In Sunlight And In Shadow

First Mariner Books edition 2013

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Helprin

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Helprin, Mark. In sunlight and in shadow / Mark Helprin.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-81923-5

ISBN 978-0-544-10260-6 (pbk.)

1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.E4775I5 2012

813'.54—dc23 2012016242

Jacket illustration © Mark Yankus

Jacket design by Martha Kennedy

eISBN 978-0-547-81925-9

v3.0615

The quotation and its translation from Lucretius on page vii are from Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, edited, with notes and an introduction, by Jean Gooder, Penguin Classics Edition, London, 1995, page 434 (Latin) and page 541, note 15 (translation).

Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare

—Inferno, II

Alma Venus, coeli subter labentia signa

Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentes

Concelebras . . .

Quae . . . rerum naturam sola gubernas

Nec sine te quidquam dias in luminis oras

Exoritur, neque fit laetum neque amabile quidquam . . .

Life-giving Venus, who beneath the gliding stars of heaven

Fills with your presence the sea that bears our ships

And the land that bears our crops . . .

You alone govern the nature of things,

And nothing comes forth into the shores of light

Or is glad or lovely without you. . . .

—Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I

Prologue

IF YOU WERE a spirit, and could fly and alight as you wished, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then you might rise to enter an open window high above the park, in the New York of almost a lifetime ago, early in November of 1947.

After days of rain and unusual warmth, the skies are now the soft deep blue that is the gift of an oblique sun. The air is cool but not yet dense enough to carry sound sharply. From the playing fields, the cries and shouts of children are carried upward, sometimes clearly, sometimes muted, like murmurs, and always eventually to disappear. These sounds inexplicably convey the colors of the children’s jerseys, which seen from the eleventh storey are only bright flecks on grass made so green by recent rains and cool nights that it looks like wet enamel.

Coming in the window, you might wonder who had left it open, for the apartment is empty, its silence, to a spirit, thundering like a heartbeat. Perhaps you would turn back to glance at the gulls bobbing in the reservoir, as white as confetti, or to see how the façades of Fifth Avenue across the park and over the trees are lit by the sun in white, ochre, and briefly flaring yellow.

The wind coming through the window, as you do, unseen, moves a shade to and fro as if gently breathing, its circular pull occasionally leaping up enough in contrary motion to tap against a pane as if it wants to speak. No one is in. In a breeze that enters and dies before it reaches the back rooms, you ride above particles of dust propelled across polished floors like snowflakes tumbling in a blizzard. In the air is a remnant of perfume, strongest by the door, as is often the case. The lights are off, the heat not yet been turned on, and the brass front-door lock silent and immobile, waiting to be turned and released.

In the room overlooking the park the bookshelves are full. Hanging above the fireplace is a Manet seascape with flags and pennants snapping in the wind; in a desk drawer beneath the telephone, a loaded pistol. And on an oval marble table in the entrance hall near the immobile lock and its expectant tumblers is a piece of card stock folded in half and standing like an A. Musical staffs are printed on the outside. Inside, sheltered as if deliberately from spirits, is a note waiting to be read by someone living. On the same smooth marble, splayed open but kept in a circle by its delicate gold chain, is a bracelet, waiting for a wrist.

And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

1

Boat to St. George: May, 1946

IF A NEW YORK DOORMAN is not contemplative by nature, he becomes so as he stands all day dressed like an Albanian general and doing mostly nothing. What little contact he has with the residents and visitors who pass by is so fleeting it emphasizes the silence and inactivity that is his portion and that he must learn to love. There is an echo to people’s passing, a wake in the air that says more about them than can be said in speech, a fragile signal that doormen learn to read as if everyone who disappears into the turbulence of the city is on a journey to the land of the dead.

