Free In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin Page A

people cry even way at the beginning of the play. It should be at the end of the play.”
    “You can’t rewrite the book, Catherine, and a lot of actors would die so they could be home at nine-thirty.”
    “Wouldn’t it be better,” she asked, as if he hadn’t said anything and as if he hardly existed, “if I, and not Amanda, married Charles? Because, the way it’s written, Amanda is kind of a bitch, and I’m the underdog. She’s got the money, a mansion, a chauffeur, and she’s really a God-awful bitch, really. I’m a farm girl, from a chicken-keeping place in Pennsylvania, who becomes a shop girl. This is a play, Sidney. I should marry Charles.” She seemed dumbfounded at the injustice.
    “You are going to argue with the book.”
    “Well, yes.”
    “Look,” said the director, “Charles is a returning soldier. The play is called
Homecoming,
right? He’s a poor Irish boy from Hell’s Kitchen. You’re right, this is a play.
He
gets the society girl. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, because that’s what people like.”
    Knowing that she would not prevail, Catherine looked to the side as she spoke, which was what she often did when she knew that her words would be spoken in vain. “But what do I get?” she asked, as if she and her part were the same. “What about me? It would be a better play if Charles married me.”
    “And you would have a bigger part. And we would have to rewrite the play, change the lyrics, and add new songs. It doesn’t work that way, Catherine. We’ve got investors.”
    “All right,” she said, “though if you did, I would be happy to switch parts with Amanda.”
    “No,” the director decreed. “Especially not after today. We need you for your song. We need you for that breath. We need you for that one note, Catherine. Catherine, on that one note, this play depends.”
     
    She hadn’t been unhappy with his assessment. How could she have been? Still, she found it galling that he had his eye on her, and every time he spoke to her or looked her way she wanted to say, “Sidney, there are many buttons that never should be unbuttoned, and never will be, at least not by you.” In her dressing room, in front of an electrified mirror that bathed her in incandescent light, she tried to mark her position and think ahead through the confusion of Harry, Victor, and God knows what else. And she found herself struggling, hardly for the first time, against a competing image, a picture that was moving and yet somehow still, of a boy swinging on a rope tied to the girders of an elevated train platform on the East Side. It was somewhere near 100th Street. Moving from sunlight into shadow and shadow into sunlight, he made a perfect inverted arc. She had seen him sometime in the twenties, as she passed in a car that seemed as big as a room, on her way south to her house overlooking the garden and the river. He was older than she was, but it didn’t matter. Though she was only a little girl and had no hope of ever seeing him again, something had happened. She had looked through the glass and seen him just as he had come into the sunlight at the top of his arc, and for an instant, in a flash that to the conscious mind is incomprehensible—behind him, to his left, merely from the corner of his eye and through the window of a moving car—he had seen her.
    As he reached the top of the arc his feet pointed gracefully but unconsciously to the path he would then follow. He had had no idea that she had seen him, and no idea that, as he flew from light to shadow and back, she had taken his image into her eyes as if with the decisive click of a camera shutter.
    The boy on the rope, by her long, insistent memory, by what he was and how he had lasted, was fighting hard not to be forgotten. Somehow, he had seen her through shame and grief, and she had never betrayed him. She saw herself behind the polished glass reflecting the lace-like girders. She saw his face, and her own, and though she