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Summary
Summary
Can love and honor conquer all?
Mark Helprin's enchanting and sweeping novel springs from this deceptively simple question, and from the sight of a beautiful young woman, dressed in white, on the Staten Island Ferry, at the beginning of summer, 1946.
Postwar New York glows with energy. Harry Copeland, an elite paratrooper who fought behind enemy lines in Europe, has returned home to run the family business. Yet his life is upended by a single encounter with the young singer and heiress Catherine Thomas Hale, as they each fall for the other in an instant.
Harry and Catherine pursue one another in a romance played out in Broadway theaters, Long Island mansions, the offices of financiers, and the haunts of gangsters. Catherine's choice of Harry over her longtime fiancé endangers Harry's livelihood and eventually threatens his life. In the end, it is Harry's extraordinary wartime experience that gives him the character and means to fight for Catherine, and risk everything.
Not since Winter's Tale has Mark Helprin written such a magically inspiring saga. Entrancing in its lyricism, In Sunlight and in Shadow so powerfully draws you into New York at the dawn of the modern age that, as in a vivid dream, you will not want to leave.
Author Notes
Mark Helprin was born in Manhattan, New York on June 28, 1947. He received degrees from Harvard College and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and did postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, Princeton University, and Columbia University. He has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force.
He is the author of numerous novels including Refiner's Fire, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, Freddy and Fredericka, and In Sunlight and In Shadow. Winter's Tale was adapted into a movie in 2014. His short story collection, Ellis Island and Other Stories, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1981. His other short story collections include A Dove of the East and Other Stories and The Pacific and Other Stories. He also writes children's books including Swan Lake, A City in Winter, and The Veil of Snows. He has received several awards including the National Jewish Book Award, the Prix de Rome, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award in 2006, and the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding in 2010.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Three decades after his seminal Winter's Tale, Helprin offers another sprawling novel in which New York City is the participatory backdrop of a love story that begins as an American idyll only to be vexed by a legion of postwar anxieties. One day in 1946, Harry Copeland-recently of the 82nd Airborne and heir to his father's leather goods company-spots Catherine Hale, a well-heeled songstress with a Bryn Mawr pedigree. The two fall immediately in love, despite the objections of Catherine's powerful fiance, and Catherine's career is savaged in the fallout of this star-crossed affair, which, from Penn Station to the Ritz and back to Harry's heroics behind enemy lines, swells to operatic grandeur over the course of 700 pages, drawing specters like anti-Semitism and the Mafia into its orbit and concluding with a desperate, violent scheme that will bring Harry's wartime expertise to bear on his sense of justice. And yet, neither love nor New York has ever seemed less complicated: despite excellent set pieces, Helprin's prose is often ham-fisted, his characters thin, and his invocations of Gotham Americana jingoistic. Still, there's fun to be had, particularly when Gatsbyesque descriptions of "the great financial houses" run for pages, but subtlety is not the author's strong suit, and the lack of moral ambiguity in his larger-than-life characters registers as a missed opportunity. Agent: Wendy Weil. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this prodigious, enfolding saga of exalted romance in corrupt, postwar New York, resplendent storyteller Helprin (Freddy and Fredericka, 2005) creates a supremely gifted and principled hero. Harry is a Jewish special-ops WWII paratrooper (we learn all the throttling details in sustained flashbacks) who has just returned home from the front to find his family's top-of-the-line leather goods company failing in the wake of his father's death. Harry is determined to rescue it and to learn the identity of the beautiful woman he spies on the Staten Island Ferry. Catherine turns out to be a level-headed, musical, blue-blooded heiress. As their against-tough-odds love grows in sync with Harry's unexpectedly perilous business woes, Harry is caught between his rigorous ethics and pride and the tempting wealth and ease that marriage to Catherine could bring. Helprin's suspenseful, many-stranded plot is unfailingly enthralling. The sumptuous settings are intoxicating. The novel's seething indictment of mobster rule in the 1940s is bracing, and the lovers' high-stakes predicaments are heartbreaking. Helprin's personal articles of faith shape every scene as he expresses deep respect for soldiers, sensitivity to anti-Semitism and racism, and stalwart belief in valor and individual exceptionalism. So declarative is this philosophical tale that it can be read as Helprin's spiritual and lyrical answer to the big, bossy, and enduring novels of Ayn Rand.