by Mark Helprin
At the dinner table on the terrace, sitting with drinks and cigarettes, talking now with less animation but nonetheless in party voices that while saying one thing really said another, were Andrea, a Barnard senior and the script girl for the play, who was pretty, precocious, and well read, if hesitant to contradict the older people even though she could run rings around them; Rolvag, the lyricist, who made fun of Nebraska, where he was born and where his mother and father still lived, and who would regret that he did and, each time that he did, feel sorrow and shame, and yet persist, sadly; a woman whose name sounded something like Surrealya, but who looked like her name should have been Cat Woman from the Moon, and who had a perpetually injured, calculating, semi-malicious expression—no one knew what she did except that she had once been married to a lawyer who collected stamps and she was an intellectual: her face said, I am a lesser being, I avert my eyes, I am aware of your superiority, and I am now moving into a deadly ambush that you cannot possibly escape. And then there was Tommy, a playwright deeply influenced by the Weimar avant-garde, although he did not know a word of German; and AT, his mate, a fashion designer of great talent and instability, who depended upon Tommy’s gentleness and patience to keep him sane. They were often introduced as AT&T.
Wary of embarrassment, wanting to shine, lonely, fiercely competitive, savagely ambitious, and as tense as pulled crossbows, they were the typical guests at a New York dinner party, suffering like soldiers in the trenches of the First World War, and, like them, forced by close combat to be fully alive to what was around them—the greatest gift that New York gives.
And yet the air was languid and lyrical; the street noises, starting out sharp, muffled; the sounds of bus herds on the avenues, their diesel engines rasping like ten thousand sore throats, distant. Blue was becoming black, the fat candles in glass globes were brightening, and an occasional breeze would materialize for a moment or two, from where no one knew, as if someone had opened and closed an icebox.
Fragrant smoke arose from ranks of skewered lamb cooking slowly over fading coals. Although Harry had had none of the abundant chilled white wine, and Catherine only a little, it occurred to them both, though neither knew that the other had had the same thought, that the hours of conversation to follow would be unnecessary. The settling darkness, the lifting heat, the scent of the few flowers that had lasted into the height of summer in the ragged garden below, the sounds of the city dampened by distance, the dirty pink sky through which only a planet could shine, the waving white smoke, and the wine that momentarily removed the weight of the world but deepened emotion and regret, begged for silence. But this was New York. Talk was inevitable, insuppressible, and not without its pleasures.
Everyone knew more or less who everyone else was, which was the cause of numerous upwellings, some obvious and some not. AT was alert and full of hope that Catherine would commission him to design at least a dress or a suit for her, if not a whole wardrobe. And then there were her mother and her mother’s friends, so AT purred for Catherine like a cat that thinks it’s an electric motor. This inexplicably necessitated his savage clawing of Andrea the script girl, who was so stunned that she let Cat Woman from the Moon defend her in facing off with AT by means of a structured and panic-inducing flirtation with Tommy, who had once been straight.
Rolvag had focused on Andrea, but then could not take his eyes off Catherine, though this disconcerted Sidney, who had hoped Rolvag would act more or less like a eunuch. Except for defending Andrea, Cat Woman from the Moon was at sea, with no one but AT to slay . . . and so on. The net of things said and unsaid was woven as if in a square dance, but a lot tighter, with all the dancers inevitably colliding.
Harry was a surprise to everyone, unknown except by what they could immediately sense and see. Though at first he was silent, they were going far too slowly for him. He wanted to be running, walking in the sun, propelling himself through the pool, or even fighting—anything but to be confined to a chair and talking obliquely. He had too much energy, too many cares, and was too fit and too fast just to sit, unless it were pure rest. But he was soon relieved when a match began that pitted him against Cat Woman from the Moon, who took the first cloaked step.
Harry’s initial utterance after “Hello” was to respond to young Andrea’s self-congratulatory pronouncement, stimulated by wine, that she would only live in “an arts neighborhood,” surrounded by “people in the arts: artists.”
Harry could not resist. “I would rather live,” he said, “in a tarantula box, surrounded by arachnids in a box: tarantulas.”
At first, almost joining in, they thought he was mocking people who were not they, but then they realized that he was mocking the people who they were. Cat Woman from the Moon asked poisonously, “And why is that?”
“Because tarantulas are less vicious, more intelligent, less conformist, more interesting, and not as hairy.”
“You’re being ironic, aren’t you?” Rolvag asked. He was from Nebraska.
“No,” said Harry, “I’m not, and I wouldn’t be. Anyway, irony is only a term for a cowardly mocking of someone else’s true conviction. If I’m going to mock, I’ll be direct.”
Of course, Harry was now the center of attention. “You were in the service, weren’t you?” Sidney asked, rhetorically and almost compassionately. People seemed to know. It was disconcerting, and made Harry think that perhaps something really was wrong with him. “For a long time, yes? It’s hard to adjust, isn’t it?”
“Not that hard. In fact, it’s rather easy to adjust to the idea of not getting killed, of sleeping in a bed, having an ice cream soda, walking in the park without a rifle and a forty-pound pack. Not so hard. Soldiers when they come back are not really crazy, they just seem so.” In having returned from the war and combat, he was hardly unique. But he was by now interesting in the pure sense and as a target. They ached to probe further.
