by Mark Helprin
He stopped in front of a black shoe missing its laces. It was preserved well enough so that with some softening and polish it might have been put back in service. The heel was hardly worn. He thought that had things gone differently it might have been his shoe, and that someone else might be standing in front of it as if at a grave, grasping the lapels of his tuxedo in a tight grip and pressing a bottle of Champagne close to his thigh. As if he were the one who was dead, he spoke to himself, the one who was living, urgently charging him with life. He let the breeze force its way into his lungs, and looked ahead at his objective, now strongly shining. Catherine was inside, not a quarter of a mile away. She would almost certainly be in a strapless gown—it was the fashion—and he realized that he had never seen her bare arms and shoulders, the top of her chest, or her back. And with this in mind, he stepped over the black shoe and went forward.
The straight course of the beach, which wanted to run unbroken from Coney Island to Montauk Point but did not, was cut by an inlet just short of the Georgica Club itself, a channel a hundred feet wide through which the tide was receding in a fast stream.
About to cross this, he calculated. First he approximated the distance. A hundred feet was a good guess, which he checked by throwing a smooth stone. It went almost the whole way, but he was wearing a dinner jacket and was unaccustomed to throwing things. A sidestroke while carrying with one hand his bundled clothes, the bottle, and the glass in the air would take him across in about a minute and a half. Then he threw a piece of driftwood upstream and timed its passage. In a minute and thirty seconds it was carried into the surf, moving approximately three hundred feet. Thus, were he to have any hope of crossing and keeping his clothes intact, dry, and in his possession, he would have to start from the marsh at the neck of the pond. And the wider the neck, the slower the water, so the farther inland he went, the better his chances—except that he could not go too far without sinking into the mud.
He stripped, laid out his clothes on the sand—shoes, socks, pants, braces, shirt, cummerbund, tie, jacket—and tied everything into a bundle that, were it to be swept away, would put him in a very embarrassing position. When it was secured and tightened with the braces, he picked it up and stepped into the rust-colored sand at the edge of the channel. His feet felt many sharp shells, but none sharp enough to cut except bloodlessly and shallow.
And then he heard, “Trying to come over?” Across the channel was a man of indeterminate age, tall, sandy-haired, and drunk, with a brigadier’s mustache and a dinner jacket.
“Unless you know of a bridge.”
“You could walk around the pond, but you’d be trespassing multiply and it would take you forever. No, this is good.”
“I don’t suppose the club has a boat?”
“All locked up and unreachable,” the man said, glancing over his shoulder at a line of sheds.
“Then I’ll swim. I didn’t know about the channel.”
“Coming to the celebration?”
“Yes.”
“We don’t get too many naked people at this club. It’ll shake things up. I’m all for that. Which side are you on?”
“Is it a war?”
“Not yet; they’re still unmarried.”
“I’m on Catherine’s side.”
“Wonderful girl, Catherine.”
“Yes. I love her.”
“Have a good swim. With luck, we’ll be at the same table.” He turned to go back, staggering elegantly.
“See you,” said Harry, remembering the idiom of the final clubs, to which he would not have been admitted, and he continued to walk, anxious about his nudity and wanting to get to the other side of the channel and dress. He went into the marsh and reeds of Georgica Pond’s ocean side, and on his right the club came alight in the dusk.
Away from the wind, which anyway had diminished with the sunset, he could hear music coming through the many French doors that opened onto the terraces, and when he lowered himself into the water, which though not warm was a great deal warmer than the ocean, he found himself swimming to the cadences of Cole Porter.
By the time he was halfway across, he was also halfway down and moving more and more rapidly to the sea. The minor weight of the bundle, held unnaturally, was a torture similar to that of holding a rifle at arm’s length. His left arm pumped desperately, his legs moved like egg beaters, and just as the water grew frigid and he felt the timing of the waves, he grounded on the sand, safely across, close to the edge of the surf.
Breathing hard, he struggled to his feet. His clothes were dry. He moved inland at a run, to a prominence in the dunes, where the wind was strongest. There, he threw the bundle down in the sand and stood in the breeze to dry. Ahead of him was the Georgica Club, now rising massively and shining like a Christmas-lit house in the snow. Through the clear glass of its doors and windows he saw gilt-framed paintings, fires leaping in the fireplaces, and flashes of color as guests and servants moved about. The sound of the orchestra came and went at the discretion of the wind, but as he listened in the semi-darkness, its swellings and disappearances, alternations, sudden interruptions, and sudden surges, like those of the surf, seemed especially poignant. Expensive cars were gathered like herds of cattle in the parking lots, and the golf links, now deserted, had been conquered by an evening mist coming off the Atlantic.
Inside, they were celebrating. For someone who is happy, celebration is yet another channel or instrument through which happiness may course. For someone who is not, celebration is a tedious parody of existence that seems pointless and false. Concentrated inside were fame, riches, and power, all of which were nothing more than forms of multiplication. But as the lights sparkled and the music ebbed and flowed with the deaths and resurrections of the west wind, Harry understood that Catherine was embraced by these things and lived within them, that she was protected by ancient and tested privilege, and kept from him by forces of great weight, seriousness, and long standing.
