by Mark Helprin
“I’ve been back for only a few months,” he said. “Demobilized. I’m not really doing anything.” It was, in this circle, an answer neither unexpected nor unadmired.
“Demobilized? Weren’t you an officer?”
“I resigned my commission.”
“I resigned my commission at Sweet Briar two years ago,” said the young one, and then, like a pack of hunting dogs making a sudden turn upon a scent, the conversation turned to Sweet Briar, horses, and hounds. Harry, who liked horses and dogs, though he rode neither, listened with the detachment of an anthropologist. What his dinner companions knew about animals could have filled an encyclopedia. They had a real connection to nature and the land. Even the owner of the taxi fleets, who had houses all over and took taxis between them, spent long days in high boots, in reeds, blinds, boats, and brush.
Then another bell rang, melodiously but with the timing of troopship claxons dictating shifts in the dining halls and on deck. Dinner was over—all nine hundred carefully wrought calories of it, including a chocolate mousse in a cup the size of a half dollar—and the dancing was about to begin.
Everyone had had a great deal to drink, and half the women now walked like beagles. Harry had gone far beyond his normal limit. So when the music swelled, it would be easy for anyone to find a willing partner provided he or she could stand up, and the ballrooms would quickly fill. The tedium of tight, confining clothes and small talk, which are to the soul what acid is to metal, would soon disappear, as ordinary mortals, if they could, seized upon the opportunity to move like angels.
As he was getting up, Harry saw that the dowager of profound visual neutrality was sharing something with the taxi-fleet man, and it was about him. “I think he’s a Goatly,” he heard her say.
“Which Goatlys?” was the response.
“The ones with the dean of St. Michael’s.”
“You think he’s Warren Goatly, Edmund’s son?”
They drifted off.
Harry imagined that he might see Catherine dancing. He both dreaded and desired this. He had seen her dance to a bar or two during rehearsal, just a twirl, really, as a transition from her song, and what he saw in those brief moments was what dance, when not too studied, not too disciplined, can accomplish as if by nature and in defiance of it—the movement, by the deepest commemoration, to another plane; the transcendence of the body by its own art; the giving over of oneself to the invisible wave that runs through all things.
He imagined her dancing to the music coming from the ballrooms, her movements both poignant and irresistible, as impossible not to love as when the wind slightly lifted her hair. And what would he do if she was paired with Victor? He feared witnessing them in the greatest and most intense intimacy that is both allowed and takes place mostly in public.
With little scope of what was going on, who was who, or what he himself was going to do if faced with Catherine across a room as time stopped still, he began to move toward the sound of the music, a route that took him through the main dining room. As he was wending his way past tables that waiters had begun to clear, he saw at what appeared to be the head table five people in animated conversation and distressed withdrawal, with speech and silence alternating in a tapestry of disconsolation. The scene was anchored by two older men who had the restfully stiff bodies of those who, even if still athletic, paid the price for it. And yet their wives, handsome women beyond their prime—one still comely—seemed to direct whatever action there was. These he took to be the Marrows and the Hales, the more attractive and younger couple, who were also physically smaller, being the Hales. The third man, who looked to be in his forties, with little hair and a big, square face, he took to be Victor. It seemed that they didn’t know where Catherine was, either.
Victor looked like a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. At this moment at least he was so stolid and gray that he could easily have been mistaken for a post office. He seemed neither cruel nor kind, intelligent nor unintelligent. He, too, was distressed, but not so much as the others. Nor did his presence give Harry any clue of attack, and Harry could think of nothing to say should words become necessary. The anger that had sometimes grown to storm subsided, and he feared that he might laugh.
As he observed from a standstill and as if from invisibility (for they would hardly be aware of a stranger amid the waiters), Catherine stepped from the path onto the boardwalk and increased her speed. When she crossed the terrace, its hard surface made her realize that her shoes were filled with sand. She was breathing through her nose, as her lips were tightly closed lest they tremble, and her hands were gently gathered into fists. Although a few stragglers who were not by then dancing greeted her as she passed, she neither heard nor saw them. Her hair was slightly disheveled, and the sea wind had brought to it pearl-sized drops of clear water that sparkled in the many lights. The sequined top, which fit her closely and sent out dozens of communicative flashes, was like some sort of glorious feminine armor. Her arms and shoulders, which seemed capable of wielding a two-handed sword, were bare in a way that was not vulnerable but the sign of martial confidence and courage.
When she entered the dining room, the families rose. She was behind Harry and to his right. He saw her in the periphery as a fast-moving, sparkling orb, and as she went past he smelled her perfume. She glanced at him and continued forward as if he didn’t exist. About to follow her, he checked himself and remained in place.
Her father stood and took several steps toward her. Before anything was said, they embraced in the embrace that can exist between fathers and daughters, all-forgiving even as they fight. Her mother, having seen without doubt in the way Catherine moved that whatever was going to occur was inevitable, merely smiled.
Catherine whispered something to her father, who, looking as if he had just been hit by a bullwhip, wearily pulled back. Then to her mother, who as if pleased that whatever she had correctly foreseen was now about to come and go, smiled yet again, in resignation.
