by Mark Helprin
Marshall stood by a table laden with cake and champagne. Glass in hand, he fixed his glance on the clock. He was thinking that the room was hot, and was nearly on his way out to eye the black bay, when he saw a woman descending the curved stairs, towed by Rollo, who let go and dashed into the kitchen. It was Rollo’s aunt. She came to the bottom and stood still, staring at Marshall. It seemed to them that they were at the end of a long corridor. The music was like gold and silver pouring in an arch over the way between them—percussive stars and whitened sparks. They did not know how long they stood like that, oblivious of the comings and goings of others. Behind her was the brassy clock, behind him the bay. She had dark, chestnut-colored hair which was thick and soft. Her eyes were green. Her lips moved ever so slightly in astonishment. When finally she came close he was overtaken by the heady scents of good perfume, thin red Florentine leather, and the juniper and herbs of gin. And he was stunned by her high, perfectly formed shoulders. But he could see in her that which he had always loved. They looked in one another’s eyes, transfixed. Marshall shuddered and would have been seized had she not brought him back as only she could, with characteristic love and tenderness, saying, “Are you seeing colors?” For it was Lydia.
Parting from her in Union Station fifteen years before he had seen the dark colors and the shafts of sunlight, the porters’ red hats, and the black iron, and it had nearly broken him. But there on the Battery he found himself with her in a chamber of light and gold; she had become the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; and it was a clear spring night in South Carolina.
19
FAR MORE luminous than the girls Marshall saw from a distance in the Saturday Regatta at Charleston, sunburnt in the seas white clothes, Lydia Levy was graceful, warm, beguiling, brilliant, and lithe-limbed. She herself embodied the ravaging simplicity and beauty of static Charleston and its smoky wharves.
Upon his return from Palestine in 1947, an amazed Paul Levy had found his mother in an advanced state of pregnancy. His first trip to Eagle Bay had been to try to reclaim Marshall so that the new Levy baby would have a companion. But there had been no chance of that, and he had seen that the Livingstons were a fortunate choice, even if fortuitous. He had surveyed the splendid mass of Eagle Bay, the stables, the works of art, the discipline of the Livingston study, and decided that from a practical standpoint it would be better for Marshall to be nurtured alone and the center of attention. Then there was the issue of wealth. He did not know that Livingston would retire to his garden at a relatively early age, thus activating the stopcocks on a generous income and considerably reducing the family accounts. Still, the inheritance would not be divided, as would that of Levy senior. No one (including the Internal Revenue Service) knew exactly how much Livingston had squirreled away, because he lived simply almost to the point of fraud. Once, Marshall had cried because Otto Boar, the father of one of his classmates, had called him a pauper.
Lydia was born on a clear blue day in late September, 1947. Her brothers and sisters were much older than she was, and she grew up virtually alone. She began her dancing in high school, during which time the beautiful child whom Marshall had known became a beautiful woman. When she graced herself with silver rings or just a velvet ribbon in her hair, she stopped hearts. At Berkeley, she had majored in history and spent all the time she could in the High Sierra—like Marshall, she wanted to live in a wilderness cabin. Like Marshall, she wanted to live high above the hills of San Francisco in one of the precarious flying towers there. Like Marshall, she wanted to farm in the mountains. They wanted so many things that it was impossible to choose. She was the only girl he had ever met who looked with favor upon his dreams of being in the Navy. She, too, liked to walk for miles and miles on punishing hikes, to climb obstacles and buildings, to listen to classical music as well as the music of Potato Za and his band. Like Marshall, she preferred to eat while walking, to have the kitchen clean while eating, to keep the windows open all the time. He hated coffee. She hated coffee. She hated drugs. He hated drugs. They loved to exercise, to read solid works of history. Scholarly books excited them. They liked country music, spotlights instead of round bulbs, dogs. They danced together to the music of Potato Za. They made perfect love.
Marshall lost track of time and forgot about the dossier that Levy had returned to the vault. Levy did not remind him. Since their parents had died in her adolescence, Levy had been like a father to Lydia, and he was delighted by what seemed to be an impending marriage, although he knew that Marshall had a task to fulfill. Marshall and Lydia together made the household shine like a jewel.