What exactly was he doing, naked, almost in the dark except for the faint rose light of a sun that had set, with the wind coursing freely over him. All he had was himself. With water still streaming off him, his body hard and his eye keen, he realized that he had nothing and could not have been more naked, and this allowed him to lose all apprehension and fear. As soon as he was dry, he dressed. He combed his hair with his fingers. After popping the cork of the Champagne, he drank a third of it directly from the bottle so as to bring himself close in spirit and demeanor to the people he was about to join. Walking in from the beach, holding the bottle by the neck and the glass by the stem, seemed as natural as anything he had ever done.
The surf crashed in the dark several hundred feet away, its broken front further disrupted by the current rushing from the inlet. This cruel sea stretched for thousands of miles with more mass and power than was comprehensible. A simple shrug, no more than a turn in its sleep, a barely perceptible movement of its world-spanning flanks, an adjustment of a millionth of its mass, would instantly swallow the third of civilization sitting at its edge and by its leave. When Harry had stood in the wind, stripped of everything, the eternal ocean had been on his right, and the club, delicately perched on sand, to his left, pulsing with light and warmth and in the scheme of things all told just a brief flare. Though the building in front of him was destined to disappear as surely as the tens of thousands of ships, pieces of which now lay bleaching on the shore, women in lovely gowns now glided across its Persian carpets and its polished floors.
As he moved from the dunes to a path compacted in the sand, to a boardwalk, to a stone terrace, and then to shiny heart-pine and antique Isfahans, he forgot the sea. Once again in uniform, just like more than a hundred male guests and waiters also dressed like penguins, he acquired the confidence of anonymity. No one would challenge him. He could move freely, more than freely, because he had no position to protect, no investment, no membership to preserve, and no agreement to keep. He felt as invulnerable as if he had come back from the dead a
nd was walking invisibly. He was a ghost who could without detection flip trays loaded with full glasses, trip pompous dowagers, and launch baked potatoes through the air like artillery shells, and he drifted forward in the oncoming air of scandal he was determined to create.
Though he had told Cornell that there would be no Jews within a mile, with his ability to recognize other Jews even when non-Jews could not (something that he thought would disappear in a generation or two), he became aware of several of the musicians and the woman who was singing. Perhaps it was something in their eyes, the way they moved, or the very shape of them, and in her voice: he was of course unusually sensitive to a woman’s voice. She was singing “Someone to Watch over Me,” and as one of the Jewish musicians brushed the surface of a snare drum to soften the plaint, another sharpened it with his violin.
All he had now was light and music as he wandered from room to room in search of Catherine. Everything there—the glossy white millwork, the rich colors of the walls, the silver and crystal, and the carefully tended fires—was only a frame for her. And yet, in half a dozen capacious rooms and long halls, he couldn’t find her. Perhaps she’d been moving away from him at the same speed he’d been moving toward her, and they had circled never to meet. Perhaps when breaking this pattern and crossing his former paths at random he had simply missed her. That the two of them could be in an enormous, busy place for half an hour and not meet did not seem unreasonable. It had happened on the ferry.
He stopped to consider this. In the center of a large library a fire was burning and twenty or thirty people were talking in small groups. His glass was in his hand, empty. Some time before, he had abandoned the bottle to a table with fifty others. He might have felt self-conscious standing alone in the middle of the room were it not for the fire, what he had drunk, and the thought that had come to him that it was likely that in the years before they met they had passed on the street, or sat in the same subway car, or waited next to one another, as New Yorkers say, on line. Although he had no memory of such a thing, and as far as he knew it had never happened, he believed nonetheless that it had, because he did have a memory that he could not quite remember, and suspected that he had created it only in honor of something he would never reach. And yet it was very strong and stayed with him. It lasted no longer than the snap of two fingers or the clicking of a camera shutter, but it was repeated over and over: a flash of clouds and sky—the sky pale blue, the clouds like a pigeon’s lightest gray. He was falling through them, as when he parachuted in the war. It was a winter sky, and the sun was shining.
Then a hand clasped his shoulder. He started, and turned. “It’s you,” said the man, neither more nor less drunk than he had been at the inlet. “You made it.”
“Barely.” The pun vanished unrecognized. Harry was, himself, slightly drunk.
“Did you have a good swim?”
Harry stepped close to him and said, softly but with the deliberate clarity of someone speaking to a drunk in a noisy room, “Very cold. And I was almost swept out to sea. Can we keep this quiet? It’s somewhat embarrassing, not being aware of the inlet, and having to go around naked.”
“Absolutely. Wouldn’t dream. . . .”
“Good.”
“Were you in the war? You must have been.”
“I was.”
“So was I. I flew transports in the Pacific and went down twice. What about you?”
“Airborne. I went down, too, but it was part of the plan.”
