In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  Breathing hard, worrying about his heart and whether it might stop, not confident that in his state and in the wind and current of even the denatured storm he could reach shore, he thought back to 1910, before the great wars, when he had swum at the height of summer under a full moon in the Gardiners’ bath-warm pond. In the moonlight the Vassar girl was flawless. He had thought at the time that he would marry her, and eventually he did.

  At eight o’clock by his still-running watch despite the paradox of the description, he abandoned what was left of the Winabout and, at first half walking, half swimming over the bar that had saved him, found deep water and began a slow, two-hour crawl toward Napeague Inlet.

  Were he to make it, he would burrow into the side of a dune and sleep, and when he awoke go to the highway and then East Hampton, where among the many people he knew, someone would be at home despite the season and the storm. He had nothing but his clothes, neither shoes nor socks, which had been stripped off by the sea as easily as a two-year-old’s shoes and socks are shucked from his feet by a mother’s well practiced and affectionate hands. In the cold, dry sides of a dune, he dreamt of the island pond, moonlit, warm, and ruffled by the wind.

  30. Baucis and Philemon

  CATHERINE NOW DISPLAYED a delicacy that made her parents unusually tentative in her presence. They refrained from speaking when ordinarily they would have spoken, they shot glances at one another, and were as careful about what they said as if they were disarming unexploded ordnance. The more fastidious they were in her regard, the more fragile she seemed to become, until, faced with this realization, they pretended unsuccessfully that nothing had changed. But it had. Silences in conversation were now much longer, the resumption of speech more abrupt, the endings unnatural, the atmosphere brittle. Her insoluble problem, that of injustice working upon a single human heart, threatened to transform her. Forced to change, she longed not to, and in sorrow and in anger could only observe what was happening. An unknowing onlooker might have thought that she was angry at the people she loved, but it was just that when she struck out at enemies she could not reach, her frustration found its target among those who were closest to her.

  At first that Saturday, she hadn’t wanted to ride out to the docks at Montauk to buy dinner from the incoming boats. “Why don’t you send him?” meaning Harry, she had asked her father, who, instead of upbraiding her for her startling rudeness, stated patiently that he and Evelyn would be going, and it would be good to get out of the house on a rainy day. In East Hampton, storm days wore out playing cards and electric lights, and by late afternoon the roads were filled with restless people who, as if it would be their salvation, wanted to look at storefronts.

  Harry loved Catherine too much to be hurt that she had referred to him as if he were a disliked servant or an untrusted stranger. “Why don’t you come?” he asked. “We can look at the storm waves from the Montauk Road.”

  “We can just walk out here and look at the waves,” she answered, her tone half combative and half a cry for him to take her in his arms.

  He remained practical. “It’s far more interesting and dramatic from a height.” He should not have said dramatic. Billy and Evelyn winced.

  “The storm is over,” Catherine stated.

  “But on the ocean side,” Harry responded, trying not to be argumentative (which was somewhat like walking over a bridge of eggshells), “the highest waves are born at sea and they come after the storm. They’ll be at their maximum, and you can face them knowing that they can only back down.”

  “Yes,” said Billy, “and from inside the Rolls, where you’ll be quite comfortable.”

  She had seen too many wonderful things while looking out through the windows of that car not to go, and, announcing that she would, she seemed closer to her old self. “I don’t want lobster,” she said. “I want something that’s comforting.”

  “Lobster’s not comforting?” Billy asked. “I guess not if you use it to clock someone in the face.”

  “Lobster is for triumph, for people who don’t care. I’d like something like chowder, and rolls.”

  “Oh,” Billy said. “I see.” He didn’t.

  “Of course,” Evelyn added, knowing how simple it would be to make what her daughter wanted.

  At Hither Hills the waves were once again cavalry charging against the dry world as line after line of galloping white attacked beaches that somehow remained intact. The water on the bay side was comparatively still, and there fishermen driven by habit and necessity had gone out before the storm was over, baiting smaller hooks, dragging lesser nets.

