In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  “It must have served you well in the army,” Evelyn said from the couch.

  “On occasion.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Catherine asked. And then, opening the icebox, she answered herself: “Half a dozen lobsters. Not again!”

  “We’re in Maine, Catherine. What would you expect, enchiladas? Oh, and I forgot to bring the bread from the plane,” Evelyn announced. “They never have decent bread here.”

  “Oyster crackers will do,” Catherine said.

  “Only,” Billy added, “if you like them. I don’t, really.” He was disappointed. “I’ll bet that tonight it drops into the thirties. If the weather holds, we can sail tomorrow, or the next day. No rush.”

  “Where?” Harry asked.

  “Just out into the Atlantic, beyond the sight of land. Ever since Catherine was a child she’s loved to be on the sea. And if the weather’s bad we can sail on the pond. A Winabout in a gale can give you a hell of a ride.”

  “And what does one do here at night other than read?” Harry asked.

  “Games,” said Billy, “and dinner—which takes a long time to cook and eat, and you have to boil water to wash the dishes. If our minds have slowed enough, as they tend to do up here—which is the whole point—we’ll turn up the lanterns and play Monopoly. When Catherine would bring one of her friends or if her cousins were here we always used to play board games and do charades on the first night. Once, Honoria—quite a name—a very Mediterranean-looking girl for a Hale, lost a diamond as big as a golf ball as she was swimming in the pond. Well, not a golf ball, but children shouldn’t have such things. It’s still there.

  “We didn’t finish those games, because the children would fall asleep and we would carry them to their beds. We would try to preserve the board for the next night, but with three or four kids, a dog, and the wind, good luck. Once, the money blew into the pond, I guess to be with the diamond, and for years thereafter the game was much harder, but that seemed appropriate as the Depression dragged on. We probably won’t finish tonight, either, because we’ll have too elaborate a dinner and start too late. But the main thing is that we’ll sleep a sleep such as no one in New York has ever slept. The air will be cold and it will be bitterly quiet. No appointments to keep tomorrow, no taxis, no garbage cans making a symphony at four A.M. All in all, the effect is like that of anaesthesia.”

  “I think I’ve outgrown Monopoly, Daddy,” Catherine averred.

  “Nonsense,” said Billy, slyly. “No one ever outgrows Monopoly. What do you think I do all day?”

  “Yes,” Evelyn added, in the same self-deprecating tone, “for people like us, it’s like looking at a family album.”

  While Billy and Evelyn sat on the porch in the sun, Catherine and Harry went through an unmowed field to a dock from which they swam (gently, for his sake) a mile down and another mile back up the pond. The water was comfortable, sweet, and slightly rippled by the wind. Had the distance been shorter or the surroundings less entrancing they might have increased their speed, but swimming slowly past the granite walls, determined to get to the end and back, their pace was as leisurely as if they were drifting on a slow current. They were in the water for almost three hours.

  Halfway back, feeling as if she had been born and raised in the lake, Catherine asked, “Do you know what we could do? My father could deed the house to us. Just with the money I have now, we could stay here in perpetuity, with neither doubt nor wants. We could fill it with books and music, sail on the Crispin, swim, run, catch lobsters and fish, and live with silence, the wood fires, the pure air. We could buy a tractor and have the best garden the soil would permit. We could import soil. We would have no schedule. We could throw away clocks and watches and lie together for as long as we wished. Our children would go to the local school, and we would supplement their education carefully and well. We can do this if we want.”

  “You would have to give up your career,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to sing.”

  “Yes I would.”

  “Not in the theater, not with a live orchestra, not lifting a thousand hearts.”

  “I’d give that up to lift just one.”

  “You’re scared of the opening?”

  “Everybody’s scared of the opening. It has nothing to do with that. And you’d have to give up your career, too.”

  “That would be easy, since I don’t have one.”

  “Not yet, but you will. You could give your share of the business to Cornell.”

  “And where would we find the friction, the sparring with the world, that you need to feel alive?”

  “Where is it now, in this swim?” she asked. “There’s no strain. We’re moving slowly and yet we’re covering a large distance, enjoying every moment of it, and we’ll be hungry tonight.”

  “Can’t do it,” Harry said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m too young for that, and so are you. We can come here for vacations, long ones, a month or two. And then we’ll go back to New York in the fall. How could we do without New York in the autumn? How could anyone?”

  Harry was nervous at dinner because he thought the conversation might turn to him. It did, but not in the way he expected. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and everyone was grateful for the fire. The lobsters, slightly charred, sizzling upon pewter chargers, had shrunk in their shells and smelled deliciously of brine. The three Hales, like the three bears, had wine in proportion to their size, sex, and age. Billy had carried up a bottle of white Haut-Brion wrapped in the New York Times, which got so wet in the surf boat that it became like papier-mâché, and news about troubles in the Mediterranean was fused with a report of a tennis match and an ad for garden gnomes: it would have been an odd story had anyone been able to decode it. Wine, Billy explained, could not be left in an unheated house in the winter, not in Maine, although Scotch presented no problem. “Too bad you can’t take advantage of that,” he went on. “Sitting on the porch with a tumbler of Scotch is more salutary than three years in a Swiss asylum.

