by Mark Helprin
As miserable as he was for losing his brother, a steady course under the stars worked its magic. Had the night not been clear, morning would have come far more slowly, but it came fast enough, and traveling straight over a glistening sea in which he could see a raft of stars revived him.
Gliding through the oil-black sea under stars so still and dignified that they might have been decorations for the dome of a cathedral, Asbury began to realize where he was headed, and why. It was something that he could understand only with the gifts that come of early morning—one of those things, like a dream, that one cannot always piece together again to remember and feel in sunlight and day. And yet enough early risings and enough work of heart and memory will bring it, half alive, from unfamiliar depths, like a slowly panting fish, hauled on deck, with fading eyes that beg for the sea.
NO ONE knew how old Asbury Gunwillow’s grandfather was, but he claimed to be well over 175. “I’ve gotta be,” he would say. “I’ve gotta be a hundred and seventy-five or a hundred and eighty. When the Civil War began, I had just bought out my partner in a dry-goods store in St. Albans, Vermont. During the war, I moved all my stock to New York and set up next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We supplied the yards when they built the ironclads. By the time Lincoln was shot, our warehouse covered a whole city block.”
Then he would look to the ceiling, his gray eyes and delicate white hair would catch the light coming into the room, and his expression would turn to disbelief and confusion. “How could I be that old?” he would ask. “No one lives to be that old. And besides, I’m not clear on how the time went. But I remember, for example, where we lived during the war.”
“Which war?” Asbury asked.
“I don’t remember. Our house was in the middle of the city, on a hill that gave us views of the Atlantic, the Hudson Highlands, the Ramapos, the Palisades. . . . I could see everything from that house. I could see thousands of children playing in hundreds of parks. I could see them on the swings and slides. I could see the buttons on their coats. I saw the barges and ships on the river, and I knew where they were going, what they were carrying, and when they would arrive. I could see into every office, house, and cellar of the city, and not even a newly picked daffodil in a bottle of water on a windowsill could hide from me. I looked into every garden, over the shoulders of singing housewives, and into the committee rooms, the hospitals, and the theaters. I knew exactly what was happening at the Stock Exchange and what was going on in all the Staten Island steambaths. How could that be?” he asked, doubting himself. “I don’t know. But it’s true. It was like being up in a balloon on a clear summer’s day, watching everything.
“On either side of our house, like doormen’s epaulets, there were boxwood mazes with one-way gates. Each had miles of passages, and the leaves were so dense that you couldn’t fire a bullet through them. One balcony that looked north was suspended by cables. It had an airy feeling to it, and we used to sit there after dinner and drink tea. The dog slept in the corner, in his own special dog nest under a green awning. It was very cool there in summer, that’s why. Give a dog a cool place in summer and a warm place in winter, and he’ll sleep for the rest of his life. The balcony faced north. Every evening, in the north light, the rivers were strikingly blue. . . . Are you my son?”
“No, Grandpa. I’m your grandson.”
“Which one are you?”
“I’m Asbury.”
“Where were we talking about?”
“About New York.”
The old man stared vacantly ahead. “That’s the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“You ought to go there.”
“Why?”
“Catch it before it gets too late—the engines.”
“What engines?”
“All of ’em. They’re all set up to play one sound. They’re tuning, I think. It isn’t right yet, but it’s music. One will lead. The others will follow—and that’ll be the day.”
“I’m sorry, Grandpa,” Asbury said, “but I don’t understand exactly what you mean.”
“What are we talking about?”
“The engines.”
“Oh, the engines. What do you want to know about them?”
“You said that they’re all set to play one sound.”
“I did. They sit there as quietly as dogs, facing in all directions, some abandoned in the dark, some rusting and aging, others well tended. It doesn’t matter. They have souls.”
Asbury looked shocked.
“Souls—every one. They move, don’t they? Who do you think sets things to moving? Nothing that moves lacks a soul. I ought to know. You ever heard of a bellwether? It goes for engines too. There’s one engine that’ll pick up the intervals as they pass through it, and echo them just right. Then all the others will follow.
“If I was young like you, I’d go there myself,” he said. Then he had a coughing fit. He turned purple very quickly, but just as rapidly cooled into blue, and finally breathed easily in white. Asbury wondered how the old man could breathe so little. He seemed to inhale and exhale only a few times each minute. Asbury must have wondered this out loud, for when his grandfather was once again in possession of himself he said, “Because I don’t need oxygen. I’ve already come to all my conclusions. I’m just slowly gliding down. Someday I’ll be as light as a feather. Promise me.”
“Promise what?”
“Go to New York.”
Asbury had promised. But until the day that the wind had taken him, he had forgotten what he had vowed.
Now, after a few sunny days on the sea, he was surrounded by a low-pitched rumble that he took to be the thundering heartbeat of a city, and he had no doubt what city it was.
