by Mark Helprin
“I’ll have the same.”
“Do you always do that? You did that the last time.”
“It’s a habit left over from Victor, but last time and just now it’s what I really wanted. Maybe we have the same tastes. We’ll see. Tell me, what were you going to do tonight? Were you going to disrupt the announcement? Punch Victor?”
“I wouldn’t have punched Victor, he’s as big as the Hindenburg. I had no plan. I thought that when I saw you I’d know what to do. Then I didn’t see you and I thought I was in the wrong place and had missed my chance.”
“I saw you,” she said.
“You did?”
“I did. As I was coming out of the ladies’ room. I was resigned to everything that was about to happen, and not too unhappy about it, either. I’ve been with him for so long I’m used to him. It would have been like an arranged marriage. There are worse things.
“And I hadn’t thought about you . . . for at least two or three minutes. I was putting you out of my mind. I could have. Maybe I would think of you every now and then for the rest of my life. Maybe, if I lived to be eighty, I would regret that I had not lived with you, and maybe not. If I had nothing to remind me of the past few days, my memory of them and you would eventually have been shorn of detail. . . . That’s what happens. People say, Think if we hadn’t discovered Emily Dickinson. I say, Think of all the Emily Dickinsons we’ve never discovered. The greater part of things is secret, lost, undone. I do believe that.
“And then, as they were playing that song—I would like to sing it; I think I could sing it very well—I stepped into the hall and nearly had a heart attack. There you were, awkward and out of place, a bottle in your hand, held by the neck. Even a waiter wouldn’t have done that. You looked like someone who had walked into the club from the beach to crash the party. People do it now and then, and it’s easy to spot them.”
“I was spotted?”
“Like a leopard. They knew. I heard them, but you were too prepossessing, too good-natured, to kick out. You were wandering alone, it was obvious, until that idiot Ross Underhill got to you and you started talking to him. He’s a nice idiot who, like most idiots, doesn’t know he is one, but even other idiots won’t talk to him, because since he got back he’s been trying to raise money for an expedition to catch the Abominable Snowman—in Austria. It was very kind of you.”
“I thought he was just drunk.”
“He was. He always is.”
“And, besides, even idiots have souls. Even idiots can be loved.”
She hesitated, enjoying the seconds that passed as one enjoys time elongated in music. “Then I had to decide. It didn’t help that I had numbed myself with expensive alcohol, and that the ocean was close by. It made me think, This is what is important, this is what we live for. And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, You have only one life, you have only one life.”
Soon after they began to eat, she got up and crossed the empty diner to a telephone booth from which she called her parents, a sudden rush of love and regret prompting her concern that they might be worried about her. But they hadn’t been as concerned as she had thought, and had not only gone to bed but to sleep.
Her father told her that the garage at home in New York was full. She knew this already. “Don’t park the car on the street,” he said. “It’s a convertible; you can get into it with a penknife. Put it in the garage on First.” She would. They said nothing about what had happened. They would wait until she brought it up, as she would have to, but in saying nothing they had lifted a weight from her. When she returned from the telephone, Harry’s jacket casually draped over her shoulders, her purplish-black sequins an earthquake of elegance in the diner in Commack or wherever they were at four, now, in the morning, it was as if her life had opened up in the clear. She showed it. Her smile was almost as beautiful as her song, which was to say a lot.
“They’re all right?” he asked.
“They were sleeping.”
“No explosions?”
“No.”
“Reprimands?”
“None.”
“Got off easy.”
“Got off easy,” she repeated, “especially considering that this is the end of Willie and Billie.”
“Enlighten me.”
“My father is William Hale III, and Victor’s father is William Marrow III.”
“What happened to Victor?”
“His older brother was the Fourth, but he was killed in the war. People call my father Billy and they call Willie Marrow Willie. So the joke was that when Victor and I had a boy he would be William the Fourth, and the firm he would inherit would be Hale, Marrow—like Hail, Caesar—but otherwise known as Willie and Billie. I think that name would have stuck. Wall Street is like that. Don’t tell anyone, but my father hates it.”
“Hates what?”
“The Street.”
“Oh. But it was all planned out?”
“On a track.”
“How do you know Victor’s not following with a posse?”
“If he is, he probably went the wrong way. Besides, he doesn’t do things that aren’t carefully engineered. Insult him, and two years later you’ll find that your checks bounce. You know how some things are warm to the touch, like wood or wool, and some aren’t, like marble or steel? Victor is marble.”
“I’ll keep an eye on my checks. By the way, why Catherine Sedley?”
“My stage name.”
“I know, but why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted you to think I was poor. It’s a reflex we have, to protect ourselves from insincerity.”
“I didn’t think you were poor, just not rich.”
“But you didn’t think of me the way so many people do, did you? It’s disgusting when they do. In freshman year in college, it would make me cry.”
“I didn’t, and I don’t now. I never will. You blind wealth right out of the picture. Do you understand?”
“No,” she said, although she did.
“Catherine, I want to court you, slowly.”
