by Mark Helprin
“Harris,” she began, but he interrupted her.
“Please, Margaret, Harry.”
“Sorry, Harry. Are you all right? Are you having an attack of some sort?”
“I’m not used to the warmth,” he almost squeaked. “And the alcohol,” he added, after looking around desperately and noting the drink in each person’s hand.
“But you haven’t had anything to drink.”
“The suggestion is sometimes enough”—he took a deep breath, interrupting himself—“to. . . .”
By this time, Claire knew that it was she, and, if truth be told, began to have a strong sexual feeling in regard to Harry, which was both persistent and magnified by his awkwardness and, perhaps, charm.
“Then let me get you something,” Margaret said.
Harry, at this time extremely ignorant of alcohol, and whose last taste of it had been a thimbleful of grappa offered to him by a Sicilian peasant in the first flush of political rehabilitation, was now trapped. “Scotch,” he said, “four up.”
“What is that?” the Texan asked, “a quadruple shot?”
“That’s right,” said Harry, “in a glass.”
“That’s how we do it in England,” the don said, “ever since Ethelred the Fat.”
Margaret went to an array of light-spangled bottles, ice buckets, and glasses, where she took a cut-crystal tumbler, filled it to the brim, and gingerly sailed it across the room, with everyone following this as if she were building a house of cards.
So as not to spill it after being admonished by the don—“Don’t spill it, it’s Glenfiddich”—Harry drained half and, as his interior roasted in the tropics, thanked his hostess.
Now, as if drawn by an electromagnet a magnificent inch and a half closer, the brief rustling of her dress more powerful than the Scotch, Claire asked, “What part of the army are you in?”
The Texan answered, almost proudly, “Eighty-second Airborne. You can’t do better.”
“Oh,” said Claire, “a para.”
Harry, already more than relaxed, heard parrot. “What?” he asked.
“A para,” she repeated, with time to calibrate her tone exactly, somewhat admiringly, slightly mockingly, certainly seductively, not completely clearly, and another half inch closer.
“Well,” Harry replied, having heard parrot again, “if you say so.” And then he turned to her, not leering, but very open and friendly, and said, “Polly want a cracker?”
She had no idea what he meant, but he had by this and his general maladroitness vaulted past all normal obstacles and come very close to the state—he himself had actually entered into it—where he and she could not look at one another without imagining the details of a very long kiss and what would follow. Every time they turned away from one another, they cooled, but when they turned back they heated up again. He had been in the room for only a few minutes. God, he thought, what’s it going to be like in half an hour? To prepare, he drank from the crystal glass, soon asking for another.
“Why not just a double this time?” Margaret asked, understanding that he didn’t know what he was doing.
“Please! Do you have any nuts or popcorn? I don’t like popcorn, but I think it might act as a kind of batting.”
The don, whose name Harry had heard and immediately forgotten (he struggled to remember it, and came up, inaccurately, with Chester), rolled his eyes.
“I’m afraid we don’t,” Margaret said. “Smoked salmon?”
Harry was dumbfounded. He hadn’t seen a smoked salmon for years. “Lox!” he said, startling even himself.
“Lox?” Chester questioned, with a gimlet eye. “What kind of a term is that?”
“Yiddish,” Harry replied, seizing a little knife and a cracker. “Also German, lachs, Scandinavian, lax, and Russian, losos. A venerable Indo-European root. Don’t you know? You must be an economist.” Chester was, in fact, an economist, who before the war had moved with Martin Cater from Oxford to the LSE. Paratroopers were not supposed to know about Indo-European roots, not American paratroopers anyway, but the evening had just begun and there would be plenty of time in which to turf him out no matter how many roots he might grab on to.
Harry turned respectfully to his tutor, also his friend. “Martin, I’m told you can’t respond. How then am I to address you? You always found a way, and no matter how old I get—if I do—you’ll always be ahead of me and everyone else, as you are now, even if they may fail to see it when it’s right in front of them.”
With perfect timing and consummate sensitivity, Margaret rose, took her place beside her husband, and put her hands upon his shoulders. “We like to think, Harry,” she said, “that it’s a question of timing. How often in his tutorials, in listening to, among others, me, would Martin respond with silence, the glint in his eyes, his expression, the silence itself guiding you along, bringing out the best in you as you yourself found it?
“Now, that silence is elongated,” she said, pronouncing the e by elongating it, as ee, and putting the stress on the third syllable, as befitted her upbringing.
“And it ends where, in death?” Harry asked.
The shock of the chill that swept the room could have shattered glass, but Harry, who knew Martin, knew his courage, knew his detestation of nonsense, and also knew exactly what he was doing, saw a barely perceptible smile on the face of the paralyzed man. “Like hell it does,” said Harry. “It must have been extremely frustrating for you, Martin, all this time.” Moments passed, with Martin blinking as if in panic. No one knew what to say, and then Harry announced, deepening his jeopardy, “He says, ‘Bloody hell!’”
