by Mark Helprin
It said so much about her that could not be said in words, that he was battered. Until now he had been in love because he had been infatuated, entranced by her manner and appearance, excited by her presence, drawn to her by invisible attractions. Until now it had made perfect sense, for she was interesting and alluring. But now she took him far beyond sense. Her voice—its quality, its clarity despite the frequent mistiness of slightly offset double notes riding together, like the complex sounds of distant breaking waves—led far beyond her, enlarging her worth and depth by its embrace of seemingly all things. Her voice summoned and fused images in their thousands: memories, colors, views, other songs, fading light, blooming trees swaying in sunshine and wind. It united past, present, and future, limning and lighting faces and souls, their expressions carried forth over time, holding them as long as it could until they would vanish except for a remnant in the exhausted air, almost invisible, like smoke that hangs over a valley until the winds passing above pull it after them and it disappears. And when this knitting together of all things was gone, what was left was Catherine, the source and spring of life itself—daughter, wife, mother—to be loved and treasured above all else.
In the perfection of her song, by the voice that sprang from her, speaking words as he had never heard them spoken, he now loved her as he had never known he could love. He might never see her again, and decades might pass, yet he would love her indelibly, catastrophically, and forever. If half a century later he were alive, he would remember this song as the moment in which all such things were settled and beyond which he could not go. As she sang, and he understood that he loved her as he had never loved anyone in his life, he was almost frightened, because he knew that actresses and singers have such an effect quite commonly, and that most often it simply comes to nothing.
Then hers was subsumed in the voices of others. She sang in a higher range when she sang with them, and when their feet hit the boards in unison, precisely striking and precisely lifting in the glare of the spotlights, it was electric. With the help of the chorus, the deep emotion of her song had become celebration.
“Stop!” the director shouted. As if in midair, they stopped, mortal again, silent. “I want to break up this line so it doesn’t look like the goddamned Rockettes.” He turned to the choreographer. “Can’t that be done?”
“We can do it in three,” the choreographer answered immediately. “That way it’s not symmetrical, and the eye won’t be frozen. Someone looking on will always feel that it’s out of balance, so it’ll seem to be that much more in motion.”
“Two parts stage right, one left?”
“It would have to be, because the pillars of Penn Station will be stage left.”
“It’s better that way, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the choreographer, “I think so.”
“Where should Catherine be, in the center of the middle line?”
The choreographer ascended to the stage. He was as thin as a thread. “Divide up,” he said, directing with his hands, and when he had marched them into position he looked at Catherine, who had remained standing, as straight as a column, stunning in the light.
“Catherine, why don’t you take the left position in the middle line.” She walked over and linked arms with a young man who seemed not to notice. “That’s great. You become the center point, no matter how much you move.” He turned to the director, though because of the lights he could hardly see him. “How about that?”
“Let’s try it,” the director said.
“From Catherine’s song?” the conductor asked, twisting his body so he could get his question across clearly.
“No,” said the director, “from the end of Catherine’s song. We don’t need to do her song again. Her song is just right.”
The conductor raised his wand, and off they went in the sharp white light. As actors have always known, though a show may be perfect and triumphant, rehearsals, less than perfect but closer to the heart, are better.
7. And There She Was
SHE WAS STANDING in front of the theater, near but apart from a small line at the box office, where people who had been unable to get tickets for musicals were unenthusiastically buying them for the physics play. Now dressed more for dinner than the beach, she was in an elegant gray silk top lightly gathered at the neckline, with two ribboned panels hanging down from the collar at her left, and a pleated skirt of matching gray, which was shorter than the fashion of the moment and made him think of the twenties, in the latter years of which he had been an adolescent newly intoxicated with women. No more an adolescent, he had a great deal of self-control and was used to disappointment, so he knew or at least believed that no matter how much he might be knocked akilter by her he would not reveal it, which is not to say that he would not feel it.
Even for an actress, she showed a great deal of leg in the soft, light wool skirt that, because it was classically tailored, was enjoying a long run and had survived the fashions of the times. After she had left the stage and gone to change and to remove her makeup, he had walked around the block. He was a minute or two late, knowing that one could always safely be that late when meeting a well dressed woman, because she wouldn’t have a watch or it would be too small to fit the blazes for minutes. Coming from the west, he saw her in profile, her posture undiminished, as straight and strong as he had remembered it, her face, though lit harshly by the lesser lights of the marquee, both gorgeous and thoughtful, and her legs as smooth as Jean Harlow’s pajamas. How lovely that the woman with whom he was so deeply in love was also so sexually exciting.
