by Mark Helprin
And here Harry and Catherine made love as if he, too, were departing for the Pacific. It was not simply having sex in a hotel, and they understood this. The way they held tight as if in a struggle, the way they looked into one another’s eyes, and the sadness they felt were almost as if they were spending their last hours together. And yet, as had others, lying together exhausted and totally united they felt that a knot had been tied forever and that everything that had unraveled had been knit back up.
As it got dark, Catherine led Harry upstairs to dinner. They watched the lights coming up and the bay darkening to indigo, and looked calmly over the world with no fear of leaving it, having, although they did not know it, fulfilled the task for which they had been born.
It took an hour to go from San Francisco—where the ocean was a frigid blue and the light was cool—to the Sacramento Valley, where, to the left and right of kiln-fired yellow prairie, dry mountains stood in long golden lines. The wind was hot, and carried the smoke of burnt fields and the scent of things growing. If the coast belonged to the Pacific Northwest, the valley clung stubbornly to Mexico—in its shimmering dryness, the supremacy of the sun, and its emptiness of nearly everything but agriculture, light, color, and heat.
Although finding their bearings in the great north-south valley was not complicated, the roads were poorly marked, and in a rented convertible as big as a boat, the top down, they found themselves raising dust on dirt tracks that ran between fields stretching endlessly in every direction. To be lost in such intense sun-beaten color was a pleasure, and if they took an extra day to get up to Redding it hardly mattered, for they had no precise appointment. Still, after an hour or two of elated cruising with their radio supplying Mexican music that could not have been better suited to the terrain, they saw an ancient truck parked in a field ahead, where a man was stacking long irrigation pipes.
“Let’s ask,” Catherine said. Harry reluctantly threw the wheel over to the left as the car followed into a fallow field and crossed it like a tank. As they approached, the man loading pipe stopped and stood straight. A bracero the color of tanned leather, he had a broad mustache and kind yet cautious eyes. When the car came up even with the truck, Harry took it out of gear and, while still seated, greeted him with a little bow. “Can you tell me where the road is that will take us to the road to Redding?” Harry asked.
For a second the bracero stared at him, then widened his eyes and spread his hands casually and asymmetrically to the sky, to say that he didn’t speak English. That was all right, because Catherine spoke Spanish of a sort. Pulling herself out of her seat, she turned and knelt, so that now she looked over Harry’s head. The chrome fitting she grasped to hold herself steady was pleasantly hot. “Where is the road to Redding?” she asked in Spanish that, though it may not have been correct, carried the inimitable loveliness of her voice.
“Oh, the road to Redding,” the bracero said. And then, in the hot wind, he began a five-minute dissertation. Each time he mentioned a junction where they had to make a turn, Catherine counted on her fingers. At the end, she had gone through both hands and started over again, logging fourteen turns. “There are fourteen turns,” she said in Spanish. “It’s impossible.”
“I know,” the man said.
“Are the crossroads marked?”
He thought this was funny.
“How do you get out of here?”
“Me, I don’t,” he said. “I live here.” He smiled at their predicament. “It’s pretty.”
“Yes, it is,” Catherine told him. She looked west toward the line of mountains and shaded her eyes with her left hand, her right resting on the top of the seat back.
“Ask him if there’s a town near here where we can stay,” Harry said.
She did, and, still kneeling, reported back. “He says about ten miles that way—her right arm swung like a compass needle, clearing the top of the windshield—there’s a town with a hotel and a restaurant. He says that everybody goes there because they can get vanilla ice cream in a big glass of root beer. How does that sound?”
“It sounds like a root-beer float.”
“I can see that,” Catherine added.
They thanked him and drove off toward the root-beer float, Catherine still kneeling on the seat, facing backward and waving like a little girl.
They didn’t need to know the name of the town, and didn’t ask. And because everyone there knew it, it wasn’t written anywhere. “It’s like New York,” Harry said to Catherine as he watched her in the shower in the best room—it was clean—in the hotel.