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AT last, the story can be told: of the love of a man for a woman so strong that it can leap class barriers and religious taboos; of a talented ingenue's struggle to flout corrupt critics and float to Broadway stardom; of the valiant actions of a band of brothers fighting the Hun in occupied France; and of the moral courage of regular guys in peacetime, driven by their yearning for justice, law and order to stand up against New York's brutish Mafia. Their attack comes with the blessing (and, more usefully, the munitions) of a quirky retired millionaire who's devoting his golden years to founding the C.I.A. It's incredible that this story - or, to be more precise, these stories - hasn't been told before. Except that, of course, it has, and they have . . . though never before in more than 700 consecutive pages, between the covers of one book. Mark Helprin's sprawling new novel, "In Sunlight and in Shadow" (the title seems to have been inspired by the dirgelike ballad "Danny Boy," so indispensable to mob flicks like "Miller's Crossing" and "Goodfellas"), uses language, not music, to conduct the swelling themes of at least half a dozen Oscar winning films to lyric crescendos. Passionate, earnest, nostalgic and romantic in multiple senses of the word (infused with love, straining with valor, prolific in fable), it resurrects with throat-catching regret and nickel-gleam luster the automats and assumptions of the America of the 1940s, both the sets and the sensibilities. Quite directly, and repeatedly, Helprin proclaims his novel's mission through the reflections and perorations of his hero, Harry Copeland - a 32-year-old American paratrooper of Jewish ancestry who looks like a young Clark Gable and has just returned to Manhattan after serving death-defying overseas missions in World War II. Harry decides his chief peacetime duty is to use his gift for gab to further his "overriding purpose," namely: "By recalling the past and freezing the present he could open the gates of time and through them see all allegedly sequential things as a single masterwork with neither boundaries nor divisions." Once he opens these gates, Harry will flood his audience with his redemptive epiphanic impression that "the world was saturated with love." First, though, he must save his dead father's leather goods business from Mafia goons and woo and win Catherine Thomas Hale, a 23-year-old heiress, songstress and all-around goddess he spots from a distance on the Staten Island Ferry. Falling in love with her at first sight, naturally, Harry mentally itemizes her attributes, from her hair ("bright as gold") to her glasses ("a foil to the sharp assertiveness of her nose, which was small, perfectly formed, gracefully projecting") to her teeth ("alluring palisades that cried out to be kissed") to her breasts ("not large," but possessed of "a perpetually attractive thrust") before economically concluding that she is "just beautiful, beyond description." Harry and Catherine serve as the standard bearers of a mannerly and Manichaean age: a poster couple invented to persuade 21st-century readers of the way things once were and, presumably, still ought to be, reanimating a bygone era when men were men, women were ladies, wars were against Nazis, and even cowboys and their partners danced cheek to cheek. As the historical record reflects, this halcyon period did not last. The decade that followed the glory years of "In Sunlight and in Shadow" would see the advent of Buddy Holly and Elvis (who dispersed the big-band stardust with floor-stomping rockabilly and swiveling hips) and the emergence of a new enemy (in Southeast Asia, not the Ardennes) who damnably lacked either an ear for Mozart or an eye for Gothic architecture. In reactionary terms, the world went to hell. But in the prolonged cinematic moment resuscitated in this novel, Helprin regilds the frame around an idealized portrait of how society looked, in Curtiz and Capra films, at least, before the essential and ineffable turned mutable and digital. It's a pity this novel is being published in the autumn rather than the summer; it would have made superb reading for the vacationing 1 percent in August. That said, it will come in handy for anyone of a backward-looking temperament who sits by the fire come January, when the blizzards descend. This précis serves, to an extent, as a reproof of what one loves. Which of us doesn't pine for romance, fairness, virtue and bravery? Rich satisfactions come from savoring the archetypes Helprin varnishes here; and, as one character dreamily says in Woody Allen's "Purple Rose of Cairo" after a handsome leading man pops out of a movie screen and into her life, "He's fictional, but you can't have everything." Helprin's heroes seem to crave similar indulgence. Throughout the novel, he splashes down paeans to virtue and beauty you'd have to be heartless not to enjoy, but mires them in sloughs of homily at which you'd have to be brainless not to bristle. That said, it's altogether possible that male readers who long for works of fiction (scarce of late) that provide paragons of masculine excellence will find pleasure in this Boys' Own tale for grown-ups. As for female readers, it may be helpful to ponder the insight Harry shares with his beloved Catherine: "Girls don't have what boys have, which is a goatlike capacity to bang with the head against heavy objects that will not move." IF this is so, "boys" may be more apt than girls to savor the repeat impact of Harry's floodgate cargo, bearing the news that "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." Then again, the female characters come out remarkably well, despite