by Mark Helprin
She seemed to be coming right for him, as if she knew him, as if she loved him, as if she were about to attack him. Because he knew her in part already, having concentrated upon her, he thought that maybe she did know him, and that she would suddenly stop and say, “Where were you?” or “I love you” or “What’s playing at the Roxy, and if we don’t get there in time for the afternoon show we’ll miss Velez and Yolanda, the world’s most exquisite dancers.” Or perhaps she would say, “This is my time, and I’m bearing down hard upon it, which is why I walk so fast and why you should, too. Come out with me, walk down the avenues, look across the river at the steam clouds rising for a mile and looming like mountains. Take off my hat, stare at me, touch me, kiss me.”
But she said nothing. She didn’t even see him, or if she did she gave no sign, and she blew past, a foot away—her guidons of striped taffeta flapping—like the mail train in Wisconsin. Said train does not stop, but pushes on to Chicago, dropping off and picking up with its deadly hook the wasp-waisted sacks of mail with letters that could come from Mozambique, its stamps green, coffee-colored, and red, the tropics made miniature to tempt the souls of snow-covered stamp collectors. She was gone in a puff, but when she was gone it was indeed as if she had kissed him. And that, he discovered, was New York.
Already changed and left standing like a rube, he then humiliated himself by asking where his hotel was. It might have been less humiliating had he not asked at the information booth, which sat in the center of the marble sea, encased in brass, beneath a giant turnip that thought it was a clock. At the information booth, questions were suffered indignantly. “Excuse me,” he said, his first mistake. “Can you tell me how to get to the Waldorf-Astoria?” What he should have said was, “Ha-doo’wai geh tu d’Wawldawf?” Because he didn’t say it that way, the man in charge of the western front thought that he was being mocked, despite the fact that Johnson was carrying a suitcase. Sometimes college boys, and Johnson looked young for his age, went to elaborate lengths to torment the prisoners of the information booth, asking, for example, “How many balls are there in New York?”
“Track seventeen, leaving two-oh-seven.”
“The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel?”
“Step aside, there are real people out there.”
“I’m real,” Johnson said.
“In your dreams, big ass.”
Dumbfounded, Johnson eventually asked a policeman, who was, if abrupt, not impolite. Then he emerged somehow onto Park Avenue—another name for the rocket-launching rails to Westchester and beyond, ornamented on either side by people who rode horses and tried to send their sons to Princeton. The policeman said the hotel would be on the right, five blocks north, look for the flags. Johnson did, and it was. Another deal like the Drake: all paid for; peacocks, jewels, and gold; a piano being played elegantly in the bar; an elevator that popped his ears; a room that looked out upon the smoothest, most relaxed view he had ever seen, a city stretching languidly to infinity, dotted with parks, lakes, and trees that even at the end of their autumnal haze were explosively yellow and rusty scarlet (who was playing the piano at the bar).
Apparently the maid had left the radio on. Johnson walked into his room at exactly three-thirty and regretfully parted with fifty cents for the bellboy. As he stood mesmerized by the roiling city made lovely by distance and altitude, he heard, “Welcome to What’s on Your Mind?, WQXR’s forum, with Iphigene Bettman. Today’s guests, Dr. Mary Fisher Langmuir, Mark McCloskey (headmaster of the Scarborough School), Ethel Alpenfels, and Benjamin Fine, will discuss ‘Are we creating a nation of adolescents?’”
After what he had been through in the war, and looking upon this airy view of a great city, Johnson found this amusing, but he did not rule out the effect for the future and listened dutifully until four, not so much as taking off his jacket, because the riveting north light and the very scale of things held him in place.
Sussingham had been to New York three or four times as a child, bundled up like baggage as things passed by, his head bent in looking at a comic book or a game. Now he came as an adult. On the twenty-second of October, after a detour in Pennsylvania to see an uncle, he got off a commuter train on the Jersey side and took a ferry across the Hudson. It was almost as warm as summer, as if New York were in another world.
