by Mark Helprin
The water was cold enough to banish some of his pain, but he knew that it would encourage the bleeding. In forty-five minutes, he thought, he would be dead. Being naturally fastidious, he was horrified at the thought that if he died there the residents of the building might not know it and would drink the water for months. The window of war seemed very narrow indeed.
He was now close enough to the end to sense the all-forgiving grace in which enemies no longer exist. In the eternal quiet that lay perhaps minutes away, the noise, exertion, and passions of the moment—all hatred, ambition, and the divisions among men—would be left behind as if from a fast express rocketing from a crowded station into the open countryside. In whatever might lay ahead, the fact that he died in an elevated water tank, high on a ridge, during a battle by the sea, would be something just to note, yet another of the sadnesses of the human heart, all of which, somehow, he would know.
Growing more and more content, he felt himself—and all else—slipping, but he felt something new and great, a comforting presence. How was it that, bleeding and cold, with perhaps only minutes of life left, he was painless, calm, and enfolded in an all-embracing love?
And yet he did not want to die. Half unconsciously, he pulled himself to the iron rungs that went below the water, and tilted his head up. At the first blockage of the light as a man appeared in the hatch, the first disappearance of blue from the rectangle above, he would push himself under and hold his breath, hoping that whoever looked in would need time for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and would neither notice the unavoidable ripples on the surface of the water nor look for too long. He expected this position, with his head turned up and his eyes filled with a rectangle of pure blue light, to be his last.
THEN THE BARRAGE STOPPED, and it was quiet except for a few tanks speeding off the ridge. Soon they were gone. The field artillery had ceased. Nor could he hear small-arms fire. He was light-headed and thought that perhaps he could no longer hear. He looked at his watch. He had been in the water for more than an hour, and hadn’t bled enough to die. He wondered if he would have the strength to climb the ladder and get out without falling. He tasted the water, which didn’t taste like blood, and began to climb.
Sometimes he would black out on the way up, but he locked his arms around the rungs, and when he came back there he would be, folded against the iron, ready to take another agonizing step. There were only four steps to the opening, and he managed them all. The air outside, heated by the sun even as the battle had tried to scramble the physics of existence, was warm, sweet, and full of October light.
Through the quiet he heard the rumble of armor once again, and looked to his left along the ridge. A column of tanks and half-tracks drove toward him. And at the top of their long flexible masts that rose ten feet in the air were Union Jacks stretched out by the wind from the sea.
Vandevere’s House
A YEAR OR TWO BEFORE MELISSA LEFT, Vandevere had fallen into the rhythm of making the house better, day by day. At first it had seemed that merely buying such a house would have been sufficient, splendid as it was in itself, but little things called out. The mailbox needed relettering, relocation, and to be set in a limestone plinth. The Bar Harbor juniper had to be thickened, trimmed, and fertilized. The stones of the long drive were neither round enough nor of the proper sandy color not to match but rather to suggest the sunlit glow of the beach beyond the dunes. The list he made in regard to things like this had more than four hundred entries, in a hand so small and precise that they might have been written-in by a mouse. The house loomed enormously large.
Apart from its unassailable beauty and the fifty-six acres of carefully tended farmland, lawns, and trees that rose to a rampart of heather-covered dunes and then swept to a wide beach unsurpassed by any in the world, what provided inimitable satisfaction to the owner and excited envy in others was that for at least a mile in three directions, and without limit in the direction of the sea, it was protected. Each of the few estates around it was of high station, indivisible, sacrosanct, and serene. Each was watered by fonts of money that sprang from banks and brokerages in Manhattan in such strength as to employ armies of immigrant maids and gardeners, pay taxes, and replace roofs … forever. Unlike things that were fleet, the value of these houses would hold, in perpetuity, ’til work be done, ’til kingdom come.
