by Mark Helprin
Harry came in, with Catherine following. They carried stacked-cylinder food containers of the type made for invalids (and which the Hales used for beach dinners), and silverware rolled in a pressed linen napkin. Vanderlyn stood for Catherine, who was preoccupied with closing the door with her left hand while she held a thick porcelain bowl in her right. Although he bowed slightly when she appeared, the conversation had already started and turned practical, and there were no introductions.
“Here,” Harry said. “Corn-and-roasted-cod chowder, salad, bread. There’s a bottle of beer in the kitchen.” He went to get it as Catherine set an informal table.
“You really don’t have to do this,” Vanderlyn said to her. “I just need to get to the station.”
“The last train’s gone,” Catherine stated. She looked up. “Do you have a ticket, or money?”
Remembering that his wallet had been in the lost rucksack, Vanderlyn turned red in what Catherine thought was a deeper form of shame. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll take care of that.” And knowing about pride and honor, she would not slight his: “You can pay us back when you’re able.”
“Thank you,” he said, his head slightly dipping with his heartbeat.
They set the dinner before him, and as he ate they made sure not to interrogate but to converse. When he offered, they offered, and soon this courtesy proved revealing, even if everything, on one side or another, and for differing reasons, was deliberately shielded.
“I lost my boat and all my money,” he said, truthfully, but knowing that, coming as he had from the direction of the Montauk docks, what he said would be taken for what it was not.
“Your shoes, too?” Catherine asked.
“I’m lucky, Miss, not to be naked. And it wasn’t a poker game, it was something a lot more serious and demanding than poker.”
“Your family?”
“My wife and I live on the North Shore.” Here he spoke with crooked ambiguity. “She helps to take care of a very big house, and in season I sometimes work in the garden—when I’m not out on my boat.”
“Do they pay well?” Harry asked.
“Uhh!” Vanderlyn said. “The pay is nothing. I’m going to have to go into the city and really start to work. I prefer to be outdoors, you know, but I guess those days are over.”
“Where’d you learn to speak French with virtually no accent?” Harry asked, wondering how a gardener-fisherman had become a French-speaking agent of the OSS.
“From my mother,” Vanderlyn said, aware of the opening and delighted that with the simple truth he could continue his obfuscation. “She was French. She came over in the early eighties sometime. I was born in ’eighty-eight. When I was little, I spoke French first. I was over there in the First War, too.” It was all true. Vanderlyn’s unconcealable delight that he could use the truth to mask himself seemed to Catherine and Harry like a simple man’s pride at having done things considered beyond his expected range.
“This is crazy,” said Harry, “because my business is probably on its last legs. But I can give you a job if you want. It might not go for long, but it’s there if you need it.”
“What kind of business?” Vanderlyn asked.
“Leather goods. Briefcases, handbags, portfolios. We can use you.”
“And why wouldn’t it last long?”
For the next hour, with great relief and without mentioning a single name, Harry told him.
At the station in the morning as they waited for the early train to come charging over the flats from Montauk, the sky was clear and a cool breeze came all the way from the sea, waving grasses now dry and golden in the sun. Harry noticed that, as if Vanderlyn had done so many times before, he went to the spot on the platform where the club car would stop. “I’ll get the ticket,” Harry said, “be right back,” and went to the ticket window.
The night before, as Vanderlyn lay in bed listening to the pounding of the surf, he had been filled with a kind of happiness that he had not experienced in a long while. The young couple had taken him for what he was, shorn of everything but his French. They had risked her parents’ anger, gambled with their security, given of their time and now their money, expecting nothing in return. He saw in daylight when leaving the house that it was Billy Hale’s. So she was Catherine, the daughter of Billy and Evelyn Hale, who was so strong in spirit and independent of view, while yet remaining lovely. But who was he? That is, Harry. His business was failing catastrophically, his life in danger. He would not, out of pride, take his future father-in-law’s offer of help.
