by Mark Helprin
“But you’re Jewish, dear,” Evelyn said in a preternaturally Episcopalian way.
Catherine laughed. She didn’t think it was a joke: she knew it was serious, but, still, she laughed, because it, whatever it was, was so much a shock as to be incomprehensible. “But I’m not adopted.”
“No.”
“So,” she said to Billy, “you’re Jewish, too.” This struck everyone as funny.
“No,” said Billy, “I’m Episcopalian.”
“I always thought so, Dada. I always thought you were.” She hesitated. Seconds passed. “That means, Mama . . . that means, that. . . .”
“Yes,” Evelyn told her.
“Oh God. You were adopted by Grandfather Thomas?”
“My mother was adopted. She was born a Russian Jewess, and never converted. That means that I, which means that you. . . . You see? Had you married Victor we might never have told you. But when you chose Harry, how could we not have?”
“It’s the strangest thing in the world,” said Billy. “My grandson, for Christ’s sake, as I understand it, will be a hundred percent Jewish. The Hales, in one fell swoop. . . . I mean, had my classmates known what was to happen, they would have ostracized me. Had my grandfather known, I hesitate to tell you. One wants one’s children to be at least a little like oneself. To carry on. You want your grandchildren to be like you, too.” He looked at his daughter and her fiancé, and said, “And I think they will be, no matter what the world may say.”
“Is this true?” Catherine asked, not waiting for an answer. “Why didn’t you tell me? It’s such a shock, such a shock, to find out that so important a part of you was unknown to you. I don’t know what to think.” She stood up and made her way to the bow.
There she sat at the root of the bowsprit as the boat flew forward and sometimes, obliging a surge of air, pitched gently into the swell. Harry was content to wait amidships, watching the wind blow through her hair as she stared outward, until she would call or come to him.
They had long passed the island where they had first seen the gannets, but now, on the port side, many more appeared—dozens, perhaps scores—the lords of small green isles, whitened driftwood, and pine, going about what they did with simplicity and the perfection of a hundred million years in which they had come to know the elements so well that it was as if they had never been cleaved from them, although they had, and that was the beauty of it, their separation from the wind and the sea, but their never having left them.
Instead of returning home, they found a cove and anchored there out of the wind. Evelyn cooked dinner while Catherine remained at the bow, as if in grief, but with an expression of concentration. At risk to his extremities in the numbing water, Billy took the dinghy to shore and walked about in the shallows, digging up quahogs. The meat of these enormous clams looked like boned chicken breast, and, cut up with potatoes and celery, made a buttery New England chowder more than a match for the Riesling that went with it.
Every once in a while, as the quahog chowder cooked in its pot, Catherine would turn her head. And when dinner was ready they didn’t have to call her. She was neither angry nor hurt, but had fallen into a deep rest in which speech had no place. Thus, as the Crispin kept its anchor line taut in a current that entered the east-facing cove on its south side and exited north, the dinner was silent. They felt the tranquility that comes of being close to the sea, a steady heartbeat that substitutes for activity and noise. It was what Catherine needed, and as they watched her, if only with glances, she seemed simultaneously subdued, wounded, content, and amazed. No one dared speak, until she said, “After dinner, I’d like to row to the beach, and cut some wood, and build a fire there next to a rock.”
“Who speaks?” asked Harry, “a cave woman or William Butler Yeats?”
“Be careful, Harry,” Billy said. “This reminds me of when I had had a bit too much to drink—which is always—and I called Evelyn Elephant. It took several years to get over that one.” He paused. “And a diamond necklace. The lesson I learned is that you can’t call even a svelte woman an elephant, even by accident.”
“That’s all right,” Catherine said. “I don’t mind if he calls me an elephant, or a cave woman. Flattery will get him nowhere.”
