In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin Read Free Book Online

trust you?”
    “You can keep my ring as hostage.”
    He looked at the ring. “Where’d you get it, Woolworth’s?”
    “Tiffany’s,” said the voice, lying (and it knew it was lying).
    “How do I know you won’t go to the police or the FBI?”
    Suddenly, a second hot dog entered the chamber and dived onto the plate. “I took it from another tray.”
    “Thanks,” said Harry. “You’re a sweetheart.”
    Catherine looked at him in a way she had never looked at anyone before, truly, and then she asked, “Do you always do this?”
    “Not when I’m in a hurry.”
    She was speechless, but then she began to laugh, and the laugh came back as she bought herself iced tea and a buttered roll, and even when she rejoined him and sat down at a little table that wobbled every time either of them touched it or put something down. “Really,” she said.
    “It doesn’t seem too outrageous to me,” he replied, “given that a very short time ago the law required me to jump out of airplanes and shoot people whom I didn’t know, and who were the sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers . . . of women just like you.”
    It was a lament. The war was so close, and so many had served. She closed her eyes briefly in acknowledgment.
     
    Other than the effortlessly surfacing memory of her, all he had was her name, which was not real, her telephone number, which was, and an invitation to call her on Sunday night: at eight, she had said, with alluring precision. That weekend he wandered in and out of the complex shadows of the Els, in the Saturday-quiet districts of deserted factories and lofts, in a chevron across and down Central Park beneath a canopy of new leaves coloring the air light green. He walked forty miles in those two days, and though he spoke to no one, words came silently in torrents.
    In every residential neighborhood, he imagined that she might suddenly step onto the sidewalk, and at every market or store, that he might see her buying whatever she might buy—a scarf, a book, an emerald, it hardly mattered. He would round a corner, wanting to see her amid the shelves of roses and peonies banked in front of a florist’s. He would peer far ahead on the avenues and wide cross streets, hoping to catch sight of her at a distance. And dreaming that she would appear, he would scan crowds exiting theaters or moving through the parks in the armies of leisure and their stray battalions relaxedly ambling in all directions.
    Manhattan and its vassal boroughs tirelessly generated images. Even smoke and steam rose beautifully, slowly unfurling in the play of wind and light like a silent song to redeem the memory of forgotten souls. As pictures endlessly flashing were the telegraphy of a superior force, so his infatuation, light and all-possessing, was the prelude to something finer. By what magic in the expression of a woman one could pass through the door to her heart into the heart of the world, to and fro in time, he did not know, but it was true.
    On Sunday before he called Catherine he walked to the Battery, crossed over to Brooklyn on the Brooklyn Bridge, and recrossed on the Williamsburg. Behind and to his left, the Navy Yard was frozen into silence, the ships unfinished and the cranes stopped in their tracks as much reminders of the war dead as would have been white crosses. In the park, across from his apartment, he rested on a bench overlooking the playground in which he had played when a child. At four that afternoon the air turned rather cool for late in May, and mothers and nannies farseeing enough to have brought coats and hats put them on their children and their charges.
    Watching the children, he noticed two things especially. A girl of about five, and her sister, who was no more than three, wanted to drink from the pebbled concrete fountain at the playground’s edge, but it was too high for either of them, so the five-year-old, who was fairly heavily coated and had a cloche hat, jumped up and, resting her stomach