She seemed agitated and displeased, but when he stopped at her left and she turned to him, her dark mood simply faded. He sensed that this was involuntary, and had broken her determination to be grave. Her eyes showed that though she may have decided to reject him, as long as he was in her presence she could not. Why she was torn so early on he could and did not imagine, but, like her, he brightened at the instant they met. “Hello,” he said. Even in heels, she was somewhat shorter than he, and she looked up at him, thus softening her posture and her stance, so that she seemed very young. He had thought that she was in her late twenties and still youthful in many respects, but she was very womanly and had not struck him as girlish until this moment.
She was about to speak, but then, late like Harry, the church bells in Clinton rang out from the west and the full lighting of the marquee went on, with the sound of the relays—metal thrown against metal—in counterpoint to the bells, the electric currents fusing with a knock. It seemed strange, because the sun was fairly high in the sky. Her greeting displaced by sound and light, she stared at him and asked, “What happened to your eye?”
A long cut traversed almost the entire length of his left eyelid. It had begun to heal, but, unlike most wounds of that size, it was still red. “From a machine,” he said.
“What kind of machine?”
“A leather punch, a kind of stamping machine.”
“Did you put your head in it?”
“I was changing the belt. It snapped and whipped across my eye. Another eighth of an inch and we could go to a pirate restaurant.”
“When did this happen?”
“Friday after we met. I wasn’t paying attention.”
“I see.”
He wanted to kiss her right there as she stood in the middle of the sidewalk. He wanted to draw her to him, to feel her body through the silk, and he thought that she would have let him, and that she would have kissed him back with the same urgency and heat, but he dared not, and instead just let it wash over him. An inimitable pressure would build up until the slightest touch, or even its imagination, would echo throughout his body and hers, blinding them to the practical.
Though they hardly knew it, they were already walking east. “I’m used to it,” he said, coming back to the cut over his eye.
“How so?” She had no idea where they were going, and neither did he.
“In the war.”
“D
id you work in a factory?”
“A factory in its way, the Eighty-second Airborne, though I was often detached and sent to other formations. The cuts, abrasions, minor contusions . . . were continuous.”
“From what?”
“Branches snapping back, not only when you parachute into trees or brush, but in moving across country. Under fire, you move when and where you have to. You don’t notice things like brambles. And if there’s gunfire directed at you, you throw yourself into all kinds of places without knowing where you’re going to land. But that’s not the half of it. Breaking windows, making cover, loading and unjamming weapons, attaching winches and trailers, fixing recalcitrant jeeps, pulling them out of the mud.” He stopped and turned to her. “Shaving with a safety-razor blade held between the fingers. When bullets hit walls, rock, or stony ground, lots of little particles zing around. Mainly they sting, but sometimes they draw blood. Oh, and then there are animal bites, sheet metal cuts, trying to move around in the dark in places you’ve never been.”
“What about bullets?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, bashfully, it seemed to her, “those, too.”
“Where are we going?” she asked, as if disenchanted with his catalog of minor wounds. He felt that his list had put her off, that he had sounded boorish and boastful, and, worse, that he was talking at her, which hurt him more than the little wounds.
“I know a lot of restaurants that were good, anyway, before the war, but they’re closed on Monday. The French ones, that is.”
“It doesn’t have to be French,” she told him. “It doesn’t have to be fancy. I really can’t afford that.”
“I’ll pay,” he said. Of course he would pay. The man always paid.
“Not for me” was her reply.
“Why?”
“There’s a reason,” she said.
“I know,” he answered. “I have to tell you about it.”
“You have to tell me?”
“When we sit down.”
She was puzzled. “Okay,” she agreed, “but where?”
“There’s a place in the Twenties between Fifth and Sixth that’s open Mondays. Their specialty is fish (which they pronounce fis) grilled on charcoal.” She wanted to go there. “Shall we walk or take the bus?”
They were at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th Street, and at that instant a double-decker pulled up to them and opened its doors with the sound that seals make at the zoo when their keeper arrives with a bucket of squid. Catherine leapt onto the steps and was up the spiral staircase and out of sight before the doors closed. He paid and followed.
Appropriately for a couple that had come on together and would leave together, they sat next to one another. Their thighs were close enough so that when the bus occasionally lurched from side to side they touched, and for both of them this was enough to erase the previous awkward moments. Each touch, she felt, was as powerful as two shots of gin.
“What did you do in the war?” he asked, his gaze fixed on the side of her face as she deliberately looked ahead. He had misjudged her age: the construction of her face was such that, even when she was fifty, she would look thirty-five.
“I went to college. Other than rolling bandages and giving blood, I didn’t do much for the war effort.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “The war effort was for you. We were fighting for you.”
“For me and not democracy?” she asked archly.
“I never met anyone who fought for anything but the flesh and blood of the living and the honor of the dead.”
“What about the Atlantic Charter?”
“Who the hell knew or cared about that?”
“I just wish I could have done more,” she told him.
“By your existence, you did more than enough.”
“You’re a flatterer,” she said, half accusingly.
“No, I’m not” was his answer.
“You don’t know me.”
