Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  While leaning over the rail, Marshall had been telling A1 about Jamaica. In the middle of his narrative he looked north at familiar skies and, even though no clouds were visible, predicted a thunderstorm. A1 did not believe him and made him go on. For an hour they stood on the bridge, Marshall gesticulating and hoarse from a tale in which A1 did not place much trust. No one believed anything Marshall said about Jamaica, but A1 wanted to know what had happened. At the end, when frightening sheets, chains, and bolts of white fire were striking tall buildings to the north and the purple mass of a great Hudson Valley thunderstorm was sweeping ominously southward, Marshall hurried to finish his story, and they sprinted to the Manhattan side, drumming the boards and dodging pear-sized raindrops. A1 pondered the similarity between his family and the Pringles, though he did not think that the Pringles actually existed.

  Wet and breathless in the sullied blue of Brooklyn Bridge station, A1 leaned over Marshall and grabbed him by the throat. He was much bigger than Marshall (not difficult) and he throttled him. “If you ever sleep with my sister,” he said, “I’ll kill you.” Until that moment, Marshall had never imagined that he and Alexa could be lovers. She was too fine, too tall, too beautiful, too crazy, and too unpredictable. He had always regarded her as a sister—living in the same house ... and there were other girls ... the hospitality of the family ... honor ... death. But she was alluring and, despite her rebellion and feigned boldness, she was shy and gentle. That, really, was why he had thought of her as so delicately removed. Marshall caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror of a gum machine. Though red from the throttling, he had an open, whimsical look. A subway thundered in, dripping and sooty. They got on, and by the time the door closed a vision of Alexa in all her beauty floated before Marshall’s eyes, and he couldn’t wait for that night’s reading of The Divine Comedy, for he knew that he would share her book.

  2

  SIGNOR PASCALEO settled into a pose of religious infallibility. Facing him were his family and Marshall, teamed up in pairs at volumes of Sinclairs dual-language Dante. The Pascaleos had completed the cycle nine times since Alexanders birth, and that June they would finish the Inferno. They read only one canto a week, going over it several times, translating, and discussing. Signor Pascaleo was authority and guide, a digest of all important criticism and an important critic himself. The more he read, the more excited he got, so that often at the end of a canto he paced the room like a spotted beast, arms alternately clenched and flying, a stream of Italian rhetoric issuing from him at such great speed that even his wife could not understand. How difficult it was for Marshall to work his way through the dark and savage wood of those rapidly uttered words.

  Signora Pascaleo, whose braided and piled hair made her look like an Austrian basket, sat with Paolo, who, a few months before, had just started to understand vaguely some of the readings, but who squirmed and more often than not fell asleep while leaning against his mother. A1 sat alone or, sometimes, with the goat, who had to be held when Signor Pascaleo became excited. Marshall sat with Alexa. That evening he realized that his enjoyment of the Commedia had not been entirely pure. He was in love with Alexa, but from politeness and civility to his hosts, and from fear, he had hidden it even from himself.

  She had magnificent hands. He watched them gracefully embracing the text. On her right wrist were two tortoise-shell bracelets, and she had several small rings of silver and gold. From the corner of his eye he could see that some of her hair, though tied back, fell in delicate wisps about her ears and neck. When she spoke, he felt the process of it throughout her body and his, so close was she. As time wore on he felt a reverberating heat between them, especially if she were to laugh. When in turning pages their hands touched it remained with him long afterward. She looked a little frail and thin, but the sight of her full, stretched jersey reminded him that she was not. A1 had told him of how as a child she had been deathly afraid of everything, of how she (a short fat girl) had stood at the window only a few years before and eaten boxes of chocolates while she watched her girlfriends cavort with boys on the street far below. Then, in a year or two, she had changed. They hoped that she would make good on her splendid transition, and be neither timid nor brash, nor exploitive, nor preyed upon. At the University of Rome she would be very much on her own, a delightful, frightening prospect. She longed for a city of fountains and green grass in January. She wanted to walk like a contessa down the worn and civilized streets, to pass by with a straight stare and high thoughts. She had determined that this city was for her, and though she shuddered in imagining it, the thought of living there alone on one of its hills in temperate Roman colors was as satisfying as a long embrace.