The ferry nosed out of its berth and made an arc slightly upriver before turning straight for the Manhattan shore. Sussingham stood at the bow, clasping the shaving-mirror gate, his lungs filled with the balmy air over the water and his eyes knocked back by the spectacle of the city rising before him like a steel mill shrouded in smoke and steam, backlit in white and gold by the morning sun. Its towers stretched in a line as far as he could see upriver to the north and to the edge of the harbor to the south. The palette of blacks and grays was irrationally varied. Some of the buildings were dark and inexplicably in shadow while others behind them were light gray in the mist, and still others behind these black and dark again. Sunlight and shadow in almost infinite alternation made for a depth never-ending, from which things were produced as if by the fires of the earth to issue forth from stacks and chimneys and pipes, while kicking off from the docks were ferries, ships, and barges rushing to open water.
Harry had paid in cash both for Sussingham’s stay at the Astor and Johnson’s at the Waldorf. He left envelopes for them with money, tickets to shows and movies, and no instructions, as the understanding was that they would simply be visitors to New York, soldiers who had once promised themselves Broadway and now had come to grant their own wish. “Enjoy yourself,” he had said, “and when it’s time for us to meet, we will.” This seemed unnecessarily mysterious, but it was a result of Vanderlyn’s experience in occupied France and in Germany itself during the war, not just a habit but rather a method of operation that had been proved under the greatest stress. Harry would not contact them or bring in Bayer until Saturday, the twenty-fifth. So they had a few days in which to wander around, doing anything they wanted except leaving their names promiscuously or attracting the attention of the law.
“You mean,” Johnson had asked, back in the Drake, “we can’t jaywalk?”
Harry had looked at him blankly.
“Cross the street against the light?”
“That’s not illegal,” Harry said.
“It’s not illegal in New York?” Johnson asked.
“I wouldn’t think so. At least, I’ve never heard of it.”
With money in their pockets, orders to relax, and the freedom to cross against the light, they hit the streets like Baptist sailors on liberty. They both knew Chicago fairly well, especially Sussingham, who although he was from Indiana went into the city at least once every few months. Both had thought Chicago the epitome of cities, but after an hour in New York they abandoned that belief, for Chicago can have all the tall buildings it wants and as many millions as it can hold: it’s still a suburb. If you take a cord of wood and lay it out evenly over half an acre of field, you have, in a pretty good stand-in for Chicago, something that will neither kindle nor light. Take the same cord of wood, stack it high into a structure with broad and intricate channels for the air to race through, and you have, in an approximation of New York, something that will easily take fire, burn, flame, whistle, roar, and wake up the world.
Each had in mind things to do and sights to see. Being from somewhere else, they actually thought they could check them off one after another. These were men who were capable of marching a hundred miles in the snow and then attacking an entrenched enemy. They found, however, that when they stepped out of their hotels they were introduced to new forms of being. Every foot of travel offered resistance to the senses, an overload upon eyes, ears, and everything else. The crush of things, the speed, the way all the billion moving parts wove like fighter planes in a dogfight and yet went right to the places where they belonged, all without direction or, seemingly, broader intent, was exhausting to behold.
Johnson decided to walk the length of Fifth Avenue, only to
discover that he was soon plotting a route back to his hotel the way a swimmer in a rip tide focuses on the beach. A quick study, he learned from department store windows, and from ducking into Lord & Taylor in hope of respite that he did not find, that most of the women he passed that morning in the office districts were wearing what was called a “ballerina suit.” These came in two basic varieties. Although both comprised close-fitting, short jackets and full-swinging, gracefully swirling skirts, the notched-collar suit (he was overwhelmed by such detail) was rib-hugging and handsomely tailored in fine wool gabardine with notched revers and a high-waisted skirt. The round-collar suit, on the other hand, was a cutaway with a sculpted, tiny-waisted jacket accented by shiny crown buttons. Its high-waisted skirt was notched, all in worsted crêpe. He had no idea what the hell was going on, but it looked good.
