by Mark Helprin
Biferman looked up, his eyes closed, and said quietly, “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.”
SHOOTING THE BAR—1904
MICHAEL HAD been to London, and Paris too. Suzanna had no solid idea of what these places were like. Casco Bay had surrounded every instant of her life with its mists or its waves, or its storms that brought the angry Atlantic almost to the door of her house, which she locked at night if Michael were still out at sea. Suzanna had the most beautiful face in all of Maine, perhaps in all the world. It was a clear face which seemed to make its own light; its features were light and did not seem to depend on each other. When Michael first saw her he imagined she might be easily capable of walking through walls, so fresh and energetic was her manner. “She is sunlight,” he said.
She loved the Bible, “because it is beautiful,” she said, and she read it every morning. She dreamed of the places Michael had been, imagining herself a captains wife, or perhaps a contemporary princess of Russia, one whose life went from peak to peak, operatically encountering dozens of carpeted stairs lined with mirrors as she ran to the high heat and noise of a ballroom. How many times had she been carried by imagination from the beach to an open carriage. The horses were white and perfectly clean, the path straight and arched by French trees. Musicians were everywhere in the park, playing Brahms by bronze fountains that splashed in the day and would splash in the dark. Bright colored leopards and lions in zoos paced gracefully in front of her, and by her side was Michael with his strong face, somehow as a European, dressed and looking as if an artist had painted him, which was how she thought all Europeans were.
Suzanna was Mrs. Ashely, something that for the several years of its existence had never ceased to surprise her. She wondered if she ever would or could feel like her mother, who was purely Mrs. Tyler, and seemed to have been always the wife of Suzannas father, Suzannas mother, and the mother of Suzannas brothers. At church when Tom had come back from whaling and said, “Suzanna Tyler,” Michael said with great authority and delight, “Suzanna Ashely,” and Tom, who had always been in love with her, turned very red and rotated back in his pew. The preacher preached to all the brown eyes focused on him like a diagram in optics. If the eyes had had half Suzannas radiance the preacher would have burned. She had always been special and strange.
Michael was once a thin boy who wore gold-rimmed glasses and loved books. He was best with boats, always managed to catch more fish than could his friends, and he spent so much time in the dunes and the pines reading or walking or feeling October, that when he came into town it was as if he had come back from the sea. People asked him questions, and he told them stories full of lies that were true.
After graduation Suzanna had become a teacher of little children, and Michael had gone into the navy, for he changed. He began to hate Three Mile Harbor, and he brooded all day in the woods or at work lifting heavy barrels at the wharf. As his face began to take shape and become less boyish, he wished for new scenery and a place to answer or drown his questions, so he left on a frigate from Portland, and went around the world. In his youth he touched the shores of Egypt and Arabia, marched into Peking, tried to fake familiarity on his first trip to Paris, loved Rome, spent more hours than required on his watch straddling the bowsprit looking at the Wedgwood-colored clouds and sky.
After a year he began to think of Suzanna, and found that he could not stop thinking about her, nor did he want to. Every city, every stretch of sea, every special storm, strange sailor, oddly draped dwarf, beautiful bridge, or full and luxuriant tropical tree he saw, was captured in his mind as a present for her. He talked to her on lookout as the ship pitched in a gray sea. He closed his eyes and kissed her as the spray wet the forecastle. His greatest fear was that when he came home she would be taken.
He kept a journal, and despite the fact of his delinquency, “March 21, 1900 ... December 22, 1900,” wrote some good things. He wanted to tell her about the beaches of Alexandria, “which are bordered by poppies and sea-lakes, and clean, bright, white, blue, and washed by the winds of Africa from the west. Thousands of years of man cannot spoil even the thin rim of this place”; of Athens and the Acropolis, “Yesterday I was at the Acropolis, and although it is very beautiful and affords a beautiful view, I was much disappointed. They are only buildings, and stone, and stone is akin to dust which is everywhere and too much. I am done with antiquities, suspicious of dreams; Suzanna is my only relevance.”
