In Sunlight and in Shadow (12 page)

“Yes.”

“It didn’t matter. She still had the charm of youth. They were happy to eat with us, to eat at all. I remember how amused they were when I asked them in my rudimentary German to join us. And I remember how the sun sparkled on the river, blinding me and warming the room. The river grew shallow just before plunging into the reservoir, and rushed over a bed of small, rounded rocks with the color and blur of a school of fish. Polyhedrons of light backlit the girls, backlit their hair.

“We could have been killed so easily, because at dinner we forgot everything. The four of us together, with my friend interpreting and me speaking fractured German, and the girls speaking fractured English, and everybody speaking bad French. . . . They would consult on a word and then sally forth; we would consult on a word and then sally forth. It meant the end of the war, the restoration of everything . . . the restoration, to their rightful place, of love and kindness.

“Naturally, we had to pay for them, and they were in our debt. We were conquering—and I really mean conquering—their country. We were taking them on the road, feeding them, carrying them under our protection. When the waiter came and we paid him, in dollars that he took so eagerly it was a sure sign they had lost the war, I glanced at the girls, and the expression they had was that now the bill had come due. All the lightness I had felt suddenly drained.

“What can I say?” He hesitated and looked away, and then back at Catherine. “When you love someone, even if it’s only infatuation, even if it’s only immense respect, the last thing you want is subservience, obligation, dread, payment. I thought to myself that I never wanted to see that expression again. Never.”

“So you don’t mind if I pick up my half of the check?”

“I’d prefer it, although it’s hard to explain to someone who assumes I’ll follow the custom.”

“I think you’ve explained it quite well. They didn’t pay the bill, did they?”

“No. They expected to, but we weren’t like that. My friend ended up marrying the one whose face had been disfigured—in a bombing raid, one of our bombs, or a British bomb. She was sixteen when it happened. He loves her, he really loves her. . . .” He couldn’t finish.

Harry was apprehensive that he had spoken too much, that he had fallen too fast, that he had been too suggestive, too forward. Although he sensed that she was attracted to him, she moved on tides that he could not read. As comfortable and warm as she became, she was at times reserved, distressed, almost disdainful. She used the expression “Oh please,” which he did not, and which he now realized was a class marker with the power to freeze him cold. It was the language and enunciation of someone who either needed nothing or had come from a society in which the norm was to need nothing. It was dismissive yet charming. It stunned him, almost frightened him, and at the same time made her infinitely desirable. For the way she said it was rich in intonation and expression—like her song. Of course, he was in love, even with the way she brushed her hair back from her face. Like her speech and diction, her emotions, hot and cold, were held in magnificent balance.

He thought he saw what was coming, and was determined to get through it successfully. It was like watching a big wave moving dangerously fast right at him. She looked down, gently clenched her left fist, closed her eyes, and shook her head very rapidly from side to side. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this to Victor.”

“Victor,” he repeated.

“Yes, Victor.”

“I hope it’s a cat.”

She tried hard and in vain not to laugh, and then said, resolutely, “It’s a man,” which made her laugh again.

“Oh,” he said. “I’m not surprised that his name is Victor. Everyone I’ve ever known by that name has been able to beat me at one thing or another. It’s as if there’s something they know that I don’t. I think it may be more than just coincidence, but rather that their parents gave them that name as part of or a prelude to a mad program of education in winning. Wouldn’t you think that someone who cared about winning would name his child Victor? I see the Victors at age five being solemnly—desperately—instructed in how to cheat at tennis, how to play a sharp hand of poker, flatter a teacher, dress perfectly, and, above all, assume that they’re going to win, and that they have no other choice, as it is their destiny. Winning is what they do, and all they can do. It stops there. Never have I failed to have been beaten by a Victor, even at chess, where, throughout the whole game, they smile like Cheshire cats.