He studied the suits on mannequins as he took shelter from the chaos of the street, trying to understand the meaning of the minor variations. There seemed to be a subtle class difference, or perhaps an age difference, between the two, with the older, richer, more sexually devastating women in the notched-collar suits, and the younger, more demure, recently-in-from-Smith-or-Mount-Holyoke secretaries in publishing or import/export, in the round-collar. The notched-collar went for $55.00, and the round for $49.95, which didn’t speak volumes.
Back on the street, real women in the sunshine pushed against the light and wind, their hair lifted by gentle masses of air touring languidly south of the park. How these women did this he did not know, but as they sped forward like corvettes or PT boats they often appeared to have closed eyes. Was it possible that they could see without seeing, or navigate like bats, or were guided by some unseen hand? Of course, most of the time—given the great numbers of people on the street; the rounded, dashing taxis; the green-and-white double-decker buses moving slowly like loaves of bread on wheels; the trucks and carts and racks of clothes pushed by teenage boys who had just missed the war; the signs, obstructions, opening doors, flashing lights, elevators rising from basements right up through the sidewalk; and accountants walking blindly in a fog of figures—most of the time, the women on the street kept their eyes open. But when for the brief moments they trusted in the harmony of things to guide them, and turned their faces to the sun, resigning their vision to something higher, they were then achingly, movingly, almost unbearably beautiful.
On West 57th Street, having sailed up Sixth Avenue against a Victoria Falls of office workers pouring into midtown, Sussingham ran aground temporarily in front of Fraser, Morris—purveyors. He held his position on the sidewalk, staring in wonder at a placard in the window. According to Fraser, Morris, two and a half years after V-E Day each limey in England was limited by law to one egg a week, if he could get it. This was incomprehensible to a near-Chicagoan in whose proximity agricultural commodities ran like rivers in flood. But the New World was ready once again to supply the Old, by hook or by crook, as the restrictions did not apply to direct imports. For its part, Fraser, Morris, which claimed already to have dispatched four million food parcels, was willing and wanting, for only $14.95, to send six dozen freshly laid eggs by air express to Great Britain. They would arrive two days from the laying, and the Englishman who received them would be up 7,200 percent on his egg ration.
Shellacked by all this, Sussingham thought of the many egg flights, the English iceboxes full of eggs, the egg recipes, egg parties, and egg thefts. He turned to a passerby, a man who looked like Melvyn Douglas, and said, “Boy oh boy, they could take a bath in eggs.” The man was unaware of the sign and thought Sussingham was just a New Yorker of a certain type that could never be eradicated.
Like Johnson and like Harry, when Sussingham made eye contact with a woman, even if she were a photograph on a billboard, something happened—to him, and to her, although not if she were just a photograph—which is why at lunch he found himself in his hotel room, exhausted, looking at a three-pound box of Loft’s chocolates, because the salesgirl was an Irish beauty from Queens who spoke to him without words about what she wanted of love, and he spoke back. If he had been in New York for other, less dangerous reasons, perhaps instead of buying three pounds of chocolates for 79¢ a pound he would have married her. But he didn’t, and had he wanted to find her he would have to exert himself at some future date. Among other things, he thought that she was in the only Loft’s chocolate shop in New York and that all he had to do was look it up in the telephone book. He didn’t remember where it was, but in only the half hour it took him to carry what he had bought safely back to his room, he knew when he passed his fourteenth Loft’s shop that his luck had deserted him.
