In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  “Everyone asks me that, because no one knows the answer, and neither do I.”

  “What if I gave you the money? Set you up in another business? Or took you into the firm?”

  “That’s precisely what I can’t accept.”

  “I understand, but this is an extraordinary situation. It could save your life. Catherine loves you. I’ll do whatever’s necessary, and it wouldn’t be a strain.”

  “You wouldn’t be saving my life, because I would hardly be alive. And more is at stake than you allow. My father built this business. It took him his whole life and then he bequeathed it to me. That means they’re attacking my father, his will, and his hopes. Thus, they attack my mother as well. And Catherine. ‘You take my house when you do take the prop that doth sustain my house. You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.’ They would rob me of my past, present, and future. I won’t let them do that.”

  “You’re not an industry. You can’t hire a private army, you can’t bribe the whole government.”

  “I know.”

  “So how are you going to manage? You won’t run. You won’t accept my help. You’re in a very difficult position.”

  “Very.”

  “And do you expect that I would approve your marriage to Catherine?”

  “I would hope so.”

  “How will you raise the children?”

  “Meaning?”

  “As Christians or Jews?”

  “I see.”

  “No you don’t. There’s a great deal you aren’t aware of, and my question is perfectly appropriate. How would you raise the children?”

  “We haven’t discussed that.”

  “You’d better discuss it, because you’ve got to make a choice. They’ll be either Christians, Jews, neither, or some messy hybrid, which is also neither. They will be one thing or the other, which, initially at least, you and Catherine will determine. I’m not the one who poses this question, it’s posed by circumstance.”

  As calmly as a diplomat, Harry said, “What are your objections?”

  “In theory, I would object if they were raised as Christians, and so were distant from their father. I would object if their father converted, and thus betrayed his family all the way back to Abraham. I would object if they were raised as Jews, and thus were distant from their mother. And I would object if their mother converted and thus became distant from me. And, certainly, if they were nothing, and had no belief, and were part of no tradition, I would be heartbroken that lines so loyal, stubborn, and courageous for so long would come to a vacuous end.”

  “We haven’t dealt with this,” Harry said, “because we love one another so much that in comparison it seems minor. I may be blind and proud, but I see it as a matter of faith.”

  “How so?”

  “I believe in God. Not as a manifestation of man but as an omnipotent power. If He made the world in such a way that it results in the love I have for Catherine, I trust that He will take care, and that all will come right in the end. His commandments are fundamental and of the heart and soul even if man has drawn them out into orthodoxies of his own making in a forest of dry reeds. Sometimes a storm rises and flattens the reeds to open the world to the sky.”

  “With what theology, exactly, does that comport?”

  “God’s theology.”

  “How justified and confirmed?”

  “By all nature, rich in life. I haven’t arrived at this belief via reason. I was brought to it, carried like a child in benevolent arms.”

  “That’s heresy, of course.”

  “Oh, you mean that though you yourself can speak to me, and professors can teach me, and the town council of West Hempstead can dictate laws that govern me as I drive through it, though Western Union can send me a message, the Mafia can force, a poet can entrance, a logician can convince, and an orator can enthrall me, God lacks these powers and is compelled to be forever mute and indirect. Who compels Him?”

  “Perhaps it’s His choice,” said Billy, who, although Harry didn’t know it, was used to theological discussion much more than most people would have thought.

  “How justified and confirmed?” Harry returned. “And if it was, or is, or will be His choice, can He not change His mind, make exceptions, operate on more than one plane, sustain contradictions, or set up blinds, puzzles, and traps? My tradition, Billy, if I may, considers intermediation secondary. And so, I believe, does yours.”

  “But the more you depart from intermediation,” Billy said, “the more you risk madness, pride, and error.”

  “Very risky, I agree, and one of the most dangerous things in the world”—and here he drew out his words and spoke them firmly—“from which the chief protection is God’s grace.”

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” said Billy, “but what about practical things? The world is so constructed that, as you well know, in many respects you can’t move in it as freely as I can. Your children will not have the same freedom as I have. It’s wrong, but it’s true. You can’t live in certain places, go to certain restaurants, work in certain fields, go to certain schools. . . .”

  “I know.”

  “And the long courses of both our families would be altered forever. It’s only natural for someone to want his children and grandchildren to be like him and those who came before him, not slavishly, but at least a faint echo after he’s gone. And not just he, but she. Evelyn, too. Continuity is not an unreasonable thing to want, is it? Is it anti-Semitism? Wouldn’t your father have felt the same discomfort in a like situation?”

  “Yes, and I won’t say that it should be addressed only by trying to make the world perfect, because that evades the question by substituting for it an obvious impossibility. Of course we want continuity of belief, appearance, tastes, predilections, way of life, morals. My father would agree. I have no answer, nor would he, but he would admit as well that marriages are made in heaven, which is why they cause so much trouble on earth. My only answer to these questions, my only answer, which to me proves sufficient, is my love for Catherine.”

