraviolet, black velvet—were largely unnatural and unfailingly exciting.

  Catherine hesitated at one of the doorways. The barker/bouncer was dumbfounded. As she was neither a potential victim, customer, cop, nor kid, he had no tools in his kit with which to deal with her. Her tailoring, bearing, and self-possession were entirely out of place in his world. Inside, an orchestra played as if it were Saturday night. Except for the bartender and a skinny sailor trying to keep up with the other dancers, everyone in the place,
and the man at the door, was colored. Heretofore, they would have been confined to Harlem, but the war had brought them downtown. Women with immensely long legs were dancing to the blasts of trumpets, drums, and saxes. They wore flower-petal-like dresses, upside-down yellow roses that, like skaters’ costumes, stopped at the top of the thigh.

  Thousands of sequins were dashed in the strong lights that shone upon the dancers and musicians. A mirrored ball revolved like a water wheel pushed by light. This was a portal to the south, which suddenly, in New York, had pushed up like a daffodil. It seemed that they were celebrating something that, though yet to come, would come unstoppably; something that, in truth, was already halfway there. In her childhood Catherine had been in the presence of many people who had in their own childhood been slaves. The climb out was slow, but it was steady.

  “This is new,” she said to the doorkeeper, who had begun to get nervous.

  Relieved that she had spoken, but still puzzled, he said, “Yes, Miss, this is new.”

  She leaned slightly toward him and asked, “Do you have to be Irish to go in?”

  He thought this was rather funny, and as she left he smiled at her and gave a thumbs-up. The women were still dancing, no more tired than locomotives running across the flatlands early in the evening, lights shining onto the straight track ahead.

  Having added the appointment at the Beck Organization, about which she tried not to think, Catherine had to manage her time very closely. She had half an hour for lunch before arriving at the doctor’s office on Park in the low Seventies. After her annual checkup, he had called her back, which she hadn’t mentioned to Harry or her parents, being too young to think that anything might be seriously wrong. She thought less about this, in fact, than what kind of part might be offered to her—if indeed it were—by Mike Beck, and less even than about where she might eat. She decided on a Schrafft’s that she knew was on Madison somewhere in the high Fifties: she would find it.

  The food would be light, the service fast, and no one would recognize her. It was not that she was ashamed of herself, but that she knew that many servile people of the upper class, with whom she was loosely acquainted, and who took their direction faithfully from newspapers whose truth and wisdom they did not doubt or ever question, might believe that she should be ashamed of herself. It happened often enough and she hated the way they enjoyed it. They would be at various restaurants and clubs that were definitely not Schrafft’s, so she went in and sat safely at the counter.

  The trick of the place was that it was almost luxurious and neither expensive nor pretentious. Perhaps it was the name, which always made her think of the sound water makes as it flows through a weir. Perhaps it was the lighting, or the way they somehow muted sounds, unlike in most restaurants, where sound was sharp and aggressive. Here it was a cross between a low murmur and the sibilance of wind and water, with sometimes the sparkling clink of silverware or glass. The food was quite acceptable, no more, no less, and always the same. She did not have to look at the menu, for she always had a BLT and a chocolate milkshake, which, this time, came at her before she finished ordering it. She asked the waitress how this could have happened.

  The waitress pulled out her pad, studied it, and seized one end of Catherine’s oval platter. Catherine grabbed the other end with her left hand, and half the sandwich in her right. “What are you doing?” she protested. She was tired of people taking, assuming, and attacking, just tired of it, and she wasn’t going to let it happen anymore.

  “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.