The Speed of Light Read online

  “Dear Miss Weisenthal,

  “I write in the hope that you will, in time, forgive this brazen stroke. Although I admired you from afar at a party we both recently attended, I failed to request an introduction. Now, I have only regrets, for the indelible memory of you exhorts me to make your acquaintance at last.

  “I am a not unhandsome man of 31, an ophthalmological surgeon and a member of the faculty of New York University’s School of Medicine. Having completed my training at the University, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity of additional training under Dr. Karl Kopfer in a navy medical center in Geneva for two years prior to completing my tour of duty.

  “Who can say what draws a man to a woman? I know only that I departed from a casual visit to an old friend in Massachusetts regretful at not having insisted upon an introduction to the most attractive girl in the room.

  “I am not, I assure you, accustomed to being so importunate. However, I know no other way to compensate my regrets but to write a brief note requesting an opportunity to introduce myself to you personally.

  “I hope you will not reject this unusual request out of hand but, rather, consider it and discuss it with your friends and, of course, with your family. If you should see your way clear to allowing us to meet, you may write to me at the address on the enclosed card. I would be most grateful for your telephone number so that I might call to arrange the necessary details.

  “Wishing to assure you of my absolutely sound intentions in this regard, I have attached a list of professional references which you or your father should feel free to check at your leisure.

  “I look forward to hearing from you and, again, beg you to forgive this unseemly approach to the matter.

  “Sincerely.”

  Nathan attached his professional resume and three references and reread the letter several times before sending it off.

  That evening he visited Sylvia Rubinoff, a lusty Communist nine years his senior, whom he’d met at a lecture at Cooper Union. There were large chipped bowls brimming with thick lentil soup and irregular grainy slabs of bread and a greyish brown crust around Nathan’s mouth when he was done with his meal. Sylvia’s throaty laugh amid the pillows and feather beds pricked his inventiveness. Her big pink belly thrust at him from every direction. He was a tiny splinter of a man, caught in her golden thighs until morning.

  Three

  Radiant, glossy Carla Weisenthal was not in love the way her classmates might have been. Hers was a quiet, abiding love for a man at Yale who played superb tennis, sailed a splendid boat, and never touched her. She dated others, of course, and sometimes let them plunge their tongues into her mouth when they said good night. It was unpleasant, but she had learned at Smith to gargle with mouthwash immediately upon returning from such evenings and so it was an unpleasantness quickly forgotten.

  Always smooth-shaven and crisp in tennis whites or sailing whites, Philip Neuman was the man Carla would have beside her, within her, all about her for her lifetime. But it was not the whiteness of him. It was, in fact, his darkness. It was the blackness of his eyes, the rumbling ambiguities in his demeanor, the unanswered questions. It was the interstices that she filled with her own hopes for him that made him so irrevocably hers. He was irrevocably hers because she had invented so much of him.

  She had written his name in various styles of handwriting along the margins of the notes she took in General Biology, and had sometimes written “Mrs. Philip Neuman,” which she thought would look excellent in print. In her Sophomore year she’d written, “Dr. and Mrs. Felix Weisenthal take pleasure in announcing …” But when, after a tennis game, she ran, flushed and glowing, to the net to meet him, he stopped a few paces away, taking her into his eyes and smiling a soft, sad smile.

  He met her at New Haven station when she arrived for homecoming and drove the Studebaker to Haven House. He carried both her bags to a third floor room all pink and white with marguerites and daisies on the walls. He had brought her to that room before. As before, she sat in the rose damask armchair, its rusted springs creaking, while he unpacked her clothes, respectfully hanging each skirt and blazer in the ample closet, cradling her cashmeres to the dresser as if setting a sleeping infant in its bassinet. And then, as before, he propped the pillow against the headboard and swung his long flannel-trousered legs onto the bed.

  He spoke of his roomate. “Mike will be taking Natalie to the game, of course. He could do without it, but Natalie wants to be part of everything. You know how she is. How most girls are. I’m very, very lucky to have you.”

