by Mark Helprin
It did not take long before they were speeding to Switzerland in a touring car he had rented with the remainder of his grant for study in Rome. He told her the speedometers thin red needle reminded him of a hummingbird’s tongue. They stopped at a dam in a valley of the Alps. Across the spillway was an automobile bridge that led nowhere, and fog from the rushing water cascaded in a convection arch over the bridge, over the two of them.
The time together in Rome had made the priest and the girl heady. She was young, and he not so young but it was new to him. When he removed his collar he sighed in relief and walked out into the warm sun where she was waiting in the open car in a hat and heavy coat ready to head north. There was singing all the way. In one inn, Father Trelew, having had too much wine, told the porter that he was a priest. The porter raised his arms as if to say, “That is very serious, but so what?”
They stayed in Switzerland for more than a month. He was going to give up the Church, when she left him. There was no comfort. Everything had failed. He had not written his paper and could show nothing for his summer in Italy. The bishops at home would have his head for that. There would be nothing he could say; he could see himself gaping at them.
It would not be the first time he had found himself mute. The first was the time he and the girl had been unable to resolve an argument and it grew wider and wider, until she was on a platform waiting for a train and nothing he could say made anything better. He felt untrained for that sort of thing. The argument had started while they were drawing by a lake, and he threw his picture to the ground. He was angry. She had too many plans for him. She had him in the White House when he was not yet even just a defrocked priest. He threw his picture on the ground because he realized that she was young and nothing could be done about it. When the train came, she was crying, for she did love him, and perhaps because she was crying and she was young she struck a blow she had not meant to strike. She was not even Catholic but Episcopalian. She said through the steam and rain which soaked them both and was warm and very much like their tears—she said on that hot misty August day so uncommon for Switzerland, “And you are such a little man.” It was then that his mouth dropped open and he could say nothing. She cried and cried, and as the train left he ran after it halfheartedly with his mouth still open and tears streaming down his cheeks and the steam from the gaskets making his suit smell as if it had been just pressed.
He looked at the high white mountains, and his smallness choked him. He boarded the next train to Rome after waiting in the station for seventeen hours. He did not eat, nor did he return for his belongings. It stayed misty and warm until he left.
They sent him to Arizona. They would have thrown him out, but they needed someone there. He was perfect for the job. He could have left on his own. They offered him that, but he was afraid. The archbishop made him afraid. Offices made him afraid. Even cathedrals now made him afraid.
The only thing that calmed him was the desert and its silent, dry heat. In the desert he started to seek God as he had not ever sought Him. In some ways he stayed weak, and in others he became very strong.
He watched the blue mountains and the billowing sand, which was like the foam on the ocean when he came home from Italy, but cool and dry.
A MAN from the desert is not a dry man, but he keeps what is wet inside him, like a cactus, so that visitors to him wonder how in such a world he can be alive and have enough. Father Trelew had not been born in the desert, but his forty years there taught him much. Although there will be some who might deny that a man may be taught such a thing, it is a fact that Father Trelew was calm, quiet, and gracious during his first heart attack. It occurred while he dined with several other American priests near the hotel in a restaurant they had all frequented during the first weeks of the Council, and then abandoned, then remembered and rushed to, as Father Trelew had done with his drawing. He ate prosciutto and melon, scaloppine alia zingara, and drank gaseous mineral water and cold white wine. He was contemplating dessert and had his wineglass raised to his lips when he felt the first pain. It seemed as if the entire restaurant had been jolted by an earthquake, and the electricity somehow savagely unleashed to attack the assembled priests. At first he thought there had been an earthquake. He kept his glass to his lips, afraid to move. He would put it down, slowly. He would go without dessert, excuse himself, and walk to see a doctor. He did not want to trouble his companions, because they were younger and he felt they did not like him; he had said hardly a thing in the course of the meal while they burned with the politics of Council.