They recalled the last day on the train, thundering across the heartland. As soon as they tried to define what it had meant, to corner its undoubted importance, they forgot words and sense and drifted into one another’s arms. “On the train,” she would say, her lips numbing with desire and love, “when we rode for hours staring at the plains, the wheat ... the mountains.” By that time, he would be holding her tightly, kissing her shoulders, she with eyes closed and fingers spread. But nonetheless, they got the spirit of it.
They went to Atlantic Headquarters—the nerve center of seaward defense, a fortress of Levy’s design. A great violet-colored room was crossed and circled by glowing translucent lines of red, blue, and green. Chunks of amber light representing the ships of the Second Fleet moved sluggishly across a black sea. A compass rose, projective lines, and the assurant grid of Mercator pulsed in high-frequency yellow. Twoscore men and women in white uniforms glowing ultraviolet worked faint consoles and followed the amber spots across empty seas. Aware that the plotters and trackers were young, Levy had had quiet electronic music piped in. They went about their jobs smoothly, as if they were in another world. The amber and the electronic tones were killing and rapacious to the senses. Intellect carried on there very well, affording its strange paralyzed joys in an advanced incursion of the future into a century still close to the land, the wood, and the salt of the sea.
They sought the light in a Charleston church full of little children tied in tight on a Sunday morning. Marshall and Lydia watched through long straight windows as boys and girls in knee socks and Jesus buttons squirmed on folding metal chairs. The palmettos bent in the wind outside. Wills were forced into ceremony and religion. Parents waited by the bay to retrieve their children, and vanished down a long water-bordered street into an uncertain distance—almost as if back into the interior of the Carolinas—to rest from codes and escape the law. Lydia said, “Those children will look back and remember the old light in their schoolroom, light long passed, and like us they’ll see themselves stretched in a beautiful tension, always unknowing. Sometimes, I wish I had not been educated, and would be a fat old country woman indolent with fan and beer.” And she easily achieved that homeward, lazy, rocking indolence—only to wake up with a dancers body and a scholar’s mind, gentle and true.
One day they went to the out islands. She was wearing white—white tennis shoes, a white skirt, a white blouse, and a white hat. Her arms were darkly tanned (it was already the end of April), as were her long and perfect hands. Her face was ruddy, and from her hat, bent in flowing curves like a flower, her energetic hair swept around her neck. They sat down on the side of a dune and she pulled her knees up to her chest, resting her head on the little platform which resulted. Marshall knew that he could spend the rest of his life with this woman—doing simple things like going to the beach and watching tankers and military ships beyond the shining ribbons of white and blue; driving into the country and sitting by a river; going to an outdoor restaurant; swimming in the salty estuary; holding her in his arms. She was the first woman with whom he felt entirely at ease (as he had known that he would), with no need to prove himself or to overwhelm, and no fear that she would go. He had often been afraid, combative, in pain. It dropped away.
They walked until they got to a road, following it until they reached a small shack outside of which was an old Coca-Cola machine. He took out some dimes an
d they found themselves with two icy bottles, which they carried along the heat-waved macadam road to a bridge, where Marshall opened the bottles on the girders. “I hate it,” she said, “but I always end up drinking it.” He almost fell off the bridge, because she was a thousand times more ideal than all the paintings on the back of all the National Geographies he had ever seen, when an American beauty takes the pause that refreshes. In her white hat, with hair shining, arm uplifted, and neck smoothly stretched, she drank. As her lips separated from the bottle and the remaining liquid fell back, there was a perfect sound, like a little bell.
“Hey,” she said, “there’re shrimp in this creek. Lets go get ’em. I’ll use my hat. I can always wash it.” In one move, she jumped into the water—landing almost knee-deep—swept off her hat, releasing a mass of buoyant hair, and began intently to skim the surface for shrimp, which ended their days at a roadside stand where, for a dollar, an old woman cleaned and cooked them, and served them up with fried potatoes. Marshall and Lydia slept in her barn.
