Body & Soul (23 page)

The moment he laid his fingers on the keys Claude was oblivious of his surroundings, aware only of Peter, into whose magnified eyes he stared fixedly. The feel of the keys, the topography of them—so familiar, so constant—launched him into a trance, like an infant at his mother's breast or a true believer before the moment of communion. He paused, imagining the music in his mind, and then began to play. Four bars of introduction, a nod to Peter, and they were launched, the stately bass figure ascending smoothly, the top line of the piano fitting the free melody of the violin, the inner voices moving effortlessly, all of it spinning into the languid air. Peter played confidently, not bothering with the music. Claude heard the words to the bittersweet melody in his mind:

Music,
Music,
For a while,
Shall all your cares beguile.
Shall all, all, all,
Shall all, all, all,
Shall all your cares beguile.

It was going so well Claude introduced the slightest rallentando as they approached the cadence. Peter followed with uncharacteristic smoothness, and then gave a lopsided smile as they held the last chord. "Terrific," Claude whispered when it ended.

Peter put his violin on top of the piano and turned to the audience to acknowledge the applause. He placed his forearm rigidly across his waist and bowed twice. Then he stepped back and swept his arm up to indicate Claude. This formal gesture got a little laugh through the applause as Claude half stood at the piano and nodded to the crowd. Mrs. Fisk came forward to wait at the foot of the stage as Peter descended, folding him under her arm, kissing the top of his head, and shepherding him back to her table, giving quick squeezes that hunched up his shoulders.

Suddenly the stage lights went out. Claude sat in the darkness and watched all the lights at the opposite end of the room come on.
Catherine, barefoot, wearing a white knee-length toga and a green cape, ran from the dressing room and leaped onto a coffee table in front of the fireplace.

"Hark!" she cried, and all heads turned in her direction. "Hark to the story of Daphne and Apollo!" She spread her arms, her voice ringing out strongly. "I am Daphne, and my father is Peneus, god of the river. He allows me freedom to do what I want, to run in the deep woods, my hair full of leaves, my legs and arms cut by brambles and thorns, my heart wild as I hunt, like Diana. I am free!" She jumped gracefully from the table, ran to the side of the room, and mimed shooting arrows in the general direction of Central Park. Then she froze, staring at the audience. "What is that noise?" From the corridor to the kitchen came the sound of running (Claude knew this was Charles, the chauffeur, running in place, having picked up his cue). "It is Apollo! Chasing me!" she cried, and ran in a zigzag pattern toward the tables.

"Do not fear" came the muffled shout of Charles. "Stop and find out who I am. No rude rustic or shepherd, I am the Lord of Delphi, and I love you."

"I know," said Catherine, addressing the audience as she strode back and forth before them, her eyes glittering. "I know the message of the nymphs to Prometheus. May you never, oh never, behold me sharing the couch of a god. May none of the dwellers in heaven draw near to me ever. Such love as the high gods know, from whose eyes none can hide, may that never be mine. To war with a god-lover is not war, it is despair." Now she ran, legs flashing, through the tables, weaving in and out toward the stage. From the pantry, Charles increased his tempo. This was Claude's cue to go to the wings, which he did. Isidra was on her knees, her right hand on the handle of one of two long, blue cardboard cutouts shaped to represent waves, which stretched across the back of the stage to the opposite wing, where another maid knelt in a similar posture. Isidra looked up, her expression entirely blank, and Claude nodded.

"As fleet as I am, he is a god and he will catch me sooner or later," Catherine cried as she ran up the steps to the skirt. She screamed, and it raised the hair on Claude's arms. "Help me, Father, help me!" She extended her arms to the rented scrim, which represented a river, and Isidra began pulling and pushing the handle. The two long cutouts passed back and forth in opposite directions, creating the illusion of
water. "My father is too deep in the river to hear me." Now her movements to stage center became stylized, slow motion. "A dragging numbness comes upon me." She stopped and faced the audience. "Now my feet send roots into the sandy earth. Bark encloses me. Leaves sprout forth. I have changed into a tree, a laurel."

