by Mark Helprin
“If you really want to do this, look at all the advantages you have. You’ll have to avoid the law, but not attack it, and it will be delighted to look the other way. Your bases are safe at least until you open the fight. You’re native born, and free to circulate. You can order food in a restaurant or walk down the street and you don’t even have to think about it. You have many resources that we didn’t have in the war, and your enemy has many weaknesses that you can exploit.”
“That may be true, but I don’t have license.”
“Take license. They do.”
“If I can’t know exactly who you are,” Harry said, “I’d like to know whom you’re with.”
“Fair enough. Let me put it this way. America really suffered in the war and a lot of people died because before the war our special services were undeveloped. It has been decided that we won’t be caught short again, and that, therefore, people like me, who can’t get this out of their system, can continue. What’s under construction may go in a number of directions, depending upon the funding, the political reaction, and the international situation of the next few years. We’re starting out now as we did: informal recruitment, relationships, improvisation. It worked well during the war, and we hope that whatever comes out of this is not too bureaucratic and stiff.”
“You’re recruiting me?”
“No.”
“Then, what?”
“From what I know about you, you’re ideal: a pathfinder with years of combat, the best education. Languages other than French?”
“A few.”
“Good.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
“And a businessman. It’s what we were built on. I regret that you weren’t in before, but I’m not recruiting you. This is personal. If in the future you want to come in, that’s another thing. For now, for this, I told you why I’m here.”
“And how can I trust you?”
“To trust is both to sense accurately and to risk, to neither of which, I believe, you are a stranger. Do you think I’m with them?”
It would have been absurd, and Harry said, “There isn’t one among them who could pass for Fred Astaire, and there never will be. You don’t do this full time, do you? What do you do?”
“Wall Street,” Vanderlyn said, “just like the Hales.”
“You knew.”
“In the morning I saw the house. I was there once for a reception. I remember the daughter when she was about eight. She got to be really stunning, didn’t she? She used to be a sweet little thing, with glasses, excited just to be passing out hors d’oeuvres. Every time someone took one, it was as if she had been given the Nobel Prize. Granted, the whole thing is a bit risky. But think about it. What needs to be done seems obvious. It’ll have to be refined. I’ll need more to go on, but I know the outline of these things generally and how they work. As for the methods and means, I’m hardly a genius, but I’ve been there before. I think it can be done, and I think you think it can. It would be interesting.”
“Yes,” Harry said, “it would be very interesting. You’re talking about. . . .”
“Assassination.” Vanderlyn started to walk, and then turned. “They will never, ever, be expecting to receive what you are capable of visiting upon them. Like everyone else, they’re creatures of habit. They have their systems and their rules. They know about crime, they don’t know about war, and you do. It would be better to retreat and let them have their way. Don’t you think? Just start a new life. But, if you need it, I’ll help.”
Vanderlyn turned placidly toward the city. Without looking back at Harry, he said, “You leave first. I’ll take the next boat.”
The play debuted in the midst of three days of Indian summer that threw open outdoor cafés and propelled not a few boys to jump from the rocks at Beekman Place into the early October waters of the East River. Audiences are cruel but understanding, as half the tension and excitement when the curtain rises comes from their imagination of themselves onstage doing the difficult and wonderful thing they know they cannot do. Looking upon the performers, they fear every potential slip, miscue, or mistake, so that when actors or actresses are lifted up and out of themselves, the audience, empathetic to the point of physical pain, rides with them on the same wings.
Because the theater filled with people who had arrived touched with sun and with neither the fur wraps nor greatcoats common to opening nights, the coat-check girls were despondent. Exhaust fans had run on full power since five o’clock to pull in the cooler evening air, and would be shut down only just before curtain time. It was hoped that a convection current would draw enough of a breeze through the lobby to cool the hot lights and exit through the roof vents, rising like a sea current into the pink sky of Times Square.
Catherine now had no choice but to sing for the sake of singing itself. She expected nothing or worse from the critics, and, no matter what Sidney said, to be booted from the production. This gave her songs a quality of defiance, emotion, and truth that paralyzed her listeners with admiration not for her but for the state she had attained. She carried them on a wave that made quite a few of them fall in love with her through the mystery of a voice that was evocative beyond reason. The way Catherine sang a single, simple word could summon memory, love, and the best graces of her listeners. Even the position of her body, the way she held her hands, the expression on her face (powdered and yet flushed), and the sparkle of her eyes were surpassed by the voice, most feminine, with which she conquered and commanded.
She dominated the first act. Had she been onstage more, she would have become a rising star of Broadway, pushing aside the doubts sown in the press. But her part did not afford her that, and she waited in her dressing room as the building vibrated with the cheers and applause that had begun to interrupt the action more and more as it built, and would have followed her songs and pressed her to an encore had her audience been as warm and relaxed as it could not have been at the beginning of the play.
Not wanting his exit to suggest disapproval to those sitting around him, Harry waited until the intermission to go to her. The lobby and sidewalk were packed with people eager to finish their drinks and go back in. The production was more than safe, as were Sidney and the investors. Harry circled into the alley and entered through the stage door. Left and right, stagehands, chorus girls, and people with clipboards were rushing in opposite directions like sailors summoned to general quarters.
