The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  “I did. I wasn’t even young. When I was young I was working. It’s gold,” he said of the trophy. “It was the only prize, and it weighs at least ten pounds. I weighed it once.”

  “We’ll see,” the jeweler said, placing it on a balance and then expertly exchanging cylindrical brass weights until all came right. “Five kilograms exactly—eleven pounds.”

  “How much would that bring?” asked the ’round-the-world racer, who had to wait while the jeweler ran tests and weighed the mass of gold yet again before turning on his calculator.

  “I can give you sixty thousand dollars.”

  “You can, and you can also give me more and still make a large amount of money.”

  “Sixty-two thousand, five hundred.”

  “A little more.”

  “Sixty-three thousand.”

  “I mean more than that.”

  “I stop there.”

  “I go up the coast to Sarasota.”

  “Sixty-five, that’s it.” In the jeweler’s mind, he had just lost several thousand dollars that he had hoped for, but he softened when he realized how much so few minutes of work would bring him still.

  “Okay.”

  “It’s too bad that you have to give up the trophy.”

  “No. Even though I’ve provided for her, and she can provide for herself, my daughter might need the money someday—one always lives and hopes just beyond one’s capacities—and every time she might think of selling this her heart would break a little, not to mention when she actually did. I don’t want to break the little girl’s heart. I’ll wire the money to the trust. She won’t even know, but it will be there.”

  “How old is she?” the jeweler asked.

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “That’s not a little girl anymore.”

  “She’s a physicist,” he said proudly. “She’s at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. And she’s got a boy—my grandson—in high school, a brilliant jerk, just as I was when I was fifteen. Only I wasn’t brilliant, and I apologize for that, but I never wore my clothes backwards, and I was able to speak in English.”

  “Yeah, they wear their clothes backwards.”

  “My daughter. … I was born to see her in her little corduroy jacket and at my very last I’ll be thinking of what she looked like, buoyant and overjoyed, as she rode on my leg, standing with both feet on my foot, holding on below the knee. That’s why I said ‘little girl.’ I know she’s a woman, and so does she, but every time we embrace, we go back. And I know she knows exactly how I feel, now that her own son has long since been unable to ride in the crook of her arm.”

  THE LAST TIME his daughter had been at what she referred to as his “house,” she had asked, “How can you possibly think of disconnecting the telephone?”

  “How can I possibly not think of it?” he answered, knowing that this made no sense.

  “How are we supposed to speak to you when we’re at home?” She was skirting the main subject, which both he and she knew was coming.

  “You can use your cellular phone,” he said with a twinkle, mocking all the telephones in the world as he took yet another step on the plank of pretended senility that somehow pleases both parent and child—as inexplicably as the baby tooth, hanging by a thread, that his daughter would worry when she was six. “Remember the baby tooth that you used to flap back and forth like a pet door?” he asked.

  Stunned, she said, “No.”

  “Well, it’s like that.”

  “What’s like that?”

  “It’s because I love you. You did it because you loved me, but we’re different people.”

  “I did what?” she asked.

  “I know, Anna, and I know that two telephones are required to complete a discrete circuit, just as you knew not to worry your tooth.”

  She tried another tack. “How can you, a man who directed a great corporation. …”

  “It was a shitty corporation. I hated it.”

  “You hated it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were rather cheerful, considering.”

  “I did the best I could, but, believe me, I never liked that company.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t human and it wasn’t alive, and all the thousands of people whose lives were molded around it were like sequins on a corpse. It had no desire or regret, it didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, it couldn’t breathe or kiss or sweat. I wasted my precious time on it, my life, and it will never die.”

  “But that’s how you made a living. It’s how you provided for us.”

  “That’s why I did it,” he said, staring not so much into space as into the past. “You know how you could spin your top for hour after hour, and see God-knows-what in the whirling city inside, where trains and boats moved ingeniously over painted fields and rivers?”

  “Yes.”