She grasped the edges of her cape and slowly raised her arms. Slender laurel branches had been sewn into the material. "Apollo watched the transformation with grief," Catherine said. " 'O fairest of maidens, you are lost to me,' he cried. 'But henceforth with your leaves my victors shall wreathe their brows. You shall have your part in all my triumphs. Apollo and his laurel shall be joined together wherever songs are sung and stories told.' "

This was Claude's cue, but it took him a moment to react, so fascinated was he by her image. She had swept through the recitation with a kind of recklessness, an abandon that now seemed to infuse her with power. Her small white figure under the lights seemed to radiate some fierce and intangible energy. When she turned her head, looking for him, her gaze was so intent, so focused, it felt almost like a blow. Startled, he looked around at his feet for the wreath, found it, picked it up, and proceeded onstage. He approached her slowly, holding the wreath before him, bringing it to her outstretched hand, which she then laid upon it. He could see drops of sweat at her temples, glistening there, her cheeks flushed, her lips slightly swollen.

"Thus the wreath," she cried, her dark eyes sharp, seeming almost angry, "is carried to the champion."

A buzz in the audience as Claude bore the wreath down the steps, across the open space, past the first tables and up to Dewman Fisk. The man's face seemed even more long and melancholy, as if his head had been pressed from either side by some great vise. His eyes were dull, unfocused. As Claude placed the wreath on Fisk's head, he thought he saw a faint welling of tears.

As the applause started, Claude remembered to step out of the way, out of Catherine's line of sight. "I want to see him," she had said. "And you watch his lower lip. See if it quivers." It was not quivering.

Catherine stepped backward and the curtains were drawn jerkily, two or three feet at a time, until with a final swing they joined.

Claude did not speak to Catherine again that evening. When she rejoined the party, still dressed in the toga, the green cape (with the laurel branches removed), and new gold sandals, she was surrounded
by a knot of men, pressing her with champagne and conversation, and he could think of no way to approach her.

Mrs. Fisk and Peter withdrew, presumably to retire. Senator Barnes, tall, white-haired, with very light blue eyes, drifted into the library with Dewman, the mayor, Nelson Rockefeller, and a dozen other men. The ballet dancers, the other guests, and Catherine with her entourage milled about in the living room. Claude tried to catch her eye to wave goodbye, but she was constantly in motion, talking and laughing with great animation, spinning from one face to the other.

The candles were beginning to gutter, and as the staff began discreetly to clean up, Claude went to the cloakroom for his coat. Balanchine was there, staring into a mirror and rubbing the hair back over his ears. He caught Claude in the glass.

"That was well done, young man," he said. "Very professional."

"Thank you, sir." Claude left, crossed the foyer, and slipped out the front door. He buttoned his coat up to his neck and walked home.

T
HAT WINTER
Claude saw a movie called
A Place in the Sun,
with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, and was swept away. He fell in love with Taylor, and, without knowing it, with Clift. The story—poor boy falls in love with beautiful rich girl, but the relationship is doomed because of his previous affair and impregnation of a poor factory girl (Shelley Winters)—struck him as profound and tragic. His heart seemed to twist as he saw the two young people, before things got complicated, flirting over a billiards table, water-skiing on a bright lake, riding horseback through the woods, dancing, kissing. He was drawn back to the Loew's Orpheum again and again, until he could play the entire movie in his mind, from the first frame to the last. (The only fly in the ointment was the soundtrack: sentimental strings, unimaginatively arranged, playing a schmaltzy love theme with a two-bar melody that didn't go anywhere. After a while he didn't even hear it.) It never occurred to him that there might be a connection between the movie, which had the power to make him weak at the knees, and Catherine, who could do exactly the same thing. It did not occur to him that his adolescent desire for Elizabeth Taylor was mixed up with a yearning for the rich, secure, gentle, and civilized world in which the Taylor character and her family lived This, he imagined, was the real world the world as it should—be secure love drenched and safe There was an almost unbearable beauty to the image of Taylor languishing sadly under a lap rug in a bay window, autumn leaves
swirling in the air behind her, dreaming of her lover in his jail cell. As well, Claude was moved by her father's tactful concern.