When they awoke it was sweet and dark, with the light patterns of winter, and air as still and soft as silence. They drove inland, halted by a field, and watched for hours as the shade moved across it, a heavy weight receding and advancing on the pale new grass. They could hear hundreds of birds, and sweet smoke was slowly rising in a distant column.
They started back to Charleston in early evening. He went too fast because he was thinking of how it could be with her in New York, in the commercial districts and downtown where it was frenetic and violent. He imagined her standing by City Hall, the great ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge visible to her left, gray snow falling crystalline as if on the North Sea, diesel smoke from ships in the harbor, officials gliding up and down stone steps into halls bluer and finer than the shell of a robin’s egg, heavy winter coats, men around bright fires in trash cans, and the penetrating cold. Looking into her face, framed by a fur collar and her hair, which glinted overpoweringly in the slanting sun, he heard a single tone like the sound of a shaking reed or a powerful note from Lucius’s pipes beating over the mountainsides before the raid.
She stopped that vision completely when she turned on the radio and let out Elvis, who pulsated throughout the car and about the cool trees on the roadside. They agreed that Elvis was better old and crazy than young, that he fit into the landscape of the South best of all, and that he should never have left the South.
Having made a circuitous route inland, they drove past the warships in Charleston as one was lighting its boilers. Black diesel smoke poured from the stack. The ship was as strong, cutting, and gray as New York Harbor in winter. They sensed fire, and he looked past her, ravishingly beautiful in worn white, at the sailors doing their tasks inevitably and with directed energy. He loved her all the more when she understood why he shuddered with resolve at the sight of a warship. She moved her hands to the music and nearly danced in her seat as they drove by the water, and the sun finally started to set—round, driving, orange fire dipping into the back bays and branches of the sea.
20
THEY WERE married in the summer, after a quick and physical courtship. Queried about the wisdom of such a momentous step, Levy had said to Marshall, “I think its a good idea. If you took time to look more carefully, you wouldn’t know what to look for anyway. You might as well just jump into it, if the spirit moves you.” And since the spirit did, one day in June Marshall became uncle to Rollo and Amanda, brother-in-law to Susannah and Paul Levy, and husband to Lydia Levy. Stunned, the Livingstons flew to Charleston. Suddenly Marshall was part of an enormous vital family. It was good that Levy knew the Livingstons, satisfying that there were children about, and amusing that dignitaries came from Washington to witness the union. Several tents and platforms were erected on the back lawn, and young women from the city worked behind linen-covered tables in a mist of beating sun. Palmettos had been fixed at the tops of the tent poles as if Marshall and Lydia were to be married near the Sixth Cataract of the Nile, and not in a Battery garden. The Livingstons brought engraved gemstones for Lydia. And that Saturday there was a harbor regatta—moving like magic on the summer inlet, pressing forward with grace and with courage.
Marshall was grateful, and not just because of the wedding. Some of Lydia’s friends had flown in from Berkeley and arranged to meet her in a Charleston restaurant. Even at a distance Marshall heard over the phone as they specified in conspiratorial yet booming voices that he not be present. He asked Lydia why, and she replied that they had come to dissuade her from marriage. “They’re feminists, and think that marriage is being a prisoner of war. They would rather spend their lives seeking out reflections of themselves in everything that exists. You see, if you are married to a man, he does not present you with a mirror-image. You have to look apart from yourself. They’re afraid to do this, imagining that they would be subsumed, and perhaps they would be. But I do like them, or at least I used to.”
“Are they against the family?”
"Sure."
“They would really rather see men and women apart?”
“Yes.”
“And what about the children?”
“God help the children.”
This was one area in which Marshall had not a defense in the world, and could not even begin to think clearly enough to argue. He could only feel, and it upset him very much. All his life, he had loved and been thankful for the Livingstons, and, lacking a real father and mother, did not understand how anyone could wish to rid himself of the true attachments for want of which he had been outcast and tormented. He was afraid that they would take Lydia away from him.