Margaret leaned over her husband and saw his blinking, as if he had been pushed into some variant of a seizure, which is what she thought, as it had happened often. But it was not a seizure, hardly so, for as Harry had been electrified to discover almost immediately, it was Morse. Now Harry moved forward in his seat to the edge of the sofa, followed by Claire, who was still with him, and, slowly, as Martin blinked, spoke for him.
“‘Harry,’” Martin said. Harry said it as he decoded it.
“Oh Christ,” Margaret cried. “It’s Morse code. We didn’t know!”
“That’s right,” Harry said, “and you’ll have to learn it starting tonight. He says
“‘Those . . . blighters . . . don’t know . . . Morse. Not . . . even . . . doctors. No . . . not afraid . . . of . . . death. Margaret . . . quick . . . learner . . . why . . . I . . . married. Hope . . . eyelids . . . hold . . . out. Harry . . . stay . . . safe . . . I will . . . just . . . listen. Come . . . back . . . for . . . slow . . . conversation. Tired. Don’t . . . like . . . black . . . currant . . . jam.”
Harry said, “Martin, when I came in you were blinking at me like a tart, and I remembered that once, in your office at Rhodes House, you told me that in the First War you were a signalman. Right before a drop, I talk to airplanes full of paratroopers by blinking lights at them. Think of how fast you can go when you and Margaret get abbreviations settled, when simple Y’s or N’s will convey a huge amount of information upon answering a series of questions.” He lifted his glass. “Cheers, Martin. And you should know that if I have rendered anything to you, it is but a small part of what you have given to me.”
This was all quite astounding, and as everyone was reflecting silently upon it, a woman in a white bonnet that looked almost like a nurse’s cap but was shaped more like a mushroom, appeared and announced as stiffly as a six-year-old in a school play that the dinner would be served. The timing was perfect, and they rose, abandoning the fire, to file in procession to yet another room of quiet splendor as is often produced by limited resources and educated yet independent tastes.
Seated across from the exquisite Claire, Harry kept his gaze upon her immoderately, and she often returned it. He tried not to but could not help it, and nor could she, for neither of them could wait to exit, embrace, and kiss, right outside the door, in Brompton Square. But civilization, elongating anticipation and
thus amplifying the connections between a man and a woman far beyond what barbarians, modern or ancient, can comprehend, forced them to. Immediately they joined the others in a collective gasp as the doors opened from the kitchen and a butler (a caterer, actually, no puns having been intended) brought out a platter of steaks as thick as Texas.
This was so unheard of in England at the time as to suggest illegal activity or perhaps treason. But from behind half a dozen burning candles Margaret was quick to disabuse them of false impressions. “Before you turn us in,” she said, “because not even the king has such an allowance of beef, please take into account that these are whale steaks, what in Canada are called, I believe, ookpik. Choice ookpik, very chewy, very oily. You may be delighted. If not, you’ll be reminded that we’re still at war. We do have traditional potatoes, a semi-fake chocolate cake (no chocolate), and good wines from before the war. Why not?”
Harry looked at Margaret and thought that, should a woman grow old, she might still have her deepest charm. Should a woman grow old, she would still be a woman, the essence of being so being so inerasable as never to vanish. And if men were to understand this as they, too, grew old, the world would be a happier place. That charm was in Claire so strongly that it was wonderful just to be in the same room with her.
But the don had a bone to pick. He had been left on the sidelines because he had been demonstrably unintelligent enough not to know that with apparently spastic blinking his friend was pleading to be heeded and understood. He had been shown to be unobservant, and thus stupid—for a professional academician the most potent toxin of all. Slammed into his place as violently as a lorry spinning out after hitting a chuckhole, he rebounded in frontal attack.
“You know,” he said, “Americans eat the real steaks they bring over. They have massive amounts of men and materiel. But they can’t match our brilliance in fighting.”
“You mean like Dunkirk?” Harry asked, “or Yorktown?”
“Nonetheless, man for man. . . .”
“No no,” Harry countered. “I’m from the Eighty-second Airborne, and you’re treading on ground that will swallow you.”
“And how is that?”
“That is,” Harry said, “because the world has never seen—in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness—anything like the American fighting man.” He was still plundered by alcohol. “Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-German Viennese, the British, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Danish, or the Nepalese. You may in future” (here he resorted to British usage) “condemn us for it. You may continue to think that we are savage, disproportionate, and uncivilized. But we saved you the last time. And it is we, I guarantee you, who will liberate Paris and drive into Berlin. We don’t like it. We don’t like fighting and dying. But” (and here he held up his fairly intoxicated left hand) “when it comes time for that, we are facile princeps, and will always be. We were born for it. The terrain of the New World educated us in it. That in America every man is a king assures us of it.” Here he made a kind of circular, magician’s motion with his hand, or something that an eighteenth-century aristocrat might do with a handkerchief, and ended his peroration with yet another drink from the tumbler he had carried from the salon.
Backed into a corner, Chester, whose real name was Nigel something, could only repel. “Do you realize,” he pronounced royally, “that I haven’t understood a single word you’ve said?”
“Why? Because you’re stupid?”
“Because your speech is hideous and unintelligible, not English.”