Vanderlyn, who had learned as a matter of survival to be uncannily observant, saw Harry by the ticket window, methodically placing bills in an envelope into which he had placed the ticket. From a distance, not many people would have been aware of this, but Vanderlyn had learned under the highest pressure to synthesize the most fleeting clues—flashes of light and color, the messages in someone’s gait as far as a mile away, a concealed expression. In the pool house, as the night wore on and the sea surged, he had been filled with gratitude. Although he would not have been able to calculate or foresee it, what they had done had not saved him materially—that salvation was less than half an hour away in any number of places—but at his age it had given him new life. It was not something he had achieved, but something he had been granted. It was more than their simple and generous act, but he could not figure quite what.
Harry came back, walking anxiously because he could hear the train whistling through the crossings, although when the wind was right as it was that morning you could hear the locomotive’s whistle blasts ten minutes before its blinding headlamp would come into view, daffodil yellow even in daylight. Harry put the envelope in his pocket because he didn’t want Vanderlyn to see how thick it was until he was on the steps of the train.
“Write down your name, address, and telephone number so I can pay you back,” Vanderlyn told Harry.
“You don’t need to pay me back.”
“But I will.”
“Really, you don’t.”
The yellow light came riding in on decreasing exhalations of steam, far away, moving fast but slowing down. “Please,” Vanderlyn asked. “I’ve got to return the boots”—a pair of Billy’s rubber Wellingtons, expensive, British, and pre-war—“and what about the job?”
Harry quickly pulled out the envelope and a pen, and went over to use as a desk an ancient baggage trolley with steel wheels and a wood deck three feet off the ground. The smoothly rusted brown steel rim had grown hot in the sun, and the ink from his pen spread out beyond the lines, leaving archipelagoes of little dots.
“Copeland,” Vanderlyn read. “Then it’s Copeland Leather.”
“Yes.”
“We wouldn’t want that to go out of business.”
“You know it?”
“Sure. On the estate, they’ve got it all over the place.”
“Who owns the estate?”
“You’ll hear from me,” Vanderlyn said loudly as the train pulled in and spread a cloud of water vapor over the platform, obscuring everyone’s feet: all they needed were wings and harps. Vanderlyn had said You’ll hear from me with almost a magisterial air, as if he were used to saying it. It wasn’t the kind of phrase a destitute fisherman might employ.
Curious about this, puzzled really, Harry remembered that he had no name to go on. “What’s your name?” he asked over the exhalations of steam and drippings of water that come from a halted steam locomotive.
For this, Vanderlyn seemed unprepared. At least before the age of seventy and after the age of four, one does not normally hesitate when supplying one’s own name, but Vanderlyn let at least half a minute go by. He could not use any of the names he had stocked in his time in the OSS, so he cleared his throat to cover the delay. Harry couldn’t fathom it, thinking that perhaps Vanderlyn was in fact a criminal. But then Vanderlyn said, “Baucus.”
“Baucus?”
Vanderlyn nodded.
“Your last name.”
<
br /> “Yes.”
“And your first?”
Vanderlyn looked up in the air, and, as if he had plucked a fruit, presented it, with strange satisfaction. “Phil,” he said, as if he had just made it up, which he had. “Phil Baucus.” He held out his hand, which Harry took.
“Phil Baucus,” Harry repeated. “Somehow it seems familiar. I don’t know why.”
Vanderlyn gave him what he thought was a haughty look for an insolvent fisherman, but Harry remarked to himself that he himself was an insolvent manufacturer. “There are lots of us here. Goes all the way back,” he said with a kind of twinkle, “to Queen Elizabeth’s grant of cod-fishing patents to Humphrey Lemmon and Reginald Baucus. (My middle name is Lemmon.) Although they built only summer dwellings, my family was here before the Mayflower—it is said. Never mind.”
“Okay. Phil, if you need a job. . . .”