“Are you in the theater?” Cat Woman from the Moon asked, despite their lack of recognition, and other signs that he was not.
He answered her with a short, negative shake of the head, and almost a smile.
“What, then?”
“What price glory?” he answered. He didn’t like it when people asked him what he did. He didn’t like his dinner companions, and even before the war he often met concealed hostility bluntly rather than, as Evelyn had once put it, “dueling around the bush.”
Cat Woman from the Moon also could be direct. “Terrific. You know the name of a play. But I asked if you were in the theater.”
“And I said no.”
“And then I asked what you do.”
“In what circumstance?”
“Probably to make a living,” Sidney said. “That’s what the expression means in America, generally.” He thought he had Harry here, and he almost did.
“You mean other than marrying heiresses?” Harry asked, tacking right into the gale.
“Is there anything, these days,” Cat Woman from the Moon asked, “other than marrying heiresses? Which explains why I’m no longer married and probably never will be?”
“There is,” said Harry. “Leather goods.”
“Ah, leather goods!” Cat Woman from the Moon said with equal and immense volumes of surprise, disbelief, faux puzzlement, and contempt.
“Copeland Leather,” said Andrea, the script girl. “I can’t afford it.”
But now they had him. “Did you inherit it?” AT asked.
“I did.”
“And that’s all?”
“What do you mean?”
“You run Copeland Leather, and that’s it?”
“I’ve just started running it. I had no intention of doing so, but my father was inconsiderate enough to die. So, for the moment, I have no choice.”
“What did you do before?”
“I was involved in something called the Second World War. Before that, I was mostly a student.”
“So you have no profession,” Tommy said, astonished that a man Harry’s age
could be so unformed.
“I have no profession other than manufacturing and selling leather goods, which is far more difficult than I imagined.”
“But, still,” Cat Woman from the Moon said, “what is it?”
“What is what?”
“What do you leave behind?”
“Leather goods,” Harry answered.
“Are you people out of your minds?” Catherine asked. “We just walked in the door, and now he’s on trial for his life.”
“Why not?” the lyricist asked. “We all are, all the time. We may hope not to be. We may pretend not to be. But we are. When I write the lyrics of a song, and people don’t like them, that hastens my death. . . .”
“No it doesn’t,” AT interrupted, “but it should.” AT didn’t like either Rolvag or his lyrics, both being, to him, inaccessibly Norwegian, though in fact AT himself was Norwegian, or at least of Norwegian extraction.
“The same with me,” Tommy added. “I don’t escape the critics. Why should he? And you, Sidney, if your play’s a flop . . . and Catherine, if they don’t like your singing. . . .”
“You don’t like my briefcases?” Harry asked, with evident enjoyment.
“It’s not that,” Sidney told him patronizingly. “What they’re saying is that whether one likes it or not, what one does with one’s life can be judged, and there are hierarchies of value.”
“Oh,” said Harry, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Catherine began to regret that she had convinced him to come, and to believe that when he said he didn’t like social gatherings he really meant it. Still, what they were doing was unfair, especially because it had a great deal of truth to it. So she abruptly chimed in.
“Do you know the line,” she asked, “‘What had Rome after its many centuries better than cicadas singing on a golden afternoon’? Or something like that. The glories that people seek are dross. Real glory, in unlimited quantity, is simple and free. You can’t show it off, because it isn’t yours. When you come into a room and people say, because you want them to say and you work all day to have them say, ‘Oh, it’s so-and-so. She does . . . whatever,’ you’ve done nothing but indict yourself. And I mean you,” she said to everybody.
“Wow,” said AT. “It’s like the Battle of the Bulge.”
With Catherine having covered his flank, Harry pressed on against the main body. “I don’t think a life can be judged by what one leaves behind,” he said.
“What about Mozart?” Andrea asked.
“Who here is Mozart?” Harry asked back. “I’d yield to him, but not to you. For the rest of us, what’s important is conduct, how we carry ourselves given the circumstances we face. There are people, for example, who spend their lives working until death to try to get a small fraction of what is guaranteed to someone like Catherine entirely without effort. Does that make them better than her? Worse? Tell me that I’m wrong to look first to what one makes of one’s life in the absence of choice: if you’re crippled so that you can’t walk or speak, or you’re impoverished, caught up in war, or, like Catherine, born rich. All these, including the last, are burdens.”
“About that last,” Sidney interrupted, “can you tell me where the burden is in being born to great wealth, and where I might pick it up?”
Catherine jumped in before Harry could begin to speak. Unlike most heiresses, who are bred to be apologetic, Catherine in defense of herself was concise, stern, and combative. Her brows tightened and she leaned toward Sidney as if ready to strike him. “Being the object of envy is a burden, Sidney. Being separated from other people and treated more roughly or more tenderly than one deserves is a burden, Sidney. And the biggest burden, Sidney, is that everything you earn you have to earn twice or three times over, because no one thinks you have to earn anything.” Then she came slightly unhinged, speaking passionately and fast, and it was delightful to watch. “Because people look at you like you’re a goddamned ostrich in the goddamned zoo, that’s why. How’d you like that, Sidney, starting in infancy and following you for the rest of your life? People assume too much about you, always. They don’t see you, they don’t hear you. They put someone in your place, someone who doesn’t exist, and they take that person in your stead. So in the end what you face is a continual pressure that tells you more or less that you don’t exist. To hell with that, Sidney. And to hell with you if you think it’s easy to be me.”