the machismo and exploding shells. Helprin invests nearly every woman in the novel with charm, virtue and desirability - even when she's disfigured by war; scarred with acne; or old, poor or downtrodden. When Catherine accuses Harry of flattery, he stubbornly persists in his conviction that "a woman is the spur and essence of existence." When she asks if his attitudes are antiquated, he chides her: "Women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time." It's certainly pretty to think so. (At least, it is if the person who's doing the chiding looks like Clark Gable.) Yet, somehow, these fine sentiments and throwback characters belong to celluloid, not paper. Thirty years ago, in his rollicking breakthrough novel, "Winter's Tale," Helprin thrilled more than he maddened, in part because that book was more thoroughly a work of fantasy. Anchored at the dawn of the 20th century in a brawny, lawless, magical Manhattan inhabited by flying horses, roving Irish gangs, lascivious guttersnipes, clam-digging marsh dwellers and consumptive damsels on rooftops, its apostrophes to wonderment came off as organic. In that book, a storm-bright Manhattan sky might naturally prompt a character to remark, "In those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry and justice, it becomes the color of gold - warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten." Passages of similar beauty and unchecked grandiloquence abound in this new novel, but their purple glitter contrasts jarringly with the olive-drab of war and the wan aisles of Wool worth's. When Harry looks down on Manhattan from a height across the Hudson River, he thinks to himself, "All he had to do was close his eyes and breathe deeply, and the past would glide forward like a warm breeze - plumes of smoke silvered in the sun, ferries sliding gracefully to land, their decks crowded with souls long gone but somehow still there as if nothing were lost or ever would be." Reading that mellifluous sentence, you know better than to drive to Weehawken and look for yourself. To see what Harry saw, you'd need the author's romance-colored glasses. Helprin reanimates a bygone era when men were men, women were ladies and wars were against Nazis. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
Elegant, elegiac novel of life in postwar America, at once realistic and aspirational, by the ever-accomplished Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War, 1991, etc.). Harry Copeland is a sturdy-looking man, so much so that a wise aunt likens him to a young Clark Gable, to which he replies, "For Chrissakes, Elaine, when he was young, without the mustache, Clark Gable looked like a mouse." There's nothing mousy about Harry, though he does share Gable's burden of tragedy. But that is far from his mind when he lays eyes on Catherine Thomas Hale on a New York ferry and is stopped in his tracks. He pursues her, and in time he wins her over, only to find that Catherine harbors many secrets--and that her family harbors more than a few hidden prejudices and is not at all happy when Harry comes a-courting in the place of Catherine's longtime beau. The lovers' story is appropriately tangled and star-crossed, for if Catherine has a wagonload of baggage, Harry, a former paratrooper, hasn't quite forgotten the horrors of the war in Europe. The story crosses continents and is suffused with the California dream, but Helprin is really most at home in New York, which he describes with the affection and beauty that Woody Allen invested in his film Manhattan. There are other celebrations--of love, of books and learning--and other regrets, as when Harry finds himself "plundered by alcohol" and on the verge of doing things he will rue. Helprin charges the story with beautiful passages: "More like gentle lamps than stars, their blinking was not cold and quick like the disinterested stars of winter, but slow and seductive, as if they were speaking in a code that all mankind understood perfectly well even if it did not know that such a language existed." A fine adult love story--not in the prurient sense, but in the sense of lovers elevated from smittenness to all the grown-up problems that a relationship can bring.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Acclaimed novelist Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War) has written a tale of two individuals who meet by chance on New York City's Staten Island Ferry and fall in love forever. When Harry meets Sally, uh, Catherine, he pursues her until she rather quickly falls in love with him. She's a fabulously wealthy budding actress whose career seems thwarted owing to suspiciously bad reviews, while Harry, who has recently returned from active duty in Europe after World War II, is struggling to make a go of it with the leather goods business he inherited from his deceased dad even as he faces a shakedown by the mob. Both main characters are attractive, and plot and setting are well drawn. But the tale is about twice as long as it needs to be. At times the romance here seems to be the author's love of his own writing, with infelicitous consequences: "[T]he buses running along the avenues [were] like unhappy buffalo inexplicably tamed to their routes." VERDICTFor readers who enjoy a rich, dense stew and won't notice that it is at times too thick to stir. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/12.]