“Why?” she asked. “It doesn’t make sense. How could they?” Then she realized that such things did not have to make sense—they just swooped down as hard and as surprising as falcons. Marshall was afraid because it had happened to him in a time that he could not even remember. She took him in her arms. “You don’t know about these things,” she said. “Of course you don’t. Now what can I do? I know. Come to the Palm Restaurant and hide on the roof. It will be dark, and you can get up there. We’ll sit in the courtyard, toward the water. It’s a late supper, at ten.”
He made his way to the restaurant and struggled two stories up a drainpipe until he reached the roof. Just as he was clear, a Chinese chef brandishing a long knife rushed into the alleyway and, cursing in Mandarin with great ferocity, killed a slew of invisible swordsmen. Marshall groped along terra-cotta tiles until he caught sight of Lydia in the courtyard. As she had said, she was sitting at a table on the bayside. He perched on the roof unseen, squatting with chin in hand like a forgotten gargoyle. From above, he could see the full sweep of her hair. She was wearing a black shawl. He threw a pebble onto her plate. The china rang and everyone looked, but she calmly crossed her legs and scratched her nose.
Then the two young women arrived and embraced and kissed Lydia in a way that made Marshall bristle. He could hear every word of their conversation. First they talked about women; women here and women there, women in literature, women in art. Then they talked about women; women in politics, women in society, women in sports. And then they talked about women; women in the cinema, women in history, women in agriculture.
At dessert they got to the heart of the palm. They wanted Lydia to come with them at that very moment and fly out of Charleston, without even going home to pack, without making a telephone call. They held up a ticket. “Its for you,” they said. “It has your name on it. You can live in the co-operative. Come with us. Be our sister.” With uncharacteristic softness, they looked into her eyes, waiting for her answer. Marshall was clenching his fists, swaying back and forth as if he were watching a boxing match. Lydia had listened silently. They thought they had her, and, for a moment, so did Marshall. What they said was powerful for the times, direct, and daring. There were two of them and only one Lydia, and they were skillful proselytizers, because they depended completely on making others believe what they believed.
“No,” s
aid Lydia. But they didn’t take her seriously, and they started up again. She interrupted, saying, “Didn’t you hear me? I said no, thank you.” Again they began, as if what she thought meant nothing as long as it did not fit their expectations. This made her rather angry, for she was someone who, most of the time, was taken very seriously.
“Lydia...” they oozed.
“Lydia, shmidia. Do you know what ‘no’ means, a nice, tough, assertive, no-nonsense ‘no’?”
“She went soft,” one of them said to the other, and they started to get up.
“Just one minute,” shouted Lydia in rage. “If there’s anything soft here, it’s your mushy little brain.”
“Where do you think you’re going to get, with babies, and a house to run?” they screamed. “In a few years you’ll come to us, you’ll see, when you want to escape a dead, fascist institution which will rape the life out of you. Marriage is paid rape. There’s no such thing as love, except between sisters.”
“You are deranged. Don’t tell me about getting along in the world. Who was Summa? Who won the History Prize? And what did you do? I happen to know what you did. You spent your time staring at your genitals in a mirror—four whole years!” They gasped.
“You could be a pioneer they said, unable to escape a world of slogans.
“You be a pioneer,” said Lydia. “Go out West. Beat off the Indians.” They gasped again. “I’m going to have a family, and I will love them and be devoted to them. The rest will work itself out. And if that’s a dangerous pronouncement in these times, then I choose to live dangerously. I can do it, even if I’m the last woman in the world who does. And you, you self-centered gherkins, keep on riding your endless corkscrew. But stay out of my life.”
Marshall, who had been completely engrossed in the argument, lost his footing on the roof and began to slide. “Oh, no,” he said, desperately clawing the smooth tile, but he continued to slide. “Oh, no,” he said, hurtling off the edge of the roof, ripping his pants on a projection of drainpipe, and flying, as if aimed, right for Lydias table. He landed on his back. The table broke in two and collapsed with a great clatter. A dozen old ladies began to scream uncontrollably, as if in a play when a woman sees a mouse. The two sisters assumed vicious self-defense positions. Marshall stood up quickly and began to hop around on one foot. In the sound of Lydias laughter, his fear of feminism disappeared forever.