Late on a winter night when the snow quieted Three Mile Harbor and put out the street lights, when it edged beautifully on the merchants tin and wooden signs, when it hissed into chimneys, Michael came dressed in black (with a broader face than he had had when he left) to the store and sail loft, where they hardly recognized him. Tom strained in the yellow gas light. “Michael?” Michael had an important question. Then he ran through the snow all the miles to Suzanna’s house, where much out of breath he came into a warm room. There were two bright fires, and they burned strongly, heating the air until Suzannas cheeks were vermilion, as were Michael’s from the touch of the snow. Her parents bustled about and gently maneuvered Michael into a chair. The gas lamps were yellow and singing, the window black and frosted, and Suzannas eyes were blasting back at Michael the heat of a forge. They looked directly at each other.
He saw that things were not the same, but better, that she was a woman and better than a girl, and then for the first time, before they had said a word, he realized that he had changed and become a man. Without once consulting his journal, Michael told Suzanna all that had happened to him, and evidently he told it well. They were married.
WHEN THE President arose that day and glanced at the sky through a window in the White House, he sent for his favorite artist, and told him to duplicate the blue of the sky on all the medals, banners, and plumes of the army and the navy. The artist said quite flatly that it was impossible.
Suzanna Tyler Ashely stood by a wooden table next to their water pump. She was wearing a new white linen apron, starched, dazzling, and large, and she was opening clams, buckets of them. An autumn day without a cloud, the wind and the sea were fierce. After cutting the mud-colored back muscle she pushed the knife into the shell and worked it around until the two halves separated and her pink fingers were wet. She put the meat in a bowl and the juice in a bottle. Occasionally she would drink from a particularly well formed shell, holding it to her lips, bending her eyes to see the absolute white pearly cup; the wind was so wild it made little waves and bubbles in the liquid before she drank it. It washed in the shell like a small sea, and the shell was the color of her apron which was the color of the clouds and the whitecaps on the sea, which was blue like the sky and her eyes. She felt in her dreaming a power; she felt as if she were conjuring the wind.
Several months past when they were traveling to Boston they had argued on the way. Michael in a rage stopped the horses, tied the reins, and jumped off the wagon, leaving it and her by the side of the road. She looked straight ahead and pridefully refused to watch him or turn. A group of sailors came down the road, crowded into a wagon, drunk, rowdy. As they neared she wanted to run to Michael, for they had seen her golden hair from afar and all eyes were centered upon her. As a compromise, she took out a mirror and moved it until she saw the comforting image of Michael leaning against a tree, looking with great wisdom at the group of sailors (for he was an alumnus of their life and older) and with great love at her, for he loved what she had done with the mirror.
Michael was getting lobsters from his traps; doing it made him feel like a sorcerer. She could see him in the tiny green boat with the white sail he raised when he moved from float to float. Had he known the wind would rise as it had he would not have gone out, for the fishermen of Three Mile Harbor were like lobsters who are clever enough to get out of the coil; they had to shoot between two sides of a jetty over a bar, and negotiate a thin channel funnel. There had been deaths there.
Suzanna felt as if she, and he, and the century itself, we
re on the verge of a discovery. She dreamed always of the remote and thought it one reason why Michael loved her so. Beneath her white and gold New England face were thoughts that went deep into the tropics and skirted jungles full of richer, darker colors, colors of fast and intense life. This woman sat in church and, taking the rhythm from the organ, put herself in Africa, or Turkestan, or Palestine, or any place with a name like candy, fruit, or the Bible. Her father and her father’s father had been missionaries; they were ministers in Salem and saw the sea as a natural road for what they believed. As Salem merchants traded spices and brass from and to Zanzibar, so they preached. Her brother and she had been born in Africa; she did not remember it, he did. She had been her father’s daughter after he returned from the brighter parts of his life. When a little girl, she had grown among stories and artifacts from Africa and China, where her grandfather had been.
