by Mark Helprin
“And where will we stay?”
“Anywhere but the Benjamin Franklin Hotel.” She had had a hard gloss when she said this.
“You’re quite grown-up about that sort of thing.”
“I am. I’m like a divorcée. Does that trouble you?”
“No.” He bent to lift his luggage—she had none, as usual, a characteristic of the Hales, who hated to carry things and so left toothbrushes and coats stashed seemingly all over the world. The train had been called and the rush to it began, a river of seersucker, pin cord, sundresses, and straw hats. Jackets over the arm. The beaches were much cooler, and people had begun to flock to them. The smell and humidity of steam from the boilers of the locomotives idling in tunnels beneath rose through every passage. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Good,” she said. “I don’t have to be coy, or worried, I hope. Just love.”
For him, the word love was the most beautiful in the English language, even if not the most gorgeous or sparkling. It would last beyond all privation, and surface after years of repression as gamely as a glass float shooting up from beneath the waves. As a word, it bloomed before his eyes as red as a rose, and was as round and cupped in hand as a buff-colored dove.
Though the Friday-afternoon Hamptons train, the Cannonball, was packed, they sat facing one another in single seats in the parlor car. She had reserved the tickets with that in mind. And though many people were smoking, and Catherine and Harry never had, the windows were open and the sun-filled air was as fresh as the wind above the dunes. As people who are in love often do, they stared at one another like idiots. She kicked his small suitcase with the toe of her shoe. “That’s a hell of a suitcase. Where’d you get that, I wonder?”
“Finished today.” It was the richest, darkest leather she had ever seen. “This is the best one we make. FDR used them, but they were all battered. The Roosevelts didn’t take very good care of their things. He wouldn’t buy new ones, either, so we offered to send a stainer, a polisher, and a leathersmith down to the White House to clean them up. The president himself received our guys, they got a great lunch, and by the end of the afternoon the whole set looked better than new because of the patina. Wherever the president went, people saw our product.”
“How about Truman?”
“We’re working on it. He doesn’t like fancy things, but he does like good things. One of our leathersmiths lives next door to Joe Micelli, Truman’s barber and friend at the Carlisle, but it’s delicate.”
“My parents are allergic to luggage,” she said. “We don’t like burdens. But they know something beautiful when they see it.”
“So do I,” Harry said. She turned the color that Russians call “blood and milk,” and he loved it. “This morning I started out with a pack, but then I stopped in and traded.”
“It must be convenient to own Copeland Leather.”
“It was today.” He paused as a train flew by in the opposite direction, rattling the windows in their recesses. “Catherine?” He deeply enjoyed just saying her name.
“Harry?” And she his.
“What did you say to your parents?”
“About you? What do you think I said to them?”
“I think you said that I love you and that I want to marry you.” Before she responded he was able to count twenty-three sections of rail over which the carriage clattered as they flew by.
“That’s what I said.”
In the high summer heat of February, 1888, Billy Hale was born in the harbor at Rio de Janeiro, in the sickbay of a United States naval vessel with paddle wheels, masts, and sails. Now fifty-eight, he and his friends of the same age rationally expected to die within five or ten years. The weight of this expectation took from him, as it did with most of the men of his generation, much of the fire that he had managed to bank despite a youth that had not been touched by it.
He loved his daughter and only child, and watched as time and necessity properly carried her away from him to make a life of her own. With no need to struggle, never much ambition, and the clear understanding that even had he an ambitious nature the few years remaining would mock it, he was lost. Except that, as if by nature or just the way of things, he was drawn to his wife anew, and sometimes with more force than in the earliest days of their marriage.
Ten years younger than her husband, Evelyn Hale was blond and, in a kind of miracle, delicate, indestructible, kind, and severe. Her hair was pulled back, but she did not look in the least horsey; she dressed magnificently; seemed always to be made up, perfumed, and bejeweled; and had only recently comprehended that her husband’s renewed obsession with her physicality would not die until he did. In public she treated him with an indifference marred only by a hint that she was irritated by everything he did, which was not true; and he treated her, with the same impulse to preserve their privacy, as if she were nothing more than a paperweight. But in private they comforted one another and confided. And of late what their bed, the pool, and the deserted beach witnessed was in appearance as desperate as a death struggle. At one point she had asked, glistening with sweat, “Billy, what’s come over you? Are you some sort of salmon or something?” And then, under her breath, though they were alone, “You’re a goddamned sea turtle.”
“A sea turtle? Is that a compliment?”
“I think it is.”
By his reckoning, he was indeed a salmon, or a sea turtle, or an electric light that flares before it burns out. As a son of a prominent family, he had always been underestimated, but he was like any other man. He loved his wife and his child, he appreciated the beauty and decorum of the life he had lived, and wanted it to last into time. It would be a gift to those who succeeded him, as it had been a gift to him. He had as much courage as most, but because it had not been put to the test he doubted it. Now he was going to meet his daughter and her surprise fiancé. He thought it too soon after the war to drive the Mercedes except to sneak it out at night to keep it in shape, and he didn’t want to overdo it in the Rolls, so he showed up at the East Hampton station in a dark green MG, its top down and its chrome untarnished.
