In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  Inside the house, Billy stood in his robe, teacup in hand, as still as an Elgin Marble. Instead of greeting Harry, he remained motionless, gazing into the strong light from outside. Had Harry looked closely enough, he could have seen two perfect pictures of the terrace, the pool, the gardens, and the line of dunes, miniaturized and bent to follow in faithful color the orbs of their owner’s eyes. Fearing that Billy’s impassive demeanor meant that he had decided against him, Harry carefully said good morning, but Billy just stared in his direction, until he quoted, “‘The air was literally filled . . . the light at noon-day was obscured . . . and the continual buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.’”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Audubon. The passenger pigeon. There.”

  Harry turned around. Behind him was what captivated Billy, the Audubon engraving of the passenger pigeon.

  “Audubon reported that there were so many of them that they darkened the sky. But now they’re gone. The very last one—they had her in a zoo, in Cincinnati, and they knew that she was the last of her kind—died at one in the afternoon on the first of September, nineteen fourteen. I was probably . . . I don’t know what I was doing then. If it were a weekday, I may have been trading stocks. What were you doing?”

  “Probably sleeping or drinking milk.”

  “Were you born in Cincinnati?” Billy asked hopefully.

  “No, but had I been born there, I don’t think I would have been her.”

  Billy seemed disappointed. “Look at this,” he said, walking over to a flat tin box, as gray as lead and scarred by time, resting on a cherrywood desk. “It’s one of the boxes they used for sending prints to subscribers. I have all the prints, the complete set.” He opened the lid and propped it up with the dowel that came originally for the purpose. “Wow,” he said, meaning the life still to be felt in a wild goose, its plumage as dark as velvet and as white as raw cotton, its neck bent in readiness for combat, the red tongue vibrating between the halves of its beak like flame, its cry almost audible, and the background of marsh plants as lonely as in a Japanese print. Harry bent to the caption, which read, Drawn from nature and published by John J. Audubon. F.R.S. F.L.S. & etc. Engraved, Printed, & Colored by R. Havel.

  “Sometimes I regret that we so readily eat birds and fish, which are beautiful, and perfectly suited to the water and air. But, then again, when they can, they eat us, and with no regret.”

  “And we’re ahead in the game,” Harry said.

  “Not for long,” Billy answered. “Humankind, or at least American-kind, will lose its edge as we produce more and more pipsqueaks and everyone gets nicer. Whole generations of pipsqueaks will be so fucking nice you won’t be able to tell a man from a woman.”

  “You won’t?”

  “Nope. And it will get worse and worse as people mistake nice for good. Hitler was nice, supposedly, most of the time. A lot of good that did. Luxury and prosperity breed pipsqueaks. A century from now the country won’t even be able to defend itself.”

  “Do you think that my generation,” Harry asked, “that just conquered the world, are pipsqueaks?”

  “That’s why the pipsqueaks are on their way. The universe isn’t homogenized. Everything changes, and there’s only one direction in which we can go in the near future. Brace yourself for a different world, where you’ll be totally out of place, and hope that your children are strong enough to carry through to the hard generations that will protect your line from extinction.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Harry said, unconcerned about the virility of his sons, and, given Catherine, the femininity of his daughters.

  “Mark my words,” said Billy. “Within a decade the British Empire will have vanished.”

  And then Catherine appeared. She had been standing close by and listening to their discussion. She, too, was in a robe. “Okay,” said Billy. “To hell with the British Empire. Let’s have breakfast and get to the beach before the sand fleas.” He left quickly, like Santa Claus.

  “Are sand fleas a problem, like pipsqueaks?” Harry asked, aching for Catherine even as she stood before him.

  “That’s what he calls the talky people who bunch together in groups to lie in the sun. It’s a semi-nude cocktail party, with seaweed. Listening to the two of you, one would think that you were both slightly out of your minds.”

  “You’re his daughter, and I came out of nowhere. In the natural order of things, that’s difficult. What you witnessed was civilization overcoming the impulses of nature. Even birds have patterns of behavior and ceremonies that save them.”

  “It’s just that he feels wanting because he missed both wars,” she said. “You should get into your bathing suit.”

  “So soon?”

  “In our house, breakfast is a grapefruit, and that takes a minute and a half because it’s pre-cut. Daddy frowns upon reading the paper at the breakfast table. He thinks it’s slovenly. So in the morning the Hales are always out like a shot. And now the idea is to do the five miles before getting trapped in the seaweed party. If we go soon, we’ll escape them.”

  She was iron-straight in her pink silk robe. A strap, silvery pink with a metallic sheen, rose from beneath the robe’s shawl collar and looped around her neck. “Are you in yours?” he asked, meaning her bathing suit.

  A second or two passed as her expression changed from something light to a deep, slow stare. Rather than speak, she undid the loosely tied belt, took in a long breath that she did not immediately expel, lifted her hands to open the collar, and let the robe drop to the floor.

  She was in a two-piece bathing suit, in the French style. The pleated top took the shape of her breasts with enough force to iron out the pleats, and her nipples, pressed back, showed sharply nonetheless through the sheen of metallicized fabric. The lower part was deliberately a scandal—two triangles meeting on the side of the hip in just a narrow band, the front bulging gently and softly, arrestingly beautiful.