-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Prologue If you were a spirit, and could fly and alight as you wished, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then you might rise to enter an open window high above the park, in the New York of almost a lifetime ago, early in November of 1947. After days of rain and unusual warmth, the skies are now the soft deep blue that is the gift of an oblique sun. The air is cool but not yet dense enough to carry sound sharply. From the playing fields, the cries and shouts of children are carried upward, sometimes clearly, sometimes muted, like murmurs, and always eventually to disappear. These sounds inexplicably convey the colors of the children's jerseys, which seen from the eleventh storey are only bright flecks on grass made so green by recent rains and cool nights that it looks like wet enamel. Coming in the window, you might wonder who had left it open, for the apartment is empty, its silence, to a spirit, thundering like a heartbeat. Perhaps you would turn back to glance at the gulls bobbing in the reservoir, as white as confetti, or to see how the façades of Fifth Avenue across the park and over the trees are lit by the sun in white, ochre, and briefly flaring yellow. The wind coming through the window, as you do, unseen, moves a shade to and fro as if gently breathing, its circular pull occasionally leaping up enough in contrary motion to tap against a pane as if it wants to speak. No one is in. In a breeze that enters and dies before it reaches the back rooms, you ride above particles of dust propelled across polished floors like snowflakes tumbling in a blizzard. In the air is a remnant of perfume, strongest by the door, as is often the case. The lights are off, the heat not yet been turned on, and the brass front-door lock silent and immobile, waiting to be turned and released. In the room overlooking the park the bookshelves are full. Hanging above the fireplace is a Manet seascape with flags and pennants snapping in the wind; in a desk drawer beneath the telephone, a loaded pistol. And on an oval marble table in the entrance hall near the immobile lock and its expectant tumblers is a piece of card stock folded in half and standing like an A . Musical staffs are printed on the outside. Inside, sheltered as if deliberately from spirits, is a note waiting to be read by someone living. On the same smooth marble, splayed open but kept in a circle by its delicate gold chain, is a bracelet, waiting for a wrist. And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold. 1 BOAT TO ST. GEORGE: MAY, 1946 If a New York doorman is not contemplative by nature he becomes so as he stands all day dressed like an Albanian general and doing mostly nothing. What little contact he has with the residents and visitors who pass by is so fleeting it emphasizes the silence and inactivity that is his portion and that he must learn to love. There is an echo to people's passing, a wake in the air that says more about them than can be said in speech, a fragile signal that doormen learn to read as if everyone who disappears into the turbulence of the city is on a journey to the land of the dead. The busy comings and goings of mornings and late afternoons are for doormen a superstimulation. And on a Friday morning one Harry Copeland, in a tan suit, white shirt, and blue tie, left the Turin, at 333 Central Park West. His formal name was Harris, and though it was his grandfather's he didn't like it, and didn't like Harry much either. Harry was a name, as in Henry V, or Childe Harold, that, sounding unlike Yiddish, Hebrew, or any Eastern European language, was appropriated on a mass scale by Jewish immigrants and thus became the name of tailors, wholesalers, rabbis, and doctors. Harry was one's uncle. Harry could get it at a reduced price. Harry had made it into the Ivy League, sometimes. Harry could be found at Pimlico and Hialeah, or cutting diamonds, or making movies in Hollywood, or most anywhere in America where there were either palm trees or pastrami--not so much leading armies at Agincourt, although that was not out of the question, and there was redemption too in that the president was named Harry and had been in the clothing business. The doorman at 333 had been charged with looking after the young son of one of the laundresses. As a result of this stress he became talkative for a doorman, and as Harry Copeland, who had maintained his military fitness, began to increase his velocity in the lobby before bursting out of the door, the doorman said to Ramon, his diminutive charge, "Here comes a guy. . . . Now watch this guy. Watch what he does. He can fly." The boy fixed his eyes on Harry like a tracking dog. As Harry ran across the street his speed didn't seem unusual for a New Yorker dodging traffic. But there was no traffic. And instead of relaxing his pace and executing a ninety-degree turn left or right, north or south, on the eastern sidewalk of Central Park West, he unleashed himself, crossed the tiled gray walkway in one stride, leapt onto the seat of a bench, and, striking it with his right foot and then his left, pushed off from the top of the seat back and sailed like a deer over the soot-darkened park wall. Knowing extremely well the ground ahead, he put everything into his leap and stayed in the air so long that the doorman and little boy felt the pleasure of flying. The effect was marvelously intensified by the fact that, because of their perspective, they never saw him touch down. "He does that almost every day," the doorman said. "Even in the dark. Even when the bench is covered with ice. Even in a snowstorm. I saw him do it once in a heavy snow, and it was as if he