by Mark Helprin
Melissa understood philosophically, but, despairing of argument, she could not agree. To him, his meticulous approach and unvarying discipline seemed redolent of life. But to her they seemed always to freeze things in place, and were like death, which is why she left. But she still loved him, and he loved her, and while he dreamed that she would come back, suddenly neat, she wished that he could break free from what she considered an all-consuming tyranny, and that then they could remarry.
IN SEPTEMBER, East Hampton can be the most beautiful place in the world, when the ocean, brimming over with a whole summer of sun, surges to and fro in clear light, finally warmer than the air. Beaches newly empty of bathers and haze reflect in the far distance like gold, and cicadas make a hypnotic white sound that almost holds back time. Only a Mercedes or two passes down the beach road or climbs up from Napeague. Seagulls wheel in the air, relaxed, landing anywhere, unafraid of being chased by boys who, now, as white foam crashes onto warm and brilliant sand, are trapped in prep schools from Maine to Manhattan, sweating in their blazers, doing sums, and learning Latin.
Sometime in the last week of September, in late morning, Vandevere sat in his east garden, the Italian one. Both he and it were exemplary of what he had long undertaken. Although fifty-four years of age, he was in perfect health except for a slight deafness on one side, the consequence of having been a rifleman without earplugs. Early that morning he had run six miles, done calisthenics, lifted weights, and swum. His exercise clothes, washed and ironed, were back on the polished blond wood shelves of his airy closet. He had read the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, an article on naval operations in narrow seas, and an essay by Friedrich Hayek. At a breakfast table set with Copeland china, George III sterling, and Austrian crystal, he had dared eat a peach, some fat-free yogurt, and a piece of dry toast.
After breakfast he had dismissed the staff for a day off. During their leave he would cook his evening meal over a fire of driftwood he gathered on the beach, and, having washed and put away the dishes, he would read until the fire went out and the stars blazed in the wind. And although in these quintessentially lonely times he was less lonely than people who cannot do without the incessant presence of others, he was lonely nonetheless.
He sat in the garden, which had been gardened for six hours before the staff departed. Six hours is a lot of time for several professional gardeners to garden, and not a blade of grass was out of place. Nor was a hair on his head out of place, except for some that blew perfectly golden in the breeze, as if by design. The September sun was warm and weak, the wind pleasing, the light pure, and the sound of waves thudding onto the beach now uniformly timed as if to match the steadiness and glory of the weather and the slow even beating of his heart.
As lean and strong as a man his age could be without being a fop, Vandevere wore brown English walking boots polished to a Royal Grenadier sheen. His shorts, tailored in London for Africa and not quite pressed, were clean and unwrinkled; his belt, of bridle leather, was buckled on the second hole. His lightweight polo shirt was of navy-blue silk. As was his custom, he had set his reading glasses over a pair of polarized sunglasses that made everything seem cool and blue.
Removing the reading glasses, he rested them carefully folded on the closed volume of the journal he had just finished. East-southeast, in the direction of the sun, were peach trees, flower beds, caramel-colored sandstone walks, lawns, a sapphirelike pool set in a flat unwindy place, fields of corn and alfalfa, vegetable gardens, a riding ring, and the dunes. This was the way it should have been, except that Melissa should have been sitting beside him in all her settled and spectacular middle-aged beauty.
His bank accounts, investment accounts, and REITs were perfectly tended. Monthly summaries came to him in leather folders, weekly in heavy blue paper trimmed in gold. Experts kept the accounts growing, and in their reports they rounded to the thousands. Experts also had cataloged his extraordinary library, the envy of anyone who might envy a room. His desk drawers were a marvel of organization, and all the linen, one-thousand-two-hundred count, was tucked in without a wrinkle. Even nature was cooperative across its many spectra, of sun and surf, and the lighter blue of the bay, and hay waving in the wind like water heaving on the surface of the sea. Vandevere was as happy as could be expected, and resigned to his life and his death. An almost magical ordination of all physical things seemed to bless his choices and his well-being as his luck continued to hold.