  Signor Pascaleo guided them throughout Canto XXVI, the Canto of Ulisse, reading without emotion until suddenly he rose in his chair and the net of his vessels was visible in his hands. Though the storm had passed and it was mild and dry outside in the dark, with the sound only of a few taxis, they felt again the excursive cracks of thunder and lightning which had rolled down from Eagle Bay.

  “O frati,” dissi, “che per cento milia

  perigli siete giunti all’occidente,

  a questa tanto picciola vigilia

  de’nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente,

  non vogliate negar l’esperienza,

  di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gentle.”

  Signor Pascaleo felt his youth and history, when he had climbed the mountains north of Salerno and seen it as perfect and as miniature as a town on a postage stamp. The family was riveted, Alexa slightly quivering, the sweep of her shoulders and neck like the flowing main cables of a suspension bridge—in that the curve was perfect and hypnotic. The goat, who had been as immobile as a white stone, pranced up and down sneezing from excitement and had to be held by Al, who calmed him, saying, “Shh, shh, caprone, non c’è niente. ”

  Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;

  chè della nova terra un turbo nacque,

  e percosse del legno il primo canto.

  Tre volte il fè girar con tutte l'acque:

  alla quarta levar la poppa in suso

  e la prora ire in giù, com’altrui piacque,

  infin chè’l mar fu sopra noi richiuso.

  Then it was sad, for it was dark and quiet and the boat had gone under even after Ulysses’s great speech urging his crew to try for new lands in the track of the sun, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Signor Pascaleo turned on a light, and remained with his hand on the switch. Signora and Paolo disappeared toward Paolos belated bath. Alexander said, “Let's get outa here and go to a noisy saloon.” Alexa didn’t want to go. “C’mon,” said Al. “C’mon.”

  In a place on Second Avenue—Julia’s Cockroach Bar—a piano, a lot of rude bullyboy jostling, and a pint or two of beer made them forget the enjoining paradox which, without plan, had come to light in the reading. Everyone in the bar looked at Alexa, while Marshall and Al discussed their plan to explore beneath the city. In Signor Pascaleo’s office was a set of forty master keys allowing access to every sewer, subway, water, gas, or steam passageway in the city. They were going to borrow the keys and spend a night underground. At night the sewer current was gentle enough to allow passage through all but the swiftest straits—the Fifty-third Street Flume, the West End Avenue Delta, and the great falls under the New York Times (absolutely impassable after lunch). They planned to return the keys by morning. They had already purchased miner's lights, high boots, a good rope, and a crowbar.

  Alexa thought the scheme moronic. “The sewers smell disgusting,” she said to her brother. “You would want to walk around in the sewers for fun.”

  “The sewers smell better than you do,” Al snapped back. “Did you ever not see a nude mule?”

  “How much beer have you had?”

  “Half a glass ... see. Did you ever not see a nude mule?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No. Did you ever not see a nude mule?”

  “No!”

&n
bsp; “You mean you always see a nude mule? Ha!”

  “No!”

  “You mean yes.”

  “Oh, all right. Yes. I did.”

  “Did what.”

  “Did ever not see a nude mule.”

  “When?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “You have then, I take it, seen a nude mule, on occasion?”

  “I’m looking at one right now.”

  “Then, did you never not see a nude mule?”

  “When?”

  “Ever.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not now?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “When?”

  “Let me ask you this.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Okay. Who?”

  “Marshall, of course, who else?”

  “Is that so?” asked Al. Then for half an hour they sat without speaking, while in the rolling bittersweet music Marshall did not realize that in the shorthand of brothers and sisters, Alexa had said that she was in love with him.