“And yet, what victories have Victors achieved? Napoleon wasn’t named Victor. It wasn’t Victor the Great who conquered the known world, or Victor Caesar. For that matter, it wasn’t Victor Nelson or Victor Wellington, Washington, Eisenhower, Montgomery, or Grant. Nor do we have Victor Shakespeare, Victor Einstein, Victor the Baptist, or Victor Christ. Victors are in fact in short supply as victors, except that they always make more money than I do, beat me at games, and get the girl. . . . But maybe not this time.”

“You stun me,” she said. “You drive me crazy.”

“And you, me,” he returned. “So Victor isn’t a cat?”

“No,” she said, “he isn’t a cat.”

“If he’s not a cat, why are you laughing?”

“I shouldn’t be. He’s my fiancé. Victor Marrow.”

“Victor Marrow?”

She nodded, no longer laughing but almost crying.

“That’s a name?”

“Yes. He’s a Mellon.”

“He’s a melon,” said Harry, deadpan.

Again, she nodded, and even sniffled.

“What kind of melon?”

“A Pittsburgh Mellon.”

“Is that like a watermelon, or a cantaloupe?”

“No, you idiot,” she said, with more affection than she could bear absent an immediate embrace, which could not and did not materialize.

“I thought his last name was Marrow?”

“His mother’s a Mellon.”

“Well, if his mother’s a Mellon and his father’s a Marrow, how can he tell if he’s a watermelon or a squash? He must have had a very difficult childhood.” He looked at her. “It’s not something to laugh about.”

This made her laugh more.

“What does he look like?”

She came to and assessed Harry straight on. Then she drew in a breath both pleased and resigned, and said, “You’re much handsomer, damn you, and he went to Yale.”

“I’m glad you got that right, about Yale.”

“He wouldn’t agree.”

“Deep down he would. They know.”

“Yes,” she said, “they do. I’ve noticed it myself. It’s as if they know they can never catch up,” and then she looked away. “Can I,” she asked, “can I . . . take a break? Can we just not talk for a while, and maybe eat. There’s too much, too much going on. I’ll be all right, but I just need a . . . a minute.”

“I myself need a week,” he told her.

“You don’t have a week,” she said. Then she took a long drink of water. As she raised her glass, he could see her heart beating against the silk of her blouse.

“God,” she said, partly because of the retsina, “this is wonderful. It doesn’t taste like what you would think grilled octopus would be. I never would have ordered it.”

“Nor would I.”

“Why did you?”

“The first time I had it was in a tiny village in the Peloponnesus. It had taken several days for me to walk there over a high, deserted spine of mountains, but it was on the coast, not that far by sea from Piraeus. When I arrived, however, because of the difficulty and loneliness of the journey, I thought I had come to the end of the earth. Then a yacht full of Germans appeared, flying a big flag with a swastika, and the shutters were suddenly flung open in what turned out to have been a little waterfront restaurant that served whatever it could to the yachting trade.

“I didn’t like it when the Germans came ashore. They were all so tall, and there were so many of them, and while I had a walking stick, they had a yacht.”

“Victor is even taller than you are,” she said, “and he has a yacht.”

“The yacht that didn’t show?”

She confirmed this with a lifting of an eyebrow in an unmistakably condemnatory, and yet fairly hopeless, expression. And she saw very clearly and could not banish from her mind the yacht coming up from the south on humid and silvery air, bringing with it insistently another age, the rear guard of time, moving across the sea in force and at a different pace and as arrestingly as a ghost. Haunting, seductive, easy, it called for many kinds of surrender, each comfortable and tragic. Were she to have been rowed out, she would have been lost to this. She would have regretted and grieved for the rest of her life. She had come that close, and would have disappeared had it not been for the winds and tides.

Not knowing what she was thinking, Harry snapped her back to the restaurant, and then off to Greece before the war. “You know what happened to the Germans?”

“They lost.”

“That, too, but before that, maybe as an omen, they couldn’t start the outboard on their dory. They tried, each of the men taking turns, for a whole hour. Nothing. It was a delight to watch, because I knew they would have to turn to me.”

“Did they?”

“Of course. It was an Evinrude, which they pronounced
Ayfinwootah.
No wonder they couldn’t start it. And they were really obsequious when they asked me to see if I could. I got into the dory and looked it over. Practically the first thing I saw was that the bleeder valve on the bulb in the gas line was open.”

