by Mark Helprin
“Did we get another account?”
“Did we?”
“What? Look at you,” Cornell said in exasperation. “We could save on electricity if we plugged a few lamps into you. It must be a woman.”
“It is. A woman.”
“Jesus. Are you going to go out of commission? This is a big account.”
“I think so.”
“You think what? That you’re going to be out of commission, or that it’s a big account?”
“Both.”
“Can you put it off for a while?”
“No. On Sunday she’s going to be engaged to someone she doesn’t love, someone who’s been sleeping with her since she was . . . very young, and who’s twice her age.”
“How’d you get mixed up with someone like that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m attracted to the lower orders of society.”
“It sounds like it.”
“I can’t stop thinking of her. She’s only twenty-three and yet she thinks and feels with neither feeling nor thought degraded but rather each elevating the other. Most people can’t begin to do that. It’s as if when they see they can’t hear, and when they hear they can’t see. We haven’t been educated into separating the senses, but we have regarding the heart and the intellect. I told her this. She thought about it. It was while we were eating dinner in a Greek restaurant. I thought she might not even have heard me, but then she looked up and said, ‘Without thinking, there’s no clarity; and without feeling, there’s no purpose. Why would I starve them of each other? Why would anyone?’
“Can you imagine what she’ll be like when she’s thirty?”
“Can you imagine you when you’re sixty?” Cornell asked. “You’ll be a moron, if you aren’t already.”
“And Cornell, she’s so much more than what she says. Every gesture, every adjustment of her body, every lifting of a brow or movement of her eyes. . . .”
Cornell interrupted. “God,” he said, “you’re gone.”
“I am,” Harry agreed.
“Fine, but you’d better come down if you don’t want to lose everything.”
“The business?”
“The business, and her. You don’t want to lose her, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“What can I do?”
“Who is she? How long have you known her?”
“I’ve only seen her. . . .” He thought about it. “Three times,” he said, counting the time he had seen her before having spoken to her.
“That’s not really a lot.”
“I met her on the ferry. We went out to dinner twice. The first time was at the automat.”
“Elegant.”
“It was great.”
“How much can you really love someone, Harry, if you know her that little?”
“I know her much more than a little. I fell in love with her a long time ago.”
“You fell in love with an image you’ve carried, an image of your own creation.”
“No. With her. When I saw her, it was very strong. I caught just a glimpse of her: she was walking away from me. And then I saw her later, and we met, and it was as if I had known her all my life.”
“Infatuation happens all the time. Sometimes it happens to me, and I’m sixty-one.”
“She’s an actress.”
“Oh boy,” Cornell said. “Here we go.”
“She trained in music, and she has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. When she speaks, I have no power of resistance. I went to the theater to meet her before dinner. Because it was early I went in and I heard her sing. Cornell, if I were married, I would have to leave my wife. If going to her meant that I would die, I would go to her.”
“You can’t judge a woman by her singing, Ulysses.”
“You can. You can, by her singing, know her absolutely.”
“No. The song isn’t hers. The music isn’t hers—unless she wrote it. Anyway, even if she did, the song is alive in a way that the person who’s singing it can never be. I know about that. For the first half of my life, we had no electricity. My relatives in South Carolina still don’t have electricity. Until I was your age the light I saw by came from a wick—the wick of a candle, an oil lamp, or a kerosene lantern. The flame rides above the wick, it doesn’t touch it, it doesn’t consume it. No doubt that when she sings, her song has all the qualities you say it has. I believe you. But her song isn’t her. If it were, it would consume her. The flame is never inside the candle, which is something else entirely. Stage-door Johnnies fall in love with that flame, but it can never be touched or possessed. It neither lasts nor can it be loved.
“You’re just back from the war. For four years you lived on the edge. You still live intensely, and you see everything in heroic terms. But you’re home now. It’s different. It won’t work here.”
“Guide me, then,” Harry said. “I’ll listen. But I give no guarantee.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do. That’s what Meyer would have done.”
“I know. But you’re not my father. You can stand to see me fall, which is good, and why I can probably take your advice a lot better than his.”
Cornell sighed, and then entered the problem. “If she’s interested in you, why will she not cancel or postpone her engagement?”
“Expectation, family, security, inertia. But mainly he has the kind of hold on her that you might expect of a pimp. I should kill him.”
“You can’t kill someone you don’t know.”
“Oh really?”
“I mean, you don’t know enough about him to know if he really deserves to be killed. And anyway, if you did, even if you could get away with it, you’d never have her.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen the very thing.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Win her. You have to take her from him right in front of him, and without hurting anything but his pride. Hurt him otherwise, and you break her love for you.”
“How can I do that with so little time?”
“How much does she love you? Does she love you at all?”
“I suspect she loves me very much. I hope so.”
“But she hasn’t told you?”
“Not in words.”
“Then you’ve got to risk everything.”
“By Sunday?”
“On Sunday. It’ll be more dramatic. That’s what you need to break a lock.”