“Yes I do,” he said. “I know you very well. And you know me.”
Early on a Monday, the restaurant was nearly empty. As they waited to be escorted to the terrace, it was the first time they had been together in a small, quiet room. Until then, it had been in the open air, or the automat, which was noisy and busy, with a forty-foot ceiling and whirling fans. Here it was almost silent, the air still. Standing next to Catherine, Harry breathed in. Catherine often smelled like a good department store: new cloth, expensive perfume, fresh air, and, when she carried a purse, fine leather. And when at times, which he would come to know, she would have a gin and tonic, the scent of juniper coming from her lips was far more intoxicating than the alcohol. He wondered if women understood that their apparently insignificant attributes often have a power greater than that of armies. It was what he had meant when he had said that the war had been fought for her. Like the atom, which in its internal bonds contains the essence of matter and energy, in her glance, the sparkle of her eye, the grasp of her hand, the elasticity of her hair in motion, the way she stands, the blush of her cheek, sweep of her shoulder, tone of her voice, and snap of her locket, a woman is the spur and essence of existence.
They sat at a table in the garden, opposite a long brazier from which a fire cast up white smoke. Sometimes the wind blew the smoke around them before it rose. When this happened, and they were enveloped until they could barely see one another, they couldn’t stop laughing, because sitting in a restaurant was not supposed to replicate the experience of being trapped in a burning building. Immediately when they had come in, the maitre d’ and waiters had sized them up and judged that they were just beginning a love affair. The staff knew to keep out of sight even if the couple would be locked in one another’s gaze, pay no attention to anyone else, and stay for hours, and even if the tip, either fantastically large or fantastically small, was anyone’s guess, because such couples almost always handled money unmindfully.
Bread, olives, a dish of olive oil, a bottle of mineral water, and a bottle of retsina were brought to the table. In a heavy Greek accent, the waiter who put them down said, “In how many minutes—hours?—tsall I come back to take your order?”
Harry looked at Catherine, who merely smiled, and he said, “Twenty.”
“Minutes or hours?” the waiter asked, knowingly. Harry didn’t answer. “If you want sooner, call me.”
After he left, he came charging back, beginning to speak as he was halfway across the flagstones. “Forgot. Spessal dinner tonight. Oktopadi on grill, kotopolou fornu, salat, very good.” He turned to go.
“Wait,” Harry commanded, and, turning to Catherine, asked, “Would you like that?”
“What is it?”
“Marinated octopus on the grill, chicken from a clay oven. The octopus, like many people, is better than either its name or its appearance.”
“Yes,” she said, and then, to the waiter, “I’ll have that.”
“Two, then,” Harry told the waiter, holding up two fingers, like Winston Churchill. “Duo.”
“When the waiter disappeared, Catherine asked, “You know Greek?”
“A little.”
“Demotic Greek?”
“Enough to get by as a tourist. I was in Greece before the war.”
“Doing what?”
“Supposedly studying.”
“Studying what?”
“I was a graduate student, what they call an ‘advanced student.’”
“Where?”
“Magdalen College, Oxford.”
“Aha.”
“What aha?”
“Just aha. What were you doing?”
“I wanted to write a doctoral thesis on the Mediterranean as a historical force unto itself. The civilizations that ring it have so much in common other than just the olive, and half of what they are they owe to the sea. It’s certainly worth a book, which would be interesting, beautiful, and sensual.”
“You wanted to write a sensual doctoral thesis?”
“I did.”
“You expected it to be accepted? I majored in music at a girls’ college in Philadelphia. . . .”
“Where?”
“Bryn Mawr.”
“Aha.”
“And I’m not exactly Ph.D. bait. But even I know that you could never get something like that through.”
“You think I didn’t?”
Her jaw dropped a little, but she kept on with her train of thought. “It would collapse the professoriate.”
“You say that because, you see, you’re a girl, and girls don’t have what boys have, which is a goat-like capacity to bang with the head against heavy objects that will not move.”
“Isn’t that pointless?”
“Yes, except that, once in a million times, it does move.”
“Did it?”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“In general?”
“We have time.”
“I was the class of ’thirty-seven. . . .”
“Where?”
“Harvard,” he answered, like someone anticipating being struck. It was always that way.
“Oh no,” she said, very annoyed.
“Why do you say that?” he asked, but he knew why.
“Harvard boys think they’re semi-divine, and they aren’t. They used to ride down to Bryn Mawr like Apollos in their chariots.”
“I wasn’t like that,” he stated. And he wasn’t.
“I know.” Then it dawned on her, and she said, “You’re eight years older than I am.”
He did the arithmetic. “You were graduated last year?”
“Yes.”
She seemed much older than twenty-three, and she thought that he seemed much younger than thirty-one or -two. The shock, however, was only momentary. “To write on the Mediterranean that way, how many languages would you have to know?”