Billy and Evelyn stayed aboard to clean up and go to bed early, as one can do easily on a gently rocking boat, and Harry and Catherine rowed to shore. He was relieved that she had spoken. She didn’t have to speak in torrents. Out of sight of the Crispin they found a huge rock and built a bonfire against it. Sun-dried driftwood lit easily, and though it did not burn hot the fire was big enough and the backing reflective enough so that as night fell and the temperature dropped they remained warm. Shadows danced against the rock but the firelight was too weak to dim the Milky Way. By starlight undiminished, and yet able to see one another’s faces softened as if in candlelight, they listened to the waves, the wind in the pines, and the crack of the fire.
“What have you come up with?” he asked.
“How long has your family been Jews?” she inquired.
“Five thousand years or so, I guess.”
“And what have you come up with?”
“You got me.”
“In the last five hours I’ve been doing my best,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“You really want to know?”
“Or we could go bowling.”
She looked at the base of the fire, where the coals were already in agony. “It changed me instantly,” she reported, “neither completely nor because I wanted it. I didn’t want it. It was very sad to leave what I was—not in terms of belief, which, compared to what I’m talking about, is superficial, but in terms of what I am.
“I looked at my reflection in the water and didn’t get much back from the swell, but there I was, the light moving past me like a river, and everything obscure. I looked at my hands. I turned them slowly and opened my fingers. And at my legs. You may have seen me: I crossed my arms and held my shoulders as if steadying myself, holding myself, discovering myself. And I could see my hair in the periphery as the wind lifted it in and out of view. And I thought to myself, Who is this girl, whom I haven’t known, who’s come from someplace that I never thought about, ’til now?
“I can’t ignore them, all the people who came before me, who lived in hovels in Eastern Europe—in Poland, the Ukraine, Moldova, Russia. . . . I thought we came from Scotland. Well, my father did. But I’m more deeply like my mother, and I can’t forget the people from whom she came, even though I’ll never know them, because they’re me—rabbis in caftans and fur hats, their wives, the children dressed in black, with sparkling, tragic eyes, it’s unbelievable. And, Harry, I’m them. Whatever I had thought about them before, now they’re with me forever. I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to believe anything, as far as I can tell, though deep inside it’s all working as if on schedule. Today I became as rooted as a tree, with no voice of its own except the wind that moves through it. It’s an extraordinary thing, what I’ve just learned, which is the patience of five thousand years. For the past few hours I’ve been motionless but time has been moving through me. Am I talking nonsense?”
“No.”
“Those skeletons in the newsreels, the children stacked dead at the sides of ditches, their legs like firewood. . . . They’re me.”
“They are.”
“It changes everything. It really does.” She held her head high, refusing to collapse beneath the weight of emotion while tears rolled down her cheeks. Catherine, she cried easily.
27. The Evening Transcript
“THIS IS NOT A goddamned college production of Gilbert and Sullivan,” Sidney said with simultaneous anger and joy as he led Catherine and the other stars of the play across the Public Garden and through Boston Common toward Washington Street. “We are the American musical theater. We are Broadway. Others look to us, aspire to be us. We’re professionals.” They were walking four abreast with stragglers of the cast grouped
behind them, the rhythm of their step in keeping with people who habitually worked at singing and dancing, and at this moment Sidney was their general. It was cold and dry for late September, and as the lights came on in buildings that flanked the Common they sparkled in place as if in winter.
“Catherine, are you anxious? I hope not. You’ve got it down. All of you have it down, and it was that way before we left New York. In the weeks here, it’s been almost flawless.”
“I am anxious,” Catherine answered, “but I can’t wait to go on. The only daunting thing is the time between now and then.”
Though everyone but Sidney would change into costume, they were dressed beautifully, and they could hear music so faithfully that it was as if they were already in the theater and the orchestra lay in wait in the black space between the audience and the stage, bridging with music the gap between them. If the production were half as good as the Boston rehearsals had been, the audience would be sure to be delighted most of the time and now and then know bliss. Sidney was in a double-breasted greatcoat and Liberty of London scarf. Charles—handsome, strong, and as dumb in real life as onstage—was in Harris Tweed, ready for his heiress. Amanda, the heiress who was not an heiress, was coatless and dressed as a leading lady should be, in a gown too flimsy for the cold, too high at the knee, too low at the bosom, and just right for the party. And Catherine, the simple girl from Red Lion, Pennsylvania, who really was an heiress, and who, every night, would lose Charles, was in a French dress so wonderfully tailored and arresting to the eye that as she walked across the Common everyone turned to her as if slightly startled. Her colleagues—people of ceaseless and merciless charisma, directors and Broadway performers—were made to seem like postilions.
