In Sunlight and in Shadow (88 page)

“That, of course, was my question.”

“Perhaps they don’t know.”

“Perhaps they don’t,” the Turk said. “I came in to escape the rain, and when I saw it. . . .”

“Why have you stayed?” Harry asked. “The rain?”

“The rain is really nothing.”

“Then why?”

“I see my child,” he said, “my wife, my parents, in the flames. I can’t leave them. Of course, they aren’t there, but that’s the point: in holiness, they are. Oxidation,” he said professionally. “In the grave, slow. Here, rapid. In the grave aided by foragers minute and otherwise. Here, aided by, or, rather, I should say, it is pulled along as if by the hand, by the oxidation of methane. It’s all the same. The difference is velocity.”

“You’re a chemist?”

“At one time,” the Turk said, “I was a physicist.”

“Where?

“Budapest.” He said it in Magyar:
Buda-pesht.

“I thought you were Hungarian. I didn’t guess that you’re a physicist.”

“
Was.
Physicists have a penchant for philosophy in the abstract, which is a sin. If I were to return to physics, I’d be tempted by that sin. It’s the sin that gave rise to the war that took everything. I’m no longer interested in the truth of nature, or any other such cold thing. We’re too delicate for that. It won’t do us any good.” Here, he stopped.

Harry tried to come to his rescue. “What does one do then,” he asked, “when one ceases to be a physicist?”

“Work in a restaurant,” the Turk said, almost cheerfully. “Not far from here. It’s kosher. I know how to do that. I was not religious, but my wife made me observe those things, although we made many exceptions that we were not supposed to have made.”

“Like what?” Harry asked, wanting to distract him further, although it could not have been a distraction to have asked him about his previous life.

“In Italy and Dalmatia, eating shellfish. And now I work in a restaurant. For me it seems strange to be among Jews who are alive. It’s as if they’re ghosts.”

“
You
are alive.”

“Not really, and not for long, which is as it should be.”

“You’re a waiter?”

“I wash the dishes. Because I lived in England when I was a child my English is, well, you can see. They wanted me to wait. It would be more money and a lot more pleasant.”

“But you have to do penance.”

“I have to do penance. And I have to die. But tell me why I have yet to die.”

“You keep them alive as long as you live. You’re a vessel that must not sink, or they sink with you. And you stay washing dishes because. . . .”

“Because it is holy,” the Turk said, finishing Harry’s sentence for him. Harry had no need to prod, for the Turk wanted to explain, and did so, not like the professor he once had been, but with conviction and emotion that the world had burned into him. “Souls,” he said, “like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But when for infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection.

“For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extent to which they succeed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacrifice. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or a bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.” His expression hardened, and then softened a little. “But so what,” he said, rising. Pointing to the fire, he added, “That’s where I want to go, and I will, and there I’ll find peace—but not yet.”

In making his way through the tangle of tables and chairs, he touched Harry on the arm. “I didn’t mean to burden you. At my age, I have no fire, and can only reflect. I’m sorry to talk so much about myself, except that, and here you have my apologies, I was, of course, talking about more than just myself.”

“I know,” Harry told him, and they parted.

Here by the fire, half in darkness, the light still dancing, Harry understood that those left behind—the failures and the deformed, the suffering and the dead—are not just equal in soul, but that they are we and we are they. Struggle as we may for distinction, soon enough we fail, and, without exception, follow.

Vanderlyn took the East Side IRT to Grand Central, where he stood in the reduced traffic on the main floor as it ebbed between rush hours. He had calculated that he would have no time for a restaurant, so he bought a pretzel and a celery tonic, remarking to himself that he paid the same price for these as he had in the twenties, and that by this measure the Depression was over. He was most likely the richest man in New York who ate a pretzel lunch while sitting on the Vanderbilt steps.

Grand Central had been the scene of one of his greatest triumphs. At the beginning of the war he had been sent to Camp X in Canada to be trained by the British special services. The final exercise required him to make his way back to New York, saddled with what most people might have considered the disadvantage of having been parachuted—blindfolded—into the wilderness of Ontario, shoeless, bootless, with only reichsmarks in his pocket. A warrant had been issued to the RCMP, and—in perhaps the most challenging part—he was dressed in the uniform of an SS major. Less than two weeks later, attired in a Savile Row suit, shaved, bathed, silk tie, pocket square, and shined shoes, he arrived in Grand Central. Before reporting in, he stopped for oysters. This as much as anything else had caught the attention of Colonel Donovan, who was also Vanderlyn’s lawyer, and Vanderlyn was almost instantly packed off to London, with the order simply to do everything he could to win the war. He thought then that he would never return home. Instead, the one who never returned was his son and only child. At that point, Vanderlyn despaired. Psychiatrists were becoming the vogue, and he was urged to consult them for his own good. “I’d be happy to,” he had said, “if they can bring back the dead.”

Sutherland, Dwight, so white-shoe that its partners could walk in the snow and not leave tracks, was on three rosewood-paneled floors of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, so high that it had an internal, windowless conference room for the use of clients who feared heights. The city spread out on all the firm’s comfortable sides, glinting magnificently in silver and gray. Clouds rushed in on Atlantic air, light ricocheted in blinding incandescence from streets and avenues that shone like burning filaments, and all was quiet except for the muted whistling of the wind.

Vanderlyn never had to wait long in the waiting room and Sutherland always came out to greet him. They had no need of saying anything, as they had been acquainted since their chief excitement was catching tadpoles. Sutherland’s huge office was beautifully and sparsely furnished, and from his windows, even while sitting in a visitor’s chair, it was possible to see the Ramapos to the west, a lightship anchored off Sandy Hook directly south, and the disappearing plains of Long Island to the east. Aircraft rose from Idlewild as delicately as house flies in a squall, flashing like mica as they banked to set their course.