  “You weren’t the only one. I could, too. I wasn’t bored when I took care of you. I had to leave in the morning because I had to: I didn’t want to.”

  “Even when you were my age?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even as a man, back then?”

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “You have a baby’s mind.”

  “I do.”

  “How did you survive the war? How did you command a destroyer?”

  “Anna, a child knows what’s important, what’s essential, what’s eternal. It’s no small thing to keep a child’s mind. And to answer your question, war is a clash of essentials. People who in civilian life are taken in by the castle of clouds we build as we grow old don’t understand the nature of the forces that in battle are both terrible and sublime. But that’s just a comment. I got too old for war a long time ago.”

  “Da Da,” she said. She had called him Da Da when she was a child. “What if you fall, and can’t get up?”

  “Then I wouldn’t be able to get to a telephone anyway.”

  “We’ll never hear from you again.”

  “I’ll use the phone at the dock. I’ll call you.”

  “What if you get sick?”

  “That’s okay, Anna. If I get sick and I can’t get to the telephone, I’ll die. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I don’t want to be a hospital case. Really. There’s something to dying on the ground, or in a room where the air comes in the windows. You know how I hate fluorescent lights and windows that don’t open, and how I love what I have here—the sound of birds, the deep green, the ocean, even the abject heat that makes the shadows so blessed.”

  “What about your friends? How will you keep in touch with your friends?”

  “In the past ten years or so, most of them have gone beyond the reach of the telephone.”

  She nodded quickly, her eyes closed.

  He knew what was coming. “The world,” he said, “the whole world, and all of time—sometime in my lifetime, and I don’t know exactly when, it must have been a wide and diffuse line—crossed the line nonetheless between the two great ages. First was the age of patience, into which my mother and father brought me. And now we are in the age of impatience, which I have never loved. Impatience in everything. In loving, in understanding, in action, even in seeing. I’m not suited to it.”

  Anna, his daughter, went to his arms, just as she had done as a baby, a child, and a young woman, and cried. And then, as always, she was better, very quickly becoming sunny, because, as he had many times, he took her cry into his heart.

  IN 1961, when his wife was not quite forty, someone in a passing yacht had photographed her in the bow of a sailboat they had chartered in Hawaii. Though neither party had hailed the other, an eight-by-ten Ektachrome print had been sent from Charlotte Amalie to “Inverness II, Honolulu,” eventually reaching New York in February.

  A note with it said, “I took this photograph off Lahaina, Maui, in December. We then made the passage back to Los Angeles, down the coast of Mexico, through the canal, and to Charlotte Amalie, where we’re holding over. Normally
, I would be surprised by a photograph, among hundreds, of someone I don’t know. But I was not surprised. The image, and her smile, had never left me. I had thought that perhaps I was investing too much in memory, but when the pictures came back I realized that I had not invested enough.”

  The stranger had photographed Anna’s mother, Sabrina. Her grace and beauty had rolled across the water to him like the flower-scented air that cascades over a beach in the morning. The bow of the Inverness II was dipping into a smooth blue sea. Behind its white chevron were the green hills of Lahaina, topped by white clouds with shadowy blue bases. And above these clouds were pieces that had been torn from them by winds aloft and were engaged in battle with patches of Bristol, delft, and sapphire.

  She was perched on the raked chrome rail, over the anchor that projected from the tip of the bow, so that, facing sternward, she appeared to be floating without care not merely above the rolling swell but above the deck. A scrim of foam had been knocked aside by the passage of the glistening hull. With her head turned to the passing boat, her hair fell across her shoulders and was lifted lightly by the wind into a soft fullness, semigolden, chestnut brown.

  As relaxed and unself-conscious as a young woman might be, she was a study in perfectly flowing limbs and flying, floating, weightless, airy majesty. During the war she had been a Wave, and her confidence had never shaken in even the war’s most anxious moments. What had always impressed him about her most had been a natural, indelible grace that made even the loveliest things around her lovelier still; a tranquillity alert nonetheless to the excitement deep in all things; a self-possession that said she understood the shortness and beauty of the breath we take of the world. Without that impenetrable grace, every other quality could be shattered like glass—brilliance, beauty, force, spark, all would melt away in the face of loss and terror.