disappeared into the air. Every goddamned morning." He looked at the boy. "Excuse me. And in a suit, too." The little boy asked the doorman, "Does he come back that way?" "No, he just walks up the street." "Why?" "Because there's no bench on the other side of the wall." The doorman didn't know that as a child Harry Copeland had lived at 333 with his parents--and then with his father after his mother died--before he went to college, before the war, before inheriting the apartment, and before the doorman's tenure, though this doorman had been watching the weather from under the same steeply angled gray canopy for a long time. In the spring of 1915, the infant Harry had dreamt his first dream, which he had not the ability to separate from reality. He, who could barely walk, was standing on one of the glacial, whale-backed rocks that arch from the soil in Central Park. Suddenly, by neither his own agency nor his will, as is so often the lot of infants, he was lifted, though not by a visible hand, and conveyed a fair distance through the air from one rock to another. In other words, he flew. And throughout his life he had come close to replicating this first of his dreams--in leaping from bridges into rivers, or flying off stone buttresses into the turquoise lakes that fill abandoned quarries, or exiting airplanes at altitude, laden with weapons and ammunition. His first dream had set the course of his life. Because he was excellently farsighted, no avenue in New York was so long that the masses of detail at its farthest end would escape him. Over a lifetime of seeing at long distances he had learned to see things that he could not physically see: by reading the clues in fleeting colors or flashes, by close attention to context, by making comparisons to what he had seen before, and by joining together images that in changing light would bloom and fade, or rise and fall, out of and into synchrony. For this fusion, which was the most powerful technique of vision, it was necessary to have a prodigious memory. He could replay with such precision and intensity what he had seen, heard, or felt that these things simply did not lapse from existence and pass on. Though his exactitude in summoning texture, feel, and details could have been bent to parlor games or academics, and in the war had been made to serve reconnaissance, he had realized from very early on that it was a gift for an overriding purpose and this alone. For by recalling the past and freezing the present he could open the gates of time and through them see all allegedly sequential things as a single masterwork with neither boundaries nor divisions. And though he did not know the why or wherefore of this, he did know, beginning long before he could express it, that when the gates of time were thrown open, the world was saturated with love. This was not the speculation of an aesthete, or a theory of the seminar room, for this he had seen with his own eyes even in war, darkness, and death. To see and remember life overflowing and compounding upon itself in such vivid detail was always a burden, but, that May, he was able to carry it easily. Though a bleak, charcoal-colored winter had been followed by an indeterminate spring, by June the beaches would be gleaming and hot, the water cold and blue. The streets would flood with sunlight and the evenings would be cool. Women had emerged from their winter clothes and one could see the curve of a neck flowing into the shoulders, actual legs exposed to the air, and a summer glow through a white blouse. In the weeks before the solstice it was as if, moving at great speed toward maximum light, the world had a mind of its own. It clung to a reluctance that would slow it as the brightest days began to grow darker. It is perhaps this hesitation at the apogee that lightens the gravity of sorrows, such as they are, in luminous June evenings and on clear June days. As the half-dozen or more people who had swum that morning rushed back to work, the shivering clatter of slammed locker doors momentarily overwhelmed the hiss of steam escaping from pipes in locations that would remain forever hidden even from the most elite plumbers. Why steam still charged the pipes was a mystery to Harry, because the heat had been off for more than a month, and a string of cold days had chilled the unheated pool to the taste of polar bears. As he removed his clothing and floated it across the gap between him and the hook in his locker, the tan poplin undulating slightly as it met the air, the last of the other lockers was closed, and after a long echo the hiss of the steam pipes restored the room to timelessness. He was alone. No one would see that he did not shower before entering the pool. That morning as always he had bathed upon arising. He walked through the shower room and onto the pool deck, which like the walls and floor of the pool itself was a mosaic of tiny porcelain octagons, every edge rough and slightly raised. The last swimmer had left the water ten or fifteen minutes earlier, but it was still moving in barely perceptible waves repelled by the walls and silently rocking, lifting, and depressing the surface, though only a keen eye could tell. Unlike in winter, when the air was saturated with moisture and chlorine, it was cool and dry. Standing in front of a huge sign that said Absolutely No Diving! he sprang off the edge and hit the water, gliding through it like an arrow. As the body's sensual registration is not infinite, the shock of falling, the feel of impact, the sound of the splash, the sight