by Mark Helprin
“They do?”
“Someone told them. Then they asked me, and I said yes.”
“What did they say then?”
“They didn’t say anything.”
“Nothing?”
“What should they have said?”
“I don’t know.”
“They’re civilized people.”
“They are, I know, and I won’t approach them as I did Harvard.”
“Have you ever been to Maine?”
“I knew a girl in Maine once, on an island near Portland. It was in summer. We were both twenty, but she was nothing like you.”
“That’s good,” Catherine said only teasingly, “because, had it been the other way around, you’d be in hot water.”
25. The Wake of the Crispin
SOMETIMES IN THE WAR, will exhausted, faith depleted, and death seemingly imminent, Harry had bowed his head, closed his eyes, and prayed. Not for victory, not for survival. He asked nothing. He just prayed. And having thus surrendered he was lifted and empowered, with a foresight of ensuing battles that then ran before him as if in slow motion, the enemy’s moves almost as still as a painting.
Now, as then, although on a lesser scale and in a lesser register, he waited to be shown the way ahead. Though his broken ribs would take months to heal completely, within a few days of coming home he had begun to run and swim, carefully. And though it was still hot, the declining sun announced that autumn was gathering somewhere beyond September.
Just before the Labor Day weekend, Catherine called to say that if he could be ready she would pick him up in a taxi (she had added “honey”), not at about half past eight but in an hour. Someone who had lived out of a knapsack for years and felt little privation even though half its weight had been ammunition, could of course be ready in an hour. “I’ll be out front,” he said, assuming that she had changed their reservations and booked an earlier train. As it had stood, they would not have arrived in Bar Harbor until the holiday was half over. Now they would have an extra day.
The taxi stood at rest across the street on the park side, facing north. He thought that the driver, instead of making a U-turn and cutting across at 86th, might want to gain an extra six blocks on the meter by using 96th. It could actually be faster, in that getting over to Park higher uptown would be easier, and shooting down Park rather than Central Park West would be better in that Park was wider and they wouldn’t have to cross at midtown.
They did take 96th, and when they sped across the southbound lanes of Park he then assumed that they would turn north and go to the 125th Street station to get on the New Haven and Hartford, but they crossed the northbound lanes as well and continued east. “Where are we going?” he asked, with the anxiety of someone, misrouted in a taxi, who knows he will have to pay both for the driver’s mistake and for correcting it. He looked at his watch as if he knew what time the train was leaving.
“Lunch,” she said, “at a great restaurant I know. It’s not crowded, but it’s a little noisy. I hope you won’t mind.”
“We’re not booked on an earlier train?”
“No.”
“But we do have reservations,” he said, suspiciously, as the taxi turned north onto the East River Drive. “In the Bronx?”
“No, Harry. They’re mostly in South Dakota and places like that,” she said, “where there are Indians.”
He knew something was up when she got like that. “Are we going to eat in Queens? Has it ever been done?”
“Wrong.”
“Westchester? Not Connecticut.”
“No.”
“Where? A nice German restaurant? They’re always popular after a war, because people love a light German lunch on a hot summer day—ten or twelve pounds of potatoes, a pound or two of wurst, sauerkraut, and a gallon of dark beer. Then we can play tennis.”
She had her family’s characteristic smile when amused. It was generous, restrained, and mischievous. “It’s not German.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s American.”
“What’s it called?”
“N-something, I don’t really remember. I’ve been there only a few times.”
“N-something? N-what?”
“Seven six two eight?” She looked at the roof of the taxi. “Seven six two four? Does it matter?”
“That’s a peculiar name for a restaurant.”
“I admit that.”
“Perhaps it’s Maison N—seven six two eight? Or Chez—seven six two eight?”
“No,” she said, “because it’s American.”
