In Sunlight and in Shadow by Mark Helprin Page B

do, cut the leather a second time?”
    Cornell turned and looked at him directly. “You’re supposed to do
something,
” he said, and turned back to the work at his desk.
    “When I said I’d need a year, you didn’t object.”
    “Why a year?” Cornell asked, pivoting in his almost-yellow swivel chair, which squealed like a mouse. “I was in the First War. I went to work the day after I got back. Right here.” He paused and, to be clear, added, “Not here, when we were in Paterson.”
    “It’s different.”
    “Why is that?”
    “How long were you in the army? How long were you overseas? And how old were you?” Harry asked, knowing that Cornell, who was Jesuitically precise, would know exactly.
    “When we entered the war I was your age now. I was in the army a little over a year, and in France for seven months.”
    “There’s the difference. When we entered the war this time I was twenty-six. I was in the army for four years. And I was overseas for more than three. I need the time, because I don’t know what to make of what happened. It isn’t that I don’t understand it: I’ll probably never understand it. It’s that I haven’t yet absorbed it. I need a rest not because I’m tired but because of what I’ve seen, and there’s no direction in which, at present, I have ambition.”
    “Necessity will show you that direction or you’ll live a wasted life.”
    “It hasn’t ’til now. The business is running efficiently: I couldn’t manage it the way you do. I have no desire to duplicate what you do. I don’t even know if I want to stay. I know how it works, but to cut or stretch as well as they can”—he meant the workers beyond the glass partitions—“would take twenty years, and what would be the point?”
    “We’re running efficiently,” Cornell said, “but selling less.”
    “We’re not a mechanized business, we’re a craft. The only way to compete with people whose labor costs are a fifth of ours or less,” Harry said, “is for all of us to take less. The workers are closer to the margin, so you and I would really have to tighten, but the two of us can hardly do it all. If we reduce their wages, the unions will rescind the exception and strike us. We’ll go out of business or pay up, after which we’ll go out of business anyway, just as we may now if the trend continues. I don’t know what to do. It’ll take Europe decades before it catches up to us and prices align. Maybe never.”
    “There could be another war in Europe,” Cornell said. “We’ve just had two.”
    “Stalin would attend,” Harry added, “as Russia has yet to demobilize. But if there were another war, when it ended and we stopped making belts for generals we’d be right where we are now.”
    “If we were a different kind of business, if we were an industry, we could pay off Congress and they would raise tariffs to protect us,” Cornell said. “But we’re too little. We don’t matter like General Electric.”
    “I wouldn’t want to be General Electric.”
    “That’s not the point.” Cornell stared out the window, into the north light. “The store’s okay.”
    “Because we’ve got the only two clerks in New York who don’t raid the till. It’s a miracle.”
    “We could open in other cities.”
    “No cash, Cornell. With our sales the banks won’t loan us any money, and we couldn’t afford the interest anyway. At this point they probably wouldn’t lend to us if we were doing well. I have a hundred thousand dollars to my name. With that we could open stores in Chicago and Boston. People know Copeland Leather. We’d probably do all right. But it’s all the money I have, and if we open stores, we lose accounts.”
    “We’re losing them anyway.”
    “So maybe we’ll do that. But it makes me nervous, because if it didn’t work I’d have no reserves, either for the business or myself. And where can we get a Henry or a Thaxton? There aren’t people like them anymore, who have the