by Mark Helprin
“Is there anything we can use in their place?”
“Not on the attachés, unless you want to change the color and texture. You know what that does to repeat buyers.”
“We’ve got to stick to it. That’s what we’re known for.”
“We are,” Cornell said, licking a stamp and pressing it onto an envelope. “By the way, Tony Agnello said he would come for lunch.”
This was the owner of a shirt manufacture on the floor above, a young man in his middle twenties, whose company made the highest-quality men’s dress shirts for a wide variety of stores that sold them as their own and under their own labels at vastly differing prices calibrated according to perceived prestige, despite the fact that all the shirts were exactly the same.
“What else is new?” Harry asked.
“Nothing.”
“What are we going to do?”
Cornell shrugged his shoulders. “We can’t survive if we pay two thousand dollars a week. It would take a miracle.”
“What about half a miracle, and we do the rest?”
“I’d be happy with a quarter, Harry, but we’ve got to have something, a little handhold, some sort of break. I think about it day and night. I’m approaching the point that bankrupt merchants reach when they consider shedding their inventory for anything they can get.”
“We’re not there yet.”
“Harry, it’s not good to be headed down when you’re old, when you’re on the way down anyway.”
Harry had known Tony Agnello since childhood. Their fathers’ long friendship began when they discovered that they came from similar backgrounds (one an Italian, the other a Jew), were the same age, and were engaged in much the same profession, but, as Meyer Copeland had said, crosswise. Contrary to what might be expected, the Italian sewed shirts and the Jew worked in leather. When visiting one another’s lofts, one directly below the other and as high off the street as tree houses, each had had a sense of the other’s business as if in the blood, and they believed that though they had crossed over they were absorbed in the same task. One made shirts of silk or Egyptian cotton, the other briefcases, portfolios, women’s handbags, and belts. Their products often went to the same stores, where they were bought by the same people. Their underlying desire was not to satisfy the demands of the market, something with which they struggled and that neither of them could ever get quite right, but to satisfy the demands of their crafts.
Because Tony was almost ten years younger than Harry, Harry had often been assigned to take care of him. Whenever the boys found themselves at their fathers’ places of business, usually in summer, Harry would be relieved of polishing leather or making boxes in the almost dead air, and his father would say, handing him a dollar bill, “Take ‘Ant-knee’ someplace. Buy yourselves lunch. Go to the zoo. And bring back the change. He’s going crazy up there because he’s too young to sew.”
So Harry would go upstairs, get Tony, and take him out into the world. Sometimes they would ride the subway all day, standing at the front window as tunnels rushed at them. At Coney Island they looked for dimes that had slipped through cracks in the boardwalk. Once, they got off a train at Van Cortlandt Park and tried to walk to what they imagined was Canada but turned out to be Yonkers. Even now, after both their fathers had died and both boys had been through the war, Harry was still the older boy, and Tony’s face seemed hardly to have changed. As in childhood, he had dark, sunken eyes, a gentle smile, and jet-black hair that had the look of sable. He was getting heavy, but then again, he had never been thin.
“What?” he said as he came into the office. “The girls gone out again?”
Harry and Cornell had been deserted, as usual, at noon.
“What’s today’s beauty secret, Tony?” Cornell asked.
“Never get involved with a woman who keeps a snake,” Tony responded, not missing a beat.
“You had to learn this by experience?” Cornell marveled.
“And tattoos. You couldn’t see them when she was dressed.” He was carrying a shopping bag, from which he withdrew two bottles of beer, a bottle of Coca-Cola, and three deep, thin-walled, tinfoil pie dishes crimp-sealing white cardboard covers.
“What’d you get?” Harry asked.
“Porta Rican,” Tony answered, not looking up as his tailor’s fingers rapidly uncrimped the foil around the cardboard. Steam rose and disappeared as the cooling dishes became approachable. “Arroz con pollo.”
“No salad?”
“You don’t like it?”
“I like it, but next time bring a salad. If I don’t have a salad I feel like I’ve betrayed my country.”
“How many miles did you run?” Tony asked.
“Twelve.”
“Twelve!” Cornell exclaimed, beginning to eat.
“What are you gonna kill yourself? What’s it gonna get you?” Tony asked.
“It keeps me fit, so I don’t get ant knees.”
“Harry, the war, I heard, is over.”
“And if we have another one?”
Tony had a built-in delay, but could always come up with an answer. “You’ll be too old.”
“But you won’t.”
“So that’s why you run twelve miles?”
“Six for you and six for me. When they get off their asses, the Germans and Japanese. . . .”
They ate their arroz con pollo contentedly, as if that portion of the conversation had ended, but then, after a long drink of beer, Tony said, “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think what?” Cornell asked with the touch of severity he had to have in the presence of the younger men.
“It’ll be the Russians.”
“Whoever it is,” Harry said, “if I’m pulled into that again. . . .”
“And you would be,” Cornell told him, “because you were an officer.”
“I don’t want to have to relearn everything. It took too much out of me.”
Agnello said, “I hope so.”