Catherine went to her father as if Harry did not exist, something to which Harry could hardly object, especially when, like a wave that breaks against a sea wall and is instantly thrown back, she retreated to him. Billy put out his hand, and Harry took it. They were both nervous. “Can you fit in the back?” Billy asked, pulling the passenger seat forward and exposing the luggage compartment.
“I may stick out a bit,” Harry answered, his phrasing almost British, as if to match the car. First he put in his suitcase and what he had retrieved from the stationmaster, who had been astonished to see him with Catherine, and then compressed himself into the narrow space that was left. When the seats were returned to position they bound him in like a swaddled baby. As Billy picked up speed, Harry freed his right arm and tried to catch his sky-blue summer tie, but soon gave up and let it trail like a flag in a hurricane. Billy drove like a fighter pilot, rounding turns with such speed that the wheels screeched before either the left or the right pair would momentarily leave the road. And on straightaways he would shift like a racing driver and run down the fortunately empty lanes as if he were immortal. They went so fast through the back streets and cool, moist air, its heaviness a gift of evening and the sea, that the few people they saw would disappear in a blur of madras, canary yellow, or pink. The lawns were so green, tight, and cold that Harry wanted to stroke them. And the trees out there, near the ocean, had just come into full leaf.
“Have you been here before?” Billy shouted into the wind, which easily carried his question to the back seat. Still, everyone shouted.
“Yes. I had friends here, in college.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Watson Dickerman?”
“East Hampton?”
“South.”
“And what college was that?”
“Harvard.”
“In what?”
“English. I was a stud
ent of Howard Mumford Jones, but I was too dumb to understand him.”
“It doesn’t matter. Evelyn will appreciate it. I was never quite good enough for her, being Princeton, class of ’ten. Her father taught there, so to her we ranked somewhat below yeast. What year were you?”
The wind forced itself into Harry’s lungs. His answer sounded as if it were coming from underwater. “’Thirty-seven.”
“A good deal younger than Victor then, who was . . . class of what, Catherine?”
“’Thirty,” Catherine said, somewhat annoyed. “But Victor was a stayback at Andover, so he’s actually older.”
“Really,” said Billy. “I didn’t know that.”
“A D in trigonometry, D-plus in French, and nothing higher than a C,” Catherine said.
“What are you laughing about?” Billy asked, repressing a smile.
“Nothing,” said Harry.
“You’ll meet Victor if you’re out here for more than half an hour. Everyone does. He’s always lumbering along the beach. I feel sorry that he’s lost someone like Catherine,” he pronounced over the wind, “but I’m actually glad she’s found someone else on her own. It smacked of an arranged marriage.”
“It more than smacked,” Catherine called out.
As they turned into Further Lane, Billy slowed the car. “It was your choice,” he said. “No one pushed you into it, and no one blames you for pulling out.” Harry looked at her as her father continued. “The wine in the face was a tad dramatic, but what’s a little drama after four years of war? On the other hand, it was a Lafite. I hope it was worth it.”
“Believe me, Daddy, it was.”
He slowed to a crawl when he entered the driveway, to make it seem longer, cool down the motor, and restore the decorum he had thrown aside while speeding. Orchards on the left, newly ploughed fields on the right. Dense hedgerows compressing both into a long rectangle leading to the sea. A quarter of a mile later they pulled up to the house, beyond which the dunes were visible. Billy halted the car on an apron of beige gravel and it came to a stop with a concussive rasp. After the engine was switched off, and in the silence before Evelyn appeared, they heard the wind and felt the thud of the breakers. Beyond dunes covered with sparse, sharp grasses, the world was at war in the white of the surf, and the wind curled the tops of the waves.
Always apprehensive in social situations, Harry wanted to escape to this pounding surf, for in fighting he was never awkward. It would have been much easier and less dangerous to be leading an infantry squad or sailing into a gale than to meet Catherine’s mother. He looked over at Catherine, who had turned her head toward the house, and the sight of her, her hair pulled up at the back of her neck, changed his thoughts of war, which were easy, into a longing for her, something that was in its way far more risky. As her father walked around the front of the car, facing away, Harry reached over Catherine’s right shoulder and pulled himself forward. She briefly squeezed his right hand with hers, and he kissed the side of her head. Her hair was sweet, and when he kissed her he heard her lips make the sound of a kiss, barely audibly. As he fell back and began to extricate himself from the luggage compartment of the little car, he saw that her mother had been watching.
Knowing from previous experience how radically girls can differ from their mothers, he had no idea what to expect. He knew that any natural discord with Billy could be quenched in fishing, launching a boat, or building a stone wall, for he had seen that Billy was not so full of himself that the two of them would be unable to revert in the face of such things to something resembling boyhood, and thus make their peace. But there was no way he could so engage an older woman except by wit, and that would not do, as it was too close to flirtation. Thus, Evelyn, were she in the slightest bit malevolent, could concentrate upon him the female death ray that only a mother-in-law or potential mother-in-law can deploy, that comes from frustration of a hundred types, that is as old as the monkeys, and for which there is no antidote.