By this time they were speeding along the deck of the Triboro Bridge. To their right, over the East River, Manhattan formed a spectacular palisade of brown and gray, still glinting in the eastern sun. It was so immense and of such great mass and depth that they leaned slightly toward it as if by the command of gravity, and they felt as if they were flying above the river, now a cool gray tinted with the blue of the sky and flecked with gulls. The next thing they knew, after a shock of cool air on the bridge, and then a long, lovely embrace, was coming to a stop at the Marine Aviation Terminal. “I see,” he said, “but I’m really not used to getting into a plane if I don’t have a parachute.”
“Steel yourself,” was her answer. “It’s a new world.”
At the end of a wooden pier sloping toward and then projecting into a back bay of Long Island Sound, a huge gray clipper, its wings projecting into fine points far from the fuselage, faced outward toward a run of open water. Several men were working atop it, some now more than a hundred feet apart, inspecting the four enormous engines, the ailerons, and the flaps. In comparison to the plane they looked like the figures on a wedding cake, and, dressed in what looked like naval uniforms, they glowed in white.
“That’s quite a restaurant,” Harry declared, reading the black letters on the right wing, or perhaps, because it was a seaplane, the starboard wing: NC 18604.
“I knew it began with N,” she said.
“Whatever it begins with, it’s a great way to get to Boston.”
They walked faster than they normally would have, and their heels knocking on the wood planks of the pier made the sound of departure.
“It doesn’t go to Boston until it drops me off on the trip back. It’s a charter. We’ll pick up my parents in East Hampton.”
The whole plane was for them. “I’ve never lived like this, Catherine. It’s unsettling.”
“Would you rather spend twelve hours on a train?”
“No.”
“Does flying bother you?”
“Only through flak.”
“Come on, then,” she told him. At the door they were greeted by two stewardesses in pale blue uniforms of French-tailored, superfine wool. Each of them had straight blond hair that seemed almost lacquered and was pulled back on the left side, and each was heavily made up.
Stepping into the cabin, Harry and Catherine saw a small room with leather banquettes and, at one end, a table covered with white linen. Vases of flowers were held on gimbals, and the interior was lit like an expensive restaurant on the Upper East Side. As soon as they sat together on a banquette and strapped on their seat belts, two men jumped down from a forward hatch, closed it after them, and went to the flight deck. The main door had already been shut and bolted. Engines were started one by one and brought up to equal tach. The stewardesses took to their folding seats, snapped closed their buckles, and the engines came alive, moving the plane out onto smoothly rippling water.
The dominant shades of blue and silver on the bay were compressed by the heat into an opalescent mist, and by contrast any touch or smattering of gold was breathtaking and hypnotic: the stewardesses’ gold earrings, rich in the sunbeams and shadows of the salon; the distant skyscrapers, some yellow-gold; and the ordinary, highly polished brass cabin fittings. Their effulgence in the blur of silver light made a glowing fume around them not in halos but in orbs. And although Catherine’s earrings were diamonds the size of buttons, h
er hair was gold and it glowed.
The plane pivoted and then strained forward, throttles open, engines deafening. A ray of sunlight tracked steadily through the cabin, seizing upon a rose in a gimbaled flute that slowly turned as if to meet the light that warmed the rose to the color of a fire engine. As the enormous plane lifted from water into air, everything was aglow.
With military timing, the stewardesses unbuckled at the same instant, one moving briskly toward the galley and the other offering her two passengers Champagne. Catherine declined, sure that Harry would follow suit, but he surprised her.
She signaled to the stewardess that she would join him. “But you don’t really drink.”
“There’s no way I could forgo it now.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m sitting on a web bench, weighed down with parachute, carbine, pack, ammunition, flares, food, and all kinds of other things. My harness is so tight it compresses my body painfully and makes me even more claustrophobic. I have to wear my lousy helmet because there’s no room for it on my lap. My carbine keeps slipping into a tilt because of the vibrations. The sound is deafening. I’m surrounded by scores of men, the cabin smells, we’re about to jump into battle, the flak has started, the evasive maneuvers, the nausea. I’m doing my best not to throw up, and some people are not as successful as I am, and I see only a devilish red light, the black gleam of oiled weapons, and blinking eyes.
