by Mark Helprin
On the other hand, and I hate to do this, because it smacks of the rationalization I have just descried, officers of this corporation are paid a great deal more for doing a great deal less than what I do, and in far greater luxury, just as there are those in this company who, for less, risk their lives and work to exhaustion—just as in the army I was in an infantry platoon that was landed in Sicily, Salerno, and Normandy, and the sound of gunfire was as familiar to us as the sound of polo mallets was to some soldiers who never left California, and the sound of the surf to those who manned coastal defenses against an enemy who never came. I used to dream of serving my enlistment in riding a horse from Amagansett to East Hampton and back on the beach, over and over, with rifle, wind, and waves.
In the uneven distribution of rights, privileges, and luck, who am I to challenge this accidental posting, relief, and rest? If in fact I have not paid already for this interlude, then I simply have yet to pay. When my father was dying, we sold most of what we had, against his protests, to pay for what he might have needed to suffer less than he did. I left college. The house disappeared. My mother became a cashier. And then, when she died, nothing was left at all, I had just crossed the Rhine, and I came to her grave two months after she was put in it.
So I accept this covert and undeserved award, in behalf of my father and my mother and the men who died beside me and who doubtless would say that the spark of life is brighter even than the shield of morals, who would say that before they died they had wished for luck, and that luck, by definition, is seldom just. Men who die beside you are like climbers who fall away into an abyss. On the battlefield you do not have the time to be moved, such are your responsibilities. What you feel is shock, which spans the valley of death like a bridge and spares you from dying more than once. I intend with all my might, clerk or no, cheat or not, to die only once, and at the end.
And yet though what I am doing here may not be a mortal sin, it is nonetheless dishonest and dishonorable. In that sense, its pleasant nature has become unpleasant, its advantages taxing. The only reason I haven’t disengaged is that I have been leaving behind the things that broke my heart. I had thought that I might need a full five years, but not now, no longer, for something has happened.
A few weeks ago, just after Decoration Day, I went one morning to visit my mother’s only sister, who lives on Staten Island so near the ocean you would think it was the coast of Ireland, where she and my mother were born. I go there not just to see how she is, but to present myself to her as if she were my mother. It is as if—and she, too, feels this way I know—her eyes become my mother’s eyes, and when I report to her what I have been doing I am not really speaking to her, and she doesn’t expect me to, but to my mother. I stayed for a lunch of salad and iced tea, which was all I could take in the heat, and when I left I walked on the beach road toward the Narrows, with the sun beating down.
When at last I reached St. George, and sailed into the shade of the ferry terminal, I had the feel of someone who has been by the sea in the sun, which is what June can do for you even close to Manhattan. In the cool darkness of the ferry hall, I listened to the echoes of gates closing, engines turning over, and the sound of footsteps on the stairs, heel taps, and muted conversation.
I had read the newspaper, had no book, and was pulsing from the sunburn of the road, when the gate was pushed back with the call for the next boat. Moving forward, my glance was averted by the sight, on a bench to my left, of a woman of about my age—had she been much older or much younger it would not have mattered, for as she lowered her newspaper, folded it, rose, and swept toward me, I fell in love with her.
Having done with the paper, she dropped it in a trash can as she moved past, crossing my path not a yard from me and on her way up the ramp. She, too, looked as if she had been out on the ocean, perhaps the day before, and she was as full of summer as a woman can be. Dressed in white, somewhat tense, with buoyant blond hair, she moved ahead of me as gracefully as a skater. And on her left hand, which I thought she held as if she knew that I was looking, were no gold rings, not even one.
When she chose the port side, I dared not follow, if only because I wanted to so much, and I went to the starboard side and stepped into the sunlight. As the boat pulled away and the water churned and upwelled beneath it, I began the terrifying imagination of how I might approach her and what I might say. If I said the truth, it would be too forward, but anything else would be almost a lie. I have never known how to solve this problem, which is why I have so many memories of girls and women in places where I lost them without a word. But this time was unlike any other.
What the world calls a pretty face seems to me most often to be vacant, doll-like, self-conscious, and grasping. Women who are told that they are beautiful and come to believe it not only lose delicacy of soul and sharpness of wit, they forfeit the appealing privacy and loneliness without which real beauty cannot exist. They hardly reflect, as everything reflects upon them, and this makes them dull.
The woman on the port deck in the shade was someone—this I knew from having looked into her eyes for only an instant—of a spirit both tranquil and profound. Perhaps, I imagined, what I took on faith to be her great intelligence has made her lonely, but not too lonely, for she is too graceful for that, grace having brought her the companionship she needed. Perhaps she is not what I think she is, but, no, I can see in her face the qualities for which love comes not only easily but even, as now, almost explosively.
Halfway across the harbor, I had not come up with an answer. There is no good way to approach a stranger with whom you have fallen in love. At Governors Island, I grew anxious, and leaned over the rail to estimate the distance to South Ferry. Five minutes, I judged, and I’ve lost my chance. Here I was, a slightly trembling coward, not even a real clerk for United States Steel, who had seen a beautiful woman who was standing on the deck opposite and would get off the ferry and disappear into Manhattan forever.