“I’m going to pay you back, you do know that?”
“I think you will, yes. I think I won’t be able to stop you. Please don’t rob a jewelry store.”
Vanderlyn thought this was extremely funny. “I’ll try not to,” he said, “but if I do, it’ll be Tiffany’s.” As he stepped up into the vestibule of the club car a corpulent man in horn-rims and a whipcord suit—it was after Labor Day, he was careless—the very model of an Ivy Leaguer gone richly to seed in a rain of alcohol and a hail of hors d’oeuvres—called out to Vanderlyn. “Jim!” he said. “Jim! What are you doing out here?”
“Fishing, as usual,” Vanderlyn said.
The conductor helped the fat preppy up the steps, politely pushing on the small of his back when it would have been much more efficient to press against the big of his behind, and soon after that the train pulled out, conductors jumping on board as it moved, the best part of their job.
Harry stayed on the platform, looking down the track. Wives reentered their wooden station wagons and headed back toward the ocean. The red lantern attached to the last car of the train, he knew, would still be glowing in the tunnels that led under the river to New York, and would burn in the dim light of Penn Station as the passengers disgorged into the beige rooms above, as busy and humming as a beehive, a world like no other, crossed by beams of dust-filled light.
31. Crossing the River
FOR CATHERINE, PART of being rich was that she would get no sympathy from anyone but those closest to her. It is for some reason incomprehensible to many that owning a fair Persian carpet or a mahogany table is no compensation for the death of a child, a life without love, or a failure of ambition. Though money may make tragedy less likely, when mortality and matters of the heart come calling, they easily cut through the soft armor of wealth.
She was hurt and perplexed by the Boston critics’ obvious enjoyment as they savaged her. Their mistaken notion that her father had bought her the part they took not only as license to destroy her, but also to overlook, merely for the pleasure of their cruelty, that which was right before their eyes. To sing arrestingly onstage requires courage, for the theater is a kind of killing ground, which is why she was impelled to protect George Yellin. One line of praise had been the only light to illuminate his last twenty years and would likely be the only light to illuminate the next. She had no intention of following suit.
She would either have to overcome what lay ahead, giving her performances despite the preordained reactions, and lasting through punishment for years, or abandon what she believed she had been born for. Despite much praise, she was hardly certain of her talents, and half the time she believed everything the newspapers had said. She wondered if ever she or her detractors would be distant or disinterested enough to feel either shame or pride, and which it would be and who would be right. But for the moment the temptation of the boards and the lights was such that she would not be kept away. The cast worked hard at revisions before the October opening, and every day she found new strength in her own voice, the music, and what she was still able to convey to an audience as the theater went dark. The energy of the craft itself and the work they put into it carried them through and promised to carry the audiences as well, but outside the theater itself, where the music stopped, it was not so.
One of Sidney’s changes, all of which, given the success in Boston, were minor, was to have Catherine wear gloves during the first part of her second scene, a trick of timing to provide visual distraction as she removed them before going into her second song. “I’m not Gypsy Rose Lee,” she told Sidney, and he replied convincingly that of course she wasn’t, but that as she took off the gloves and bared only her hands and wrists it was not just for the pacing but also symbolic of her opening herself to the audience. “Think about it,” he said. “It’s modest, lovely, and it commands attention. In this scene the mood changes, and you’ve just been standing passively, as if you were a part of the audience. I want them to watch you and not vice versa, and so you have to move, and thus the gloves coming off, to catch their eye. The gloves should be gray so they won’t shine in the spotlights like a traffic policeman’s gloves.”
“What kind?”
“Any kind. You know more about gloves than I do. We’ll reimburse you, of course.”
“That’s all right.” She could afford to buy a pair of gloves that she would keep anyway. In fact, she would neither ask the price nor ever see the bill, which would be sent down to Wall Street to a very efficient office that invisibly took care of such things.