Victor was inert, but with the patience of a hunter. His parents stepped forward graciously to greet the young woman who was to be their daughter-in-law. They didn’t know what was coming, and had no impulse but that of kindness and respect. Seeing this, and hurt that she would have to rebuff them, she shook her head to warn them off. They understood instantly. And Victor, though inert, knew as well. As if the whole thing were unimportant to him, he said, so that it was audible to Harry and half a dozen waiters, “Oh crap.”
“That’s what you say?” Catherine asked, infuriated. “That’s what you say?”
She seized a half-full wine glass with her right hand and pitched it into his face. Although it shattered, brought up blood, and covered him with red wine, he hardly flinched.
“Oh, God,” her father said, not in distress but as he would have in reaction to a particularly garish pair of golf pants.
The Marrows were paralyzed.
A dozen guests were now looking on, having been drawn in by a sixth sense of scandal. As a covey of thrush in the fall woods suddenly rises, its wings mastering the north wind, so the Georgica Club would erupt that evening in the flutter of having found something to talk about other than real estate, horses, and problematic servants.
Catherine pivoted angrily and walked toward the exit. After a short distance she turned back and shouted, “That’s what happens when you do what you did, you bastard. It sleeps. But then it wakes.”
As she marched past Harry, she said to him, as if to a dog that had followed her down the lane and was going to make her late, “Go home!” As far as anyone knew, she was addressing all the onlookers, who had no idea that Catherine would never speak to a dog in that fashion, or care that it had followed after her, unless she loved it.
10. Distant Lights and Summer Wind
“I SWAM HERE,” he said, over the sound of the motor furling the roof of her convertible. Standing by the passenger side, he watched the top rise and fold.
“You swam from New York?” Even in her present sta
te she could not help but think this was amusing.
“Across the inlet.”
“In a tuxedo?”
“I held it above the water. I was naked. I was almost swept out to sea. And now I need a ride.”
The top was down and tucked in, the motor silent. Victor watched from the main entrance. He had heard her laugh.
“How is it,” Catherine asked, “that when I’m most upset, you can make me laugh?”
“You know,” he said, “if your eyebrows were like woolly bears, and your lips were thick, and you spoke like a dunce and couldn’t sing a note, I’d still be in love with you. You know that.”
“And then you make me cry,” she said. “What are you trying to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Well you’re not succeeding.”
Quietly, he said, “I came out here and I was going to do something. I didn’t know what. But I didn’t have to. You did it. You didn’t see me until you were going full steam, did you?”
“Actually, I did,” she answered. And then, like a taxi driver, “Where’re you going?”
“Home.”
“Get in.”
After he had become accustomed to the shock of her driving—“That’s all right,” she had said, “I know this kind of road: I grew up here”—he asked if the car in which they were riding belonged to her parents.
“Not a Chevrolet convertible.” It was black and boat-like. “My mother wouldn’t have a convertible, because it would muss her hair, and my father has to have a Rolls or, before the war, a Mercedes. It’s my car. I keep it out here.”
“Where are we going?”
“You tell me. What direction are we headed in? You think I know?”
He looked up at the stars, and, unperturbed by the sea wind except to sparkle, they told him. “West-northwest.”
“That’s just because the road bends that way.”
“So, where are we going?”
“New York.”
“We won’t get there until three in the morning, if that. Do you know the route?”
“Past Southampton it’s anyone’s guess. No one knows. It’s like never-never land.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Then let me ask you this. How much gas do you have? Gas stations won’t be open.”
She looked at the gas gauge, moving only her eyes. “Half a tank.”
“That won’t get us to Manhattan.”
“It’ll get us to Hauppauge,” which she pronounced Hop Hog, “and past there it’s a kind of hell where gas stations and diners stay open all night, at least along the big road.”
“You drive pretty fast.”
“I always have,” she said.
“It makes me a little nervous, even though I do, too. I don’t knock down mailboxes.”
“Was that a mailbox? I thought it was a dead branch.”
“It may have been a branch, but it had a metal flag and it said Lucastrino.”
“I should send them a check. Would you like me to slow down?”
“I would. And you didn’t eat, did you?”
“I was having a crisis on the beach. When I have a crisis, I don’t eat.”
“We’ll find a place that’s open late, somewhere in Hop Hog. We’ll take it easy, we’ll go slow, I’ll drive some, and we’ll pull into Manhattan at dawn and see the sun reflecting from a million windows. I’ve seen that at the end of the day more times than I can count, but never at sunrise.”
“Nor have I,” she said. “You see, we look right into it.”
They took many wrong turns on roads that bisected huge fields of potatoes or hay, and they would come to unmarked junctions where great oaks were clustered after several centuries safe from the plough, and there in the dark, the new leaves choking the moonlight, they would have to choose. When they chose wrongly, they would still come to a beautiful end, overlooking a bay, inlet, or the sea itself, the waters ruffling in moonlight and summer wind.
