by Mark Helprin
“I’m speaking metaphorically,” Freddy said.
“I know,” was the answer. He turned sharply to look at her. She had known.
My God, he thought, had she known all the time?
THEY HAD DONE VERY WELL in the thrift shop, as Washington has many highly placed lawyers, lobbyists, and officials. In fact, because they were judicious and had an eye for clothes, they had done splendidly well. Fredericka now had, in addition to her dusty-rose polo shirt, one in navy and one in white. She also had a beautifully cut pair of khakis, some olive-coloured shorts, a Fair Isle jumper, and a yellow shell-parka. It was a sailing wardrobe and very versatile, down to the gum-soled Top-Siders.
Freddy too had piqué polo shirts, though in navy only, and he had acquired a grey lamb’s-wool sweater, khaki trousers and shorts, a yellow parka like Fredericka’s, and the same kind of shoes. They each had a tan rucksack with leather straps and bottom, and Freddy had a bridle-leather belt with a surcingle buckle.
When they were dressed and had carefully arranged their gear, Freddy said, “You look beautiful, as always. All we need now are teeth.”
She did look beautiful. In fact, shaven and clean, they looked like the people they once had been—as long as they did not open their mouths. It was not surprising that they seemed like what in America are called preppies, in that they were the Mecca toward which all preppies pointed. If they had been able to keep their mouths closed they could easily and without challenge have swept into any yacht club or polo ground in the world. But their destination that afternoon was the pro bono dental clinic of Dr Jay Popcorn.
Dr Popcorn made them recline on chairs on either side of him. Poor people are used to having a dentist between them, swivelling from one to the other like a mechanic working on two Vauxhalls at once. Dr Popcorn was a celebrity dentist with curly grey hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and an aquiline nose. Usually he gushed over his patients, though not at the clinic, where they didn’t pay. But this was different.
“You have,” he told both of them, “magnificent, magnificent teeth. I would have to think that either you’re from a mineral-rich-aquifer area like Texas, or you’ve had monthly dental care all your lives. Are you from Texas?”
“Ahlahbahmah,” said Freddy.
“Alabama, Alabama. Hmn. Were your parents dentists?”
“No.”
“Neither of your families?”
“No.”
“What did they do?” he asked, curious about the background of patients who seemed unlikely for a pro bono clinic, and whose traumas were identical.
“My father was in the army, and my mother does a lot of gardening,” said Freddy.
“I see, a military brat. And you, Mrs Moffat?”
“My parents are farmers,” she said, after hesitating a bit. It was true, in a way.
“And what, may I ask, do you do?” Dr Popcorn asked.
“We’re dentists,” Fredericka blurted out. After all, that was what it said in the capsules.
Knowing that this could lead to trouble, Freddy clarified Fredericka’s answer. “Not for people, though,” he said, holding up his right index finger.
“Not for people? For what then?” A long silence followed.
“Crocodiles,” Freddy finally said. He seemed to think about it in awe.
“Crocodiles?”
“It’s mainly periodontics.”
“Is that true?” Dr Popcorn’s hands fell to his sides.
“There are tens of thousands of crocodiles in the South, where we come from. They have a lot of problems with their teeth, and they have a lot of teeth—a lot of teeth.”
“But there are no crocodiles in America.”
“There aren’t?” Freddy asked.
“No, just alligators.”
“Oh,” said Freddy. And then, turning to Fredericka, “You mean all that time, all those years, we’ve been working on alligators, and we thought they were crocodiles?”
“What’s the difference?” Fredericka asked.
“I have no idea,” Freddy answered.
“Whatever they are, they make nice belts and bags,” Fredericka continued. “Did you know that Bunny, the middle daughter of the Duchess of Trent, has a speedboat with crocodile upholstery? Or alligator, I don’t know.”
“How do you get them to the point where you can safely work on them?” Dr Popcorn asked. “I can’t even do that with a lot of my own patients.”
“I guess you shoot them,” Freddy said nonchalantly.
“To anaesthetise them.”
“To kill them.”
“You do periodontics on dead alligators?”
“Alligators or crocodiles, whichever they are.”
“What for?”
Freddy was hard-pressed to think of an answer. “We’re animal lovers,” he said.
“But you shoot them.”
“We have to. They’re terribly vicious. They can swallow a Corgi in the blink of an eye.”
“How do you know?” Fredericka asked.
“I saw it.”
“Where?”
“At the Crystal Palace.”
“What was an alligator doing at the Crystal Palace?”
“It was there for the handbag show, Fredericka. Will you stop asking questions?”
“I was at the handbag show, Freddy. I didn’t see any alligators, not live ones.”
“This was before it opened. We were on a private tour.”
“Why wasn’t I invited?”
“Perhaps you were, but no one could find you, because you were having breakfast with Jus d’Orange.”
“I hadn’t yet been introduced to Jus d’Orange. I wasn’t invited, because your mother doesn’t like it when the photographers gather around me. And I know your mother was there, because how else would the alligator have swallowed a Corgi?”
“You’ve jumped to conclusions, as always.”
“That may be, but you know as well as I that she can’t stand it when the people pay attention to me and not her.”
