by Mark Helprin
“God,” she said, partly because of the retsina, “this is wonderful. It doesn’t taste like what you would think grilled octopus would be. I never would have ordered it.”
“Nor would I.”
“Why did you?”
“The first time I had it was in a tiny village in the Peloponnesus. It had taken several days for me to walk there over a high, deserted spine of mountains, but it was on the coast, not that far by sea from Piraeus. When I arrived, however, because of the difficulty and loneliness of the journey, I thought I had come to the end of the earth. Then a yacht full of Germans appeared, flying a big flag with a swastika, and the shutters were suddenly flung open in what turned out to have been a little waterfront restaurant that served whatever it could to the yachting trade.
“I didn’t like it when the Germans came ashore. They were all so tall, and there were so many of them, and while I had a walking stick, they had a yacht.”
“Victor is even taller than you are,” she said, “and he has a yacht.”
“The yacht that didn’t show?”
She confirmed this with a lifting of an eyebrow in an unmistakably condemnatory, and yet fairly hopeless, expression. And she saw very clearly and could not banish from her mind the yacht coming up from the south on humid and silvery air, bringing with it insistently another age, the rear guard of time, moving across the sea in force and at a different pace and as arrestingly as a ghost. Haunting, seductive, easy, it called for many kinds of surrender, each comfortable and tragic. Were she to have been rowed out, she would have been lost to this. She would have regretted and grieved for the rest of her life. She had come that close, and would have disappeared had it not been for the winds and tides.
Not knowing what she was thinking, Harry snapped her back to the restaurant, and then off to Greece before the war. “You know what happened to the Germans?”
“They lost.”
“That, too, but before that, maybe as an omen, they couldn’t start the outboard on their dory. They tried, each of the men taking turns, for a whole hour. Nothing. It was a delight to watch, because I knew they would have to turn to me.”
“Did they?”
“Of course. It was an Evinrude, which they pronounced Ayfinwootah. No wonder they couldn’t start it. And they were really obsequious when they asked me to see if I could. I got into the dory and looked it over. Practically the first thing I saw was that the bleeder valve on the bulb in the gas line was open.”
“What’s that?”
“To prime the engine you have to pump some gas into it by squeezing the bulb. It has a bleeder valve, as on a blood-pressure cuff, that’s circular, and you can’t always tell if it’s open, but I saw that the threads of the screw were half shiny and half dull. The shiny ones had normally been inside the valve, protected from the salt air.”
“And they didn’t see?”
“They were not people who are used to doing things for themselves.”
“Oh,” she said, thinking of herself, her family, and Victor.
“So I knew I could do it, but I wanted to make it seem more complicated. I removed the engine cover and used my fingers to move and palpitate the most mysterious-looking parts. I didn’t know what the hell they were, but I was jiggling them around at blinding speed like playing the piano. The Germans were looking at me, their mouths hanging open. Then I put back the cover really fast, and sort of set things up, including closing the bleeder valve and squeezing the bulb. It was empty at first, and then it filled, and I knew I had it. I set the choke and the throttle, turned to the audience, said Alles klar!, and gave the starter rope a single pull. The engine started with a roar before the rope was halfway out. If they were alive at the end of the war, when they saw the American flag on our vehicles, over our camps, and above their ministries, they might have thought once or twice of that moment.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, not because she hadn’t wanted to hear, but as an encouragement for him to close the circle.
“Because, when they left, they thanked me in stilted English—I acknowledged in worse German—and they gave the restaurant owner a wad of bills. I hadn’t been able to afford the restaurant. I was on a tight budget, and while they were being served grilled fish and lamb, I ate a can of sardines that I had carried with me.
“So the ‘restaurateur’ ran over to me and, picking up my pack, herded me onto the concrete dock where his restaurant was. The village was called Nea Epidavros. There were some very flimsy tables and chairs on the pier. He told me in Greek that the Germans had paid for my dinner. And the next thing he did was take off his shoes and shirt and dive into the water. I thought he was nuts. When he surfaced he was holding an octopus, which he then spent half an hour tenderizing by smashing it (dead after the first blow) against the concrete. He looked like a madman, or maybe a Guatemalan woman doing her laundry on the rocks by a river. The rest of the afternoon he marinated it, and by dark I had one of the best meals of my life, done on charcoal just like this, with retsina and all the rest. I could see the stars there so brightly I felt I was sailing among them. I was alone, and the Germans had disappeared over the sea.” He paused. “I really wish you had been there.”
“I never would have ordered it,” she said.
“Neither would I. Like quite a few things in my life, it was the result of unforeseen action by Germany.”
Riding the troughs and peaks of the waves, they were happy in one another’s presence, with little awareness of anything else, frightened that it would not last, frightened that it would, staring at one another with great draughts of what felt like love, and then withdrawing coldly in the face of practicalities. For her, loyalty, prudence, staying the course, the expectations of her society. For him, the fear that she was so much unlike him, although she wasn’t, and that even were he to win her she would soon stop loving him.