“It is?”
“Because in New York there aren’t signs everywhere that say ‘New York.’ I’ve seen a sign at the northern extremity of the Bronx that says ‘City Limits,’ but it doesn’t say which city. My guess is that it’s there to keep out the savages of Yonkers.”
“Are you staring at me?” Catherine asked as shampoo foam ran down her body in streams of hot water.
“I am.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Do I enjoy it? Oh!”
“Even after all this time?”
“I could watch you for a thousand years, naked or clothed. Each is better than the other.”
“I have to confess,” she said, “that I enjoy it when you do . . . tremendously.”
Two hours later, having used up a great deal of hot water, they were sitting in a booth in the only restaurant in town, not surprisingly the Café Mexicana, where because it was so near closing time they had only one option: steak Mexicana, salad Mexicana, tortillas, beer, and root-beer floats. Their steaks were actually fajitas hot in temperature and otherwise. The salad, with hot sauce and chili, was such as they had never had, and they got the hang of buttered tortillas after the proprietor explained how to handle them.
“I’ve been to Mexican restaurants in New York,” Catherine said, “but they’re so fancy that everything was unrecognizable. This, however. . . . If you brought it to the East it would really take off.”
“After French rules for a while,” Harry offered. “All the soldiers coming back from France. It happened in the twenties as well.”
“Why didn’t it last?”
“The Depression.”
“You know,” Catherine said, “I like this restaurant better than any I’ve ever been to in New York. In New York, you go into a restaurant and everyone looks at you. Not here.”
“That’s because there’s no one here but us,” Harry informed her. “And look over there.”
She turned to see. The proprietors were staring at her as if hypnotized. “They want to go home, that’s all. But in New York, it’s like entering a contest. The other diners stare at you.”
“They stare at you.”
“Not just me. Everyone’s measure is taken. Even the waiters are engaged in a great, never-ending Olympics of station. I think that’s because, although they lose all the time, they can win if they spot a phony, of which there are many.” She looked around. “But not here.” She glanced again at the very dignified middle-aged man and his wife, both of whom seemed happy, but eager to close up. “They’re not in combat with us.”
“I may be out of my mind,” Harry said, “but I’ve been thinking about maybe living here. Pulling the plug in New York and coming here. I can’t run away, or can I? I could live with dishonor, guilt. I could stand knowing that I’d run away and let evil run its course. All I need is you.”
As Catherine put down her fork, it clanged on the plate. “I’ve been thinking that, too,” she said.
“Catherine, I had a vision while we were driving. We lived in a white cottage on the slope of the mountains, overlooking a sea of golden fields. I don’t know whether they were ours or not; it doesn’t matter. It was quiet, private, sunny. It was as if there were no people in the world, or it was not even in the world. You were in the garden, planting flowers. You wore a white blouse that was open quite far down, and you were a sort of light olive and tan color but with so much red underlying
it and showing through because of the heat, though now and then there was a cool breeze. Sometimes you wiped the sweat from your brow with your forearm and you blinked. And there was a rhythm to your work. Your hands shaped the loam in a floating kind of way, quickly, sometimes thrusting down into the dark earth but then gently healing the wound, as if your hands themselves knew exactly what to do to cultivate and plant.”
“We can do that,” she said, “if we want.”
“No. It’s just a dream. It wouldn’t work.”
Catherine was young enough to say, “Why not?”
They stayed in the town, but because their rest had refreshed them they got in the car and drove as if they hadn’t driven all day. They might have driven all night, had they not suspected that at four in the morning their clarity and energy might desert them. So rather than pushing north they followed long, straight farm roads into the darkened valley, navigating by the stars, with no place in particular to go. They had done this before, coming in from East Hampton.