of the world rushing past, and even the smell of the water he aerated in his fall crowded out the cold, and by the time he began to feel the chill he had already begun to warm in exertion. He would swim a mile, first at a sprint, then slowly, then, increasing his speed until he would move as if powered by an engine, all vessels open, every muscle primed and warmed, his heart ready to supply whatever was asked of it. He swam twice a week. Twice a week on the bridle trails and around the reservoir he ran a six-mile circuit of the park. And twice he took a racing shell out on the Harlem River or, were it not too windy, on the Hudson, or upstate on the Croton Reservoir, for ten exhausting miles in the kiln of summer or in the snow, fighting wind, water, wakes, and the whirlpools of Spuyten Duyvil where the Harlem and Hudson join. And on Saturday, he rested, if he could. Although he had played every sport in high school except football, and in college had rowed, boxed, and fenced, it was the war that had led him to maintain the strength, endurance, and physical toughness of the paratrooper he had become. Whereas many others long before demobilization had abandoned the work of keeping themselves fit for fighting cross-country and living without shelter, Harry had learned, and believed at a level deeper than the reach of any form of eradication, that this was a duty commensurate with the base condition of man; that civilization, luxury, safety, and justice could be swept away in the blink of an eye; and that no matter how apparently certain and sweet were the ways of peace, they were not permanent. Contrary to what someone who had not been through four years of battle might have thought, his conviction and action in this regard did not lead him to brutality but away from it. He would not abandon until the day he died the self-discipline, alacrity, and resolution that would enable him to stretch to the limit in defending that which was delicate, transient, and vulnerable, that which and those whom he loved the most. Though as he swam he was not thinking of such things, they conditioned his frame of mind upon reaching the state of heat and drive that sport and combat share in common. Upon leaving the water, however, he was a study in equanimity. As he showered, a fragrant gel made from pine and chestnuts, and bitter to the taste--he had brought it from Germany just after V-J Day not even a year before--made a paradise of the air. The pool had been his alone, and no old men had come to paddle across his path like imperial walruses. In the glow of health, he dressed, and the bitter taste became more and more tolerable as it receded into recollection. To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love. Trees flower into brilliant clouds that drape across the parks, plumes of smoke and steam rise into the blue or curl away on the wind, and disparate actions each the object of intense concentration run together in a fume of color, motion, and sound, with the charm of a first dance or a first kiss. In the war, when he dreamed, he sometimes heard the sound of horns, streetcar bells, whistles, claxons, and the distant whoop of steam ferries. All rose into a picture attractive not so much for the fire of its richness and color but for the spark that had ignited it. He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through. In the five or six miles down to South Ferry the life of the city crowded around him and no one could have been more grateful for it. From the arsenals of history came batteries of images bearing the energy of all who had come before. They arose in columns of light filled with dust like the departed souls of hundreds of millions agitating to be unbound; in sunbeams tracking between high buildings as if to hunt and destroy dark shadow; in men and women of no account, the memory of whom would vanish in a generation or two, and who would leave no record, but whose faces, preoccupied and grave, when apprehended for a split second on the street were the faces of angels unawares. For a moment in Madison Square, he had locked eyes with a very old man. In 1946 a man born in the last year of the Civil War was eighty-one. Perhaps this one was in his nineties, and in his youth had fought at Antietam or Cold Harbor. Fragile and dignified, excellently tailored, walking so slowly he seemed not to move, just before entering the fortress of one of the insurance companies through an ancient ironwork gate he had turned to look at the trees in the park. No one can report upon the world of the very old as the old comment upon that of the young, for no one has ever been able to look back upon it in reflection. Who could know therefore the real weight of all the things in this man's heart, or the revelations that had begun to surge from memory, to make the current that soon would bear him up? In Little Italy, Harry saw half a dozen men loading heavy barrels onto a wagon. The sides of the wagon were upright two-by-fours joined by chains in symmetrical catenaries. Two dappled grays stood in their braces ready to pull. The barrels were lifted in coordinated rhythm, rolled along the wagon's bed, and righted. For these men, the world was the lifting of barrels, and nothing could have choreographed their moves more perfectly than had the task to which they submitted. And when finally Harry broke out from the tall buildings of Wall Street at South Ferry, the harbor was gray and almost green, the sky a soft blue. Excerpted from In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.