Silence. She reverted almost to her polite self. “Harry, did I interrupt?”
“Sort of,” Harry said. “But, as I think I was saying, I look to conduct also when there is a choice: what it is that you do when you have the power to decide. And then I look to the balance. You must help others in distress. If you’re not compelled to that, you’re more a casualty than those whom you pass over, although to make a self-announcing career of it is sin. To begin with, if it’s all you do and you live no life beyond it, you’re guilty of murdering your self.
“As long as I retain the capacity to act independently of my own interest I need not be ashamed, either of the things I make or the limitations I face. But leather goods are hardly my whole life. If you take as your whole lives the plays you write or direct, the lyrics you provide, the dresses you design, or the articles you publish, then you’re the vulgarians you like to think businessmen are. You, then, are the acquisitive, the blind, unconscious, lesser men and women, and not the better, ethereal selves you take yourselves to be.”
“How can you say that,” young Andrea asked, the purist among them, “in a city that’s red hot with movement and competition, where getting and spending is—are?—everything?”
“It isn’t what you say,” Harry answered, with Andrea awaiting his further explanation, “if you draw back in distance or in time. Then the moment stills, the struggle ceases, and the qualities of which I speak rise: beauty, courage, compassion, love. Like a song, such as Catherine sings,” he said, looking across the table at Catherine, “which stops the show. There’s nothing better than that, and you’re not the ones who’ve made it, even if it sometimes flows through you.”
They were mystified.
He turned to address Catherine as if they weren’t there. They were amazed at his ability to ignore them. “Once, I sat just inside the doors of Schermerhorn Hall at Columbia—it seems like a very long time ago, a war ago at least. It was a summer afternoon and hardly anyone was there. For hours I listened to faint sounds from outside and within: pipes shuddering when someone, somewhere, drew water, and then going silent; the squeak of a door opening and closing; someone on a higher floor, coughing twice; a plane so far away it sounded like a mosquito. Only a few people went in and out, but when they did the changing air seemed as momentous as a tidal wave. I used to think about that, in the war. I’d put myself back there. It was nothing of account, but it was peace.”
No one said anything. What was he talking about? It didn’t matter. He was talking only to Catherine, unembarrassed to do so, and so much in love with her that it had actually shut them up. But he would wait to tell her later, on Bank Street, with not a soul in sight, that in the cemetery, when she had turned to him as she knelt, and with the briefest, slightest smile, changed everything, she had had the greatest courage and the greatest beauty he had ever seen.
“I wish I had someone who would talk to me that way, as if no one else were in the room,” Andrea said, not caring how vulnerable she might appear in the eyes of her friends and acquaintances, for she had no one who would, and at that moment she would have traded everything in the world that was clever for one simple thing that was true.
20. The Gift of a Clear Day
THAT SUMMER HAD MORE than its share of the unusual days when almost cold winds rush in like cavalry and waters that have become nearly emerald turn back to blue. The wind was like a long letter from Canada, and in the cool air that helps athletes Harry ran more than his accustomed miles, went home to shower and dress, and then walked down to the loft. Despite the worsening situation, he was optimis
tic and happy, for in the evening, as almost always now, he would see Catherine, and as almost always, the first glimpse of her was enough to disconnect him from his troubles. She might come to the door and stand in shadow, or on a corner in full sun. She could be wearing a suit or a dress, or her arms could be left bare and framed by a snow-white blouse or sleeveless gown. The first sight and first touch would be both anaesthetizing and electric.
When he arrived at work he went from station to station, reassuring everyone, much like the generals who, before a battle they are destined to win even if they do not know it, pulse with inexplicable confidence. He put his hands on everything, moving them across piles of leather sheets or over glossy boxes, touching the soft flannel bags for finished cases and belts, resting his palms on the anvils, running the tips of his fingers over stitching to see that it was tight, lifting polished objects close to smell the wax and examine in detail surfaces he tilted to refract the light.
He greeted each of his employees by name and spoke with some at length, eventually joining Cornell in the office not long before lunch. The clock said eleven-thirty, and to its left, even so high above the ground, a sunny, iron-framed window was alive with ivy moving in the unaccustomed breeze. Light green shoots and young leaves rocked back and forth and gently slapped the glass, recoiling like drunks who bump into lampposts only to come at them again and again. The newly emerging leaves had never been in the wind or known the cool, the clear, or the unfiltered sunlight that showed their infant green to perfection.
“How are we doing, Cornell?”
Cornell, too, was inappropriately cheerful. “Blazing along and headed down. Today things are slightly worse. What else?”
“Just since yesterday?”
“A six percent increase for the sheets from Cronin in St. Louis. Found that out this morning. Six percent.”