And Park Avenue and its environs—granted, the Hales, nonconformists, had decamped for Sutton Place—were full of caked and powdered reptilian women and florid, panting men who lived to shop and eat, with muscles evolved mainly for approaching a maitre d’, lifting a poodle, or carrying glistening packages. At home these people did not breathe. There was no air, no room to move, no space to stretch out an arm without shattering Lalique, no sunshine, no water, no waves, only a coffin-like bella figura of life as still as a wax dummy.
How surprised he was, then, as Evelyn came into view. For although she was done up as if she had just walked out of the Colony Club, she was girlish as she descended the steps gracefully and fast, and beneath the mature and knowing planes of her face was a softness and kindness that bloomed in the presence of her daughter, whom she adored. Immediately, his apprehensions fled, although he knew just as instantaneously that though he might get along with her and develop a kind of affection, he would never, ever, understand her, no matter how perfectly and naturally he could know Catherine.
After all, he had never been a woman. He had never been a mother. He had never been middle-aged. He had never been a socialite. He had never been a Christian, a debutante, or had cellulite (although she didn’t either). He had never been trapped in the delicacy and inadequacy of a woman’s clothes and shoes. Because of their clothes and shoes they could hardly take a step in rough terrain, running was out of the question, and God help them if they had to throw a punch. He hated what he called “little pea-brained sandwiches sized for canaries”; he thought a dog was something you should be able to wrestle with rather than use to dust a Fabergé egg; and he had never been an aspirant to, much less a member of, either the Georgica Club or the Four Hundred.
On the other hand, she was the child of a prominent theologian, and had grown up—without radio, without movies—with much of her entertainment the complex disputes of moral and religious philosophers, in contrast to whom and as a gift of nature and her sex she was much wiser. Wise enough to absorb and comprehend—eventually—all of what they said, wise enough seldom to comment, and wise enough to reject it in favor of a knowledge that, exactly according to her father’s ideals, came directly from God and without intermediaries—though at times intermediaries might be advantageously consulted.
Catherine remembered an evening long ago, and her mother sitting by a fireplace in their house on Sutton Place. A silk gown, of a color hard to describe except that it glistened slightly Roxburghe in the firelight, surrounded her like a soft throne. All the dinner guests were men. They were talking about bridges and steam pressure and electricity. The first to leave was Evelyn. Then Catherine could not take it any longer, and found her mother. “Don’t worry,” Evelyn told her. “It’s all very interesting, what they’re talking about. . . .”
“I don’t think so,” said the child.
“You will. But, Catherine, everything that’s true despite us—the things they’re talking about, natural laws—will always remain true despite us. What matters is what’s true because of us. That’s what’s up for grabs. That’s where the battle is. One remembers and values one’s life not for its objective truths, but for the emotional truths.”
“What do you mean?” the child asked.
“I mean the only thing that’s really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that’s fixed in the heart. That’s what we live and die for. It comes in epiphanies, and it comes in love, and don’t ever let frightened people turn you away from it.” Though Catherine had not understood the words precisely—she was still too young—the meaning had been conveyed, and it stayed with her for the rest of her life.
So if Catherine did not entirely understand Evelyn’s lesser pronouncements, she did the greater ones. Nature does not require children to understand their parents, and may require that they don’t. Still, just like Billy—who although he was fifty-eight was older than that when he was born, and yet seemed in many ways to be much younger, perhaps because of his fondness for practica
l jokes (most of which were incomprehensible to anyone not an enthusiast of croquet)—Evelyn was as mutable as the ocean weather but as solid as Manhattan bedrock.
When she greeted Harry, she said, “The only other person who’s ever done to the Marrows what you did was Al Smith, who went after Victor’s grandfather like a rabid dog, bit his buttocks, and threw him from his golden den.”
“What?” Harry asked, his hand still in hers.
“A stock scandal when you were too young to remember or care. Long over.” She turned to her daughter. “Catherine, take Mr. Copeland to the guest house. I don’t mean to hurry you, but we’ve been roasting a tuna that your father caught this morning and I don’t want it to dry out.”
“I’ll take him,” said Catherine.
“Don’t stay too long. Dinner at six-thirty. Come as you are.”
The guest house lay beyond the pool and was encased like a jewel in a crucifix of shell paths dividing up a garden about to come into bloom. Before he was established there he put down his suitcase and they passed through a gate in a waist-high stone wall and onto a cedar boardwalk that led to the beach. No guest except those who arrived in a squall could resist the ocean. To settle in at East Hampton without looking at the ocean, even at night, was the sign of a crippled soul.
The boardwalk crossed the hump of the dunes to a small deck with benches and an outdoor shower. Overlooking the water from this spot, they saw fast flights of gulls and terns sweeping parallel to the strand and colored by the setting sun into half a dozen shades of deepening red. The breeze was steady and the sea roared with unimpeachable authority. Every board was heart of cedar, and its scent mixed with the salt air. “This is magnificent,” he said.
“Not as much,” she replied, “as when you come from the sea and lie on the cedar as it bakes in the sun. Two of my favorite places in the world are this long run of boards and the Esplanade in the park. The way their straightness aims you down their lengths I find pleasurable and comforting.”