“What do you mean,” Cornell pressed, “you ‘hope’ so? You hope what?”
“That it’s not the Japanese.”
They thought Tony had said this because he had served in the Pacific, and they also thought that he might be claiming too much for someone who had been a clerk. But he surprised them. “The Japanese are going to save us.”
“Save what, America?” Cornell asked.
“Lexington Shirtwaist,” he told them, referring to his archaically named company.
“How is that?” Harry asked, pushing away his tinfoil dish.
“We bombed their cities and their bases. The cities burned and the bases were destroyed. Half the men of a certain age are dead. But there was no mission against the mulberry trees, and the silkworms weren’t in the army. Even when Tokyo was in flames, they were working away as if there was no war. And the women who take care of them, who spin the silk and weave the cloth, they didn’t fight. The whole damned industry’s intact except for some of the mills, but there are plenty in Korea, and what could happen there? In a few months we’ll be getting silk so cheap it’ll offset the rise in labor costs. God bless Japan.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know if the Japanese were left with herds of cheap, leather-producing cows?” Cornell asked.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “You won’t get off that easy, will you? But you’ll make it. Our fathers made it through the two crashes. So will we. It’s not even a crash.”
“If we can make the payoffs. Do you get a discount for being Italian?”
“Why would Mickey Gottlieb give me a discount for being Italian? He’d give the discount to you.”
“That was then. I’m talking about Verderamé.”
“Who’s that?”
“The guy we pay off to.”
“Since when do the needle trades pay the Italians? It would be like the produce wholesalers paying the Jews. I pay Mickey Gottlieb. I always did.”
“Gottlieb’s dead.”
“I don’t think so. I paid him last we
ek. Who do you pay?”
“Verderamé. You don’t pay Verderamé?”
“No. Never heard of him.”
“How much do you pay?”
“The same as always, four hundred. You don’t?”
“No.”
“What are you talking about?” Tony asked. “I was in the elevator as his guys, the same guys, Mickey Gottlieb’s, went from floor to floor. One got off on two, the other on three. Ten minutes later, they came to me. They work all the floors. Who’s Verderamé?”
After Tony left, Cornell said, “Hold on.” He stood up—tall, thin, and crooked, but still strong—and left the office in a way that said he’d soon be back. Harry tried to order the situation as best he could. How often in tight straits new information promised a way out but then failed to deliver. He didn’t want to be seduced by relief, because he knew that whatever his conclusions he would have to ride upon a guess.
When Cornell returned he sat down as if to punish the chair. “We’re the only ones. Everyone else pays Gottlieb. And it didn’t go up. I don’t know the stationers on six, and it’s just a warehouse anyway, but for everyone else nothing’s changed.”
“Why us? Maybe we’re the first. Maybe the whole building’s going to go one at a time and we’re just the first.”
“Couple it with the fact that it’s so unreasonably high,” Cornell said, as it was beginning to come clear, and then it did. “To drive us out of business.”
“No,” said Harry, “not why, who. The Cypriot. He was so cocksure and excited, and I thought, Who the hell is he? We just conquered Europe and he’s strutting around as if he owns New York. I don’t even remember his name.”
“The little fat guy in the expensive suit?”
“Why would he have to?” Harry asked. “They’ve got so many advantages as is.”
“Maybe because it’s easy,” Cornell speculated. “We don’t know. Maybe a friend of his is Verderamé’s cousin, and he suggested it. Verderamé’s got everything in place. This is what he does every day, only he doesn’t kill his cows, he milks them. But so what if he kills just one? Farmers do that. Everyone else will keep quiet as long as it’s not them. It makes perfect sense.”
“But what about Gottlieb?”
“He does it as a favor for Verderamé and gets something in return,” Cornell said. “Maybe he’s getting all the money, or half of it. Look at it the way Bernstein would. Verderamé gets a hundred thousand from us before we go under. Fifty thousand, let’s say, goes to Gottlieb, who, after we vacate, gets his normal take from whoever buys our floor. It’s not something they can do on a regular basis, only now and then. Why not? Maybe Verderamé’s getting paid by the Cypriot, they’re not connected in any other fashion, and another thirty or forty thousand is going to Verderamé. The Cypriot buys our name, or at least takes over our accounts after we’re gone. You can run through it in half a dozen ways, but these bastards have all the options and they always come out ahead. I almost wish I were in that business myself.”
“This is only speculation. How can we know? We can never know.”
“What else have we got? Who’s going to tell us, who’s going to bail us out?”
“The government?”
“Tell me you didn’t say that, Harry. Every business in New York, including the police, either pays off or is paid.”
“La Guardia was on the take?”
Cornell shook his head from side to side. “All right, La Guardia wasn’t on the take. Neither was Theodore Roosevelt. I mean, I don’t know. But even people like that can’t do a thing. They make some noise, it shrinks a little, and then it comes back. In a hundred and fifty years it’ll still be the same.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry protested.
“What don’t you understand?”
“If they can do this, why can’t the far greater numbers of people they steal from rise up against them?”
“Because they’re willing to kill and be killed. Are you?”