“Oh,” said Harry, having encountered this in his student days. “Not English. Not English. Let’s explore this.” He was angry, and used to fighting hard. What a dinner party it was, like eating whale hot dogs at a boxing match.
“My dialect versus yours. Were there a pure, uniform, consistent English in England, you might have a point. But there isn’t, not even in London. Not even in Oxbridge. If you can understand someone from Southwark, much less Bristol, why not from New York or St. Louis? In India they speak as if they are floating on a cloud. In the Caribbean it’s like singing. And by the way, you’d be better understood if, when you spoke, you removed the ball bearings from your cheeks.”
Harry was an airborne trooper who truly expected that he would not live long. He didn’t care about breaking up dinner parties, and all he wanted to do was to float to Claire.
“Tell me, then,” Chester asked from a rather deep crevasse, “pimp of New-World-vulgar speech, what is salpiglossis?”
“What?” Harry asked, laughing. “Are you out of your mind? I may have had too much to drink. I’m sure I did. But you? Am I imagining you? You can’t be real.”
“I’m testing your command of English. What is salpiglossis?”
Harry had two options. He could laboriously demonstrate that his ignorance of the word salpiglossis had no significance, or he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. Though it would be nearly impossible, he prayed for a miracle, and God, apparently aware of the reading Harry had done on his cot at Camp Quorn, north of Leicester, in loneliness and cold, in the absence of women, in the scholarly devotion that for Jews is worship first class, sent him one. It came via the fire and the light, the magic of the evening, the vitality of London, the spirit of man and the beauty of woman, from the improbable, from love, from all he treasured, and from a required botany course that once had almost driven him crazy.
“Salpiglossis,” he said, with a long, dramatic pause, “as I recall from a difficult time, is a herbaceous, somewhat showy-flowered garden plant allied to the fucking petunia, its etymology deriving, I would guess, from the Greek salpigx, trumpet, and glossa, tongue, of course. Isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately,” Chester volunteered, “it is.” And then, “And what am I to do now?”
“Eat your whale steak,” Harry answered, “and I’ll eat mine. We speak the same language, which makes us brothers. Imagine if we spoke German. We wouldn’t know what the hell we were talking about. We’ll drive on to Berlin and sort this out later.”
Harry drained his glass and, lest he grow ill, refused wine. Embarrassed at having been the center of attention for too long, he glanced now and then at Claire, who, had there been another man closer to her age, by now would have begun to pay him attention for the purpose of influencing Harry, even were it the kind of influence that vanishes with evening and infatuation. She had turned to Chester, with whom she was engaged in conversation that on her part was for Harry’s sake, the elevation of her voice reflecting this in reaching just the right level to find him across the table.
The excitements Harry had felt when first beholding her were quickly outdone merely by listening to what she said, for the things she said and how she said them were more attractive to him than anything he might see or touch, and vastly multiplied the powerful alchemy of her appearance and voice. Getting up between courses to go to Martin at the head of the table, with his napkin in hand trailing like a scroll held by a statesman in a monumental painting, he heard Chester say, “I have a general contempt for war,” and Claire’s reply: “What a coincidence! So do I! Let’s send a telegram to Hitler and Mussolini. Maybe they do, too.”
Harry found a side chair and positioned it next to Martin so they could converse, as far as possible, in relative privacy. From the corner of his eye he could see the fire in the salon and its reflection in a set of glass doors. This was a stand-in for all of London, which he imagined as if he could see it from the air, as if he could somehow take in all at once the careful labor and extraordinary judgment of centuries; the balance, restraint, and fairness of the English; their heartbreak and trials like a knife cutting at the city as it was turned on the lathe of time. The moonlit curve of the Thames, which could not be blacked out or erased, was a guide for the bombers that then with incendiary vengeance restored to London its darkened lights. In peril, every detail could sing, and did.
“Anything you want me to tell Margaret before she learns Morse, which, if she s
tays up all night, she’ll know by tomorrow morning?”
Martin blinked out that he wanted lemon in his tea in the P.M.
“Milk at other times?”
“Y.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t be unusual,” Harry said, “for me to present you with a monologue as I did in tutorial. But how will you bring me up sharp? How will you point me right and guide me along?”
“O-n y-o-u-r o-w-n.”
“There are so many things I wanted to ask you, in that you’ve done this, been through it—twice now. Complicated questions that I didn’t ask when I could have.”
“Now you guide,” he blinked. “I need to see this through.”
“I see.” It would be nearly impossible, like a son guiding his father, and not just in the ordinary things but in something far separated from Harry’s youth, strength, and the frame of mind to which he had been brought by rigorous training and war itself. In a single moment, between courses, he would have to contradict his training, resist his predilections, open all the gates he had shut to survive, and put himself into the heart of the afflicted man. With the fire and its reflection vying with Claire on the periphery, he would have to backwater all the way up the Thames to a different time and a different self. But Martin was dying, as Harry would too, so Harry, who loved him, did his best.
How he knew where to go was a mystery, but it was given to him to know. “You once told me,” he said, “that you believed the impressionists were the product of the Siege of Paris and the Commune. That the darkness and misery had bred an explosion of color, that the love of life cannot be suppressed.”
