by Mark Helprin
The great assemblage and activity on and above the land and the sea were more exciting for him than for the others, whose view was colored by their knowledge of things he had yet to experience. For Townsend Coombs, all this seemed not the potential end of things but their beginning. He was proud of the strength of his country, comforted and assured by the vast numbers and their balletic efficiencies. He was fascinated by the British, from whom he had sprung, and delighted by colors and climates so different from the white and slate-blue New Hampshire winters and its short, cool, entrancingly deep green summers.
Harry often listened patiently and respectfully when Townsend Coombs told him what Harry already knew, or, wanting to impress, about the triumphs of his sports teams, or mischief he had done with his friends. Putting a skunk in a teacher’s mailbox, things like that. Harry had tried to steer him to the soldier’s craft and draw his attention to what he would need in battle. It was sad to heavy the heart of a youth, but it had to be done.
Sometimes Harry was not patient with him, and would revert fully to rank, ordering him to do something unpleasant or criticizing him in ways that he suspected he himself would regret for the rest of his life. Once, when the boy was acting foolishly, Harry had snapped, “Not that way, you idiot!” which, although it had hardly been a mortal wound, had shamed and hurt Townsend Coombs in front of the others. And because Harry was his commanding officer, he could not, and did not, apologize.
In evening light forty miles east, the sea turned a color blue that hid details shown by day. From beaches and bluffs it was no longer possible to see wave lines sweeping in on winds from the Levant, or whitecaps spilling over, though one could see night hanging over Palestine and Egypt as the sky above them tended to violet as it cooled. On the airfield, as far as the eye could make out, long lines of men blended into the desert and dusk as they moved with military patience into fleets of transports and gliders. Though assembled en masse, they would fight in much smaller groups, and at times individually. But gathered in thousands for a flight that would end with thousands of parachutes silently blooming in the dark, they felt the great pride and elation of battle that battle itself almost always destroys.
If you looked ahead or back, right or left, you saw on the rust and ochre desert sinking into the dark thousands of armed men quietly boarding the planes to sit in facing rows. Insane and guaranteed to break hearts into eternity, there it was nonetheless, war inescapable, elevating the sense of being alive like nothing else but love. The engines started with such great noise that cheers were made silent and doors closed and bolted without sound. They felt the brakes strain as the throttles were opened, and then the transports moved slowly into lines to await their turn to rise. It seemed to take forever, but in a steady rhythm the aircraft ahead of them in the queue began their runs and screamed past. Then they themselves turned. The first ninety degrees put them on edge. The next promised everything at the end, and, almost to the degree, they knew when the turn would flatten out. For most the timing was perfect, and the engines came up to full exactly when they expected. The airframe shuddered as if all its rivets would pop at once, but the more it vibrated the more it moved, and soon it was racing down the runway, following the path of the other planes rising in the half darkness like fat, olive-drab dogs.
Its propellers spinning in occasional flames of exhaust, the plane lifted. The last thing Townsend Coombs saw in the light was the illusory basketwork of the spinning propeller blades, as gold as a woven bracelet. Soon they were over the sea, which despite the fact that evening had long sunk into violet and black, somehow held a trace of powder blue where it ran beyond the shadow of the cape.
Dim red lights in the cabin illuminated two rows of men as overwhelmed by their equipment as babies in snowsuits. Part of the allure of the drop would be that when down they could shed parachutes and harnesses and move unburdened except for the weapons and packs to which they had long been accustomed. They knew they might die, but at least they were moving, and in movement was the chance that they would live. Because each time they jumped it was as if they were given a new life, they yearned to exit the planes. The moment they stepped into darkness was the moment they began to fight. At first it seemed from their expressions, when you could make them out in the red light, that they were almost euphoric. Far from their families and prepared to die, they were nonetheless without care. Only in the last part of the flight did joy harden into determination.
As the 144 transports approached Gela from the sea, each man stood and hooked his static line over the cable that ran through the center of the cabin. Everything was checked and rechecked so many times that doing so in itself began to make them nervous. Some now began to be afraid, and though they were in the minority, this reminded the others of fear and laid them open to it. All anyone wanted to do was get into clear air. The jumpmaster issued a string of orders for moving them out of the plane expeditiously, and also to distract them. It worked well, and the imminence of the jump had lifted their spirits. And then they heard the first muted booms. A few to begin with, up ahead, soon there were many, and in less than a minute they were everywhere in front, behind, underneath, and above.
“We weren’t told,” someone began to say, but was cut off by a burst that knocked half the men down and left the others swaying and confused. Pieces of flak hit the plane, piercing its skin in several places, but leaving it intact and still flying.
“Sit down!” the jumpmaster shouted as the plane began evasive maneuvers that had little chance of protecting it but were certain to nauseate everyone on board.
“How much can they have?” a paratrooper asked, shouting from close to the open door.
Townsend Coombs, who had never been in flak, looked to Harry, who hadn’t either, and by silently moving his lips, Harry said, “Don’t worry.”