Slowly, they made their way west, through a silent and benign landscape just sixty or seventy miles from the largest city in the world. The roads gradually became wider and less rural, and they had the sense that they were nearing a paved highway that was connected to the industrialized maze, as macadam always was. But they were wrong, for they came to yet another barrier of water, a dead end where the road disappeared into a bank of sand.
Braking to a stop, she said, “Less than a quarter of a tank.”
“Let’s see where we are,” he suggested, opening his door.
She turned off the lights and engine and joined him as he climbed the bank. When they reached the top they saw an immense bay, its little waves sparkling dimly in the moonlight. The wind blew through the sharp dune grasses and made them bend, and on the other side of the water two radio towers, black against a slightly bluer sky, blinked in red, their distant lights beating rhythmically. Beyond, somewhere invisibly to the west in an endless volume of darkness that its throbbing lights would make as pink as coral, was New York. “This reminds me,” she said, “of the kind of scene they light when they make a sunrise. They always start with dawn, and hold it proportionately longer than would nature. When I was a little girl I wanted to go into the theater because of the music and the light. I didn’t have many friends when I was growing up—none, really. But then my mother took me to a play, where the light and music seemed better than the world itself. I’m so stuck on that, that when I see the real thing it makes me think of the imitation. When you watch from the dark, as I did for so long, that’s what you get.”
The wind blew her hair back as she stared across the water—her posture, without deliberation, unrelenting, her arms crossed against the sequined top to protect her from the chill. At first, concentrating on her face, and watching the distant lights reflected in her eyes, he hadn’t noticed that she was cold, but as soon as he did he removed his jacket and laid it over her. She pinched closed the satin lapels and was relieved not to have the wind flowing through her almost insubstantial gown.
He put his arm on her left shoulder and turned her until they were facing one another. She thought—she was sure—that he was going to kiss her, as she wanted him to, and he did, only once. The shock of it was such that, for the moment, once was enough. Many kisses, days of kisses, would come. Now he pulled her close to him, and with his left hand he took her hand as it clasped the lapels of his jacket. And then he looked at her, bowed his head, and closed his eyes as if in prayer. By the time he straightened not long after, she had accepted him as she had never accepted anyone else in her life. “I wanted so much,” he said, “this evening at the Georgica Club, to dance with you for as long as we could. I really wanted to dance with you.”
“You will,” she said. “You will. Ten thousand times.”
The night now had a different quality. They were happy to leave the oaks, the silvery fields, and lights that beckoned from the other side of windy bays. You never reach the lights across the water, but their beauty on the summer wind is such that you never have to. The forward progress of the car homing in on Manhattan, where its engine would be like a bee in a hive of innumerable others, was as cheerful as being in love, which, of course, they were.
Somewhere way to the west of Hop Hog they found an open gas station and filled up the car. Twenty minutes farther on, they were on roads blazing with neon and incandescents and crowded with tire shops, furniture stores, and huge cylindrical tanks the sides of which moved up or down as they filled or emptied, but only very slowly, so that many people and nearly all children were mystified by the empty steel frames where once solid tanks had stood, and then by the return of the solid tanks. Farther on, where the ground was shadowed by streetlights and split by railroad tracks recessed into the streets, and the overhead trolley wires were like bolts of lightning that had been stilled and straightened, cleaned and pressed, they saw a diner. It was elevated on a platform, with four wings in a cross, like the Georgica Club itself, glowing from within like a window
at Tiffany’s, and open to serve policemen, cleaning ladies, and emergency returnees from the Hamptons.
“Stop here,” she commanded. He pulled in. As their doors slammed and they stood bathed in white light, she said, “This light reminds me of how we found out the war in Europe was over, just before it was announced. We were in East Hampton last year at the beginning of May. It was very warm one night, so we decided to walk home on the beach after we had dinner at the club. If you walk slowly it takes about half an hour. As we were turning toward the cut in the dunes that leads to our house we noticed a kind of glow, and we could see our shadows against the sand. The three of us turned at once. Not far from shore was a ship that had come up behind us from the west. The ship was ablaze, but not burning, as we had seen on the horizon many times during the war. It was close, with electric lights strung from the bowsprit to the masts and down to the fantail. It was so beautiful, for so many reasons. For years, everything had been blacked out. You could hear freighters, battleships, whole convoys—but at night you never could see them.
“My mother said, ‘Someone’s going to get a ticket,’ but my father told her, ‘No, no one’s going to get a ticket. That’s Henry Stimson’s yacht.’ I remember. He said, ‘That’s Henry Stimson’s yacht, Evelyn’—my mother’s name is Evelyn—‘and if the secretary of war turns on his lights like a Christmas tree in the middle of the ocean, the war’s over.’
“You’ve had dinner?” she asked as they took their seats in a booth. They wanted to sit side by side, but also to face one another. They ended up facing. It was three o’clock in the morning and they felt no desire for sleep.
“That was yesterday,” he stated as he scanned the menu, “and it was Champagne. I’m going to have a club sandwich and a milkshake, to bring me back to earth.”