In Sunlight and in Shadow

by Mark Helprin

  44. In the Arcade

  PHILOSOPHERS, MATHEMATICIANS, and logicians would not have given it a thought. But dyslexics, those with right-left confusion, women whose sense of direction was not quite equal to that of a carrier pigeon, and men who could not fathom the idea of a Möbius belt were stopped for at least a moment by the fact that 28 West 44th Street was also 25 West 43rd Street. How could this be? The post office had long before reconciled itself to the paradox. People who wanted to put on the dog could write: “Please send to me at my offices either at 28 West 44th St., or at 25 West 43rd St., and my staff will see that I get it, even if I’m in Paris.” And visitors who walked through the arcade, entering at one address and leaving by another while in only one building, sometimes found it pleasing.

  This was the arcade in which Eugenia Eba worked beneath the symbol that apart from memory was all she had left of her husband, a gold star to which she would be faithful—which would inspire within her a feeling of holiness as if he were in her embrace—for the rest of her life. Reweaving was an art that soon would be lost, but all day long it is what she did, working amid travertine walls beneath a vaulted ceiling and separated by her little window from a constellation of highly polished fittings that gave off a golden glow. She had always loved how, hour after hour, the brass arrow of the elevator indicator moved like a weathervane in the wind.

  She worked in a silence made soft by many sounds mixing in tranquility—footsteps and heel clicks on the marble floors; sewing machines whirring intermittently like orgasmic crickets; and lost voices rising invisibly to the ceiling. Murmurs, cries, or singing, their meaning was unintelligible but their import was felt as little explosions upon the heart.

  When finally the beginning of November had hesitantly returned to fall, bands of rain remained nonetheless to sweep over Manhattan in alternation with sun and blue sky. As Eugenia Eba finished mending a particular English wool jacket she had fixed many times before, the streets were wet and dark or just as often sparkling with sunshine. Business was slow thanks to ready-to-wear, so she was grateful for the work, strange as it was, and it was not hers to question why the tear in the sleeve kept on tearing. The second time the garment was handed over to her, she recognized her own work, and offered to restore it for no charge. “I wouldn’t hear of it,” the owner had said commandingly. “It’s my fault. A hinge on the tiller of my boat keeps on catching there. I can’t change that. It’s a fast boat that wins races. You can throw over the tiller in such a way that it turns on a dime, coming about with the stern elevated rather than depressed. No. I wouldn’t hear of it. If you don’t mind fixing this, I’ll just bring it in when it tears.”

  Knowing that the tear was made with a thread hook and not by a sailboat hinge, she acquiesced anyway. At first she thought he was interested in her. He was, but it was not the kind of interest that often stopped men at her window, as, young and old, they pretended fascination with reweaving but could not take their eyes off her, her hair shining in the light. He was wealthy and of an age when he might have been seeking a mistress, but the way he spoke to her, and his expression when he did, said that this was not the case.

  It was at least the tenth time he had brought the jacket in, always cut in the same place. She knew no more about him now than the first time she had seen him, and he no more about her, as he was not eager to make conversation, and of all the things of the world, conversation was one of the foremost that Eugenia Eba did without. She was grateful and at the same time somewhat resentful, for over almost a year the work she did for him served to keep her accounts in the black month after month, even if not by much.

  In January she never pointed out that he almost surely could not have been sailing, or, in July and August, when the sun came close to boiling the waters of the Sound, that he was unlikely to have been sailing in a wool jacket. It was understood that such things would pass without comment. For him, whatever he was doing was not a duty. Nor was it pleasure or displeasure, but only somehow written in. Time after time he would bring her the jacket he cut and she would gently reweave it. Perhaps he took pity on her. Perhaps he had lost a son and seen her star, or had been commanded in a way he did not know, or was simply generous, as some people are. Perhaps, after the war, he was a bit crazy, and thought that an exquisite woman sitting alone in a little shop was reweaving and repairing with gifted persistence not just the torn jackets, pants with cigarette burns, and coats with fraying edges upon which she worked every day, but the whole wounded and suffering world.