After peering out the door, the jumpmaster announced in an angry, emotional voice strong enough to carry through the sounds of exploding anti-aircraft rounds: “We’re still over the sea. Those are our ships firing at us.”
The words Christ and Jesus were said so many times and in combination that the narrow cabin was more like the nave of a church than an aluminum airplane now taking enough hits that it yawed and pitched as air forced its way through holes in its skin.
“It’s Americans, and they’re firing at us from the beach as well.” No one knew who said this, but it was true, and just as he finished, a huge explosion bounced the plane thirty feet straight up and fifty feet to the right, taking a piece of wing and a piece of the fuselage. Suddenly, where part of the side and underside of the plane had been, there was nothing, only a gap five or six feet in length and three or four feet high. Nothing, that is, except the upper half of Townsend Coombs, briefly suspended in air, as if in a dream, before it fell into the void and down to the sea. His face had upon it the expression he had had before the blast. He looked calmly ahead, eyes open, with neither grimace nor shock. Harry didn’t know whether, in that instant, still in his helmet and harness, young Townsend Coombs had been dead or alive. And then the air took him, and he was gone. He would become a telegram that would be pressed to the hearts of those who loved him, and saved until their deaths, or perhaps beyond, until sometime, somewhere, someone would read it and feel little or nothing.
He was simply gone, and wouldn’t have a grave. For an instant the air came up cool and clean through the hole. Flashes of white light illuminated vacant space and flapping pieces of metal. But before he could think, Harry was being rushed to the door. The jumpmaster pushed him and a dozen others out almost all at once, just before the plane broke in half and cartwheeled slowly through the air, its flames extinguished only by the sea.
That night, American guns downed twenty-three American planes carrying paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne. Someone’s boot kicked Harry in the head, but his parachute opened, and the wind swept him over the beach, over the American lines, and onto ground held by the Hermann Göring Division. No one saw him land. He was safe. A
lmost as a reflex, he gathered and hid his chute, made ready his weaponry, sought initial cover, and swept the view 360 degrees. At first he didn’t know quite where he was, or who he was, or what had happened. Only when his pulse began to slow did he begin to understand.
He had no time to think of young Townsend Coombs. Later he would think of him now and then, still as shocked and puzzled as when he had landed hard in the rocks and scrub. He had no answers, and could imagine none. He had hardly known the boy, and neither had anyone else except perhaps his father and mother, who were left to grieve for him with the hopeless grief of parent for child, and to look forward to joining him as soon as a decent interval might allow.
In the dusk, Catherine knew not to touch him and not to speak, but just to sit down to his left on the teak bench without saying a word. That she knew at all, without an obvious sign and without having been with him in the four years that now possessed his thoughts, was a confirmation of the quality and grace that in Catherine was far greater than education, breeding, and luck. He stayed still, turned to her only briefly, and then looked out as he had before.
And when the time was right, she asked, “What are you thinking about?” She could see in profile his expression changing subtly as he answered.
“A soldier named Townsend Coombs,” he said, focusing on the distance the way one does when speaking of those who are lost forever. “There was nothing I could do, but, still, I failed him.”
“Townsend Coombs?” she asked, driven somehow to be precise about the name. “Dead?”
“Yes.” He told the story, in full.
A gust rippled the surface of the pool enough to make it sound for a moment like the bell-like lappings of a lake.
“Look,” she said, gesturing to their left. “You see that dark mass? The bank of hydrangea?” Flanking the pool was a thick rectangle of hydrangea, now in bloom. “Hydrangea is a Linnaean name, I guess, very unattractive, as are so many words with a g, either soft or hard.”
Harry had never thought about it, but he agreed.
“As a child, I didn’t like hydrangea because of the name and because the flowers, purplish blue, seemed so cold. I let that prejudice continue in force until just recently. That kind of blue, almost violet, is like the color of death. Not merely because of the color of the dead, but because, if you look really closely at it, it takes you past the known colors of the world. It bleeds right off the spectrum into light we can’t see. But before you lose it, it takes you someplace where you yourself begin to lose your bearings.”
He waited for what she might say.
“But not long ago I found that I couldn’t avert my gaze as I had in childhood. It had become my time to look, and to be disconcerted. It was my responsibility to see ahead, to see what, eventually, was coming. And I was no longer afraid. So I stopped, and I looked hard.
“Tomorrow, if you come out here in the morning when the sun is beginning to get hot and no one is around, when the pool water is always clearer than at any other time, and the sound of the surf the most energetic . . . if you come out at that time, and walk along that thick barrier, look closely. The light is disconcerting, and leads to another world, but you’ll see hundreds of thousands—literally hundreds of thousands—of bees of all types: fat bumblebees, drones, carpenter bees, and little ones of various sizes, some almost as small as a grain of sand.