“How? It’s going to be announced at the Georgica Club in East Hampton. I’ve never heard of it. I don’t know where it is. Probably the only Jew to come within a mile of it is their accountant.”
“But I’ll bet they’ve got plenty of us working in the kitchen,” Cornell said. “She’s not Jewish?”
“Catherine Sedley?” Harry asked. He loved both her names, but he had fallen in love first with Catherine Sedley.
“Who’s she going to marry?”
“Me, I hope.”
“Who’s she scheduled to marry at the moment?”
“Victor Marrow.”
“Marrow as in Wall Street?”
“Apparently. He’s a thirty-eight-year-old Marrow—I have no idea what his position is. Perhaps her father wants to unite the two families’ bank accounts in the little Marrow she’s been practicing to bear, although she didn’t say so directly.”
“Oh, so she’s an heiress from the lower orders of society.”
“I guess she is.”
“That’s convenient.”
“No, because I won’t take money, if that’s what you mean.”
“Harry, the money’s always there. It can pull you out of trouble.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“In any circumstance? At any price?”
Harry thought. “The way I feel about her . . . yes. What I have right now is the best time of my life. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, much less certainty or ease, which eventual
ly disappear anyway.”
“That’s the war speaking, Harry.”
“Not just the war, Cornell. It’s love speaking.”
“Love or not, what do her parents think of you, a Jew hurtling toward insolvency?”
“Now we’re hurtling? They’ve never heard of me.”
“As merciful as that may be,” Cornell said, “it won’t last and it doesn’t make it any easier.”
“You don’t have to tell me. There’ll be two hundred guests there, all WASPs, like some sort of Indian tribe with Champagne. I spent a lot of time with them at school and I know how to talk to them. Sometimes they mistake me for one of them, which I always found flattering, because they’re admirable in many respects, but they’d never let me be one of them even if I wanted to be, which I don’t.”
“Then how are you going to do this?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“You think I have an advantage here?”
“You’re a Christian.”
Cornell drew back. He put his left hand up to his forehead as if shielding his eyes from the sun. “You are truly,” he said, “a piece of work.”
“You’re closer to them than I am.”
“You really think so?”
“Yes. You are, and always will be.” He was sincere.
“I’ve got to say,” Cornell said, astounded, “that’s an eye-opener.”
“She made me promise not to call her or go to her house, and I did promise.”
“Well then you’re all set.”
“And yet I think she really loves me, maybe. And, for some reason, I don’t think I’m going to lose her.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m not?”
“No. If you hadn’t said what you said about me being a Christian, I wouldn’t have known what to do. But now that I know you’re as crazy as you are, I do know. Meyer wouldn’t tell you to do this, but I’m not Meyer, and I can. It’s simple. It’s obvious. It came to me when you put me in shock.”
“What?”
“Do what you’re good at, what you know, what you’re trained to do.”
“And that is?”
“Go on a raid.”
“A raid? What kind of a raid?”
“I don’t know. You’re the pathfinder.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s on the beach, isn’t it? It must be on the beach. It’s probably on a bluff above the beach, to catch the wind.”
“There’s no bluff there. She said it’s in the dunes.”
“That’s great. It’s like Normandy, but there isn’t a bluff and there aren’t any Germans.”
“In Normandy I was dropped deep in, nowhere near the beaches, and I don’t have a plane.”
“You don’t need a plane or a parachute. You have a train. Get out there. What can you lose?”
“Her.”
“And if you don’t get out there?”
“Her.”
“Need I say more?”
“War is different. I have no license.”
“You’re not going to kill anybody.”
“I could still end up in jail.”
“So what? The food’s good in jail.” Cornell stopped and brought himself up short. “No it’s not.”
“Just to think about it makes me nervous.”
“Tell me you weren’t frightened in the war.”
“Initially, always.”
“So was I. And when the things you had to do frightened you, what did you do?”
“I did them anyway.”
“That’s right. So do it. But be careful, be gentle, because it’s all about a woman.”
9. Georgica
PERHAPS IT WAS the rhythm of the wheels clicking past the joints of the rails, or the lurching and swaying of the coaches, or the weaving of steam and smoke as they painted the brush and the sandy banks through which the train sped. Or perhaps it was the fields newly ploughed and newly cut, or still in hay and waving like the sea. Or perhaps just the great mass of the train pressing forward, but he was thrown back to a time not long before, when he had ridden powerlessly with the fortunes of war and nothing was left of what he had been. He was a pathfinder, whose job was to go first and set the flares and smoke that others would follow. With the first major actions in Sicily, and then in France, Holland, and Germany, he discovered that no matter how well he might show the way, he was following a course that had already been set. So many times he would look back toward the echelons that he guided in and know that just as they were tracing his path he was tracing another; that it had all come before, and that he was merely following the first soldier. He remembered—he could never forget—that in the fiercest fighting the casualties were so many that you could feel the souls of the fallen rising all around you, lifting upward as gently as snow falls.
