In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  For a moment in Madison Square, he had locked eyes with a very old man. In 1946 a man born in the last year of the Civil War was eighty-one. Perhaps this one was in his nineties, and in his youth had fought at Antietam or Cold Harbor. Fragile and dignified, excellently tailored, walking so slowly he seemed not to move, just before entering the fortress of one of the insurance companies through an ancient ironwork gate he had turned to look at the trees in the park. No one can report upon the world of the very old as the old comment upon that of the young, for no one has ever been able to look back upon it in reflection. Who could know therefore the real weight of all the things in this man’s heart, or the revelations that had begun to surge from memory, to make the current that soon would bear him up?

  In Little Italy, Harry saw half a dozen men loading heavy barrels onto a wagon. The sides of the wagon were upright two-by-fours joined by chains in symmetrical catenaries. Two dappled grays stood in their braces ready to pull. The barrels were lifted in coordinated rhythm, rolled along the wagon’s bed, and righted. For these men, the world was the lifting of barrels, and nothing could have choreographed their moves more perfectly than had the task to which they submitted. And when finally Harry broke out from the tall buildings of Wall Street at South Ferry, the harbor was gray and almost green, the sky a soft blue.

  At a newsstand in the ferry terminal he bought a paper, folded it, tucked it under his elbow, and so armed walked through a patch of sunlight in the center of a room blackened at its edges by shadow, to stand at a folding steel gate beneath a sign that read, Boat to St. George. From there he could see out to the slip, where iron railings and ramps and walkways of riveted steel plate were hung from chains and ready to clamp an incoming boat to land and release its passengers, by the thousands, who would then descend into subway tunnels hundreds of miles long.

  Though it was already hot, every grown man wore a hat, and the calendar had yet to reach the magic, variable date when the gods gave license to the men of New York to switch to straw boaters. Perhaps this permission had something to do with the proximity of the equinox, or the sum of temperatures above a certain level, or the sexual maturity of cicadas had there been any in the masonry canyons. But when it happened, it happened all at once, and it hadn’t happened yet. Men were still imprisoned in felt hats and in coats and ties, and women wore fairly long dresses and skirts, jackets, and summer shawls to cover partially the luxuriance of arms and shoulders that soon would be bare.

  In the hundreds of times that he had watched the docking of the Staten Island Ferry, almost never had he heard speech in the procession upon the ramps. Though once or twice, young girls had spoken excitedly of their plans for the day, those who were habituated to the run took the walkways in funereal silence. But because they were coming to Manhattan from Staten Island—and whatever one might think of Manhattan it had so little about it of the dead, who for centuries had not been accepted for burial there and were forced instead to spend eternity in Brooklyn, Queens, or New Jersey—their silence as they shuffled over steel had to be something else. Even cows, Harry thought, lowed and mooed when they filed through their gates and pens.

  And that was just it. They weren’t cows. Their silence was their dignity, their protest of being herded through channels of industrial iron, ramps, and chains along which they—living, breathing men and women—were moved like wood or ores. It was their reticence and dismay at being compressed into a crowd and swallowed by a dark, tight tunnel, something especially trying after half an hour over open water. Many times, the younger Harry Copeland had hurried through the terminal and rushed out to the street rather than into the subway, whether he would take the subway later or walk the eight or more miles home.

  Now, his direction was opposite that of the incoming crowds the boat would disgorge. He was going out into the harbor and the problem of confinement did not exist forward of where he stood. When the gate opened he would be released to walk onto the ferry, seek the upper decks in the sun, and glide in the wind across to Staten Island, within sight of the ocean sparkling through the Narrows.

  Before he saw the ferry, it cut its engines. Then it cleared the plank walls and piles, bow first, stern sliding into alignment, a crown of spray tossed toward Brooklyn by the breeze. In the interest of efficiency and speed the ferries came in too fast, and as a result the wood walls that guided them to their berths always suffered. For, most times, despite the hysterical reversal of the screws, the boats coasted too uncontrollably to do anything but smack and push the wood. Again and again, they mimicked a drunk trying to park a big car in a little garage. Half the people at the bows were there not because they were in a hurry to disembark but because they wanted to be present if, as each landing seemed to promise, the boat in all its magnificent tonnage would finally snap the wood and hurtle into the pages of the Daily News.

  As the arriving passengers filed past, he closed his eyes and saw again the spray lifting from the water in the moment when the stern swept gracefully to starboard. Were there a choice—between the steel walkways lowered with deafening racket, and the toss of spray in the air; between the silent, graceful coming to rights of the stern, and the crash of the boat into wooden palisades; a choice between the great heaviness of the city looming behind him, and the gravityless air above the water—he wanted to make it. And if there were a way to come from darkness into light and to stay there as long as life would allow, he wanted to know it. He was thirty-two, the war was over, and he wanted to leave even the shadows that he himself had made and to which he feared he was becoming a lifelong apprentice. But he could not imagine how.

