In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  “No, it’s not his fault,” Victor’s mother declared, addressing Catherine. “It’s yours.”

  “I can solve this, I can solve this,” the psychiatrist said, putting his professional pride on the line.

  “You can?” Billy asked, skeptically and somewhat amused, for he had been in too many negotiations to believe there was a solution, to whatever this was, other than time and separation.

  “Yes. I guarantee that if Victor, there, and Harry were to walk together to the club and back, by the time they return we’ll have peace between them, between Catherine and Harley, and between the Hales and the Marrows.”

  “Are you insane?” the lawyer asked. As a named partner in a leading firm in New York, and a rhino-hided litigator in his day, he spoke as he pleased.

  “I’m the psychiatrist and you’re the lawyer. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes it does,” the lawyer said confidently.

  “Look,” Evelyn observed, “now they’re fighting, too.”

  “No no no,” the psychiatrist insisted. “It’ll work. He turned to Victor, who got up by placing his hands in front of him on the sand, one at a time, like an elephant coming to its feet. “No one’s going to kill anyone. Take a walk. Go ahead.”

  As they left, not exactly arm in arm, Catherine sat down and sighed. The artist turned to her. He was tall and slim and his hair shone silver in the sun, just as Catherine’s shone in gold and deep red. “Catherine,” he said, able to elevate her above Harley and everyone else, because he was the only one there who would be remembered in history, and they all knew it, “I’d like to paint you. Billy, what do you think? She’s in full bloom.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Victor said.

  “So are you,” Harry shot back, tranquilly.

  “You realize,” Victor threatened, “that I could beat you silly. I boxed at Yale.”

  “What’d you box, lunches?”

  “You’ve got a nerve, coming out of completely God-assed nowhere and stealing Catherine from me. How long have you known her, ten minutes? I’ve known her since she was born.”

  They moved down to the compacted sand. The sun was high enough so that the wind had largely died and the surf quieted. “It’s true, Victor,” Harry said, deliberately containing himself, “that I haven’t known her very long, and you have. But I didn’t rape her. That gives me a kind of advantage.”

  “Is that what she told you? That I raped her? I didn’t rape her. She seduced me.”

  “Of course she did. In fact, she probably raped you, right? After all, she was thirteen and weighed all of a hundred pounds and you were thirty-one and weighed—what?—a thousand? And you know, I know what she was like when she was that age, because I know her now. I know what she likes, I know her favorite poet, I know her heart. She was quite delicate, remember? Deep in her Emily Dickinson phase, which always puts young girls in the raping and seduction frame of mind, especially since she was so coarse and worldly. Who would believe her instead of you, who claim to have been ‘seduced’ at thirty-one by a thirteen-year-old? You just couldn’t help it.

  “She was not even out of puberty, you son of a bitch. Be grateful for law, Victor, because were it not for law, I would kill you.”

  “You wouldn’t kill anybody. And you’ll find that you can’t take her from me,” Victor said confidently and smoothly. The authority of the pronouncement was for Harry a window into what Catherine had seen for so long when she beheld Victor, and it made Harry both more careful and more determined.

  “I’m not taking anyone from anyone. If she comes with me it’ll be because she’s decided on her own. I’ve made no effort in that regard.”

  “The hell you didn’t.”

  “Not in the sense you mean. She’s not a yachting trophy or a bank you’re trying to buy.”

  “What would you know about banks?” Victor asked condescendingly, and because he had little to fall back upon.

  “I know a lot about banks, I owe them a lot of money. I know about banks as much as a rabbit knows about foxes.”

  “What banks?” Victor asked.

  Harry immediately regretted what he understood to have been a dangerous indiscretion. Victor’s eyes had lighted, it appeared to Harry, like the flicker from a peephole in a woodstove in Vermont.

  “I think I will get Catherine back, because I think you’re afraid to fight,” Victor stated as they increased their speed yet again. They were now walking so fast that Victor was almost out of breath. Harry had decided that if Victor actually would attack him, because of Victor’s size and weight it would be best to face him when he was winded.

