Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  “As for his general condition—well, don’t expect a strong child or, later, an athlete. It is probable that he will be sickly for a long time. I think he will have trouble with his eyes and with his hearing. His spine is slightly bent, in what is called Spina Bifida (this we will keep an eye on), and his legs, poor creature, will be bowed into parentheses. If he grows to be five foot six, he will appear to be five foot three. I have given him certain immunizations, and will give him others when he is well enough to come to my office for Roentgen. He must be given vitamin supplements and be fed as if he were a new acquisition at a prestigious zoo.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Livingston.

  “It was close for him. He has to be strengthened or he won’t survive.”

  This was, to say the least, upsetting news. But Livingston never put as much faith in doctors as did doctors and their victims. He had seen medical men gravely pronounce impending death, and the subjects of the pronouncements had later lived to sail around the world or climb an unconquered mountain. He planned to tell his wife, after the doctor left, his rather extreme views on the subject, forgetting that he had done so many times before. However, the doctor would not leave. Not only had he not been paid, but he was curious about the envelope with the red religious seal. He said that if it contained information about the child’s history he would do well to hear it. So Mrs. Livingston got the chocolate cake, made some iced tea, and they sat down in the big livingroom to hear her read the contents of the heavy brown envelope. The seal itself must have weighed a pound. When the paper was cut, Mrs. Livingston pulled out some yellow-ruled sheets on which was penned a masculine hand. She took a sip of tea, adjusted a lamp (leaving her audience in deep shadow), and with the tree frogs and night birds sounding like waves at the beach, and the moon rising, she began to read.

  “20 July, 1947

  “I am sitting in the garden of the Dominican Sisters of Marseilles. My name is Paul Levy, and I am a Lieutenant-Commander in the United States Navy, presently on leave of absence. On the twenty-eighth day of June, 1947, the child Marshall Pearl was born on my ship as it approached the coast of Palestine. Nothing is known of his father. His mother was a Russian Jewess who, from the ill effects of war, died immediately after giving birth. My ship, the Lindos Transit, was wrecked by the Royal Navy after a hard and costly fight. Most of its passengers, Jews illegally entering Palestine, managed to do just that. However, about forty were captured, including the newborn baby. Luckily, two doctors and a midwife were among the detained, and on the way to Haifa and for a week or so afterwards in the internment camp, they managed to care for the child. Since I was a potential cause of embarrassment and an actual cause of irritation, I was released rather quickly. I managed to convince them to allow me to take Marshall back to the United States. We traveled on a hospital ship as far as Toulon. Here in Marseilles I am told that I cannot take him farther, but the Dominican Sisters have promised to arrange for him to be sent to New York where, as a result of the war, they are in communication with various adoption agencies.

  “I am a military man, due for a good deal more of sea duty, and unmarried. My parents are too old, and my sisters and brothers too young, to make good parents themselves. So I must give him over. I can explain a few other things, and make a request of you, whoever you may be.

  “I was told by one of the captives that the woman who died was named Pearl. That may or may not have been the father’s name, but no matter, it is one of the few things this infant has in his possession, and I am of the opinion that it should stay with him. As for the name Marshall, I chose it because I have always liked it. A friend of mine, a good friend, named Marshall, was killed at the Coral Sea. I thought that perhaps in his honor this child who was born in battle, a rare thing, should take his name. Also, of course, the words are a pun on the little history he has.

  “His mother was most beautiful. I noticed her from the beginning, but I did not speak with her because I was intensely busy preparing for our violent landfall.

  “I ask only one thing. His mother was a Jew, and he is a Jew. Whether he is brought up that way, whether you who read this are Jews, is not important. But you must tell him of this. If you do not, you will betray his people, his mother, and him. It will be confusing if he is not told directly of the facts. For he is what he is, and though he may grow up completely at ease in his chanced locale he will always suffer the interference of his origins. This I know well from my own experience.

  “I hope that you take good care of him, and love him, and that someday he will visit me in Norfolk. I hope he will be able to find me. One last thing. I could tell by looking just once into his mother’s face that she was a woman who had much love in her. I am sorry that we did not speak. Perhaps if the circumstances had been slightly different she would have lived. But that is over, and only the child remains.

