by Mark Helprin
12. Changing Light
FROM THE MOMENT he had been apprised of the sickening amount of money he would have to pay regularly and indefinitely to someone whose name he did not even know, he felt a continual pressure that became the background of all events, something only half forgotten even in sleep, that then, when he became fully awake, became fully awake itself.
Each time he did the kind of calculation that people who worry about money do over and over again, the results, varying only slightly according to an only slightly varying range of assumptions, told him that it would be impossible. And as each calculation was followed to its end, its end was some form of death—of the business that was the last remnant of his father’s life, of the commercial equilibrium that kept half a hundred families secure, of his savings, and of his chances with Catherine. He could not offer himself to her bankrupt and in decline, and would never seek an excuse for his catastrophic failure at such an early age. As he walked, and he walked a great deal, he went over the numbers. For hours and hours, they took their places like eighteenth-century soldiers in highly structured battles. He hadn’t been made to be the kind of person who can think all day in numbers, and their ceaseless ballet in the air weakened him as they crowded out the world. He was going to bleed to death slowly so that the overcoats could fill and expand, their faces riding above their collars, puffy, stuffed, overfed, and red.
Sometimes, despite his anxiety, nothing seemed to have changed. At other times he would imagine almost joyously half a dozen ways not merely to extricate himself but to triumph. As he returned to these again and again, however, the difficulties became clearer, the risks more forbidding. Having failed to prevent the decline in revenues, he was at a loss to engineer the dramatic increase that was the only thing that would keep him solvent. Cornell understood the checkmate far better. The period of waiting for developments was familiar to someone who had waited his whole life and never seen the unfair lock on his fortunes dissolve. Harry alternated between dejection and euphoria, the euphoria coming with his temporary excitement at schemes he would then have to abandon. It seemed natural to want to kill Gottlieb, except that Gottlieb had apparently already been killed or pushed aside by someone of greater power, someone who, in the midst of civil society and in a country at peace, killed people as part of his business.
How could this person, whose name Harry had never heard, whose face Harry had never seen, have enslaved him in the space of an afternoon? The answer was, if not encouraging, nonetheless uncomplicated. Amidst the peace, his opponent lived in a state of war and dared others to do the same. If they did, he would fight them as he had habitually fought to reach his place. If they did not, he would take from them. It was how the knights and lords had lived off the substance of the peasants. As old as man, the technique had come to the New World and made its home beneath the happy, lighted surface of things.
By his own account, Harry had a year’s grace in which to see what he might do. What happened, he asked himself, when the peasants came back from the wars and knew how to remove a knight from his horse with a pike and dispatch him with his own sword? In those times, peasants had seldom fought, but now wars were democratic and the city was filled with former soldiers who knew a thing or two even if, having fought, they loved peace dearly.
And Manhattan seemed to welcome his distress, as if it had somehow been constructed for the story of such a thing, had seen it an infinite number of times, would see it until kingdom come, and with perfect calm use it to build the invisible webs of its history. The beautiful prospects, galaxies of lights, and scenes and feelings that an observer felt overwhelmingly, were composed not of stone, steel, and electric current, but took their charge and made their fire from the mortal struggles within its impassive folds. The city would stay the same were Harry Copeland to be buried in a potter’s field and Gottlieb’s successor watch the lights come up over the skyline as he sat on his high terrace, or were Harry somehow to triumph in overturning the reigning design. Forever neutral, the city would favor no one, promote no one, mourn no one, remember no one. And as everything within it that had occurred before or was yet to be would be set as in stone and unalterable, it seemed that the only thing that mattered was to do right. The only thing left to anyone would be an echo that would not even be heard, and, therefore, whence pleasure and pride except in doing right? This was a conclusion that Gottlieb, his predecessors, and those who would follow would never understand, and for which, therefore, they could not be as fully prepared as they would have to be to survive it if it came at them by surprise.
“Come at two,” Catherine had said, and, partly because of this, in the morning he had run so well on the bridle paths that he had been able to pass cantering horses. As he was running, Catherine was speeding through flat water as if swimming down a fast stream. When she combed out her hair in front of the mirror and lifted her arms to braid it, she turned her head as if posing for a photograph, and then, ignoring her image in the glass, felt that whatever was within her that was beautiful was like a fire sweeping to and fro, its light changing, its life fleeting. As a singer and a dancer trained from an early age, she wanted both to sing and to dance, but had she done either she would have been stopped or asked to leave by the ladies of her mother’s club, who could do neither. Nor would she ever sing or dance except where it was appropriate: in the rehearsal hall, at home alone, on the stage itself.
So she made the rhythm, sang the song, and inconspicuously mouthed the words, in silence. But she could hear as if the orchestra were there, and the music, only remembered, was more powerful for want of an outlet, its compression driving it deeper into her than if it had filled the air. As she closed her locker door, she watched it move in the deliberately slow arc in which she had propelled it, her arms tense and engaged as she guided it, her left foot extended forward, her back magisterial and straight, her entire body moving as gracefully and rigidly as a gliding swan.