  “By the way,” he went on, “why were you hospitalized? I asked Catherine but she said to ask you. Did you have an accident? You’ve got the remnants of. . . .” And here Billy made a gesture with his hands to indicate the bruises and areas of stitching.

  Harry replied with a question. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but did you ever have any problems with organized crime?”

  Evelyn stiffened in her chair. “Uh-oh,” Billy said. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not? I would think that, as you’re in the business of money, vast sums of which can be carried on a slip of paper, they would find Wall Street and the banks irresistible.”

  “The Mafia?”

  Harry nodded.

  “They do. They hunger after us. The more abstract an activity, the easier it is to appropriate it, if, like a forger or an accountant, you know the procedures, you have the skills, and you’re patient. We get around that with controls and exclusion. Our people come from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It’s a different world, with different thieves, and to the Mafia it’s unknown and as yet impenetrable. They would stick out, you see, much as I would in their society.”

  “What about the back office, where Harvard, Yale, and Princeton don’t ever set foot?”

  “They do when they’re young, but, it’s true, not as a career. The back office is all Irish, the kind of people who have been honest cops for a hundred years. Most of our employees are related, and everyone knows everyone else. It’s like a tribe. It is a tribe, and these people, the salt of the earth, have the integrity of saints.”

  “Do you keep out Italians, Daddy?” Catherine asked.

  “We haven’t reached the stage of keeping anyone out, and when the ice does start to break up on the American rivers, which it will, we won’t do that. But for now it’s us and the Irish, and we’re in a different universe than the Mafia. I don’t know how the Jewish firms handle the Jewish gangsters, because the Jewish firms employ Jews almos
t exclusively, so there’s opportunity for penetration at all levels.”

  “I didn’t mean fixing or embezzlement,” Harry said, skirting the subject of ethnicity, a subject that had made Catherine nervously roll her knife back and forth over the tablecloth, “but of pure extortion, protection. The Jewish gangsters run the garment business, Irish gangsters in Boston run the government, and the Mafia extorts protection money from practically every establishment in New York. But not yours?”

  “No. You take from people you know. You’ve got to know who they are, how their business operates, where they live, how they think, and what they’ll do when pressed. There’s a Turkish neighborhood in the Twenties. I guarantee you that the Mafia doesn’t touch them. They’re closely knit, who the hell knows what they’re saying to each other, and they’ll fight and die rather than surrender to extortion.”

  “How do you know this, Billy?” Evelyn asked.

  “From living in New York all my life.”

  “But so have I.”

  “I’ve lived more on the outside, Evelyn. My job has been to protect you and Catherine. I sometimes deal with harsher things and rougher people.” Turning back to the subject, he continued. “We’re the last stop on the line. Like the Turks, we have our own culture, our own neighborhoods, our own organizations, and we are, to the new arrivals, the most mysterious of all, because we’ve been here longest, we have power, and we—not I—wear mauve-colored pants and canary-yellow blazers, which I’m sure scares them the way you might be scared by the regalia of a New Guinea headhunter. How the hell are they going to read somebody who dresses in madras and a boater? They can’t. It’s like the Rosetta stone without the Greek. The tribe is very strong, its powers unmatched and supreme. Pastels and madras are its plumage. Still,” he went on, “Mafiosi know how to fight both aristocracy and its government. That’s why they came into being in the first place. And even if we are to them the most impenetrable and most mysterious, we’re also the richest prize. From time to time, they lunge for us.”

  “And what happens?”

  “The first time was in the teens. They set up an extortion scheme on a narrow front, with the idea of breaking off one branch at a time. They threatened individuals and their families, but only people in the two weakest and smallest firms. In those times, however, there was both more structure and less. The big firms—Morgan, Stillman, and all the others—realized that they would be next. So they had a meeting, and what a meeting it was.

  “They said—my father was at that meeting, and told me this. They said, more or less, ‘These people get what they get because they have a secret and loyal army and they’re willing to kill and, if necessary, die. So what we’ll do is match and exceed them.’ And they had the money, so they fielded two armies. Their reserve, army number two, was the United States Army itself and the whole government, which they had already partially purchased for various other reasons. I mean, everybody knows that. But now they gave even more to the politicians, from the president on down to the police commissioners and the precinct commanders, and the message was, keep these people off our backs. That would hardly have been enough at the time, given the powers of the government, which, domestically, were pretty feeble. So what did they do?

  “They fielded their own army, literally. More than a thousand, mainly Irish, but plenty of Yankees, Southerners, Rough Riders, former marines who had served in the Philippines, cowboys. They armed and trained them at ten camps upstate, and, to keep them under control, organized them into ten separate command structures. Then they brought them to New York in the guise of bank guards and detectives. You should have seen Wall Street. It was an armed camp.

