In Sunlight and in Shadow Read Free Page B

was clear, the world was filled with beautiful women, whether the world called them that or not.
    As the sound of a claxon that had whooped in Brooklyn seconds before now echoed off the buildings of lower Manhattan, he remembered at last to breathe and to walk, and the breath came in two beats, one of astonishment and the other of love, although what right had he to love the brief sight of a woman in white who had crossed a crowded deck and disappeared in shadow?

2. Overlooking the Sea
    A S EVEN THE MOON has its virtues, so too does Staten Island. But except in declarations erupting from the crooked faces of politicians, the borough of Richmond was no more a part of the city than Mars is a part of Earth. If New Jersey, linked to Manhattan by tunnels and a bridge, could not make a claim of attachment, how could Staten Island, the humpbacked child of the Atlantic? It couldn’t. But it did.
    As they sat in her garden overlooking the sea from a high hill, Elaine, Harry’s aunt, the widow of his father’s only brother, put down her glass and asked, “Now that you’ve returned to the light of day, what will you do?” He thought this was a widow’s question and perhaps a touch envious, for although he had come out of the war she could not come out of old age. He meant to comfort her by lessening the contrast.
    “In some respects,” he said, speaking carefully—for she had been a Latin teacher and she listened clause by clause—“there was more light and air in the war than now.”
    Via a slight tilt of her head, she asked why.
    “When you did see something of beauty, when you did love, it was more intense than I can describe. Perhaps wrongly so, I don’t know, but it was. And in the fighting or when you came out were islands of emotion such as I had never experienced: in short takes, in fragments that pierced like shrapnel.”
    Not wanting to go deep, she just smiled, and the setting carried them through. A shingled house on two acres of garden shielded from other houses by thick hedges, on the eastern slope of a hill overlooking the sea, with three parterres of lawn, fruit trees, flower beds, and white shell paths, this was a paradise with a view to the horizon forty miles out and 140 degrees in expanse. The ocean breeze that came up the hill was artfully broken by ranks of boxwood until all it could do was gently sway the profusion of red and yellow roses on their long and threatening stems.
    Elaine, and Henry, the brother of Meyer Copeland, Harry’s father, had fled to Staten Island because each had married outside the faith. Neither the Irish on her side nor the Jews on his were hostile or unforgiving, but the couple felt discomfort, disapproval, and tension. Not wanting to spend their lives this way, they exiled themselves to Richmond, where, in the City of New York, they lived as they might have on the coast of California or Maine, and prayed every day that no bridge would ever be thrown across the Narrows.
    After Harry’s mother died when he was a boy, he had spent a fair amount of time in this house. When his father went abroad to buy leather or hire craftsmen, this was where Harry would stay, arising at six to make his way to school on the Upper West Side, studying with such concentration on the ferry twice a day that he seemed to make the crossing instantly. It was on Staten Island that Harry had first encountered a lobster and eaten it. Now he sat in the sunshine at a linen-covered table, encountering another one, in a salad by the side of which was a glass of iced tea and, although he did not ask for more, not quite enough bread and butter for someone who had swum a mile and walked eight.
    Not long before, he wouldn’t have noticed any effect after several times the exertion and no food whatsoever. He had learned in the war to unlink the output of energy from its intake, resulting in the conversion of hunger into a feeling of warmth. Which is not to say that, after a lobster, four rolls with butter, two