In Sunlight and in Shadow (46 page)

“This is what we get,” Cornell said from a low chair near the window, “for paying what they asked, when they asked.”

“It was the right amount?”

“It was. They came to get it Friday. No complaints.”

“Did you speak to the police?”

“I did. A nigger speaks on behalf of a spic who was beaten up by people he can’t name, for a reason he can’t say. No one saw, no robbery, he’s not dead, no weapons. We won’t see the cops again. They have nothing to go on. And if they did, and they found them, they would stop out of fear or because they’ve been bought off. Now what?”

“We have to take care of him,” Harry said. He approached the bed. Turning back to Cornell, he asked, “He’ll be all right? Does my experience fail me?”

“You’ve seen a lot of beaten-up waxers and polishers?”

“I’ve seen a lot of chewed-up soldiers. He looks bad, but he doesn’t have that faraway stare that comes when your outside is calm but your inside is bleeding out like a stream and no one can see it. He doesn’t have that look, yet.”

“The doctor said he was at the edge.”

“Verderamé is precise. He could have been a jeweler or a bomb fuser.” Harry went to the bed and leaned in. “Velez? Guada?”

Velez opened his eyes. Harry looked in them and saw morphine. “Wake up, wake up.” He did. “Do you recognize me?” Velez nodded as best he could. “I’m going to give your wife a thousand dollars,” Harry said, taking the money out of his pocket. “When you get better, come to collect your back pay. You may not remember this, but we’ll tell you, and tell you again. We’ll keep you on the payroll for six months until you find another job. And if you want to come back, you can at any time, for a job and a raise—if we’re still in business. Is that clear to you?”

Velez tried to say something, but it came out as a hiss from between dry lips.

“Later, then. I’m sorry this happened. You know that it happened to me, too? Not as bad, but probably the same guys. We’ll take care of you if we can.” He patted Velez’s uninjured hand, and left, followed by Cornell, who assured the patient, whose eyes were now closed, that he would be back the next day.

As Harry and Cornell stood outside the hospital room, Harry kept his hand tight against the packet of bills. “Does she know you?”

“Not from Adam,” Cornell replied.

“Doesn’t she wonder what you’re doing in there?”

“I think she thinks I’m a cop.”

“I’ll do it.”

When he gave her the money and, in a most peculiar Spanish constructed from Latin, Italian, and French, explained what he would do, she knelt and tried to kiss his hand. He wouldn’t let her get below him, and knelt with her, and as they were having a sort of contest in which he wanted to win so that she wouldn’t lose, he thought to himself that Verderamé’s actions and existence were pushing history backward and running time in reverse.

To drop off Mrs. Velez, they took a taxi, because Cornell had miraculously come into possession of a fifty-pound hamper of food for her and they didn’t want to struggle with it in the subway. The three of them sat awkwardly in the turtle-backed cab, the hamper at their feet, the smell of leather brought up from the seats by a sudden drop in pressure that had come with rain and wind from the direction of New Jersey. They knew it had come from there because it smelled like burnt coffee. In summer, weather usually arrived from the south, billowing up over the sea in clouds that were as enormous in proportion to the rest of the world as a painter’s tube of white is to his smaller tubes of more intense colors, like a whale surrounded by porpoises. In winter, memorable weather came from the north with sterilizing clarity and immersed the whole world in a sea of shining glass. But in spring and fall it tended to roll in from New Jersey as surreptitiously as if it were ashamed. The clear wet air that had crossed the fields near Princeton, dipped down into abandoned canals, and strained through willows dripping with rain, often arrived with the foul smells of marshes, bogs, factories, refineries, tanneries, and landfills. Most people could not begin to guess what it was they smelled on those winds, but the rain would eventually clear it away.