“So, if now, two miles above the ground, a beautiful woman with hair that shines in the sunlight offers me a glass of Champagne, there’s no way that I’m not going to take it, because you don’t look an angel in the gift eye—whatever that means. I don’t really know what it means.”
“But I do,” she said, and then the clipper banked.
It followed the Sound for a few minutes before making a chevron across Long Island at Islip, gaining altitude for a short time only to begin its descent over Westhampton. It flew parallel to the beach, as if after many years of spanning the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans it was impelled to strike out for Europe. As they descended, the surf came more clearly into view. From a high altitude it had looked steady, deliberate, and slow: it crawled. But from near its own level it was like herds of horses galloping toward the beach. It had from this perspective a persistent, wide-fronted, and purposeful urgency. To see it frustrated on the shore and pushed back in cataracts of foam was like witnessing the frustration of an invading army.
A relatively calm sea state allowed them to land on the ocean rather than the bay. Their first bounce came at the Georgica inlet, the second far past the Georgica Club, and then a series of closer and closer touches, the distance between them diminishing as it does when a stone is skipped across the surface of a pond, until the plane ploughed a steady white furrow deeper and deeper as it slowed. They came almost to a stop opposite the Hales’ beach. Then they turned left ninety degrees and taxied toward the path that led through the dunes to the house, halting about a thousand feet offshore and idling the engines as the waves slowly pushed them toward land.
From the air as they approached, and then at each upward skip, they had seen the house. Beyond the dunes, sheltered from wind and surf, the gardens, fields, and pool—a clear sapphire—looked even better from afar than from close up. For her it was home, but for him, because he knew he would have to earn it and that he might never do so, it was especially beautiful in the foil of its inaccessibility.
What they saw next was Billy and Evelyn and one of the gardeners dragging a light rowboat across the beach and into the water. In a sundress and carrying her pumps, Evelyn waded to the stern, climbed in, and made her way to the bow as the boat rocked and yawed at the edge of the surf. The gardener, in Montauk fisherman’s khakis and visored cap, stepped into the boat from amidships and took the oars. Then Billy, in a blue pin-cord suit with the pant legs rolled up above his knees, threw his shoes and socks onto the floorboards, loosened his tie, and pushed the boat over the shallows, keeping its prow pointed at the waves.
When a breaker would hit, he would push down with his hands on the top of the transom, lift himself high enough not to be soaked, and kick like a hysterical frog, his swimming motions acting as a rudder to stop the prow from being swung around by the waves. Then he would drop down and run forward, pushing the skiff ahead of him until the next wave. When finally the water was too deep, he threw himself into the boat and took a seat and an oar amidships, and he and the gardener rowed hard through the surf to reach open water. Then the gardener took over. He had been born a fisherman and was a gardener only because of fate and change. It would be easy for him to keep the lightened boat straight when speeding back to the beach and cresting the waves.
When they came alongside they were helped into the plane by the copilot, who stood by the door, carefully watching the rise and fall of the sea. Evelyn’s dress was half wet from the waves and foam that had been battered into the air above the prow, her hair slightly disheveled. Billy was dry only from the waist up, and the triangle at the bottom of his tie was as dark with brine as if it were a strawberry dipped in chocolate. They were pleased that they had rowed out in such a way and with such skill that it seemed like something they did every day.
One could not fail to note not only that they took things in stride, but that they possessed immense resources of all types, and that Evelyn, though her dress was half wet and her hair disheveled, like her daughter and like any woman, looked more beautiful in the wind than she did in perfect presentation. The door was closed before they knew it, and the plane took off southward, climbed, and banked north. They would fly over the inner Cape, with Boston to the west shielded by its many islands and peninsulas, and then dash above the sea to Mount Desert Island.