  At the docks, Catherine seemed connected to the fishermen in a way that Harry, having come from the war, well understood. He was neither jealous of her love for them nor disturbed by their love for her, for it was the kind of thing, glancing and pure, that he had seen make hardened soldiers worshipful of feminine beauty they had mistreated and misapprehended all their lives, and would again, perhaps, when their privations came to an end. Catherine had always understood the difficulties of the fishermen, and she had always been kind, but now it was deeper, as if she had been riding with them in their boats or waiting at home with their children.

  Billy bought fish, and they started back. She was placid and silent. It was raining lightly. Either dusk had fallen or dense clouds had replicated evening light. Billy flipped the switch for the headlamps, and as he did so Evelyn leaned forward and turned on the radio. At the tip of Long Island they were more or less halfway out to sea, with neither hills nor mountains to obstruct radio signals as the storm-driven atmosphere did to these what wind did to escaped birthday balloons. A station in Chicago faded in and out, its ghostly dance behind the warm yellow light of the dial finally disappearing. French then filled the car as if a miracle. “Montreal,” Billy said after listening a moment to the transmission, disappointed that the broadcast had not leapt the ocean. And then Evelyn turned the dial and stopped its lighted bar on a strong New York station from which Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D issued amid lonely cracks of static from lightning over distant seas.

  As if by instinct, and like a pilot checking his gauges, Billy directed his eyes to the bar to see the number of the station. He was a good driver, and had looked ahead. The long, straight road was empty as far as he could see, and he would have noticed lights a mile off. He was comfortable and relaxed, as one is in driving on a straight and empty road even at dusk. Billy was the only one who had not been able to identify the music almost instantly—it took Catherine two bars—and as he narrowed his eyes and listened, trying to pick out patterns and the characteristic use of various instruments, the car drifted toward the side of the road. It was a very big car, and although the right wheels had yet to touch the sandy shoulder, the body of the automobile was planing a six-inch strip through air where it should not have been.

  Evelyn was the one who grabbed the wheel and sent the Rolls veering over the center line so as not to hit the dark form of a man they would have killed as he walked right next to the pavement. It would have been hard for him to have heard them. The wind was high and the Rolls’s large engine, which did not have to strain, was exceedingly quiet.

  “Son of a bitch!” Billy screamed, bringing the car back to its lane as the adrenaline coursed through him so that he could hear every note coming over the airwaves. “I knew it was Beethoven. That son of a bitch, what was he doing walking in the road like that?”

  “We were almost off the road, Daddy,” Catherine said severely.

  “But we weren’t,” Billy replied. “We weren’t. You don’t walk right on the road, where you can get hit by a car.” Billy was expecting a male-female division in this debate, and waited for Harry’s support, but Harry had turned around in his seat and was staring out the back window.

  “Stop,” Harry commanded.

  “For Christ’s sake, Billy, you hit him,” Evelyn declared, out of panic.

  “I did not. I didn’t hit anybody.” Still, he braked as if he had, and th
e car came to a stop. “Why stop?”

  “His tunic is from the Hundred and First,” Harry announced. “He doesn’t have any shoes.” The figure was just visible in the darkness, coming toward them in what the ocean wind and rain made to seem a threatening, discomfited gait. Billy pressed the accelerator, and the car moved silently back onto the road.

  “Wait,” Harry called out, as if to the man outside.

  “What do you propose?” Billy asked.

  “Let’s give him a ride.”

  “To where? The last train’s already left.”

  “The village.”

  “An immediate arrest for vagrancy.”

  “Maybe he knows someone there, or lives there himself.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Billy said. “I’m not having him in my car. I saw him in the mirror. Forgive me, but he looks like the kind of person who would slit our throats to get the contents of the picnic basket.”

  “But he’s from the Hundred and First,” Harry said, realizing that, to others, and since it wasn’t even his own division, this was hardly a powerful argument.

