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

57th Street toward the East River, watching flags and clouds in the wind, the former as rebellious as a wild horse on a rope, and the latter sailing like weightless galleons.
    The servants who had not accompanied her parents to East Hampton, where she was supposed to have been as well, had been dismissed, and she was alone in the house. On Saturday night she descended the five flights from her rooms on the top floor to the kitchen in the basement, and on the wide marble stairs between the first and second floors she danced—because she could dance beautifully, because the stairs were challenging to the choreography, because she liked the sound of her shoes clicking against the glossy stone, and because she imagined that he was watching her, and, better yet, that someday, though it seemed impossible given the situation, he really would watch her as she descended these stairs. She wondered if, in what she hoped had been his infatuation, he had noticed her body, through which she could express a great deal both effable and ineffable. Then, still on the stairs, she paused, recalling that he had.
    In the kitchen, dangerously happy as she listened to the radio, she made herself a light dinner, which she ate standing up at a limestone island beneath a huge pot rack. On a bed of lettuce, greens, and cherry tomatoes, she put two enormous prawns, two sea scallops, and some crabmeat. This she dressed with olive oil—no vinegar, she did not like vinegar—a pinch of salt, pepper, and a sprinkling of paprika. To the left of her plate she placed a linen napkin and silverware—she did not like to put silverware on the right, without a napkin upon which it could rest—and to the right a wine glass three-quarters filled with Champagne. Champagne seemed to follow Catherine wherever she went. She opened the metal bread drawer in front of and below her, took out a roll, put it on a small bread plate, and stepped back. The bubbles in her glass seemed to rise and dance in synchrony with the songs on the radio. She was so happy she was silly, and she sang her version of a song that, even after she sang it, she could not get out of her head:
     
Picka you up in a takasee honey,
See-ah you abouta halfa past eight!
Picka you up in a takasee baby,
Donah be late!
     
    She would not have eaten while standing up and moving to music had she not been overbrimming with expectation. “Goddammit,” she said out loud, encouraged by just a little Champagne, “if I have to throw him over, I’ll throw him over.” Then she stopped, two feet from the plate, staring at it as if it were a calculus problem. “No one,” she said, “has ever thrown Victor over. He doesn’t throw over.” And then she said, “But I will!” and she was happy again, lightened, confident.
    The next day, Sunday, she walked from Sutton Place to the tennis courts in Central Park to meet a friend and college classmate, a beautiful, unpredictable, Cuban blonde who was scandalously married to a Jewish neurologist, the scandal being not that he was Jewish, for so was she, but that he was a neurologist, which by her family’s standards was insufficiently dynastic. Her mother had once said, “To live without chauffeurs is to live like an animal.”
    Catherine and Marisol in tennis whites turned so many heads that they were embarrassed. The male tennis players, sometimes missing their shots, could not refrain from glancing at them, first at one and then at the other, like spectators, rather than players, at a tennis match. Had Harry been home and looked out his windows fronting the park, he could have seen them, distant but dazzling. Instead, he was half searching for her on every street in the city. As he was walking home, they were finishing their game, and as he passed the playground and came out onto Central Park West, Catherine was a few hundred feet to the east.
    On her way home, she continued to hear in memory the tennis balls that, struck by earnestly wielded rackets, sounded