by Mark Helprin
“Reviews,” Evelyn added.
“The only one that matters is the Globe,” Billy insisted.
“No,” Harry contradicted. “What really matters is that they were uniform and they all said that you bought her into the play.”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Don’t you have a feeling about that?” Billy asked.
“I thought,” Harry said, “that it might have come from Victor.”
“Maybe.” Evelyn stared at a golden roll sitting forever safely on her bread plate. “But it was in Winchell’s column more than once. That’s how all the Boston reviewers knew, probably.”
“Winchell, that evil idiot,” Billy added, “called Catherine ‘an investment angel.’ Investment has nothing to do with it. She is what she is, and she can sing.”
“I had thought,” Harry said, “that because Marrow lends to the press—”
“You don’t need to make loans to the press to start a rumor,” Billy interrupted, “but perhaps if you do, and you have a lot of contacts, it would be that much easier. The damage. . . .” He shook his head.
“What can we do about it?”
“If I did anything at all it would appear to verify the original charge.”
“You could write a letter stating the facts.”
“I did. I wrote to each paper. Not that it would have helped—the reviews are in—but to set the record straight.”
“What happened?”
“They don’t like to admit they’re wrong. Look, they slay people every day. For them it wasn’t worth a moment’s thought. They know we won’t sue, because in court they fight like dogs, and by the time a verdict came down, even if in our favor, Catherine would be thirty and the play long forgotten.”
“Can’t you talk to someone—you must know people—so that it won’t happen in New York?”
“I would, except that if I so much as approach them they’ll back off as if from a leper. The one thing they claim never to do is to bow to outside pressure. It’s their rightful pride. If they took account of what people do to influence their coverage one way or another, nothing would ever get printed.”
“Even when they’re wrong?”
“Especially when they’re wrong. The point is, Harry, that on these questions opinion is divided. When they make an egregious mistake, which might cost thousands of people their livelihoods, or a number of people their lives, they won’t respond, because of what it would look like. They’ll say to you, and I’ve been through this, ‘These are the people I hired. I trust them. They have integrity. Their job is to seek the truth. Write a letter.’ They never publish a letter when they’re wrong enough to be embarrassed.”
“Winchell seeks the truth?”
“Winchell is his own special case. He libels a dozen people a day and you can’t touch him. This kind of complaint wouldn’t even register. To show his irritation he would probably write that to protect my untalented daughter from the justified criticism of the production I unethically bought for her, I tried to suborn the press. With something like this, the harder you pull, the tighter it gets.”
“But . . . Catherine.”
“Catherine is my daughter. We won’t be able to sleep at night because of this. I’d kill for her, but we’re powerless to help.”
“If it’s Victor, can’t you talk to his father?”
“You’re going through all the options, aren’t you? Willie Marrow will never speak to me again, which is all right with me. But even if he would, he doesn’t control Victor and never has. When you think of Victor, you have to reckon with the fact that he has so much money he knows that his children, his grandchildren, and their grandchildren will never want. If there’s a depression, he has cash. If there’s inflation, he has real property. If there’s a revolution, he has gold. If there’s war, he has minerals, rubber, armaments, and food. If there’s peace, he has consumer goods. If there’s prosperity, he has luxuries. In hard times he has staples. It’s like an armored vehicle, and the brain that drives it is very clever, even if not that big.”
“Though he’s much more dreadful,” Harry stated, “he still sounds like a cross between Sears, Roebuck and Santa’s workshop. What does he want, anyway, other than Catherine?”
“Money.”
“But he has it.”
“Yes, but getting more of it is the only exciting thing left for him to do.”
“For me,” Harry said, “money has always been difficult, but simple. I need relatively small amounts, and struggle to get them, but I’ve never thought about getting a lot. I think that Victor never will be rich enough to know what I know, which is that money is highly irrelevant. Do you see what I mean?”
“Certainly I do,” said Billy. “I have from the beginning. That’s one reason why you’re sitting here. We don’t just take raccoons off the street, especially greedy ones.”
