In Sunlight and in Shadow (3 page)

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?

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 glasses of iced tea, and a large salad, he was in danger of starvation, but that he was still drawing on his reserves.

“I went out to the cemetery,” he said, leaning back in his chair so that the full sun was in his face. He knew that because his aunt didn’t drive she seldom could visit her husband’s grave, which was not far from but invisible to Manhattan, on land that rose gently westward from the Saddle River.

“I haven’t been there for a while. Are they taking care of it?”

“No. There were perpetual-care medallions on every stone, but they weren’t taking care of it. I went to the office. They apologized. They said that half the workers are still in the service. What with the demobilization, I thought at first this was just an excuse. But the mortuary detachments are still busy. Graves Registration has got to find gravesites that weren’t always well marked, dig everyone up, and move them to war cemeteries over there or bring them back home. And it’s not like digging potatoes. When they were buried, with artillery deafening the gravediggers and the bulldozer operators, there wasn’t much ceremony. Now they’re making up for it. They take them out carefully, as they must.”

“So what will they do? At the cemetery.”

“It’ll straighten itself out in a year or two. Meanwhile, since I complained, they offered to attend to us at once. But I wouldn’t let them. It would make it worse for the graves that no one comes to visit, so I did it myself. They had tools to spare, and they let me use them. I think they were embarrassed, that they feel they owe us. They don’t owe us.”

“They don’t. I know.”

“I cut the grass. I repaired the rails that go around the plot, cleaned the markers, weeded, I even planted ivy. It’s all done. And I said Kaddish for my mother, my father, Henry, my grandfather, grandmother, and my mother’s father and mother, wherever they are. By myself of course, no
minyan.
”

“A lot of people would not approve,” she offered.

Elegant, almost formal, and prepossessing in his suit and angel-blue tie, he contemplated for a moment and said, “Well, then fuck them.”

After lunch, as Elaine carried several trays into the house, and he, at her order, remained in the sun, he thought about the woman he had seen walking onto the ferry. Even as he had been in conversation, her image would brighten and fade, rise and fall. Although he did not know her, he longed for her. The memory might last a week or two, or perhaps forever, but he was sure he would never see her again. He hadn’t been able to find her on the ferry, when instead of standing in the bows as he usually did he walked around the decks as if taking exercise. There were enough levels that had she moved casually from one to another only once or twice, he could have missed her, and he did. And when he tried to find her as she disembarked, the crowd was moving too fast through the four exits all at once. Though she may have been visible for a moment, concealed among the rapidly trotting people whose heads bobbed up and down like a flock of birds floating at the edge of the surf, the sight of her had eluded him.

“The business,” his aunt said, as she returned to her chair. “How is the business going? Is that colored man still there? What was his name?”

“Cornell.”

“That’s right.”

“That really is right. His name is Cornell Wright.”

“After Meyer’s death, was he able to bring everyone through?”

“He was. It was weeks before they told me that my father had died. I can’t blame them. They usually didn’t know where I was, because we were often seconded to other divisions. So I don’t hold it against them, even if they forgot. When I found out, it was a comfort to know that he had long been at rest. I hadn’t known, but still it was as if I had grieved in that time and was beginning to recover. I’ll never be able to explain that. It’s as if the world is running according to some master clock. I felt like a character in a play, and for some reason I was offstage when I should have been playing my part, but when I returned things had moved on without me, and I had, too.

“We were fighting in deep winter. It took awhile before it occurred to me that the business was on its own. But then I didn’t worry in the least.

“I own the voting stock, but only thirty percent of the dividend-paying shares. Cornell owns twenty percent, and fifty percent is in a profit-sharing trust. Everyone there has a stake.”

“How was he able to run the company?”

“You’re saying that because he’s colored?”

“It would be difficult.”

“Elaine,” Harry said, pausing as if to drop what he was going to say and then catch it, bringing it up high, “Cornell could run any business. He’s very much underemployed. If he worked anywhere else he wouldn’t have ownership, and they might make him push a broom. That was my father’s genius and luck, that he saw Cornell as a man rather than as someone who, when he comes into a room, makes people breathe differently and talk carefully in his presence. It happens to me when they find out they’re sitting next to a Jew. They stiffen and distance themselves even if they don’t want to.”

“I used to see that with Henry,” she said. “Sometimes people reacted to him as if he was polluted or dirty. He didn’t even know it.”

Harry looked at her and smiled just a little. “Yes he did.”