“She has every right.”
“I walk behind her, as I’m supposed to. Talk to the photographers.”
“Popeel!” said Freddy, angrily.
“Yes, ‘Desi’?” Fredericka answered, with acid dripping from both words.
“Shall we?”
“Shall we what?”
“Shall we shut up so we can get on with our dental work? We’re not bloody crocodiles. Let this man do his job.”
Fredericka thumped the dental chair, crossed her arms petulantly, stared up at the ceiling, and opened her mouth.
THEY WERE USED TO services performed expeditiously and the undivided attention of professionals—from horse trainers to bankers to yoga or sabre masters—devoted solely to them. Where a normal person might wait a week for a procedure or its results, they might not wait at all. So when their teeth were ready early the next day, before they were to start work, they affected no surprise, and did not suspect that the teeth were not bespoke but had instead come off the rack. And that Dr Popcorn installed them in under an hour did not, for the prince and princess, seem remiss.
When he finished, he said, “Well, at least the colours match perfectly.”
“Do they?” Freddy asked politely, having failed to appreciate both the slapdash nature of the pro bono clinic, where standards were always relaxed, and the fact that, because of the business about crocodiles, Dr Popcorn had come to feel that they did not really respect him.
“Perfectly. Please realise that I have never seen the teeth these have replaced, and, not having anything to go on, I had to make a guess. I think it came out all right.” He shook his fist and knitted his brows. “Strong,” he said. Freddy and Fredericka both quieted their breathing and followed him with their eyes. “Don’t be alarmed. Anything new in the mouth takes some getting used to.”
“Do you have a mirror?” Freddy asked.
“We used to,” Dr Popcorn replied, “but a patient smashed it.”
Freddy and F
redericka rose simultaneously, bibs on, and rushed to their room. Once inside, they leaned against the door as if Satan were in the hall. Freddy threw the deadbolt. Both were pressed against the door, eyes half closed. They had not dared look at one another. “You first,” she urged.
“I will, in a minute.”
“What are you afraid of ?”
“Nothing. Well, perhaps the mirror. If Dr Popcorn has been too enthusiastic, if he has violated the rules of proportion. . . .”
Freddy was interrupted by a scream. He turned to see Fredericka falling onto her bed, left hand against her forehead, palm out, in the nineteenth-century signal of feminine distress. Her right arm, hand and fingers extended, pointed away from her at a forty-degree angle, as if at a sinking lifeboat. She had landed on her back, head on the pillow, perfectly. Freddy ran to her.
His eyes widened. There before him was still one of the world’s most beautiful women, but changed. Her new front teeth were perfectly matched in colour to those that existed already, but they were twice the size they had been. They curved like a beaver’s teeth, slightly but certainly, and protruded over her lower lip. Freddy was distressed, because though it was endearing, striking, and even sexy, it wasn’t quite human. Even Freddy, who could hardly afford to cast stones, had the uncontrollable urge to ask her how many trees she had felled that morning.
As she recovered, he approached the mirror, eyes half closed in a deliberate fog, face all screwed up. Then he opened his eyes wide. “Jesus,” he said. He ran his finger over his new teeth in wonderment.
“What are we going to do?” Fredericka asked meekly from the prone position.
“We can never go back to England.”
“Why not?” she asked indignantly. “Half the girls in my school had teeth like these. That’s why riding clothes are cut the way they are.”
“One thing is for sure,” he opined. “It will make it either much more difficult to conquer this country, or a lot easier.”
“Make up your mind.”
“It’s impossible to know, but if we fail and cannot return to England we can go to the wilderness of Canada. We own it, you know. Mummy is on the stamps.”
“Will you stop that? Everywhere we go, ‘We own it. Mummy is on the stamps. Mummy’s on the coins.’ Really! Who cares? It’s such a stupid thing to say, because you don’t own it. You don’t own Canada, you don’t own Jamaica, do you.”
“Perhaps not technically.”
“Perhaps not at all. God, Freddy, if you become king and I’m queen, all the pictures will have to be retouched.”
“Don’t be foolish. We’ll get new teeth long before then.”
“How? We don’t have any money.”
“We’ll go to a public dispensary again.”
“They won’t give us new teeth just because these are too big. Cosmetic dentistry isn’t covered by the National Health.”
“Perhaps in Beverly Hills,” he speculated.
“By the time we get there, given that we’ll have to walk, we won’t need new teeth.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Freddy, Beverly Hills is three thousand miles from here, and America is full of hunters.”
“We’re not finished, Fredericka. We’ll carry on. Come, if we hurry, we can catch the bus to work. It’s our obligation to the Salvation Army. We agreed, and they’ve been feeding us. I’ve grown rather fond of corn dogs. Buck up. We’re healthy, well fed, suitably attired, and now our teeth are weapons.”
“I don’t want to work. What if someone photographs me?”
“No one does that any more. We’re free.”
“No, Freddy. We’re beavers.”
“And what do beavers like to do?”
“Have sex?”
“No, they like to work.” Freddy hesitated. “You knew that, didn’t you.”
She smiled mischievously. “Let’s go,” she said.