  The gate was rolled back and he and a large group of passengers went through it and streamed down the ramp. He chose the port side and would head for the bow. As he stepped into the sunlight between the terminal and the deck, he saw a woman off to his right, just beyond the ramp on the starboard side. Although distance did not allow much detail, he could see certain intricacies across it.

  She walked with her back so straight and her head held so high that it was as if she had studied for years to be a dancer. But though she had studied, the effortless way she carried herself had been born with her. She was a flow of color. Her hair trapped the sun and seemed to radiate light. It moved in the wind at the nape of her neck and where it had come loose, but was otherwise gloriously up in a way that suggested self-possession and formality and yet also exposed most informally the beauty of her shoulders. She wore a blouse with a low collar that even across the gap he could see was embroidered in pearl on white, and the glow of the blouse came not only from its nearly transparent linen but from the woman herself. The narrowing at her waist, a long drop from her shoulders, was perfect and trim.

  She carried nothing, not a newspaper or a purse, and the way she walked was so beautiful that an angry man berated Harry for stopping on the ramp, where he was oblivious of everything on account of a woman who then vanished, and left him as if struck by a blow. She was more than image, more than the random beauties by which he lived through his days and of which he had never been able to make more sense than a shower of sparks. He had long known that to see a woman like this across the floor in receptions or gatherings is as arresting as if a full moon were rising within the walls of the room, but this was more arresting yet. And what was a beautiful woman? For him, beauty was something far more powerful than what fashion dictates and consensus decrees. It was both what creates love and what love creates. For Harry, because his sight was clear, the world was filled with beautiful women, whether the world called them that or not.

  As the sound of a claxon that had whooped in Brooklyn seconds before now echoed off the buildings of lower Manhattan, he remembered at last to breathe and to walk, and the breath came in two beats, one of astonishment and the other of love, although what right had he to love the brief sight of a woman in white who had crossed a crowded deck and disappeared in shadow?

  2. Overlooking the Sea

  AS EVEN THE MOON has its virtues,
so too does Staten Island. But except in declarations erupting from the crooked faces of politicians, the borough of Richmond was no more a part of the city than Mars is a part of Earth. If New Jersey, linked to Manhattan by tunnels and a bridge, could not make a claim of attachment, how could Staten Island, the humpbacked child of the Atlantic? It couldn’t. But it did.

  As they sat in her garden overlooking the sea from a high hill, Elaine, Harry’s aunt, the widow of his father’s only brother, put down her glass and asked, “Now that you’ve returned to the light of day, what will you do?” He thought this was a widow’s question and perhaps a touch envious, for although he had come out of the war she could not come out of old age. He meant to comfort her by lessening the contrast.

  “In some respects,” he said, speaking carefully—for she had been a Latin teacher and she listened clause by clause—“there was more light and air in the war than now.”

  Via a slight tilt of her head, she asked why.

  “When you did see something of beauty, when you did love, it was more intense than I can describe. Perhaps wrongly so, I don’t know, but it was. And in the fighting or when you came out were islands of emotion such as I had never experienced: in short takes, in fragments that pierced like shrapnel.”

  Not wanting to go deep, she just smiled, and the setting carried them through. A shingled house on two acres of garden shielded from other houses by thick hedges, on the eastern slope of a hill overlooking the sea, with three parterres of lawn, fruit trees, flower beds, and white shell paths, this was a paradise with a view to the horizon forty miles out and 140 degrees in expanse. The ocean breeze that came up the hill was artfully broken by ranks of boxwood until all it could do was gently sway the profusion of red and yellow roses on their long and threatening stems.

  Elaine, and Henry, the brother of Meyer Copeland, Harry’s father, had fled to Staten Island because each had married outside the faith. Neither the Irish on her side nor the Jews on his were hostile or unforgiving, but the couple felt discomfort, disapproval, and tension. Not wanting to spend their lives this way, they exiled themselves to Richmond, where, in the City of New York, they lived as they might have on the coast of California or Maine, and prayed every day that no bridge would ever be thrown across the Narrows.

  After Harry’s mother died when he was a boy, he had spent a fair amount of time in this house. When his father went abroad to buy leather or hire craftsmen, this was where Harry would stay, arising at six to make his way to school on the Upper West Side, studying with such concentration on the ferry twice a day that he seemed to make the crossing instantly. It was on Staten Island that Harry had first encountered a lobster and eaten it. Now he sat in the sunshine at a linen-covered table, encountering another one, in a salad by the side of which was a glass of iced tea and, although he did not ask for more, not quite enough bread and butter for someone who had swum a mile and walked eight.

  Not long before, he wouldn’t have noticed any effect after several times the exertion and no food whatsoever. He had learned in the war to unlink the output of energy from its intake, resulting in the conversion of hunger into a feeling of warmth. Which is not to say that, after a lobster, four rolls with butter, two glasses of iced tea, and a large salad, he was in danger of starvation, but that he was still drawing on his reserves.

  “I went out to the cemetery,” he said, leaning back in his chair so that the full sun was in his face. He knew that because his aunt didn’t drive she seldom could visit her husband’s grave, which was not far from but invisible to Manhattan, on land that rose gently westward from the Saddle River.