HARDESTY MARRATTA and Virginia had fallen in love in the obsessive and total way of two people who have seen the same truth which they cannot quite comprehend. And though the times were not as promiscuous as they had been several decades earlier, no one would have blinked had they taken up residence together (Virginia’s apartment was just barely big enough for three) or maintained some sort of indecisive relationship that, like many others of its type, was half scandal and half hesitation. But they didn’t. Instead, they courted almost as their parents had done. Perhaps it was that, save for when they were small children, Hardesty had not known his mother and Virginia had not known her father. They had been brought up on tender descriptions, and had heard the stories of their parents’ courtships in the most glowing terms. And perhaps it was because Virginia had been unsuccessfully married, and was still wary of visions, even if they were her own; whereas Hardesty, who had been drafted into combat twice in his life, had already suffered conscription doubly. For whatever the reason, their passion unrolled in a long, easy wave, and they courted, slowly and gently, throughout the severe winter that followed their first meeting.
Hardesty lived in the attic of a house on Bank Street. The roof was peaked, and he had to bend when passing through doors, but the neighborhood was quiet and all he could hear apart from the wind and snow was the sound of bells ringing through yards and gardens as churches patiently struck the hours, their halves, and their quarters. Cats and squirrels made astounding leaps and tightroped the telephone lines in a show of hunting and escape that put the greatest circus to shame. When a cat walked in the snow, it moved like an exiled queen, the epitome of caution and pride. Once, a hawk alighted briefly in the courtyard, but only long enough to look under each of its mottled wings and then rise up. The air was often choked with snow or sweet wood smoke that darkened things and had a way with time, suspending it. And when night came early with its snowy blue light, the world looked like that quiet place depicted in paperweights filled with water and confetti.
Every afternoon, just as The Sun was put to bed, Hardesty called Virginia from a public phone (neither had a telephone in the house, believing it a wasteful extravagance). They discussed the composition of dinner, and later, as they walked from different directions toward Virginia’s apartment
, they gathered ingredients from markets and stores on the way. Sometimes, if Virginia were working late or Hardesty had finished early, he would meet her in Printing House Square and they would go home together. Most of the time, though, Hardesty had a solitary walk at dusk down Greenwich Avenue. He thought there was no finer street in the city. Whenever he passed St. Vincent’s Hospital he felt as if he were inside a great Russian novel. Its looming walls and large lighted windows spoke of things eternal; and seated next to timid interns, in local restaurants with wood fires and evergreen wreaths, were people of fashion and means who seemed in comparison to be astonishingly empty. How could they help it? The interns carried with them the truths of death and dying, and when they walked across the street in the snow they did not shed the strange melancholy of their sleepless and terrible year.
Though he felt obliged to carry out the task his father had skillfully engineered for him in San Francisco, Hardesty was held in place by powerful attractions and satisfying responsibilities. Thinking of how it would be to leave Virginia made him sadder than he could tell. The way things were set up, he would have to betray her. He truly loved her, but she was not willing to cross the Atlantic with him or anyone else, having had her sleigh ride to Canada. Thus far, she had successfully held him back. And, then, there was his job.
Praeger de Pinto had found in him not just a kindred spirit, but something better—a competitor. Praeger was never sure that Hardesty wouldn’t think of what he himself was thinking, beforehand, and, despite what this implied about Praeger, Praeger considered it a magnificent talent. He had asked Virginia about Hardesty on several occasions, because he wanted to hire him. But he did not know in what capacity: he thought perhaps as a political writer, or a neighborhood reporter, since he had discovered that Hardesty knew Italian. Furthermore, he wanted Hardesty to ask for the job. One Saturday afternoon, they met by accident at a skating pond in Brooklyn.
This place was famous for a vista of New York that compressed the city unerringly, so that one could look down the rifle barrel of a long avenue and see it laid out as if in an oil painting. Sitting on crowded benches in a rectangular yellow building with roaring wood stoves, and windows that faced Manhattan, Praeger, Virginia, and Hardesty had pounded their skate blades on the floor to throw off the ice shavings and then stared in a daze through the ten-degree air. “I wonder what that strange-looking tower is,” Praeger had said, almost to himself, referring to a Moorish campanile of rose-colored stone. And, to his surprise, Hardesty told him.
“That’s the Clive Tower,” Hardesty said, “built in 1867 by John J. Clive, in honor of his son, who died at Mobile Bay.” He went on to discourse about its place in the city, its relation to the history of architecture, and the engineers and architects who built it.
Praeger asked about other buildings. Hardesty knew most of them, and soon the spots of fire that Praeger had set worked them selves into the blaze of a lecture in history, architecture, poetry, and thunder—a portrait of the city from the skating pond, that amazed Praeger, Virginia, and Hardesty himself. Only when they saw a group of local boys playing hockey by torchlight did they realize that it had grown dark.
“How the hell do you know all that?” Praeger asked.
“I’ve been reading and walking around a lot.”
“What did you do in San Francisco?”
“I didn’t do much,” Hardesty confessed. “I was resting after the army. I rented for a couple of years. But when I came back the first time, I managed to get a doctorate in the history of art and architecture. That’s probably what you want to know.”
“It makes no difference to me,” Praeger stated, “as long as you know what you’re talking about, and I think you do. Why don’t you write a few pieces for The Sun and The Whale? If they’re as good as that little dissertation on Western civilization that just went by, you can have a regular column.”
