by Mark Helprin
Such steady, heavy rains, which in August were plentiful, would put him to sleep like nothing else, and because her practice was to leave without waking him, she seemed to appear and disappear supernaturally. He wanted to get more of a grip on things, but his body’s insatiable need for rest, the opiates, and the tranquility of his room won out.
The door opened and a day nurse entered, a matronly Irish woman with green eyes, gray-blond hair, and the distinctive speech of a woman one generation away from an unadulterated brogue. It cascaded upon itself like water spilling down rocks, full, echoing, and clear. “The young lady comes at ten. Who is she, then, that sits with you like an angel? You’re a lucky one. And you should have a bath, if only for her. Can you walk by yourself today?”
“I think so.”
“There was a gas leak on the street side, so the kitchen will be an hour and a half late with breakfast, but that has nothing to do with the hot water, which is made by the boilers, oil-fired I’m told. I’ll have the sheets changed and the room done while you’re at it. You don’t run Argentina, do you?” she asked, used to dictators with heart ailments.
“I’m working on it,” Harry said. He began, exhaustingly, to get himself out of bed. As she opened an armoire to his right, he felt the breeze made by the door. Swaying slightly as he stood, he let her help him into a robe of navy-blue cashmere, a gift from Catherine after he had told her that he had never owned a bathrobe.
“Are you capable?” the nurse asked.
“I’ll go slowly.”
After she left, he sat in a chair and laboriously put on his hospital slippers. Then, getting up, he shuffled across the floor until he reached the door, breathing heavily, his heart pounding. He knew from previous experience that it would be all or nothing, that when recovery took hold it would seem unbelievable that he had been so weak. Using the wall for support, he made his way to the bathroom, turned on the light, closed the door, and breathed as if he had just run up every flight of stairs in the Empire State Building. Then he went to the tub and twirled the faucet handles. Water gushed as if from a fire hose. While the tub was filling, to save his strength he closed his eyes as he undressed. A bulb behind a frosted glass fixture made the light in the bathroom pearly, and when the tub was half full he grasped scored handles on the wall and lowered himself into the hot water. Then, in a half sleep, he heard a stream coursing through the overflow.
Thought and dream came together as he lay in the bath. He saw a stream of black water, choked with flowers and green stems. It was busy, slow, and quiet, with a life of its own. He thought of things, like seawater or a clear lake, obviously featureless, inert, and pellucid, that in strong light show upon the bottom a motion-filled gray marbling like a silent after-action report of desperate goings-on above—the battles of currents, eddies, fronts, and waves in three dimensions even a small patch of which all the physicists in the world could not analyze precisely, but that the light makes easily apprehensible.
Taken all together, the oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, and rivulets, even water dripping off eaves or rain upon a tin roof, but especially the surf and the wind out on the open sea that whips the tops of whitecaps and spreads them back in spray with a sound like that of gently shattering icicles, but softer. . . . Taken all together, the insistent lapping of little waves on inland lakes as if protesting imprisonment by the land, the roar of hurricanes across the Atlantic, typhoons in the Pacific, and the breaking of waves all over the world. . . . All this, in volume and variation too great to imagine, is the earth singing unceasingly, giving off not just light reflected from a star to mark its existence in the void, but also a lovely, comforting, continuing song.
In strong incandescent light that made the water sparkle, he took stock. His left knee was swollen and purple, with a dozen black stitches projecting in ugly knots as if from a rotted fishing net. His right thigh, unevenly mottled and red, was the color of a split pomegranate. Above four broken ribs distributed with a bias for the right side were fields of bruises and a stitched laceration ragged with more black thread. The marks on his arms and shoulders were inconsequential except over contusions of the bone, which ached deeply. His right eye was blackened, three tiny stitches held the left lower lip together where it had been split, and the dental lab was fabricating crowns for two back molars on the left, which had been painfully shattered. And he had a fever.
As he moved his arms in slow motion to carry water for splashing on his face, breathing hard from exertion, he wondered whether anyone who made movies had ever been beaten. No artistic license could justify the immediate leaps back into action of heroes who had sustained the equivalent of half a dozen fatal beatings. Beyond the will of its speakers, the English language had conflated two meanings in a single word, and whatever the final outcome, to be beaten, if not actually then to be beaten, is to feel beaten, and for a long time afterward.
Now that he could hardly move, he sought refuge in unprotected sleep, and was aware every moment that by their not coming for him and not having killed him, his enemies were merciful and had powers far beyond his own. As long as a slow, careful shuffle across the room would leave him breathless, or he might die from an embolism or an infection, the idea that he might take retribution would seem impossible.
Hospital water ran from huge boilers in the enormous quantities needed every day for washing, cleaning, and bathing. No one anywhere would know the difference if he turned off the tap or he did not. The sound of the inrush, the outflow, and the stirring of the water was pleasant. Their action aerated his bath and made it bearable despite its high temperature.