“We’re going to have to bill you, you know,” Sutherland said. “I don’t like to do that. Actually, I do, but you could have just come to my house and it wouldn’t have cost a cent.”

Vanderlyn literally waved away the cost. “I want to change my will.”

“That’s relatively easy assuming that you don’t want to alter the nature of the trusts or do anything for which we would have to petition the court. I assume you’re not cutting out Elyssa. I won’t do that.”

“Elyssa is my wife and your sister. What do
you
think?”

“It would be a tragedy all around.”

“It’s a change for after her death.”

“What happened? Did the chairman of an institution you’re going to endow tell you to fuck off?”

Vanderlyn said, “I wish they had the courage, but they’re too good at sucking up. Maybe sometimes they go out on the beach and try to scream the truth into the wind, but I’ll bet they can’t.”

“Too many wealthy dames at the beach. Depending on which beach. I’m not going to tell you,” Sutherland said, “as I’ve told you all our lives, not to be impulsive. We’re too old for that now, and you are impulsive. As long as Elyssa is protected, it doesn’t matter to me if you leave your money to the circus. Is it the circus?”

Vanderlyn shook his head dismissively.

“I do remind you, however, that soon after we met you told me that. . . .”

Vanderlyn knew exactly what Sutherland was about to say.

“You would cut off your right arm. . . .”

“Left. I was hedging, even then.”

“For five chocolate bars and twenty minutes alone with a naked girl.”

“I would have. I think I might now.”

“All you had to do was wait. That’s my point.”

“I’m too old to wait.” Vanderlyn pointed to the Rolodex on the credenza behind Sutherland’s desk. “When did you get that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, a long time ago.”

“Look at it.”

“Look at it?”

“Yes.”

Sutherland looked at it. It was, as he well knew, heavy with hundreds of cards.

“What percentage of the people on that are dead?”

Thinking for a moment, Sutherland made a calculation that he did not accomplish with numbers. “Half. Maybe more. When they die, I can’t take them off the wheel. It would be horrible just to toss them in the wastebasket.”

“I’m much better at making decisions now than I was when we were nine, and I’ve decided.”

“All right.” Sutherland took out a legal pad and picked up a pen. “Shoot.” He was much like Vanderlyn—fit, self-contained, modest, thoughtful, all of which could be read in his bearing and in his face.

“I don’t want to leave what I have to institutions, Gibb. I know it would help charity and art, and a lot of people one way or another, but I do that from income anyway, and so can my heirs. All things—everything material—are useless unless they’re fed into the fire of the living. My son is gone, and he won’t be honored by having his name on a building. That’s not my idea of how it should be.”

Sutherland listened attentively, having not yet made a note.

“I’ve discovered of late . . . this morning . . . that perhaps the greatest pleasure and relief in life, and I know this may sound strange, is to trust your heirs, and the heirs of your heirs, in a future you cannot and will not know.

“When Charlie was a kid, we. . . .” Vanderlyn stumbled, but, with resolution, went on. “We fought a lot. I thought that sometime in his twenties it would be over, as it was with my father and me, but he never got there. Even so, even at the worst of it, I saw in him a man as steady and as good as any I’ve ever seen. You trust in that. You cast your bread upon the waters, and in so doing, in expressing confidence in those who follow, you give them the greatest gift, and the gift you get in return is even greater.”

Sutherland agreed, but he still hadn’t made a note.

“So the institutions will have to wait. I read biographies now, Gibb. In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there’s a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with a tweezers.”

“What about powerful ideas, Jim? The atomic bomb, gravity, the Magna Carta, and all that?”

“Stabbing the universe with a needle.”

“And a life? What’s bigger about a life?”

“All the great forces working in miniature, perfectly. That’s where to look. That’s why I want everything to go to living flesh and blood. Specifically, to someone who I know is courageous, honorable, faithful, charitable, and has no expectation of me in this regard. To someone who reached out to help me when to him and everyone else in the world I was the least among us.”

“In the war?”

“After the war.”

“Is he married?”

“Yes.”

“Children?

“I’m pretty sure not.”

“Do you want his future children to inherit,
per stirpes,
or some other arrangement?”

“Yes, his children. I’m not doing this halfway.”

“The cousins will fight it.”

“He’s semi-criminal, and his son is worse. Make it shell-proof.”

“That I can do.” Sutherland tossed the pad onto his desk, having written nothing on it. “If it’s all for after Elyssa is deceased, the terms of the trusts are the same, and there’s no messing with the inventory, the only things we have to do really are some typing and signing. I won’t have to blow off U.S. Steel this afternoon, though God knows they deserve it. They’re real pricks, you know. Come back before the close of business and we’ll have everything ready, just like a dry cleaner’s.” He thought this was amusing, and he picked up the pad and opened his pen yet again. “Give me the name, accurately spelled, and an address.”

“I don’t remember his address, but I can find out. I’ll do that.”

“Then come back at”—Sutherland lifted his wrist to look at his watch—“five.” He positioned the pen. “What’s the name? And what’s that?”

Beneath Vanderlyn’s arm was the roll of canvas that he had carried all the way from Wall Street, hardly giving it a thought. “It’s a garment bag,” he said. “I’m going to pick up a jacket that’s being mended.”

“Don’t you send someone?”

“No, it’s something I attend to myself.” He turned and began to leave.

“Jim? The name?”

When Vanderlyn replied, naming his heir, it was a little like getting his son back, and he stopped his turn, because he did not want even his friend of such long duration to see how this affected him. Sutherland’s pen moved smoothly over the legal pad, in the quiet of his office except for the wind hissing past the windows as it moved across the world in great currents as clear and cold as ether.