Twenty million had been too much to pay, but then again it had not, for even if the value of the house were to decline for a year or two or a decade, something inherent in it, like a mysterious engine that patiently worked through difficult times and good times equally, would keep and build its worth in an upward spiral. Vandevere had been able to buy this. He owned it. And it was worthy of its absurd excess valuation. Whereas most properties were certain to decay, this one had the spark of life in it, and seemed, somehow, to regenerate itself and all who came to it. It was the spark of life that he had bought, and for which he had paid. Money was a thing that could never come to life, despite the many illusions invested in it. No one ever thought a nickel was alive, and though some believed otherwise, even the breathtaking mass of twenty million was dead. It had been a good trade. As the nineties rolled off their middle, saturated in optimism and deals, he had thought this was the best he had done.
He had then put fifty million away in a fund that with only conservative growth would be more than enough to provide the wherewithal to maintain the house and pay its taxes ad infinitum. And after that he still had a hundred and thirty million left to live on, though he would be melancholy for the rest of his life because the partners in the most lucrative IPO of his career had conspired with the lead investment bank to insert a clause, in minuscule writing that even he had not read and that his lawyers could not properly interpret for lack of factual knowledge about the business, which clause, by its effect and irrevocably, notwithstanding any other clause to the contrary, and according to the laws of the State of Delaware and the State of New York, screwed him out of seven hundred million.
Shocked by his own carelessness and ashamed of the contribution he had made to his lasting defeat, he wanted only to live modestly and unnoticed. No longer in the newspapers as were his former partners, no longer a source of capital or ideas, he would remain as if motionless in his very lovely garden, in the midst of freshly watered hydrangea, geranium, spruce, and peach. Just over the protective dunes, which did not protect his regret, the Atlantic, supremely cold and navy blue, broke into white foam and salt spray that carried on the wind and sparkled in the sun.
IN 1912, they had built Vandevere’s limestone Georgian to fairly modest proportions that now appeared almost glorious but nonetheless were everywhere perfectly understated. The way almost a hundred years had weathered the stone and slate said that this house had not been built by an IPO, but its newly revised detailing made it clear that an IPO could not be totally excluded.
Though you could not see them, the things you could not see were flawless. The plumbing supply lines, for example, were made of an alloy used in United States naval ships to coat areas subject to the greatest corrosion. When water ran to sinks and tubs, you could not hear it coursing within the walls even with a stethoscope, and when it drained it cascaded inaudibly down stainless-steel pipes with sides two inches thick, themselves encased within walls as heavy with plaster as the White Cliffs of Dover.
The water was hot the instant it flooded from its English nickel fittings into the light of tiny high-intensity lamps set in the marbled bathroom ceilings and walls so as to make every bath sparkle like the Aegean. Because Vandevere took his vitamins with mineral water, he placed in the travertine wall next to his sink a refrigerator specially constructed by the Sub-Zero Company to mimic a feature Vandevere had observed at the bar of a hotel in Prague. Two dozen little bottles of Badoit were chilled silently and without condensation, ready to roll into his hand one at a time.
As the bathrooms were as big as kitchens, the kitchen too was overwrought. It had not only every excellent, unnecessary, h
eavy-duty commercial system, but also mechanisms designed to augment each one. The cooktops and ovens had digital thermometers that read out in a continuously moving display as if they were stock prices. Things like mixers and blenders rose slowly from nowhere on silent, smooth-running elevators. Because Vandevere did not want dust to accumulate in gray drifts beneath or behind his refrigerators and Agas, at the touch of a button they all moved at once toward the middle of the vast kitchen, like circus elephants on Pentothal, to reveal white ceramic runs that could be polished with a mop and chamois before the appliances were commanded back to their stalls.