  “Respectfully,

  Paul Levy, Lieutenant-Commander, U.S.N.”

  In silence, Mrs. Livingston looked at her husband. She had always thought of him as somehow magical, tied to a scheme of things that she did not understand—as if she were married to a Gypsy. Only he could go to a Catholic foundling hospital and bring back a Jewish baby with credentials embossed in symbols of the high priesthood.

  They saw the doctor to the door; he was amazed, because it seemed that no incubator had been used. This he did not fathom, and he went away talking to himself. Though it was calm and (after the lights of the doctor’s car had vanished) dark, though it was night and the moon was high, the Livingstons were as excited as if it were a September day in Manhattan when work begins after vacation, and cool air floods in from the north, and women buy clothes in department stores. They went upstairs and looked at the baby, calmly sleeping in his crib unaware that he had touched down. His new parents lay awake listening to the forest flooded as it was with night sounds. Even when the moon disappeared beyond Haverstraw, they did not sleep.

  6

  ONE DAY in June when it was so hot in New York that Livingston could not work and swiveled about in his chair staring out the window, he decided to cut back a little. He had some appointments scheduled for that afternoon, but just thinking of the stoked-up little men so miraculously skilled at the dollar and so overheated in its pursuit made him tired. On the street below taxis were rushing in both directions. It was early enough in the morning for the sun to cast a shaft of gray and gold light from the east, the special light in New York which comes down between the high old stone buildings and through which dust rises and pigeons turn in complex flight. It is a tired light; even though it shines early in the morning, somehow it suggests afternoon. It is a light which illuminates the past, and Livingston was reminded of the twenties and the thirties, of the El, although he remembered these times as if they were in a sepia print and not in the orange and green sunset colors in which he had truly seen them. He began to think of when he was young in New York, and had been wild and stupid.

  During Prohibition he had gone to a party and awakened two days later in a lifeboat on the Staten Island Ferry, with no knowledge of how he had gotten there and no desire to leave. The way things changed, the differences in shading, how all the new buildings had become old buildings, how men he had known had died, how the Flatiron was suddenly a relic, how the misery and vigor of his youth seemed pointless and unwise, and the fact that the records were all scratched up and would not play on the new machines made him restless and upset. He went to the window and leaned out. The sidewalks, diamond sparkling, were beginning to heat, and he could see an ice cream wagon down the street on the corner of Fifth Avenue.

  His secretary had come in while he was leaning out the window and thrown a batch of telegrams on his desk. He turned around and looked at them, deciding to get down to business. He pulled his chair up to the desk, clearing his throat and girding himself for work. Should he take a short nap? A cool leather couch the color of ox blood beckoned. No, he had already taken a nap—to work.

  He picked up the
first dispatch and opened it. It was from London, and was marked Urgent. It read: REPEAT STOP CONFIRM OR DENY STOP TAX UNFAVORABLE STOP PARLIAMENT FICKLE STOP REPEAT STOP CONFIRM OR DENY STOP SIGNED EDWARD. Obviously this telegram was the last in a series which had been delayed and mixed, so he opened the next one, which read: WHY WILL YOU NOT CONFIRM OR DENY STOP DEAL FALLING THROUGH STOP WE ARE AMAZED STOP SIGNED EDWARD. The next few were from California, and one was from Rome. The very last was another London cable, reading: LAST CHANCE STOP SIGNED EDWARD.

  Livingston screamed to his secretary, “Do we have any earlier cables this week from that son of a bitch in London?”

  “We have many son of a bitches in London,” replied the secretary.

  “But Edward. I mean Edward.” The secretary checked and replied in the negative.

  Livingston swung around in time to see a blue balloon, which had likely been lost near the zoo, ride up into the shaft of light. Then, as he did often, he began to think about the West. He remembered a dark little boy without shoes, riding an Indian pony along a mesa and returning to his rough house in time to light candles. He remembered the Indian agents and the resourceful lawmen who would sometimes pass through. Once, a Texas Ranger had chased a man as far as the reservation back country, several states beyond his jurisdiction. He had a Colt .44 and an Enfield rifle. He bought provisions from Livingston’s father, who wondered how he could operate so far from Texas. The Ranger smiled, white teeth showing brightly in a face as darkly tanned as an Indian’s. He threw his arm back and cocked his head, indicating the mesa and beyond. “I come overland,” he said, “from Texas. And when I git ’im, I’ll bring ’im back, overland. Nobody’ll know.”