“You stand close, safely, enveloped in their hum, which becomes louder even than the surf. They work intently and as if they have a plan. I’ve never seen people working as smoothly or well. They’re so rich in color—yellow, gold, black, and red—that they break the spell of the ultraviolet and move among its waves as if working above water at the edge of a fall, fearlessly and without accident, collecting their nectar, while the sun is high.
“Stay in the light while you can. It’s not that far from Townsend Coombs. You can hover in the sunlight at the edge and still be very close, which should be a cause not of regret, but of happiness.”
“How can you know this?” he asked. “How could you possibly, at your age?”
In her clear speaking, the very sound of which he realized yet again was miraculous and thick with import, she said, “I stopped to look.” And then, inexplicably and perhaps inappropriately overcome by emotion, she closed her eyes, from which tears were streaming, and she said, “God bless Townsend Coombs,” as if she had known him, and as if she had loved him, all her life.
23. The Settee
ON A SUMMER morning in New York, between the rush to work and just before crowds of people made their way to lunch, even the shadows that had held remnants of cool night air were windless and hot. And on a side street echoing with the muted traffic of the avenues, the honeycomb of windows was filled with hundreds of steadily turning fans, some moving slowly and others racing invisibly. Midtown was almost never empty except very late at night and early on Christmas Day or the Fourth of July, but every day at this time it was made to feel empty by the immense unseen activity in its high buildings. Descending like rain, the whitened heat brought peace, contentment, and the hope that a downpour would light the lights, cool the air, and break the chain of days each hotter than the last.
According to the New York idiom, Catherine and Harry were in Saks. In London, one might have been at Harrods, but in New York one was in Saks or Macy’s, though, inexplicably, at Gimbels. No one was ever in Gimbels. It was ninety-eight degrees and they were sitting on a tufted leather bench in a room off one of the selling floors, watching people with dazed expressions go in and out of the bathrooms.
“I’m going to splash some water on my face,” she said to Harry. And then, after thinking about it for a moment, she added, “Not a single one of the women who has gone in and out as we’ve been sitting here has been able to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Makeup. My mother wears makeup on days like this when she goes out, and sometimes at home, too.”
“Your mother is as consistent as the meter stick in Paris.”
“All for dignity,” said her daughter, wondering about what she herself might be like in twenty or thirty years.
“At least women don’t have to wear a jacket.”
“Why don’t you take it off?” she asked.
“For the same reason that every morning I make my bed without a single wrinkle, though from morning to night the only one who’ll see it will be Morris the pigeon, who sits on the windowsill all day while I’m gone. That I make my bed to please a pigeon shows both the power and difficulty of civilization. I do, however, have a fairly uncivilized trick for keeping cool.” He waited for her to ask what it was. In the Copeland family, rhetorical questions and leading statements had always called forth a response freely given with the next beat in the music of conversation. The Hales, however, were more economical, and that beat was skipped in favor of a Christian caesura as clean as Occam’s razor.
“Don’t you want to know?” he asked.
Her answer came silently, in her eyes. She had changed her hair at Elizabeth Arden so that it was cut to float near her face like the crown that sun and wind had made of it at the beach. Were it not for the balance of its form as it framed her features, it might have looked anarchic. But the masses of hair casually arranged—some purely shining; some in shadow and almost red; some in wave-like curves; some straight; some in white gold riding in the light that filtered in through the high windows—were overwhelmingly beautiful.
For a long time, nothing was said as people came and went on the periphery like ghosts. Distant jackhammers, faintly sounding, ceaselessly pausing, sighing, and exploding, forced upon them by recall alone the presence of white dust rising in the sun, the concussive blasts, the loud, low jingling of the metal as a jackhammer snaps back like a whip when it has shattered concrete. “What trick?” she asked, eventually.
“I take off my shirt, soak it in cold water, wring it out, and put it back on. It darkens evenly, doesn’t bleed through to the jacket, and the cooling effect lasts
for half an hour, with no one the wiser.”
“You should tell that to my father,” she said.
“He probably won’t do it, for the same reason that on a day like this your mother wears makeup.”
“You’d be surprised. This is a man who, well, I’m not supposed to say.”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me what?”
“I really can’t.”
“You started. That means you have to,” he said authoritatively.
She fell for it. “I suppose it’s all right if you promise not to tell anyone—because he’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Roosevelt.”
“The president?”
“Promise not to tell anyone, ever.”
“I promise.”
“Okay.” She paused, as if aligning the story. “Our families were fairly close, beginning in the nineteenth century, but when Franklin became president things changed. The New Deal was what did it, but we go so far back that it wasn’t sufficient to cause a complete break. And both Daddy and Franklin were raised by Groton, which is like having a common set of parents, although Franklin was much older. The point is, when Daddy was little, Franklin used to trap him and tickle him until Daddy’s throat was raw from shrieking. Everyone thought this was very funny, and it ended with Franklin throwing Daddy, way high, into the pool, river, lake, or whatever body of water was convenient. This was a summer thing.”