  Carla’s eyes moved momentarily from her lap to his face and caught the sad smile. “The game is just an excuse, you know. Just an excuse to be here. To see you again.”

  They passed the afternoon in the places they had initially assumed: he, elongated upon the bed, she, in the oversized chair, her hands folded in her lap, her blue eyes sometimes darting hopefully to meet his and then modestly retreating to her lap. He asked about her paper on Brueghel. She asked about his Comparative Anatomy exam. And was that fellow still sabotaging other students’ slides in Microbiology? And then, sailing. It was growing cold. He’d be going up to Groton next Saturday to dry dock the boat. And his mother, was her hip healing? The gentle laughter they shared about their mothers who had both come from Europe and could never really be American, even if they had bobbed their hair. And what would she be wearing tonight?

  “The powder blue wool suit. Is that okay?”

  “You know I love that suit. That color was made for you.”

  Nathan’s letter waited for more than two weeks on the starched linen runner on her bureau at 40 East Sixty Second Street, sandwiched between an invitation to the Brearley Alums’ Christmas party and a newsletter from Henry Street Settlement. As it was a real letter, she saved it for last. By the time she finished reading it, she had stepped back from the bureau and sat down numbly at the edge of her bed, bracing herself against the slippery surface of the taffeta bedspread. She wished she had never let it out of its envelope.

  “Mother! Mother?” She found Sophie Weisenthal in the dining room. “Mother.” Carla extended her arm with the letter just barely held between her thumb and forefinger.

  The letter that had alarmed her daughter utterly charmed Sophie Weisenthal. And the letters of reference! The resume! She smiled up at Carla.

  “You remember him from the party?”

  “I don’t know what party he means! I don’t know who he is! I don’t know how he knows me! What should I do, Mother?”

  “I think we show this to your Papa. The man is a doctor. Maybe well-known. At dinner. Papa will decide.”

  Felix Weisenthal’s soup grew cold in the wide-rimmed bowl while he studied the papers in his lap. For months he had lain awake nights forming the sentences he would need to help his daughter see the truth without causing her pain.

  “Carla, my darling,” he would have to begin. “This Philip from Yale is a very lovely fellow. But you must understand that as a psychoanalyst I can see things that remain hidden from others. It is because I love you more than my own life that I have to tell you to leave this man alone. He cannot become a husband or a father. He is no man for you, my lovely daughter, because he is no man for anyone.”

  Felix was dismayed at the prospect of invoking his professional wisdom to sway his daughter’s affections. He tormented himself with this dilemma for months. And now, this letter, this Nathan. This Nathan was an exceptional man.

  He took a few spoonfuls of the tepid consommé, lifted the papers from his lap to the table, and continued pensively until the bowl was drained. With his linen napkin, he dabbed the droplets of soup from his bristly mustache and rested his round, balding head in both his hands.

  “This is an exceptional man,” he said finally. “I will check the Directory, but I think you must write to him tomorrow.”

  “Papa! Are you saying I should meet him?”

  “Of course you must meet him. We must all meet him. This is a very
exceptional man. The kind of man you must meet.”

  Carla excused herself and ran to her room. Sophie looked steadily at her husband. Early in their courtship, she had seen a German rendition of “Felix the Cat” and had ever since called him “Katte.”

  “Katte, I think perhaps you rush to judgment. No one knows this man. Where he comes from. What kind of man he is. This may be dangerous.”

  “I said I would consult the Directory. If it would give you more comfort, I will also ask around. I have a feeling people will know this young man. They will have heard of him. I’m sure I am right about this.”

  “Your daughter could never say no to you,” Sophie told him. “You suggest something and it’s an order to her. Now you are going too far. You frightened her this time.”

  Felix rubbed his forefinger back and forth across his mustache. “The man from Yale is no man at all and she is too much in love with him,” he said. He turned back to the letter beside his plate. “This Nathan is exceptional.”

  They waited in silence while the maid served their dinner.

  “Importunate,” Felix resumed. “He uses such language. ‘Importunate’ is a wonderful word. Only a highly cultivated man would use such a word.”

