by Mark Helprin
“It’s an American citizen,” Catherine said as they pulled up to the market, “and it sat out the war. With the Bund and everything so close it had to keep a low profile, so it stayed in the garage and out of the salt air.”
“Are you selling it to me?”
As they kissed before they got out, a little boy saw them and it made his heart beat fast and his face turn the color of lipstick.
Extremely busy on a Saturday in July, the market was tense with class. Those who came in a particular kind of car and were dressed in a certain way were addicted as if to heroin to the need to assert their position. They did not so much want to be envied as they wanted their rank to be known. For many it was the reason for living, and for some there was nothing else. Harry knew the facts of his position here, which in some respects was unassailable. He had come from a house of great wealth, with a woman of extraordinary elegance, vitality, and beauty. Physically, they outranked everyone in the crowded store. People looked at them, but they themselves did not look back. His academic credentials and military record, although unknown to others, were known to him. And they had arrived in a car that some might criticize but that he could justly claim as the spoils of war.
And yet he felt kinship only with the grocer and the Puerto Rican assistants who stood behind the counters or were stocking shelves that investment bankers and their wives, or delegated servants, were stripping like locusts. He had neither money nor a profession. The business he had inherited was on the verge of bankruptcy. And in the eyes of the people who surrounded the Hales, Harry’s father, his uncle, and his grandfather would be viewed, if they were lucky, as servants, assuming that one might have Jewish servants, which was unlikely.
It was an old and intractable problem with which he was never comfortable and which he suspected would not and could not be solved. But it was one of those problems that came and went in one’s life, and could be forgotten as one lived.
“It makes my flesh crawl,” Catherine said as they spoke about this on the drive home, “when I think of the lengths people go to, to keep themselves puffed up so they don’t feel bad when in the presence of someone with more diamonds on her bracelets.”
“It’s the nature of man,” Harry said, “and baboons.”
“Snobbery is human nature?”
“Insecurity and competition. I guess snobbery is different—the profit and joy of invidious comparisons. It’s cowardly. Like contempt, it’s always directed downward. It comes from lack of experience and lack of generosity. You can think you’re superior to others only if you’re blind to their inner lives, and, by extension, to your own—assuming you have one. Though they’re educated differently, the men with whom I served and the workers on my factory floor are just as intelligent and capable as my classmates at Harvard. And yet my classmates at Harvard, for all their fashionable egalitarianism, think they’re truly better than everyone else, as some of your father’s friends undoubtedly think that, because they’re wealthy, they’re better than everyone else.”
“And my father?”
“You tell me. I’d imagine not.”
“He’s not like that, which might be viewed by some as quite remarkable.”
“Not in view of you. You’re above all this. But take, for example, a Wall Street magnate—call him Chase—who needs to have a painting authenticated. He calls in a professor—call him Salmon. Chase thinks of Salmon as an impoverished, blinkered, powerless, naive, super-specialized tool without the dynamism to meet moving challenges or weather a fight. To Chase, Salmon is a glorified clerk or butler. He needs him, but he may also need a truss.
“Salmon, on the other hand, thinks of Chase as a lucky, vulgar idiot who runs after money and can do nothing himself, who must rely totally on others who can actually do things while he merely directs. People like Salmon are necessary to explain the world to people like Chase, and making money is for corrupt simpletons. Salmon thinks it’s so easy he won’t even try. It’s too far below him.
“They deny the virtues, necessities, and realities of the other, and thus they deny the world and blind themselves to it,” Harry said. “Sorry. I tend to speak in aphorisms when I’m driving a fancy car.”
“Would you prefer to drive a less fancy car?”
“In a way. It wouldn’t make me think, I’m driving a fancy car, I’m driving a fancy car. It’s like that with hotels. I don’t like cheap ones, but in the super-luxurious ones your attention is commanded far too much by the details.