He blinked and stared ahead, breathing slowly in the slight trance that comes after exercise, and rather than think of anything at all he just watched everything that lay before him. What was left, and what to do? Much as he was compelled to it, the pursuit of material perfection weighed heavily upon him. Perhaps he would travel, or have a beautiful sailboat built to put him on seas that in their immensity and danger would bring him the liveliness of youth one more time. But whatever he might do, as long as he kept the house and refused to disengage from it, Melissa would not return. Nor was he able to leave it, as much as his inability to go to her would break his heart.
HALF ASLEEP AND HALF DREAMING, he smelled fragrant dry smoke. He assumed, as he awoke, that it came from the brush pile at the Maidstone Club. Now that it was September and the wind was coming off the shore, the gardeners there would burn the huge pile of pine boughs that had been drying since their deaths in a storm in late May. Though its source was half a mile distant, the smoke would come to him when the wind shifted eastward, as it did from time to time.
In fact, all the land windward of the fire was swept with a resinous scent carried on a haze of white ash, so that it seemed like Italy in the early fall, when farmers burn the stubble on their fields and sweet smoke is everywhere. He had never understood exactly how the chains of fire, orange at night and white by day, could regenerate the land over which they burned, so that in the spring it would be green again and bring forth rich crops. But the tranquil scent of these fires told him in its calming sweetness that after destruction a new beginning was assured. By what mechanism he did not know, but he knew that it was so.
He thought that the wind coursing in a straight line from the Maidstone pine boughs would now be visible in air that had filled with smoke until it was a gauzy white. If they were home, the people who lived between his land and the club would probably complain. If they were absent, their staffs would not, as maids and gardeners accepted such things far more readily, being used to forces and currents that shaped their lives and carried them from place to place with neither their consent nor their desire.
Should he himself complain? He loved the scent of the smoke, but the smoke was now almost alarmingly heavy. It had thickened so much that the peach trees seemed to be standing in fog, and when its white shroud reached the dunes, it compressed and accelerated, speeding over their tops like a magician’s silks.
Anxious about how densely this Maidstone smoke was covering the rest of his property, and wanting to know if it had enveloped the house, he turned around slowly and was surprised to see that the hayfields closest to the Maidstone Club were clear. Continuing his turn, he saw that the lawns immediately west of the house were clear as well, and that the smoke was coming not from beyond the house but from it—from his own house, which was burning.
Sometimes, when confronted with momentous things, he did not move as quickly as might have been expected, but stayed still to think of what was true, what was right, and what was required. He stayed still now. Then he calmly stood, rotated his chair, and sat down again facing the house. Flames leapt from places that he never would have believed flames could leap from—from beneath copper gutters and seemingly from solid walls. How many minutes, precisely, he watched this he did not know, but as he sat, the conflagration built.
Vibrating with restraint, he went through in his mind all the things that were now dissolving in flame and combining together in a serpentine of gases and smoke, in a ballet of uncountable particles each behaving with a precision to which he could never even
aspire: paintings; suits; books; metals and silver; things of ivory, leather, and silk; furniture of cherry and mahogany. The heat was such that even the porcelain might melt. He felt this heat, but did not move. Nor did he want to move even as all he had built and worked for over so many years vanished before him at great speed.
For he had already left it behind, and his spirit had been unlocked, and his soul freed, in a gift that had come on the wind. All that Vandevere could think of now, as white smoke swirled around him like snow, was his wife as she had been at the quarry, and her face, and the water running off her hair as she had bobbed up in the foam.
Prelude
GOD KNOWS, I was young enough to be excited by the World’s Fair of 1939, and many of my friends were as impressed as if it were the prelude to Armageddon, which, as it turns out, it was. But I did not allow it to haunt my days and nights, as it did theirs. For them it was one and the same with coming of age, but for me such things would have to wait, though not for long, and when they did come they were carried on the crest of the breaking wave that was the war.