“Court,” she echoed, thinking of the word and idea. She felt deep emotion, for what she had lacked and what she now might have.
“Victor certainly didn’t. Has anyone?”
“Harry?”
“Yes?”
“Victor raped me. Not figuratively.”
Taking this in, Harry was silent. Remarkably, she had said it unemotionally. “Then maybe I should kill him.”
“No. It was a long time ago. I can never put it behind me, but I don’t want to take it forward. And no, no one ever courted me.”
“During the war, when you were in college?”
“We danced with servicemen at the USO in Philadelphia, and some fell in love with me, but it was inappropriate. They were boys, and I didn’t meet the right one. The sailors got back on the bus and so did we. The Harvard boys had to go back to Cambridge to study and drink. And Victor managed to be there whenever we were free. I would meet him at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. I didn’t go in chains, Harry, and no, no one ever courted me.”
“I would like to, if you’ll let me.”
“Out of charity?”
“Charity!” He was amazed. “My God, not out of charity. I would like to show up at your door, in my best suit—not a tuxedo—and take you out. I would like to meet your parents, and get you back before midnight, or one, or whatever, gently.”
“They don’t care.”
“I do.”
“You’re not bloodless, are you? Are you?” she asked.
“Oh no, Catherine, hardly, but I know when to hold, to go slow, and I really want to court you as you have not been courted. Every little thing. Every touch. Every word. I felt that the first time I saw you, as you were walking onto the ferry, before I had any reason to.”
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“How did you know?”
He shrugged.
“We were told,” she began, “that courtly love. . . .”
“Told by whom?”
“By our professors . . . that courtly love is twisted.”
“How so?”
“Demeaning. Controlling.”
He straightened in his seat, lifting himself until he seemed taller, unconsciously positioning his upper body as if for a fight—not with Catherine, but with an idea. His eyes narrowed a bit as they seemed to flood with energy. “I don’t know who told you, but I do know that whoever said this was a fucking idiot who must never have seen anything, or risked anything, who thinks too much about what other people think, so much so that he’ll exterminate his real emotions and live in a world so safe it’s dead. People like that always want to show you that they’re wise and worldly, having been disillusioned, and they mock things that humanity has come to love, things that people like me—who have spent years watching soldiers blown apart and incinerated, cities razed, and women and children wailing—have learned to love like nothing else: tenderness, ceremony, courtesy, sacrifice, love, form, regard. . . . The deeper I fell, the more I suffered, and the more I saw . . . the more I knew that women are the embodiment of love and the hope of all time. And to say that they neither need nor deserve protection, and that it is merely a strategy of domination, would be to misjudge the highest qualities of man while at the same time misreading the savage qualities of the world. This is what I learned and what I managed to bring out with me from hell. How shall I treat it? Love of God, love of a woman, love of a child—what else is there? Everything pales, and I’ll stake what I know against what your professors imagine, to the death, as I have. They don’t have the courage to embrace or even to recognize the real, the consequential, the beautiful, because in the end those are the things that lacerate and wound, and make you suffer incomparably, because, in the end, you lose them.
“And then, you know, I’m not talking about Sir Lancelot. It’s different now. What I mean is deep consideration, devotion. That’s hardly demeaning, and not controlling,” he said, falling back in his seat. “I’m sorry. All I want is to be with you.”
“And you are,” she said. “And it’s four-thirty in the morning and we’re in a diner in—where is this? Commack?”
“I think it’s Commack. It looks like Commack.”
“You know what Commack looks like?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Come on,” she ordered, “we can time this for sunrise.”
“You drive even faster than I do,” she told him from the passenger seat.
“I’ve never had an accident.”
“Neither have I, apart from things.”
“Oh, things. Who cares about things? Did you ever knock down a house?”
“No, not yet.”
“And you’re only twenty-three.”
“Well, you were gone for four years.”
“But I drove.”
“You did?”
“Sure. Sometimes I had a jeep. I took them all over Germany. I told you. And half the time it wasn’t on roads but through open country. I got to know jeeps so well I could use them to take out a splinter. You would hit fewer mailboxes if you didn’t move in bursts—foot on and off the accelerator. It’s not a potter’s wheel. And you don’t have to whip it. Hold it steady and it’ll run steady. That would give you more hope of survival. Would you like me to drop a few miles an hour?”
“I feel perfectly safe with a dullard driver like you.”
“Catherine, when you were driving I could look at you, and that compensated for any peril.” It was true.
“Today,” she said, “I’ll sleep until noon and then go to rehearsal. But tomorrow there’s a matinee of the physics play, so we can’t use the theater and I’ll be free. Call me.”
“I will.”
“Next weekend, can you come out to East Hampton? We won’t go anywhere, just stay in the house and at the beach. I don’t want to humiliate Victor any more than I have. In a few weeks, no one other than Victor will care, but next weekend all the mousetraps will be set.”
“I’ll pick up the clothes I left at the station.”
“Do you play tennis?”
“Not really.”