The busy comings and goings of mornings and late afternoons are for doormen a superstimulation. And on a Friday morning one Harry Copeland, in a tan suit, white shirt, and blue tie, left the Turin, at 333 Central Park West. His formal name was Harris, and though it was his grandfather’s he didn’t like it, and didn’t like Harry much either. Harry was a name, as in Henry V, or Childe Harold, that, sounding unlike Yiddish, Hebrew, or any Eastern European language, was appropriated on a mass scale by Jewish immigrants and thus became the name of tailors, wholesalers, rabbis, and doctors. Harry was one’s uncle. Harry could get it at a reduced price. Harry had made it into the Ivy League, sometimes. Harry could be found at Pimlico and Hialeah, or cutting diamonds, or making movies in Hollywood, or most anywhere in America where there were either palm trees or pastrami—not so much leading armies at Agincourt, although that was not out of the question, and there was redemption too in that the president was named Harry and had been in the clothing business.

The doorman at 333 had been charged with looking after the young son of one of the laundresses. As a result of this stress he became talkative for a doorman, and as Harry Copeland, who had maintained his military fitness, began to increase his velocity in the lobby before bursting out of the door, the doorman said to Ramon, his diminutive charge, Here comes a guy. . . . Now watch this guy. Watch what he does. He can fly. The boy fixed his eyes on Harry like a tracking dog.

As Harry ran across the street his speed didn’t seem unusual for a New Yorker dodging traffic. But there was no traffic. And instead of relaxing his pace and executing a ninety-degree turn left or right, north or south, on the eastern sidewalk of Central Park West, he unleashed himself, crossed the tiled gray walkway in one stride, leapt onto the seat of a bench, and, striking it with his right foot and then his left, pushed off from the top of the seat back and sailed like a deer over the soot-darkened park wall.

Knowing extremely well the ground ahead, he put everything into his leap and stayed in the air so long that the doorman and little boy felt the pleasure of flying. The effect was marvelously intensified by the fact that, because of their perspective, they never saw him touch down. He does that almost every day, the doorman said. Even in the dark. Even when the bench is covered with ice. Even in a snowstorm. I saw him do it once in a heavy snow, and it was as if he disappeared into the air. Every goddamned morning. He looked at the boy. Excuse me. And in a suit, too.

The little boy asked the doorman, Does he come back that way?

No, he just walks up the street.

Why?

Because there’s no bench on the other side of the wall.

The doorman didn’t know that as a child Harry Copeland had lived at 333 with his parents—and then with his father after his mother died—before he went to college, before the war, before inheriting the apartment, and before the doorman’s tenure, though this doorman had been watching the weather from under the same steeply angled gray canopy for a long time. In the spring of 1915, the infant Harry had dreamt his first dream, which he had not the ability to separate from reality. He, who could barely walk, was standing on one of the glacial, whale-backed rocks that arch from the soil in Central Park. Suddenly, by neither his own agency nor his will, as is so often the lot of infants, he was lifted, though not by a visible hand, and conveyed a fair distance through the air from one rock to another. In other words, he flew. And throughout his life he had come close to replicating this first of his dreams—in leaping from bridges into rivers, or flying off stone buttresses into the turquoise lakes that fill abandoned quarries, or exiting airplanes at altitude, laden with weapons and ammunition. His first dream had set the course of his life.

Because he was excellently farsighted, no avenue in New York was so long that the masses of detail at its farthest end would escape him. Over a lifetime of seeing at long distances he had learned to see things that he could not physically see: by reading the clues in fleeting colors or flashes, by close attention to context, by making comparisons to what he had seen before, and by joining together images that in changing light would bloom and fade, or rise and fall, out of and into synchrony. For this fusion, which was the most powerful technique of vision, it was necessary to have a prodigious memory.

He could replay with such precision and intensity what he had seen, heard, or felt that these things simply did not lapse from existence and pass on. Though his exactitude in summoning texture, feel, and details could have been bent to parlor games or academics, and in the war had been made to serve reconnaissance, he had realized from very early on that it was a gift for an overriding purpose and this alone. For by recalling the past and freezing the present he could open the gates of time and through them see all allegedly sequential things as a single masterwork with neither boundaries nor divisions. And though he did not know the why or wherefore of this, he did know, beginning long before he could express it, that when the gates of time were thrown open, the world was saturated with love. This was not the speculation of an aesthete, or a theory of the seminar room, for this he had seen with his own eyes even amid war, darkness, and death.

