Free In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin

city was at the moment displaced by a London drawing room in which, by nine that night, fake German accents would contend with fake English accents in arguments about the atom: “I have izolated zeh atom in zeh zspecial zserum!” “Bloody not!”
    His front bathed in lectern light, the conductor took up a white wand and, without a tap, quickly lifted and depressed it to make his musicians ready. Then began a coordinated rush: a blast of brass, a piano tremolo, a horn, bells, and Catherine’s marvelous breath, the finest note of all, and so full of life it was like God breathing into Adam, a woman in the midst of love, a cry of astonishment, or the sound made by a swimmer who bursts into light and air. For in her quarter of a second she outdid the instruments, the plan, the setting, the lighting, the book, the music itself. That she could do this so readily and so well, stunned her listeners, but then came the song, so different from the brassy start, so terribly moving and entrancingly slow. It was, at least in that very moment, the most beautiful song in the world.
    “That was . . . ,” the director said, unable to find words when the music ended. “That was. . . . Can you do it again, just like that?”
    “Yes.”
    “From the top,” he commanded.
    The conductor lifted his baton a second time, the music started with the same professional consistency, and at the right instant Catherine came in, playing a note that, though it was common to everyone who had ever lived, here was played astonishingly well. When she finished her song, the director, thinking of Boston and Broadway and his apotheosis, spoke as if from the thrones of Hollywood.
    “It couldn’t be better,” he told her. “Keep it just like that. And the beginning. . . . God, I was looking at this
fahkahkteh
set, but I saw Madison Square.”
    “I have a suggestion,” Catherine said, though not because she was taking advantage of the quick rise in her stock, for she would have spoken up anyway. “I arrive at Penn Station from God knows where. . . .”
    “Chickens,” the director filled in. This was his opinion of anything west of the Hudson and east of Santa Monica Boulevard.
    “Yes, you said that, but where?”
    “Pennsylvania.”
    “Why Pennsylvania?”
    “Are you arguing with the book, Miss Sedley?”
    “The book doesn’t specify.”
    “So we can supply anything we want. You can’t be from the South, you don’t speak that way. Most of Pennsylvania is rural, and you really are from Pennsylvania.”
    “I’m from New York,” Catherine said. “I went to college in Pennsylvania.”
    “Where’d you learn to speak that way? Don’t ask me for a raise, but it’s gorgeous.”
    “Thank you. I don’t know.”
    “Bryn Mawr,” the director said, pointing at her with the index finger of his left hand as if he had solved a mystery.
    “No, Sidney,” she replied. “New York, with possibly a little Bryn Mawr, although I doubt it.”
    “New York City?” he asked, pointing the same finger now at the floor. Her voice and manner of speaking were so aristocratic that he looked at her for a long moment as he realized that he didn’t really know who she was. He might have resented her refined mien and speech, but he didn’t, because he knew that though the country had long before given the forbears of people like her their chance, and that obviously they had taken it, it was now giving him his. “Whatever your speech,” he said, “keep it.”
    “I arrive from Pennsylvania,” she stated, moving on. “I set the scene. The audience sees the city through my eyes and in the breath. Then I meet Wilson in the automat.”
    “Who the hell is Wilson?”
    “I mean Charles. I fall in love with him, I go to work at Lord and Taylor, he falls in love with Amanda, the society girl, and I’m out, finished, smunk”—they wondered what she meant by
smunk
—“and I can be home by nine-thirty, despite my song, which is really great, and makes