“Good. I’ll beat you. Then I’ll train you. Chess?”
“Not too badly, but you have to practice. My chess is dormant because in the army everyone played cards.”
“Good, my father can beat you.”
“Why is that good?”
“Give him something. You’ve already beaten him in that you’ve got the future, and he worked for Bernard Baruch in the First War and was too old for the Second.”
“But he’s your father, one of the leaders of the economy. I don’t even have a profession.”
“No matter what anyone else may think, he’s not very impressed with himself. No one who inherits can be. And when he looks back, he’s unhappy. That binds me to him as nothing else.”
“Why is he not, if not impressed, at least content with himself? How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, engaged in a way that showed him that when a beautiful woman speaks beautifully it becomes all the more devastating for one who is in love with her. “I’ve thought about that a lot. You don’t want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don’t want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never touch it. My father works not to get money but to work. But real work is valued in money, so he does work to get it—as a measure. But there’s always someone richer, always someone better at something than you are. We judge narrowly, by measures rather than by the soul. It wouldn’t matter if you were at the top of everything. You know why? I figured this out because so many people approach me with the idea that I’ve got it made. No. You see, everyone, no matter what his accomplishment, is made to feel insignificant by the scale of things. Not by nature, which is miraculously kind in this regard—but all the things that are done by groups of people and nations. The economy. War. Cities.”
“The economy? Cities?”
“Yeah,” she said charmingly, sweeping her hand to reveal the kingdom around them of small grocery stores and car repair shops. “People do little things, like making change for the sale of a muffin, sweeping up a tenth of an ounce of lint, putting a stamp on an envelope, or brushing a dog. Then they look about and see vast constructions and efforts: huge airplanes crossing the Atlantic at three hundred miles an hour; buildings that rise a quarter of a mile into the air; networks of roads that cover millions of miles, a single square foot of which a human being would be hard-pressed to lift; armies that invade and conquer continents; cities that stretch to the horizon; causeways; bridges; atomic bombs; huge buckets of molten steel, as big as locomotives, gliding noiselessly through the darkness of a mill; and money that sloshes in the billions past back-office clerks who worry about the next dollar.
“Every time you open your eyes, everywhere you turn, we’ve built immense cities to inhuman scale and thrown bridges across rivers and straits, and yet, individually, well, most people can’t even draw a house, much less build one, or the Empire State Building. No wonder everyone feels like an ant. So the ants, indomitable of spirit, set out to correct that disproportion, and wind up throwing their lives away in competition with the other ants. I’ve thought about it, you see, ’cause I had to.”
“You think about things a lot, don’t you, but not clothes, and parties, and jewelry, and shows. . . .”
“I think about shows. Are you kidding?”
“Movies, then. Like someone your age.”
“No.”
“You’re pretty serious, you know.”
“That’s what a lonely childhood does. It screws you up and makes you suffer forever, but it makes you think. Not that I ever came up with anything much.”
“By memory,” she answered, turning away from the things on the road and toward him. “Love. I fight to hold some things in place, to keep them from being swept away. You can’t really win, but you can fight.”
“And this you know, at twenty-three?”
“I knew it,” she replied, not triumphantly but sadly, “before I knew numbers, before I could speak.”
It was a lovely moment that nonetheless she wanted to cap with sunshine, so she said, “And so did you, or you wouldn’t be driving my car, with me in it, at four in the morning, down the boulevards of Hop Hog.”
Quite happy, she longed for the radio, and when she turned it on she knew the song that was playing and sang along with it, in the proper key. When it ended and before the next one began, he said, “When I sing to myself it makes me happy but embarrassed. For you, it’s different. When you sing to yourself it’s a lot better than listening to the radio.”
She blushed. She was, after all, only twenty-three.
Ahead, the sky was pink with artificial light, and as they closed upon it, it grew less intense as the dawn had begun to rob it of its powers and would soon burn away the color like mist. Factories were changing shifts, and there was traffic on the roads. For a long time they paralleled a railroad track over which a freight was moving at their speed, its empty boxcars making a thunder like the thunder that echoes through the canyons of Utah. Airplanes, marked by lights that hung silently in the air like burning lanterns, rose and fell from a half-dozen fields and airports, and early commuter trains with sleeping passengers leaning against the windows rumbled west to a city sleeping in gray.
At first they saw the flash of the towers as distant flares or out-of-place pieces of the sun, but as they sped without cease and when they rose on ramps and viaducts and were elevated into the air as effortlessly as aircraft, a gilded city appeared as the sunshine dropped its rays from the cliff tops of Manhattan to the depths of its streets.
In strengthening light, they sped over vast cities of the dead to the left and right of the raised roadways that kept them airborne. The crowded tombstones seemed to propel them upon their rising trajectory and to bless and condone every risk they might take. Amid the constantly working transfer of light, the unceasing shuffle of ships, trains, and traffic gliding and glinting silently along the arteries, amid lives playing out, clouds twisting and floating, tugs whistling, they were carried forward.