I was repulsed by the modernist theories and ideology of the Fair. I didn’t like them on their face, and didn’t think that buildings and cars should be shaped like torpedoes: it was bad enough that torpedoes were shaped like torpedoes. Overwhelmed by the richness of the world and impassioned with what I had, I thought it would take a lifetime of effort to understand even the smallest part of it, and did not fancy that it be reformed or discarded before I had even come to know it. I did not want my street to lose its trees and dappled light so that it could be the bed of a streamlined conveyance that went at blinding speed from one nowhere to another. I did not want the form of things to change, nor my parents to grow old and die, nor to lose the comfort even of familiar imperfection. I wanted neither a revolution of the proletariat, nor a thousand-year Reich, nor even a radio without static, for in my radio with all its static I could hear, over and above Beethoven, the progress of a lightning storm a thousand miles away. My great desire was to achieve rapturous and complete physical unity with the most exquisite woman in the world, to whom I would be devoted for the rest of my life, which was the very least that would have been required to accommodate the infinite number that I imagined of the kind of ecstatic kisses—each lasting for hours—that I had yet to kiss.
A general sense of oncoming destruction may have been the reason why all around the country so many mementos were sunk in so many cornerstones that it was not at all unusual to see a man hurrying down the street with a time capsule tucked under his arm. Into these stainless-steel-and-glass cylinders were rammed the wrong things—evening papers and monthly magazines; reels of movie film; small products of civilization such as cameras, coins, and electric razors; the kind of things that come and go and do not last. But if one of them would in fact last ten thousand years, who then so far off would care more for a spool of thread, a telephone, or the classified section of the New York Herald Tribune, than for the portrait of a physician or carpenter staring out in time, or the inner thoughts of a girl in Paterson stitching shirtwaists, or the cri de coeur of an operator of machines, or any one of thousands of such scenes.
They put in time capsules that which should not endure but does. They choose what is interesting over what is profound, the charming over the beautiful, the nimble over the true. It was only eight years ago that time capsules were so much in fashion, before the death of some fifty millions placed the urge to preserve ephemera in a somewhat different light. In a world of balance and counterbalance, and laws that cannot be abridged, the echo of the war must come. Such violence, as it flows through all things, must flow back. And yet peace seems long lasting and everything has begun anew. The soldiers are home. This summer in Manhattan there are a vast number of baby carriages in the street and a vast number of babies in their mothers’ arms. Although it is summer, Friday, the 27th of June, 1947, it feels like spring, when grass sits lightly and evenly upon the fields, and trees are so green and delicate they seem to float up with the light.
If I go to my window and lean dangerously over the sill, I can see Grand Central at the end of the street, and in the opposite direction, framed by converging lines of brownstones, a patch of blue, the East River. You don’t have to look long before a ship, tug, or barge rushes across it and disappears from sight. The street itself has the unusual quality of midday blackness topped by shattering silver light, which New York shadows make at the base of straight stone walls. Like stage light, it changes very fast and the shadows are theatrically velvet. When I arrive in the morning, and when I leave at five, I walk in this light like a bather in the surf. The pigeons are the foam that scatters on the top of the waves, as they fly up in glistening flashes that ride the air. Throughout the day as I sit by my window supposedly filling out my ledgers, the combined roar and glare of Manhattan becomes a whisper and the light of dusk, and the music goes faint and shifts to a minor key, as if I am looking on from afar. This sensation sets a seal on time like a press that fixes the incessant motion of words upon a page. To see the present in the clear, one must see it as if from the future. I watch the ships glide across the narrow slot at the end of the street, and though they pass quickly, they are frozen against the blue forever.