While the sun was still high, the huge plane landed on Blue Hill Bay and taxied to within a hundred yards of Seal Cove. Engines idling, it sat gently rocking as its passengers were rowed to shore in two trips of a rubber dinghy. Then it turned around, brought itself to full power, and skimmed the top of the sea until it lifted and disappeared southward. A few hours before, Harry and Catherine had been in a taxi on the East River Drive in heat that seemed eternal, and now they were in Maine, with only the sound of a cold breeze in the pines. They started walking against the wind, with Evelyn clasping her arms together, as if in the pose of refusal, to warm herself.
Along the empty road it was fresh in a way that only the northland can be. Billy bent down and pressed his palms into the earth, inviting the others to do so. They did. It was cold. “The soil in East Hampton,” he said, “and certainly in Central Park, is still hot. By the middle of September it’ll be just warm, and not like this until the end of October.” It was fine dirt, reddish black, and it muted their steps as they moved between thick walls of trees.
At the northern tip of Seal Cove Pond was a large cabin that for sixty or seventy years had sat on eighty acres at the end of a long, winding road. It had four bedrooms, four baths, and a lodge-like center room in which could be found the kitchen, a woodstove, a huge fireplace, a dining area, and wooden cabinets, some sturdily locked, keeping everything from bedding to rifles, provisions, jackets, fishing gear, books, lanterns, and games. Other than the food, half these items had descended from the nineteenth century, but as they were all of the highest quality, their age was only an asset.
The floors and walls were unfinished wood, there was no electricity, and the water came from a cistern in summer and, in winter, a hand-pumped well. Light came from lanterns, and the heat, hot water, and cooking depended upon fired wood, which meant a great deal of work and constant tending. From a southward-looking porch, the pond below was visible down its length of about a mile, a narrow and even stretch of water far warmer than the sea and now, though quickly fading, at its warmest. On both sides, walls of granite were fragrant with pines rooted like mountain climbers clinging to crags.
A jeep stood by the house, fueled and maintained by a caretaker who was seldom seen and who had stocked the pantry with groc
eries and fresh food. They threw open the doors to let in the air, which seemed to carry oxygen better than air in the city, perhaps because it came off the ocean and was free of the many millions of rooms, tunnels, and cul-de-sacs that in the city captured, tortured, and enslaved it. Billy built a fire in the woodstove while Harry was tasked with starting a medium-sized blaze in the fireplace as a primer for the larger one that would come in the evening. Billy watched him discreetly, wanting to see how he would make a fire, and thinking that he might not be very good at it after having been brought up on Central Park West. To the contrary, Harry quickly hatcheted some split logs into kindling and tinder, built a structure expertly, and brought it to an almost explosive conflagration with just one match and not a single breath.
With Catherine looking on, Billy asked, “Where’d you learn to do that? You make a fire like an arsonist. Bring me a brand so I can get this going.”
Harry put a burning brand in the cast-iron shovel used for ashes and carried it across the floor to the woodstove. As Billy positioned it and blew until he was dizzy, he asked, “In the army?”
“No, when I was ten my mother died, and after that my father and I fled into the wilderness as often as we could, usually in a canoe. We started on the Hudson and went all the way up to the Adirondack chain of lakes. We did the Connecticut River, then Lake Champlain, and as time went by we went into Canada. I think we were probably Abercrombie’s best customers who didn’t go to Africa. Sometimes we’d be out for two months at a stretch. My father spent his youth on a farm and worked with his hands all his life. You couldn’t have anyone better or smarter to take you through the wilderness.”
“How could he have left his business unattended for so long?”
“He had a partner to help him run it, who still does, and manufacturing leather goods doesn’t require split-second timing like trading on Wall Street. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway: we had to get away, and we did. I’m not skilled at the social graces—as you may now know—but all we had and all I wanted day after day were paddle, rod, rifle, ax, and book. If you’re out for months, when you make a fire you make your home.”
