by Mark Helprin
Hemphill and Reeves were still on the road. Nothing was left of Reeves. Harry couldn’t even look. Hemphill was not easy to see, either, but he was alive. Harry moved toward him. Rice, Bayer, and Sussingham were still where they had landed north of the road. Bayer was sitting up, staring into space. Rice and Sussingham looked as if they were sleeping.
When Harry got to Hemphill he saw that the tread had run over his middle, and that he looked like something in the cartoons they show before movies, which Harry would hate always. That Hemphill was alive did not seem possible, but he was. Everything was forgotten. All differences, sharpnesses, challenges, had dissolved. He looked at Harry as if Harry were his mother and he were a baby.
Seeing that he was shivering, Harry put his arms around his shoulders. “They’re bringing up a field hospital to just beyond the trees. A whole field hospital.”
Hemphill said “Oh,” and looked toward the edge of the forest, where there was much more light. “Where’s the dog?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Harry said.
“The dog is gone,” Hemphill whispered.
“Hemphill,” Harry said, tightening his embrace, “I want you to do something for me. I want you to do something.” Harry’s wool uniform and the gunnery flannel underneath had begun to be soaked with Hemphill’s blood, which was as warm as bath water. “Just one thing.”
“Any fuckin’ thing, Captain, any fuckin’ thing.”
“Live.”
Smiling, Hemphill expelled a weak breath as if to laugh. “Captain, that I can’t do.” And he didn’t.
Untouched himself, soaked with blood, holding a body that was still warm, Harry turned his face upward, as if inquiring, and the only answer he received was the snow falling evenly and impassively, its pace unvaried, spilling from endless reservoirs above.
37. Catherine
JUST AFTER DAWN, surprising gusts of wind moved the falling snow off the perpendicular as the cloud layer broke to show light blue. Harry was still lost in memory and nothing was left of the fire, but time was recalibrating with the steady clearing of the sky. The Hudson was azure, its flanking auburn, rust, and yellow hills now covered in a quickly disappearing blanket of snow. Like the sound of an alarm clock that seems unnecessarily hysterical to someone who is already awake, a train from Beacon clattered down the tracks and tooted its whistle as it approached Cold Spring. In the fall of 1946, the war had been won, and the great landscape he saw before him—including West Point, clinging to the hillsides on the opposite bank of the Hudson—was at peace. But shortly after the train passed, the faint notes of reveille drifting across the water suggested that although war might sleep, it would never fail to wake.
By the time Harry reached the station at Cold Spring the morning trains had gone. Pacing on the platform, he waited for at least an hour until a desultory local arrived, and on it he slept to recover his strength, until the train rushed into the Park Avenue tunnel very near the place where as a boy he had swung from the girders of the El. And with a whoosh that rattled a hundred windows, shades, floor plates, and doors, this put a temporary end to crossword puzzles and news stories about the rebirth of Europe.
In Grand Central, he looked up at the representation of heaven and was moved by the unboundedness written into it by art. Perhaps those who made it had known, like Michelangelo, that when someone looks up and stretches into immobility as his eyes focus and lock, he is taken further than he might go on the level, cut-off paths of the world. Add to that the flashing of the constellations, the oceanic green of the vault, and the white noise roiling above the sea floor of travertine, and never was a station more like a cathedral.
Harry crossed the concourse and dodged through the crowded arcades to the counter in the Oyster Bar. Although no one could know it, he was a soldier in a dream. Still not quite sure what was real, he was determined to enjoy it even so. All around him the advertising men, accountants, and lawyers were the infantry and sailors of just a short time before, but now in tweed jackets, pinstriped suits, and hats. They had returned, and were grateful. Theirs was the energy of those who had survived and were at the beginning of new lives. Every reader of English at Harvard College was required to know the Bible, as Harry did, in English more than in Hebrew, which he always thought a failing. The sight of legions of soldiers now in suits brought back Deuteronomy 24 from the King James: When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war . . . but he shall be free at home one year. It had a very sad ring to it, because years end.
