In Sunlight and in Shadow (2 page)

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.