In Sunlight and in Shadow (96 page)

Although she had not known it was Harry she had seen swinging beneath the El, she had fallen in love with him then. For most of her life she had been waiting even when she had not known that she was waiting. And now she knew, she remembered, and when she realized that, then as now, she loved him most when he was flying away from her, she shuddered, and in astonishment and grief she took in the short, involuntary breaths that she took onstage.

Had the story come full circle in the way that stories end, they would have walked quietly, Catherine and Harry, into the rest of their life, knowing that in the end the whole world is nothing more than what you remember and what you love, things fleeting and indefensible, light and beautiful, that were not supposed to last, echoing forever—golden leaves swept across the Esplanade, wind-polished bridges standing in the winter sun, the sound of Catherine’s song.

S
OMETIME BEFORE THANKSGIVING
, Catherine returned to the apartment. In the weeks that had passed, the heat had gone on and despite newly cold nights the air inside, freshened because the window had been left open, was as warm as if no one had left.

The doorman, who didn’t know that Harry was dead, smiled at Catherine, who smiled back and tried not to cry. With exemplary control, she rode up in the elevator, but could not help feeling as she ascended that when she opened the door Harry would be there. Although she knew it could not be so, she believed it because she so wished it, and as she turned her key in the lock, she felt hope, excitement, expectation, and love.

It was a lovely thing, the turning of a key, the brass tumblers as they snapped to attention, the sound of someone coming home. When she opened the door, the silence and desertion hit her hard, and her grief rose all over again. But then she heard the shade-pull tapping against the window frame. Lifting her head sharply and looking toward it, she said “Oh no!” and ran to the living room, expecting a miracle, believing the impossible. And there in the living room, when she saw the pull and the cord swaying in the wind, she cried until she could cry no more.

When she was done, she walked back to the hall, where she stood, almost insensibly, until she became aware of the bracelet. She instinctively clasped it to her wrist, as if to ratify her love for Harry forever, and then she saw the note, on musical notation paper from her first year in college.

Before she opened it, she touched and held it as if it were part of him. Before she opened it, she knew she would keep and read it until someday it was yellowed and brittle, and that she would keep faith to it until the end. Before she opened it, she knew it would be full of heartbreaking instruction. And then, because she knew that this would be the last, and that whatever was left of him was about to depart, she slowly unfolded it, and with all her courage, she read.

In it, Harry told her that, because she was so young, she had to marry, and that he wanted her above all to live to the full. He told her that for her the world would start again, imperfectly, but that it would start nonetheless. This he knew. He told her how much he had loved her, more than anything in life, and that even were he to die, and except that he wanted more time with her, she had been enough, she had been much more than enough, and he would die well.

He left no message for his son—who would hunger for such a message all his life, for it was not just Catherine who had been left—because he did not know he would have a child. And at the end, after bidding her once again to marry, he wrote: “I thought I had come through the war, but apparently have not. If that’s so, and I’m one of the later casualties—the hospitals are full of them, and in other ways the war will continue, in silence, far longer than anyone may now imagine—you must not fall with me. Catherine, I beg of you not to withhold the smallest part of your love from your husband and your children. I know you will think of me now and then, but with time I will leave your memory except in symbols and traces. Let them be enough for you. Let me pass into the things we love: the motions of the city; its whitening sunrises; the ferries that glide across the harbor, trailing smoke; the avenues where once we walked toward an open horizon, holding one another comfortably pressed together at the hip; the bridges diamond-lit and distant; and all the millions, who should never be forgotten, and never go unloved.”

And this she did, she married again, and fulfilled his wish, but when she thought of him it was not just as he had asked. For although she could not see a ferry lonely in the distance moving smoothly and silently toward the Narrows, or a snowfall that muted the streets, or any other such beautiful thing without thinking of him, she thought of him most of all as she had seen him first, swinging beneath the El, rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling through another time permanently set within her heart.

Mark Helprin is the acclaimed author of
Winter's Tale,
A Soldier of the Great War,
Freddy and Fredericka,
The Pacific,
Ellis Island,
Memoir from Antproof Case,
and numerous other works. His novels are read around the world, translated into over 20 languages.