Within an hour of Sidney’s request she found herself staring into a display case of gloves, a quarter of which were gray. As she looked them over she heard her own clear but slightly misty voice echoing through the theater in a very sad song. She could hear it with the precision and power of real sound as if she were listening outside herself. A light that had once been installed to make diamonds sparkle still shone strongly down upon the display case, making the kind of contrast she had always loved, and that in painting is called tenebroso.
It was the end of the day, and the salesgirl was anxious to leave. “Have you decided?” she asked, shattering Catherine’s peace, which allowed the sound of an accelerating bus to replace that of the music.
“No,” said Catherine, visibly upset. A disappointment in love, the salesgirl thought. “I don’t know which one.” She went from one to another, unable to decide. Then she looked up at the salesgirl. “I don’t know what’s good anymore.” She shook slightly but uncontrollably as she asked, “Can you choose for me?”
“These,” the salesgirl said decisively, pulling out the first pair of grays she touched.
“Fine,” Catherine agreed. “I’ll take them.” It was most unlike her.
After she arranged payment and exited the store, she walked up Fifth Avenue, angry at the lights and the rush, and knowing full well that anger was fatal to song.
“Kill who?” Harry asked.
“Victor and Verderamé. They both begin with V.” Coming from Catherine this was charming, because, never having killed anyone, she couldn’t have been serious.
He knew that she had been behaving oddly. For two and a half hours on the drive from East Hampton—all the way in and relentlessly—she had engaged her father in a ferocious argument about patents and trademarks. No one knew what the hell she had been talking about, why she was so exercised, and how she had come to know so much about patent and trademark law, least of all Billy, who stuck to his guns but was left dazed and with a ringing in his ears. Harry, who knew a little bit about trademarks, and patents too, had tried to adjudicate, but she had turned to him as fast as a whiplash, commanding him to “Shut up.”
He loved her in all her moods, not least when she was unreasonably passionate, so, as Ronkonkoma and Commack whizzed by, he had leaned back in his seat to listen to her furious disquisition. And now this. “You’ve killed people before. Don’t get peanut-hearted about a jerk like Victor, or some gangster. Just shoot them.”
“It was somewhat different, you see,” he said, gently, because she was upset.
“Oh?” she sa
id, as if he had said something implausible.
“It was a war.”
“Well?”
“Why don’t you kill them?” he asked her, regretting that he had.
“I don’t know how, and I. . . .”
“It’s easy. They won’t be in a tank or a pillbox. Just get a gun and shoot them. You’ve been to a butcher shop. That’s what it looks like, only a lot bloodier.”
“It does?”
“It’s not a magic ray. The body gets torn apart. It’s just a question of how much and where. We don’t even know if Victor’s responsible.”
“You yourself said that was his chief weapon, and that it was to be ignored.”
“But not as a sentence of death, Catherine.”
“But what about Verderamé? You always say, in regard to what’s happening to you, ‘If you take my livelihood, you take my life.’ ‘The props that do support my house. . . .’”
“Merchant of Venice,” Harry said. “‘You take my house when you do take the prop / That doth sustain my house. You take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live.’”
“That’s what I mean.”
“And what have I done about it?”
“Nothing. You’ve done nothing.”
“And why?”
“I don’t know. Because ‘the quality of mercy is not strained’? Why? You tell me.” She was twisting her pearls dangerously. He imagined them clattering onto the terrace floor and rolling out the drains to rain down on the garden below.
“Electric chair,” he said, beginning the list. “Being caught by the mob. Not being caught by the mob and hiding for the rest of my life. Being caught by the police. Being in a cell with Louis Lepke. Not wanting to go back.”
“To Sing Sing?”
“To the war,” he said, now serious. “If there’s no difference between the battlefield I left and here, what was the point of fighting? I’d love to snap my fingers and make Verderamé disappear. Snap twice and Victor goes too. But if everyone just killed whoever persecuted him, the world would be constantly at war.”