In the midst of the many paths that lay across the land and beneath the gliding stars was one that branched off in a curve. For a time it followed a huge irrigation channel. The water rushing headlong in the dark was so loud they could hear it over their engine. Then the road abruptly changed direction and climbed a projection in the valley floor, as out of place as a volcano and a hundred or more feet high, at the summit of which the road came to an end with hardly any room to turn around. They stopped here, facing south, stunned by the pellucid night.
Lined with blue at its western edge, the sky was heavy with stars that, sparkling gently, showed a barely perceptible hint of yellow. An uninterrupted horizon was visible in the direction they were facing, they were high up, and many stars seemed to be below them, others straight on. More like gentle lamps than stars, their blinking was not cold and quick like the disinterested stars of winter, but slow and seductive, as if they were speaking in a code that all mankind understood, even if it did not know that such a language existed, much less that it was following its benevolent commands. And along with the stars came the inexplicable illusion that the warm wind was visible in a procession across the valley floor. While Harry and Catherine were suspended among these stars, for three hundred and sixty degrees the world was as calm as if it had never known anything but peace and perfection.
“I didn’t know the world could be like this,” Catherine said. “I’ve never seen the sky in such a passion of kindness.”
The next day, the sun was dependably hot, the air reliably clear. Just as after two days at sea, out of sight of land, you become a sailor as the boat moves ahead, rising and falling on the waves, as they sped north they were separated from almost everything they had left behind. In the valley it was as hot as molten silver, dust devils arose and played in the fields, and the golden summits of the mountains were lost in glare.
“We’ll make Redding by evening if we don’t get sidetracked,” Harry said. Catherine was content just to be driving through the summer air. After a silence of ten minutes or so, Harry said, “I’ve been thinking about your father and your mother.”
“You have?”
“I have. You’re their only daughter, their only child, and they’ve entrusted you to yourself and to me. I was my parents’ only child as well. Everyone in my family is dead except my aunt by marriage, who’s older and not a blood relation. I never knew our relatives in Europe, and they’re all almost undoubtedly gone—if not murdered, then broken and scattered only God knows where.
“The two of us are kind of a slender reed. If the car blows a tire and flips, two families come to a sudden end. I’ve never quite understood how brave and disciplined your parents are and mine were. I’ve never quite felt the way they must feel when they look after us as we go out into the world. Maybe I should drive more slowly.”
Catherine said, “No. You’re not driving too fast. Just drive well. There’s no guarantee, no safety. That’s what—between us and them, and between us—clarifies love. That’s what the songs that they pay me to sing are about, and I want nothing but that. Of course, I’ve already got it.”
As she put her hand out into the wind, her arm was lifted by an insistent and invisible force. By rolling her hand slightly left, it was forced down until she rolled it back to the right and it was lifted as smoothly as a sea bird. The afternoon passed in confident silence, and then Redding appeared in the foothills. The plain of the valley had subtly vanished, and although here just as dry, it was rolling. They had no idea how they were going to find Rice, but the town was not that big.
By the time they checked into a hotel, settled, showered, and dressed, it was almost dark. They stepped out on the sidewalk unsure whether they were going to find someplace to eat or look for Rice. There weren’t many streets and they didn’t know where to go, but when they heard the sound of distant music coming over the air they walked in its direction, and as they crested the top of a hill what appeared to them a quarter of a mile in the distance was a lighted dance floor, about fifty feet square, beneath strings of colored lights.
Musicians were arrayed on steps at the platform’s north end. The music was strong, and on the boards were scores of dancing couples moving gracefully beneath Japanese lanterns waving in the wind. As they do at such times, children chased around the perimeter. Adults who were not dancing were engaged in conversation at the edges. Sometimes the wind took the music, but then brought it back with a slight slur. The mountain wall in the distance was black at the base and purple at the top beneath a rim of vanishing royal blue.
As they approached, now in the spell of the music, Harry said, “I see him.”
“How can you tell at such a remove?” Catherine asked. “You can’t see anyone’s face.”