  “I haven’t been there for a while. Are they taking care of it?”

  “No. There were perpetual-care medallions on every stone, but they weren’t taking care of it. I went to the office. They apologized. They said that half the workers are still in the service. What with the demobilization, I thought at first this was just an excuse. But the mortuary detachments are still busy. Graves Registration has got to find gravesites that weren’t always well marked, dig everyone up, and move them to war cemeteries over there or bring them back home. And it’s not like digging potatoes. When they were buried, with artillery deafening the gravediggers and the bulldozer operators, there wasn’t much ceremony. Now they’re making up for it. They take them out carefully, as they must.”

  “So what will they do? At the cemetery.”

  “It’ll straighten itself out in a year or two. Meanwhile, since I complained, they offered to attend to us at once. But I wouldn’t let them. It would make it worse for the graves that no one comes to visit, so I did it myself. They had tools to spare, and they let me use them. I think they were embarrassed, that they feel they owe us. They don’t owe us.”

  “They don’t. I know.”

  “I cut the grass. I repaired the rails that go around the plot, cleaned the markers, weeded, I even planted ivy. It’s all done. And I said Kaddish for my mother, my father, Henry, my grandfather, grandmother, and my mother’s father and mother, wherever they are. By myself of course, no minyan.”

  “A lot of people would not approve,” she offered.

  Elegant, almost formal, and prepossessing in his suit and angel-blue tie, he contemplated for a moment and said, “Well, then fuck them.”

  After lunch, as Elaine carried several trays into the house, and he, at her order, remained in the sun, he thought about the woman he had seen walking onto the ferry. Even as he had been in conversation, her image would brighten and fade, rise and fall. Although he did not know her, he longed for her. The memory might last a week or two, or perhaps forever, but he was sure he would never see her again. He hadn’t been able to find her on the ferry, when instead of standing in the bows as he usually did he walked around the decks as if taking exercise. There were enough levels that had she moved casually from one to another only once or twice, he could have missed her, and he did. And when he tried to find her as she disembarked, the crowd was moving too fast through the four exits all at once. Though she may have been visible for a moment, concealed among the rapidly trotting people whose heads bobbed up and down like a flock of birds floating at the edge of the surf, the sight of her had eluded him.

  “The business,” his aunt said, as she returned to her chair. “How is the business going? Is that colored man still there? What was his name?”

  “Cornell.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That really is right. His name is Cornell Wright.”

  “After Meyer’s death, was he able to bring everyone through?”

  “He was. It was weeks before they told me that my father had died. I can’t blame them. They usually didn’t know where I was, because we were often seconded to other divisions. So I don’t hold it against them, even if they forgot. When I found out, it was a comfort to know that he had long been at rest. I hadn’t known, but still it was as if I had grieved in that time and was beginning to recover. I’ll never be able to explain that. It’s as if the world is running according to some master clock. I felt like a character in a play, and for some reason I was offstage when I should have been playing my part, but when I returned things had moved on without me, and I had, too.

  “We were fighting in deep winter. It took awhile before it occurred to me that the business was on its own. But then I didn’t worry in the least.

  “I own the voting stock, but only thirty percent of the dividend-paying shares. Cornell owns twenty percent, and fifty percent is in a profit-sharing trust. Everyone there has a stake.”

  “How was he able to run the company?”

  “You’re saying that because he’s colored?”

  “It would be difficult.”

  “Elaine,” Harry said, pausing as if to drop what he was going to say and then catch it, bringing it up high, “Cornell could run any business. He’s very much underemployed. If he worked anywhere else he wouldn’t have ownership, and they might make him push a broom. That was my father’s genius and luck, that he saw
Cornell as a man rather than as someone who, when he comes into a room, makes people breathe differently and talk carefully in his presence. It happens to me when they find out they’re sitting next to a Jew. They stiffen and distance themselves even if they don’t want to.”

  “I used to see that with Henry,” she said. “Sometimes people reacted to him as if he was polluted or dirty. He didn’t even know it.”

  Harry looked at her and smiled just a little. “Yes he did.”

  “It’s convenient that Cornell can run the business. Entirely without you?”

  “He could. He did.”

  “Your father would have wanted you to finish.” She was referring to what was going to have been his graduate education.

  Harry shook his head and looked down, addressing the ground. “I can’t go back. Not after the war. I wouldn’t have the patience. Not now, anyway. Things have been moving too fast, there’s been too much change, and my heart wasn’t really in it even then. We have problems, all of a sudden. I don’t know what to do. Cornell doesn’t either. Maybe my father wouldn’t have known, although that’s hard for me to believe. I’ve been trying to make the right decisions, but it’s difficult.

  “We were lucky during the war that whoever made the contracts didn’t throw us the kind of business they gave to others. It may have been because my father didn’t wine and dine anyone, much less kick back. I don’t know, I was a world away. But because we’re known for our quality they didn’t give us the staple contracts, the millions of holsters, rifle slings, binocular cases, and that kind of thing.