“Marko Chestnut might illustrate it,” Virginia added.
“You see,” Praeger began, turning toward Hardesty because he knew that Virginia already knew, “The Ghost has an architecture section: section thirty-nine, on Mondays and Fridays. But it’s a personalities page. For example, they recently had a piece on a character—I think his name was Ambrosio D’Urbervilles—whose ‘design statement’ was to stuff an entire apartment from floor to ceiling with dark purple cottonballs. He called it ‘Portrait of a Dead Camel Dancing on the Roof of a Steambath.’
“If we compete with them, we have to do it as if they were something other than what they are. To avoid their influence, we try to pretend that they don’t exist. To counter the mirror-image effect, we fight them as if they were actually serious opponents. This takes much imagination on our part, and elevates them a great deal. But Harry Penn would have it no other way; and, these days, neither would I.”
“I understand,” said Hardesty, with the sound of the stoves thundering in his ears like sunstroke. “I read the thing about the camel dancing on the roof.” As the hockey players’ torches flew across the night ice under the glow of lighted canyon walls, Hardesty told the editor of The Sun that he would try his best to portray the city.
Within a week, Hardesty and Marko Chestnut began to wander in search of those places constructed to hold and keep the spirit. These were not hard to find, because they existed literally in the hundreds of thousands, from Riverdale to South Beach, and from Riverside Drive to New Lots. On Thursdays, The Sun ran Hardesty’s commentary across two full pages. In the center of each page was a large pen-and-ink drawing by Marko. They gave The Sun’s readers Brooklyn from the air: there it was, spread out before them like a pinioned eagle trying to eat the oyster of Staten Island. They gave them the chaos of Fourteenth Street, the chimneys of Astoria, silvered sections of the East Side, Gramercy Park as misty as an English garden, and Manhattan’s golden spires as seen from Weehawken at sunset, when the city of glass burns like a star in space. The more they found, the more they could see to find, and they did very well by The Sun.
But all this only made Hardesty increasingly impatient to see the just city. He resolved to overcome all his feelings and inclinations, and get on a boat to Europe. Though he loved Virginia, loved her even more than he felt responsible to his father, there was something else apart from either of them that drove him on. Its power astounded him and made him think of those men who leave their families to go to war. And now he, too, was about to trade, to take the cold wind for the warm, because of something that was not his own, and that spoke to him from a time so distant that he had to admire it merely for its tenacity. He was wrong to leave, and he knew it. But simply to be wrong was one thing. To be wrong for the sake of a perfectly just city, was another.
He told Virginia on the first of June, and it caught her completely off guard. She cried fiercely, and then she attacked him. She tried to pull his hair, and landed a punch or two. “Get out!” she screamed in rage. When he did get out, she slammed the door and bolted it, and he heard sobbing that broke his heart. After all that, he couldn’t just knock at the door and step back into the house, so he bought a ticket for a ship that was soon to depart, and went back to his attic, cursing summer.
The day that Hardesty left New York he took a taxi through the city on his way to the ocean liner. It was early on a Sunday morning in the beginning of June, in perfect weather. Though it was cool, serene, and blue, no one was in the streets but the sun. Passing through Chelsea, Hardesty heard on the taxi driver’s radio an aria that seemed to come from the buildings themselves, their abandoned inner courtyards, and the souls of their inhabitants. He could not have loved Virginia Gamely more, and he wondered if what he assumed lay at such a great distance were present in this very city—or even in Virginia herself, if the future were to be fair and imaginative enough to take refuge in a single soul. If that were so, then he would be doing the wrong thing. Midway through the aria, he saw a familiar figure crossing Hudson Street with an easel over his shoulder and a box of oils under his arm.
Marko Che
stnut was returning from painting the Hudson early in the morning, when the light was best and gangs of hoodlums were just going to bed. The Hudson was a thousand rivers, changing with each variation of the light—mild at dawn, whitecapped in a strong autumn wind, royal blue under an empty sky, covered with white ice, green and gray in winter storms, a mist-covered mountain lake in August. But Marko Chestnut preferred summer mornings with their strong and unambivalent light.
Hardesty had the taxi pull over. He jumped out and called to his friend, who was always wary, because he was often attacked when he painted outside. Marko began to scurry away. “It’s me!” Hardesty shouted.
“I thought you left already,” Marko said, squinting through his glasses.
“I’m on my way now. What time is it? The boat leaves at eight.”
Marko Chestnut hesitated, looked at his watch, and said, “It’s seven. How come you left so early? The pier for the Rosenwald is only three blocks from here.”
“I didn’t think it was that early.”
“Have you eaten yet?”
“No.”
“Let’s go to Petipas and have some breakfast,” Marko Chestnut suggested. “We can walk from there to the boat.”
They had breakfast in the garden at Petipas, watching birds in the sunlit ivy on the garden wall, and listening to ship whistles echoing off the cliffs of the Hudson. “How can you leave a woman like that? And for what? You know she was left once before, by that Canadian lunatic, what was his name, Boissy d’Anglas?”