  When Nathan called her, he said things he had rehearsed very carefully and she agreed to an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum and invited him to lunch first to meet her parents. Nathan’s anticipation drove him wild. He almost bowed when Sophie introduced him to her husband.

  “You know,” Felix Weisenthal beamed, “you and I are probably the only two men alive who actually use the word ‘importunate.’”

  Four

  There is a shade of lavender reserved for November dusk. Blue enough to herald December when there would be no dusk. Rosy enough to console the brown leaves that still cling to their branches. A lavender sky, streaked shamelessly with orange, stretched out at the western edge of Central Park.

  Her eyes were watery with cold and her cheeks crimson with it. She pressed forward against the evening chill, her hands buried in a fur muff that suited her so perfectly Nathan could have leapt to embrace her when he saw her with it. But he kept his reserve.

  “You look more charming than ever,” he said with a narrow smile. Nathan enjoyed this measured pursuit.

  “Thank you. I guess winter’s just about here.”

  Impersonal conversation. She was demure, perhaps coy. She was playing her part of the game, he supposed.

  She supposed she was seeing him for her father’s sake. This exceptional man, this Nathan. There were times she took pleasure in his company, times when his quick wit could make her laugh. Other times, she would try to imagine him in some cozy place, in the guest house in New Haven, perhaps. In silent conversation, words exchanged in glances. When she tried to imagine him in these ways, she found it was Philip Neuman she was imagining, not Nathan.

  Nathan always spoke at great length and she had to admit she rarely heard it all. Phil spoke very little, but she remembered every word and repeated entire conversations to herself after they’d parted. Repeated them as she curled about her pillow, nuzzling the soft linen. Repeated them to the oval mirror framed in rock maple that hung over her bureau in Barnes House. She pressed herself against the cool plaster wall, her cheek, her hips, her open palms, and the tender underside of her arms.

  At Christmas, Nathan bought her a silk scarf from France the color of her eyes. He took her to the Brandenburg Concerti and offered a critique of the trumpet solo that seemed, to her, quite brilliant. He took her to tea at the Plaza and to the Impressionists at the Modern. She blinked attentively through his disquisition on Manet’s uses of the color red. They drove to Peekskill for a weekend with her parents.

  The Weisenthals’ country house sprawled on a soggy plateau in a slope from the road to the lake, a huge slumbering mutt: mangy, arthritic, loyal. Former owners had tugged it this way and that, adding wings, enclosing porches to create long, drafty, many-windowed rooms and then slinging new porches around the perimeters of the old. It had no discernible shape inside or out.

  Felix had torn out the little hive of servants’ rooms in the rear wing and made for himself a barny retreat, stocked with sagging couches, insufficient lamps, and low tables where open books lay nesting in others. There were no shades or curtains on the broad, new window that overlooked the lake. A maze of passages and stairs led back to the original house with its tiny upstairs bedrooms and poorly plumbed baths.

  Nathan sat amid chintz cushions in the meandering living room. Embers hissed at his back from a massive stone hearth. He and Felix drank vodka and talked late into the night about Medicine, about Prague, about Vienna. He sat with Felix at the window that gave out across the snowdecked lake and drank coffee and talked about St. Augustine, Blake, and Pascal. He asked Felix about the psychology of visual perception, about Gestalt theories of perception, about Kohler and Koffka and Arnheim. And when Felix asked him about optics, he was ecstatic. A colleague, Nathan thought. A worthy friend at last!

  On Sunday afternoon, Felix played a recording of Bach’s A-major violin concerto.

  “Ah, Bach. My favorite,” said Nathan. “And the A-major violin concerto with its brilliant coda. How nice of you to play it.”

  “Wolfgang Schniederhan,” Felix said with his ear cocked to the record player.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The violinist. A Viennese not so well known in the States, but one of my favorites,” Felix said.

  “Ah,” said Nathan. “And who is conducting?”