When the movie crossed the street over to the Loew's Eighty-sixth for a second run, Claude took Ivan to see it, forgoing the balcony to sit downstairs, very close to the screen, in which, had he been able to arrange it, he would undoubtedly have wrapped himself.

Afterward, outside on the sidewalk, Claude still deep in the movie's spell, Ivan thought it better to say nothing for a while. They walked up toward Prexy's.

"What'd you think?" Claude finally asked.

"I enjoyed it. The script was intelligent. Good direction, good acting."

"Isn't she beautiful? I used to think Jean Simmons—did you see her in
Blue Lagoon?
Just incredibly lovely. But now I don't know." He gave an apologetic little laugh. "I can't get this movie out of my system. I've seen it four times now."

"It's very romantic," Ivan said. "Much more so than the book. Dreiser is interesting. Possibly the clumsiest writer that ever put pen to paper in terms of style. Just awful. But the ideas and the structures are wonderful. There's a part when he's working in a big fancy hotel. It's not in the movie. Somehow the hotel becomes a symbol for the city and the whole hierarchical capitalist system. It's marvelous. You'll like it. Not in the same way as the movie, of course."

"I know it isn't real," Claude said. "But it gets to me."

"Movies can do that."

Claude was seldom home, but it became clear that Al was now a frequent visitor. If the intensity of the first encounter between Al and Claude's mother had been a mystery, no less puzzling was the way he seemed to be helping her, guiding her with great patience back to something like normalcy. It had taken only a couple of weeks to persuade her to get back to driving the cab for at least part of the day, with the late afternoons and evenings reserved for her "project," as they came to call it.

One night he came home to find them drinking beer at the kitchenette counter (she had stopped keeping whiskey in the apartment), working with pencils and paper, drawing up budgets.

"He ain't as bad as some of them," Al said, referring to Mr. Skouras, the landlord. "Now you at least making the rent, he pulled those
eviction papers. You chip away at that back debt twenty dollars a month, I bet he'll go for it. Give you the time."

"Yes, maybe," she said. "But that means driving ten or twelve hours a day again. I'd have to give up the project."

Al looked thoughtful.

"I'm getting the goods on those crooks. I don't want to stop now."

"I can see that." He nodded and rubbed his thumb on the side of his bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. "You put in a lot of work here."

Claude had sensed that telling his mother he'd actually been in the same room with the mayor or that he'd talked to the man's bodyguards would only excite her unnecessarily, perhaps setting her off on some manic spin. The thought of her showing up at the Fisk mansion, hurling accusations and demanding justice, made his blood run cold.

"Tell you what," Al said. "How about another driver? Keep that medallion on the street, making money two shifts."

"Oh, sure. How am I going to find an honest hackie? I'd get robbed, and the way they drive, it would ruin the car."

"I used to hack," Al said quietly. "I got a chauffeur's license. Kept it up, for some reason."

She put down her beer and stared into his fox-like face. "You mean
you?
You'd do it?"

"Sure. For a while. Till you get even. Four or five hours a night. The usual split. "

"Well, that would be great." She smiled. "Great."

"Then it's settled," Al said. "Let's go over the numbers again, see how they come out now."

Claude had gotten so used to the towering piles of newspapers, magazines, files, and cardboard boxes of correspondence that he only gradually became aware that they seemed to be getting smaller, the paths between the stacks growing wider. He interrupted them one afternoon as they sat on the floor, Emma with a ledger, Al methodically going through a large mound of papers spilled out between them. He would pick up five or six papers at a time, glance over them, and hand them to Emma one by one.

"This is cement contracts," Al said.

She took the paper and, twisting, dropped it into one of a number of large numbered cartons behind her.

"These two are the sanitation department."

She repeated the gesture, dropping them into a different carton.

"What's going on?" Claude asked.

"This stuff is all mixed up," Al said. "We're getting it organized."

"For the archives," his mother said with satisfaction in her voice.

"The what?"

"The archives," she repeated. "It was Al's idea."

"Sure," Al said. "Lot of important stuff in here. Got to save it for the future." He looked up at Claude. "You know. History."