  “The extortionists already felt pressure from the police. It was relatively straightforward: ‘Do what you will, but don’t touch the financial sector.’ To really drive it in, they were called to a meeting at which they were told that the private army, the power of which they could not begin to match, knew their neighborhoods, knew who they were, where they lived, and that if they laid a hand on the financial sector, they and their families (you know, in their code, they don’t touch families) would be massacred. Not hurt, not just killed . . . massacred. It was more horrible than they were, and they were told of it by very serious men who had done very terrible things in parts of the world they had hardly heard of, men who, if you saw them in the street, would give you a fright.

  “For more than a decade, they didn’t touch us. In the late twenties, however, after they had built themselves up during Prohibition, a new generation of their leaders came at Wall Street again. The army had melted away, and Morgan—that is, Junior—being old, tried a different tack. Not only had the power of organized crime increased, so had that of the government, which now had the means to go after them. With the government as its sole agency, the financial sector, at a cost of only a few millions, sent the same message, almost the same anyway, and it worked. Had it not worked, there were plenty of war veterans to be assembled once again into another private army. After all, the money and investments of the United States pass through us. If we’re broken by the mob, they’ll run the country. Not that we do, but they would, because in regard to such things they have no ethics whatsoever.”

  Catherine was amazed. That she hadn’t known much of her father’s world had been his intent.

  “I expect that they’ll make another run at us. Why not? But the response will be the same. It has to be.” He cut a seared lobster tail in half and looked up, muscles tight from the determination he fell into by placing himself in the battle as he narrated it. “Why do you ask?”

  The Crispin’s wake rolling out on the sea was as soft as the glint of polished silver. “Money,” Billy said to Harry, while Catherine and Evelyn were forward, stretched out and asleep on cushioned benches in the mild sunshine, “is a net in which sometimes you can catch something as splendid as this.”

  “It also feeds you, keeps you sheltered, and cares for you when you’re sick,” Harry added, “keeps enemies at bay, protects the ones you love, and allows you to live without constant anxiety.” He said this with some resentment.

  “I know that,” Billy said. “I was speaking of money in excess. It’s the only thing for which excess money is good, and it’s a risk to character, because you can do the same thing with hardly any money at all. The more civilized a civilization, the more that moments of beauty and contentment have no price and are accessible to everyone.”

  “That’s right,” Harry said. “In a park, in the lines of a building, in speech, in a dish that’s cooked, in the way the days are laid out. In France even during the war everything stopped in the early afternoon and people would return home for lunch and a nap. Families reconstituted each day at the same time. It was a source of strength and continuity that no one and nothing, not the Germans, not the war, could break. I wanted us to do that here, working to live rather than living to work.”

  “Theater people say they live like that, don’t they?” Billy asked.

  “They do, but they’re always ‘on.’ What kind of life can you have if you yourself are calculated for effect? And at lunchtime they’re not yet out of bed.”

  “You don’t like theater people, Harry?”

  “I take them as they come. I’m just being accurate.”

  “I’m concerned about Catherine,” her father admitted, “because I think it’s a bad crowd.”

  “Not as bad,” Harry said, “as the sons of some investment bankers.”

  “Obviously you don’t like Victor.”

  “I’m not fond of him, no.”

  “I understand. He always struck Evelyn and me as being overly polite, hiding something, or perhaps a lot of things. Since the age of two. Is that possible? At that age? Politeness is wonderful if it’s deep and quiet like a lake, but not if it gushes like a waterfall. He never called me Billy. He’s known me all his life and he never called me Billy. Everyone calls me that—it’s my name, for God’s sake. I don’t stand on ceremony. You call me Bi
lly. . . .”

  “I try not to.”

  “When we first met, you didn’t, which is proper, but you should now.”

  “Billy,” Harry said.

  “What?”

  “Just trying it out.”

  “Right. Look, they’re sleeping. You never got to what happened. Maybe I can help.”

  “I appreciate that, but it’s something for which I can’t accept your help, just as I could never work in your firm or live off Catherine’s money, either her own or her inheritance, in that it would make me unworthy of her.”

  “And what makes you think that you’re worthy of her otherwise?”

  “She does. And I trust her, I want to fulfill her expectations.”

  “Did she tell you that you’re not to live on her money or work for me?”

  “To the contrary, she wants to help in any way she can. She’s generous. She has a good heart. She’d give everything.”

  “But you won’t accept?”

  “I won’t.”

  “And what happens—if the Mafia beats you up it’s a rather strong signal—what happens if you go down? I mean, if they kill you?”

  “If they kill me, for a time Catherine will be like a war widow, of which there are plenty. Then she’ll start anew. This is all around us right now.”

  “What do they want?”

  “They want me out of business.”

  “Are you sure they don’t just want money?”

  “They’re taking much more money than we can afford. They want to milk us and then kill us off.”

  “Why kill a cow rather than milk it like a long bond?”

  “As a favor to a constituent, maybe a cousin, I don’t know.”

  Billy moved the tiller and altered course by a few degrees. The sail stiffened, the wake doglegged, and, like a spotlight that had been turned with a crank, the sun began to shine more fully into the cockpit. “So what’re you going to do?”