by Mark Helprin
The English Benevolent Orphanage was a square of brick buildings around a courtyard. Each building had metal-covered roofs, lead-silver colored with white from the weather. In places the roofs came almost to the ground because the complex was built up against a little green hill, and Anneka took to the leaden metal as if it were a doll or a blanket. She always returned to it, and if she were missing, then Miss Wesley just went to where the roof met the hill and there was Anneka leaning against the smooth gray. Miss Wesley was unable to know that before coming to Canada the only place Anneka had ever seen sunshine was in the valley of a tin mansard roof on top of the warehouse, but Miss Wesley had understanding for silence and what it can say, since she herself had grown up in the midst of a great silent plain. So after a few weeks of fetching and re-fetching the little greeneyed blond girl from the back of the building, why the child returned always to the same spot suddenly dawned on her, and it showed in her face. When the child saw this she burst into tears, and the two rushed into one another’s arms. And holding the little girl, Miss Wesley leaned against the metal, which they both touched with their fingers.
From then on Anneka was able to put things behind her. For as inevitably as the winter wheat, she had to grow. Miss Wesley had become her friend, and was quick to discover her intelligence and energy. Within a year she was speaking English fluently and excellently, and she astonished with her sense of ideas and process. Luckily there was a music instructor, and because of Anneka’s quick grasp he provided her with a little cello. “Incredible,” he said to the headmistress, “she’s incredible. These Jewish children take to stringed instruments so marvelously.” But you see it was not so incredible, for her mother had played the viola, and it had been the only music she knew, played quietly and slowly only on evenings when wind, rain, or snow could muffle the sound to outsiders. These became Anneka’s favorite times for playing, in the evenings or at night in rain, wind, or snow.
The bracelet had descended to the wrist, and what a lovely wrist it was, of a lovely girl who was tall and thin and had dreams of music. She was very beautiful, the lush alert blondness of The Netherlands thinned and polished by northern winds and snow and ice on the plain. She had two years more of high school, which she was to continue in Toronto. And she had set her heart on the Juilliard School of Music in New York after that. It was spring. The weather had not yet turned and was wet and promising. She was in the music room with the little children, teaching them with tom-toms and triangles, and thick sticks painted red. She was at the piano, her sheepskin jacket thrown over her shoulders. She wore her schoolgirl’s uniform, a white blouse and blue and green plaid skirt. Rain was wetting the window panes. Beyond, the snow had melted over most of a field littered with straws and steins. It was just before five o’clock and dinner, the least lonely time of the day, which she knew well from her years there was the best time to get the children interested, and so she banged the piano and sang loudly (somewhat affectedly, in a strangely English accent for Beverley Station), for she loved these children and wanted them to be interested in music—if not as she was, then at least so they could carve a mother or father from the objective world, as was so often done in that place.
When she finished, a girl came in and said that the headmistress had asked to see her. “What for?” said Anneka.
“I have no idea,” answered the girl, “but you’d better hurry since you have to do tables tonight.” Anneka put her music in the piano bench and went out into the hall. The headmistress was a woman who stood before the assembled children, her hands quivering, to lecture on courage and decency—qualities she believed orphans needed more than others to survive in a world where, she counseled them, events and circumstance were forever tearing men and women apart. Sometimes she spoke on this and other themes for an hour or more, looking out the blue windows at a snow-laden sky, forgetful that little girls were arrayed before her. And sometimes she did things they did not understand, as if something invisible had taken hold of her. She might for example suddenly stand in the dining room and berate the happy eaters about their lack of manners and their “disgustingness.” This was like a sudden windstorm which came up from nowhere and then just died down. What a terrible sadness it was, for the older girls, to have to fight her. They knew that she would always be there in the place for which they felt affection only because by some good grace they quickly grew and left it. Anneka had been accepted at the school in Toronto, and as she made her way to the headmistress she felt wary only of her own power.
She entered the office of the headmistress, an elegant room, a study and a parlor at the same time. The headmistress stared directly at her from behind an oaken desk. Anneka could see through the leaded glass window a V of wild geese veering toward the West and a gray cloud. The headmistress wore black gloves. Her hands clasped delicately together looked like a monkey. A fire burned in the fireplace making the room hot and dry.
“Anneka,” she began, “you are one of our best girls—a good student, an excellent musician. In May you will be leaving us for Toronto. Have you read the information about the school which I asked Miss Wesley to give you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” answered Anneka.
“Well then, did you come across the dress regulations?”
“Yes.”
“And did you see that,” and she picked up a piece of paper and read, “girls shall not wear jewelry of any kind.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Anneka, feeling helpless and hurt.
“This institution,” said the headmistress, “exists for the benefit of all who enter, and that includes those who have yet to come. We must comply with the rules of other institutions with which we have close relationships. I certainly cannot allow one of our girls to leave here while perpetrating an infraction of the rules of a school which has accepted her.” She smiled, and then said, “I am afraid, Anneka, that you must remove your bracelet. Our reputation rides upon it.”