  The May night was clear and balmy; they walked along the river and watched lighted sparkling bridges, viaducts, elevated roadways, trestles, and barges, which lately had been washed by pure rain. Between the two boys was a glimmering girl, and the skyline was like a great forest of fireflies. As so often is the case, New York could easily have been an idealized picture of itself in a quiet, contemplative future.

  Marshall wondered how such great power could be still and mild at times, and thoroughly abrasive and destructive at others. Cellular and divided, the city’s rooms, lights, squares, and streets could in their complexity put to shame the heart of a great electronic machine, or the whirling mosaics of the most colorful mosque. All of it could never be seen, and therein lay its great promise—its swarming variations were as valuable as an ever-receding geographic horizon. Beneficent distance was within, hidden in the turmoil, as if a monster had swallowed nature.

  “Let’s drive,” said Al. He loved to drive, and prided himself on his knowledge of the streets, expressways, shortcuts, and detours through lost unknown neighborhoods. At night they often rode around the city, exploring the empty roads.

  “Where to?” asked Alexa, as they climbed into the Pascaleos’ vintage Dunderburg.

  “How about a bridge tour? I’ll take you over the Verrazano, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Fifty-ninth Street, Triboro, Henry Hudson, and George Washington in less than an hour.”

  They put the top down and glided smoothly in the pulsing arteries, achieving precise transitions from one highway to another, taking corners with just the right G, maintaining near constant speed. Marshall and Alexa leaned back and watched the city lights, which seemed clearer and gentler than in winter when they sparkled and cut like diamond grit. Now, there was a fresh wind, and young trees had a chance.

  Marshall felt as if he could stay in New York forever. He imagined making his way up the echelons to find ease and power in a high place. He imagined living in a loft south of Houston Street, where artists were beginning to set up studios as they had done long before in Greenwich Village. He imagined entering ward politics with no protection or perspective except what he would get from the heat of his own effort. In summer the streets boiled and the air burnt his eyes, but he could always look down long disappearing avenues to the small blue square of sky at the end waving upward in viscous snakes of air. And if Alexa would return from Rome, or not go at all...

  But as they flew across the wide rivers and had laid before them great important views, Marshall felt the draw of other times and other places. His origins seemed as well to pull him from the fine scenes that he often saw, so that within his own life he frequently felt like an observer. However, Alexa was too intoxicating to ignore, and he soon fell back into the mill of his infatuation, eyeing her delightful profile as the three of them did the bridges. The ways to love, it seemed, were as tangled and marvelous as New York’s great network of roads.

  3

  ONE EVENING while Signor Pascaleo paced back and forth like a matron glace in a dressing gown, Marshall and A1 were tramping through the vast system of tunnels under Manhattan. They had given up completely on maps, which were about 800 times more complex than subway charts, and had decided just to wander. They entered by the basement of the Yale Club (accessible via an unlocked door in the Hotel Roosevelt tunnel) and quickly found their way to an enormous main through which knee-deep water was rapidly rushing. The conduit was so high that they would not have reached its top even had they jumped. A1 had been right—it didn’t smell, except for a dank odor like that of a sweating rabbit. They had the distinct impression that the water was coming from some specific place and going to yet another place of particular importance. Underground water seems issued from momentous chambers and destined for hidden seas. Actually, or so it was believed, the current came from countless gutters, sluices, and drains, and no Valhalla was at either end. But the rushing suggested a purposefulness that water does not have. They walked in the big tunnel, pushing against the current, and they stopped to rest, peering northward into the darkness, from which emerged a cool wind. Straight down the tunnel was a tiny yellow light. It flickered, and it was moving. “Look,” said Al, “that light is moving toward us.”

  “How could it be?” asked Marshall.

  “I don’t know. Turn off your lamp.” They switched off their miner's lamps and hid in a recess near an exit ladder. The light was moving toward them.