“I’d rather be working in the kitchen of an expensive restaurant, or as a waiter, than to sit there and be served porcupine gelées. Really. Luxury not only makes me uncomfortable, it frightens me.”
“It frightens you?” Catherine asked. She had taken such things for granted since birth, had never wanted them in either sense of the word, and preferred—when she was able to tell the difference between the rough and the smooth, which her background made sometimes a difficult task—to do without them. But they had never frightened her. “How can you be frightened by a watercress sandwich at the Brook Club?”
“I’m frightened, for example, to be entombed in stiff, expensive clothes that make it impossible to run, jump, climb, fight, or swim, or engage with half of the things in the universe. I don’t want to be a fancy person, because fancy means you can’t lie on the ground to look beneath something, or to rest: there is no ground anywhere near anyway; you’ve forgotten the ground. You have to sit relatively still because the presumption is that it’s better to let other people do things for you. Your muscles get croquet-weak, your nerves and reflexes, all bottled up, get lazy and unpracticed. You don’t strain or sweat, or ever work with your hands, so you don’t get to stretch beyond yourself. And then you have no reserve capacity. You’re in a semi-exquisite paralysis, far too aware of how other people regard you, separated from nature, from human nature, challenge, storm, sun, rain, life. I’d really rather be in the kitchen, or a mounted policeman in the park, or coiling rope on a tugboat speeding through Hell Gate.”
“The upper class pays a price,” she said, “of vertiginous paralysis. But there’s a kind of thrill to it. It’s dangerous.”
Harry’s expression showed that he found this strange. “That thrill is totally alien to me. Were we immortal, I might try it. But time is limited and I don’t want to let go of the texture and feel of things. I don’t want to watch as other people serve me. The war pounded into me that you have to be as alert and independent as you can be, or you die one kind of death or another.”
“Why don’t you come along with me sometime?” she asked. “Are you sure that the habits of a thousand years make certain things impossible for you? That it’s not just a question of blind loyalty?”
“Even if I marry up,” he said, turning to her rather dangerously given that he was driving, “I don’t want to live in that kind of breathless, delicate world.”
“Hold on, Harry,” she insisted. “Tell me what’s dead about running across a gleaming sea on a sailing yacht that you’ll race to Bermuda at risk of your life, conscious every second of a change in the wind, a jibing boom, or a rising storm? We do that kind of thing, too.”
“That,” Harry admitted, “I could get used to.”
“You see, we can make deals. It doesn’t have to go just one way. I’ll give up the watercress sandwiches—I won’t give up watercress entirely—if you’ll take the yacht. We’ll split our own wood and tend the fire if you’ll accept complete financial security. I’ll shoot with you, if you don’t mind a Holland and Holland. I understand. Real life must be classless. Friction, motion, risk. I know. I want that, I always have. The Hales, actually, are as tough as cypress or ebony.”
“What about hickory?”
“What about it?”
“Are you as tough as it?”
He loved how this animated her. “Tougher,” she said, like a five-year-old, but it was true.
Billy spent an hour or two preparing for the arrival of his oldest friend by enlist
ing the aid of gin and tonic. In the midst of the greatest comfort and security—on a hundred safe acres by the sea, in a house that glowed like a jewel, in a room filled with paintings, and on a chair that with a football field’s worth of satin damask banished every touch of arthritis—he sipped from a crystal glass for the purpose of freeing his mind from his body, something he had done from an early age and that he no longer could do without.
“Why do you drink so little?” he asked Harry in a tone both benevolent and accusatory. “You haven’t even had half that. Are you planning something?”
“Even a little alcohol can make me ill, Billy.”
“A hillbilly? What?”
“Ill, Billy.” He thought Billy might take him for a Cockney. “Anything more than half a glass, sometimes just a sip.”
“That’s worse than being allergic to water.”
“My father was the same way. I live dangerously if I have a glass of wine. In a social situation, just the obligatory little bit can make me look as if I’ve drunk myself under the table. Unfortunately, I like Scotch. I like the smoky taste. Sometimes I have some, but then I pay for it.”