“If you look at him,” Evelyn said, getting back to Victor, “you can see that no one controls him, least of all himself. He refused to be disciplined as a little boy. Once, long before Catherine was born, the children were playing a game of throwing cards down on the floor, and if yours landed on top of another you got to keep everything. Practically the whole deck was waiting to be won. Catherine’s cousin, a boy Victor’s age, threw his last card, which appeared to land on the pile. Victor jumped down and put his head close to the floor. In his version, a loop of shag rug had kept the last card from touching, but before he could make his case Catherine’s cousin snatched up the winnings, destroying the evidence. Victor was probably telling the truth, but from the grownups’ perspective it did look as if the cards had been touching.
“Willie told him to be sportsmanlike and accept defeat, but he wouldn’t have it. He insisted that he’d won, grabbed at his winnings, and flew into a rage. Willie had to throttle him down and, because Victor was kicking and biting so savagely, actually hit him. Victor was nine. He ran away, got on a train, and spent a week alone in Manhattan. The Marrows barely survived this.”
“And so did Manhattan,” Billy said. “He was returned to them only after he was apprehended by the police.”
“For what?” Harry asked.
“Robbing Chinese merchants,” Billy said. “They were more or less his size, and he knew they were afraid to go to the authorities. When one finally did, the police found Victor living in a shipping crate in an alley, with a bag that had more than a thousand dollars in it. Willie never had any influence over him after that. He couldn’t disinherit him: like Catherine, he’s now the only child. His brother was killed in the war. Really, the only way to deal with Victor would be to do away with him, and that would be out of proportion and rather dangerous.”
Evelyn leaned forward. “And we really don’t know that it was Victor, although I think it was. We can’t think of what to do. Can you?”
“I’ve never had to deal with anything like this,” Harry said, “but the same sort of thing now seems to be popping up all over the place.”
“Don’t you know,” Billy asked, “that this is how life is? The world is made up of insoluble problems, of things that are beyond the influence of heroic action—of bitter loss, and no recoupment.”
“I did know that,” Harry said. “I thought you were the ones who didn’t.”
“Even Catherine has a sense of it. The world screwed up,” Billy said, half to Harry and half to the ice in his glass. (Evelyn already knew.) “And what’s going to happen is, it’s going to have to make amends in suffering and further confusion. You can’t just have wars like these and not feel the recoil. It’ll be a hundred years before the crying stops. You have to be prepared to ride the storm.”
“I’ve been doing that for a while now, Billy. I had hoped it was over.”
“Harry, it’s never over.”
Walking up from Wall Street to the loft and occasionally catching sight of distant bridges spanning the rivers, Harry felt both his own powerlessness and the inex
haustible energy of the streets in which the work, emotion, and concentration of millions gathered in a magnetic wave that enlivened everything it touched.
The Cypriot, Victor, Gottlieb, Verderamé, and the other things that seemed to hold him and even the Hales in check were like a part of nature. Were they simply to vanish, others would take their place. These were the forces that assaulted all that he was obliged to protect. There would be no profit in remarking upon their injustice, but rather he should enjoy them as much as he could, no matter how painful, if only because, lacking opponents, fencers cannot fence. The more he accepted them as ordained in and organic to the life of the city, the freer he would be to deal with them however he could. Nor, he thought, walking fast and feeding off the vitality of Manhattan, must he win. Rather than merely win, he would engage, move, and fight. He would dodge, strike, rest, hide, and strike again until the end, the sole object being to continue the story in which he had a part.
When he arrived at the loft he guided the elevator slowly past active workshops appearing and disappearing beyond its gates until he stopped at his floor, where no one was working. Instead, people were scattered about in small groups, standing by the windows, and talking. He took a few steps into the workspace and, saying nothing, lifted his hands to inquire what was going on. It was neither the lunch hour nor a holiday nor the end of the workday. Those of whom he had inquired waited until one of the polishers/stainers/waxers was summoned from around the corner to offer an answer. Born in a country in South America that during the war had, like most, stayed neutral (Harry had forgotten which one), he had a mustache and a full face, and his hands were dark with stain. His expression was that of a man whose life easily eclipsed his job.
