In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780547819259
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

At the station in the morning as they waited for the early train to come charging over the flats from Montauk, the sky was clear and a cool breeze came all the way from the sea, waving grasses now dry and golden in the sun. Harry noticed that, as if Vanderlyn had done so many times before, he went to the spot on the platform where the club car would stop. “I’ll get the ticket,” Harry said, “be right back,” and went to the ticket window.

The night before, as Vanderlyn lay in bed listening to the pounding of the surf, he had been filled with a kind of happiness that he had not experienced in a long while. The young couple had taken him for what he was, shorn of everything but his French. They had risked her parents’ anger, gambled with their security, given of their time and now their money, expecting nothing in return. He saw in daylight when leaving the house that it was Billy Hale’s. So she was Catherine, the daughter of Billy and Evelyn Hale, who was so strong in spirit and independent of view, while yet remaining lovely. But who was he? That is, Harry. His business was failing catastrophically, his life in danger. He would not, out of pride, take his future father-in-law’s offer of help.

Vanderlyn, who had learned as a matter of survival to be uncannily observant, saw Harry by the ticket window, methodically placing bills in an envelope into which he had placed the ticket. From a distance, not many people would have been aware of this, but Vanderlyn had learned under the highest pressure to synthesize the most fleeting clues—flashes of light and color, the messages in someone’s gait as far as a mile away, a concealed expression. In the pool house, as the night wore on and the sea surged, he had been filled with gratitude. Although he would not have been able to calculate or foresee it, what they had done had not saved him materially—that salvation was less than half an hour away in any number of places—but at his age it had given him new life. It was not something he had achieved, but something he had been granted. It was more than their simple and generous act, but he could not figure quite what.

Harry came back, walking anxiously because he could hear the train whistling through the crossings, although when the wind was right as it was that morning you could hear the locomotive’s whistle blasts ten minutes before its blinding headlamp would come into view, daffodil yellow even in daylight. Harry put the envelope in his pocket because he didn’t want Vanderlyn to see how thick it was until he was on the steps of the train.

“Write down your name, address, and telephone number so I can pay you back,” Vanderlyn told Harry.

“You don’t need to pay me back.”

“But I will.”

“Really, you don’t.”

The yellow light came riding in on decreasing exhalations of steam, far away, moving fast but slowing down.

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