He knew that the water came from holding reservoirs in the city and the vast lakes upstate that in times of drought he had seen with their banks advancing and the ruins of farmhouses suddenly emerging after many years. Those reservoirs now were full, so he fixed his attention on the oil that fueled the boilers. To sustain the river of hot water, a fire had to burn hard, and for that, oil had to be drawn from the ground, refined, shipped to New York, distributed, stored, and paid for. If all the taps at St. Luke’s were left open, would it be only a matter of time until, without intervention, the hospital would go bankrupt? It was privileged with the immortality of institutions; with the loyalty, participation, and resources of thousands; and with a tax exemption. How many years might it go on if the taps were opened full? He tried to calculate an answer, but for lack of pertinent facts he could not.
In his own case, however, the facts were available. He had no contributors, no endowment of any magnitude, no institutional immortality, no multiplicity, no freedom from taxation. Eventually and soon at his rate of flow there would be no more money, water, or blood. With their vast reservoirs, the Hales had at any moment much more coming in than going out. The excess grew every day of every year, and there was so much left that to be decent they could only give it away, which they did. Here, for example, they had paid for a great deal more than all the water the hospital could use even had the taps been left open all year. What a feeling—more coming in, always, than draining out. The rich are different, he understood, not because they have more things or more freedom, but because they are not confronted with the perpetual metaphor of death by exsanguination. Our time runneth out always, but theirs doesn’t, until it does. Of course, most people, by discipline, hard work, or, at the very least, self-denial, could adjust the balance and create equanimity. In this sense, the chief treasure of the wealthy would always be available via simple modesty of desire.
The admirable basis and sound practices of Copeland Leather would ordinarily have been able to see it through at least a decade of difficulties, but not now. They had a year at most, after which the business would fail and he himself would have nothing. What was the difference, he wondered, between him and the Hales and the Marrows? Success begat success, optimism begat optimism, cheerfulness begat cheerfulness, and all begat confidence, which incestuously begat them over and over again. Were they brought to this state solely by luck? He would
not allow himself the luxury of believing that, if only because he was horrified by the prospect of relying on luck alone. Work, discipline, suffering, fortitude, brilliance, courage, risk—all these were to luck as tugs are to the docking of an ocean liner.
Thus, when purely by accident one evening while making his way through Madison Square he saw Verderamé, he found it impossible not to try to talk to him once more. It wasn’t a matter of thinking. The instant he beheld him dressed to go out on the town he was struck by a rush of optimism, and immediately ran toward him, leaping over an iron fence, crossing a flower bed, and closing—from behind—before the bodyguards were aware of his presence. Harry could run very fast, and he took obstacles like a hurdler.
“Jesus Christ!” Verderamé exclaimed, startled, then embarrassed to have been startled. Shamed and irritated, the bodyguards surrounded Harry and immobilized him. Two had drawn pistols, and held them, cocked, against either side of his gut.
“Mr. Verderamé,” he said, not having had the time to be frightened, but breathing hard from his sprint. “I saw you from over there. I just want to talk to you. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t mean to scare me,” Verderamé said, weighing the words. “You didn’t mean to scare me.”
“No.”
“You didn’t scare me.”
“I just got excited because”—Harry tried to find the right words—“we may not mean anything to you, but you’re very important to us. You have the fate of a lot of people in your hands.”
“Who are you?” Verderamé asked.
Harry looked at him not in disbelief but with the feeling that comes just before despair, and he told him.
The guards stepped back a foot. Verderamé no longer looked like someone just missed by a bullet. Turning his left hand in the accompanying gesture of an exasperated question, he asked, “What do you want? You’re making your payments, what do you want?”
“I wanted to ask you,” Harry said, “why we’re the only ones in the building who pay you rather than Gottlieb, and why we pay ten times what everyone else pays, and if maybe you think we’re a different business, or another kind of business, or bigger—much bigger—than we really are, and if it’s all a mistake.”
“A mistake? It’s not a mistake.”
“But, then, why?” Harry pressed, tempering his argumentative recklessness with a deferential way of speaking that was so unnatural to him that not only was he ashamed of it, but it didn’t communicate deference as much as it did defiance.
Verderamé looked up and turned his head quickly, snapping it in anger and disgust. Harry knew exactly what it meant. The bodyguards knew exactly what it meant, and at the south end of the square two cops who knew exactly what it meant turned away as the four of them began to beat Harry, who, had he attempted to fight back, could not have prevailed without a weapon, and, knowing this, sought only to escape. When he couldn’t, he tried to protect himself with his hands, arms, and pulled-in legs. They took long, considered, well aimed strokes, choosing a target on his body and thrusting for it as if they were splitting wood or hitting a golf ball.
Circling like a tiger, Verderamé held up his hand to signal a pause. They stopped. Harry struggled on as if they were still landing blows, a cry emerging from lungs filling with fluid. Verderamé said, “When I get out of that restaurant, I don’t want to see you on this sidewalk. So no matter how you feel, no matter how unconscious you wanna be, walk off. That’s my answer to your fuckin’ question.”