“I was.”
“But that was then, in the war. You had license. You were forced to it.”
“I don’t want to, but if I had to I could go back in a minute and it would be as if I’d never left.”
“Maybe you could. But would you? That beautiful girl, she’s such a beauty.”
21. The Beach Road
IN BLAZING SUN at eleven o’clock on a weekday in August, when few people had come out from the city and the beaches were empty, Catherine and Harry had walked a few miles up the road to Amagansett and turned toward the sea. Following a deep sand track churned by the jeeps of fishermen and the Coast Guard, they passed through juniper and shoulder-level laurel across the sand until they reached an opening that led to the beach. Windless and concave, with the dunes reflecting the high summer sun upon a reflective floor, the route was unbearably hot until the breach gave out to the sea, where the temperature dropped by forty degrees or more.
Halfway there, she in her satin-tight, two-piece suit that had knocked the breath out of him when she had dropped her robe, and still did, and he in khaki naval swim trunks, they began to feel the heat to the point of distress. In a totally windless bowl, pinned by rays of sun, the temperature was close to 130 degrees and the radiative heat could be endured for only a few minutes. Covered with sunscreen that made them as glossy as the sand, they began to sweat until the water ran off them in droplets and the scent of Catherine’s perfume mixed with the salt and juniper that pervaded the air.
Tramping about the sand in canvas boat shoes was strenuous, and she walked in front so as to set a slower pace. He watched her through the glare. Deeply tanned for someone of light coloring, her skin was smooth and flawless, as much rose as brown, pulsing with life and color. The gloss of the sunscreen made her shine with light, and golden flecks of sand had gathered in random places like glitter. Clear droplets sparkled and grew until they plunged in rivulets that soaked the small of her back.
On the previous trip, they had walked from the house to Accabonac, swum to Cartwright Island, and thence across a chain of sandbars and shoals to Gardiners Island, five miles of swimming all told and twelve miles of walking: more than a full day of sun, wind, and water. When they returned they played tennis before dinner, and Catherine won. She was very good. He couldn’t drive from his mind how the wind that evening had carried braided within it dance music from the Georgica Club, sometimes faint, sometimes swelling. He couldn’t drive from his mind her burnished hair, made full by the salt air, sunlit and shining. As they made their way to the ocean, his knowledge of her, his sense of what she was and what she would be, was overlaid upon the woman who walked before him, the sea wind carrying back steady seductive traces of scent.
Following the path she made through the waving air, he increased his pace. After a step or two, he caught her elbow. She turned, with the expression and stance appropriate to someone who was about to be drawn to something practical or of interest, such as an alternate route or a bird gliding above. But as soon as he closed upon her she relaxed every muscle and felt in every cell an upwelling of expectation and a lightness that separated her from the world. Clear perspiration, sparkling in the sun, rolled over her upper lip. She tasted the salt, and knew that in a moment he would too.
“Not here,” she said, “we’ll die of the heat,” but as soon as he began to kiss her they fell into a gravityless, hallucinatory state they did not want to leave. Dropping to their knees in the hot sand so as to be pressed together without effort, they entered into competition with the sun for domination of the flats and dunes that surrounded them. And if the power of love and adoration can outshine light, for a few moments it did.
When he had said that he would court her, he meant it. He recoiled at the thought of what Victor had done, and though now she was not thirteen but twenty-three, and had been through ten years of an apprenticeship that had fully acquainted her with any and every part of sexual mechanics, they held back.
Once, on a quiet evening when time was unus
ually slow even for New York in summer, they had lain together, alone, eleven floors above Central Park West. A warm breeze came through the open windows and brought the sounds of evening. They were tangled in their disheveled clothes, wet, and engorged everywhere appropriate. Her breasts were turgid, her nipples taut, and she throbbed. And yet, as difficult as it was, they went no further.
“Why?” she asked, as if drugged, although she knew exactly why.
“To go back to where you started with Victor, and do what people are supposed to do, but to be brought along slowly,” he said.
“I would have thought it would be impossible to erase what happened,” she said, “that it was indelible.”
“Is it working?” he asked.
“It’s working.”
“You see?”
“But we will?” she asked.
“Of course we will. Have you noticed”—he propped himself up on his elbows—“that we can make love for hours, and we just want more? Every time we touch, it’s more intense. Have you ever felt this strongly?”
“No, but my friends in the theater would think we were prudes.”
“Your friends in the theater fuck like a bunch of rabbits playing musical chairs. They go from one person to another because no one is sufficient. You should throw Victor into the pot. He’d probably be very happy there.”
“He had me pretend to be other women.”
“I’d feel cheated if you were another woman.”
“So would I,” she said.
“Did you used to go into three-hour-long trances with Victor?”
She laughed cruelly.
“How long did it take before he finished and turned to the business pages, ten minutes?”
“That would have been a world’s record.”
“So when he had sex with you it wasn’t as if you were dancing, was it?”
“No.”
“And it wasn’t a conversation, right?”
“Right.”
“It was a lecture.”
“A short lecture,” she added. “Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.”