“No,” answered the girl, terrified.
“What do you mean ‘no’? I have explained, haven’t I, why this is necessary?”
“Yes you have, ma’am.”
“Then what is your answer?”
“No,” she said, “I can’t.” She was visibly shaking.
“Well then,” said the headmistress, “I will have to write to the school and withdraw our recommendation. You give me no choice at all.”
The school meant everything to Anneka. Where else could she go? It was music which made her life a life of love. She had felt so strong, only to be shown in an instant that she was indeed very weak. But she would not cut her bracelet. So many times she had kissed it, and held it with her left hand as she slept. So many times she had held it to her breast.
Terribly frightened, the headmistress stood up at her desk, holding a wire-cutting pliers. “Don’t cut it,” said Anneka gently and sadly, as the headmistress approached, opening and closing the unfamiliar instrument. “Don’t cut it,” she said—passive, broken, and then full of silent tears. The headmistress put the bracelet in between the heads of the pliers, and with a soft clip, it was severed from her wrist. Anneka sat crying with not a sound, her face red and swollen, her eyes almost unable to see.
Anneka left the room and went down the hall, guiding herself by placing her hand against the wall and feeling the wooden coat-pegs. Everyone was having dinner. She went to the music room and sat on the piano bench staring out the window at night falling over the fields. It was cold and wet outside, blue-black, like a late November afternoon when hunters go home. She raised her head and looked into the darkness. Her tears were dry, and she was very still, whispering to herself, What have I done to you, my Papa, what have I done?
ON “THE WHITE GIRL” BY JAMES WHISTLER
WITHOUT SACRIFICE the world would be nothing. There are cardinal principles by which we grow, and we blend them together with the energy afforded us and the enthusiasm at our disposal for the result which is our life. These were the thoughts she was thinking while she was
thinking, Where do I go from here? It seemed for the first time as if her direction were really important, for this time it was not learning, and not condoned, but truly her own. No one was watching and nothing was expected. It was simply her life, a life started in the era of rebellion and played that way to the full so that even she was embarrassed by its excess. Underneath, though, she knew she would come through, even if she felt lost and lonely, looking for a way to vent the passion she was afraid had vanished.
Her husband was a painter who painted her. In the latest painting she was standing in a white dress by a white marble fireplace. She could not imagine how he had managed that perfect and balanced fireplace, for in the Virginia countryside where they lived they had nothing like it. Both their families were Washington families, in government. Both had lived graceful lives and been trained with thorough severity in great halls. They were precise. He could produce a rejoinder which made an adversary feel like a fox flushed from a hole. He could shame his enemies, and she inspired impossible longing in most men who saw her, even in the paintings, which were painted with strength and ferocity. They were sure the world would take notice. It did not. They worried, for he was a fine painter and engraved his principles into his paintings in great depth.
He painted her in a white dress standing by a marble mantel of his memory; her face was beautiful and contained, framed by soft red hair and small eyebrows. She was clearly the wife of the painter. Even had she been only his model and his wife were somewhere else she would have gained the true title, for with the love he used to paint her he had effectively married. She was his wife, her every footstep to him something to love, a true love intent upon concert so specific and intense that it could be shown only in a painting of skillful black and defeating white amidst the red smile of his red-haired wife.
He painted her there with flowers, for flowers were something he could also paint. Her pleading was no success and he had allowed her to compete with flowers. She had looked at them during the painting. They changed, they died, but she looked at them throughout. They were flowers from the fields she was walking through, in the midst of an early summer which as setting for dreams is preserved in stormy winters and seasons of emptiness.
She walked slowly, for she was troubled. She did not know if she should believe in her husband the painter and all the flowing idealisms, all the times when he could not paint, the times when everything she held precious and passionate seemed to vanish. That was part of life, she guessed, and only guessed although she was young and part of life she was young enough not to know it too well.
They had wanted to go to a tropical place, perhaps Tahiti, or South America, or even to a non-tropical place like Japan. And then she was reading and had come across the quotation: “New skies the exile finds but the heart is still the same,” and said, “Let’s stay in Virginia, for in Virginia as everywhere else we can find fragments of what is good.”
Dammit, she thought, winding her way through incredible fields that only a writer would write about, the plague of my generation is the plague of all generations, is that we are searching for essences. She, the woman, the young woman of the painting, was now riding a wide-backed courageous horse in sight of a long row of trees, riding and deciding what she would do. Roads there were through this part of the country, dirt roads of brown like the leather of her boots. My husband the painter, his abandonment and the death in his painting, wild, colorful, risk, risk of a thousand men and the courage of a thousand—or the feminine sight of fields in early summer which I see, she thought, what is it—the horse cleared a stream by jumping—what is it, the torrent or the spread green?