  Her body was lithe, sharply defined for a woman, and of ideal proportions. She had wanted him to see her, and the way she had shown herself was stunning. Pleased by his reaction, she said, “Harry, you can breathe now.”

  From a distance, the knot of people arrayed in a rough circle on the high, level part of the beach, where tire tracks showed that fishermen’s jeeps had passed by at dawn, might easily have been mistaken for a hump of colored rock. Almost a dozen of them had coalesced from east and west, from the Georgica Club, the houses inland, and the houses to the east along Dune Road. Artists and theater people came from the east, loping in from Amagansett like camels and stopping magically near the Hales’ as if repelled by the Episcopalian energy belt that emanated from the Georgica Club. Being artists and theater people, they often had psychiatrists in tow—not always their psychiatrists, but psychiatrists just the same. From the west came the investment bankers, lawyers, and rentiers, pouring into what Billy had christened the Demilitarized Zone, where they gathered with the others to sit in clumps and talk in the sound of the wind. From the east, fame and art; from the west, power and wealth. Each probed the world of the other in search of advantages less likely to find them than would a direct meteorite strike.

  By definition, the artists, writers, and actors were so desperate for money that, had a decent amount been offered for doing so, they might have taken the few steps to the Atlantic Ocean and swum it, and yet they never talked about money in the presence of those who had it, lest those who had it think that they might need it. And those who had the money came because, having crested the top of the hill and seen that on the other side was nothing, they wanted to feel the touch of life they had left on the slope behind them. This was why they spoke so little. The artists thought it was because the monied were deracinated WASPs who somehow had less soul than others, and that, at least in comparison to the newly arrived and deeply engaged, they had nothing to say. But it was not so. It was only that success had introduced the bankers and lawyers to futility, and they could do nothin
g but look back, as if from the land of the dead, and with gentle envy and equal affection, at those still animated in struggle.

  The Hales were there, having failed to get out quickly enough; various Marrows; a lawyer named Cromwell, without the wife who had left him because he won every argument and was never home; a Hollywood leading man and his Eastern European acting coach, who looked astoundingly like a monkey, both from a distance and from very close; a truly great representational painter, his wife, and their daughter of five or six; the psychiatrist du jour, who was bald and to compensate had grown a beard of the kind, common to nineteenth-century whalers, that could have served as a brush for reaming out barrels; two very strange Mediterranean dogs that looked like bulked-up greyhounds, one chocolate brown, one light khaki, both stretched out miserably in the sun with the resigned elongated necks of dogs who sleep stoically while suffering through human conversation; and Victor.

  Victor Marrow’s dreams were set and glazed in the spring of 1929 when, as a junior at Yale, he sat in his room, at the edge of his bed, staring at his closet, the doors of which he had (and not for the first time) opened fully to reveal his carefully attended wardrobe. Carpenters had constructed this closet along an entire blank wall. He felt a surge like that of an opium/caffeine cocktail that a chorus girl once had shared with him at Chumley’s: tiny, microscopic, warm, almost infrared rays coursing through his body, like the species of sexual pleasure that is primarily the province of women, who, unlike men, are more apt to take long rather than wild rides. But he didn’t know this. All he knew was a marvelous, ecstatic, pre-orgasmic contentment, white foaming oceans of it frothing in his mind as the birds outside sang of Eli. As he hummed in low tones like a Tibetan chant, “Boola-boola, boola-boola, boola-boola, boola-boola, boola-boola, boola-boola, boola-boola, boola-boo!” over and over again, he surveyed the eighty Savile Row suits, the Peal shoes, the walking sticks, spats, umbrellas, and hats, the pumps, braces, cummerbunds, and coats, the gloves, shirts, and sweaters of the wool of angora goats. And when he combed his hair, not a single one of the brass-colored straight strands rode up or was even vaguely crossed with another. Perfect parallels to the end of the earth, he thought, just like Euclid. Better than Euclid. Of course, Victor knew that his hair would soon start its emigration to other worlds, leaving strand by strand to race down the drain of a shower or sink, like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and a very skinny snake. He was well educated, clever, and marvelously inane. But beneath these qualities was a callousness, a disregard for all living things (as a boy he had used frogs for shuttlecocks), a malice as sharp as Angostura bitters, and a hold over women that, surviving the process of his body going to seed, paralyzed them as if they were staring at a swaying cobra. Although no man could see or understand this quality, it worked upon the feminine in a way that must have begun at the beginning of time. Although men like Harry were born to protect women from men like Victor, in perceiving no threat, they often failed.

  “The sand fleas,” Catherine announced to Harry as they approached on the hard-packed part of the beach that the water strokes twice a day and then abandons. They had become so comfortable walking tightly together that it seemed to be less difficult than walking independently, and that morning they had gone all the way to the Coast Guard station at Amagansett and back. As soon as they came in range of the group, however, they separated.

  “Do we have to show?” he asked.