  “I don’t care if he’s from the Million and Tenth. The war’s over. He should get a job and wear shoes.”

  “The war isn’t over yet,” Harry said, “not for him. And it’ll be a really long time, Billy, before it is. Eighteen months ago he was fighting in Germany. What does that say to you?”

  “Not enough, Harry. I’m not going to risk my family by picking up a stranger on a dark road.”

  “But he isn’t a stranger,” Harry insisted. He knew this was weak, that anyone could be wearing a paratrooper’s tunic.

  “I’m sorry, Harry, to me he is.” Billy accelerated, and soon they ran up the hill to Amagansett and left the area that was subject to inundations when hurricanes pushed the sea over the dunes and joined it with the Sound. There, a few miles back in the dark, James George Vanderlyn continued his unvaried pace.

  Billy and Harry had never had words, with Harry always respectful not only of Billy himself but of his age and his position as Catherine’s father, and with Billy trying hard to avoid the thoughtless and weak-minded tyranny that so often seduces fathers-in-law. But rather than worry about alienating the Hales, Harry was concerned about the man walking along the lonely stretch of road between sea and sound. As the rain had strengthened, the wind had come up cold.

  Although Catherine had been for a while fairly distant, she surprised him. Arriving at the pool house, where Harry had gone to allow Billy to cool off, she said, “Oh, he’ll be all right. His point is well taken, but still, I think about that man out there. I wouldn’t have last year, I just would have let it go.”

  “He’s a brother in arms. We could at least have given him a ride into town, and a few dollars. Yes, there’s a risk, but he’s got no shoes. It could be me.”

  “Why don’t you bring him here?” Catherine asked.

  “Here?”

  “Feed him, clothe him, give him shelter, a place to sleep, and some money, and then set him on his way.”

  “What if he kills us?”

  “Hales don’t like to be murdered in their sleep,” she said matter-of-factly, “which is why Copeland will revert to his military self and stand watch all night if this guy seems even slightly dangerous. If not, locked doors will do.”

  “If your parents found out, they’d never speak to me again.”

  “Yes they would, because it’s my idea. But they won’t find out. He’ll stay in the pool house, and you’ll stay with me.”

  “I hate sneaking around.”

  She looked at him with not a little heat. “I kind of like it,” she said, and thereafter nothing could have kept him from her room that night, where they would make love as if in a silent movie—except that there would be no piano.

  “They’ll hear the car,” Harry told Catherine. “How am I supposed to retrieve him? We have an hour and a half until dinner. I can’t walk to him and bring him back in that time. If dinner ends two and a half hours from now he’ll be gone. He may be gone already, sheltering in the dunes.”

  “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  Moving like conspirators, they crossed the gardens quickly, unseen from the house, which glowed in the rain. The garage was dark and musty, but the cars, parked in a neat row like cows at milking gates, smelled of fresh wax and leather. Catherine held his hand and moved slowly, feeling her way to the back, where she pulled at a white porcelain knob on a paneled door. It was one of those doors that always sticks and that when it comes open vibrates like a reed. She threw a switch that lit a clear lightbulb. There before them, amidst mildewed badminton nets, surf-casting rods, and sports equipment of the twenties and before—varnished Indian clubs, rings, a mechanical horse—were three French bicycles.

  “I’ll bring him back.”

  Some rain was still driven on the wind, and it was cold and dark, but beneath the dripping trees of Further Lane Harry’s spirits rose as he rode toward the Montauk Highway. Shepherding the second bike alongside, he held the yoke in his left hand. Sometimes the front wheels of the two bicycles left the parallel, but he brought them back and pushed on. The bicycles were solid and heavy, the kind that, in peacetime, postmen ride and that in war are used to carry packs and ammunition.