A separation was not impossible. He was not a success, but she understood what he was doing enough to occasionally fill her full of love. They had expected a paradise, being from so rich a time. But he had given her great conflict and the burning which can be likened to a prairie fire in the sun. Was it this she wanted or something else? The irresponsible wild crazy burning or a tight set-in shattered life? The burning she would take, like the crashing of the sea against the shore, no craft to that, no skill, just what was artfully raw.
She crossed another stream and started to gallop home, home to a small house, to a husband who painted in falsetto, an intent madman afflicted with the beauty of color.
She spurred the horse across green plains and luxuriant powerful summer fields, summer fields of summer rain and a gray sky which told her that life was short and everything in the simple stroke of a painter's brush. Her husband was a painter. It was part of her choice. What else, she thought, is there in this sober life that makes us good?
She was committed to this man who traded all for essences and captured everything in color. She spurred her horse, over fields, across woods, in the mockingbird spring of Virginia, Virginia of a new world untried and untested like a young woman in white with garland of young hair. Virginia, to her from then on the symbol of courage, the symbol of bravery, the very center of her soul, the first essence she had ever got, true love for the painter.
Everything was a flat field of green bright in the sun, and she rode fast, devoted, decided. She was for him, all throughout. He painted and she loved him, loved him, loved him, as much as he loved her, for the gentle arching of her eyebrows and her mortality made him a man.
BACK BAY CONSERVATORY
BOSTON IS a city of libraries and darkness, winter darkness, when lights shine through a cold mist or the clear air. If the wind has come from New Hampshire it is possible to see every star from every street and in the day the blue of the sky is absolute. But if the wind is off the sea the entire city is dark and close, the sparkling crystals not faraway stars but luminous white ice and snow. You can see the snow fall even in the dark, and though there is complete silence each descending particle has its own sound. Libraries shelter students and give the impression that strong fires burn in adjoining rooms. Of course there are no fires but the impression remains as one takes off coat and scarf. At night the windows of reading rooms are black and astonishingly cold.
Victoria had not been named after the Queen but rather her mother’s sister who was not, as Victoria said, drowned on the Lusitania but killed as a child in a great fire which took most of the town and left the rest in despair. It happened one January night in Vermont before the First World War, and the father of the first Victoria had gone over the border into Canada to find laborers to build him a new house. It made no difference; she had been his hope, the little girl who when burned to death had been clothed in flannel the color of flame.
Victoria played the piano and was taught by a man named Andreyev. He kept his studio in a building devoted to music on Massachusetts Avenue near Symphony Hall, near enough anyway so that when Victoria caught a glimpse of it on her way to the lesson she thought how she always thought of playing to a mythical audience of professors and music critics. There were thousands of music critics. They came from every publication ever published, even Turkish technical journals and African joke magazines. And there were friends, all the friends she had ever known, especially the ones who had slighted her, the ones who had somehow gained on her in competition at remote and remembered times, and the front row was reserved for those she had loved who were no longer in her life.
Leaning over the piano, Andreyev looked out his window and saw a golden dome on a hill of brick houses, and a white dome on buildings grayer than Westminster. He knew that Victoria often took a long tour around the hill before her lesson. A magnificent pianist, she was his best pupil. She did not always practice as much as she might have, and was not as disciplined as many others, but she had so much love for what she played that she could not help but play it well. She knew she was good and her career in the literal sense was fast and musical, forward without hesitation; she enjoyed even the strain.
They always talked while her hands warmed. Sometimes when it was very cold it took fifteen or twenty minutes for the frost to pass so that she was dexterous. He wanted to warm her hands in h
is hands. He might have done it. She wanted him to, but instead they talked about his silver medals. They were won in his twenties and they impressed her greatly. He thought she knew she was going to win gold medals, but she knew neither that nor that at thirty-five he believed himself to be not good any more as a pianist, only passable as a teacher, and too old for girls of their early twenties—girls like Victoria, whose diversionary walks around Beacon Hill were so that her face might be red and the cold would cling to her coat and refresh the room.
Ascending the staircase she progressed faster and faster, gliding up like a rising angel to the sound of strings from the many rooms all about her. She felt like heat itself rising and when she entered to find serious Andreyev there came to her a sudden reddening which reminded him of all the Provençal and early Italian poetry he had been forced to read, which in Victoria suddenly seemed quite real.
She walked to the window and looked at the vanishing light, at the gold-rimmed snow on buildings, at the flat white basin of the Charles River—not a river because it does not flow—and her heart danced. The sun glinted off her glasses, and her black hair came near the thick white edge of the lens. She had bad eyes but they were large and brown. Her hair was as black as if she had been Chinese, and her face was long and fine. She knew that when she left her lesson it would be dark and she would ride the green-sided trolley back to Cambridge.