  Harry stared out his windows high over Central Park and watched as bands of rain clouds would raid the city and then run from blue sky. The elements had begun to fuse. Sussingham and Johnson would leave their hotels, Bayer would flip the sign on his door early that afternoon and his clients would have to come back another time. Vanderlyn’s people were waiting in Newark, and the surgeon knew to arrive later. Verderamé was holding court amid walls of gray and green, sure of his role and the justice of what he did. He was what he was, he thought, because the world was unfair to him, and the license he had granted to himself because of this injustice was an endless source of enjoyment as he revenged his slights and struck at everything before it could strike him. Though the wheels on his Cadillac were still, they would roll at dusk. Everything was poised for what would happen, even if not everyone knew it was coming and no one knew exactly how it would occur.

  Catherine told herself more than once that Harry had fought through the war with the 82nd Airborne, that he and the others were naturals to begin with and had learned all the lessons they might need as they had pushed the Germans into the heart of Germany, that they were used to hard combat and knew what to do, which would not daunt them.

  Still, sometimes she trembled. But she would go onstage that evening and give the best performance of her career. The applause would rival the recent downpours, but she would not hear it. She would disdain and leave it behind as she was carried away by her song. All she could think of was the Esplanade, where everything would come clear.

  Harry made his way toward the ferry, leaving earlier than planned, hoping to walk off all that was unsettling him. He had never been in a city just before going into a fight. It had always been on some quiet airfield when he could listen to the cicadas in the desert, or on an English weald after a long truck ride. These surroundings, lacking in complexity or action, had allowed him to catch the pacing of war and unite with it, to alloy with the battle and cast away the hope of life, as a trick to preserve it.

  Now and then the remnant bands of rain, which could last for a minute or half an hour, would pound down furiously before running north to die in the highlands of New England. Not long after he left the park, Harry was caught outside a piano store on 57th Street, where he found himself standing with half a dozen people in the vestibule while a young girl inside tried out a piano. As her parents watched, she played sections of Beethoven sonatas and concerti, and fragments of Mozart, all joined together by her own superb cadenzas. She didn’t know that she had an audience, that it had been raining, that it had stopped, that they had left, or that Harry had stayed to listen when he might have gone on. The last thing she played, before she put down the cover in a way that said that this was the piano she had chosen, was the second movement of the Pathétique.

  When Harry pushed out from the vestibule onto a wet sidewalk reflecting dashes of blue, he had begun to get a little of what he had always sought before he went into battle—a sense that time does not exist, that he himself was of no account, that all things were connected and orchestrated far beyond human will, and that the world was saturated with beauty no matter what the loss. This he began to receive from the music, and then from the motion of the streets and what seemed like the purposeful racing of the clouds.

  After he went ten or twelve blocks down Fifth Avenue to 46th Street it began to pour. He thought he might outlast it, but was forced by wind and water to seek shelter west on 44th. He thoughtlessly imagined that he might duck into
the Harvard Club. On occasion, he could fake it, walking in with an expression of aristocracy, pleasure, and irritation all compressed into one odd look. Still, the porter sometimes checked, asking, “Are you a member, sir?” in tones that could touchlessly dissect a frog. The one time Harry had been intercepted he had had no need for counterfeit nonchalance. He was there, legitimately, to meet Howard Mumford Jones, with whom he had formed a connection after the eminent professor had asked Harry, who one fall had been the only student in his course he had not recognized, what he thought of literature in service to politics and ideals. In the thirties it was assumed that literature would be. Harry replied, improvising and out of conviction, “My view is that literature should move beyond opinion, where music already is, and old age, if we’re lucky, may lead.” That was the beginning of their acquaintance. After Harry returned to New York, they sometimes met for a drink at the Harvard Club.