But he could not move his arm to put his glass down. It was there for a full minute and no one noticed until he fell to the ground, for he could not stand the second wave. He fell to the ground still with the glass in his hand, apologizing and begging the pardon of the assembled priests, who were younger and who had ignored him.
When he awakened in his hospital room, he was grateful that the walls were not white. Rome is a yellow color, an old saffron-powdered sun color which seems always rising upward. His room was a comforting beige, the color of a lightly done roll in the oven.
He was happy to be alive and would not move his head until later, when a nun told him it was safe. He saw by turning his eyes the tops of pine trees and green hills in the not so far distance. He judged himself to be on a mountaintop. “Splendid,” he said. “I’m on a mountaintop.” He could hear birds and the clicking of crutches in the garden. After a few weeks he was up and about. He could see most of Rome from the garden and some of Rome came up to meet him, although that part of Rome which traveled up the hillside to him was not people but houses and streets.
When he had been a priest in Arizona and visited parishioners in the hospital, he thought because of its bustle and crowded corridors that a hospital was a social place. He had often thought of going to a hospital on some physical excuse to cure his loneliness, but in Rome (and he assumed that hospitals were spiritually the same everywhere) he discovered himself more alone than he had ever been. The face of his nurse was constantly changing, and there were eight doctors who cared for him in varying degree, none with particular intensity. He was alone during the day, and in the night. He did not dare draw. He was afraid to look in the mirror. No one paid him any attention, because he was old.
There was a man dying of some unknown disease, a violinist in a symphony orchestra in the north of Italy. He looked as if he were made of old loops and patches. He smelled of death. It came from inside him—from his bowels, from his throat, even from his legs and fingers. Father Trelew had smelled the same smell in Arizona when some boys cut open a deer they had shot in the mountains several days before. Every day the violinist sat in the garden and played. He was particularly fond of the Andante of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, and he played it again and again. The officials allowed it because it helped those who recovered recover, those who were dying to die, and those in the middle of the road to pass the time. Father Trelew wanted to talk to the man whose music was so beautiful; he had never before heard any Prokofiev. When he went to him in the garden, he found the old man unable to speak. But the patterns of the music were so strongly ingrained, and his hands so powerful, that he played, he played, until the day of his death—not always correctly, often out of time, but always with much passion.
Father Trelew was not afraid of dying. He was afraid of what he might be before he died. When he first realized that he was dying he stayed in his chair—an old man in a chair—and tried frantically to remember all the parts of his life. He thought that when a man dies a man reviews what he has seen. He expected memories to jolt his frame, and visions to seek him and turn him, and shower the room with light.
But it just didn’t happen as he expected, which he might have expected but did not. He became whimsical, prided himself suddenly on his sense of humor, and found the truth in sayings. He would say, “Love makes the world go round,” and laugh. He was generally good-natured. Every four hours a nurse, never the same one, came to ask
him if he had moved his bowels. He thought this was hilarious.
“Father Trelew.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Have you moved your bowels in the last four hours?”
“Moved them where?” he said, and burst out laughing.
He was happy for no particular reason, and for that reason he adjudged himself particularly happy. One would have thought he was getting better. He said, “I want to have a good time on earth while I can,” and spent the days in the garden, in the sun, watching flowers and delighting in the smell of rich grass, which was green as if on a riverbank. At night, he looked from his window at Rome, and because he remembered his memories so well he did not think of them, or need to. One look at Rome from a moderate distance was to see his life, but it was past and he had no need for that.
A week after the death of the violinist who could not speak, Father Trelew died. The bishops in New York sent a militant priest who had been embarrassing them to fill his place in Arizona. He died in late afternoon. It had been raining. He knew from years before in his student days that there is a special name for raindrops in Rome because they are often so big, but he could not remember it. He was admiring the light coming off the wet buildings, and he was calm, listening to the wash of the rain. The bushes in the garden glistened with drops, and when someone went by and hit them the water flew off like water off a vibrating dog. Streams of warm water coursed down the gray stone streets of the mountain—or hill—of the hospital. All across Rome flocks of pigeons were seeking the rays of sun, which came from holes in the clouds, and they flew in great masses, looking for light that quickly vanished with new configurations of the dark sky. Father Trelew listened to the work of the rain, to the wash of the rain, and to a car going through a puddle. The water is warm, the blood of the earth. He was a man resting for the afternoon in his chair. Warm breezes thick with invisible mist moved his white gauze curtains, and he faced the wind. He turned his head to it and breathed it in.