To see and remember life overflowing and compounding upon itself in such vivid detail was always a burden, but, that May, he was able to carry it easily. Though a bleak, charcoal-colored winter had been followed by an indeterminate spring, by June the beaches would be gleaming and hot, the water cold and blue. The streets would flood with sunlight and the evenings would be cool. Women had emerged from their winter clothes and one could see the curve of a neck flowing into the shoulders, actual legs exposed to the air, and a summer glow through a white blouse. In the weeks before the solstice it was as if, moving at great speed toward maximum light, the world had a mind of its own. It clung to a reluctance that would slow it as the brightest days began to grow darker. It is perhaps this hesitation at the apogee that lightens the gravity of sorrows, such as they are, in luminous June evenings and on clear June days.

As the half-dozen or more people who had swum that morning rushed back to work, the shivering clatter of slammed locker doors momentarily overwhelmed the hiss of steam escaping from pipes in locations that would remain forever hidden even from the most elite plumbers. Why steam still charged the pipes was a mystery to Harry, because the heat had been off for more than a month, and a string of cold days had chilled the unheated pool to the taste of polar bears. As he removed his clothing and floated it across the gap between him and the hook in his locker, the tan poplin undulating slightly as it met the air, the last of the other lockers was closed, and after a long echo the hiss of the steam pipes restored the room to timelessness. He was alone. No one would see that he did not shower before entering the pool. That morning as always he had bathed upon arising. He walked through the shower room and onto the pool deck, which like the sides and floor of the pool itself was a mosaic of tiny porcelain octagons, every edge rough and slightly raised.

The last swimmer had left the water ten or fifteen minutes earlier, but it was still moving in barely perceptible waves repelled by the walls and silently rocking, lifting, and depressing the surface, though only a keen eye could tell. Unlike in winter, when the air was saturated with moisture and chlorine, it was cool and dry. Standing in front of a huge sign that said Absolutely No Diving! he sprang off the edge and hit the water, gliding through it like an arrow. As the body’s sensual registration is not infinite, the shock of falling, the feel of impact, the sound of the splash, the sight of the world rushing past, and even the smell of the water he aerated in his fall crowded out the cold, and by the time he began to feel the chill he had already begun to warm in exertion.

He would swim a mile, first at a sprint, then slowly, then, increasing his speed until he would move as if powered by an engine, all vessels open, every muscle primed and warmed, his heart ready to supply whatever was asked of it. He swam twice a week. Twice a week on the bridle trails and around the reservoir he ran a six-mile circuit of the park. And twice he took a racing shell out on the Harlem River or, were it not too windy, on the Hudson, or upstate on the Croton Reservoir, for ten exhausting miles in the kiln of summer or in the snow, fighting wind, water, wakes, and the whirlpools of Spuyten Duyvil, where the Harlem and Hudson join. And on Saturday, he rested, if he could.

Although he had played every sport in high school except football, and in college had rowed, boxed, and fenced, it was the war that had led him to maintain the strength, endurance, and physical toughness of the paratrooper he had become. Whereas many others long before demobilization had abandoned the work of keeping themselves fit for fighting cross-country and living without shelter, Harry had learned, and believed at a level deeper than the reach of any form of eradication, that this was a duty commensurate with the base condition of man; that civilization, luxury, safety, and justice could be swept away in the blink of an eye; and that no matter how apparently certain and sweet were the ways of peace, they were not permanent. Contrary to what someone who had not been through four years of battle might have thought, his conviction and action in this regard did not lead him to brutality but away from it. He would not abandon until the day he died the self-discipline, alacrity, and resolution that would enable him to stretch to the limit in defending that which was delicate, transient, and vulnerable, that which and those whom he loved the most.

Though as he swam he was not thinking of such things, they conditioned his frame of mind upon reaching the state of heat and drive that sport and combat share in common. Upon leaving the water, however, he was a study in equanimity. As he showered, a fragrant gel made from pine and chestnuts, and bitter to the taste—he had brought it from Germany just after V-J Day not even a year before—made a paradise of the air. The pool had been his alone, and no old men had come to paddle across his path like imperial walruses. In the glow of health, he dressed, and the bitter taste became more and more tolerable as it receded into recollection.

