Freddy and Fredericka

by Mark Helprin

  “A cow?” Fredericka inquired.

  “Yes, a cow owned by a Mrs O’Leary.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know,” he said, almost sweetly, without upbraiding her for her ignorance, even though he knew that she would think he had just made it up, and that in a minute or two she would say something like, “That’s funny, because it was Mr O’Nero’s cow that burnt down Rome.”

  “That’s funny,” she said, after a pause, “because it was Mr O’Nero’s cow that burnt down Rome.”

  He patted her hand. “No,” he said, “it really was Mrs O’Leary’s cow. He kicked over a lantern.”

  “He?”

  “Yes.”

  “How could a cow be a he?”

  “I call cows he. I always have. Really, whom does it hurt?”

  They were not unhappy. Quite to the contrary, they had learned to love pork shoulder and dollar-a-pound canned mackerel that Fredericka whipped into interesting pâtés with Cheez Whiz or soy protein substitute, whichever was on sale. They made wonderful soups of potatoes, leeks, and chicken parts other than breasts, legs, thighs, and wings. Their meals steamed up the room and thickened the air with an aroma even stronger than what came from their ever-burning kerosene fire and its dancing ring of Druidic-blue flame. With day-old bread and some sort of green vegetable, this was, to people who expended three or four thousand calories a day, far better than the most refined cuisine of a youth spent almost entirely without hunger.

  After dinner they would clean up, brush their teeth, and boil water to humidify the otherwise painfully dry space and add heat to the air. Then they would take their two glass mugs and fill them with boiling water for tea, wrap themselves in ragged but clean army blankets upon which was written US Cavalry—Ft Sheridan, and sit before the kerosene fire, a steady source of warmth and light that became the centre of their world. After hot soup, doing the dishes in scalding water, and tea, they might actually feel warm. Just beyond the occasionally quivering wall that they faced was the unforgiving darkness into which, if one were to penetrate, one could snake one’s way to Siberia. Down a slope of dirty snow was a river of some sort that was even more filthy than the Cleveland river that Freddy had ignited in an effort to douse a burning brand that another vagrant had used in an effort to maim him after Freddy was unable to identify, much less recite, the Pledge of Allegiance. “Allegiance to what?” he had asked.

  If the river (or possibly canal) in Chicago was a tad less flammable than the one in Cleveland, it was filthier with that which was floating upon or gelled within it: tyres, shopping carts, animal body parts, plastic containers, mats of algae, condoms, oil slicks, and offal. It didn’t freeze, but it did thicken enough to support dirty snow. And beyond it and a rubble-strewn rail line, on rubble-strewn rocks against which rested a million tons of lake ice stacked by wind and waves, was the void.

  Their walls were painted the same ungainly green as the inside of armoured personnel carriers and tanks, and the stove, which according to its embossed metal tag had been installed on 2 July 1915, had probably not been cleaned since. The seal in the toilet tank was rotted, so the water ran all the time, which was the only thing that prevented it from freezing. The cupboard in the kitchen area was warped and didn’t close, and termites had made the floor underneath the ancient impetigoed linoleum as foamy as kapok. Freddy had lifted a splotched corner and seen, in a hollowed-out area, a she-rat nursing her litter. She had looked at him as if to say, I beg your pardon, which caused him to replace the flap apologetically.

  On one wall was a picture of Jesus, in blues, whites, and silvers as in the Orthodox rite. On another wall was an automotive air filter company catalogue with a nude for each month. And over the bed someone had long before tacked the famous picture of Mao Tse-tung swimming, in which all you could see was his head floating on the Yangtze. With neither the kerosene fire nor the cooker burning, when the wind was blowing, which was all the time, the refrigerator was a lot warmer than the room. The constant cold brought Freddy and Fredericka physically closer together than they had ever been.