  “They saw us come out of the dunes at our house. We can’t avoid them or it’ll look like we’re afraid. We just have to do it,” Catherine said. “Victor is on the right. I can’t fear him or seem ashamed. I won’t turn around. If we remain standing, we can leave after not too long. Just don’t sit down or we’ll have to stay there an hour.”

  “I thought that was a rock,” Harry said, referring to Victor. “Does he go anywhere without his parents?”

  “That’s not fair. You’ve only seen him twice now.”

  “But many times in my dreams.”

  As they ascended to the flat ground, conversation stopped. “Who are they?” the acting coach asked with a mixture of excitement and envy that could have come only from someone who looked so much like a monkey that when very small children saw him they thought they had been taken to the zoo. “They’re too strong to be dancers. Are they gymnasts? God, look at them.”

  The leading man tensed his abdomen lest he be upstaged. Only the artist and his wife, a couple of superior temperament, were undisturbed in any way. Even the lawyer was made unhappy, as he had no wife but the law, and no one actually has the law. The daughter of the artist, platinum-haired, lay asleep in his arms, and the dogs didn’t look up. Victor did not, like the leading man, prepare for meeting Harry by tightening all his muscles, but by letting himself go slack as a sign of contempt. He so let his jaw slacken that his jowls expanded.

  Evelyn made the many introductions over almost five minutes, at the end of which, as a rainbow dimly formed in a cloud of mist over the waves, and then floundered on the wind, she introduced Harry to Victor. Like a dying crab, Victor lifted his forearm without taking his elbow from the sand. Harry extended himself into a cantilever and reached for Victor’s hand, which was as limp as a lamprey. But when Harry grasped it firmly and quickly, Victor just as quickly and unknown to anyone but the two of them bent his index finger and scratched Harry’s palm.

  Harry was not pleased, and then posed this question to the group. “What does it mean,” he asked, “when someone, while shaking hands, scratches your palm with his index finger?”

  “It means he’s interested in you,” immediately said the acting coach, whose name was Arthur Tawney, although he had been born Szygmunt Przyemskl. When everyone looked wonderingly at him, he added, “In some circles . . . I believe.”

  “Victor, what do you think it means?” Harry pressed.

  “It means,” said Victor dismissively, “that the person who scratched thinks the other one is a shithead.”

  “This is among four-year-olds?”

  “This is among forty-year-olds.”

  “Is that where it stops?”

  “No,” said Victor. “It stops when the shithead is dead.”

  “From what? Rabies?”

  “From whatever you’d like,” Victor continued. He glanced at Catherine, who was obviously annoyed, and who, in the blush of morning sun, looked spectacular. “Maybe from choking on a breast.” Suddenly aware that even his parents were horrified, Victor added, “Of chicken,” and lapsed into determined silence.

  “Of chicken!” exclaimed Arthur Tawney.

  “Harley,” Billy said, ignoring Victor, this is my daughter, Catherine. She’s in the theater.” He did not have to introduce Harley to Catherine. Everyone in the United States knew Harley. His eyes went as briefly past her as a basting brush, and his mouth tightened in contempt. Catherine was obviously hurt, though she tried not to show it.

  “What was your last movie, Harley?” Harry asked, with a delicate edge and having lost no time.

  “Delilah.”

  “Was that the one with the talking dog, or was he in Fire over Bulimia?”

  “Rumania. Fire over Rumania. I played the bomber pilot who. . . .”

  “I liked the one with the talking dog. He stole the show.”

  “And what do you do?” Arthur Tawney asked, like acid on metal.

  Harry turned to him, put his finger to his lips, and said, “Shhh! Let the organ grinder speak, or he won’t feed you.”

  At this, the psychiatrist interrupted authoritatively, addressing Harry both as if no one else was there and as if he were in front of an audience. “I can tell,” he said, “that until recently you were a soldier. Is that not correct?”

  “It is.”

  “And that you were in for years?”

  “I was.”

  “The war is over,” he said, kindly rather than with rancor.

  “Then tell that to the fat palm-scratcher over there who called me a shithead and ‘threatened’
my life. And to George the Fourth and his chimp, who treated Catherine like the dirt they are.” For Harry, who had seen a great deal of war, this was not really fighting.

  “What do you do, anyway?” Harley asked, sensing that this was how he might trump Harry, in that he was famous and Harry was not.

  Harry said, “I wanted to be a movie critic, but during my training I saw a lot of films that made me so ill—you might know them—that I changed my profession and now I’m a monkey hunter and a hippopotamus slayer.”

  “Are you talking about my son?” Willie Marrow asked indignantly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Obviously I’m not the monkey,” Victor said, as if from sleep.

  “Who’s the monkey, then?” Arthur Tawney asked, without a clue.

  “I can’t believe it,” the lawyer announced. “This man has been here five minutes and we’re all about to kill each other.”

  “It’s not his fault,” Catherine asserted.

  “Don’t be defensive,” the psychiatrist said.

  “Why not?” Catherine asked. “When you fence, Doctor, do you stab yourself?”

  “I don’t fence, Catherine, I listen.”

  “Oh please. Spare me,” she said.