The fields between sea and sound were in their silence like the fields of France where he had been broken, and now he was racing through them, still alive. The window was open full, and sometimes cinders from the steam engine came in and stung his eyes. The larger ones, more than just grit in the wind, were hot enough to burn where they touched. Farmers had made long windrows at angles to the rails, and the land was in the state of perfection it knows only in early June. Clouds and sun made the light that burst through the windows of the train flash as if from a heliograph, and now and then the train would run near the ocean, where the sea air was as fresh as the water was blue.
With one telephone call he had found out the schedule for the event, the requirements of dress, and, although he hadn’t asked, the menu. Whether Victor or Catherine had chosen the salmon with sauce verte he did not know. At the station, the detraining passengers were met by fleets of taxis and private cars (some of which had “Georgica Club” painted in gold on their maroon front doors) and ferried to the reception and dinner.
Had he been dressed properly he would have chanced riding with them, but he was in street clothes, with his formal outfit in a musette bag strapped across one shoulder and hanging at his side. With time until a taxi would return, he could change at leisure, which was good, because changing in a train station toilet stall was bad enough, but to do so in a rush was worse. Once he had done this in Philadelphia when it was 105 degrees and he was late for the wedding of two people he hardly knew. Exiting the fetid toilet stall and dripping with sweat, at risk of being less on time than he was already, he had stood in front of a giant fan in the hall that led to the men’s room, his dinner jacket open like a bat’s wings, as he enjoyed every second of evaporation.
At the East Hampton station he was neither sweating nor late, and when he emerged from the men’s room the taxis were gone and he was dressed and dry, with not a hair out of place. His heart, however, was beating fairly fast. The stationmaster agreed to store his bag, and told him that the taxis would be back. “There’s a big thing at the Georgica Club. Is that where you’re going?”
“I might stop in later.”
“I think it’s pretty full unless you’re invited, even if you’re a member. I don’t know how it works. Are you a member?”
“Of course, and members can attend,” Harry said, making it up out of whole cloth, “if they respect the privacy of the event.” He pronounced the word privacy with a short i, in the English way.
“It’s a Marrow getting engaged to a Hale.”
“I know.”
“You brought your own bottle and a glass?” the stationmaster asked, eyeing the bottle of Pol Roger and a flute hanging from Harry’s left hand.
“I’m stopping someplace first,” Harry told him, truthfully.
“A housewarming gift.”
“It makes my arrival more appreciated.”
“One glass. I hope she has another one,” the stationmaster said, wanting to tease out something erotic.
“She drinks straight from the bottle,” Harry told him, more than fulfilling his expectations. A taxi was pulling up.
“She must be some kinda w
oman.”
“Oh, she is,” Harry answered as he got into the taxi, which drove off before the driver even knew where he was going, which seemed appropriate for the evening.
“A Marrow is marrying a Hale,” the taxi driver said.
“Like hell,” Harry told him.
“No?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“Uh-oh. You want me to take you to the Georgica Club.”
“No. I want you to drop five hundred to the east, on the beach.”
“What?”
“Can you put me a quarter of a mile to the east of the club, on the beach?”
“I can’t get to the beach on the east. It’s private all the way to Amagansett. There is a road about half a mile west.”
“That’ll be fine.”
As Harry came out of the dunes and onto the strand the sun was riding just above the horizon and evening light had begun its conversion to banker’s gold. The wind was steady at his back from the west, the beach totally empty, and the Georgica Club, where the first act would be cocktails until dusk, the second a late dinner, and a third the announcement and dancing, was visible to the east, perched on the dunes and garlanded by golf links. The building itself, of gray stone like an Edinburgh townhouse, was enormous, each of its many large wings as big as a ministry. Paper lanterns glowing imperceptibly in what was left of the sun were strung across its terraces, and lights could barely be seen in the windows of shadowed areas from which the sun had been blocked.
As it had done night and day without cease for hundreds of millions of years, the surf broke in a war of blue against white. And because the season had not yet begun—early June was too cold for most—the beach was unswept and the detritus of fall hurricanes and winter storms was everywhere. There were the ordinary tangles of driftwood, fishermen’s floats, nets, and dried kelp, but with the war less than a year in the past the beach was littered as well with shattered life rings, sections of raft, and items of clothing scattered at different levels of the tide. Tins of food and provisions, unopened but somehow empty or partially filled with salt water, bore witness to torpedoed ships, and planes downed at sea. The print on all these was fresh enough to read—in English, military English, and sometimes German. The sea had rid itself of most of the markers of six years of war by sending them up onto the beaches as if onto shelves in a cupboard. Some may have been still afloat, but it would not be long until every surface of the ocean was clear, for that which could be waterlogged would sink, and more buoyant things would eventually be cast onto dry land where they would be worn down by sun, wind, rain, and blowing sand. The print would fade, colors bleach, nails and metal rust, structures collapse, and wood rot. In twenty years or so when the children of those who had crossed and recrossed safely over the sea were young women and young men, hardly a trace would remain, and of the traces virtually nothing identifiable—sea, air, and sun having swallowed and vaporized everything but memory.