“You know Velez, the polisher, Clementino Velez?”
“I didn’t know his name was Clementino.”
“That’s because no one calls him that. They call him Guada.”
“Oh, yes. We make out the pay packets to Guada. From Porto Rico.”
“He was hired just before you got back.”
“What about him?”
“He was coming from lunch. Two guys stopped him downstairs in the hall and asked how to find us. He told them. Do you work there? they asked. He said yes. Good, they said, and then they punched and beat him. For a long time. They put him in the passenger elevator, pushed the button, and it stopped on this floor. Guada was lying in a pool of blood that was moving, because the floor of the elevator is a little”—he made a gesture with his hands.
“Tilted.”
“Yes. For when you wash it. The blood ran over the metal edge and dripped into the shaft.”
“Where is he?”
“St. Vincent’s.”
“Who saw this?”
“No one. He told us before he went out.”
“Lost consciousness?”
“Yes, and he couldn’t hardly talk. Blood in the throat.”
“Is Cornell with him?”
“Cornell and some others. Someone went to get his wife.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Detectives from Manhattan South looked at the blood, but no one here saw anything they could say. They said they were going to the hospital. We told them what happened. Then I think they went to the hospital. You know what he said?”
“Velez? What?”
“Not to call the police. But we had called them already.”
More people had gathered. “Okay,” Harry said. “Clean up, and everybody go home. Tomorrow, come in early. Be right at the door downstairs exactly half an hour before the usual time. No one goes out alone. Key the elevator. I’m going to the hospital.” Before he went, he stopped in the glass-paneled office, opened the safe, and took out a thousand dollars.
He knew that though she would have no cause to be, Velez’s wife would be frightened of him, so he went in to see Velez first. The woman in the waiting room, a peasant such as still existed all over Europe but not among even the poorest of the poor in the United States, didn’t know who he was. Harry was reluctant to face her, because he knew she wouldn’t understand him and because an oppression of man that had begun at the beginning of time would make her unnecessarily grateful and obsequious. He anticipated that were Velez’s condition to worsen, his wife would wail hysterically. The poorer and less powerful a person, he had observed, the more expressive. Had the wife of an English duke been apprised of her husband’s death, she might have clouded over, perhaps stiffened a little, or trembled momentarily, and in the stillness the bearer of the bad news might hear a leaf drop somewhere on the soft and capacious lawns. But not here. Were Guada to die, the screams and flailings would be like those of torture, and then, not long after, would come the exhausted silence of utter defeat, a silence where, courtesy of death, all classes meet.
Velez was different from his wife. He worked, spoke English fluently, circulated in the streets, ate at the automat. Though he may have grown up cutting cane, he would know that the rules here were not the same, and that for anyone who played by these rules, as did Harry, there were neither masters nor slaves. It is true that a discrepancy existed, and, as he had arrived only recently, not in his favor, but all Copeland workers knew that Harry was well aware that he was himself almost a new arrival.
Velez was hardly awake. He breathed with difficulty in extremely slow flutters. His face was swollen like a puffer fish, slit, stitched, and so heavily mottled with red, black, and cyanotic blue that it looked like someone had spread different kinds of jam over it. His left hand, right leg, and right arm were in plaster casts. Blood and saline dripped into him from bottles suspended above the bed.
“This is what we get,” Cornell said from a low chair near the window, “for paying what they asked, when they asked.”
“It was the right amount?”
“It was. They came to get it Friday. No complaints.”
“Did you speak to the police?”
“I did. A nigger speaks on behalf of a spic who was beaten up by people he can’t name, for a reason he can’t say. No one saw, no robbery, he’s not dead, no weapons. We won’t see the cops again. They have nothing to go on. And if they did, and they found them, they would stop out of fear or because they’ve been bought off. Now what?”
“We have to take care of him,” Harry said. He approached the bed. Turning back to Cornell, he asked, “He’ll be all right? Does my experience fail me?”