To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love. Trees flower into brilliant clouds that drape across the parks, plumes of smoke and steam rise into the blue or curl away on the wind, and disparate actions each the object of intense concentration run together in a fume of color, motion, and sound, with the charm of a first dance or a first kiss. In the war, when he dreamed, he sometimes heard the sound of horns, streetcar bells, whistles, claxons, and the distant whoop of steam ferries. All rose into a picture attractive not so much for the fire of its richness and color but for the spark that had ignited it. He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.

In the five or six miles down to South Ferry the life of the city crowded around him and no one could have been more grateful for it. From the arsenals of history came batteries of images bearing the energy of all who had come before. They arose in columns of light filled with dust like the departed souls of hundreds of millions agitating to be unbound; in sunbeams tracking between high buildings as if to hunt and destroy dark shadow; in men and women of no account, the memory of whom would vanish in a generation or two, and who would leave no record, but whose faces, preoccupied and grave, when apprehended for a split second on the street were the faces of angels unawares.

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.

We were given luxury orders—general officers’ belts, Sam Brownes, attachés, wallets, map cases, presentation portfolios, the top end. So we weren’t raking in the money, we didn’t overextend, we stayed perfectly stable. Our civilian carriage trade declined to almost nothing, but all of the slack was taken up by the top-end production for the military. We neither expanded nor contracted. As a result, we haven’t had to lay anyone off, we haven’t relaxed our standards, we still produce the finest leather goods in the country, and we’re still connected to the right sources of supply. Everyone else is in chaos.

Then what’s the problem? It sounds ideal.

Europe. The first industries to revive are not the steel mills and automobile plants—it takes time to rebuild something like that—but the ateliers, the small workshops and family businesses like ours. They’re back up already. In Europe now people will work for nothing. The exchange rates are such that even with import duties and excise taxes an Italian briefcase of a quality similar to what we produce, or better, will soon go for half of what we can price ours if we pull in our belts. And the United States is not going just to sit still while Europe teeters and the Soviets keep their armies mobilized. We’ll have to help them. How will we do that? We’ll liberalize imports, for one. And when we do, the big industries here will bribe Congress to go easy on them, but small companies like ours, in small sectors like ours, won’t be able to.

Then what can you do?

"I don’t know. If we cut prices, which we can’t anyway, it would destroy our image. I don’t want to lay people off, and if we scale back production it wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem. In fact, it would hasten our demise by reducing volume at the same time that margins are shrinking. A lot of companies are farming out work to the Italians. That just puts off the day of extinction, and it means layoffs, or shutting down. Any temporarily advantageous deal you make with your competition will run only as long as the date on the contract, if that.

A Cypriot who said he knew my father—although Cornell had no memory of it—came onto the floor a couple of weeks ago. He has workshops all over Italy, and wanted to take our production and mix it with the lines he’s importing here. He’s done it with other companies. It would be the end for us. He was arrogant in the way that people who suddenly make a lot of money can be arrogant, all puffed up—mania. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, I thought you were Clark Gable, until my eyes came into focus.’ Can you imagine? That’s how he greets me, in my own factory, in my own country, where he’s a guest.

You do look a bit like Clark Gable, when he was younger, she said.

I do not. For Chrissakes, Elaine, when he was young, without the mustache, Clark Gable looked like a mouse. He still looks like a mouse.

Some mouse.

Elaine, nothing I’ve ever done or thought has had anything whatsoever to do with what I look like.

I know. You have no prettiness. I’m not saying that.

Be that as it may, he continued, I don’t know what to do. But it’ll come clear one way or another. It always does.

And marriage?

What does marriage have to do with it?

When will you get married? You’re thirty-one years old.

Thirty-two.

All right.

I’ll marry a beautiful girl I saw on the ferry.

Oh?

She disappeared. At this, Harry stood and offered his arm to his aunt. Let’s take a walk, he said, helping her up.

Take a walk?

Just around the paths. You don’t have to leave the roses. The shells are so white. How do you keep them that way?

We don’t use oyster shells, she said. They have a lot of black and gray. What we use is more expensive, but worth it. And we put down about twenty percent fresh every year. I mean, I put down.