  He glided down the big hill that descended east from Amagansett, the wind in his ears, the breakers barely audible to his right. He must not either miss his target or smack into him. Thinking of this man in the 101st jacket, with no shoes, he had a vision of himself in what had been the most vivid part of his life before Catherine. Perhaps he would have reason to fear a former soldier, were this man indeed that, but nevertheless Harry was a trooper of the 82nd on his way to aid one of the 101st. There was something very important about this, something he would neither deny nor forgo, not now, not yet, because it was written in him still that this was what one did even if it meant dying.

  He sensed motion ahead, a slight turbulence in the black, which persisted and strengthened, the faint glimmer that a paratrooper had learned to extract from virtually nothing with the corner of his eye, the relaxation of focus and of expectation allowing whatever was there to make itself known more strongly than an image that preconception overlaid upon the field of view. Within a few seconds he had passed Vanderlyn.

  They could barely see one another. Harry turned the bicycles around and came up alongside. He stopped, wheeled the free bicycle a few feet forward, and then looked at Vanderlyn with an expression unmistakable even in the dark.

  Surprised, Vanderlyn surveyed the bicycle and asked, “Pour moi?” in a perfect accent.

  “Oui, pour vous,” Harry answered, amazed that he was conversing in French on the Montauk Highway in the dark.

  “Merci bien,” Vanderlyn said, mounting the bicycle. And then, with some amusement, “Puis-je vous demander de m’aider? Pourriez-vous m’indiquer le chemin de Meudon?”

  “What?” Harry asked. “Are you French? What’d you do, swim the Atlantic?”

  “No, but the last time someone handed me a bicycle, a French bicycle, no less, I said those exact words.”

  “The last time I was on a bicycle,” Harry told him, “I was in Holland.”

  “It was a password,” Vanderlyn said, “a pass-phrase. I knew he was all right when he said . . . what did he say? He said, ‘Nathalie a vu écraser sa maison par une énorme roche.’ Yes.”

  “Nathalie saw her house destroyed by an enormous rock?”

  “Didn’t you have passwords?”

  “Yes we did. Things like Oil Can, and Betty Grable’s Tits.”

  “Very elevated.” They were pedaling now.

  “I was the Eighty-second. I didn’t think the Hundred and First was all that erudite.”

  “It wasn’t. They dropped me out of their Dakotas but I was something else entirely, although I wore their uniform beneath my clothes.”

  “Oh,” Harry said, “one of those.”

  Vanderlyn smiled. Harry still could
not see his face clearly. “And you?”

  “Pathfinder,” Harry replied.

  “What luck. Now, may I ask, where the hell did you come from with two bicycles?”

  “We passed you in the car, almost hit you.”

  “That was you. And where are we going?”

  “We’re going,” Harry informed him, “up the hill into Amagansett and then down Further Lane, to get you a pair of shoes.”

  After they replaced the bicycles, Harry led Vanderlyn through the back garden and over the tennis court to the pool house, so that even had Billy been looking out the window, and even had he been able to see in the dark, nothing would have seemed untoward.

  Vanderlyn stood between the fire and the French doors, dripping slightly, his paratrooper jacket dark with rain, the pockets distinctively slanted, the belt hanging loosely, the eagle on the shoulder patch, laundered by hours in salt water and rain, glowing white. Although he was unshaven and disheveled, he seemed healthy and strong; and although he stood straight with a military bearing, he was relaxed.

  An hour later, bathed and shaved, his clothes having dried by the fire and his hair neatly combed, he sat by the hearth completely at ease, the unease having been beaten out of him by the storm. The only discordance was that, his and Harry’s shoe sizes not being the same, he was in his stocking feet. He looked like a general, but his jacket had neither insignia nor rank. Waiting for Harry, who had explained the situation and promised to bring him dinner, he studied the room and the beautifully lit house beyond the pool, and was aware that whoever had saved him had no idea that there were half a dozen houses in East Hampton and a dozen like them in Southampton where he might have gone to sit by the fire and recount his adventure to people he had known all his life. This was better. He was grateful that Harry hadn’t known and still didn’t know him, and entranced by the fact that Harry thought he was some sort of impoverished, French-speaking vagrant.