In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  “I know, Harry, but they’re the fashion. Altman’s is selling one for thirty-five-forty, including the twenty percent federal tax.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “European labor costs and the dollar, that’s how. De Pinna has a cigarette case for twelve-seventy-five. We’d have to sell it to them for four dollars. That’s our cost, depending; and we never had much volume and we have less now, so if we squeezed out twenty-five cents of profit from each sale we’d have maybe twenty-five dollars a week to show for it, at the cost of shifting production from more expensive items.”

  Harry said, “There’s a Chekhov story, ‘The Fat One and the Thin One.’ The thin one made cigarette cases. He did well with them, but in the end—unlike the cigarettes in his cases—he was crushed.” Harry looked down as they both listened to the deep whistle of an ocean liner that had backed out of its berth in the North River and was signaling that it was headed out to sea.

  “Let’s keep going, Cornell,” Harry said, “’til it’s running on fumes, and then when the fumes are gone we won’t tell it, and maybe it’ll run without fumes.”

  “Do you know how to do that, Harry?” Cornell asked, because he knew, and he had seen it many times. He had seen men go down, some bravely, some not.

  “Yeah, I do,” Harry said. “To the last.”

  At the end of October the weather had been May-like, with some readings in the seventies, but the audience at the chamber music concert in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum was dressed as if for winter and the racks in the coat room threatened to snap with the weight of cashmere and mink. For the most part, the listeners were old, their circulation was poor, and they had lived long enough to have been caught by sudden temperature drops that in the mountains of New Hampshire, on the plains of Nebraska, or in the ice-boating bays of the Hudson had almost carried them away when they were small children. The young, too, of whom there were not just a few, were more heavily dressed than the air outside required. They did this out of pure conformity, as people do.

  Harry wore a blazer and a bow tie, which was inappropriately informal, but he had his reasons. Some of the older people looked on disapprovingly. He was not a college student, and this was not a picnic. What was he trying to prove, or was he just careless, or a boor? “Sit between Catherine and me,” Evelyn said to him as they stood in an alcove near the coat room. “We’ll protect you. Do you like this kind of music, or for you is it like sawing wood?” (She had invited Harry and Catherine mainly as an excuse to see them.)

  Before answering, Harry opened the program. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t really care for anything in the program except the first movement of the Brahms Quartet Number One, which I really love. The rest is like grasshoppers complaining at the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

  Billy thought so, too. “It’s the hors d’oeuvres,” he said. “I myself came for the shrimp.” A very dry-looking old woman with the face of a starving coyote gave Billy a look that was supposed to make him wither, but which made him laugh. “Let’s get to it,” he said so that she could hear. “In tiny voices, the shrimp are begging to be eaten.”

  Billy and Evelyn went in, leaving Harry and Catherine in the echoing alcove. He looked at her, and she looked back. He loved her so much, so hard, always more, always driven deeper. “Are you okay with how things are now, Catherine?”

  She was surprised. “Yes, why shouldn’t I be?”

  “You were shocked when you found out that all your life you hadn’t known who you were, and now all this.”

  “I got over it, and it’s not true. I knew who I was. I always did. If you know what you love, you know who you are. Harry, I know what I love.” She smiled, as if she knew, and didn’t know, what was going to happen. One way or another, it would somehow be the same.

  And then they went in, together.

  Luckily for Harry, they played his favorite movement right off, and luckily for him Catherine was by his side. Despite the room’s high ceiling, it was hot. He leaned slightly toward her, so that as she leaned toward him they touched, ever so gently, and each put an arm around the other, at the waist. It was like a kiss. Catherine’s suit, of light, soft wool, smelled of her perfume. Sitting so closely together, yet modestly, they felt their pulses. When, as a student long before the war, Harry had listened to the allegro non troppo again and again, he had dreamed and desired that someday there might be a woman like Catherine, who loved him, with whom he might listen just as they were now, not wanting anything else in the world. And, for a moment, there was.

  Running down the front steps of the museum to catch a bus that would then swing to the right across the park, he felt his heart break as if with grief. But when he leapt into the open vestibule as the bus began to move, action made him feel somewhat better. As he settled into his seat, the heat rising from him carried with it not just the remnants of Catherine’s perfume but its scent after her body had changed it and made it better. He breathed its last for as long as he could.

  Having crossed the park, transfer in hand, he went south toward midtown, eventually losing patience with the speed of traffic and alighting to walk the last few blocks to Madison Square Garden, there to see the fight that would bring together not only Gitano Morales and Marcus Joseph, welterweights, but the greater portion of his pathfinders now living, synchronized to arrive from various parts of the city and converge upon four seats close enough to take in the whole spectacle and far away enough to do so without craning one’s neck or catching droplets of sweat as the boxers’ heads were whiplashed by punches. Harry had written on each ticket, “Be sure to attend.”

  The fight crowd poured in tensely: a few women, but mostly men. It was not like going to a movie. Adrenaline rose long before one got to the arena, because this was not just something to see but rather a form of simulation and training. Every blow was followed for its technique as every man transported himself into the ring, senses alive, to give and to receive it. The connoisseurs of boxing could talk of its art all they wanted to; it was primarily a ritual of transport and preparation in which the ordinary man who did not have to fight reclaimed within him the man who did.