Now, early in the afternoon, the streets were slick and the lights in the commercial districts had blinked on. Farther north, it was different. Most apartments and houses were dark. Sometimes a light appeared where people were at home—a woman ironing, small children too young for school, an invalid, a widower, a widow, or perhaps a musician who worked at night—but overall the premature dusk was undisturbed—except all the way up Broadway, where old ladies were shopping, and pulling old-lady wheeled wire baskets behind them through the rain. In midtown, Harry and Cornell, unable to comfort Mrs. Velez, who was as tense as a piano string, leaned toward their respective windows and scanned the blocks as they passed. The streets glistened, the windshield wipers were hypnotic, the lights, yellow in cast or burning red neon, were doubled or tripled by watery refection. The taxi passed a gun store on the second floor of a building on the east side of Sixth Avenue. It had a neon rifle in the window. Harry bent his head to look up at it, and followed with his eyes as it receded.

“
Rifles,
” he said in Spanish, to make conversation of a sort with Mrs. Velez, who was sitting in the middle, drawn up against herself for fear of touching either of the two
patrons.
She had not seen the sign, and had no idea why Harry had said
rifles,
but she smiled to be polite. Thinking that this had made her more comfortable, Harry said, as they passed a hairdresser on the second floor on the other side of the street, “
Parrucchiere,
” as if, because it was Italian, she would understand.

Although she didn’t, she said, “
Sí.
”

“
Bueno,
” Harry replied.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Cornell asked.

“I don’t know,” Harry answered, and then the taxi rounded Columbus Circle and slingshotted up Broadway. In a minute or two it turned on a side street and disgorged them in front of a tenement. They carried the hamper up four flights of stairs, past brown walls that had aged into black. There was hardly any light, and the floorboards creaked like the timbers of a ship. “What’s in this, anyway?” Harry asked.

“Ham, biscuits, cheese, bread . . . ,” Cornell told him.

“Where’d you get it?”

“My church. They keep them for when someone gets sick or dies. My nephew brought it down.”

“In a truck? Why didn’t he wait?”

“He carried it in the subway.”

“He must be a giant.”

“He’s as skinny as a chicken leg, but he’s fourteen years old. He could probably carry the
Titanic.
”

Mrs. Velez did not want them to go into her apartment, and they were about to put down the hamper and leave, when one of her children opened the door. A girl of about five or six, she stood on the threshold, her eyes seeming very large for her size, her dress simple and stained, her face smudged. She looked hungry, numb. As they carried the hamper in and put it down, they could hardly make out the apartment’s two small rooms. One was filled with mattresses, some covered and others with the ticking exposed, on which sat or lay half a dozen children, doing nothing. The other room was a kitchen, with a bed in it and a small table covered with dirty dishes.

“Okay,” Harry said, about to repeat what he had told Velez, but he realized that his ersatz Spanish would be insufficient to communicate it, so he just said, “Okay, okay,” as she thanked him in Spanish. They left quickly because they were afraid that she might try to kneel to them again. The children had a great task ahead, and this would be something they would be better off without witnessing.

When Harry and Cornell came out on the street, the light rain and now cooler air were welcome. “That was my family, sixty years ago,” Harry said, “only my grandmother would have kept the place spotless, piecework shirtwaists would have been in neat piles, and the children, far fewer, would have been reading or sewing.”

“And it was mine,” Cornell added, “working or studying. My father told me that my first commandment was never to be a slave. And that there’s only one just way not to be a slave, which is to be a master—neither of another nor of the world, but of oneself.”

“I feel the tenement pulling at my heels,” Harry said. “All I’d have to do would be to close my eyes, and I’d be there.”

“That’s where we’d all be,” Cornell answered, “rich or poor, white or colored. Some people don’t know it, but they find out.”

“In a matter of months, at this rate,” Harry told him as they were striding up Broadway in the rain as darkness fell, “I will have lost all that my mother and father and their mothers and fathers worked to build in the New World.”

“Except you, Harry. The business is just a business. You should close it down and keep what you have.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Defiance.”

“You’re not being very defiant as far as I can tell.”

“It’s more than that. I could never live on Catherine’s money, but that hurts her and she says that everything she has is mine. The problem is the imbalance. All I need is to be a Rockefeller, and we’d be even. I can’t throw our people out of work. I don’t want to close down or give up this business that means such a great deal to so many and has helped so many rise, including me; that makes useful and beautiful things; that’s something into which my father put so much of his life and his heart. If he were alive it would be different. I could. I could pull out and do something else. But he’s not alive, so I have to see it through.”

