Read Online In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin - Free Book Online Page A

stairs was a door. After pushing it open and stepping out she found herself high above the street, with neither rail nor parapet to guard her from falling. Because of what she saw from the roof of the theater she did not need to practice as she had thought she would. For as she beheld what lay before her, the sharp infilling of her lungs, divided into a short beat and a slightly longer one that followed and concluded, was as lovely a sound as any living being has ever made. She had had no idea that a single breath could be so magnificent, that it could outdo the clearest notes of the greatest soprano, or the perfection, down below, of a brass section manned by balding and ever-hopeful rejects of the New York Philharmonic.
    She had mastered her part in an instant, but, still, she stayed, held by the time and place, for although she was only twenty-three, she had a history of looking into the heart of great scenes and busy prospects as if she were at the end of life and these were something that she had yet to decode.
    Down long streets in a hundred shades of gray, in clouds of fast white smoke and in flights of pigeons that with the twitch of a thousand wings were like the turning of a skyscraper’s worth of venetian blinds; at the foot of piers where ferries skated-in over silver water, their top-hat stacks billowing smoke that trailed across a whitening page of sky; in the tangle of the streets; in the traffic autonomous, fighting for complete independence, yet ever moving as a herd; amidst sound too broken and complex to interpret except as a twin of surf perpetually effervescent on the beaches of Long Island; and in the miracle of faces, to which even the greatest painters cannot do full justice; there was the city almost at midcentury, as one age had begun to elide into another, and the innocent forms of the past, though numb from the deep cut of war, were still alive.
    She felt so strongly what she saw that she tried to hold its impress in memory until she was able to puzzle it out, even if that would be never. To see things and long for them, shadows in gray, people who will never return, days of sun and clouds that vanish like smoke . . . this was what she wanted.
    What she saw was not random, and not chaos beyond the deepest power to make clear, for the threads of beauty and meaning that ran through it shone brightly in the dark, the whole a work greater than art, its consistency assured. This she knew because she had seen it and felt it since infancy, and would not be turned from her faith and trust even by all the war and suffering in the world, even were the suffering her own, which, although in her view it had never been, she knew eventually it would, in that it comes to all. All souls, she believed, blinded and blown into the air like dust and tumbling without gravity, can nonetheless find their bearings and rise as intended into the light. But despite this glimpse of the years to come in a vision of the ceaseless shuffling, transfer, and transaction in the streets below—like spangles of light on a sunlit river—she had to go back down into the theater to play her part, and she did.
    She had taken the breath as instructed, and night after night would reproduce it onstage. Though she did not have the lead, in a quarter second she would have to supply the transcendent moment upon which the production would rise or fall. From her lungs and breast would come a gasp, a cry, the beginning of a song that would bring into view in a dark theater the machinery and friction of one era breathing its life into another, of light mixing with light, and sorrow with sorrow. And all conveyed in one sweet breath of Catherine Thomas Hale.
     
    Which was not, however, the name by which they knew her. Her stage name was Catherine Sedley. They were unaware that she had chosen to call herself, professionally, after a mistress of James II. This was not because the original Catherine Sedley was virtuous but because this Catherine