In Sunlight and in Shadow (92 page)

Neither at the warehouse in Newark, nor in the truck on the way up, nor when they had armed themselves and inflated the boat, had they been pulled back to the France of 1944 and 1945. But with their paddles dipping in unison, sometimes flashing when the moon appeared, and as they fought the wind and moved slowly and smoothly across, they became once again the proxies of history: silent, awed, working entrained with death. They felt again the tragic satisfaction of soldiers separated from time as everything fled before the concentration of battle. Something beyond and apart from the noise and the pain was always there, comforting and strong, the river upon which, if they did not survive, they would be borne away. Perhaps it is God’s merciful gift to soldiers that they can look upon themselves as if from the future or afar, that even the most terrible sounds are silenced, and time slows so as to lift them gently from the things of the world. The wind across the black water was cold, and with each stroke they knew whatever it is that is the opposite of fear.

By the time Catherine heard the rap on her dressing room door she had been pulled deeply into the magic of the theater. Here, just as powerful as the real scenes on the street, was the touch and elusive afterimage that brought and held audiences and always would. In the wave-like progressions of the songs and the glare of the lights was something that, though never directly apprehended, was sought by every soul. And like so many other things, the theater was an attempt to come near it.

Tonight, Catherine was stronger and more radiant than she had ever been. It was as if she were actually in the scene and could not tell the difference between what was real and what was not, her life and her part having fused until she was in two worlds at once. As she stood in the wings she had steadiness and strength she could not account for. She couldn’t wait to go on, for she was certain that this performance would flow through her as if she did not exist and as if she offered no impediment to perfection.

Right on cue, she stepped onto the stage, the girl from Red Lion or wherever it was, and the lights found her. The color rose within her, and was stronger. Perhaps the way she stood, her energy rising, made the audience aware, even before her famous drawing in of breaths, that they were present at a remarkable moment.

The music began, the pounding of the kettledrums, the bells, all the things that brought the chaos of the city into the shining set, and she took in her breaths, and began to sing. What a song it was. Everything was in the balance, nothing settled, all uncertain, which lifted her as never before. The sound was so strong it filled the theater like a wind that fells the trees, and yet it was so pure that it was perfectly tender. When a gull flies across the waves, sparingly moving its wings, taking energy from the crests to stay close and just above them, this was how Catherine sang.

All was at risk, all the time, and ever would be. Therein lay the greatness of her singing, eternally clarified by the oppression of mortality and the rebellion of love. It was almost as if she were singing to the rhythm of the paddles, and the paddles were dipping in time to her song. As brave as her husband, she sang into the darkness beyond blinding light, and time stood still. Evenly and steadily, with strength newborn within her, she carried the audience, through sunlight and shadow, effortlessly upon her song.

T
HE HUDSON IS
an estuary. Ocean tides surge in and out, making its waters variously brackish and fresh depending upon the time of day, the distance from the sea, and the strength of the sweet streams that tumble into it. The life of the river always changes. Sometimes beaches, sandbars, and shallows appear, placed by new eddies and currents. Coves can fill with silt and cattails, and then empty of them so that deep water returns once again. White sandspits stretching into Croton Bay come and go over decades, so that the river of childhood and youth vanishes with one’s maturity and old age, and children can hardly believe old men who point to open water and say, There, when I was a boy, was a peninsula of white sand so fine that high winds lifted it and blew it into the waves, which eventually took it all.

Isolated from the influences of the Croton River, from which it is protected by Teller’s Point, Haverstraw Bay is relatively stable, its eastern shore rocky and high compared to the western shore after the heights that run from the Palisades to High Tor flatten before rising into the Highlands.

Verderamé’s house stood like a battlement on a rock overlooking the water. The gravel-and-shell beach where the rubber boat made landfall was no more than three or four feet wide at high tide. Any footprint made upon it would not need the waves to wash it away, as by its nature gravel, though impressed, refuses to record. The wind was high and noisy, so even had the boat slammed into shore no sound would have carried above. It was impossible from beneath the cliff to see the house, or from the house to see what was below. Nor was it likely that in a cold wind on a November night anyone would have been stationed at the base of the cliff, and no one was.

Probably no one had ever stood watch there or been tasked to look down from above. Still, they brought the boat up so smoothly and slowly that the gravel made no sound. They breathed quietly; communicated with hand signals; scanned right, left, and upward; and stepped as lightly as burglars in a house with dogs. Sussingham took the painter and tied it on to a gnarled pine projecting from a fold in the rock. They stood for a minute or two, staring up and to the sides, carbines cradled in their hands. Then they slung their weapons, adjusting them to keep them from moving as they climbed, so as to prevent them from banging noisily against the rock or causing a loss of balance. They waited some more, banking into their accounts as it were the water and ground across which they had already moved without incident. By training and experience, they did everything patiently and in small, highly controlled steps, and rather than simply rushing ahead, they would listen and then move.

When they felt that in staying still they had sunk into the quiet and dark of night almost enough to become a part of it, they began to climb. Johnson was burdened the most, with the light machine gun, and he stopped to rest frequently. The cliff was not terribly steep, and it offered wide, open seams, broad ledges, and solidly rooted trees to grasp. One could go up it or down rather easily. The challenge was to move so slowly and deliberately that not one rifle butt or barrel would clatter on the rock. If they had sung at the top of their voices it was unlikely that anyone in the compound would have heard, or, if they had, would not have assumed that the noise came from a car passing innocently on the road. It hardly mattered, though, for the standards of assault were such for Harry and the others that to hear their own footsteps or breathing would have been a breach.