And then he suffered through a quiet struggle in regard to Miss Rheingold and the Trommer’s White Label beer girl. They looked like sisters. They were everywhere, on giant billboards and posters, in magazines, newspapers, and cardboard cutouts in restaurants. Chicago had plenty of advertising, but not as much as New York, where word was more important than deed. Sussingham felt obliged to choose between Miss Rheingold 1947 and the Trommer’s White Label girl—bypassing Ruppert entirely, because Sussingham didn’t like the name Ruppert. It was hardly a serious matter, but somehow he could not dismiss it as easily as he could the exhortations to “Smoke Camels” (perhaps as opposed to hams) and to eat Planters peanuts because “a bag a day” would give him “more pep.” Miss Rheingold was holding a rifle and a target with eleven shots through the bull’s-eye. He counted, and wondered at what range she had shot, or if she had shot at all. She seemed sporting and Irish, and her name was Michaele Fallon: maybe she was half Italian. The Trommer girl, on the other hand, had spectacular teeth and so open a smile that in the end she won, and when each day that Sussingham had both lunch and dinner at the White Turkey on East 49th Street or the one at Madison and 37th, or the one in University Place, he always had a Trommer’s White Label. Being a regular gave him a certain sense of stability that New York otherwise was quick to take away.
As Bayer labored sadly and with growing anger, “finding” supposedly lost plans at the building department, Johnson and Sussingham went separately to the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center. Johnson went to the New York Public Library and there, happily melancholy amid the glowing green shades and a consistent unintelligible murmur that sounded like a stream in a cavern, he read. Although neither of them knew, he and Catherine were at times in the same room, bathed in the same light. Sussingham, on the other hand, went to see the elephants in the zoo.
But for both of them all these things, delightful or exhausting, wondrous or taxing, were moved aside like mental scenery pushed by imaginary stagehands when they thought of why they had come to New York. Away from home and the ordinary, they had their doubts. Would they go through with it, should they, and was it right in itself and for them? Opposed to their hesitation was their habit, formed in years of war, of operating together ruthlessly and violently to accomplish with discipline an objective about which they had never, not for one second, felt the slightest passion, but only a grim determination to do what had to be done. The more time passed in loneliness, the more they were thrown back into what they had been in the war. It rose from within and took its place without shame. And as they hardened back into place, they, like everyone in Manhattan, eventually got down to business.
Thin, white-haired, rugged, his gaze piercing, Cornell was calmly fighting to the end. Though now convinced that they were going under, he kept at it without flinching, his initial anxiety having fled before the winds of certainty. He knew from a long life of privations and indignities that what mattered was not winning but how one holds to one’s part. In that, he was a cousin to Catherine, who had come to it by a different route, and a father to Harry, who, not as far along as Cornell or even young Catherine, was on his way and would soon be there.
As Copeland Leather was stripped of assets and options and driven toward bankruptcy and dissolution, Harry had become more active in its management even if for naught. Ear
ly one morning, as Johnson and Sussingham slept in their hotels, Harry sat with Cornell in the office. A third of the employees had had to quit because they could not get by on the forty percent pay cut everyone was obliged to take. Harry and Cornell had long since put their own funds into the company. No bank, upon looking at the balance sheet, would lend them money. Nor should any bank have done so, because among other things any banker with experience could tell instantly that they were being bled dry by protection payments. Accountants and loan officers knew how to spot this under “miscellaneous expenses,” “cash payments,” and, most often, especially if large sums were involved, “fees and services.”
“The buyers are in town,” Cornell announced without energy. “Are you ready for our three appointments today?” They had customarily received a dozen a day when buyers flocked to New York. “That guy Swanson from Hudson’s in Detroit. . . .”
“Never buys anything,” Harry said. “According to my father.”
“Sometimes he buys a little. Miss Mahoney from Lansburgh’s in Washington. She’s good for fifty or a hundred bags, as is Miss Levy from Hecht’s in Baltimore. It’s as if they’re in competition.”
“They are, because the people who live in between the two cities have the choice of either,” Harry said, as if he knew what he was talking about.
“Who? Dairy farmers?” Cornell asked.
“Other people live there: bureaucrats, politicians, spice magnates.”
Cornell, who was born in Washington, said, “Harry, the suburbs are tight. Washington in some senses is as far from Baltimore as it is from Boston.”
Corrected, Harry jumped to Boston. “What about Filene’s?”
“Haven’t heard a peep. And we missed the boat this fall with the box bag.”
“It’s insane,” Harry said. “They’re too small, they don’t carry well next to the body, and what woman wants to open a trunk-like lid to get at her stuff?”