  They were forty miles out, but Billy held his course and didn’t come about. It was relatively early and the radio had predicted magnificent weather. The sea moved in a gently rolling swell no higher than a foot, and all was pellucid and blue. After five or ten minutes during which he seemed to be weighing things gravely, Billy asked, “Am I to take it from this conversation that you and Catherine do plan to marry?”

  “We do.”

  “Why haven’t you asked me for her hand?”

  “I had hoped to straighten out my affairs.”

  “No one ever straightens out his affairs. There’s always something, and if marriages are made in heaven, why would you let it stop you?”

  “Shall I ask you now?”

  With a gesture of the hand that was not on the tiller, Billy said to proceed.

  “But we’re on a boat. Catherine’s sleeping. I thought I would be formally dressed, that we would be in your library and she would be waiting in the next room, in a gown or a suit.”

  “To hell with that.”

  “All right, Mr. Hale. . . .”

  “You might as well keep it Billy.”

  “Not for this. I love Catherine more than anyone in my life, more than my father, more than my mother. In a way, that breaks my heart, but it’s true, and I have to admit the truth. I promise that I’ll always care for her, that I’ll always put her before myself, that I’ll never betray her, that I’ll protect, honor, love, and defend her. The world can be unimaginably violent, and, therefore, this is required. I say it not only in the heat of love but because of what I’ve seen. I say it as an oath before God and on my honor. I ask for Catherine’s hand in marriage. She fully concurs. And I pray that you’ll give us your blessing.”

  Billy kept him waiting in the sound of the wake and the wind as they skated primevally across the border of sea and sky. And then he said, “You have it. Evelyn and I have discussed it deeply and at great length.”r />
  Harry was visibly moved, and quiet.

  “There’s something,” Billy replied, slightly lowering his voice, “that you should know, that even Catherine doesn’t know, but that she will, God help us, when she wakes up, because it’s time.” He leaned forward, keeping the tiller, which was highly varnished and as yellow as butter, in his right hand. For the first time, Harry looked closely at him, to take in his features so as to guess their influence upon children yet to be born.

  “Here,” Billy said, for no apparent reason other than just to start. “Evelyn was born in eighteen ninety-nine. Her mother was born sometime in the late seventies: we don’t know exactly when.” This seemed strange to Harry, as people such as the Hales knew the particulars of their ancestry. “I met Evelyn in the summer of nineteen twenty, when she was twenty-one. I was your age. It was at a dinner on the North Shore. I can still hear the clinking of the glassware and the little waves of the Sound striking the gravel beach, and I can still see the roses on the table. God, she was much more than beautiful, and I fell in love with her instantly.

  “She fell in love with me, too, but I had to chase her. At first I thought she was just shy, or that she wanted to set the barb tight, but no, she really did pull away. I was determined enough, and followed her to Princeton. I didn’t actually follow her: I knew where her family lived, and it was believable that I would be in Princeton, having been an undergraduate there. I called the house and asked if she would see me. On the evening when I met her family, the lawns were deep green and soaked with newly fallen rain. I was terrified. Her father was a Protestant theologian. I had never encountered him, as I had majored in economics, which despite what a lot of people I know might think, isn’t quite the same thing. I had heard of him, though, as at the time he was very well known.

  “So there was Evelyn Thomas, and there were her father and her mother, and there was I. I was fairly presentable, they knew of my family of course, everyone does, and it was clear that Evelyn and I were in love, even if she was doing her best not to be. But they, as well as she, were very disturbed, as if an equilibrium precarious for many years was about to be shattered.

  “The problem was that Evelyn’s marriage would bring out something they had let coast for want of ability to do otherwise. Evelyn’s grandparents on her mother’s side were, in fact, distantly related to my family in Boston. You needn’t be concerned with the complexities of that. Nor should anyone else be. They, the grandparents, were childless until, in the early eighties, they adopted a blond, blue-eyed girl who had been orphaned in northern Europe. On the Baltic someplace, perhaps Estonia, or maybe St. Petersburg—I don’t know. They knew. She probably would have remained in Europe were it not for the fact that after the Kishinev pogrom there was a massive exodus of Jews from all of Russia, and not just the Moldova. She was swept up in it, and landed in an orphanage in Springfield, Massachusetts, where they found and adopted her.

  “This child, Evelyn’s mother, was born a Jew. Nonetheless, as she was only five or so, they planned to raise her as a Christian and save her soul as a daughter of theirs would deserve. But she would have nothing of it. She remembered her parents indelibly. She knew enough so that, even at the age of five, she would have died rather than abandon the remnants and memories she had of her—God—her infancy.

  “They could not and would not force her, and so allowed the question to be subsumed in their love, and it was never addressed. Sound familiar? When she grew up she married the liberal theologian Thomas, whose love for her surpassed any other consideration. They then raised their daughter, my wife, ‘neutrally.’ It’s what happens when things mix and people take their cues from God instead of man. Thomas was a Protestant theologian who, just like you, believed in God’s omnipotence and direct address. Just like you, he thought God would take care. And because he was a theologian, no one questioned the religion of his daughter, assuming that she would of course be a good and elevated Christian, and that she went to church and Sunday school.