“Did Victor earn the money to buy his yacht, or did he inherit it? I’m not trying to set him up. I inherited my father’s business, after all.”
“Then you should know.”
“Know what?”
“That there’s no division in such things. With the Marrows, the Mellons”—she hesitated—“and the Hales,” naming three families famous for their wealth, “no one has any right or claim to the money any more than anyone else. It’s just there, and each generation is trained to ride it. Victor’s father didn’t make the money either, but on the other hand he did, as does Victor. No one feels either proud or ashamed, although, in this set, one feels as if one is truly better than people who don’t have money—as if they live half blind in the underworld and only the Marrows, the Mellons, and the Hales are free and can see.”
“Would you feel that way?” he asked, wondering about the Sedleys.
“No,” she answered. “I’ve been educated away from things like that.”
“By what?”
“Love,” she said. “If you can love, you can’t think that way. Even when I was a very small child, I played with the Bonackers’ children. I loved them, and understood that I was no better.”
“The Bonackers?” He thought they might be a family.
“The farmers and fishermen of the eastern tip of Long Island.”
“You lived there?”
“We did, for a time.”
“And this is a strong and durable feeling?”
“This is the root of my life.”
“I want, more than anything else,” he said, “to know you.”
“In the biblical sense?” She was embarrassed, but excited, to have said that.
“Yes, but that isn’t what I meant.”
“You can’t,” she said, “because I’m going to marry Victor. Last weekend, when you and I met, he was going to take me on the boat to East Hampton—his house is in Southampton—where he was supposed to announce our engagement at the Georgica. It’s a club, on the beach. There was a gale off Norfolk and he had to run into the Chesapeake. The reception was canceled, but it’s on
for Sunday, a second time: two hundred people. We can’t cancel. He’s got the ring, a diamond the size of a ping-pong ball. He didn’t give it to me, because he thinks I might lose it.”
“You can end it with the flick of a finger,” Harry said. “There’s no law. You can at least postpone it. He’s young, you’re young, it’s allowed, even expected.”
“He’s thirty-eight, closer to thirty-nine. His birthday’s in September.”
“He’s got as many years on me as I have on you.”
“And more if you count his character and his health. He seems much older. I’m supposed to like that.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Catherine, do I have a chance with you?”
“Of course you have a chance. But I have to marry him. Everyone expects it. I’m more or less married to him already.”
“No, you’re only twenty-three.”
“Since I was thirteen . . . ,” she said, sorry that she would have to change the course of things this way.
“Since you were thirteen, what?”
She didn’t answer.
“When you were only thirteen?”
“Almost fourteen.”
“And he was thirty.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“You were a child.”
“Not for long.”
“Do your parents know?”
“When I started in the theater, my father took me aside. He walked me out into the garden, where he explained to me that theater people have different mores than we do, and that actresses are expected to be loose, but that I should not be ashamed of, and should guard, my virginity.”
“You don’t owe Victor anything. He should be imprisoned. He should be shot. You certainly don’t have to marry him.”
“There are other reasons.”
“Like what?”
“I’m an ingénue. Do you know what happens to ingénues?”
He didn’t.
“Most of them,” she said, “not being strategic thinkers, don’t either. By the time you’re twenty-five, they drop you. One in a thousand make the transition to leading lady, and the rest live the remainder of their lives in thrall to the brief period when they were in full and fragile bloom. But no one else in the world remembers, and no one cares. I don’t have illusions about my career, even if I have hopes.”
“I don’t see the connection.” He understood that she might be enchained by a number of things that he could not simply dismiss, but it seemed that the prospect of her freedom, and her right to it, had never been simply stated. “You don’t have to marry so soon. You don’t have to worry about finding a husband. And, God knows, you certainly don’t have to marry Victor.”
“My clock is different than yours,” she told him, “and I’m not exactly fresh.”
“That’s absurd. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“It does. It does to most people. It does to me.”
“It doesn’t to me, and I’m right here.”
“I know you’re right here.”
“Postpone it.”
Her expression darkened. As she spoke, she trembled from emotion and anger. “You want me not to marry a man who has been . . . fucking me . . . for ten years, since I was thirteen years old, who everyone in the world thinks is going to marry me, who has bought the ring, invited two hundred people, hired the caterers, reserved the club, and told the goddamned, the goddamned New York Times? And this, this you want, on our first date?”
“I do,” he said, as if it were a vow, which it was.
8. What You’re Trained to Do
HE REMEMBERED HER song in every particular, how she carefully pronounced each word, and that each word was like a work in itself. He had never heard English or any language spoken with such lucidity, care, and dignity. The skillful enunciation and timing rode on the river of her voice, a voice that was so arresting because although it was of her body it was almost as if her soul were carried on it for an excursion in the air. It would not fade along with youth. Nor was it corruptible. Nor was she, in contradiction of her own opinion, corrupted.