But as they marched forward in natural light giving way to galaxies of electricity shining through the trees, Catherine didn’t know. At the stage door they encountered a group of people who had assembled an hour before curtain to see Amanda but who either missed Amanda or thought Catherine was the lead. Amanda smiled royally at glances directed past her. Then, the power of opening night having propelled them, they were pulled into the theater as if through an airlock, the cold of New England pouring onto the busy and expectant stage like some kind of magical fuel.
Just being in the theater began to change their voices into the powerful and perfectly calibrated instruments that project strongly and, as in the mechanics of seabirds riding on the wind, are elevated as they push against resistance. For the singers, this was the echo of their own voices. Catherine had said to Harry that one of the most wonderful things in the world was to meet her own voice and adjust to it as if in a duet, so that something there was, that was not she, that would sail above the audience and astound both the actress and her listeners. Yes, she wanted stardom, from the vanity that she was too honest to deny; and, like every child of wealth, she wanted to earn money on her own; but most of all she wanted this—to be able to project her soul outside herself for those moments, enchanted and free, when it would play among the beams of light flooding down through the proscenium. If she could do this seven or eight times a week now and then in productions yet to be born, it would be well worth all the tortures of the theater.
As he walked up Newbury Street, beneath trees shuddering in the wind, their dry leaves as stiff as cymbals and shuttering the city lights like stars, Harry understood what she faced. With nothing to do but wait for the curtain and then sit and watch powerlessly, he was more agitated than Catherine herself, and began to know a little of what women felt when they had waited through the war for their men to come home: an anxiety that found no relief in action. He was thinking mainly of Catherine. But, with no loss of force, both love and prayer tend to embrace all those who are deserving. So, in the Boston autumn, on streets that seemed charged with life, Harry was moved as well by George Yellin, one of Catherine’s fellow cast members, whom Catherine had taken under her wing. George was a slight, short, older-than-middle-aged man with a minor role that required him to don a pencil-thin mustache. He performed this small part faithfully, never faltering, always going nowhere as he aged and others rose. He had almost been a star, though not quite. Now, everyone was careful to be kind to him. His face was a symbol of certain and inevitable decline. Harry had watched Catherine protect him, at times at her own expense.
Once, when the actors were gathered in a Romanian restaurant, consuming large amounts of wine as they waited for marinated steaks from a ten-foot grill, George Yellin, who had forgotten to remove his pencil-thin mustache, had said, “You know, now most Victrolas run off electricity, with a cord.” The shock of this statement, decades out of phase, reduced the gathering to stunned silence. It was as if he had announced that someone had invented an apparatus to replace the gaslight. One could feel a burst of mocking laughter on its way, with nothing to stop it but Catherine, who reflexively leapt in to cover him. “That’s true, George,” she said, a young woman protecting a man old enough to be her father, “and what I’ll bet no one at this table knows is something my father, who works with people who fund these kinds of things, told me: that they’ve begun looking into a way to make radios and Victrolas without tubes. Daddy said that they will, and that when they do, the radios will be so small you’ll be able to carry them in a purse, and so rugged you’ll be able to throw them out the window without breaking them. And you won’t need a cord, because they’ll use much less power and will be able to run on batteries.” She looked around the table, surveying all whose laughter she had dammed in their throats, and she said, “I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?”
