In Sunlight and in Shadow
Read In Sunlight and in Shadow Online
Authors: Mark Helprin
1. Boat to St. George: May, 1946
3. Her Hands and the Way She Held Them
4. The Moon Rising over the East River
10. Distant Lights and Summer Wind
24. The Economics of Hot Water
46. The Horse and His Rider He Hath Thrown into the Sea
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.
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 1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3558.
E
4775
I
5 2012 813'.54—dc23 2012016242
eISBN 978-0-547-81925-9
v1.1012
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. . . .
Prologue—Lucretius,
De Rerum Natura
, I
I
F 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.
I
F 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.