“I can tell by the way he moves. I’ve never seen him dance, but I’ve seen him walk a hundred miles. He doesn’t know we’re coming. Let’s go up there. We’ll dance, and see how long it takes for him to recognize us.”
Partly because of their clothing, which hadn’t been bought at the two or three stores that supplied the town, they stood out as they danced. Some men wore their war uniforms, some were almost formally dressed, some danced with their hats on, others not. The women’s attire was more varied, although none of it matched the elegance of Catherine’s simple white dress, with pearl buttons in a line down the front, a sheath cut that her figure could bear easily, and the partially built-up shoulders of the period, which if not done well looked stiff and off-putting but if skillfully done gave the impression of an upper body as wide and noble as that of a goddess. Harry had no hat, much less a cowboy hat, and was one of the few men without a string tie. Though obviously they were strangers, they were cordially welcomed.
He wanted to avoid Rice for as long as possible so that Rice would see them in the corner of his eye and become accustomed to them, and the surprise would be that they had been there all along. Catherine didn’t know this was what Harry was trying to do, but was happy just to dance beneath the strings of colored lights, the brighter stars, and the Milky Way, which despite the lights was visible in the desert-clear sky.
As they danced they saw one another’s faces, constant, steady, and close, as the background passed by in a blur. Pulling apart and coming together; held gently; hands clasped and positioned almost aloft and leading through the air; with no need to speak and yet every word that was spoken elevated and made lovely. Nothing was quite so promising, beautiful, and exciting as dancing with Catherine in the mild air and open sky of California just after the war, when the valley was forgotten and at peace. They would think of other things, and then they would come back to where they were. The pleasure of re-entering was more exquisite than the pleasure of the dance itself, and, like the caesura in Catherine’s song, it was the silence that perfected the sound.
The lights made Catherine think back to a time before the Crash, when none of her father’s friends whose ruin she had seen and grown up with had yet to be destroyed, when the bank ha
d yet to face its own difficulties, and when she was only four or five years old and her house was her world. In the library, facing the East River, was a cherrywood table upon which were two sterling trays. On one was a crystal ice bucket and crystal tumblers. On the other were eight or nine bottles of liquor: a frosted-glass bottle of vodka, a green gin bottle with a red sealing wax medallion, a brown bottle of sherry with a reproduction of El Greco’s View of Toledo on the label, and bottles of Scotch, some with colorful caps in red and gold, others with more prosaic tops to fit their printed labels in black and white. Between the trays on the polished and glowing wood was a Wedgwood vase—in muted blue and white—in which on most days was a splay of red roses. The rest of the room matched this with the elegance of its rugs, furniture, and paintings, and views of the garden and river through French doors.
In those times, when her father was much younger and things were flush, without anyone’s knowledge Catherine would go to the library after breakfast, because there at all times of the year, although at different hours and from different angles, the sun climbing across the eastern sky would illuminate the concentrated colors in such a way that the child greeted them every morning she could, as if they were not mere effects of the spectrum but a living being, or a message of some sort, both of which spoke to her fluently, although she could not have translated.
The rich early morning light struck the roses and was refracted in a billion tiny gleams. The silver followed suit with the same microscopic glinting. And the reds, greens, and browns of wood, glass, and wax took fire, deepened, and glowed in caramel, emerald, and scarlet. In the very early morning when the sun was trapped by the stubby buildings across the river in Long Island City, it sent out weak rays to scout the gaps between the tenements, and these rays would leap the river and hit the bottles, their dim light making the room glow in preternatural brown, bringing up the colors so gently that they showed even finer than the blazes of color that would follow. Catherine watched this closely and was open to it as only a child can be. It wasn’t that it was speaking to her in particular, but that it was speaking of things that, though supposedly far beyond her understanding, she comprehended nonetheless. Some children have friends, and some who have no friends have imaginary friends. Catherine had neither. She had the light.