Even though Sidney would explain why what Catherine had described was, given his knowledge of physics, impossible, George was saved, and this was but one reason of many why Harry loved Catherine as he had never loved and would love no other. Perhaps had his own circumstances been not as bleak he wouldn’t have been concerned, but, confronted with imminent failure, he was frightened by the possibility that Catherine might fail as well. The theater was full of terrors—of fashion, opinion, retribution, politics, and perversity. It was one of those things, like so much of life, that cut down many more people than it raised up. Catherine might protect George Yellin, but who would, or could, protect her?
Though Harry could not, he was comforted by the fact that God had given her a shield not only in beauty and talent inborn, but in qualities that far exceeded them and would last beyond them. So it was back through the darkened, star-ravaged streets to the theater where he could confidently witness at her turn the woman for whom his love was the closest thing he had ever known to a prayer directly answered. It was commonly agreed that such things did not happen. But, of course, they did.
The usual wearers of furs and topcoats had assembled beneath the marquee, stirring with excitement like a wave rocking between two yachts. Napoleonic ranks of incandescent bulbs rained down on them a certain gleam that made them seem larger in number and louder in speech. Amidst the automobiles dropping them off came a carriage or two laden with unchangeable dowagers and delicate male companions who carried canes and dressed in white shirtfronts with pearl buttons. The horses sensed the excitement, and, though silent and enslaved, they were the most expressive of all. Meyer Copeland had once said to his son, “I have often prayed that you will grow up to be as dignified as a horse. You could do a lot worse.”
“A horse!”
“Yes, Harry, your kingdom for a horse. Their temperaments are governed by God. They skip a lot of nonsense. They’re strong, gentle, and just. You’d be lucky. I think you will be lucky.”
“But they’re stupid.”
“Maybe they’re merely quiet.”
When the brass doors were opened, the sounds of an orchestra warming up came through them so entrancingly that the crowds were drawn in as if by a vacuum cleaner. Professional musicians do not limber up with scales, but with quick remembered passages and cadenzas as impossible to resist and sometimes more beautiful than the compositions from which they are drawn or
upon which they are based.
Almost before he knew what was happening, Harry found himself in his seat, surrounded as if in a jewel box by cushiony furs and satin, by matrons from Marshfield, accountants from Newton, dyspeptics from Natick, and Harvard undergraduates and the girls at their sides from Wellesley and Wheaton. In the real boxes sat the dowagers and their men who looked and dressed like ringmasters, Irish gangsters and their molls, and young Brahmins looking handsome, impatient, and drunk. The Porcellian had a box. This Harry knew by their youthful pink faces, their dinner jackets, the way they threw back their heads when tippling, and the little flashing pig of gold tied to the chain of a pocket watch that one of them kept pulling from his vest because he thought it was a flask. Harry had lived next to their club, and although he had never shot any of them, he knew them the way a gamekeeper knows his pheasants.
Time was kept by orchestral riffs growing fuller and fuller as they skated by like puffs of smoke; by the thump of ropes and wood muffled by the heavy curtain as scenery was adjusted at inhuman speed; by lights that blinked ascendingly; the filling of seats; the sounding of chimes; and, finally, by the falling of darkness.
This darkness mixed with silence for a breathtaking moment until music cascaded inversely with the quick rise of the curtain—part of Sidney’s brilliance was his disdain for darkened overtures—and the appearance of a set radiating daylight that, no matter if it is supposed to be as white as June sun, in the theater cannot avoid a touch of incandescent yellow. The beginning was auspicious and strong.
Though they were in Boston, New York appeared in chaos and perpetual motion. The skyscrapers and bridges the set designer had launched almost to the peak of the proscenium arch were only backlighted canvas, but as envoys of the real thing they claimed the theater for New York. Brass, bells, horns, and a sudden flooding of the stage with dozens of people, yellow and checkered “taxis,” “horse”-drawn carts and wagons (some horse: the man inside was named Irv), policemen blowing whistles, criers hawking their wares, and a canvas subway train inching across a box-girdered bridge in the background, all came at once. It would have been nothing had it been nothing but chaos, but it was as choreographed as the ballet of real life it represented.