“It must be unbearable. How do you unwind?”
Harry looked down at the floor.
Billy didn’t comprehend, and said, “Well?”
Then Harry said, “Exercise.”
“Don’t tell that to Rufus, who thinks exercise is the leading cause of death. He’ll have another heart attack. I remember him when he was so skinny the doctor told him to drink cabinets—that’s what they call milkshakes in Rhode Island, where he’s from. We were at Groton together. He added rum and drank a lot of them.”
“What else does he do?”
“Bank notes.”
“Bank notes?”
“He prints money for chickenshit countries all over the world that can’t even stand up a press. Do you realize the potential of that? He does. Put it this way: sometimes it’s necessary, for technical reasons, to keep samples. He inherited the business from his father in the days when things were loosey-goosey. When we were kids, we found an unusual room in his barn. It was behind heavy wooden doors that were padlocked, but we were small enough to squeeze through the hay chute. Instead of hay, that room was filled with money. Wonderful, colorful, wrapped in packets. We rolled and swam in them and couldn’t get to the bottom. The pile was at least eight feet high and it lapped up against the walls. There must have been a hundred million dollars in that barn. I mean, wouldn’t you?”
“I might.”
“Depending on how much he put aside, the effect would be to elevate prices a bit in Bolivia or Mongolia. If their governments had an inflationary monetary policy, which they usually did, he was just helping them along. It was sweet, but I wouldn’t mention it. And no one can prove it.”
“He prints money.”
“He does. Everyone’s dream, and it’s legal.”
“How long can that last?”
“Forever, Harry, in one form or another.”
A car moved slowly up the driveway, through sea air that was salty and flashing with fireflies. When it stopped, nothing happened. It was as if it had driven there by itself, turned off its lights, and gone to sleep. Head cocked, Billy said, “I can guarantee you that they’re not necking. Rufus has yet to wake up. Give it a couple of minutes.” He listened. The waves sounded close in the silence. And then a car door opened and closed. “That’s Bridget, getting out.” There was a faint crunch. “She’s walking around the car. The other door.” A minute later, they heard people coming up the steps. Evelyn met them. Bridget and Rufus fell through the front hall into the living room. She guided Rufus to a chair, and he collapsed into it with a single wheeze.
He wasn’t that big, but he was shaped like a buoy, and his threadbare gray hair was arranged in lines across the splotched but glossy top of his head. With eyes that were jaundiced and red, he looked at Harry, and then turned to Billy. “Who the hell is that? Is that Victor’s replacement?”
Rudely ignoring Harry, Rufus started to talk to Billy in short, incomprehensible exchanges that, almost a code, were ungrammatical and heavily laden with names, terms, and grunts. But just as this was heating up, Catherine appeared on the porch and beckoned to Harry. A second later the screen door banged shut, and they were walking through the garden.
In a gray silk skirt and a white, pleated blouse with closed collar, she glowed in the incidental light from the house, and as they moved he heard the skirt rustling about her legs. Perhaps because so many theater people came out to East Hampton—the stars and producers to almost stately houses, the rank and file to little cottages in Springs and shared lodgings in the village—and because, at parties and other gatherings where there was a piano, impromptu performances easily erupted, with the beat of the waves in counterpoint, and singing more poignant than anyone might expect, Broadway was so near that if you listened you could hear the creaking of the boards, and if you looked you could see as if by stage light.
Like the trained dancer she was, Catherine walked with a controlled grace that emanated from her whole body. When she turned and spoke, only to say when dinner would be ready, he fed on every vibration of her voice. Putting his left hand against her back, he placed his right hand flat against the top of her chest. “Speak,” he said.
“Speak?”
He unbuttoned two pearl buttons hidden among the pleats, and gently rested his palm against her bare skin. “What are you doing?” she asked, not displeased.
