by Mark Helprin
“Hardly.”
“But you have things on board.”
“A whole set. In my own cabin.”
“I did notice,” he said, “that you carry nothing. Not a purse, a bag, an umbrella, or a ring on your finger. No jewelry at all.”
“No jewelry,” she repeated.
“The effect is beautiful,” he told her, touching the line but not crossing it—for it had been moved.
“Are you one of those people,” she asked, “who think everything is beautiful?”
“No. That would mean that nothing is beautiful, or that I would have an eye like God’s. And then, more simply, everything is not beautiful.”
“What about that?” she asked, indicating the cliffs of lower Manhattan three-quarters ahead, shining in the western sun. “It’s commonly perceived as beautiful. People say that it is, and take pictures with their Brownies. What do you think?”
“I think,” he said, anticipating the point and going beyond it before he would answer her question, “that one of the finest things in the world, a saintly and holy thing, is when someone sees the beauty in something, but especially in someone, who is commonly taken as having no beauty at all. I once knew a woman who in the instant she understood that she was loved and that her beauty was perceived, hardly survived the intensity of her emotions. She was shaking in disbelief—one side of her face had been forever disfigured—because it was as if in that moment God were there. This was in Germany, in the Black Forest, just like a fairy tale, but it was true. My friend, who was with me and who fell in love with her, loves her to this day. He married her. They live in New Jersey.”
Catherine was disturbed because she knew her life was going off course, and she didn’t like things to go off course. He went on to finish what he was saying and move to a lighter note, not wanting to diminish in any way the feeling almost of weightlessness that he had had since he had first seen her.
“I do believe, then, in that sense, that there’s beauty in everything other than in evil, but that it would take a perfect and perfectly compassionate being to see it.”
“And what about Manhattan?” she asked, not as the test she had originally intended, for he had already passed that, but to bring him back. She, too, did not want to compromise what she was feeling.
“Don’t like it.”
“How come? Everyone else does.”
“It’s square, rectilinear, blocky. These buildings with their hard, unbroken planes are like lives in which nothing happens. Modern architects apparently haven’t heard of either nature or human nature.”
“You don’t like modern architecture?”
“No, but don’t worry about the architects. They’ll always be prosperous because they’ll never run out of bad taste.”
“I don’t like it much either,” she said, “but I don’t feel passionately about it. You must be an intellectual.”
“I’m not. The war saved me from that.”
“And what would be so terrible if you were?”
“They don’t go outside enough.”
“They don’t, do they.”
“Not nearly enough.”
“And you do?”
“I try,” he said. “And so do you, I think. I can see it in the way you carry yourself, and in your face—unless you got too close to your toaster.”
“I have one of those toasters that doesn’t get hot unless you’re out of the room so it can burn the toast,” she said parenthetically and as if addressing someone outside their conversation, and then she returned to him. “You mean then that what we see ahead is never beautiful, that breathtaking mass, those heights?”
“Oh, no, it is,” he said, “when the sun shines against its windows and they echo it. It is, when seen as a whole from certain angles and at certain times of day or night. When it snows, or when you consider the souls that inhabit it. Beautiful not on account of itself, of its design, but in the way nature showers it with unexpected gifts. And the bridges, with the double catenaries, running parallel, high above the rivers. . . .”
He wanted to move more cautiously and slowly, which meant paying decent respect to the mundane, so he tried. “What I do like, much more than art, is, for example, water running over rocks in a wilderness stream. Just the sound of it is more beautiful than all of Manhattan.” As he said this he swept his arm backward, briefly and tightly, to indicate the city. “There’s something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need do nothing more. It’s alive in a way that’s greater than any description of it, like what you see in someone’s eyes or expression, or hear in her voice.”
“Do you actually speak this way?” she asked him, rattled by the nature of his reply. Before he could answer, the ferry blasted its whistle three times, and as the first blast echoed off the cliffs of lower Manhattan the boat began to skate into alignment with the slip, its stern skidding toward Brooklyn Heights.
“When I’m nervous, or in an exam,” he said. “But I also do short answers and multiple choice.”
“You do? You can answer simple questions, simply?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I think I have a lot of them.”
4. The Moon Rising over the East River
NEITHER COULD DISENGAGE. To part now would be like lifting the tone arm in the middle of a song, the sudden silence inexplicable. And yet, as they had passed through the terminal they hadn’t exchanged a word. The darkness above, deep and cool, was broken by the repeated flash of wings as jagged and quick as lightning. Catherine felt as if she were in a cathedral. She would remember for the rest of her life the friction of her shoes against the rough floor that sparkled like the Milky Way, which the lights of the city had banished long before, and how despite the arbor of sound—boat whistles, ferry engines, water lapping, waves breaking, the jingle of gates opening and closing, taxi horns, the flutter of birds—they had been encased in their own magnificent silence, aware of almost nothing except one another, electrified with a sense of beginning.