Then it seemed again as if there were an earthquake. For an instant he imagined that lightning had hit him, for his vision had flashed white at first, but then he knew, and when the bolts kept on coming he knew he was dying and he became very excited.
He tried to think of the girl he had once loved—of her face, of the heat and their well-being—but he could not do it. He had not enough time. He realized that dying takes away time, and that is all, and he was dying when fear gripped him and his mouth dropped open in its customary manner. He had planned to die with a vision, but there was no vision. The rain had stopped, and the water ceased to flow as rapidly inside the gutters. He noticed that. The walls seemed to him a very dark olive green instead of tan. His mouth hung open, but he raised himself in his chair of a sudden and said, “Damn you, shut, damn it!” and it did shut and he was so surprised that he smiled and his eyes came alive. It seemed to him that he was a new man, that he was no longer a priest, no longer Michael Trelew. He was only sorry that they would bury him as Michael Trelew, Priest. He had gone out of those doors.
He lived that way for the short span of time between the lighting of his eyes and the entrance of a priest who was rushing in the door to administer last rites. Father Trelew saw the priest through the corner of his eye, but by the time he would have had full view he was dead. The last thing he thought was how beautiful the summer rain in Rome—and he died, and he died with great courage.
KATHERINE COMES TO YELLOW SKY
LIKE A French balloonist who rides above in the clear silence slowly turning in his wicker basket, Katherine rode rapidly forward on a steady-moving train. It glided down depressions and crested hills, white smoke issuing lariat-like from the funnel, but mostly it was committed to the straightness of the path, the single track, the good open way. And as an engine well loved, the locomotive ran down the rails like a horse with a rider.
Passengers sat mainly in silence, not taking one another for granted but rather deeply respectful, for they were unacquainted and there was not the familiarity of one type crossing another. From each could come the unseen, perhaps a strange resolve or stranger ability. Like athletes before a match, they had high mutual regard so that as the day passed from morning to noon each man or woman kept to windows.
Katherine too stared out the imperfect glass ahead at softly glowing grasslands, yellow seas of wheat, seas of wildflowers, and June lilies, and at the dark mountains which were always visible in one direction or another. Having neglected to get a book out of her luggage she could only look, and attempt thoughts and variations. At first it was taking off her thin gold glasses and closing the good left eye so that she could blur the deep permanent colors. This she did, but saw an old man staring at her and at the way she tilted her head and set her mouth as if waiting for an answer she would never believe. She looked daft when she did that or as if she had some kind of rare nerve dance. Back went the glasses and for a while she stared straight and dignified directly into the distance, this soon giving her the appearance of a gorgeous lunatic. She wore a white dress with high white shoes, and an enormous wide-brimmed hat, which although it glowed as fiercely as the face of a glacier was modified in its absoluteness by the buttercup haze of a yellow saffron band. Her hair was a long bright auburn tied back, and her eyes a striking green, as hazy as the saffron glow and as cool as a spring in the mountains, and if it were not that way the burn of freckles on her face might have consumed her, for they gave this girl a hot and sun-colored redness even in the stillest of white winters and a youth that carried her well into age. The daughter of an Irish quarry worker and a Dublin Jewess, she was taken when small enough to be nicknamed “Carroty” from the west of England to Boston and then to Quincy, where her father became a foreman on a new opening in the granite quarry and her mother took up work in a textile mill. Katherine herself went to normal school, escaping lovers because she was wedded to a dream landscape, and although many sought her she was faithful to a vision of clouds and yellow sky far off to the West in unsettled territories. And she passed quickly from the society of the normal school to the company of a solitary idea. Convinced of new worlds her existence was animated in such a way that she had no answers, not a one, but believed incessantly in what she imagined.