The rain was heavy enough now that it ran down their necks, backs, and inside their clothes. “My mistake, Cornell, was to think that I was home safe. It just takes different forms. You’re never home, never safe.”

“If you know that,” Cornell said, “then you are home.”

This encouraged them, and they parted. As each walked in the storelight of evening, in the excitement of the end of day, in the freshness of the rain-washed air, neither could know that when they set the hamper down for Guada’s wife, she was a widow.

To the extent that Harry had known him—a conversation or two—he understood that Guada was quiet in the way of someone who, believing that he himself cannot rise, is determined that his children will. Though his English was not perfect and would always be accented, though women on the street or the bus would not look at him or simply did not see him, and though the winters in New York drew him away from his childhood on the south coast of Puerto Rico, he did whatever he could in the hope of the future.

He was a good and dependable worker. He never missed a day and he worked hard. He would fade from the world’s memory faster than those whose lives are spent trying to trick this memory into keeping theirs fresh an instant longer, but his triumph, every day, was his children, whom he loved.

There might not be much to note about him, yet one could not help but notice that this well broken horse was kind and good, and always identifiable by his one indulgence: he smoked cigars, perhaps the only thing he did not do for others. They were small, but not the cheap kind that smell like badly cooked cabbage. Even people who didn’t like the scent of cigars liked these Cubans, his indulgence, his signature, almost like a cologne. A rich scent it was, of the tobacco-drying shed, a combination of earth, wood, smoke, and honey.

The white smoke around him sometimes seemed like gossamer robes, and was the constant frame for his black hair, his khaki clothing, and his patient, ever-enduring expression—except when in winter the merciless winds shot through the canyons, and cold dry air without the slightest compassion for either sight or the preservation of scent made away with the soft white cloud as if it had never existed.

T
HOUGH HIS LIFE
was calm and gracious, and everything around him was beautiful, he lived in sorrow. Having come out of the First World War with high rank and great distinction, and the Second with greater distinction still in running a major portion of the clandestine services of the United States against enemy fronts in Europe, he was now in his late fifties and content with investment banking, serving his sentence there for the sake not only of his compensation, but of family, propriety, and the part of his soul that had yearned for peace. He had not had to serve, but when with the father’s exploits in mind his son had gone into uniform, it became impossible for the father to sit out the war.

Although his wife lived with him in the same house and slept with him in the same bed, she had begun to leave him before the war had permanently sealed their lack of a bargain. She was a charming hostess, still physically attractive, and always amusing, but love is indifferent to talent, and the something deeper from which love springs had in the case of the Vanderlyns become dust billowing in the air. Like an ancient and abandoned nest beneath an eave or at the inside peak of a barn roof, their marriage, held by inertia alone, was a powder ready to be taken on the wind, a very sad thing.

He believed that the best things he had done, he had done. In the years remaining, having missed his further chances, he would find satisfaction where he could—in modest beauties that passed unnoticed and without acclaim, in small symmetries, private action, remembrances of early sensations and loves. These now seemed so much more important than they had when he had left them in the wake of his striving. In the powerlessness of childhood, life had been most vivid, and as he began to fade into the powerlessness of old age it was becoming vivid again, if less surprising and less sharp. Despite certain things moving into place, he thought that for him action and accomplishment were over. He would be proven wrong.

On a Friday morning late in September, when hurricane season was not entirely finished and a storm against which all mariners had been warned was tracking up from the Outer Banks, having missed Florida but neither the Bahamas nor the Carolinas, Vanderlyn walked across the wide porch of his house in Oyster Bay and went down a path to the water. Past lawns as closely clipped as carpets, rhododendron long out of bloom, and a thick stand of fragrant pines planted to weaken gales as they came off the Sound, he descended to a cove made by the left hook of a pristine beach. There are some days at the end of summer, after the heat has broken and everything is dry and gleaming, when the crickets sound as metallic as bells. But those had passed, and even at midday it was wet and dark.