Then they resumed. Even had they the hands of pianists it would have been a terrible beating, but their fists were thick and hard, and at the end each one got in one last kick and a laugh, like children playing soccer with a ball they had not yet learned to control.
Harry tried hard to remain conscious, but he couldn’t, and the last thing he remembered as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk was his fear that he would still be there when Verderamé came out. He could neither move nor stay awake, and he just let go.
The two cops walked over, tapped Harry with their feet, and, when there was no response, one went to a call box to summon an ambulance. The ambulance drivers were told, and the police report said, that an unruly drunk had attacked passersby, fallen, and injured himself. Eventually, Cornell found him in Bellevue, unconscious and filthy with blood, and when Catherine came she took him up to St. Luke’s. After a while, by the time he could walk, he could converse, although he couldn’t do both simultaneously.
Now, as someone else’s hot water ran richly, it was also clear. It was possible to lose everything in an instant or over time. It was possible to be confronted by forces, natural or otherwise, that one could not overcome by virtue. Courage, greatness, honesty, all could be defeated. He had understood this on the field of battle as it was illustrated by the way death chose among the soldiers. But after such a war, in which scores of millions had died, how could anyone tolerate corruption? How could Verderamé’s tiny army rule a city of eight million? How could such a thing, after so much sacrifice, in a country where millions of men were now hardened soldiers, be allowed? There was no good reason, and yet it was so, and as the hot water cascaded over the lip of the overflow and into oblivion, so would his money and so eventually would the water of his life.
When Catherine arrived at ten he had had his long bath and was very tired. She had never been seriously ill or wounded, and did not understand the weakness and alteration of time with which such things are accompanied. Impatient for him to recover, she had no idea that once he did he would need space in which to catch up, and that in some ways he never would. As lonely and kind as she had been, always, she had known mainly victory, even (eventually) over Victor, and she assumed that for Harry it would have to be the same. He found her conversation rapid.
“We’re going to open at the Schubert in Boston on the twenty-third.”
“Of August?” he asked, as if it could be possible.
“September, Harry. Sidney says it’s perfect, because everyone is back from vacation, including the college students, who are just starting their courses and have very little anxiety.”
“Where does anxiety come into it?”
“Because they’re not worried about grades or falling behind, they go out a lot.”
“I suppose they do.”
“Didn’t you?” It was clear that he hadn’t. In the condition he was in, he looked like he never could have. Still, she pressed. “Why not?”
“At the beginning of each term I worked as if my life depended upon it. I used to work for the first five or six weeks the way people work before exams.” Tired, he stopped.
“Why?” she asked gently.
“For the foundation.”
Thinking reflexively of her family’s foundation, she was momentarily confused. “Of the course work,” she said, clarifying for herself.
“You master a subject at the beginning or not at all. I would read all the required readings and take volumes of notes—not précis, but questions, arguments, answers—all above and beyond the call. I would read the suggested readings, too. I would memorize passages, tables, equations. . . .”
“Was there a particular reason?”
“Had to get all A’s.”
This upset her. It was against the ethos of the Ivy League, almost anti-social. She came to her reaction naturally, without knowing why, but her questions, though unspoken, were unambiguous: Why were you so driven? Why did you have to stand out? Wasn’t this somehow dark and aggressive, a kind of warfare that was uncalled for?
He read the questions in her eyes. “It was expected of us in the thirties. We weren’t really welcome. If a Jew didn’t shine academically, the implicit question was, Why do you think you deserve to be here? Where’s your ticket? I had to have a ticket, and I had to punch it myself.”
“Didn’t people hate you for working so hard?”
“Yes,” he said, remembering, “and then what could I do but work harder? I rowed and fenced with the same intensity, gai
ned as much as I lost, lost as much as I gained.”
“But didn’t you ever do anything or go anyplace just for fun, without the fight in you?”
He thought for a moment. “Girls could make me forget—their goodness, and gentleness. They were sometimes so kind that I wondered what the hell I was doing. But it never was quite enough, as the world was rougher than they were, and I knew this, so I stayed in the fight. I worked the hardest in September and October. It’s a good time, however, to open a play. Sidney’s right.”
The talking had exhausted him, and his eyes closed. While he slept, she read the paper until he stirred, and then she virtually leapt out at him with the announcement that she would be staying at the Ritz: “The whole cast. You have to do it to impress the newspapers and put yourself on the highest level. We’re almost broke and we should be staying in South End boarding houses, but if the Globe comes to do an interview in your boarding house, they assume you’re not at the top of the game on Broadway, and write it into the article. The Barrymores don’t stay in rooms to let. Bella figura.” She came closer as he lay in bed. “We rehearse in Boston beginning after Labor Day. My parents have invited us to Bar Harbor for the weekend. If the weather’s good, which is always iffy in Maine, it’ll be perfect. You’ll be well enough by then to get around and to sail. No one else will be there. It’s more modest than East Hampton, no servants, and very quiet. My parents know that you’ve been ill.”
“Did you tell them why?”
“No, that’s for you.”
“I’m going to deliver a hell of a package.”
“They already know about the other thing.”