  Anna’s copy of the photograph was newer and brighter. His, slightly faded, though still the most vital color in his life, was on the huge pine table at which he ate, corresponded, and read. The lamp on that blond table, and the photograph of his wife, had become the center of a life that found itself migrating more and more toward the sea. She was gone, but he loved her so much in memory it was as if she were an angel perpetually rising from the waves.

  WHEN HE HAD WARNED of the storm for a week before its coming they had mistaken his certainty of vision for fear. Now that they themselves knew, and were overtaken with panic, they forgot that he had told them, and could not understand how he could be unafraid. Every morning he had arisen before dawn and observed the insistence and darkness of the sea. The waves that rolled in now, even in the bright of day, were long and woolly. They seemed as tired as refugees, and moved not as if toward something but as if away from it.

  A policeman visited. In his view, here was an old man who probably couldn’t write checks or carry a bag of groceries, and who would have to be persuaded and cajoled for the purpose of saving his—to be truthful—worthless life. So the policeman had an air of exasperation even before he began to speak. “The storm,” he said, “will destroy everything.”

  And the old man said to him, “I know.”

  “That seems to make you happy,” said the policeman, who had a mustache and a bulletproof vest.

  “What seems to make me happy?”

  “That the storm will destroy everything.” The policeman was thinking of his own house on the mainland, close to shore, and his boat, his pool, his garden.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you happy?”

  “If I appear to be happy, it’s not because the storm will destroy everything, but because I know that it will.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Of course. Knowing is more than half the battle. The rest is just stuff, you know.”

  “Well I don’t get that,” the policeman said.

  “To get it, to really get it, you’d have to talk to my wife.”

  “How is that?”

  “She went through the war in the Pacific without flinching or bowing her head, or perhaps even shedding a tear. Her brother was killed. I was reported lost. The atmosphere was like what it is now, before the storm, but she glowed, always. As they say, she didn’t miss a beat.”

  “I understand, but you’ve got to get out. One trip in the car with as much as you can take. The roads will be jammed.”

  “June, nineteen forty.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We’ll be coming through on a sweep starting at three tomorrow afternoon. If you’re still here, we’ll have to arrest you for your own safety.”

  “You mean propel me, don’t you? You don’t want me to be arrested, you want me to be propelled.”

  “I have no idea, but you have to do what the law says.”

  “I agree,” said the ’round-the-world racer, with strange enthusiasm. “If the law says that it knows the nature of the storm, it knows the strength of my house, and it knows what is in my soul, and that therefore I am to do what it dictates, who am I, what is the storm, what is my house, what is my soul, to contradict the law? Tomorrow, I won’t be here. The house will be shut—windows boarded, power off, loose things battened—waiting to be destroyed.”

  ON THE SEA the only law was God’s law, the physics of wind and blue water and the rolling of the waves that with continual urgency push boats across oceans that ring the world. War of any type is different on the sea, in that it is almost all maneuver. When ships are firing at other ships or planes, or planes are leveling to lock-in a torpedo drop, or a line of cruisers or destroyers is dueling, the immense force overwhelms mere men and contrasts with the delicacy of their existence. But even in the greatest tests of fire there is a sense of separation, a separate dignity, a separate identity. Sailors are delivered to war, riding, and even in the bloodiest engagements the sea cleans up quickly, quieting any chaos man can make and sealing the scene of battles with the inflow of innocent waves that whisper and relax.

  In ocean racing you leave no track that lasts for more than minutes. Though each moment is fresh and dangerous, the rules never change: the only variations are in the way you play them. In racing, one moves not much faster than a man can run, tense and intent upon seconds, watching for maximum swell in the spinnaker, sensing the changing angle of the wind so that its collision with the mainsail leaves as little as possible of slip and escape. In this patient and continual sensing of that which cannot be seen, a sailor deepens in thought. Going around the world courting the invisible at every moment teaches not only that mystery has force, but that it can deliver.