The pantry, or what his chef called the garde-manger, was alphabetized. Under G, for instance, you could find Greek malted milk balls (made with goat’s milk) in a glass canister with the date of purchase in calligraphy beneath the identification entry. You could also find, among other things (such as grape leaves and ginger), guacamole, gaufrettes, galichons, gooseberries, and gayettes. The shelves were of woven stainless steel, the baseboards limestone, the floor marble, the moldings from a renowned workshop in Flanders. In temperature- and humidity-controlled air, with its own window (most of the closets, too, had their own windows), the garde-manger could and did hold enough food to feed Vandevere, his staff, and guests, for three years. A special room, always dark and cool, was for the storage of olive oil in two-hundred-gallon glass-lined tip-flasks with nondrip ceramic stopcocks. Although Vandevere did not drink wine, his wine cellar held ten thousand bottles carefully arranged by region, château, and vintage.
The distribution of electricity, the heating of water, and the generation of auxiliary power from a two-hundred-thousand-watt, propane-fed generator that could run independently for a year, were accomplished underground, a hundred feet from the house, in a clean, well-lighted, Teutonic bunker. Even in a winter storm when the power was out and all the neighboring estates were dark, Vandevere’s house glowed with light, heat, and good order.
The interiors were so beautiful that people who saw them for the first time were stunned into silence. In some places the colors were rich and in others perfectly austere, but each room was proportioned as if by magic to make its occupants feel both fully awake and wonderfully at ease. He had had paintings from the very beginning, and now he had more. Even the lesser ones from his earlier days were cleaned and restored, and all were perfectly lit, framed, alarmed, and insured—Gainsboroughs, Monets, a big Caravaggio, and others. The formal garden that led eastward from the pool was a reproduction of the garden visible in a corner of the Caravaggio. And the fence surrounding the property—with the exception of its sensors and surveillance aids—was a reconstruction of the iron fence described in Ser Brunetto’s dream of the monastery in which he imagined that God had imprisoned him forever and without explanation. Along the inside of the perimeter ran a wide gravel walk with stone curbs behind which were dense evergreens.
HE HAD HAD THE OLD POOL FILLED IN. It was neither big enough nor deep enough and was in the wrong place, having been set between house and ocean by a dentist, the previous owner, whom Vandevere called, although Vandevere was not a dentist, “the previous dentist.” This man had become wealthy, in the seventies sense, by inventing a kind of implant. No pool should be made to compete with the ocean and have as its backdrop ramparts of white sand ground from rock over a span of a billion years by the fierce blue water that covers two-thirds of the earth. So Vandevere built a new one, eastward of the house, in a place where in July and August the shadow of the chimneys began to move across the pool decking, as on a sundial, from six to seven in the evening. He made the new pool 105.6 feet long, so that fifty laps were a mile, which is the distance he swam every day. The water shone blue in a foil of white marble set in classical Italian gardens, and, in honor of Melissa, the water was, at one end of the pool, forty feet deep.
In May of 1967, Vandevere, a Harvard sophomore whose academic career was soon to be interrupted by the draft and a year on the DMZ, had gone with some friends to swim in the abandoned granite quarry at Quincy. Neither courageous nor foolish enough to jump from the highest rock platform, which the locals called Rooftop, and take the eighty-foot plunge into a lake of aquamarine water hundreds of feet deep, he had leapt instead from fifty feet, and was floating about after the shock of collision with the water, when he saw against the sun a blaze of something purple and gold that had appeared at the highest level and flown out with no hesitation. It fell like a meteorite and landed next to Vandevere as if it were a projectile from a sixteen-inch gun. The water foamed like the cataclysmic circle of a depth charge, and then, from the crown of white and aquamarine, like a leaping dolphin, up rose a girl.
Her hair stayed blond when wet; her eyes were green; her shoulders broad. She was the kind of woman who, in a sundress, looks nine feet tall, and when she breasted the foam Vandevere was struck by how sharply her nipples showed through the violet leotard in which she was barely dressed. There in the water next to him, as fresh as rain, was his destiny, for in her, and in him, and in time, were his children. As he and this beautiful young woman, the water running off her golden hair, floated in the quarry, they were immediately attracted and ready to be drawn to each other, and it might not have seemed unnatural had they fused like lizards on a rock.