Because the mirror was surrounded by eighteen clear bulbs that burned hot, a fan was turning in Catherine’s dressing room. She had exchanged her costume for a silk robe. “Don’t you have to wear that,” he asked, referring to the wool suit of the girl from Red Lion, “for the curtain call?”
“Yes, but I must be an Eskimo. If I keep it on I’ll be dripping with sweat.” She took a drink from a glass filled with water and ice.
He told her that she had been without peer. He told her how much he loved her, how proud he was, and that, as she sang, he fell in love with her as if for the first time. Her answer was to look at him sadly, but lovingly, which was all he needed and every bit of the truth.
After intermission, the idea had been to shock the audience back into what Sidney called the “Dramatische Weltanschauung,” with a vigorous production number from the play within a play, in which the full chorus appeared in tap shoes and pounded the boards so rhythmically and hard that had a subway passed underneath, the blades of its fans and the brims of the last-of-the-season straw hats would have been bent down as if by ten-pound weights. The sounds of keening clarinets and hound-like trombones, and the very vibrations of the boards possessed the theater, moving Catherine’s tumbler across the glass top of her dressing table as if on a Ouija board. “Those chorus girls,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t want to get in their way.”
And then Catherine, hesitating just like her mother—she often had, even at twenty-three, the gravity and calm of long introspection—said, “They never tire. It’s something in the flesh. Like Betty Boop
, they were born bouncing. The other day I spoke to one who thinks that melancholy is a type of dog that loves fruit. Their energy comes from innocence. Oh,” she said, holding up her right index finger and looking at the ceiling as a wave of laughter rolled through the walls, “they laughed for George. That’s wonderful. It’ll bring him back to life.”
“And what about you? They applauded like a rainstorm.”
“Like hail,” she said. “And I’m not from Texas.”
“Will that bring you back?”
“I have to be cautious,” she answered. “I have to learn to do what I do and push through like an armored division. But I’m not like an armored division. I’m not armored, which is a problem, although if I were, that would be a problem, too.”
“Play your part every day,” Harry said, “until the end of the run. It’ll give you strength beyond what you can imagine. That’s how iron is tempered and hickory is cured. Nothing is born as strong as it can become.” He took her into his arms and she stayed there comfortably until just before the curtain call, listening to the music from above, muffled and vague, the sounds of horns and traffic filtering in from the stage entrance, and the hard whirring of the fan like wind moving through sails.
Once again, Billy and Evelyn were astonished and proud. They believed that the quality of Catherine’s singing, her magnificent presence, and her financial independence would allow her to outlast whatever difficulties Victor or anyone or anything else could throw her way. She was only a year out of school, and at the curtain call she had summoned that special burst of applause for which actors live. And this was not on a college campus or in Providence, it was Broadway.
Catherine, however, was not as sanguine. She understood what everyone told her, but she was the one who had to sing, and she had as well some of the impatience of youth. Even Billy had some of the impatience of youth. Perhaps because half his friends and associates were now dead, he was uncomfortable about wasting time.
Rather than await reviews as she had done in Boston, Catherine decided to follow the lead of nineteenth-century presidents on election nights and go home to bed. Billy proposed a stop at “21” to ease the transition, but she refused. In fact, she had little of the euphoric elevation that keeps the minds of actors spinning at high speed after their performances and long into nights often made quiet only by alcohol. Having decided that it might be years until she could collect the rewards of her labor, or perhaps never, she was all business. They went home, dropping Harry on Central Park West. By now Billy and Evelyn were used to seeing their daughter in his embrace, used to seeing them kiss. They knew by the quality of the touch that she had done right and was lucky, and at twelve-thirty, as the doorman at 333 Central Park West held the door open longer than he had thought he would have to, Catherine and Harry embraced in air that was now midnight blue.
The Hales drove off, and Harry rode up in the elevator, as always, almost stunned by Catherine’s absence. It was unnatural not to be next to her, to be looking at her, to be kissing the side of her face. It was especially painful now because he knew that were he to decide upon what Vanderlyn had in mind, it would be dangerous for them both no matter how carefully he insulated her from what he would do, and that it promised long absences.
Before the Hales reached Sutton Place, Harry was able to fall asleep. Sleep was doubly magic. It would cut by half the time he would be away from her before they were to meet for lunch the next day, and as he slept he would dream of her. When you are in love, you dream about the person you love. After ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years, the dreams are so clear and real they shake you to the core. And if love be denied or suppressed, they are so vivid as to burn.
Early in the morning, as the sunlight invaded over the bridges from Long Island, though the cast was by now exhausted and asleep, Catherine was fresh and awake, up before anyone else, on the third and last day of the Indian summer. She dressed quickly and walked to the newsstand on 57th and First, and then hurried home with a stack of papers for which, impatient to wait for her change, she had paid too much: the Times, the Trib, the Post, the Journal-American, the Daily News, and one or two others that probably could not afford to send someone to write a review.