  That which cannot be seen, in this case something as simple and explicable as the wind, had propelled him around the world and called forth his unceasing attention lest an ungraceful move dismast or capsize his craft. That which cannot be seen had warned him of the storm far in advance of its coming. For ten days, subsumed by the rhythms of nature and necessity, he had been preparing for his final engagement, which now was rolling at him from across the Atlantic.

  Though he was afraid, he was not afraid, and though his heart was broken he was happy. All the practical things had been taken care of. The money had long before flowed into trusts. Paintings and memorabilia were with Anna. The letters had been written, the plans laid out. In the last week, he had sold or sent the last of his valuable possessions. A few cartons of books were on their way through the mail. All he had left were his glasses, a watch, and clothing. In the bathroom, a toiletry kit. In the kitchen, a plate, bowl, wineglass, two pots, knife, fork, and spoon, can opener, and cutting board were the only hard items remaining.

  In the days before the storm he had slept deeply and well, on the floor, with two blankets—one folded for a mat, the other, of the lightest weave, for the late hours when the wind made a cover necessary even on the Gulf Coast in September. Shorn of most things, feeling more and more agile as the storm approached, he found less and less desire to replay the scenes of his life. Now it was as if, in facing what wa
s to come, he was able to pull from the past everything of value and make his peace with it so he could leave it behind. In truth, in leaving it behind as he had never been able to previously, a seal was set upon it. And when finally it left his hands and escaped his possession it took on a life of its own.

  AT THE MARINA on the mainland most of the boats had been taken out of the water, a useless act, for the ocean would rise to lift them from their cradles and throw them inland to end their days smashed, demasted, and on their sides. The rain was already driving, though not yet in sheets and whirlwinds, and with everything battened down and wet, and the sky dark gray, it looked not like Florida but like Maine in a gale.

  He was on the last barge, with the police, who had made their sweep. He guessed that within the hour not a single one of the fifty or sixty people on the barge or moving anxiously about on shore would remain. And there was not much more than an hour or two before one would not be able to navigate the passage out, even under power—and his boat had no engine. But it was an ocean racer, a Halifax 40, as stiff and strong as a lance, empty and light, with a keel that would enable it to hew to the windward side of the channel, closer than usual because the depth of the water had increased with the rise in the sea. The barge had slid right over the dock that it had spent years butting with its prow, the swimming pool at the marina was inches and minutes away from the jailbreak of its waters, and the last-minute evacuees were rushing along flooded paths that were up to their knees.

  He went to the shed where the luggage was stored when on holidays a crush of people went over to the island and the things they carried choked up behind them. Now it was empty, warm, and dark except for thin stalks of light pressing in through cracks in the siding. It was as good a place as any to listen to the sound of one’s own heart and breathing, to know that even this close to the end, with answers not yet apparent, they seemed, nonetheless, beautifully close.

  In the shed the water rose, flowing wavelessly through seams that had conquered its resonance. In the darkness, with his eyes closed, he was battered by the images of those who were gone and those he would never see again; of his father walking with him on an Atlantic beach in sunshine and wind; of his mother, tranquil and beautiful, in a white wicker chair in the second summer of the First World War, listening to a little boy who could hardly talk, but as rapt with attention as if he had been Ralph Waldo Emerson; of his angelic daughter, sleeping, secure in his arms; and of his wife, when she was young, in the bow of the Inverness II as it dipped and rose in the sea off Lahaina, when, for a moment, the world was perfect. These insistent memories, of his wife as she threw back her head to clear the hair from her face, of his infant daughter, her eyes squinting into the newly discovered cold wind, her little hands held up before her face to protect it, these insistent memories, soon lost but to God, he would take with him into the sea.