And now, for the sake of the ones who hadn’t come home, Harry lived the dream they had dreamed—of ordinary things, of pedestrian routine, of the small and quiet actions that to the less experienced might seem worthless or oppressive, but that were secretly laden with the beauty that graced the quiet lives that those who had not returned could not live. Here were the dead in the hearts of the living, to whom the living spoke without speaking, saying: Here is a bustling restaurant and its whited sound; here are the lights of the theater; the halls of the Metropolitan; the afternoon sun deepening the fall colors of the park; the wind rising on the avenues, blowing dust in your eye; and here is a woman, her touch warm, her breathing deep and delicate, her skin fragrant, her patience loving.
They carried the dead as lightly as if they were the newly born infants in their arms, the children to whom they would gladly show the wonders of the world. They might stop in an alley at a stage door, so that the fallen of the Pointe du Hoc could listen to the sound of a chorus line, the music rising from the orchestra pit like smoke in the trees, or stare transfixed at a brass banister under strong incandescent light, praying, literally praying, that the gleam of its refraction would skip to another realm to shine in eyes that could no longer see.
As Harry ate, he remembered the invisible others: Hemphill, nasty and unapproachable, had at the last elicited from Harry a deep love. Harry would never forget Reeves, who would forever be a boy, and Townsend Coombs, gravityless in his last and infinite moment, fixed in the night above the sea near Sicily, never to disappear. The living as well drew upon his loyalty, and would always have a place in his heart and trust: Bayer, who spoke of the necessity of compromise and imperfection, even corruption, yet ducked and weaved to make whatever he did as pure and ideal as it could be; Rice, who should have been a general, patiently taking orders from young lieutenants; Sussingham, irrepressible, never at a loss for a joke even as in the collapsing world he held the ground that ten men could not; Johnson, both brilliant and kind as rarely one sees.
And he saw the living and the dead in the men working fast behind the bar, who were like the best troops in an army. Fully equal, absorbed, and taken up by their tasks, they had surrendered to the objective and transcended themselves. As they polished cups, served soup, poured bottles of beer, wiped counters, carried lobster on a plate, and opened clams and oysters at high speed, a dozen men in starched white—black, white, Irish, Italian, Chinese—worked furiously, interweaving without collision, calling out, checking off, making change, greeting, bantering, and moving through the rush like a platoon holding off a counterattack or a deck crew launching carrier planes. United by the deeper rhythms of their work, their reward was a steadying happiness.
Harry was both fully there and elsewhere. He blessed the food and ate for those who could not eat: oyster pan roast, as he remembered it, almost scaldingly hot; broiled lobster eaten slowly and carefully, as there was never enough; a tall glass of beer with foam that lasted; a salad; French fries; and then chocolate mousse and tea. Then through the great hall of Grand Central and its twinkling lights; onto the street at midday; out to a city perpetually strutting and never asleep; to the streetcars and bells, and the buses running along the avenues like unhappy buffalo inexplicably tamed to their routes; to weak, white, nearly winter sunshine that could almost be blown aside by the wind, straining to penetrate the blue-tinted diesel exhaust of paradoxically hoarse trucks and strike the glass sparkles in the sidewalks, where it would echo unt
il exterminated by the shadow of a passing cloud; to the rare silences that would implode amidst the commotion, and lay down stillness like a pool of water in fractured ice; to the deft traffic on the rivers at evening, tugs, barges, cruisers, and launches, their moving lights a diamond necklace for Manhattan; and to Catherine, his wife.
Except for two matinees each week, Catherine’s was evening work. On rare occasions, Harry met her and they walked home (his apartment had become theirs) in the dense late night air of fall, which was somehow cold without being cold, never having been in winter. As opposed to thinner summer breezes, it flowed around them almost like water and gave the impression of having color—perhaps gunmetal blue or dark gray. Mostly she would arrive home by taxi at around eleven, far earlier than others in the cast, because she did her curtain calls in the coat she wore in the first scene, with her street clothes underneath and her stage makeup already removed. Perhaps because of this, at curtain calls she looked wan, almost as if she had been reprimanded. And she was out of the theater like a shot, beating to the street and the taxis ahead of even the standees. Sometimes she didn’t bother to stay for the curtain call.