  In the midst of a navy, black, and gray river of gabardine and wool, upon the tide of which rode an undulating flotsam of hats, stood a girl of about twenty, perhaps a student at Barnard or Vassar. She could not have been more than five feet tall and a hundred pounds, and would appear and disappear in the stream of coats, bobbing, absolutely blond, her hair tied back. She had even and unblemished features, and luminous blue eyes magnified in the crystals of gold wire-rims. She was handing out broadsheets in protest of boxing.

  Most people ignored her. Some took her sheets without knowing what they were. Some read them as they walked, crumpled them, and threw them to the ground. Harry took one and stood between her and the relentlessly moving stream of men as if to shelter her. He read carefully, looking down at her a few times as he did. She was much like a somewhat younger Catherine, and for the first time in his life in regard to a young woman who was not a child, he felt what it would be like to have a daughter.

  “This is beautifully written,” he said. “Did you write it?”

  She nodded.

  “Really wonderful.”

  “And in substance?” she challenged, bravely.

  “Not a single point with which I can disagree.”

  She smiled. It was her first success of the evening. “Then will you go in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Harry didn’t answer immediately, but thought for a while. “Because two propositions can be true at once,” he said. “Because the world is imperfect. Because we are imperfect. Because sometimes we’re called upon to do terrible things. And because we define ourselves in dying, which is,” he indicated by motioning with his head toward the arena, “what this is. Give us at least that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to. You’re beautiful and y
ou have courage. You’re already there.”

  “Am I not right?” she asked as he started toward the interior of the arena.

  “Of course you’re right,” he answered.

  In the pulse of the arena before the lights went down, Harry, Bayer, Johnson, and Sussingham sat together as if inside a transport plane before a jump. Tensing before the fight like everyone else, they said nothing. The house grew dark. Kliegs suspended over the ring came on in blinding shots straight from above like beams of light in a Bible story. The ring announcer, in shirt and tie, climbed through the ropes as a microphone was lowered to him. He had a good sense of drama, and after he gripped the microphone he hesitated before he spoke. Other than a hum like that of distant traffic, nothing could be heard but the attempted silence of thousands waiting to listen to what he was going to say. They already knew it, but there was pleasure in hearing it even were it to be heard a thousand times.

  As first Morales and then Joseph entered the arena they were accorded the respect that is accorded to those who put themselves on the line, whether they be boxers, soldiers falling through the air into battle, or Barnard girls, in wire-rims, standing alone upon principle. After the fighters came from their corners and were announced, the crowds cocked like a crossbow. Then the fighters went back, and were impossibly overwhelmed with advice from little bald trainers. They bit into their mouth guards, had perhaps a last jolt of fear, and before they knew it the bell rang for the first round. After that was no more fear but only automatic action. The gods of war abbreviate time, put a mist before the eyes, and, if you are lucky, you last until the mist dissipates and the world clears. Time is slowed to allow the blocking and delivery of blows precisely as intended. Spectators, too, can rise into this gift of grace and fly with the fighter along the rails of victory, or fall with him in defeat.

  When it ended after seven rounds, everyone had sore muscles from following each punch and dodge. Pity and joy for loser and winner were balanced with exhaustion as people filed out, mentally or actually counting the money that they had just lost or won, or trying to remember the particulars of the expertise they had just witnessed in case they would be called upon to do the same, without realizing that what the fighters knew and put into play was not visible even to those in the front row. What made them professionals was something that came in two parts. The first was born with them and could not and did not need to be learned; and the second could be learned only after years of labor and suffering, all of which allowed them to see as if through a clarifying lens the microscopic differences in action and deployment that pass right by those who have not done the work and those who look like fools when they imitate those who have.

  As the arena emptied but the lights blazed on, the four former pathfinders sat together quietly. “Are you still in?” Harry asked.

  They answered with barely perceptible changes of expression. Barely perceptible but, nonetheless, like the ignition of lightning and the roll of thunder. He told them to make their ways, individually, to an address in Newark, and he knew that he could count on them to arrive exactly on time.

  Bayer and Johnson found themselves coincidentally on the same train to Newark the next day, as did Harry and Sussingham on another train, having crossed over on the same ferry. They had no need to avoid speaking, and when they walked from their stops to a warehouse in a semi-abandoned industrial area they did so with the relaxed but burdened air of people going to work. As Bayer and Johnson walked down Johnson Avenue, to Bayer, who hadn’t made a comment but had looked at Johnson in a certain way, Johnson said, “No more than aspirin is named after you.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Bayer protested.

  “I read your mind.”

  With a longer distance to cover, Sussingham and Harry spoke mainly about the Slovak girl who worked in the glass factory, Sussingham doing most of the talking, all the way to the gate of the warehouse, which was opened for them by a security guard in a peaked cap after they told him they were there to “unload Norwegian sardines.” Bayer and Johnson were waiting amid civilian trucks and a few surplus jeeps parked in a huge fenced yard. In the center was a brick building with rows of arched doors on each of its five floors, but no windows. Not a single one of the wooden doors was open. A canal had once run right by the building, and these doors had facilitated the loading and unloading of barges. But that was in the nineteenth century, and the canal had been filled in. Black iron fire escapes clung like ivy to the brickwork at the corners, and cast-iron rosettes ran in rows across the façade, signaling where, inside, beams were attached to the wall.