  “Victor,” Harry began, pressing ahead even more rapidly, but not so much that Victor would catch on: the trick was to keep his mind occupied as he was made to walk faster and faster. “I spent the last four years fighting. I hate fighting. I’m scared of it. You can have all the skill in the world, but something can happen in an instant, and then everything you are, all the training and the experience, all you know, all the love and all the memory, gets turned into rotting meat. And you don’t come back again. It’s not like tennis, where you can start another game. I don’t know what you did in the war, but I know what I did. It’s going to be very difficult for anyone these days to get me to fight. I truly hate it. But . . . if anyone does force me, push me, and I do have to fight, you know what I’m going to do?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to kill him. I’ve put that part of me to sleep, but if you wake it up, which I don’t think you yourself can do . . . but if you do, I will kill you. I won’t want to, but I will.”

  They had reached the club, where they quickly turned on their heels. “I’ll get her back,” said Victor, “because I don’t think you’re fit to live in the world. What kind of name is Copeland, anyway? It’s suspect, somehow. What kind of a name is Harry? Are you like that pussy in the White House?”

  “You mean the pussy,” Harry asked, “the officer of horse artillery in the Great War, the tough and taciturn farmer who dropped the atom bomb and is facing off with Stalin?”

  “He’s still a pussy,” Victor said, “and so are you.”

  “You don’t know me well enough to judge.”

  “I think I just may. And whenever you kiss her, Copeland, you can think of how many times she’s held my cock in her mouth.”

  Harry recoiled briefly, as if struck. After a few waves had broken and receded, he said, “Love has burned all that away, and it’s as if you never touched her. The first moment Catherine and I beheld one another, we shot ahead of all the years you had her in your bed. And lately, you know what she said? She said ‘Victor?’ as if I had mentioned a farm animal. She said that now she felt as if she had been in a sanitarium in Switzerland or New Mexico, and that her system was cleansed and you were completely out of it, as if you never touched her, as if she never knew you, as if you never existed. She said, ‘And, besides, when I was with him, it was horrible. It was like digging ditches and washing dishes. I was unhappy all the time.’

  “Would you say that was a good review, Vic? And, you know, everything we do in life is subject, one way or another, to review. It’s not just Brooks Atkinson who gets to pass judgment or close a show. Yours is closed, curtain down, lights out.”

  “What do you do, anyway?” Victor asked.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve been asked that in the last hour? What kind of people are you?”

  “Perhaps we’re people who can sense a weak point.”

  They were back at the group, which was expectantly quiet. The psychiatrist glanced at them, sighed, and said nothing. Harry felt good being near Catherine.

  As he stood apart, he surveyed this group not for what it was but for what it would be in memory. How beautiful were the women, ranged in the sun, hats and hair luffing sometimes in the breeze, their colorful robes and scarves glowing in the beating light that in time would carry them away on the wind. They spoke, but he could not hear
them. He saw them from afar, in colors as if enameled in a kiln and still glossy and hot. The blue behind them was so dark with heat that it was almost like the night sky.

  He hoped that from amidst these people, all of whom were worthy in one way or another, even if not all to the same degree, Catherine would rise in the present daylight as if from the unretrievable past and come to the place where he was standing. He had no desire to separate her from her mother and father or from the world she knew, but the separation was already under way, and he could see it in the picture before his eyes both breaking and still.

  They spoke to him, but he didn’t hear. The painter had watched him, and understood that in taking in the true composition of the scene he had stopped time, which is what the painter did day by day. He, the painter, smiled and held his daughter tight as he watched Catherine rise from the group and, as if loosed from the moorings of gravity and time, glide across the sand until, hardly knowing what she had done, she had clasped Harry in her arms as though no one had been watching, because they had all drifted away long before.