I thought timidly that I might see her again, even later that day, and thus be able to approach her, saying, “I saw you earlier on the ferry.” But in Manhattan what would the chances be of that? I was going to have to go to her even though I could think of nothing to say, to begin my halting conversation with the words “Forgive me.” I had to do something. Almost faint with love and fear, I leaned back in, about to propel myself—with a chance of knocking people down—through the cabin and to the other deck, and there she was, next to me, just a foot and a half away.
“Jesus Christ!” I said. Being so close to her was like being hit by a tremendous sunlit wave that had rolled from the South Atlantic onto the Amagansett beaches.
“I beg your pardon?” she replied, smiling slightly, but looking at me with doubt.
“You were on the port side.”
“So I was.”
“And I was on the starboard.”
“You still are,” she said.
“I am, but I no longer have to come up with a pretext to talk to you.”
“Why would you need a pretext to talk to me?” she asked.
I hesitated. I could see that she was watching with interest as I tried to be exact.
“Without a pretext, it would have been too forward.”
“It would have. That’s always the problem, isn’t it.”
“I saw you in the terminal, when you threw away your paper. I thought that the motion of that—of your having thrown away a newspaper—was beautiful.”
This was for her truly arresting, and she stared at me.
“Even if you walk off this boat,” I said, “and I never see you again, the sight of you, back there, in the terminal, in the dust-filled air, will never leave me.”
I loved her all the more because she remained guarded as, ever so slowly, as if, in wading across a channel, she let herself be taken just slightly with the current, judging every footfall and still in control, but ready and wanting to float.
“I saw you, too,” she said, the saying of which did to me what,
apparently, I had just done to her, “and I came over to the starboard because I was tired of looking at the Statue of Liberty, and wondered if perhaps I could see you again.” It was no small thing for her to have said that.
I love the way she speaks, I love the beauty of her features, and the grace of her hands. She had been dropped at St. George after sailing in from eastern Long Island, where her parents have a house, and her fiancé keeps his boat. He went to Harvard, as I did, but ten years before me, and he was able to finish. In the war he went in as a colonel and came out as one. I went in as a private and came out a captain, rising purely by battlefield promotion. One more year of residence in Cambridge and I can have my degree. He works for Morgan, and of course, in my way, I work for United States Steel.
Tonight I meet her at Penn Station. We are to take the train to East Hampton, where I will be a guest for the weekend at her parents’ house. They may have to get used to the fact that I’m not wealthy, that for a year and a half after my decommissioning and my mother’s death I’ve been biding my time, and that for the sake of the dead—the inert, the immovable, the invisible in their graves—I will not be rushed. I intend to live up to her expectations, to exceed them, which is why I have remained here, to judge the moment precisely, so that I may say, this is where I am, and this is where I’m going, and this is why. I will follow only what is true, good, and real. Despite what I have seen not so long ago, I will not lose my faith, for in her multiple beauties she herself is correction and compensation for what is sorrow and brokenheartedness. “Let’s be practical,” she said, “about love. But not too practical.” I’m willing.
It’s Friday, the 27th of June, 1947. I don’t know what lies ahead, but the city is hot and the sky is cloudless. In quiet offices like this, many clerks, both men and women, are working in the heat, in the breeze of a fan, in the whirring of electric motors and the distant surflike noise of traffic. Barges and ferries are skidding across the bay trailing silver wakes backlit in the golden afternoon. Out to the east, the beaches of Long Island are still largely empty, for the season is only just about to begin. There the water curls into foam and thuds against the sand, and the wind will not tolerate in the dunes even a single tree. But inland are estates and farms and fields of summer sparkling in the heat and mist.
The trains that make the trip out there were troop trains not long ago, and in the evening as they rush from Center Moriches to Montauk their open windows glow yellow in twilight as ropes of steam and spark splay out against a cobalt sky. The train stations are of stone, and even close to Manhattan you see hayfield after hayfield. This is all going to change. Things are bound to get faster, lighter, and less substantial. The world, which is going the way of glass, will leave many fine things behind.
But so be it, for it leaves behind the dead as well. I came through the war and into the clear, and this is the clear. On this day in June, without a cloud, no doubt in the vast countryside that surrounds New York as an ocean surrounds an isle, hawks are rising into the blue, and as they circle and are held in apparent indecision by the ever-expanding view, they only seem to idle.
When the current that lifts them subsides, they will have seen all that is around them, they will have judged their moment and chosen their destination. And then in air both buoyant and invisible they will find their support, and, as the sunset cools the world, will begin their great glide toward the pure color of night. The last that they see other than the stars will be a distant band of violet and blue, a target of perfection they will never reach, but toward which they will have been aimed like arrows.
Perfection
EARLY IN JUNE OF 1956, the summer in New York burst forth temperate and bright, the colors deep, the wind promising. This was the beginning of the summer that was to see the culmination of a chain of events that had begun, like everything else, at the beginning of the world, but had started in a practical sense in March of the previous year, when the Saromsker Rebbe opened the wrong drawer.