The air was charged with sunlight, and the streets were crowded with office workers released from financial houses and shipping companies. So that they could stay together, and because the custom had yet to die, Harry offered Catherine his arm, and she took it, lightly, their second touch, a high, intense pleasure out of all proportion to what anyone casually passing may have guessed. He feared that were he not to introduce some sort of conversation as a guide and to slow the rush she would vanish as if in a dream. So he asked her where she would like to have dinner.
“At four o’clock?”
“They’re having dinner in Spain.”
“Where would you suggest, other than Spain?”
“We could gamble. The first place we see.”
“I don’t eat at lumberyards or hardware stores. I’m not a termite.”
“Look,” he said, “the automat.” A block and a half away, it was announced by its marquee of electric lights glowing weakly in the daylight. No man had ever taken Catherine out to dinner at anything other than an expensive restaurant that was thought to match her station, and never at four o’clock. “There,” he said, gesturing at Horn & Hardart, “for a first date.”
She disengaged from his arm, as if regretting all that occurred, and said, severely, “It’s not a date. It can’t be.”
He thought she might turn and walk away. It would have been exquisitely painful had she done so. Instead, she said, “The automat has the best iced tea in the world, somehow,” and led him inside. He felt as if he had just liberated Paris, and then Catherine told him her second untruth.
It wasn’t exactly a lie, and though it made her uncomfortable, it was something she had to do. She was troubled not because she would be misleading him but because it was necessary to mislead him. Despite her belief that they could not progress much further, she began to weave the deception. “At least it’s familiar,” she said. She had no knowledge of the automat other than what she had been told by people who had been
there. “I eat here a lot. It’s wonderfully cheap, which is why I like it. And it’s pretty good.”
“And no one bothers you,” he told her, “although sometimes I bother them.”
This made her more than slightly nervous. “How do you mean?”
“I’ll show you.” They walked over to a bank of little glass doors in the hot-food section. He guided her to the counter in front of a rank of empty windows, put his hand in his right jacket pocket, took out a nickel, and rolled it into the slot of a “Frankfurter and Baked Beans” chamber.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. “There’s nothing in there.”
“There will be,” he answered.
After standing with his left hand holding the metal-framed glass door slightly ajar for a minute or so, it shuddered, and a pleased smile came to his face. All the other doors locked shut, but not his. Soon, oval green ramekins holding little chariot-loads of baked beans with a hot dog reclining in the middle, like a very thin Prussian in an old-fashioned bathtub, were flipped like pie plates into each heated chamber. They came from the mysterious food-producing precincts behind the wall of little glass doors and the porcelain knobs one had to operate to unlock them.
When it was the turn of the chamber that Harry oversaw like a Brazilian Indian watching a rapids for the appearance of a fish, the back door opened and a hand appeared behind a loaded green dish. Harry grabbed the hand.
A scream came from behind the wall. “Lemme go!” It was a woman with the voice of Ethel Merman. Her fingernails were polished.
“Not until you put an extra hot dog on the plate,” Harry told her. “That’s the ransom.”
“Are you crazy? I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not supposed to.”
“Did anyone actually ever tell you that?”
There was a pause. “No.”
“Don’t you have discretion?”
“Let go of my hand! What’s discretion?”
“It means you’re not an animal or a dummy. You can think for yourself, you can act for yourself, you can protect your own interests, you’re not a creature of the boss.”
“What are you, Willie Sutton? Batman?”
“Batman.” He glanced at Catherine, whose eyes were wide. “Say something, Robin.”
“Hello!” Catherine said in a high, lovely voice, after clearing her throat.
“I’ll getcha one, but you gotta let go. I can’t reach it.”
“I’ve heard that before,” Harry said. “Can’t do that.”
“Then no extra dog. I’ve got discretion.”
“How can I trust you?”
“You can keep my ring as hostage.”
He looked at the ring. “Where’d you get it, Woolworth’s?”
“Tiffany’s,” said the voice, lying (and it knew it was lying).
“How do I know you won’t go to the police or the FBI?”
Suddenly, a second hot dog entered the chamber and dived onto the plate. “I took it from another tray.”
“Thanks,” said Harry. “You’re a sweetheart.”
Catherine looked at him in a way she had never looked at anyone before, truly, and then she asked, “Do you always do this?”
“Not when I’m in a hurry.”
She was speechless, but then she began to laugh, and the laugh came back as she bought herself iced tea and a buttered roll, and even when she rejoined him and sat down at a little table that wobbled every time either of them touched it or put something down. “Really,” she said.
“It doesn’t seem too outrageous to me,” he replied, “given that a very short time ago the law required me to jump out of airplanes and shoot people whom I didn’t know, and who were the sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers . . . of women just like you.”
It was a lament. The war was so close, and so many had served. She closed her eyes briefly in acknowledgment.
Other than the effortlessly surfacing memory of her, all he had was her name, which was not real, her telephone number, which was, and an invitation to call her on Sunday night: at eight, she had said, with alluring precision. That weekend he wandered in and out of the complex shadows of the Els, in the Saturday-quiet districts of deserted factories and lofts, in a chevron across and down Central Park beneath a canopy of new leaves coloring the air light green. He walked forty miles in those two days, and though he spoke to no one, words came silently in torrents.