I know.

Harry, she said, as they rested at the top of a short flight of bluestone stairs from which they could see waves breaking white on the beach far below, never forget that the time is always short.

He walked down to the ocean, reaching it at about one-thirty, with his jacket slung over his shoulder and held by one finger, arm cocked, sleeves rolled up, and tie loosened so much that the normally long ends were short enough to have been the flourish beyond the knot of a scarf. Were it not for the wind, his shirt would have been wet even though he had been going mainly downhill. Enforcing its own protocol, the beach slowed his pace before he reached the water. Fast walking, the universal pace of Manhattan, had the edge planed off it after he had left the pavement and crossed a weathered and neglected boardwalk onto glassy sand that forced him to half speed. He felt his weight as he pushed on toward the ocean, but as if taking strength from the roar of the waves he grew lighter as the sea filled his eyes. Although he stood on dry land, he could see only the ocean. The strong wind neither ceased nor changed direction, and no sail driven before it would luff. As steady and invariable as the air from an electric fan, it seemed to cover the world uniformly.

He had intended merely to touch by the sea and then walk north to St. George and get the ferry, although no one expected him back at the loft that day. But just as upon his return from the war he had found the world still and becalmed before the century (and perhaps his life with it) would accelerate toward the gleam of fire at its end, his intentions were directed entirely apart from his will.

When he had returned home, the troopship had pushed through the Narrows with everyone on deck, as impossible and unstable as that may have been, Brooklyn to starboard and Staten Island to port. He had had no idea what he might find, but it felt more like a beginning than an end. Perhaps after tests and deprivations, fighting on land, over the sea, and in the air, it would be settlement, the founding of a new family, and love. Yet nothing seemed to happen and everything seemed ordinary: subways, restaurants, telephone calls, business, the paying of bills. Now, however, on a beach where he had not planned to linger, some mercurial spirit held him as if by the leaden anchor of one of the ships that passed through the pillars of Fort Hamilton and St. George.

He had never liked reading a folded newspaper as one did on the subway, and here he was on the beach with not a soul in sight, not even the ghost of a coast guardsman in one of the abandoned watchtowers or concrete fortifications, and certainly no passengers pressing on all sides, but the wind forced him to the subway rider’s origami, and until sometime after three he read the news in his usual disciplined fashion, pausing to burn into memory important facts and figures. When he had no more to read, he collapsed the paper into a pillow, and as he stretched out and relaxed on the sand everything became quieter, the apparently immutable wind having been thrown off its game by the imperfections of the ground. Listening to his own heartbeat, he fell asleep in the sun. And in the airy, unburdened moments before sleep, he saw her in full.

Throbbing from hours in the open, he sat in the dark ferry hall, impatient to pass through the gates and out to bright water. In the harbor and under a shield of inconstant smoke, ships by the hundreds moved in and out, each bent upon its purpose, crossing a surface brocaded by the sun into flashes like a forest of leaves turned up by a sudden blast of wind. The only time he had ever been in the presence of more ships had been during the invasions of Sicily and Normandy, and these he had rapidly flown over. Unlike the invasion fleets that had been silent and immobile as they rested on surprised seas, the ships and boats in New York harbor were as loose with their horns and whistles as if they were desperately trying to speak.

Pigeons that had been trapped inside rose against the dark green walls all the way to the highest windows, glanced off them, and fell back to the rafters to rest. The floor glinted with ground glass that had been mixed into the concrete to give it traction. A hundred electric lights burned steadily to relieve the darkness even as the sun beat against the roof and walls. Footsteps, and the sound of a clock ticking. Claxons, engines, wind, water, wings flapping, the sound of breathing, the beat of the pulse, the rush of one’s blood.

Harry closed his eyes lest he lose his way in the confusion. As the gate swung wide at the call for the next boat and he opened them, he saw a flash of white in the air, like a hawk cartwheeling in a turn, and then it vanished. As he stood, he apprehended in a split second that it had been a newspaper that, with the speed and certainty of a throwing knife, had been propelled into a trash can. And he apprehended just as suddenly that this perfect, powerful, nonchalant shot had been made at a fast clip by a woman walking toward the boat, it seemed, angrily.