“It’s convenient that Cornell can run the business. Entirely without you?”

“He could. He did.”

“Your father would have wanted you to finish.” She was referring to what was going to have been his graduate education.

Harry shook his head and looked down, addressing the ground. “I can’t go back. Not after the war. I wouldn’t have the patience. Not now, anyway. Things have been moving too fast, there’s been too much change, and my heart wasn’t really in it even then. We have problems, all of a sudden. I don’t know what to do. Cornell doesn’t either. Maybe my father wouldn’t have known, although that’s hard for me to believe. I’ve been trying to make the right decisions, but it’s difficult.

“We were lucky during the war that whoever made the contracts didn’t throw us the kind of business they gave to others. It may have been because my father didn’t wine and dine anyone, much less kick back. I don’t know, I was a world away. But because we’re known for our quality they didn’t give us the staple contracts, the millions of holsters, rifle slings, binocular cases, and that kind of thing.

“We were given luxury orders—general officers’ belts, Sam Brownes, attachés, wallets, map cases, presentation portfolios, the top end. So we weren’t raking in the money, we didn’t overextend, we stayed perfectly stable. Our civilian carriage trade declined to almost nothing, but all of the slack was taken up by the top-end production for the military. We neither expanded nor contracted. As a result, we haven’t had to lay anyone off, we haven’t relaxed our standards, we still produce the finest leather goods in the country, and we’re still connected to the right sources of supply. Everyone else is in chaos.”

“Then what’s the problem? It sounds ideal.”

“Europe. The first industries to revive are not the steel mills and automobile plants—it takes time to rebuild something like that—but the ateliers, the small workshops and family businesses like ours. They’re back up already. In Europe now people will work for nothing. The exchange rates are such that even with import duties and excise taxes an Italian briefcase of a quality similar to what we produce, or better, will soon go for half of what we can price ours if we pull in our belts. And the United States is not going just to sit still while Europe teeters and the Soviets keep their armies mobilized. We’ll have to help them. How will we do that? We’ll liberalize imports, for one. And when we do, the big industries here will bribe Congress to go easy on them, but small companies like ours, in small sectors like ours, won’t be able to.”

“Then what can you do?”

“I don’t know. If we cut prices, which we can’t anyway, it would destroy our image. I don’t want to lay people off, and if we scale back production it wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem. In fact, it would hasten our demise by reducing volume at the same time that margins are shrinking. A lot of companies are farming out work to the Italians. That just puts off the day of extinction, and it means layoffs, or shutting down. Any temporarily advantageous deal you make with your competition will run only as long as the date on the contract, if that.

“A Cypriot who said he knew my father—although Cornell had no memory of it—came onto the floor a couple of weeks ago. He has workshops all over Italy, and wanted to take our production and mix it with the lines he’s importing here. He’s done it with other companies. It would be the end for us. He was arrogant in the way that people who suddenly make a lot of money can be arrogant, all puffed up—mania. He looked at me and said, ‘Oh, I thought you were Clark Gable, until my eyes came into focus.’ Can you imagine? That’s how he greets me, in my own factory, in my own country, where he’s a guest.”

“You do look a bit like Clark Gable, when he was younger,” she said.

“I do not. For Chrissakes, Elaine, when he was young, without the mustache, Clark Gable looked like a mouse. He still looks like a mouse.”

“Some mouse.”

“Elaine, nothing I’ve ever done or thought has had anything whatsoever to do with what I look like.”

“I know. You have no prettiness. I’m not saying that.”

“Be that as it may,” he continued, “I don’t know what to do. But it’ll come clear one way or another. It always does.”

“And marriage?”

“What does marriage have to do with it?”

“When will you get married? You’re thirty-one years old.”

“Thirty-two.”

“All right.”

“I’ll marry a beautiful girl I saw on the ferry.”

“Oh?”

“She disappeared.” At this, Harry stood and offered his arm to his aunt. “Let’s take a walk,” he said, helping her up.

“Take a walk?”

“Just around the paths. You don’t have to leave the roses. The shells are so white. How do you keep them that way?”

“We don’t use oyster shells,” she said. “They have a lot of black and gray. What we use is more expensive, but worth it. And we put down about twenty percent fresh every year. I mean, I put down.”

“I know.”

“Harry,” she said, as they rested at the top of a short flight of bluestone stairs from which they could see waves breaking white on the beach far below, “never forget that the time is always short.”