“Where?”
“I was in the Eighty-second, and never got to the Pacific.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Harvard,” Harry said, his attendance, in this circumstance, the equivalent of a perfect knowledge of German after being parachuted into Berlin in 1944.
“I mean where did you prep?”
“I didn’t prep. I was found in a shoebox, brought up by welders, and educated by wolves. Then I went to Harvard.”
“Welders!” said the transport pilot, delighted. “I never knew anyone who was brought up by welders!”
“Yes,” said Harry. “My mother and my father. They taught me, among other things, how to weld. Have you seen Catherine?”
“I did at first, but I haven’t for a while. Either she gets invisible to me when I’ve had too much to drink, or she and Victor snuck off to the beach or upstairs”—he pointed with his left index finger and followed drunkenly with his eyes—“because I haven’t seen Victor either.”
“There are a lot of people. What’s she wearing?”
“A silver and black thing that sparkles. At engagement parties it’s always better when the woman is beautiful. It puts everything in focus. If Victor were going to marry a mop, what would be the point? And Catherine is beautiful, in her way.”
“I think,” Harry said, with the lunacy and conviction of someone deeply in love, “that she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“I wouldn’t say that. She’s attractive, but she’s also kind of funny-looking.”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“You said that. Why do you keep saying it?”
“I told you before. I love her.”
“You did? That’s very friendly of you. I mean”—he said this conspiratorially, swaying a little—“maybe too friendly. Why do you say you love her? I thought. . . .”
“I love her,” Harry answered, as if testifying not to an inebriated, High Episcopalian transport pilot, but before God, “because of, among other things, her amplitude of reflection and the richness of her mind. That’s what makes her infinitely beautiful.”
“Wo!” said the transport pilot. “Her what?”
“Her amplitude of reflection, her richness of mind. And I just love her.”
“Wo,” he said again, as much to his drink as to Harry, “you ought to marry her, not Victor.” He was now a partisan, fully convinced.
“I’m not going to marry Victor, and I am going to marry Catherine.”
“Does Victor know this?”
“Victor,” Harry said, “has no rights in the matter.”
“Of course he doesn’t. He’s her fiancé. Why would he?”
“Even if he had rights, they would terminate tonight.”
“Don’t they begin tonight?”
“Same thing. The last person to leave the ship is also the last person not to leave the ship.”
The transport pilot struggled. “That’s right,” he said. “How did you figure that one out?”
“I figured it out as I was waiting at the door to jump out of a Dakota.”
“Do you think, do you, that as the war recedes, that five years from now, or ten, things will be less insane?”
Harry considered this carefully. “No.”
A bell called everyone to dinner. In the stream of people heading toward rooms of which he had not been aware until unfolded doors revealed flower-laden tables, she was nowhere to be seen. Had the transport pilot not mentioned that this was the engagement party, Harry would have thought he had come either to the wrong place or to the right place at the wrong time. In a dining room to his right he saw a table with a chair leaning against it, and a place card folded so that the outside was blank. He pocketed the place card, righted the chair, and stood behind it, ready to assist any ladies who might appear. Scanning the place settings, he saw that four people were due, and shortly they arrived.
One was a woman in her thirties, who, depending upon her expression, was either not attractive at all or excruciatingly so. Another was a dowager of profound visual neutrality. And the third was a young woman who was heavily made up, which can be magnificent if it is done well, but it wasn’t, and unfortunately for her and everyone else it looked as if she had been dipped in flour, and her lipstick made her lips into red bicycle tires. Some men liked this, Harry did not. He and a bald man with glasses pulled out chairs for the women and exhibited the required deference. All was well as they began to talk
and eat. Harry longed for Catherine, and, wondering where she had gone, hoped that he wasn’t too late.
“We came all the way out here,” said the older woman, “because my husband says that this presages the formation of the largest firm on Wall Street.” She was clearly resentful and willingly indiscreet. Necessity may be the mother of invention, Harry thought, but liquor is the father of indiscretion.
“We have a house here,” the woman in her thirties said. “It was no trouble.” In wrestling, this was called a smackdown.
“I’m out of school,” the youngest said. “I don’t care where I am. What about you?” she asked Harry. “Do you care where you are?”
“Of course I care where I am.”
Discovering him sexually, she said nothing except everything that could be said with an averted glance.
“I came to see Catherine and I have yet to see her,” Harry said.
“I saw her,” the youngest woman offered. “Then she disappeared. But she’s here. How could she not be here? What about you?” she asked the bald man with the glasses.
“I own taxi fleets,” he said, not taking his eyes off his salmon. “You’ve ridden in my taxis.”
“I didn’t ask what you did.”
“I know you didn’t,” he said, still not looking up. “I know what you meant, but I’m just a friend of Willie Marrow, which isn’t very interesting, so I skipped to the good part. What work do you do?” he asked Harry. It was impolite to ask the women what they did. If they did anything, which was unlikely, they would probably be brassy enough to volunteer it.