All sense, propriety, and inhibition left him as he bolted forward, pushing through the crowd to close, determined not to lose her again.

She went to the top deck, to port, where the sun would be. He followed, embarrassed and troubled that he was following, not knowing what he could say or if he would be able to utter a word. He had yet to see her face, and yet he knew that she was beautiful. Walking past her, not two feet to her right as she took a place near the rail, he looked toward the bow and waited for the gates to close, the boat to shudder, and the harbor to splay into view. He stopped ten or fifteen paces away from her, put on his jacket, restored his tie, and placed his forearms on the rail, clasping his hands in front of him as if in relaxation. He would casually turn to his left, glancing to see that the last passengers had cleared the ramps, and he knew that when he did this, and if she were still in the same position, he would see her profile. What he would do then, he did not know.

Far more slowly than someone who might be checking to see if the ramps were up, he turned, expecting to see her, if at all, in profile, fifteen feet away. But when he came around he saw that, having moved forward, she was close enough to touch, and was looking right at him, her penetrating eyes magnified in her clear lenses, a neutral, almost disapproving expression on her face, which seemed to indicate a fine judgment hard at work on subjects far from sight.

He had fallen in love with her at a distance and in an instant, and now, as he saw her for the first time in the shade of the wooden pilings and palisades, with a diffuse sun making her hair golden and casting muted shadows within shadows, what had been playing upon the surface began to plunge deep. He found himself staring at her without the ability to feign looking elsewhere. As seconds passed, he thought she was returning his gaze, perhaps waiting for him to introduce himself as someone whom she had already met, for no one but someone she had already met would be so forward and rude as to lock his eyes upon her like this.

And then he realized that she understood from his expression and his stance that in fact they hadn’t met. And yet she didn’t turn away. She was simultaneously curious, irritated, expectant, and reserved. To save his life, Harry would not have been able to say something clever or even appropriate. At that moment, as betrayed by his expression, he hadn’t the ability to say anything at all. He remembered being told, If you want to meet somebody, drop a sheaf of papers, but he had no papers to drop.

Not one woman in a thousand would have failed to retreat, perhaps resentfully. But she had read him as finely as he had read her. The ferry whistle blasted, catching even daily ferry-goers unaware and making them jump as if they had been jolted by an electric current. It shook the two of them and made their lungs tremble as it seemed to hammer them down into fixed positions on the deck and separate them from the world. As the ferry started to move and the wind came up, the sun broke out. And when the harbor appeared she stepped toward him, moving in the direction of their travel. Not taking her eyes from his, she held her right hand within reach for him to grasp, which he did, as if in a formal introduction. To touch her hand was overwhelming. And then, in the most beautiful voice he had ever heard, she said the most beautiful word he had ever heard: Catherine.

3

Her Hands and the Way She Held Them

AS THE FERRY strained forward to reach top speed, it left behind long garlands of white water at the edge of a turquoise wake. A rope hanging loose from a davit swung back and forth in the crosscurrents of wind and with the slight roll of the boat as it reached open water. He had been waiting for her for the longest time, although he had not known he had been waiting. And there she was, standing before him, too beautiful for words.

She spoke first, accusingly, but enjoyably. Have we met?

No, we’ve collided.

Lost in infatuation, he had moved incautiously ahead to the point where he was in love with even the smallest detail of her. Had she known of each or perhaps any one of the specifics, she would have had the evidence that she had begun to sense, and that had begun to sweep over her in the rare feeling of being adored. Although she had neither designed nor sewn her blouse, nor accomplished the sinuous, restrained embroidery, nor given to the embroidery the gray and rose color of mother-of-pearl, she had put it on, and it embraced her hour by hour, absorbing the heat of her body and the scent of her perfume. The collar, the buttonhole, the button, the threads that made a basket knot within the button’s ivory recess, became for him more than just a symbol, for he had never loved just a symbol, but a part of her—touched, regarded, accepted, and chosen by her.