  One entered via a brilliance of architecture—first through a reception hall that was elegant but hardly overwhelming. Then, as if to dash expectations, the ceiling was lower toward the interior and darkness made the senses adjust to a lesser scale. But the third chamber opened up breathtakingly, three storeys high, vast and wide, richly appointed in crimson, dark wood, and gold, its heroic paintings staring down through silence so capacious it absorbed sound like a pillow slammed upon a mosquito. It would have been the perfect place, tranquilly by the several fires, in which to wait out an angry bout of gray rain, but during the Depression Harry could not afford to join. He was of course unavailable during the war, and when he returned he had put off joining until, once more, he could not afford to do so. Also, other than waiting out a storm, he didn’t know—being impatient of luxury and a stranger to normal sociality—exactly what he would do there.

  But now when he had to get out of the rain he found himself in the arcade, the normal logic of which would have been for him to have walked through to 43rd Street, past Eugenia Eba in the reweaving shop. Most of the time, she was looking down into a magnifying glass, as big as a dinner plate and as clear as ether, suspended above her work while strong light illumined the strands of wool she wove and twisted together.

  He would never love anyone the way he loved Catherine, but he loved Eugenia Eba all the same, even if only from a distance. Though still beautiful, she was no longer a girl with peerless charm, but no matter how old she might be, she retained for him all the magic she once had had. Were it an illusion, it was yet a finer, more solid truth. If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind.

  Harry began to move through the narrow arcade, slowly progressing toward her shop. With each step the cares of the world drained from him, and he grew more and more content. It was not the false and misleading equanimity of success, but that which comes of failure and truth—after darkness and restriction would come a feeling of holiness, an ocean of clarity. He came to the little window, through which he saw in cameo the ideal of loveliness from his youth, now seemingly immortal. Protected from all comers by her golden star, her face lit by light more benevolent than on any nearby stage—and there were many—she was patiently weaving, and although he could not explain it, Harry thought that she would do this contentedly and forever.

  He forced himself to move until he stood at the 43rd Street door. The rain had begun to subside. In only moments he would again be on the street and in the invisible clouds of air that often linger after a downpour. In harmony arising from dissonance came the hum of the arcade, like the propeller noise of an airplane stationary on a runway, ready to release its brakes and rush forward. Like sheaves of wheat in the sun, a thousand shafts tied together as one, the revolving blades of propellers were invisible except as a gleaming disc. This insistent, lapping frequency and pitch, which announces that one is to be borne away on high, was the sound he heard in the golden arcade.

  As intermittent squalls crosshatched dark lines upon waters normally speckled with whitecaps, Vanderlyn was out of commission in his office, keeping track of the ferries as they trudged through curtains of rain. Unable to work, he would rest his elbow on the desk and hold his chin in his hand, and then drop his hand, nervously knocking his thumb against the wood, like someone who has come to a conclusion. At times his heart fluttered as if his blood had mixed with air.

  He pressed the first lever on his intercom. “What time is my appointment with the lawyers?”—meaning Sutherland, Dwight, his personal attorneys.

  “You don’t have one” came the answer.

  “Oh, I thought I did. Please get them on the phone.”

  A minute later Vanderlyn’s secretary told him that they were on the line.

  “When can you see me?” Vanderlyn asked Sutherland, who had once been a terrified little boy in the next cubicle on their first day at Groton—terrified, Vanderlyn would later say to him at innumerable family gatherings, because his extrasensory perception had informed him that in the future he would have to settle for Princeton.

  Sutherland knew from Vanderlyn’s tone that he wanted it to be soon. “When would you like?”

  “Today.”

  “I’m free now. I usually make it a practice to eat lunch. Where are you?”

  “At the office.”

  “If you shoot yourself out of a cannon you can get here in a minute. Shall I open the window?”

  “Come on, Squeaky.” (People of their station called one another such names despite their fear that immigrants of very tough fiber might hear, and make a mockery of their class.)

  “Whenever you can get here. It’s not so busy today.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “I’m sure you can’t.”