These were the best times for her, late at night when she was full of energy and disappointment, and there was Harry, who adored her. For a long time before they slept they would touch, stroke, kiss, with things said, cries cried, requests made and answered, shame courted and shared, eyes open and staring at climax. There was nothing they kept from one another, nothing they did not know, and it seemed as if there would be no end to it, as if they were always just at the beginning. Deeply in love, they were easily lost in the sea of the other’s body.
In the light of day, however, though he could not match expenditures with revenues, Harry tried to save Copeland Leather, and although Catherine volunteered to help, and sometimes worked in the loft alongside Harry or wherever she was needed, she had to save her strength for the evening performances. You would not find her at Sardi’s or cocktail receptions. She did not receive the kind of invitations received by others in the cast—even George Yellin—to read to sick children (in front of the press), to speak to ladies’ groups and at schools, to sell things on the radio and pose for stilted magazine portraits: “Here is Miss Cucuando, the leading lady of the new Broadway hit Brazil!, tending to her tomato garden in New Rochelle with her husband Xavier and their dog Vicky”—in six pounds of makeup (Miss Cucuando, not the dog), lit by half a dozen klieg lights powered by a generator truck in the driveway, with safety pins out of camera view tightening her bodice until she could hardly breathe, and after four and a half hours of art direction and trying to get the dog to smile. Such things did not come Catherine’s way, although at one time, when she thought they would, she was sure she would turn them down. Now, after too much silence, she was not so sure.
In the light of day—and for the five non-matinee days a week she was free into the evening—she could be found where perhaps no ingénue of the musical theater had ever set foot, in the reading rooms of libraries, where the world could open quietly to infinity and she could visit and consult remnant souls in traces of themselves and their efforts on shelves deep in the stacks, in obscure places past which the stack workers flew on their roller skates, unconscious of them, popping bubble gum, thinking of money, dinner, and sex. Here were books that had not been opened in a hundred years and yet had not died and would not die even if no one would ever open them again. How such life is impressed forever upon time Catherine did not know, but she felt strongly that nothing was ever lost, that the world was so full of faint echoes that the air was almost solid.
She served her sentence of anonymity anonymously. Who would ever know the people moored to the green glow of the lamps in row after row upon the long tables of the main reading room of the New York Public Library? The famous, for the most part, had never seen the place, at least those who were famous by face. Mainly scholars filled the chairs, and if scholars are assertive it is only with other scholars, for when they come up against the rougher sort, especially in New York, they shatter, cower, or melt. While she was teaching herself to deal with her wounds, Catherine was delighted to be in such timid company.
She would order from the stacks something she picked at random from the card catalog, and then make of it what she would. She might spend an afternoon reading a book in French about Marcus Aurelius, dictionary by her side, immersed in the language, satisfied, delighted, and speaking to herself by the end of the day in the Parisian dialect she had learned as a child. A description of the Hudson Valley, 1824. A technical manual for making steel. An essay upon the English Revolution. She followed her nose. October fled by. Sometimes, she would close the book, or not, direct her gaze at the far spaces of the reading room, where no one ever looked—red dragons could have been battling in the dark as long as they did so in silence—and think about her situation.
She had been done an injustice by the press, or so it seemed to her, although she could not be sure, and she believed at times that her singing and stage presence were simply not worthwhile. Nor could she be sure of or separate the involvement of Victor Marrow. Perhaps he had been the instigator, or perhaps not. It was possible that every critic failed to notice her, failed even to dislike her, or thought she was not quite untalented enough to attack. The way the tendrils of all such possibilities intertwined left her with no means to judge either herself or others. Deprived of bearings, she suffered a kind of motion sickness, a continual nausea the effect of which was rapid corrosion.