  “Catherine?” her father called out. “Catherine? When will you come for lunch?”

  Though she turned, she couldn’t hear him, for as once he had been, now she too had been taken on the flow.

  15. Gray and Green

  THE THIRD MAN to come from the storefront was the first to hesitate at the threshold and survey the street. Sharp-featured, he wore a Panama hat, white bucks, a white suit, black shirt, and a tie that looked like wallpaper in the bathroom of a lounge where people drank in the daytime. As nervous as a tree frog, he seemed relieved when after a few steps no one had shot him. For three-quarters of an hour, Harry had perched on a low brick wall half a block up Prince Street, reading the Trib and drinking from a bottle of club soda. He never once turned his head completely in the direction of the doorway he was watching, but as his eyes looked left he had counted five men in and out.

  They seemed like gangsters, because they were gangsters, but on a sunny morning in June they looked as much like everyone else as they ever do. With the exception of the nervous one, they apparently forgot what kind of world they lived in and who they were. So, papers tucked under their arms, they walked in the newly awakened streets almost like normal people, and when they saw what everyone else saw—children in green plaid with briefcases half as big as they were, moving like a tide into school doors surmounted by Christ on the cross; heavy trucks loading, unloading, purring, and rumbling; shopkeepers in the sun, washing their sidewalks clean; old people perpetually staring, their elbows welded to their windowsills—when they saw these things they forgot for a time what it was they did, and what would come during the rest of the day and at night. For at night, like cats, they found their essence.

  He hadn’t planned to observe, but reconnaissance had been burned into him in the war. As a pathfinder, his job was first to see and then to mark the route that others would take. He dropped in darkness, fully outfitted for combat and loaded as well with flares, smoke, and tape for marking arrows and codes on the ground. He was unknown to those who followed, almost always alone, and usually so far ahead that the people who had sent him tended to forget he was there. He was one of the few who fought the war by himself much of the time, until he would halt and rejoin his stick of paratroopers, who could work together nonetheless with coordination that seemed telepathic.

  He had come early. While counting and categorizing, he noticed that no one moved cautiously or was alert to being followed, except for the third man, who, as anxious as he may have been, was unaware that he was being watched. On a battlefield, because they didn’t take the trouble, by now they would all be dead.

  At eleven he folded his paper, took a last drink from the soda bottle, and rose from his position. As he walked, his clothes uncreased and fell into a comfortable drape. He tossed the paper and the bottle into a trash can and moved faster and with more concentration, until he slowed just before the door. He wanted to go in neither submissively nor aggressively, and at an even, unagitated pace. He was there not to react but to collect information, and would not give whoever it was he was to see the satisfaction of creating in him either fear or defiance. He was concerned, however, that his very lack of common reactions might mark him as someone not to write off, so he began to think of what to feign so they would forget about him after he left.

  When no one answered his knock, he turned the knob and slowly opened the door. As his eyes adjusted to lesser light, he entered a sea of luminous gray and green—the gray of a rock dove or a felt hat, with shades darker or lighter depending upon light that came through various windows. And green the dark green of tenement paint half a century old or more, in many shades on a single wall: enamel green, bottle green, seaweed green, verdigris. He had seen it many times, but never had he seen it softened by gray as if in a painting, though he had never seen in a painting such a fusion of otherworldly colors. The men standing within it, as if they were submerged in a lit aquarium, were completely unaware, but Harry was so taken by the color that he almost forgot why he was there.

  Two men were settled at the bar, and the bartender, his hands working a towel over a glass, deferred to them. One turned to Harry and said, “This is a private club.” But a man at a table in the back and to the left of the bar signaled with a flick of his head, and the second bar sitter jumped off his stool and turned his very wide front to the interloper. “You got an appointment?”

  “Yeh,” Harry answered. He thought they might not understand yes.

  “With who?”

  “I don’t know. They just said be here at eleven.”

  “That’s him,” the man at the table said.