And of other things about her that overwhelmed him there were many. Her hands and the way she held them, unconsciously. And yet her fingers never existed in relation to each other except beautifully, no matter how they moved or where they came to rest. My God, he thought, she has beautiful hands. Every syllable she uttered, the way she pronounced every word, the bell-like quality of her voice. Her grace when she moved, or when she was still. Even the few wrinkles in her skirt. The line of her neck as it rose from the top of her chest. Her bosom, though he hardly dared look, but did. And beyond all that, far beyond it, he took the greatest pleasure in anticipating the surprise, delight, fascination, anger, and love with which she would greet all that she would encounter for the rest of her life. He wanted to listen to her history, to know her microscopically and also from afar, to see her and also to see through the eyes that now held him in thrall.

This unreasonable heat was chilled only by the occasional currents of his fear that he would assume too much and move too fast, or that she was spoken for and would not transfer her allegiance, or that if she did abandon someone else she would someday abandon him. But each anxiety was outweighed by the moment itself, which gave rise to an uncalculated grace in which even their silences were perfect and needed no saving.

I have no idea, he said, how old you are, what you do, or where you live. The effect is that, somehow, you do everything and you live on the Staten Island Ferry. So I don’t know where to begin.

Begin what? she asked, her severity in reserve but detectable in response to his having stepped over the line.

A conversation, he responded, barely saving himself.

As they sped over the water toward Manhattan, she said, I could say that I didn’t expect to go back to the city today, or to see you again.

He was astounded. You saw me earlier?

I did. You were moving swiftly around the decks. I thought you were chasing someone. Are you a policeman? Whom were you chasing?

He made no comment except a slight, self-incriminating smile.

Oh, she said. Uh-huh. In that case I can confess that I threw my paper in the trash can near you to wake you up. I hadn’t finished it.

If you want to do confessions, I can do better than that, he said. I was thinking of taking the ferry every day, all day long, though it would have been really inconvenient.

Do you live on Staten Island?

No. You?

Not even slightly.

You were going to stay there a while?

No.

You were going to stay there forever, immigrate? he asked.

There is another possibility, she said. This game meant nothing for either of them other than that it was an opportunity to remain in one another’s presence, and a way for him not to ask, intrusively, what she was doing on Staten Island, a question that may have choked the bud of many an incipient romance.

You were going to go on to someplace else. Elizabeth?

Catherine, she said, teasingly, as if he were an idiot.

Elizabeth, New Jersey?

Catherine Sedley.

Catherine Sedley. Just saying what he thought was her name (it wasn’t) gave him pleasure. Where were you going to go when you got off the island? He drew back a little and surveyed her—a lovely task—as if trying to solve a riddle. You’re flushed with sun. You were on the beach. She seemed pleased by his desire to work through this. You weren’t waiting for a boat, were you? She brightened, impressed by his sharpness. The boat would have to be either very small or large enough to launch another boat to pick you up.

A hundred and five feet, was her response.

That’s the length of a corvette. Was it? Canada has been decommissioning them, and people are making them into yachts.

No, it was built in nineteen twenty-eight for the America’s Cup.

But it didn’t show.

It didn’t win the Cup, either. It travels with the wind, and the wind is unreliable. I waited my appointed hours, and then I left.

Today, he said, the wind moved as steadily as a conveyor belt.

Perhaps yesterday the wind was not so steady, or the boat lost a mast. Things like that happen on the sea all the time. Meanwhile, I’m unexpectedly on my way home.

You have no luggage. The boat is yours?

Hardly.

But you have things on board.

A whole set. In my own cabin.

I did notice, he said, that you carry nothing. Not a purse, a bag, an umbrella, or a ring on your finger. No jewelry at all.

No jewelry, she repeated.

The effect is beautiful, he told her, touching the line but not crossing it—for it had been moved.

Are you one of those people, she asked, who think everything is beautiful?

No. That would mean that nothing is beautiful, or that I would have an eye like God’s. And then, more simply, everything is not beautiful.

What about that? she asked, indicating the cliffs of lower Manhattan three-quarters ahead, shining in the western sun. It’s commonly perceived as beautiful. People say that it is, and take pictures with their Brownies. What do you think?

I think, he said, anticipating the point and going beyond it before he would answer her question, "that one of the finest things in the world, a saintly and