  The highlight of each week was bathing in the kitchen vessel on Tuesdays and Fridays. They didn’t know, and didn’t want to know, exactly what it had been, but it was a three-by-three-by-three stainless steel sink with rolled edges, a huge drain that emptied it in a minute, and a bronze plaque that said Armour & Co. Before their bath they would boil water in two huge cauldrons on the stove. Then they would fill the Armour vat with all the hot water the hot-water heater could produce, while standing naked at the kitchen sink and sponging themselves with dish rags, Japanese style, so as to be immaculately clean upon entering. When the water filling the vat started to go cold—which they knew by the temperature of their wash rags—they stopped it, rinsed themselves, and like two nude, shivering elves, poured in the cauldrons of boiling water. Then, almost dry because the wind passing through the apartment would have evaporated the moisture that had clung to them, chilling them to the bone, they climbed in.

  Half from the water heater and half from the cauldrons, the water was as hot as they could bear, and turned them quickly pink and red. This was what they dreamt of at work, on the street, and even in their room as they huddled by the kerosene fire. Except for this, their moments of warmth were never moments of heat. They needed heat, if only once in a while, to bring them back to life.

  It was as hot as hell for fifteen minutes, after which they would get out rather than cool in the water. During this time they were by necessity pressed together, completely entangled, locked, set, penetrated, and mixed. They sat in the hot water that came as high on them as it did on Chairman Mao, and that lapped clearly over their shoulders and three quarters up their necks, fully floating their embrace. Though they spoke a great deal these days, in the bath they seldom spoke but only breathed, often with eyes closed and sometimes simply staring at one another as if in pleasant shock.

  There was no place in Buckingham Palace quite as fine as this, or in St James’s, or anywhere else, for although tubs were to be had and the water hotter and more plentiful, a lack of contrast made them far less welcoming and their luxury was dulled by its assurance no less than by its abundance. Here they existed simply in one another’s embrace, with no worry of anything beyond their hot confines, not even the wind whistling—sometimes screaming—through the boards. At the end of the fifteenth minute measured by a heavy white Westclock on a table nearby, they pulled the plug.

  As soon as they were dry they dropped their thin towels, hit the light switch, and flew into their creaking bed. Even had they had night clothes they would not have worn them, for they warmed one another far better when flesh was pressed to flesh. Entangled as in the vat, but now stretched out in blankets, their limbs braided like rope, they would sometimes awaken having fused so completely together that sleep had failed to pull them apart.

  They were obsessed with one another as if they had just fallen in love. At work there was plenty of time for their minds to wander, and, to their surprise, when their minds did wander they wandered not so much to their royal pasts or to imagination of the future, or to appraisals of the world and all that was in it, but to one another. He dreamt of her and she of him. She became his world, and he hers. He found in her, in her body, in her laugh, in the way she moved, in what she said, more than he ever had thought he could find. And she found in him the same.

  They had a forbidding lake and supernatural winds. They had night, cold, and the exhaustion of work. And they had the stainless steel vat and their warm bed. One evening, as they stared into the kerosene fire, he said, “We’re like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy. What is it called when two people have such a passion only for one another?”

  WEEK AFTER WEEK, month after month, they arose before dawn and rode the buses with the sickly and exhausted people who travel to menial jobs in the earliest hours, but their habits, their background, and the short duration of their tenure enabled them to do w
hat these others did, without destruction. They ate only what they required, and despite being pushed toward pork shoulder, most of the time they ate well, preferring vegetables, whole grains, and fish above all else. Of course they did not smoke, they drank as much alcohol in a month as some of their co-workers did in a day, they watched no television, and they went to bed extremely early and were able to regenerate for the next day’s hard labour, in which they did so well that it seemed—although it was not—inexplicable.

  Each day, Freddy walked to a freight yard from which he rode, in a converted mail car with a woodstove, to stretches of track in Indiana where he would swing a hammer and carry rails for six hours, with a break out of the cold for lunch of half an hour. Machines had been doing this kind of work for decades, but some stretches of rarely used, torn-up line were too irregular for mechanised equipment, unworthy of replacement, and yet not ripe for abandonment. So out of Chicago the rail gangs came, winter and summer, to straighten track, replace bad ties, and redrive spikes that had worked themselves loose in frost and sun. Such stretches, as dishevelled and broken as pensioners with bad teeth, went on for miles. What was done would have to be redone in a year or two, so there was always work.