He was in love with her. And he had come to her so strongly, having seen her in a flash, knowing nothing of her but what she was as she stood before him. Despite its obvious dangers, his sudden, thoughtless, and intense attraction was the one thing she had wanted most in life, more than comfort, achievement, longevity, or triumph—this one thing, this one perfect imperfection. As she walked home, the world came alight. Trees on the sidewalk seemed in their slight swaying to be dancing to music she could not stop, the rhythm of which she could not escape. In the shadows of Grand Central, the beams of light flooded down in mitered columns to illuminate golden dust hovering like gnats. Her heart rose with the changes of color and form with each new view down long, sea-horizoned avenues glittering with sun on glass, or in the narrow blocks choked with green, and with the precise and astounding choreography of the scores of thousands who moved with quick step interweaving and never colliding.
For Harry’s part, it was like war, in which every second alive was a triumph, every sight indelible, each inhalation a blessing, all light magnified and overwhelming, motion stilled, and stillness put into motion. Once, somewhere east of the Rhine, his helmet dripping with cold water, he had lain in a cradle of wet leaves, watching his breath come out white in the air as he was soaked by windblown rain. He had hardly slept in days; he was filthy, thin, and under fire. But his body was hot and the rain not unpleasant, because his heart beat like an engine. Every drop sparkled. The past was crowded out, the future projected no more than a second or two ahead. With nothing guaranteed but the present, it expanded and intensified, as if a balance of force were faithfully maintained, until the cold rain became a shower of stars.
As he walked east on 57th Street, its shop windows glowing like miniatures in illuminated manuscripts, air that had ducked beneath the great bridges came to meet him from the East River and lifted his spirits like a sail on the wind. Far ahead, at the end of the street, was a window of pale blue sky.
Anxious to see her and wanting her to know, he pressed the button for the bell five minutes before two,
and in the time between the sounding of the bell and her appearance at the door his pulse escalated. When she opened the door and he saw her, though not for the first time, in full light, some of her features, which had led Ross Underhill, the transport pilot, to declare her “funny-looking,” and might have disqualified her from thoughtless admiration, made her so beautiful to him that he was unable to break the silence.
Nor was she. Her thoughts of this moment had distracted her from sleep and work. Each time she had imagined it, it had possessed a quality of lightness and effortless musicality. But she had moved beyond infatuation. And when love does move this way it assumes almost a tragic quality as the deep investment signifies to an alert mind the inevitability of a deeper loss.
“May I kiss you?” he asked, still properly unsure of how things stood.
“It would break my heart if you didn’t.”
Recognizing the seriousness and courage of this reply, he mounted the first step, and the next, until he was standing by her, and there they embraced for the first time, only slightly tighter than if they had been dancing. The first kiss was just a light touch, as it had been in the car, as if they were going back to find the place in the music where they had been forced to stop. Then the next, and the next, rhythmically, until they lost their sense of time and forgot where they were. A passerby would have seen two people on the limestone steps, pressed up against a column and kissing. But the street was empty and they were oblivious of it anyway when they stepped behind the column, hands caressing faces and pushing back hair, lips touching again and again. With his right hand he pressed against the small of her back, and with his left he went between the yoke of her dress and the nape of her neck. On the back of his hand he felt the roughness of a label, but next to his fingers and palm was skin as soft and taut as sateen. Now he knew very well the smallest detail of her upper lip, which, slightly projecting and angular, was the perfect imperfection of her beauty. He knew it wet, and he knew it relaxed, and he knew its sweet taste. She smelled so fresh, and the cotton of her dress sprang back crisply when touched. Her body, firm and trim, overwhelmed the cloth between them.
After half an hour they moved to disengage, but it took ten minutes of last kisses that were not last kisses until they sat down next to one another on the highest step, his right hand and her left tightly entwined. She burned red. Her hair was slightly disheveled. He switched hands and put his right arm around her. As she leaned into him, he asked somewhat wryly, “I forgot to ask, but are your parents in?”
She liked that. “Only the servants,” she said.
He looked to his right and then to his left, and in the wonderfully clean but old and wavy window glass he saw faces disappearing like fish darting from the wall of an aquarium. “The maids wear black and white?”
“Yes.”
“I saw them.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “They’re responsible and meticulous.”
“Meaning?”
“They’ll be sure to tell everyone in New York. Even the newspapers.”
“Why would the newspapers be interested?”
“They wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean that Margaret won’t give it a try.”
“She’s the enterprising one?”
“Well, there’s Tim,” she said. “He siphons gas. It’s part of the deal. The struggle never stops. The trick, my father says, is to make it livable for everyone: laws are like trees in the forest, and the animals in the forest move between and among the trees.”
“So he lets Tim siphon gas.”
“Yes, and Tim takes more than a couple of gallons. It’s like a tip. He’s a really good driver, and despite the fact that he’s a thief he would defend us to the death.” She pulled back, looking at him directly. “What are we going to do now?”
“All I want to do,” he answered, “is walk with you. There are ten thousand places where I want to kiss you.”