She opened them one by one on the massive kitchen island and read them at high speed. Then she read again, more carefully. When she finished, she stepped back and looked at the mass of papers spread out as if they were the white wings of dead swans or geese limp across the stone. All the reviews were good, some spectacular, but in not one line or phrase of any one of them was she mentioned: not her name, not her character, not the allegations that had failed to escape a single Boston paper.
She had been erased. It was worse than being attacked. It did not engage the emotions, but extinguished them. Silence was the cause of silence. She stood in the kitchen, staring at the newspapers as if, without shock or pain, her heart had simply stopped.
“It seems perfectly natural, doesn’t it?” she asked. He was seated on her right, at a little square table covered with blindingly white cloth. His place had been set across from her, but he had moved closer, taking the heavy china and silver with him.
“What does?” They were many storeys up, as if flying, and the midday sun, now fairly low, was powerful enough to make things clear but not so powerful as to wash them out. The harbor was the color of the Mediterranean at Malta. Flimsy clouds of translucent mist sped above, at eye level, and beneath them. Sunlight glinted off glass and stone all the way to the Battery, and the wind was wonderfully cool.
“Being here, at lunch, all dressed up, looking as if we haven’t a worry in the world. You’ll go back to your business and tonight I’ll perform in a theater on Broadway. It’s New York. It’s perfect to a T. Why do I feel this way?”
“Let’s see,” he said, which meant he would have to think about how most delicately to state the obvious. Meanwhile, it was not silent. A wash of sound came from the bar and joined indistinguishably the settling of crushed ice and the rhythmic brushing of a drum. There was a single red rose in the center of the table, the oil in its petals refracting a direct ray of sunlight into moving and uncountable flecks of gold, silver, red, and blue. Even without alcohol, it all seemed hypnotic. “Our food supply hasn’t been interrupted.” He said this in the tone of lists. “We have water. We’re alive. None of us is wounded”— he wagged his finger—“physically. We’re healthy. We’re clean. We’re free. And we’re young.”
“True. Why do I feel oppressed? I shouldn’t,” she said, lowering her voice modestly as the waiters set down before them a “bouquet” of shellfish, two glasses of the Hales’ customary white Haut-Brion, and a basket of bread that had arrived from Paris that morning on a Pan Am Clipper.
“Because you’ve been told repeatedly and from many directions that you’re no good. That would oppress even the Pope, and especially someone who has hardly ever been told anything like it. Have you?”
“Directly? I haven’t. I mean, if you count Victor and the way he treated me, yes. But otherwise no, not really.”
“That may explain part of it,” he said. “In this regard there are two kinds of people. One extrapolates the unfortunate present far into the future, takes warning, and feels oppressed. The other fails to extrapolate, never knows what’s coming, and stays happy until struck down. But if in extrapolating because you’re in a difficult situation you dare not assume that you’ll have some luck, because you’re responsible by nature your projections become grimmer and grimmer. But, Catherine, you will have luck. There’s no way to account for all the things that will happen and of which you have no inkling. Things will let up. Everything moves in a wave. Until the end, you never stay down and you never stay up. And at the very last, who knows? You might be launched like a rocket.”
“I guess I believed, despite what I knew, that I was going to be the toast of Broadway, and then, look, I became the ghost of Broadway. It’s because I’m so goddamned rich. I hate it. My father once said to me, ‘At ti
mes in my life I’ve been so desperate that I behaved like a normal person, and I liked it, but then they threw me out. They always do.’ Harry, does all the money get in the way?”
“Of us? Doesn’t mean a thing, except that sometimes it’s hard for me to keep up with you. Like this,” he said, meaning where they were and how much it would cost. “But the starch and gleam of the tablecloth alone is worth it, not to mention my napkin. In June of ’forty-four I would have traded a month’s salary for this napkin. The British, of course, have a different understanding of the word, and might find that quite funny.”
“I’ll take care of this,” she assured him.
“No you won’t.”
“That’s what I mean. The imbalance.”
“There’s one thing—I take it back—there’s one thing that I do love about your being rich.” She was pleasantly surprised by this. “You wear new clothes more than anyone I’ve ever known, including people in the garment business. I like the smell of new clothes. Whether its from mercerizing, or the scent of close-to-the-row cotton, or whatever makes silk new, I don’t know. But, like bread baking or new paint, it has a lot of promise: starting fresh just by putting on a new shirt. When I was a child I loved when we were given our books on the first day of school. The smell of ink and paper still makes me feel that the world is open, that my mother and father are alive, that the summer heat has just broken and the suddenly clear September air is pouring gently through the windows.”
“You can tell when I’m wearing something new?”
“Always.”
“I can’t say I’m not pleased. I just thought of coming here,” she said, “because my mother would take me here for lunch when I was little. Once, there was a really strong wind, and a biplane struggling against it was perfectly motionless relative to the ground. It couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away. I could see the pilot’s mustache. He finally gave up and fled, but after that I was always looking up on windy days, when sometimes you could hear a droning like that of an insect. On occasion when this happens, you see people unconsciously making swatting motions. But the war killed that. Now that the planes are more powerful, the city can’t trap them. I wanted to come here because of what I remember. I didn’t think of the expense. I’m sorry.”