She had insisted halfheartedly that he not see or call her, but she had allowed him to take her home. On the way, she said, “I’ve been telling you my stage name. It’s not my real name.” He then expected a multi-syllabic Eastern European name, or perhaps, given her accent, a name like Phelps or Horsey. “It’s not Catherine Sedley,” she told him somewhere in the Fifties, as they passed a French restaurant with a Chinese-red awning. “It’s Catherine Thomas Hale.”
Just the sound of her name was for him as beautiful as a wave slowly curling in the sun. Perhaps because he was so disarmed, he failed to make the connection to the Hales she had mentioned along with the Mellons and the Marrows. And, besides, he wasn’t thinking along those lines. She had had him walk her home because she wanted to stay with him as long as possible, and she wanted to shock him, to show him the house so that the battlements of wealth and family might make it easier for him to withdraw. When he saw it, he did see that there was a great deal to overcome and that he was on almost unfamiliar ground. But he wasn’t turned back, because although he was quiet, courteous, and contemplative, he had another side as well, to which he had been educated by jumping out of airplanes into battles with a most capable enemy.
After they parted, he hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do, but he had the happiness of someone who knows what he loves. And although she was nearly certain that her course was determined, and that for what had happened with Victor she would pay the price she was sure she owed, she too was unaccountably happy, oppressed and joyous in alternation, like the rhythm of a scythe sweeping to and fro in a field of wheat, or the pendulum of a clock as it clucked back and forth.
But they carried forward and did what they had to do—she at rehearsal, singing; he at his loft, the machines spinning—and for each the city was filled with the presence of the other.
On Thursday she was delayed because she had walked to rehearsal in a daze and stopped to look up at the racing clouds as she listened to the sound of buses, and watched horses pulling wagons, and knife sharpeners at work at their whetstones. The traffic, as usual, fought like charioteers at the Circus Maximus. As she blithely walked-in late without noticing him, the director yelled at her. And then she, like the all-powerful star she wasn’t, said, “Hi, Sidney,” and laughed, defusing his anger merely by showing it could not reach her.
Though at every go-round she sang without fault or imperfection, she was distracted; and though consummately professional and admitting no variation in technique, she seemed fragile nonetheless.
“Are you tired, Catherine?” Sidney asked, in fear that his question would unleash the tirade of an indispensable leading lady, though it unleashed no such thing.
“I’m not tired,” she said sweetly, and, of all people, when she said something, she could say it sweetly, firmly, seductively, authoritatively, mysteriously, or any way she pleased.
“How are you? Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine, Sidney,” she said, and then, with eyes closed and a slight smile, she turned her face up as if the beams of the spotlights were the warmth of the sun, and took in a long breath. She had the angelic expression of a mother nursing a baby. No one could figure her out, and the orchestra was silent, listening for something.
“Catherine, would you like a long weekend?”
“A long weekend?” she asked, coming partially out of her reverie.
“Would you like to take a rest tomorrow? You’ve had your song down for weeks. We can put an understudy in your place for the day.” He thought she might bristle at that, because understudies are to performers what colonels in dictatorships are to their chiefs of state.
“Okay,” said Catherine, and abruptly walked offstage.
“Catherine,” Sidney called out, “not now. Catherine? Tomorrow!”
She didn’t hear him.
“She didn’t have her glasses on, Sidney,�
� volunteered the playwright, who was there too much.
The director lowered his head and opened his hands as if releasing a pigeon. “She can’t hear without her glasses?”
“When I can’t hear something very well, Sid, I put my glasses on,” the playwright said, truthfully, if lamely. “Don’t you?”
“No, Barton, I don’t.”
Catherine was already on the street, having changed but having forgotten to remove her makeup. She walked as if above the sidewalk, in full faith and as if she knew the future, or as if she did not have to know it.
Harry kept thinking about the ferry, that it had delivered her up to him, that everything had happened quickly, that everything seemed set so strongly. As she exited the theater on Thursday he was in the loft, a little more than a mile away. As he circulated from task to task, filling in where he was wanted, the windows were open and he could hear bells and traffic and the rumbling of the Els at a far distance rising and falling with the wind. Somewhere in the sea of sound she was walking or sitting, or perhaps looking in her dressing room mirror, with electric light flooding her face.
As Harry was helping to carry an anvil, Cornell glided up to him. Perhaps because he was tall and thin, and old enough to be respectful of arthritis, Cornell had a light step. “Could you come into the office?” he asked, as a command.
Having put down the anvil, Harry closed the door to the office, because Cornell’s expression seemed to indicate that he should.
“We just lost half of Saks Fifth Avenue,” Cornell said, referring to their long-established Saks account.
“We did?”
“They called on the telephone. Not even a letter. Just like that. Our display space is going to be cut by half, and, naturally, the orders, too.”
“They never liked that we have a store around the corner,” Harry said, beaming.
“What are you so happy about? Are you out of your mind?”
“No.”
“Well, what?”
“Nothing.”