I work for United States Steel, at a steel desk. For the past six months I have been transferring data from tens of thousands of index cards to thick fifty-column ledgers. Someday they will have machines to do this, but now I am the machine that organizes the health records of a rolling mill in Ohio. For reasons that it did not share with me, the management has decreed that they be abstracted in a particular form. It is no secret that in tabularization and cross-tabularization many statistical operations are rendered possible, and although after my first day here in January I was bold enough to suggest that instead of using ledgers they put the data on punch cards for key-sorting, they, or, rather, he, Mr. Herman Bleier, had not heard of key-sort, and Mr. Herman Bleier said to me, “Ledgers will do.”
I have not seen Mr. Herman Bleier since early February, and was told by the receptionist on his floor when I had a question for him that if I had a question I should write to Mr. Bleier in care of United States Steel, Oakland. I don’t have any more questions, at least not for him, and I pray that he has forgotten me. As my salary comes in, my benefits accumulate, and I receive modest periodic raises in pay, I am unsupervised, having fallen into the cracks of an immense corporation that seems not to know that I exist. I work in an area of unused offices, where no one ever comes, and I do not know a single person at United States Steel, which means that not a single person at United States Steel knows me. Even the receptionist of whom I inquired of Mr. Bleier’s whereabouts thought I was from another company, or at least another division.
This is just. Since I entered the army, in 1942, I have been a servant of steel—moving it, dodging it, shooting it, ducking it, and, now, making it. As steel should be for our purposes, and not we for its, my present situation must be part of the natural balance of the dominant forces of the era. But the days of steel, even steel, are numbered, as all metals have their age, and then pass from the scene. Thus, this billet cannot last, but it serves for now. I have even tried not showing up, and no one notices. I have no one to whom to report my sick days, so they go unrecorded. But I do come to work almost every day, because I want to finish the job—albeit at a leisurely pace—within five years.
The nature of my workday would probably cause management some concern if they knew about it. From eight to nine, I do ten cards. From four-thirty to five-thirty, I do another ten. At this rate I will be finished in 1952. The root of this is that Mr. Bleier told me to wait for him to collect my work. When I asked when it was due, he replied imperiously that he would tell me when it was due when he was ready to tell me when it was due. That was our last conversation.
At nine, after my first intense burst of labor, I go to the Y, when the morning swimmers have left for their jobs and the pool echoes with ripples that
have not quite disappeared by the time I dive in. I swim a mile, do twenty minutes of weights and calisthenics, shower, and then go on my break. There would be no point in returning to the office and then going out for a break, so I combine efficiencies and sit in a café that I found in Murray Hill, where I have a light breakfast and begin to read the paper.
Back at the office by eleven, I finish the paper and do correspondence that I have brought from home. At half past twelve I then go out for the lightest of lunches—broth, mainly—and return precisely at ten of one, but because my lunches are so short I feel justified in taking a nap until two, which I do. Refreshed and in a dreamlike state, I awaken and begin to write upon my legal pads. I do this for two and a half hours, with the greatest pleasure and satisfaction, until four-thirty, when I go back to the cards for an hour, working late every day.
Whatever one might think of what I do, it is nonetheless true that I am following instructions, working each day, doing my work with meticulous care and attention, taking only twenty minutes for lunch, arriving early, and leaving late. I am the model employee. And I am also staying at the peak of health. My conduct is consonant with well known generalities. The United States is far and away the leading steel producer in the world, United States Steel is first among steel companies in this country, and, as far as I am concerned, I am part of a winning team, even if they don’t know it.
Furthermore, my experience in the military leads me to believe that of the tens of thousands of employees of United States Steel, I am not the only one who is writing a novel. Most likely, in the warrens of vast buildings converted to subsidiary use or idleness, at mills around the country, are forgotten rooms in which superfluous employees pour their hearts out upon paper or spend the hours drinking-in from books what their predecessors poured out before them. Probably in offices in Oakland, Ohio, or Kalamazoo, someone is taking a great deal of time in a clerical task and stealing from United States Steel, as am I. The pity of theft is not only the damage of loss but the corruption of the thief as he justifies his actions, slithering all over the map of what is right and what is wrong, in the slime he excretes to break his own fall.