A heavy wet snow had snapped some telephone lines in Brooklyn, many of which at that time were carried on poles above the ground. When these went down, the magnetic effect coursed its way through the webs of copper and steel in the telephone exchanges and made oceans of static that flowed like backwash into every telephone in Brooklyn. The Saromsker Rebbe had intended to use the telephone to propose a meeting with Rabbi Moritz of Breel, who lived on Ocean Parkway with his followers, who trimmed their hats in mink, whereas the Saromskers lived in Williamsburg and trimmed theirs with sable. The Saromsker Rebbe wanted to discuss a theological difference that now appeared reconcilable.
The Saromskers had taken in many survivors of the Holocaust, mostly children who had been babies when their parents had been murdered. Their devotion to mothers and fathers they had never known was fiercer and more concentrated than anyone might have dreamed, except perhaps for the parents themselves in the very moment they were parted from their children. Their prayers for the union of souls, and their silent and intense petitioning of God had the strength of all the winds of the world, of its invisible magnetism, of oceans and seas. But they were petitions that, for all their power and urgency, and though perhaps answered in time or beyond the limits of time, were not answered then.
A few of these children had been old enough to remember, some even to have begun serious study before their world was destroyed, and to these the Saromsker Rebbe would listen when, on a point of division, they held that things had changed, that movement was possible, especially in the New World and in the eyes of the young. Thus, soon after the war, the Saromsker Rebbe had swallowed his pride and begun to speak to Rabbi Moritz of Breel, who had also taken in a number of mysteriously intense young refugees. Theological reconciliation moves at a pace that makes the advance and recession of glaciers seem like the oscillation of a gnat in the golden light of a summer evening. Braced for a lifetime of cautious exchanges, the two rabbis had discovered that the telephone, more urgent even than the telegraph, was the most complimentary way for one to get the full attention of the other.
But because of the snowstorm the telephone was not working, and the only thing audible within it was something much like the experimental music then in vogue, of which neither rabbi had even the slightest inkling. The Saromsker Rebbe held the handset and tapped at the little button on the left side of the base, first three times, and then five. “Hello? Hello?” he said to the static. He repeated this six times over the space of an hour and a half, after which he gave up. Instead of talking on the telephone, he would do what came naturally and what was holy: he would write.
He wanted to write a short note, but with fountain pen in hand the Saromsker Rebbe was a dervish. Possessed of undying momentum and driven not by his own hand but by the ancient operation just of picking up the pen, he filled it, applied it to paper, and began moving it about. It then began to drag him after it like a plowman who had attached himself by a strong harness to a gigantic young plow horse before hitching it up to the plow, which horse was then stung by a big and very angry bee, and had run until he had crossed all of Bessarabia—through rivers, over fields packed with wildflowers so that the plowman emerged looking like a huge bush in full bloom with windmill legs, in long flights off cliffs, through startled towns, breaking fences that exploded like wheat on a threshing floor, through houses, skipping across the decks of boats, following the sun so that its light fueled him and he pulled the plowman without exhaustion. The plowman as he ran shouted prayers, and the horse, having long forgotten the sting, raced the sun as if to overtake it. Horses cannot be expected not to have such notions, or rabbis not to write all night.
In the morning, when the snow had fallen off the wires because of strong winds from the Ramapos, the Saromsker Rebbe found himself with forty densely imprinted pages that left him vibrating like a piano wire and that had to be delivered as soon as possible to Rabbi Moritz of Breel. Shaking not from fatigue but from having followed his pen all night, the rebbe rang his nickel-plated bell,
and one of his students, who had just started the day shift outside the study door, instantly appeared.
“I have written a little letter to Rabbi Moritz of Breel,” the Saromsker Rebbe said, holding the forty pages up to the light. “It must be delivered to Ocean Parkway as soon as possible. Who is the fastest and most nimble of our students? Who is smart but not so immersed in his studies that he would be crushed by a truck? Who knows the map, and will be able to come back? Who speaks English well? And who will make a good impression on Rabbi Moritz of Breel?”
The student said, “It’s simple.”
The Saromsker Rebbe knew that nothing is simple. “Really?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Roger.”
“That’s a name?”
“That’s his American name—Roger Reveshze.” Stepping forward, the student said, “Rabbi, he’s so fast he bounces off the walls. He speaks English perfectly, and he will impress Rabbi Moritz of Breel. He’s one of the ones from Majdanek.”
The children of Majdanek were the cause of many problems. Like other children of other camps they had their terrors and incurable sadnesses, but, for whatever reason, they even more so. For whatever reason, Majdanek was worse.
“He spends a great deal of time praying for his parents. He was just old enough to know them. He might study more, it’s true. He could be a better scholar. …”
“Who are we to say?” the Saromsker Rebbe asked. “When he prays, is it recitation?”
“No,” said the student. “When he prays, white light bathes the walls. You can see it through the cracks.”