  “Okay,” the second bar sitter explained, and moved a step forward for frisking.

  “Don’t bother,” the man at the table told him. “Come over here,” he commanded.

  Late off the mark, the one who had moved to frisk Harry said, “Mr. Verderamé will see you now.”

  Harry approached the table. “Si’down,” Verderamé said. “You want something to drink?”

  “No thank you,” Harry said. “I just had a whole bottle of club soda.”

  “Whad’ja do that for?” He pointed. “The bathroom’s over there. You shouldn’t pee on the street. You don’t want cops to see.” He was amused.

  “It’s okay, I don’t pee on the street.”

  “Yeah, but why’d you drink a whole bottle? It’s not that hot.”

  “I was early, so I bought a paper and sat on the wall up the block. Then I got thirsty. The only size bottle they had was a big one and I didn’t want to waste it.” He was watching Verderamé’s eyes. When he had given away his reconnaissance the irises hadn’t moved a millimeter.

  “You shoulda come in here. We’d give it to you by the glass, for free, no waste.”

  “Thank you.” Harry hated to be thanking the person who was robbing him. Verderamé enjoyed it.

  “No problem. Any time.” In his middle forties, Verderamé was tall, his black hair pushed back on his forehead in a slick as smooth as the smoothest wave in a Hiroshige print. He appeared to be highly alert, intelligent, and trim, with elevated cheekbones, hollow-seeming eyes, a tenor voice, and delicate hands. He spoke in almost a singsong, as if he enjoyed revealing to people miraculous things that they didn’t know. He was dressed conservatively in a dark blue suit of European cut, an oxford shirt, and a blue tie. “I told you. You shoulda come in here. Next time, you come in here.”

  The exquisite tension in Verderamé’s manner and presence that turned solicitous comments into orders and threats told Harry that he was one of those people whose reservoirs of anger, though covered with humor, good nature, or curiosity, are so deep that when they erupt nothing can contain them. When people like this work in an office or a factory everyone is afraid of crossing them. If they yoke their anger to ambition, well, then they are Verderamé, someone who when he was younger had had to relieve the pressure on his soul by every now and then b
eating some other one to death. For him, innocence was insolent provocation, and lack of aggression an indictment that had to be violently suppressed. Verderamé’s eyes sparked. Like so many of the short-fused and explosive, he was often charming, graceful, and captivating. The pit viper betrays how it will strike not in its movements, which are feints, but in its eyes.

  Harry saw that Verderamé was looking in his eyes with the same care with which he himself had earlier looked in Verderamé’s. Nor did Harry’s irises move a millimeter, as he had retreated into complete neutrality and suspended his emotions to the point where he felt he could have been in someone else’s body.

  In a heavy Sicilian dialect, Verderamé called out to the men at the bar. “Who did we send to this boy?” In the same dialect, they answered that they weren’t sure, that it could have been Marco or Sammy, or John, the new guy.

  Harry understood, and kept them from knowing that he did. He had thought that perhaps by speaking in Italian he could make some headway, but now he would not give up the advantage of being privy to conversations they thought secret. And, beyond that, to them his academic Roman dialect would no doubt sound pretentious. “Copeland Leather,” he said.

  Verderamé drew his head back and opened his eyes a little wider, quickly restoring his expression, to show that he was familiar with the subject.

  “I asked the guys you sent if I could see you. Until last week, we were paying Mickey Gottlieb a fifth of what they told us. It’s not as if business is suddenly good. We’re competing with cheap European labor. What we make is on a par with the best leather goods in the world, but though we’re as good as England or Italy, we can’t do better, and as their product begins to come in cheaply, they’re killing us.”

  “What does that have to do with me? What are you telling me this for?” He was already angry, not with reason, but because he could be.

  “If . . . we pay that amount every month. . . .”

  “Every week, it’s always by the week.”

  “Every week. God, every week. We’ll be out of business in six months, and then we won’t be able to pay anything.”