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

on the edge and grasping the sides, began to drink. But she was neither strong enough nor oblivious enough of the pain to hang on, and she began to slip off backward. At this, the three-year-old, in knit cap and pink coat, advanced to her sister and, also grasping the edge of the fountain, placed her forehead against her sister’s behind, straining to hold her in place, eyes closed, body trembling, curls spilling from her cap. Her sister drank for a long time, held in position by an act as fine as Harry had ever seen on the battlefields of Europe.
    There were swings for older children, the kind with open seats suspended from chains, but the swings for infants were almost like cages: little wooden crates with safety bars, hanging from four ropes. On one of them a mother had placed her baby girl. In a camel’s hair coat, mittens, and a dark knit cap, the child was no older than eighteen months, quite chubby, and seemingly half asleep. But she awoke when her mother pushed her on the swing and it gained speed, gently rising higher with each push. Away from her mother, and back, but always rising, always returning, her eyes on the trees and sky. As she flew, with little wisps of her hair pressed back by the wind, she squinted, and as she rose it seemed that she easily apprehended something for which he had to strain and sacrifice to remember even as a trace.
     
    That weekend, Catherine was not as sanguine as Harry, for although she might easily have had him at her door, by her side, or in her bed, merely by invitation or command, such power is not only the power of attraction but the cause of hesitation. In the automat they sat across from one another oblivious of everything else, except that, because it was too early on, they would break their easy silence with conversation. And then they would fall into it again. That as love commences all couples must make bowers is written in the blood. And in New York they make them invisibly in restaurants, where, surrounded by a shell of something like glass that mutes the sounds of the world and blurs and intercepts its light, they would hardly notice if Vikings or Visigoths sacked the adjoining tables and set the place on fire. This obliviousness she had tried to resist, and by nature, in an act written in the blood just as deeply, she put him off until Sunday.
    Though he wanted to call her and was able to wait only because he knew that he could and would, she could not have called him had he not called her. Thus, she tacked contrary to her character, which was otherwise and notably hot and decisive, and waited as if disinterestedly until Sunday night at eight, the expectation of which, despite her purposeful discipline, lifted her incessantly. For her, it had not been a minor encounter. There was something about him, something in his eyes that led far beyond his shy and careful manner upon meeting her, something momentous and grave enough to lead to a great deal of trouble, heartbreak, and anger. For she was already betrothed.
     
    To pass the time, she did what she ordinarily would do. On Saturday, she went swimming, and though the water that washed over her as she dolphined through it sometimes became his embrace, with almost every stroke she also swam away from him, and at the end of her mile as she lifted herself up from the pool onto the mosaic deck, removing the horrid bathing cap, dripping, lightheaded, and strong, as the water ran off her it was as if they had parted and she was alone. And then came sorrow, longing, and a contentment bought by the borrowings of optimism, which she knew would be paid back with interest and then some were he not to call. As she walked home, every sight and sound was intense. At the corner of 57th and Park, on Saturday afternoon in the sunshine, her right hand unconsciously over her heart, she stood through two lights, oblivious of the cars and people coming and going, surging forward, stopping, starting. She stared down the south-shadowed side of