It took them nearly half an hour to climb the cliff, so slowly on the way up that, in anticipation of the rapid withdrawal, they were able to memorize every hand- and foothold. At the top they saw the lights of the compound a few hundred feet left and north. Here they did not hesitate, if only because at the edge of the cliff their silhouettes were visible against the background of the river, which was imperceptibly lighter due to its collection of moonlight and the faint glow of New York reflected from the clouds. Off to the north, in a gap between land and cloud that looked as if it had been cut into place with a razor and straightedge, stars shone through the Catskills’ colder air.

They crawled twenty or thirty feet from the cliff’s edge to the road, and hid themselves beneath laurel and rhododendron so that if a car had suddenly approached, its headlights slewing at every turn, they would not have been seen. But no cars came, and they were lined up from north to south as they would be for the assault: Johnson, Harry, Sussingham, Bayer. Although they had discussed precisely what they were going to do, and gone over it many times, they never doubted that the plan would be forced to circumstance, and when they moved according to the design they also improvised, so that if their expectations were confounded there would be neither shock nor interruption. Their ability to do this was the dissociated sum of their experience together and individually all across wartime Europe.

Harry turned to Johnson and made, had any sound escaped his lips, what would have been a clucking noise. No one could have guessed the meaning of this shorthand unless he had served with these pathfinders. Harry had told Johnson he had to be “the chicken.” Johnson was then the first to cross the road. He hesitated on the other side, standing straight, listening carefully, then dashed perhaps a hundred and fifty feet north toward the house, made a sharp right, and disappeared into the woods. Bayer, the southernmost, his head raised like a hound’s, then crossed directly and was soon invisible in the woods. Then Harry and Sussingham, twenty feet apart, went at the same time, Harry at a slightly northerly angle and Sussingham at a slightly southerly, and in this way when they reached the other side they were twice as far from one another as at the start.

While Harry and Sussingham found firing positions with as much cover as possible and open ways to north and south so that after their initial bursts they could move quickly to escape the return fire directed at their muzzle flashes, Johnson and Bayer moved slowly about, looking for tall pines close enough to the road to fall across it. This took quite a while, and more time yet was required to strap the charges onto the trees so that they would keel over in the right direction. Branches at various levels would have to be in the clear if they were not to catch on other limbs or trees and redirect the course of descent. Then the detonation wires had to be strung down and up to Harry. It was okay to run them along the road: no one in a moving car, at night, would see thin black wires, and if by chance they were discovered it would be too late to do anything about it.

After half an hour, they were set. Farthest to the north and just beyond the gate of the compound, Johnson was positioned with the light machine gun he had hauled up the cliff. They assumed that the guards inside would rush out and toward the trapped cars. Johnson would not let them get far. Next down the road to the south was Harry, in front of whom were the two detonators. To his left was Sussingham, his carbine resting against a rock, and the bazooka, rocket loaded, ready to be lifted to his shoulder. In the southernmost position, Bayer was ready to move across the road and shoot anyone trying to escape on the lee side of the assault.

To make sure that they would not kill innocent people, after the trees were felled Harry would first identify the cars, and then move closer to determine whether Verderamé was inside. To be absolutely sure and not mistake for their target two other automobiles of similar make that might nonetheless be driving on a deserted road in front of Verderamé’s compound and at his habitual hour of return, Harry was to move close enough to identify exactly. Were it not Verderamé, as unlikely as that might be, they would take everything with them, retreat, and leave behind the mystery of two trees felled one after another with burns at their bases, which to someone who didn’t know explosives might seem to be the work of lightning.

By now they were allies of the dark, completely absorbed in their task, far removed from hesitation about what they were going to do. The evergreens, wind, and cold brought them almost all the way back to what they once had been, and they waited, not quite relaxed, listening to the sounds of branches swaying and creaking. Though they would have to remain motionless in the cold for perhaps an hour or two, not long before, they had passed a bitter winter in snow-covered forests and on whitened plains across which crows and ravens that had fled the cold of Russia had been scattered like pepper.

Their discipline was such that after an hour in which they neither moved nor spoke they themselves hardly knew the others were there. Waiting motionlessly in ambush, they found their bodies sinking into the terrain as smoothly as silt that calmly settles after flowing into a lake. Their sight and hearing were intensified, and unlike in the first moments of getting into position, they knew from which angles they were completely invisible, or only partly so, and could achieve total concealment by minor adjustments of posture, shifting an inch or two in one direction or another, or flattening themselves to the ground. As they had come to the ready, they had felt that they were making waves and ripples, but after an hour the lake of their surroundings was unruffled. By 9:30, they were confident that they were as well seated as the rocks and trees.

Forty miles to the south, in the most incandescent part of Manhattan, Catherine had stayed in her dressing room rather than go home. It would help to pass the time, and she wanted to take the curtain call. After her song the audience had stood in ovation, their applause increasing several times to a peak that reminded her not of hail but of a squall beating down upon water enough to turn it black. Like rain pummeling the sea, the ovation had continued, sometimes strengthening in unison for many heartbeats, and she accepted it calmly, having risen to another level, never to fall back. The regard that had been denied was now hers, earned many times over. The equation was in balance, and, like the weather that had rolled in from the west, the sky was clear. She had arrived.

At a little after 9:30, a man appeared, half visible over the wall of the compound. He was thick and stocky, but because one could not tell where the rampart was it was impossible to judge his height. He might have been five feet tall, or six foot ten. He lit a cigarette and was thenceforth a tiny red disc in the darkness, no brighter than the lights across the bay, which were blinking through the remnants of wind-driven clouds. Harry could see, interrupted through the foliage, the diamonds blazing across the water, and they brought him back to when he and Catherine had climbed the dune and seen distant lights gently pulsing in the summer wind.