In Sunlight and in Shadow Read Free Page A

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