  When the rain stopped, Harry looked at the clock in a store window across the street and, knowing that he was early, left without urgency. He walked slowly east and south toward Kips Bay on quiet blocks of brownstones immune to the frenzy of midtown.

  The rain, however, had one more shot, and took it as Harry crossed Park Avenue somewhere in the Thirties, suddenly driving down like chorus lines of jackhammers. Not wanting to be soaked or chilled, he ran for the first wide portal he saw, a neoclassical monument on a small scale a third of a block toward Lexington. He hadn’t had time to see what it was, but once inside he realized it was a hotel, one of many in the area, of medium price, mainly for businessmen, and largely unknown. It was usually safe to assume that such places were deficient in elegance, not a single one having a great name.

  But New York is a city of open secrets, and this hotel, the name of which Harry had no need to find out and would never know, was luxurious in an uncanny way. The entrance was so dark that it was almost as if he had either stepped into a cave or was in a quick eclipse. The darkness was relieved every minute or so by flashes of lightning as a thunderstorm crossed Manhattan. The lightning would burst, fixing a still image then falsified by subsequent movements in the dark.

  There was no front desk. No doormen or bellboys. To the right was a bar at which a few people sat absorbed in conversation. To the left was a sunken seating area at one end of which was an extraordinary fire. Two rows of gas flames each a foot or more high ran for ten feet within a fireplace of black slate. The gas pressure that shot the flames a foot into the air, sixty in each row, also made them dance wildly. Their heat was warm but not excessively dry, and the dancing light, the only illumination in a large room, changed everything as it shifted second by second.

  Harry walked down two steps and sat in a leather chair close and at eye level to the flames. It would be a good place to get dry as the last of the storm departed. He had time. A waitress appeared on the steps. She held a tray under her arm, and looked more like a schoolgirl than a waitress. “What would you like?” she asked.

  Harry had the trapped-animal feeling of someone who, to stay in place, must spend money on something he doesn’t want. What she was asking for was a kind of rent, but for the tenants to save face she would brin
g them something on a tray. It was early for anyone to drink, especially Harry, but he had to pay the rent.

  “What kind of Scotch do you have?” he asked.

  She named half a dozen. He thought to hell with his inability to drink, chose one, and asked for a glass of water to go with it. This he had observed at the Connaught, among people who appeared to know what they were doing. Back quickly, she set down the Scotch and a glass of water on a low table at Harry’s knees, took payment, and left after flashing a pumpkin smile. That so small a woman had so wide and shocking a grin was mysterious and disconcerting. Harry drank a little Scotch, and then a little water. He waited for a few minutes and then repeated the process. Given the amounts in the glasses, he thought he would take about twenty minutes to finish before he left to catch the Weehawken Ferry, which was the right interval in terms of getting dry, especially because of the fire. He closed his eyes and slipped into the kind of sleep that commuters sleep between stations, a slumber that despite its great heaviness does not compromise keeping to schedule. The roar of the fire divided time into precise increments of which he was somehow aware.

  As if on cue, he opened his eyes, and the light refreshed his wits. Across from him in a chair that was the twin of his own was a man staring at the flames, his body turned three-quarters to the fire. His face was long, strong, and gaunt. Even in a garden restaurant in May at Cap d’Antibes he would have looked like a man who had spent the previous six months fighting across the desert or the steppes, or so it seemed to Harry, who thought as well that he might be a Hungarian or a Turk. His face, though European, was also incalculably Asian. It told of untraceable places lost in time, of taut, weatherbeaten Mongols, Sarmatians, Kazakhs, and Finns.

  He was dressed in a tweed jacket and taupe slacks. His hair was thinning and pomaded, his teeth very large, white, and straight, his gums receding with age. Looking at his hands, Harry could see from their size and the structure of the tendons that his grip was powerful. He was in some senses frightening, and yet Harry felt warmly toward him. Although he was wearing round, horn-rimmed glasses, the passport of the Ivy League, they were reddish orange. Harry had never seen such frames.