  “Well, she didn’t go to church and she didn’t go to Sunday school, and then I came along and married her. We were not married in a church, and we got away with it because of the war, the influenza, and then everything just coming loose in the aftermath. Evelyn was always loyal to her mother, but she hadn’t practiced any religion, and when Catherine was born I asked and was allowed to bring her up—lightly, because that’s how I was brought up—as a Christian, or an Episcopalian. Take your pick. On the rather rare occasions that I’ve appeared at a church service, I’ve taken her with me—when she was young. She thinks she’s a Christian, she feels she’s a Christian.

  “But the fact is, her grandmother was a Jew, and her mother, pace the Colony Club, the Georgica, and the Social Register, all of which would throw us out if it were public—I don’t care—is a Jew. So, if her grandmother was a Jew and her mother is also, tell me, what does that make Catherine?”

  Harry had drawn back as if in shock. “Are you just saying this?” he asked.

  “No,” Billy said, as casually as though refusing an hors d’oeuvre. “It happens all the time, racial mixing, intermarriage, adoptions of children from other religions. People don’t talk about or advertise it, so it may seem rarer than it really is. I know a cabinet member whose maternal grandmother is named Hadassah Levy. He thinks he’s Episcopalian. Actually, he’s so drunk all the time he may think he’s Egyptian.”

  “Still,” said Harry. He didn’t know why he said that. He was quite stunned. The wake of the Crispin seemed to be saying a million things at once, as if it were a choir so immense he could not see the end of it. All he could manage was a simple question. “She doesn’t know?”

  “Not yet. I thought that, with her marriage, almost certainly to at least a deracinated Protestant, which is the way they come out of Yale, she would put us back on our ancient track. That after their two generations of perturbation, the planets would stop vibrating and settle into smoother orbits. Had she married Victor, all this might never have been known. Even had it later somehow been revealed, it probably would not have been believed. Let me correct myself. She doesn’t know on one level. But she chose you. Maybe you just came along by chance. Hell, if marriages are made in heaven, who’s to say?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t I bless your marriage? Among other things, it’s more religiously consistent than my own.”

  Graciously resigned to the force of the wind, Billy pushed the tiller over hard and the Crispin came about with a huge shudder, waking Catherine and Evelyn. Having come about, they all headed home over the open sea.

  26. Speechless and Adrift

  WHEN CATHERINE, FOR a brief oment upon awakening, returned to the world of mother, father, and child, Harry looked on at the fleeting equilibrium of a family as once it was, sorry that he, no less than time, had broken and would yet break it. As surely as the Crispin drove north, a trail of sea singing quietly behind it before softening into the depths, the forward momentum of things would break apart all families, as it had broken his own, and as in the future it would break it yet again. Watching Catherine make her way astern, he knew what would be revealed to her, and that it would change her life.

  Moving along the deck and followed by her mother, she was as happy as if while she slept all her cares had been washed away. Kneeling on one of the benches, she seized a pair of binoculars and began to track birds gliding above the water near the entrance of the bay. “Two gannets,” she announced.

  “Take the tiller, Harry,” Billy commanded, rushing to join his daughter and his wife. The Hales knew a lot about birds, and could identify them when others saw just specks in the sky.

  Harry took the tiller.

  “We don’t have to tack yet.” Billy lifted his own pair of binoculars and lapsed into silence.

  After a while, Catherine said, “See the yellow? A remnant of breeding.”

  One of the gannets’ head-and-neck plumage was yellow. The other’s was so intricately checked as to be an optical illusion. They were fishing n
ear a beach littered with driftwood silvered by Maine winters. Their nearly divine economy of movement, their speed above the waves, their darting, their effortless suspension and decisive plunges were evidence that they had received their instruction from the angels.

  Billy was the first to break off, because finally he did have to tack. He gave his binoculars to Harry, who then saw his first pair of gannets, and as the Crispin surged forward he watched them weave above the water in their primal state, a mated pair at their peak.

  “I can’t think of a more perfect setting, Catherine,” Billy began, with surprising formality, “in which to tell you that, although it was not intended for the sea, and we just fell into it—not the sea—Harry has asked us to bless your intended marriage, and, having discussed it beforehand with your mother, I did.”

  The passage of the Crispin between islands of rock cliffs and pine took place in the sun and in full air. Catherine closed her eyes. She cried easily, and didn’t want to. But every breath was an elevation she hoped would last forever. “Something else came up,” Billy said, “which Harry now knows and you don’t, although I should—we should—probably have told you long ago, and certainly in advance of Harry, because it concerns you foremost. I hope you’ll forgive me, although if you don’t I’ll understand. We kept it from you for many reasons, not least because it’s a difficult and complex subject that’s best dealt with by an adult. And we kept it from you, to be truthful, because we didn’t want it to come between us as you were growing up.”

  “What?” she asked, apprehensive but unafraid.

  “We didn’t want to introduce. . . .”

  “Am I adopted?” she interrupted, almost stridently, slightly losing her composure, and, for some reason, amused.

  “No, nothing like that. Well, a little like that.”

  “I’m a little adopted?”

  “Of course not. You’re our child entirely—biologically, legally, historically, completely. A hundred percent. Not a problem.”