  Time passed in front of Livingstons eyes. He was immobilized. Certainly he could do no work. He jumped up and closed his windows. It was, after all, Friday, when it was natural to take off early. He looked at his watch, which said 10:30. There was enough time to get back home and change before the sun started downward. He left his office for Grand Central and the train to Eagle Bay.

  Thin and a few feet tall, with a nice little face and some missing teeth, Marshall sat with the other children in the first grade reading the story of the dog Tip. Each child had his turn to recite two sentences. Marshall could read as fast as an adult, so when his sentence rolled around as Mary calls Tip to pet him and Bill looks on, and then Bill sees Tip's white coat, Marshall read them so fast that it was almost as if he had said nothing. Conscious of the remaining empty space in time, he read: “No skool llib dna mih tep ot pit sllac Yram. Taoc etihw spit sees llib.” He turned to the teacher and said: “Esaelp Ssim Yggep, tel em daer erom,” and burst into giggles.

  Miss Peggy knew he was fast, but dared not skip him. For although in first grade he tested in reading like a senior in high school, he had no concept whatsoever of arithmetic. If he solved an addition correctly it was a gift of chance. Numbers did not make sense to him. It was as if the part of his brain which handled them had defected to the reading lobes. If the head of the primary school sat him down to try and remedy his numeral ignorance, Marshall could not concentrate, and squirmed around looking for a book. When and if he got hold of one he could sit mesmerized for hours. In his first year of reading he went through novels, history, geography, travel, comic books, railroad schedules, the telephone book (the Eagle Bay directory listed only a few hundred four-digit numbers), and anything else in print, including The New York Times, which he read with unparalleled devotion—paying equal heed to the front page, stock quotations, classifieds, clothing ads, the always ungrammatical divorce notices (“My wife Velma, having left my bed and board, I will not be responsible for any debts from she.”), and Shipping/Mails. “What’s new, Marshall?” Livingston would ask, to which Marshall would reply with gravity that it was 86 degrees in Belem, or that the Prudential Catassa was sailing to Buffalo from Pier 42. He understood little, but was rapidly making progress. He learned to read so fast that he never learned how to spell, and this, plus his difficulty with math and his completely illegible, retarded handwriting, served to keep him with his classmates. In their interminable idiotic meetings the school officials debated whether to skip him or leave him back. The tension neutralized and he was unaffected. But Miss Peggy never let him disrupt the class. She put him in the closet.

  He ended up in this closet at least once a day, and was instructed to leave his coat and lunch-box there instead of in the bank of assigned cubbyholes. Through a small window much higher than he could reach, he looked to the sky in the manner of prisoners. He spent hours in acute embarrassment and shame (worse even than the terrible moment in which the other children had discovered that he was an orphan), but he learned to read every nuance of the sky and clouds.

  This day in early June was most humiliating, since there was a party, during which Miss Peggy completely forgot about Marshall. Marshall was too proud to ask for his freedom, staying instead crouched on the closet floor, staring at the window. The other children laughed, fought, and sang. Marshall had his clouds and changing light.

  Just as the little party was drawing to a close, Miss Peggy remembered Marshall and dashed to the closet, fearing and wishing that he had been smothered, which of course was impossible because the window was open. When she unlatched and swung open the door she saw him in the corner, with his brown oxfords, blue denims with turned-up cuffs, black-watch shirt, and sandy blond hair. He looked at her when she asked him to come out, and said nothing. It was clear that he preferred to stay in the closet. He was being neither sullen nor obstinate. He simply preferred to be there alone. She made him promise to come out for his lesson, and eventually he did.