He thought at first that she was a town girl who had found her way into a leotard (the summer uniform of Radcliffe), and he youthfully determined that he would marry her despite this. He would marry her even if she did have the hyena Boston accent, even if her father owned a luncheonette, and even if she had never been to France—because no matter what she was, she was pure force and life. To have leapt so heedlessly from eighty feet, she had to have been a town girl.
“You jumped from Rooftop,” he said, full of admiration.
“I did,” she answered, smiling with arresting beauty. The wind rippled the blue water around her.
“You could have been killed.”
“Yes, but when I saw you jump from fifty feet, I had to do it …” she spoke beautifully and very unlike a hyena, “because I was mad at you.”
“You were mad at me?” he asked, treading water furiously.
“I was.”
“Why?”
“I couldn’t stand the way in Hum Two you asked Finley questions about what we were reading in translation, to show six hundred people that you knew Greek. And not just once, but every goddamned day. I thought you were an ass.” Her eyes narrowed as if she were still angry.
After a long silence, Vandevere simply said, “I was.” And they studied each other while floating.
Though he wanted to ask her right then and there if she would marry him, and right then and there she probably would have said yes, as she was to say yes soon thereafter, he held himself in check, as he often did. “Let’s swim to shore,” he said, and offered his hand to her. She took it. In that first touch was their marriage. And they swam together through the opalescent waters of the deep quarry, shaming any royal procession that ever was.
• • •
THE PROBLEM OF HER LEAVING was insoluble in more ways than one, some minor but intricate nonetheless. Left with a double bed, for example, he could sleep symmetrically neither on one side nor on the other. Nor could he sleep in the middle, as that would have meant moving one of the pillows to the center and doing God-knows-what-else with the other. Three pillows, an odd number, would be as out of the question as would be one. To sleep in the center of the bed, he would have to go either distressingly asymmetrical with an even number of pillows, or symmetrical with a distressing odd number. A single bed would not harmonize with the proportions of the room. Double singles (or, as the consultant he hired called them, twins) would simply restate the agony of asymmetry.
So every night he slept on a different side, but this, too, was offensive to symmetry in that there were seven days in a week and 365 days in a year, and even the Pope could not change that. Vandevere sometimes wanted to drown such problems in scotch, except that he did not drink, because once yo
u opened the bottle it was no longer whole. The only thing to do was to get married again, but how could he know whether or not the woman he chose to marry was simply concealing her messiness during the seduction phase, as most women did? Women were absolutely pristine and symmetrical until, after a few months of marriage, it was as if tornadoes emerged from their purses and ripped up the ordered fabric of life.
Philosophically, Melissa had understood the argument that, as death and dissolution are unavoidable, life when it can be chosen should be the assertion or creation of an aesthetic order. Even the dissolution that followed death did so according to the absolute laws of nature. Within decay was order. Molecules linked and unlinked with more precision than cabooses in a freight yard. Streams of particles followed perfect trajectories and rose from what had once been a body, joining with the great oceans of air in an inconceivably complex ballet of fluids. Even with burial came a balanced transformation, a model of infinitude, a textbook case of gasification, combination, oxidation, mineralization, et cetera.
Vandevere wanted order not in the sense of control or imposition, but in the sense of a painter who orders his colors into a painting. Buying and selling companies was more like directing traffic than making something of beauty, but, then again, in the abstract what was so different about directing the traffic of colors and directing the traffic of sums? Perhaps if he had stayed with some of the businesses he bought, instead of tossing them away in frenzies and bubbles, he would have been less in need of another order to make. Most of the businesses he bought, however, were in the larger scheme of things suitable for sale only in a frenzy.
Thus, the house, and the need, when the children were gone, to make perfect gardens; to store the best olive oil; to mount, construct, build, perfect, and refine; to anchor things, and keep them, consuming as little as possible and laying in as much as could be stored and preserved.