“I fell in love with your voice the first time you spoke to me, with the very vibrations in your chest as you speak. When you say a one-syllable word I hear five or six variations in it that are so beautiful each makes me fall in love with you more. There’s nothing you can do that drives me deeper than that.”
The wind made the fruit trees sway and strain. In the dark the house was lit like a marvelous set. “In every word I speak?”
“Or sing.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’ve never been adored.”
He felt the words as they arose within her, and then he withdrew his hand and stepped back to look at her in the dark, to be away from her for a moment so he could return. When they came together they kissed, revolving on the lawn, one step at a time. He was in love with every part of her body, every stray hair, every plane or curve as much as he loved each individual part of every word she spoke or sang, and he was sorry for the years he had spent in the grip of lesser enthusiasms. Dropping to his knees, he lifted her skirt and pulled her to him. She tilted her head back as far as it could go and closed her eyes, for never had she been so adored and never had anything been more loving or pure.
After Evelyn called them for dinner, Catherine came in, scarlet and red and wholly unconcerned. Everyone else had already been seated, with Rufus breathing like a cross between a Komodo dragon and a steam engine on the Holyhead–London run; Evelyn fussing with this and that and especially the little bell that signaled for the first course; and Billy trying to diagnose the soft, out-of-focus gaze in his daughter’s eyes, and noticing that she and Harry, as if they were fifteen, were holding hands beneath the table. He had never seen her touch Victor, much less insist that the touch not end.
Bridget had learned long before that she did not have to double her conversation to make up for Rufus’s lost consciousness, but commenced nonetheless, and despite his unusual animation (he was still awake), with a question to Catherine. What was she doing now? Hadn’t she been graduated from Bryn Mawr a year ago, or was Bridget mistaken?
“I’m in a play,” Catherine said.
“Summer stock?”
“No, Broadway. At least that’s where we rehearse and where we’re booked to open. We’re trying out in Boston in September.”
“How wonderful,” said Bridget, “for one so young.”
Catherine smiled her gracious smile, and Rufus, like a geyser, as if he were a machine into which someone had put a nickel, as if he were speaking to the gods o
f the air but not to the people in the room, said, “Lots of Jews in the theater.”
Harry saw Billy and Evelyn wince. Then he focused again on Catherine, who took a spoonful of consommé, returned the spoon flaccidly to the bowl, and said, “Lots of Jews.”
“And in the movies, too.”
“Lots of Jews in the movies,” she said.
“You’re not going to make it a career, are you?” Rufus asked.
“The theater?”
“Yes.”
“I already have.”
“You don’t want to spend your life in that kind of society. Even Gilbert and Sullivan were Jews.” To the pained laughter that this provoked, Rufus answered, “They were! You see, the theater is saturated with them. You don’t want to pick up their habits. You don’t want to accustom yourself to that kind of degeneracy.”
“Why don’t you just leave off, Rufus,” Billy said.
“Well, it’s not your table, Billy, it’s Evelyn’s table. What says the hostess?”
With no hostility but rather a complex gravity that Catherine had never seen in her and that Harry could not interpret, Evelyn said, “Rufus, you may say whatever you wish.”
“I told you,” said Rufus, as triumphantly as a child who has won five hundred baseball cards.
“What habits?” Catherine asked. “What degeneracy?”
“Oh,” Rufus said. “I can see that you’re a real liberal.” (The Hales had been Republicans since before the Civil War.) “I don’t want to generalize, but as a class the Jews are associated with particular behaviors.”
“Such as?”
“Such as . . . reading and writing all the time, excessive cleanliness, hoarding, grasping, pushing, stealing, bullying. Stealing not openly, mind you, but with trickery, always with trickery. Highly distasteful.”
“You mean,” Catherine said, for she had heard the story of the barn filled with bank notes since she was four, “trickery like extending the press runs for pesetas and cruzeiros?”