  As in a speakeasy, Harry pulled a bell cord. A little port opened in the entryway. The man who let them in said, “Everything’s on the second floor except the truck, which is the one on the lot as you came in.”

  “I saw it,” Harry said. “The bales aren’t stacked all the way through, are they?”

  “There’s a space in the center, with supports and ventilation. To get to it, you remove two rows of four bales apiece in the middle of the back. The tailgate swings clear, and the bales that are to be moved around are triply strung so they don’t fall apart.”

  “Who thought of that?” Harry asked.

  “Who do you think?” was the answer, meaning Vanderlyn. “He left lunch, too, figuring you might stay awhile.”

  As they walked up a wide staircase built of heavy beams and planks, Bayer asked, “What is this place?”

  Before Harry could answer, they reached the second floor. Half of it was partitioned off, but what remained was vast and dark except where it was lit by huge turn-of-the-century bulbs as big as champion squashes, with giant filaments, the size of buggy springs, glowing in solar yellow. The floor was a mosaic of end-grain, hard-cured oak dented with the use of a hundred years. It was warm inside because the brick had been soaking up the sunlight of the unusually intense Indian summer. Arrayed upon tables gathered together beneath one of the great gourd-like lights were carbines, magazines of ammunition, a light machine gun and box of belted cartridges, a bazooka with three rockets, a plinth made of five bricks of plastic explosive, fuses, a collapsible stretcher, a rubber assault boat with four paddles, four hand grenades, four individual medical kits, rations for light duty, and, on a different table, a lunch catered by Sardi’s, although it was doubtful that any Sardi’s employee came anywhere near the warehouse to lay it down.

  The weaponry was as familiar to the four of them as a toothbrush or a pen. On one level it made them feel comfortable, but on another it did just the opposite. “You can’t buy bazookas and machine guns in a store,” Sussingham stated. “What is this place, and who supplied it?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” Harry told them. “His name is Vanderlyn, someone I picked up on the road during a storm. His boat had sunk. He looked like a derelict, but he was wearing an airborne tunic. Because of that I couldn’t leave him out there, so even though my father-in-law—who wasn’t my father-in-law at the time—wouldn’t stop the car, I went back and got him. He’s quite a big deal, although I didn’t know it then.”

  “Why would he do this?” Bayer asked, because in New York everything was either bought or sold.

  “He’s returning the favor, I guess, and it’s a good thing to do. So far this year Verderamé has been connected to half a dozen murders, including that of a man who worked for me. The way it’s been is that we play by the rules, he doesn’t, he gets away with it, he becomes our master, and it goes on forever.

  “In the war, the OSS made its own rules, and killed the wolves to protect the sheep. It gets touchy here, where we have law . . . and it’s dangerous, of course. But the way he put it to me was quite simple. He said, ‘Do we have law? Because if we do, I’ll go home and knit tea cozies. If we do not, in fact, have law, and just the unfulfilled hope of it, then how can what we do threaten something that doesn’t exist except partially or as an always unrealized hope?’”

  “That’s simple?” Sussingham asked.

  “For him.
”

  “Everything has a price,” Bayer added. “What do they want from us?”

  “He wants nothing,” Harry said, “not from me, anyway. But you’re right. I don’t know who they are, but when they get started—and they’re starting something big—don’t be surprised if you get an offer of employment. I already did, and turned it down.”

  “They went ahead anyway?” Sussingham asked.

  “Decent of them,” Johnson said. “Do they know who we are? They know you, but do they know us?”

  “I didn’t tell them,” Harry said, “but who knows?”

  “They know,” Bayer announced. He had veered toward the lunch, and stood two feet away from the table, pointing at it. The others walked over. Near a kettle above a can of Sterno were a chafing dish, similarly warmed, and trays of sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres, and cookies. On four china plates cutlery was rolled in cloth napkins, and on each plate was a folded card with a single letter written on it: C, J, S, and B, for Copeland, Johnson, Sussingham, and Bayer. “They didn’t have to do that,” Bayer continued, “but they did. I suppose there could be a hundred reasons for it, but we’ll never figure it out.”

  “I would think,” said Harry, “knowing him, that it was for fun. Where’s the blackboard? There was supposed to be a blackboard.”

  “There,” Sussingham said. The blackboard stood apart from everything else and was hard to see in the shadows of the powerful lights. He and Bayer approached on either side, lifted it, and silently led it closer. They tilted it forward slightly, but not so much that an eraser and chalk would roll off its curled ledge. As it flew at them, they pulled up their chairs and Harry seized a piece of chalk.

  “If anyone wants to go home, don’t worry about it and don’t hesitate. That you’ve come is way above the call: there is no call,” Harry said, and fell silent. After a few moments, with no response, he went on.