Not wanting to be easy, she smiled slightly and said, her tone only ambiguously echoing the double entendre, “There are ten thousand places where I want you to kiss me.”
They walked south on Sutton Place, arms comfortably around one another’s waists, shoulders touching, the Hale maids in black and white pressed against the windows until the angle of the couple’s travel took them out of sight as they disappeared into the city.
13. Billy and Evelyn
FOR HARRY, PENN STATION was a gate to the underworld. When he and Catherine had been in the automat and their conversation had returned to architecture rather than drift into anything too revealing of what had been rapidly building between them, or, rather, what had somehow always been there, he had said of Grand Central and its great counterpart, “God help the city if they tear them down. It’s been proposed. I don’t know why. It would be the first act of national suicide.” But instead of setting foot inside Penn Station he had taken the subway to Jamaica to board the train that had taken him to East Hampton and the Georgica. Now, however, he was to meet Catherine amid the great columns and arches. On every square foot of Penn Station’s expansive floor, someone had been seen for the last time, someone had been embraced by his family, and then, as surely as if he had been lifted up and passed through the ceiling so high that to see it one had to tilt one’s head way back, he had vanished. For too many soldiers and their parents, wives, and children this had been the last place.
Meyer Copeland had overruled his son, who, in uniform, a duffle bag on his shoulder, had come to the loft to say goodbye. They had decided on the loft and then Meyer had gone back on his word. “You want to ride with me on the train?” Harry had asked rhetorically. “All the way to Georgia? Do you want to join my unit?”
“I would, if I could,” his father had answered, meaning not with his son but in his place.
They stood numbly near the gate, the son busy with thoughts of the future, the father wanting to hold on to the present. When the train was called, they embraced. Meyer was wearing a tweed jacket with patches at the elbows. He was old, bearded, not in the best of health, and the years had taken from his height. He told his only child that he loved him, and then Harry had to break away lest he miss the train. As he went down the stairs he turned briefly and saw his father, as hundreds of people passed him, standing absolutely still.
The last spot where he had seen his father drew his eye magnetically as he descended the stairs for the first time since 1942, now not to go back to the army but to wait for Catherine. A policeman was watching him, perhaps because the invisible burden he carried had distorted his step. On the very spot, two young mothers had corralled three children and some luggage, and were adjusting hats, tying shoes, and pulling objects out of their suitcases. From the way they were dressed and the toys the children dragged it seemed that they were going to the Jersey Shore, unless they were so free-spirited that they could wear straw hats and sundresses in downtown Philadelphia. They covered the marble where his father had stood, and he knew that his father would have been happy had he seen the children there.
He looked up from the rose-patched cheeks of the infants, and the mothers’ bare shoulders and arms, past the ironwork and the rays of sun streaming in through soot-encrusted windows, to the space immediately beneath the vaulted ceiling. And there he heard from amidst the incomprehensible mixing of echoes and voices a sound like the singing of the surf, as if this were the barrel into which the memory of everything that had happened below, all that had been said or felt, had risen to be kept. There trapped like smoke were the faint traces of when he had been held for the last time by the man who had held him when he was born.
For a few minutes he watched quietly as soldiers, sailors, and civilians passed by, each intent on meeting the requirements of his ticket and proceeding according to schedule. They nervously sipped sugar water passed off as orange juice. They ate at wagons and counters, rushing to finish even though they always had more time than they used. And they hurriedly bought newspapers and magazines, all the while checking their watches as if the
se were gauges for their steadily rising blood pressure.
Then he saw Catherine coming down the stairs, a young woman not much older than a girl, who moved unselfconsciously, in whose eyes you could see the qualities of thought and reflection, of woundedness and optimism, of kindness, and of love. Though she was young, the woman she would become was present in the way she held herself. Dressed elegantly in white with pearls, she walked modestly through the light streaming over the stairs.
Her pace quickened as she crossed the floor, and her observant and tentative expression changed. As she closed, he saw the tiny double crescents that framed her smile, and although he disapproved of publicly demonstrated affection he forgot everything and kissed her not once but three times, the last certainly long enough to elicit attention. But kissing was allowed in a station, even over the limit.
“We’ve got ten minutes,” he said.
“I would have gotten here earlier, but there were a million people on Thirty-fourth Street. Sales.”
“Why aren’t we driving out?”
“Because the car is and always has been a symbol of my independence, and now I’ve used it to do something that gravely embarrassed them. I don’t want to arrive in it. It would just start things up. If we come on the train it will be less provocative. When I was a little girl, I would come on the train, because they would go out before school ended. Better. And I think I want to keep the car in the city from now on so I can use it to go to Philadelphia or drive around upstate.”
“Isn’t it faster to go to Philadelphia by train?” he asked.
“I like to drive in the country, especially now. Do you know the Pine Barrens or the Delaware? We’ll go to Philadelphia. We’ll leave early and walk around the Pine Barrens, swim the Delaware up where it’s narrow and clean, and then get some of my college friends and eat at Bookbinder’s.”