  Marshall broke the silence. “They don’t have night patrols down here, do they?”

  “Nope,” said Al, his throat tightening. “My father says that, except for emergencies, no one is ever here at night—no one, for any reason whatsoever.”

  “Then what’s that?”

  “Maybe it’s debris.”

  “Debris? With a light on it?”

  “I don’t know what the hell it is; don’t ask me.”

  As it drew closer they could see that it was a torch of pitch, burning with black smoke. They heard muffled sounds, words, and wood against wood, and then they saw that the torch was on the prow of a boat, fixed on a metal tripod. The boat itself was long and thin, crudely built of overlapping planks. It had a small sail of coarse, striped wool, and it went faster even than the rapid current. As it swept past them, they were speechless. A dozen bearded men in rags and tattered homespun manned little stunted oars and a seemingly unnecessary rudder. They spoke in a strange guttural language, and they were arguing vehemently. As soon as they had passed, the boat picked up speed and the torch got smaller until it vanished from sight completely.

  At first, Marshall and Al remained frozen in place, jaws hanging open. Then Al got angry (he always got angry at things that he could not explain), and he jumped back into the main, sloshing ahead. “Before you ask,” he said angrily, “I don’t know. So don’t ask.”

  “It must be beatniks going to the Village,” said Marshall, “or maybe farmers who came from upstate in the aqueduct tunnel.”

  Al turned in disgust. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s a bunch of stockbrokers who have found a new way to get to Wall Street.”

  “That’s a good theory,” said Marshall, laughing nervously. “Just keep on coming up with theories. It’s the only way I know of dealing with something like this. Use the data that you have. For instance, they were arguing. We know, for example, that they couldn’t have been arguing about which course to take. We know, for example, that—”

  “Marshall, forget it. No one would ever believe us anyway.”

  They could not see the end of the tunnel—which was many miles long—and they turned into a sizable tributary, slashing an underground mist with the beams of their helmet lights. A little down the road they came to a large platform fifteen feet above them in a high recessed well. Shining their lamps on it, they saw a door with a gleaming lock. A1 leaned against the wall, facing it, and Marshall climbed him until he stood on his shoulders, Marshall’s hands also on the wa
ll. Then Al took both of Marshall’s feet in his hands and backed down until his arms were straight, after which he slowly walked against the wall until he was standing at his full height, arms straight. Marshall was standing on Al’s palms, a platform at least seven feet above the ground. Marshall stretched as much as he could, but his fingers did not quite reach the ledge. “I can’t reach the ledge,” he said. “Can you stretch some more?”

  “No,” said Al in a gasp. “When I count three, I’m going to toss you into the air. Jump on three.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Marshall.

  “One.”

  “Wait just a minute,” said Marshall.

  "Two."

  “Thanks,” said Marshall.

  “Three,” and Al threw him as he himself jumped. Marshall’s fingers caught the ledge so slightly that he hesitated in space and then began to fall back. In complete panic he somehow threw his right hand up and caught hold. After pulling himself up, the entire right side of his body and brain contorted in a deadly cramp.

  “What are you doing up there?” called out Al from below, where the end of a convention or intermission at the theater had caused the current to swell and rise to his thighs. Marshall hardly had the breath to speak.

  “My ribs are scratching my heart,” he scrawled with his voice.

  “Your what?”

  “My ribs are scratching my heart.”

  “Put your hands above your head and crack your knuckles.”

  He did this and was able to breathe again, just in time to throw down the rope, for the water was coming close to the top of Al’s boots.

  The lock was of stainless steel. They tried several wrong keys, and then began to work systematically through the forty. At twenty-nine the door opened and they stepped through as carefully as turn-of-the-century burglars with sacks and raccoon masks. On the other side was a clean dry tunnel through which ran steam pipes and cables. Spread over the floor were many pieces of zwieback and an occasional baklava. “What are these for?” asked Marshall of Al, who had attended high-level discussions of the sewers.