  In the middle of the lesson some of the children looked up in fear. A tall man had come to the door. He was sunburnt and rough-looking, with a mass of black hair and a black mustache. He was handsome, standing on the swaybacked threshold in his Abercrombie & Fitch tough-guy fishing outfit the color of good gunmetal. The sun struck his face, and although he smiled at the children he frightened them with his imposing presence. He had a violent, strange, gentle look, tiny windows of light perceptible in the eyes, a willing readiness evident. He walked over to the teacher and conferred with her. There were only a few more days of school; Marshall had learned what he had to learn in the first grade; and the river was cool and blue. Miss Peggy was amazed at how immediately and graciously she gave in, numbingly charmed by outrageous and unheard-of demands from this laborer who interrupted her class by standing in the doorway in boots and rolled-up sleeves. Livingston signaled Marshall with a movement of his eye, and Marshall, who had been poised holding his breath, jumped up and rushed to the closet to get his things as if he had just been freed of a thousand-year prison term. The two of them left the class like a farmer and his son going out early in the morning onto the plains.

  They were riding in the old wooden station wagon with a hole in the passenger door where a horse had kicked it, going up and down the hills toward Eagle Bay. Marshall had his feet on the seat, and was sort of half-standing-leaning to see through the window the churches and stores in town and the fences and farms outside. “What’d you do today in school?” asked Livingston.

  “I dunno.”

  “How’s the arithmetic coming along?”

  “Awright.”

  “How ’bout the reading?” said Livingston, remembering that Mrs. Livingston had found Magruder's Geography of the Despotic Asian Principalities, Protectorates, Colonies, Trust Territories, Mandates, & Secessionist Splinter States under Marshall’s pillow.

  “Awright,” answered Marshall, playing with wood he had plucked from the damaged door.

  They turned into Eagle Bay and started going down the road to the house, when suddenly Marshall doubled up in storms of sobbing, unable to catch his breath, shaking all over, getting hot and red. Livingston stopped the car, got out, and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and lifted Marshall into his arms. Marshall continued to sob, and Livingston sat down on a stone wall, holding
him up close, trying to look in his eyes, rocking him almost like a baby. When at last he did see into the eyes of the boy he held, they were a mystery to him. They said so much and seemed so sad. Marshall told him about what had happened, and along with his resolution to see to it, Livingston was convinced that the little child was moved by currents deeper than he had thought.

  At the stable they saddled up a horse and Antonio the pony, and Mrs. Livingston came out to give them a cooler of cold drinks and sandwiches. In her presence Marshall’s color returned and he was happy and cheerful. She shared some of his secrets, and she could make him forget anything which troubled him. They tied wire-cage crab traps onto the saddles, mounted, and rode off into the woods on their way to the Oscawana Bend, where, when the sun was strong and high, the crabs bit like crazy and you could stand on the deserted shore and watch the bass leaping like silver. The river was glassy and flat as Marshall rode with Livingston along its edge hoping a train would pass by and salute with its whistle.

  One did. They heard it in the north about five minutes before it arrived. It was going forty miles an hour—six black engines and two hundred fifty cars. The lead engines light was visible far up the track, at first a tiny diamond, then like a mirror reflecting the sun. At night these beams were blinding. When the engine cab passed by, Marshall held the reins in one hand and pulled an imaginary whistle-cord with the other. The engineer was a lean squinting man covered with oil. He surveyed the father on his brown quarter horse, the son on a reddish Shetland, and their crab traps lashed to the saddles. Then he blew his whistle several blasts. The horses sidled. Antonio put his two left hooves into the cool lapping water. A short time later the whistle blasts echoed off the cliffs south of Haverstraw, but could hardly be heard over the rumbling of the freight. Passing them were the dirty saffron-liver-colored cars of the Pacific Fruit Express; boxcars from a dozen railroads—Georgia Pacific, New York Central, Rock Island, B&O, New Haven & Hartford, Pennsylvania, Canadian Pacific, CNR, Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Illinois Central, Santa Fe; the company cars—Swift, Hygrade, Armour, Morton, United States Steel, Flo-Sweet; coal cars; oil and chemical tankers; flat cars; and cars loaded with hogs and cows going to slaughter. Each had a distinctive color pattern, and some had notable smells. When the caboose passed, Livingston turned his hand in the air and pantomimed something rising from it like smoke. Then he dropped his reins and flashed both hands twice. A man at the rail of the caboose saluted in thanks—he had been informed of a smoking hot-box twenty cars up. After the train passed, the smells of pig, stale, rotted fruit, and grain remained, but the north wind cleaned things out fast.