Michael began to run with the wind, which from where he floated high on the waves shot directly to shore, even though on the beach it was confused and blew his wife’s skirts and apron in all directions in imitation of a real tempest. Despite the wind and waves this run would be easier than most because he did not have to tack. He could head straight for the inlet, building up speed, until he passed it with a breath of quick relief. He felt confident, as he had while traveling. When he traveled he was not knit to his possessions and made an implement to maneuver them. When in other parts of the world he felt light and comfortable, as a good man would doing something good and easy. He dreamed of traveling with Suzanna; he knew she wanted to see what he had seen, and when he had seen it he had wished for her to be by him. Without reasons it was really quite simple. He loved her and wanted to go places with her. His boat, beautifully made by his cousins who put double seams and double caulk to satisfy him, gained speed and seemed to nose itself to target. He felt always when running the inlet, or shooting the bar as the older men called it, that he knew himself, that he and the boat had something in common, a solidarity on the waves.
She finished opening the clams and went to stand by the inlet, breathing more deeply as the wind forced itself into her body. Michael was coming in. She was frightened and happy. They were married in the spring and they first made love in late April, so that the month had been always in her eyes. That night when the window was opened and she could see the stars through it, they heard the small streams and rivulets from the melting snow. Now her hands were harder and she cursed easily, and often making love had nothing whatsoever to do with the stars or the brooks, but only the bed and the heat they raised, so that even ten minutes after in the deep of quiet they were not dry and they glistened. She wished that she would not spend the rest of her life trying to get the slight flamboyance one must have when nineteen, that Michael had in the navy when he spent time finding the round world, that she had not had. He was older and had a time when he had stretched and felt free, a time between the times of a child and a man when he used his eyes so as to tire his entire body, a time when he got drunk in Spain and awoke in Sicily. As a woman she could never do the same; the most she could do was to dream, and she did, and sometimes (although she tried to shoo the thought away and get it out of her mind) she wished she were rid of him.
When Michael bought her a Kodak for Christmas, she went around taking pictures of views, and buildings, and when photographing the town she had wished that the streets had been clear of people. Her album was filled at first with shots of seascapes, and boats in a line, and ill-exposed sunsets, and angular rocks by the ocean. But after a few months she learned that people were necessary for photographs, that their faces and their bodies made the best pictures. She tried to explain that to Michael but he understood only partially, because he was a man still wed (and strongly so) to the landscape—it had been his life. She felt this division between them the worst fact of her life. He had been slow to her innovation. She cursed at the wind and exhaled as if to express her anger, as if to say “Damn him.” She continued dreaming of places where he had been and she had not.
Michael was nearing the shore, his face set ever so strongly in an expression that made her long for him inexpressibly. It was like that of an Arab bedouin or a Tartar charging over the plain on his horse, a soldier leading his battery or regiment in close-ordered electrifying precision. His boat caught all the violence of the wind and went faster than it had ever gone, breaking for the opening trimmed with heavy deadening rocks.
She was full of love for him, and yet she had thoughts of being a widow. Her fine imagination presented to her a picture of a woman in black, so beautifully blond and tanned, walking on the beach or in a foreign city, a Mediterranean port, Strega, Ostuni, or Capri, shepherded by memories of her dead husband whom she loved more than anything in the world. She cried for him every night and turned away gentle suitors by the score until the whole world said in unison, “Look how fine she is, and how good,” and sucked in its cheeks and oceans in untrammeled delight at her tight faith to her husband’s ashes. She tried so hard not to think that way, but the thoughts came likes waves into the bay, from some sort of sea where she had not been, and wished to go. She tensed with the love of the moment, for her husband was shooting the bar on a violent day in the bright autumn of her twentieth year.
He neared the bar and looked at the wind. His hands closed tightly on the ropes and tiller. Then a silence. She saw his face clearly Everything was still and dark, with silence except for the gentle luffing of his white sails, and the freedom of her apron in the wind.
All her life and all that she had read flashed before her as she saw her husbands frail boat crash against the huge rocks. A part of her beauty vanished, and her dreaming was done.