She fought this as best she could. Except for George Yellin, the other cast members now took obvious if unstated delight in her fall—which had cleared the way for them—and expressed the kind of sympathy they might have for a great racehorse that had broken its leg. They said their piece with as much politeness as they could, and then, only as quickly as did not appear ruthless, turned away and instantly forgot. George himself, who was in the last effulgence of his life, could not endanger his good fortune by allowing his sympathy to cast him too far back toward what he had just escaped. Sidney no longer thought she was as desirable, and now that she was not an asset, seemed not so sure of his high opinion of her singing. Everything changed in the great currents of fashion, and Sidney had to put on plays to suit the public taste. He had investors to please and actors to sustain, not to mention himself. Like a statesman or a general, he had learned to move forward unaffected by the people who were left behind.
At first she was puzzled as to how one might fight complete disregard. But when she thought on it, she came up with a strategy. She understood that no matter what audiences might feel directly, they could be made to ignore their own convictions. Such was the social power and that of the press. She had seen it time and again. So she could not rely upon the natural reaction she had elicited at the beginning of the run. As attention gravitated to the new stars, she noticed that this reaction changed. Within weeks, the ovations for her went from the wind-driven downpour of large hail upon a metal roof, to the obligatory drizzle reserved for those whose appearance is an opportunity to rest the hands between more emphatic bursts of applause. It is not just that actors who live with the polite drizzle eventually die inside, but that their performances then conform to what is expected.
Determined to avoid this, her method of resistance was to recognize that she could not for long overcome the currents of fashion—not one young woman, not alone—and that no matter what she did, she had only a limited time. Given that, she need not conserve her energy as any wounded animal or person might, and she could be reckless with emotion, technique, and conviction, for her own pleasure if nothing else. Though she might be forced to retire, when in the field she would move with all her strength.
She could not rely upon opinion at all, even that of those whom she loved and who loved her. Of course Harry and her parents would tell her that she was wonderful, as Evelyn put it time and time again, but if she could no longer trust her own view, how could she trust theirs? She was out on a ledge.
She would take her cues only from the music. All she could have, and ever have, was this, and if it took her up, and lifted her as she sang, that would have to be enough. Suffering throughout the day and after her performances, she held through with determination so that when the orchestra was struck her singing would be cut loose from the things of the world, and the song itself, fragile and evanescent, could spar with the background of silence.
She opened the book in front of her. It had just been delivered from the stacks: A Survey of Flowers and Floral Ornamentation in European Painting, with Identification According to Biological Principles. You could not major in music at Bryn Mawr without taking required courses in art and aesthetics. Because she had often sat in libraries with this kind of book, which had elicited intricate observations and comparisons, she looked at it unintimidated.
The page to which she had turned was in the section on lilies and irises. They were depicted in French and Italian paintings, in patterns on cloth of blue and gold, literal, abstract, or emblematic. Immediately she saw that the hierarchy of virtue in flowers was the opposite of what human intervention might create. The fleur-de-lis of Louis XIV was as dead as a horseshoe nail no matter how many courtiers subjugated themselves to it. As an emblem, it was lifeless. In a Botticelli or a Monet (although Monet was left out of this survey) flowers were beautiful, of a much higher rank than those that served as stilted emblems. Of a higher rank still, though hardly recognized and celebrated, were those in someone’s garden. She imagined a woman tending them on a summer’s day, lifting them in the sun, arrested by their color and scent. But of the highest rank were those that were never celebrated or seen, blooming by themselves in a corner of woods or at the edge of a field, never to be beheld. Distinction had no more effect on their essence or their glory than love or remembrance have upon the resurrection of the dead. In the few hours when flowers catch the sun, she realized, all are equal, then all are done. And in the reading room crowded with anonymous scholars amid long rows of sea-green lamps and in a dull murmur like that of the ocean in a shell, no one looked up but Catherine, whose face was upturned, as always when seeking courage and faith.