In every residential neighborhood, he imagined that she might suddenly step onto the sidewalk, and at every market or store, that he might see her buying whatever she might buy—a scarf, a book, an emerald, it hardly mattered. He would round a corner, wanting to see her amid the shelves of roses and peonies banked in front of a florist’s. He would peer far ahead on the avenues and wide cross streets, hoping to catch sight of her at a distance. And dreaming that she would appear, he would scan crowds exiting theaters or moving through the parks in the armies of leisure and their stray battalions relaxedly ambling in all directions.
Manhattan and its vassal boroughs tirelessly generated images. Even smoke and steam rose beautifully, slowly unfurling in the play of wind and light like a silent song to redeem the memory of forgotten souls. As pictures endlessly flashing were the telegraphy of a superior force, so his infatuation, light and all-possessing, was the prelude to something finer. By what magic in the expression of a woman one could pass through the door to her heart into the heart of the world, to and fro in time, he did not know, but it was true.
On Sunday before he called Catherine he walked to the Battery, crossed over to Brooklyn on the Brooklyn Bridge, and recrossed on the Williamsburg. Behind and to his left, the Navy Yard was frozen into silence, the ships unfinished and the cranes stopped in their tracks as much reminders of the war dead as would have been white crosses. In the park, across from his apartment, he rested on a bench overlooking the playground in which he had played when a child. At four that afternoon the air turned rather cool for late in May, and mothers and nannies farseeing enough to have brought coats and hats put them on their children and their charges.
Watching the children, he noticed two things especially. A girl of about five, and her sister, who was no more than three, wanted to drink from the pebbled concrete fountain at the playground’s edge, but it was too high for either of them, so the five-year-old, who was fairly heavily coated and had a cloche hat, jumped up and, resting her stomach on the edge and grasping the sides, began to drink. But she was neither strong enough nor oblivious enough of the pain to hang on, and she began to slip off backward. At this, the three-year-old, in knit cap and pink coat, advanced to her sister and, also grasping the edge of the fountain, placed her forehead against her sister’s behind, straining to hold her in place, eyes closed, body trembling, curls spilling from her cap. Her sister drank for a long time, held in position by an act as fine as Harry had ever seen on the battlefields of Europe.
There were swings for older children, the kind with open seats suspended from chains, but the swings for infants were almost like cages: little wooden crates with safety bars, hanging from four ropes. On one of them a mother had placed her baby girl. In a camel’s hair coat, mittens, and a dark knit cap, the child was no older than eighteen months, quite chubby, and seemingly half asleep. But she awoke when her mother pushed her on the swing and it gained speed, gently rising higher with each push. Away from her mother, and back, but always rising, always returning, her eyes on the trees and sky. As she flew, with little wisps of her hair pressed back by the wind, she squinted, and as she rose it seemed that she easily apprehended something for which he had to strain and sacrifice to remember even as a trace.
That weekend, Catherine was not as sanguine as Harry, for although she might easily have had him at her door, by her side, or in her bed, merely by invitation or command, such power is not only the power of attraction but the cause of hesitation. In the automat they sat across from one another oblivious of everything else, except
that, because it was too early on, they would break their easy silence with conversation. And then they would fall into it again. That as love commences all couples must make bowers is written in the blood. And in New York they make them invisibly in restaurants, where, surrounded by a shell of something like glass that mutes the sounds of the world and blurs and intercepts its light, they would hardly notice if Vikings or Visigoths sacked the adjoining tables and set the place on fire. This obliviousness she had tried to resist, and by nature, in an act written in the blood just as deeply, she put him off until Sunday.
Though he wanted to call her and was able to wait only because he knew that he could and would, she could not have called him had he not called her. Thus, she tacked contrary to her character, which was otherwise and notably hot and decisive, and waited as if disinterestedly until Sunday night at eight, the expectation of which, despite her purposeful discipline, lifted her incessantly. For her, it had not been a minor encounter. There was something about him, something in his eyes that led far beyond his shy and careful manner upon meeting her, something momentous and grave enough to lead to a great deal of trouble, heartbreak, and anger. For she was already betrothed.
To pass the time, she did what she ordinarily would do. On Saturday, she went swimming, and though the water that washed over her as she dolphined through it sometimes became his embrace, with almost every stroke she also swam away from him, and at the end of her mile as she lifted herself up from the pool onto the mosaic deck, removing the horrid bathing cap, dripping, lightheaded, and strong, as the water ran off her it was as if they had parted and she was alone. And then came sorrow, longing, and a contentment bought by the borrowings of optimism, which she knew would be paid back with interest and then some were he not to call. As she walked home, every sight and sound was intense. At the corner of 57th and Park, on Saturday afternoon in the sunshine, her right hand unconsciously over her heart, she stood through two lights, oblivious of the cars and people coming and going, surging forward, stopping, starting. She stared down the south-shadowed side of 57th Street toward the East River, watching flags and clouds in the wind, the former as rebellious as a wild horse on a rope, and the latter sailing like weightless galleons.