  The men who did it had to wield a twenty-pound hammer all day in sub-zero temperatures. They were mostly blacks from the South Side, but quite a few were whites from the coalfields of Appalachia, or Poles, Czechs, and Irish from the wards, and immigrants—Bosnians, Mexicans, and Russians who proudly didn’t mind the cold. The head of the hammer had to strike the top of the spike at just the right angle to drive it efficiently and not glance off to hit the rail or splinter a tie. As the spikes stood at differing heights, the men had to make continual adjustments in their stance to carry through. They pivoted, stretched, extended, arched, leant, and aimed. It exercised every sinew in their bodies, and to do it down a hundred yards of broken track was like fighting your way through a Roman legion.

  After three weeks Freddy hit his stride and came to feel an incomparable exhilaration in nailing a stretch of line, especially as the snow flew and darkness lifted or fell. The train followed, rumbling as it crept after them, smoke issuing from its exhaust pipes and the chimney of the woodstove. There he stood, the heavy hammer flying perfectly timed over his head, hurtling through light snow to explode against a spike and drive it as deep into the wood as it would go. The sound of his strikes and those of the others combined to make a strange and beautiful music that rolled onto the snow-covered fields. An incessant counterpoint of bell-like notes wove about an elemental beat that each man took into his heart and to which he unconsciously timed his strokes, so that the upshot throughout the day was that thirty men in thirty places were all doing the same piece of work.

  Were it not for half an hour in the heated railcar, scalding hot bean soup, and scalding hot coffee (tea for Freddy), they could not have done it. Once, early in February, they went inside at eleven-thirty, leaving fifteen-below-zero and a twenty-mile-an-hour wind. There was so much smoke in the car their eyes ran, and for a moment before they melted and dropped, the tears became little white pearls of ice on their cheeks. On days like that no one talked much, but on this day a huge, bullet-headed, black ex-con suddenly grew curious about Freddy.

  “Hey Moofoomooach,” he said, eschewing all subtlety, “you got a woman?”

  “Without question,” Freddy answered crisply.

  “Is she white or black?”

  “As white as a polar bear,” Freddy told him, which occasioned a somewhat lewd chorus of approval, “but as far as I’m concerned, she could be as black as ebony.”

  “You saying you like brown sugar?”

  “I’m saying I like Popeel.”

  “Popeye?”

  “Popeel.”

  “Who Popeel?”

  “Popeel . . . is my wife.”

  “And where Popeel at?”

  “Chicago,” Freddy answered.

  “Where she at in Chicago?”

  “She washes dishes at a cafeteria.”

  “You married, Moofoomooach? You sound like you was married yesterday.”

  “We’ve been married,” Freddy said, “in some senses for quite a few years, but, in another sense, for just a few months. It was America, I think, that did it.”

  “America? Then why didn’t America do it for me?”

  The others laughed.

  “I don’t know,” Freddy answered earnestly. “We were riding in a freight car and something happened. Maybe it had been happening already—I can’t say for sure—but the heat, the crossing of the Potomac, the mountains. . . . We jumped from the train into a meadow that sloped down a hillside.” Freddy put his spoon in his soup. “We may have hit our heads.”

  “Where was this meadow at?”

  “It was in West Virginia, I think, or perhaps Kentucky, I really don’t know.”

  “But it’s been cool ever since?”

  “Yes, it’s been marvellously cool.”

  Not a man stirred. The only sound was the crackling of the fire. The ex-con, a man bigger than a bull, it seemed, extended a boxer’s fist to Freddy, and they grasped hands. Then they finished eating and went out into the cold to swing their heavy hammers in the wind. Later, as the train trundled back to Chicago in the dark, rolling past a landscape of grey steel and refinery flares in Gary, Indiana, in the precincts of hell, Freddy burned with rose-coloured heat.

  FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY Fredericka washed dishes at a huge sink beneath a clock. Like Gaul, this sink was divided into three parts. The first received dishes and slop from a continuously moving conveyor belt. Though people were supposed to throw napkins and other trash into a bin at the receiving point, often they didn’t. But one of the laws of nature is that, as in politics, slop rises to the top, so Fredericka would quickly skim the floating things from the surface with a wire wok ladle, and, once in a while, lift a mesh basket from the drain and dump its contents in a garbage can. In the first sink, Inferno, the water was always hot and always running. This did a great deal of her work for her, especially in light traffic when she could let things soak.

  From Inferno the plates, cups, and silverware were lifted by the princess into Purgatory, where she scrubbed and soaped them before passing them through a continuously running water curtain into Paradise. In Purgatory, too, the water was always hot and always running, entering in the curtain wall used for the rinse.

  Then, in Paradise, the clean and rinsed tableware and cutlery soaked in extremely hot, faultlessly clear water, which did not run except through the overflow as it was displaced by the growing masses of china. When it could no longer subsume all that was put into it, and white rims poked above the waves, like Mao’s head, Fredericka would drain the sink and stack the dishes before returning them to their racks. The beauty of the system was that though the things that came to it were filthy, they left perfectly clean—by the thousands, the tens of thousands, and, eventually, the hundreds of thousands.

  None of Fredericka’s friends had ever done this kind of work, and would not have been able to appreciate its pains or rewards, thinking themselves above it, though sure to remember to express sympathy for the oppressed people who did it, which was yet another way of raising themselves in their own estimation and that of the world. But now, after six months on the job, Fredericka knew its rewards, of which there were several.

  She depended on no one. No allowances were drawn, no interest returned, no capital gained, no principal depleted. She made her living, albeit modestly, by the strength of her own hand. Every week she took home in her pay packet two hundred dollars. It is true that this was the price of an entrée at Le Chat Rôti, that she had left on the table bad bottles of wine costing five times as much and thought nothing of it, and that, not long before, a hundred times her current recompense for a week’s hard labour would have escaped unnoticed had it vanished from her accounts or her purse.

  Now that she worked so intensely for forty hours to amass two hundred dollars, a dollar se
emed like a lot, and two hundred of them were something of which she was very proud, week after week. Coupled with Freddy’s three hundred, it allowed them to pay the rent, eat, save, and enjoy themselves in ways that were surprisingly elegant. This was no summer job: she would starve without it. And although she knew she would not be condemned to it forever, nothing would lift her from it but her own determination, of which she was confident if only because she believed that she could last in the job indefinitely.

  Indefinitely. They had spoken of this many times. What if they simply were to stay this way, with perhaps an adjustment for declining strength; i.e., Freddy eventually becoming a baggage handler or a mechanic once he could no longer abide the severities he now loved, say in his middle fifties? She told him that she could go on at the sink, supervising the salvation of dishes in a three-step apotheosis, for another forty or forty-five years. They knew they wouldn’t—it was not their destiny—but they considered that they might.

  Fredericka found a satisfaction in what she did unlike any she had ever enjoyed before. The rhythm and certainty of the dishes coming off the line, getting clean, and taking their places once again in newly formed ranks gave her the pride of a serjeant-major forming up his platoons in good order. Some battles are never won except in continually fighting them. People eat, so the world needs clean dishes so it can keep on running, and she was a soldier of the line, a non-com, classless, independent. She measured her work in integral units, organised it by the clock, and watched the meals pass, like the seasons, quietly.

  In the repetitive motion she discovered a tranquillity that she loved. She was tied down to the work as if by gravity, but the motions of her hands and arms, her tight and frequent glimpses, the counting and planning, the lifting and scrubbing, again and again, was like the beating of a heart, and now, she thought, at last, I have a heart other than my own, and I am aware of it every day.