LIGHTNING NORTH OF PARIS
IT WAS approaching five o’clock on a cool afternoon in late October. Harry Spence sat on a stone railing in front of the Jeu de Paume, and as he waited for Shannon he looked through a maze of autumn trees stirred by a wind promising of winter and challenging in its direct cold northernness, a wind which lighted fires. Shannon was extremely tall and graceful. This, her face, and her dancer’s body were a continual proclamation that she be taken dead seriously. In fact, anyone not always alert with her would find himself left behind as if in the slipstream of a fast train which had just passed. She stared other women down like a man; they often hated her. In a café she had the same effect as music or a fireplace, quickly becoming the center. Men were drawn to her because they did not immediately fall in love. Her power put them off until they got close enough and then went mad, leaving lovely wives and waiting for Shannon on the street, where if she passed they became speechless as she crossed in leotards and a long skirt, a soft silk scarf trailing.
When Harry took up with Shannon he knew she would leave, but he was privileged to be with her for a time because he would not scare. He was always on guard, convincing her that he too was arbitrary and painfully free, as independent as a cloud sailing across frontiers. It was an act he put on successfully, but it was exhausting. Only a young man could have kept it up. He thought that if her demands had been made on a man older than twenty-five he would have died; frequency of intercourse was only a small part of the monumental task. That year was like a Channel swim. He wondered how he had done it, and how Shannon could always remain Shannon. They all moved like figures inside a furnace, which at the time was appropriate, and constructive, for they sat during the night at small desks and penned words or music, or played instruments, or painted, not knowing who was really good and who would fall back to the small towns of New York and Ohio never to be heard from again, perhaps to be unknown interpreters of those who had remained.
Harry Spence had not come to Paris because it was Paris, although once there he realized that even in imitation long after the originals (none of whom had really been first) the city was still a blaze and a dream. He had been granted a restricted fellowship stipulating that he live in a section of Paris dear to the benefactor and considered by him to be magical in its effect on musical compos
ition. When flying into the city that September, he wished he were a writer of words rather than music. The prospect was stunning, spread white into the bordering fields. Masculine ministries enclosed luxurious gardens of mathematical green—from the air this appeared to be the hallmark of the city. He had had the feeling that he was returning to the vortex of civilization, having indeed been there before, that the inhabitants were possessed of a strange combination of clarity and feeling and were at that moment lighting fires over secret magnetic zones which crisscrossed the earth, making artists, and converged at Paris in the center of wheat and wine-filled French prairies sobered and chilled by blasts from the North.
Wherever children gather at a forge or fire, its red heat giving them warmth in darkness, they learn quickly principles of art. This is what Harry had thought when very young as he sat by a fire with his father and uncle and grandfather in the middle of violet autumn fields which they knew would see frost by morning. The grandfather had passed through Paris on his way to the front; the father and uncle had crossed the Seine riding on the same tank. They had ached from their hearts to see Paris in peace, to live and work there. They had carried cartridges through Saint-Germain-des-Prés and been continually on edge and nervous, for they then were sent to bosky woods near the German border to fight and kill. After his father returned, his life had calmed. He never yearned for the war, but he knew it had made him. There was plenty of thunder in the following peace, haystack-leveling winds to test him, obstacles to his dreams, but none of this later adversity had defined and shaped him as had the war. He wished with all his might that he would not communicate this to his son, that the boy, born after the fighting, would find other means to know himself and would not repeat the horror for the sake of becoming a man. He wished for his son peaceful storms and not the waxen white light of artillery duels. He prayed for this. And Harry was different, soft, a baby beyond his time, unknowing of combat and the continual deathly backdrop of war, an almost effeminate university-bred tortoise-shell-glassed composer of music. His father and uncle, the survivors of that session by the fire, rejoiced that he would be thrust into the heart of Paris in a piping time of peace, peace, said the uncle a veteran of four years of solid war, peace, God bless it.