She had read all her life of the openness of the West, of its red rivers and plains leafed in neutral in-breathing gold, of the miraculous Indians and the Rockies, which were mountains of mist that formed and unformed dreams so fast as to confuse even the youngest of dreamers. And strangely enough these substanceless dreams, these short electric pictures, these confused but royally intense sketches, gradually gave to her a strength, practicality, and understanding which many a substantial man would never have. Her vindication, almost God-promised, was as clear as the excellent sea air, or the deep blue pools which in summer formed at the bottom of the quarries, to her fathers chagrin. Her father, whose strength had equaled the beauty of her mother, had seen in her very early what he himself had lost, and unlike many fathers he had no envy. He was too good for that. He loved her too much. He saw himself as a stone arch, unbending, sheltering around his wife and daughter, to keep them safe and await the day when his daughter could soar on her visions and be settled.
Katherine, a dreamer, was not hard but tender, and when her parents died one following the other in a general epidemic she was wild. Just to be in Quincy, as gray as a mans suit, afflicted with ice and dark winds, a shabby collection of boards amidst scrub trees like the coat of a dying mare, made her sad in a way which does no good and leads to dead ends and contemptible unbelieving. One day in winter she thought she saw her father standing by her mother, who was gentle and strong and had been the first to die. Her father held a sledgehammer, of the finest wood and with a shining gold head. He said, “I shall free you all,” and went to the base of the quarry where he smashed the cast-iron braces and beams which held the rock. The iron rang like a thousand bells and black pieces shattered over the quarry, ringing the pools and echoing off the high walls. And he
r father continued until every chain was severed and every brace broken, until all metal and all the past were smashed, buried in the clear pools. Free air circulated away from its bounds and the muscular father said to her, a little out of breath but with as good a red color as he had had on the finest days of summer, he said, “Katherine, Katherine, my Carroty, we too have had it with this place. We are not permanently rooted here, and you must go away. I have smashed these bonds, and this I did for you. Pile your hair, tie it firmly, and find a new place.”
This she did, about a year later, and headed West, for there she sensed something which would give her the moments she wanted before her death, moments of full cognizance and dream vision, the red roses of her life and its humor. It was good to abandon Quincy and its quarry.
She set her hat at an angle, trying to frame the light blue mountain ranges. The tracks threw up dust and she eyed steam from the locomotive. These billowing clouds became captions for her thoughts, and they centered on Yellow Sky, on a dream quest which had spread to all the people. Yellow Sky. It was still far off.
That night they stopped in Gibson, a town spread across a large rise in the prairie where cattle roads, a flat unnavigable river, and the railroad crossed at angles. Huge yards of seemingly spider-work boards held cattle for boxcar loading, and during the whole of the late spring night, cattle filed past her window in the darkness. Without awakening her assigned roommate, an elderly woman who looked like a tomb, Katherine stepped out of bed and went to the open window. A high wind carried occasional raindrops past the town and out into the vastly promising darkness from which an endless procession of moody steers was filing—giant animals intent upon moving to their slaughter—to feed the distant cities. She had seen the land-seas of wheat and flowers and from them came these steers, an abundance which kept her awake the rest of the night wide-eyed, waiting for the hoofbeats and dust and drovers’ calls to stop, but when morning found her tears were in her eyes as she stared at the clouds of sparkling dust. From where did they come, constantly, without even the slightest break? The land beyond was empty except for storm and mountains, and yet from there the night had been filled with a power so great it drew a shaking tense silence, a joyous fright. The endless power was born somewhere out near Yellow Sky, and Katherine couldn’t sleep because she was headed there, as surely and certainly as the warm steel track, or the confident horsemen who often appeared alongside to race the train.