  “I believe it’s von Karajan.” Felix raised his bushy eyebrows and peered over his glasses at the record jacket. “Yes, it is,” he said, checking the record jacket. “With the Salzburg Festival Orchestra. What do you think of Schniederhan?”

  “Excellent, excellent,” Nathan replied. “And here is the second movement. A theme that returns in the coda.”

  Felix shut his eyes and leaned even closer to the record player. “Ah yes, you are right,” he said after some consideration.

  Nathan surveyed the field of snow spread out upon the lake. His remark about the coda had more than made up for his ignorance of Schniederhan, he was sure. In the end, Felix had been dazzled. This richly learned man was worth impressing. A challenge with a bountiful reward, Nathan thought: his chatty, pleasant wife, his glowing daughter, a superbly cultivated family. Nathan held fast to the moment to still the pangs of anticipation.

  The piney forests ascending the mountains around Northampton were spongy underfoot. Reservoirs of melted snow seeped from beneath the brown pine needles and gushed over hiking shoes that zigzagged happily up the mountainside. From a mossy platform of mica-flecked rock, Phil Neuman extended an arm to Carla, anchoring himself with his other arm wrapped around a limber birch. She was breathless and beautiful when he drew her up beside him on the slippery moss. Flushed and laughing and panting. She was wondrous. He bit the forefinger of his damp suede glove and withdrew his hand. It was her eyes he wanted to touch. He wanted them to be hard as the two aquamarines they appeared to be. Hard enough to press in his hand, to press to his mouth. He stroked her cheek and kissed her lightly at the temple.

  Here, Carla thought. Here on this smooth glacial rock, this rock of ages embedding a millenium of worms and beetles! Let it be here in this meager March sunlight while only the pines are green, while our noses are running and raw! Here, with our hiking boots on!

  Phil slipped his hand into hers. From their perch atop the mountain, the tiny clusters of clapboard buildings and ivy-covered red brick were bits of painted marzipan. The Holyoke Range rose umber and grey before them. They strained and squinted to find the pond at the rim of the Smith arboretum.

  “Just one year left,” Carla said.

  “I wish I still had one year left,” he said. He would start medical school at Tufts next fall. Carla was anxious. Tufts was nearer Northampton. He might visit more often. She was certain he would not.

  Nathan visited Northampton, but he did not
care to climb the mountains. On his first visit, Carla brought him to Chez Luce, a cheery, raftered place reminiscent of a chalet. Luce relied almost entirely on white wine and garlic for seasoning, but the ambience appealed to Nathan and he was happy to return to Chez Luce each time he visited.

  “We could go somewhere else if you’d prefer,” he would say. “Of course, I do love their frogs’ legs. And the sweetbreads, too. But if there’s someplace you’d prefer …” Carla would say it didn’t matter to her, which was true.

  “You really do love exotic food,” she remarked one evening after they’d told the waiter their order. “You’d like those chocolate-covered ants my friend Cora’s mother always sends.”

  “I do like to indulge my palate,” he said. It saddened him when he thought of it and he stared wistfully at the tablecloth.

  “My father,” he continued without looking up, “is very abstemious. A staunch Puritan, that man. Eat to live, don’t live to eat. What a drab life he has.” His lips pressed hard against his teeth. Finally, he sighed and smiled up at her. “I’m the prodigal younger son, you see. I’m not expected to amount to much.”

  They both laughed at that and he knew he’d finally touched her.

  In the autumn of Carla’s senior year at Smith, Phil’s letters were long and frequent but his visits were neither. Nathan was permitted to fill the emptiness. He would tell her how his practice was growing, how complicated hospital politics were, how good it was to see her.

  Nathan had thoroughly won the hearts of Felix and Sophie Weisenthal by then. Scores of accomplished Europeans had swept through the house in Peekskill that summer and they were full of congratulations. Sophie and her sisters embraced Nathan and the men guests winked at him. A promising young doctor, well-placed, well-spoken, and so well educated for an American! They had heard his father was a certified public accountant with a solid clientele in New Jersey. And the brother was a lawyer and a certified public accountant! Felix was a fortunate man. Sophie was a fortunate woman.