AFTER A SHORT RIDE in slow traffic, a grey bus discharged its load of street people and royalty at a social services centre where they were to be taught how to work. In a room that was so ugly it crushed the soul, Freddy and Fredericka waited with their fellow trainees for the appearance of what they had been told would be their team leader. This team would win no prizes for alacrity or health. Save the prince and princess, everyone was deeply depressed, half asleep, internally ill, and off on drugs. The air in the room, even with all the windows open and a breeze blowing through, was heavily nicotined just by being drawn weakly into the lungs of these people and feebly expelled. Their blood pressures were so high that sitting next to them was like training with the bomb squad. Even though they were on average a decade younger than Freddy, they seemed on average two decades older. What struck Freddy with nagging force was that so many of them possessed the traces of aristocratic features. Here were once beautiful—beautiful in their bones and in their blood, beautiful as children, beautiful as girls—Appalachian women of almost pure Scottish lines, and men who had undoubtedly descended from the noble Masai. These were the sons of chieftains, clan leaders, and even Pygmy headmen. These were the daughters of the daughters of the daughters of thanes and earls. They were the natural aristocracy of the British Isles and Africa. And yet they were weak and ill before their time, their faces hollow, their eyes laden with the long story of defeat.
Where had they been and what had happened to rob them of the spark of life? Freddy was disquieted by the remnants of their once noble bearing. He felt like a man who, having built a new house, comes upon the smouldering ruins of one that has just burned. Fredericka was deep in the throes of compassion and could not fully contain them. “Freddy, don’t you feel compassion for these poor people?” she asked in a whisper.
“No.”
“Why on earth not?”
“We’ve been through this, haven’t we? What good does it do these people what you feel? And what good does it do you?”
“It helps them.”
“No, it doesn’t. Helping them helps them, maybe, if they can be helped, and if they are helped in the right way. Having compassion for them doesn’t do a bloody thing except perhaps for you. It’s like an orgasm, isn’t it. You have it and then you want to go to sleep.”
“That’s fine,” she whispered, “but as they said in Hermione’s ashram, if you don’t have compassion you won’t be compelled to help.”
“I don’t see why not. I don’t have a bit of compassion, not a smidgen, and all I do is patronise hospitals and orphanages.”
“You do that because if you didn’t they’d take you to the guillotine, that’s what.”
“What better reason? And that’s why I do it so well. Would you prefer that the lower classes had no leverage, and that we cater to them purely out of the goodness of our hearts?”
“Yes, it would be nicer that way.”
“Until one of us with perhaps no goodness in his heart at all simply decided to end the game. Don’t you know, Fredericka, that being the object of pity ultimately makes one angry?”
This dialogue was interrupted by the appearance of the team leader, who swept in with an entourage and spoke to the limp collection of ne’er-do-wells in the strangest idiom Freddy had ever heard. It was as if a mad doctor had made a creature who was one part hysteric, one part Karl Marx, and one part Mother Goose. He never stopped shouting.
“Use your brains, break your chains! Don’t work for another, work for your brother! To hell with money, it ain’t honey! Aim high, or you won’t fly! To hell with elections, we want protections! Capitalists suck, and to hell with their suction, we want to own the means of production!” he screamed, just for a warm-up. Between the rhymes he blistered the walls with oratory that, though it had a spectacular lilt, a seductive cadence, and tremendous emotional power, made no sense whatsoever.
Freddy raised his hand. “What does all this have to do with getting us on our feet?”
“Be-cause! I have got to moti-vate you! Challenge you! Raise your self-esteem, that has been broken down! I want
you to know, that you can take, pow-wah! Pow-wah! Pow-wah!”
“How misleading,” said Freddy, addressing his peers. “All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking, and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome, low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains, and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don’t complain. Shave, bathe, and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don’t gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don’t father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted—perhaps not knighted, but promoted. If that doesn’t happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do these things, all of which are entirely within your power, you will own your lives.”
They looked at him as if he were an armadillo that had just spoken to them in Chinese. Not having assimilated a single phrase, they all got up and went out to the bus. “You don’t have to be a king to do these things,” he told them, despairing at their passivity. “Most people live like that. Most people, every day. It’s a matter of will. If you can get up in the morning, if you can put one foot in front of the other, you can do it. And either you will, or you won’t.”
The bus driver turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial. He wasn’t being rude to Freddy, but, for him, Freddy and what he said simply did not exist. Without further ado, Freddy was completely drowned out by someone singing, “Honey pie, sugar pop, you know that I love you so. . . . Can’t help myself. . . .”
FREDERICKA WAS AFRAID that she might never see Freddy again and that she would be drawn ever further into the incomprehensible bowels of this odd country, to end her days as an old woman in an almshouse somewhere on the prairie; but she left him nonetheless, and as he travelled on to his own assignment she went into a vast office building to take up hers. How shocked she was to discover that for eight hours that day she would clean toilets. Her heart seemed to shrivel and die, and she contemplated suicide—not fake, attention-getting suicide but the real thing—as she walked down a brilliantly lit hallway, where all was silver and fluorescent and the world only a dream, with her vision blurred by tears.