“What’s that?”

“To prime the engine you have to pump some gas into it by squeezing the bulb. It has a bleeder valve, as on a blood-pressure cuff, that’s circular, and you can’t always tell if it’s open, but I saw that the threads of the screw were half shiny and half dull. The shiny ones had normally been inside the valve, protected from the salt air.”

“And they didn’t see?”

“They were not people who are used to doing things for themselves.”

“Oh,” she said, thinking of herself, her family, and Victor.

“So I knew I could do it, but I wanted to make it seem more complicated. I removed the engine cover and used my fingers to move and palpitate the most mysterious-looking parts. I didn’t know what the hell they were, but I was jiggling them around at blinding speed like playing the piano. The Germans were looking at me, their mouths hanging open. Then I put back the cover really fast, and sort of set things up, including closing the bleeder valve and squeezing the bulb. It was empty at first, and then it filled, and I knew I had it. I set the choke and the throttle, turned to the audience, said
Alles klar!,
and gave the starter rope a single pull. The engine started with a roar before the rope was halfway out. If they were alive at the end of the war, when they saw the American flag on our vehicles, over our camps, and above their ministries, they might have thought once or twice of that moment.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, not because she hadn’t wanted to hear, but as an encouragement for him to close the circle.

“Because, when they left, they thanked me in stilted English—I acknowledged in worse German—and they gave the restaurant owner a wad of bills. I hadn’t been able to afford the restaurant. I was on a tight budget, and while they were being served grilled fish and lamb, I ate a can of sardines that I had carried with me.

“So the ‘restaurateur’ ran over to me and, picking up my pack, herded me onto the concrete dock where his restaurant was. The village was called Nea Epidavros. There were some very flimsy tables and chairs on the pier. He told me in Greek that the Germans had paid for my dinner. And the next thing he did was take off his shoes and shirt and dive into the water. I thought he was nuts. When he surfaced he was holding an octopus, which he then spent half an hour tenderizing by smashing it (dead after the first blow) against the concrete. He looked like a madman, or maybe a Guatemalan woman doing her laundry on the rocks by a river. The rest of the afternoon he marinated it, and by dark I had one of the best meals of my life, done on charcoal just like this, with retsina and all the rest. I could see the stars there so brightly I felt I was sailing among them. I was alone, and the Germans had disappeared over the sea.” He paused. “I really wish you had been there.”

“I never would have ordered it,” she said.

“Neither would I. Like quite a few things in my life, it was the result of unforeseen action by Germany.”

Riding the troughs and peaks of the waves, they were happy in one another’s presence, with little awareness of anything else, frightened that it would not last, frightened that it would, staring at one another with great draughts of what felt like love, and then withdrawing coldly in the face of practicalities. For her, loyalty, prudence, staying the course, the expectations of her society. For him, the fear that she was so much unlike him, although she wasn’t, and that even were he to win her she would soon stop loving him.

“Did Victor earn the money to buy his yacht, or did he inherit it? I’m not trying to set him up. I inherited my father’s business, after all.”

“Then you should know.”

“Know what?”

“That there’s no division in such things. With the Marrows, the Mellons”—she hesitated—“and the Hales,” naming three families famous for their wealth, “no one has any right or claim to the money any more than anyone else. It’s just there, and each generation is trained to ride it. Victor’s father didn’t make the money either, but on the other hand he did, as does Victor. No one feels either proud or ashamed, although, in this set, one feels as if one is truly better than people who don’t have money—as if they live half blind in the underworld and only the Marrows, the Mellons, and the Hales are free and can see.”

“Would you feel that way?” he asked, wondering about the Sedleys.

“No,” she answered. “I’ve been educated away from things like that.”

“By what?”

“Love,” she said. “If you can love, you can’t think that way. Even when I was a very small child, I played with the Bonackers’ children. I loved them, and understood that I was no better.”

“The Bonackers?” He thought they might be a family.

“The farmers and fishermen of the eastern tip of Long Island.”