“You’ve seen a lot of beaten-up waxers and polishers?”
“I’ve seen a lot of chewed-up soldiers. He looks bad, but he doesn’t have that faraway stare that comes when your outside is calm but your inside is bleeding out like a stream and no one can see it. He doesn’t have that look, yet.”
“The doctor said he was at the edge.”
“Verderamé is precise. He could have been a jeweler or a bomb fuser.” Harry went to the bed and leaned in. “Velez? Guada?”
Velez opened his eyes. Harry looked in them and saw morphine. “Wake up, wake up.” He did. “Do you recognize me?” Velez nodded as best he could. “I’m going to give your wife a thousand dollars,” Harry said, taking the money out of his pocket. “When you get better, come to collect your back pay. You may not remember this, but we’ll tell you, and tell you again. We’ll keep you on the payroll for six months until you find another job. And if you want to come back, you can at any time, for a job and a raise—if we’re still in business. Is that clear to you?”
Velez tried to say something, but it came out as a hiss from between dry lips.
“Later, then. I’m sorry this happened. You know that it happened to me, too? Not as bad, but probably the same guys. We’ll take care of you if we can.” He patted Velez’s uninjured hand, and left, followed by Cornell, who assured the patient, whose eyes were now closed, that he would be back the next day.
As Harry and Cornell stood outside the hospital room, Harry kept his hand tight against the packet of bills. “Does she know you?”
“Not from Adam,” Cornell re
plied.
“Doesn’t she wonder what you’re doing in there?”
“I think she thinks I’m a cop.”
“I’ll do it.”
When he gave her the money and, in a most peculiar Spanish constructed from Latin, Italian, and French, explained what he would do, she knelt and tried to kiss his hand. He wouldn’t let her get below him, and knelt with her, and as they were having a sort of contest in which he wanted to win so that she wouldn’t lose, he thought to himself that Verderamé’s actions and existence were pushing history backward and running time in reverse.
To drop off Mrs. Velez, they took a taxi, because Cornell had miraculously come into possession of a fifty-pound hamper of food for her and they didn’t want to struggle with it in the subway. The three of them sat awkwardly in the turtle-backed cab, the hamper at their feet, the smell of leather brought up from the seats by a sudden drop in pressure that had come with rain and wind from the direction of New Jersey. They knew it had come from there because it smelled like burnt coffee. In summer, weather usually arrived from the south, billowing up over the sea in clouds that were as enormous in proportion to the rest of the world as a painter’s tube of white is to his smaller tubes of more intense colors, like a whale surrounded by porpoises. In winter, memorable weather came from the north with sterilizing clarity and immersed the whole world in a sea of shining glass. But in spring and fall it tended to roll in from New Jersey as surreptitiously as if it were ashamed. The clear wet air that had crossed the fields near Princeton, dipped down into abandoned canals, and strained through willows dripping with rain, often arrived with the foul smells of marshes, bogs, factories, refineries, tanneries, and landfills. Most people could not begin to guess what it was they smelled on those winds, but the rain would eventually clear it away.
Now, early in the afternoon, the streets were slick and the lights in the commercial districts had blinked on. Farther north, it was different. Most apartments and houses were dark. Sometimes a light appeared where people were at home—a woman ironing, small children too young for school, an invalid, a widower, a widow, or perhaps a musician who worked at night—but overall the premature dusk was undisturbed—except all the way up Broadway, where old ladies were shopping, and pulling old-lady wheeled wire baskets behind them through the rain. In midtown, Harry and Cornell, unable to comfort Mrs. Velez, who was as tense as a piano string, leaned toward their respective windows and scanned the blocks as they passed. The streets glistened, the windshield wipers were hypnotic, the lights, yellow in cast or burning red neon, were doubled or tripled by watery refection. The taxi passed a gun store on the second floor of a building on the east side of Sixth Avenue. It had a neon rifle in the window. Harry bent his head to look up at it, and followed with his eyes as it receded.
