by Mark Helprin
On the night when snow fell in the Hudson Highlands for the first time that October, it had brushed lightly over Manhattan on its way. Fluttering like a veil, it descended in confused spirals that trembled on winds channeled by the high towers, the upper floors of which were drowned in cloud. As Catherine walked to the theater, snowflakes sparkled on her coat. At the lamp over the stage door they plunged into its light before the storm moved north and left the city pleasantly breathless with its first intimation of winter.
As Harry had once gone into battle, so Catherine had entered the theater. Upon her demotion, the confidence of many generations of Hales had vanished, and she was put to the test anew with each performance. It was not nothing to sing into darkness, blinded by light, with just a glimpse of the hundreds of judges trying to relax in stiff formal clothes. And although she was strong and courageous, blessed with the vitality of youth, quick of wit, seductively hot of temper, and could fight with great spirit in everything from sharp debate to the waves of the Atlantic, she was in essence tender, and all the fight that was in her was there to protect her faith in the gentle and the good.
When, trying to control the nervous trembling that these days would escape from her hands were they extended too long, she had put away her coat, changed her clothes, applied stage makeup, and donned the gloves she wore at her entrance, she had some minutes before she went on. Although she was given warnings—a rap on her door, and the calling out of time left—she told time by the orchestra swelling in its overture.
A few minutes before her cue, she locked the door, sank to her knees, put her hands together palm to palm and fingertip to fingertip, closed her eyes, and did not quite pray. This was what for thousands of years warriors had done before going into battle. Her lips moved, but she spoke no words and asked for nothing. Given her posture and expression, she might have been in armor or mail, and a sword might have been stuck in the ground before her, her forehead lightly touching it. She was no different from Harry when, before the jump, hands in the same position, head bent or upraised, he leaned into his reserve chute as the plane rose and fell on the wind and he, too, not quite prayed, asking for nothing. From Catherine and from Harry came absolute surrender, and to Catherine and Harry came the deepest strength. The current was strong and magnetic, the exchange electric and warm as everything came alight from what the blind of spirit took for darkness. Catherine felt her heart swell with strength and love, and then she rose and unlocked the door.
She hurried through the corridors and to the edge of the stage, and from the shadows she watched the lights come up as if in an explosion. She could never see much beyond them, for her song was sung in the brightness of day, when every effect was intended to carry the city into the theater. As soon as the lights went on the orchestra burst into action. Someone pounded on piano keys like the police hammering down a door, and then came the strings, bells, horns, whistles, flutes, brass, and drums. By this time she was already front and center. And because she never tired of the greatness of the city that her task was to convey, she never had to pretend to astonishment. It was always real. She had it in memory, from childhood on, in a hundred thousand scenes.
She took the crucial breath that the audience had to hear. The music rose in a minor key, and when the melody took over and began its riverine flow, this was where she was put to the test every night. For it was not enough for her voice to be beautiful, as it was; to be powerful; and to be pure. She had to embrace the song until it almost broke her heart, to devote herself solely to what was true, and to ignore the judgment of the world in favor of the judgment of heaven.
Their apartment overlooked the park through a bank of three double windows, each with a window seat. The Sunday after Harry returned from up the Hudson he and Catherine sat across from one another in the southernmost alcove. She looked out at the park, over the reservoir, and toward midtown, its towers dark at dusk with not a soul working in them, not even the cleaning ladies, who that night could sleep in Harlem. Harry’s view was to the northeast, where the lights of the Triboro Bridge, having just come on, had begun to sparkle with a slight blue-green tint. The pueblos of Fifth Avenue, which in noonday sun were as pale as the White Cliffs of Dover, had turned butter-colored and then deep red with the very last of the sun. This light broke the buildings into color planes of scarlet and black as darkness climbed them from the ground up. In the silent afternoon of late October the light would briefly glow like a coal and then go quickly. Strings of street lamps now decorated the park asymmetrically because someone, somewhere, had thrown a switch, and clouds, the last pale things, floated regally over Queens.
She didn’t want to break the silence, but she had a question. “Harry,” she asked, “what’s a nudnik?”
“How can you have lived in New York all your life and not know what a nudnik is?”
“I don’t know what it is.”
After a long silence, Harry said, “Why do you ask?”
“I went into a candy store on Columbus Avenue to make a phone call. While I was in the booth, fishing out change from my purse, a man came in with his son. The boy, who was about eight or nine, burst into the store, screaming ‘I want a monkey! I want a monkey!’
“Naturally, I noticed. I couldn’t help it. What he meant was one of those little plastic monkeys that slides up and down a red stick. If you put the monkey at the top, it takes a minute to jerk all the way down.”
“Yes. George the Sixth gives those out at state dinners in Buckingham Palace.”
“They’re very clever, actually. The father took one down, bought a cigar and a paper, and was about to pay when the kid showed up from the back of the store with another monkey on a red stick. ‘I have one,’ the father says. ‘Put it back.’ Then the kid says, ‘I need two.’ ‘Two?’ the father asks. ‘Why?’ ‘A spare.’ ‘A spare? Why would you need a spare monkey?’ ‘In case one breaks.’ ‘No, put it back.’ ‘No, I’ll take two.’ ‘Uh-uh, put it back.’ ‘No, I need two.’ ‘Put it back!’ ‘I want it! I want it!’
“Then the father looked at him more than sternly, and said, ‘Cyril! Don’t be a nudnik!’ What’s a nudnik?”
“Cyril is a nudnik.”
“I know. I mean, I understand the context and I have a general idea, but I can’t fix it precisely. The West Side is new to me. Don’t forget, I grew up in the East.”
“A nudnik,” Harry said, as if lecturing the assembled French Academy, “is a person—male, usually below middle age—who is simultaneously annoying, demanding, irritating, preposterous, cloying, deeply limited, insistent, energetic, needy, innocent, crafty, amusing, clueless, destructive, distractive, disconnected, monomaniacal, totally without self-awareness, off-putting, magnetic, haunting, whiny, horrible, exasperating, and, most of the time, Jewish. That’s the short definition.”
“It’s Yiddish?”
“It could only be.”
“Can you point one out?”
“Look out the window.”
“I never heard of such a thing.”
“Really? Well, guess what. Cyril has a brother. The brother’s name is Irwin. He’s going to grow up to be a pharmacist and a mass murderer. He’s four years old but he looks like a miniature Harpo Marx, with curly blond hair and a crazed expression. On the scale of nudnikism, Cyril is a three. Irwin is a ten. When Irwin enters a room, he knows instinctively a thousand ways to make everyone insane in less than half an hour, and when he contemplates this he’s filled with joy, like the Pope or the Dalai Lama.”
“But Harry, how do you know?”
“It’s in the blood.”
Then Harry sniffed the air, raising his head progressively higher as one does when trying to catch a scent. “What is that?” he asked. Never having had much opportunity to cook, Catherine was daring to roast a chicken. She was quite unconcerned, because she was relaxed about household matters generally left to servants, and because for a while it had smelled good in the kitchen. But she had misread a digit in the cookbook, and
the chicken, left in the oven for more than six hours, was getting fairly dry.
That day they had walked from the highest point of the city, in Kingsbridge, down to the Battery and then back up to 93rd Street, stopping in Chelsea for the most imprecisely named beverage in the world, the egg cream, which had neither egg nor cream, and at Fulton Street for clam broth and a salad. They were now so hungry that they had lost their hunger to a state of mild intoxication that made it all the easier simply to stare at one another as if in a trance. Just one look, just a touch, was like a strong surge of narcotic. On the rare occasions when instead of walking they took a subway, a bus, or a taxi, they would automatically and simultaneously reach out and take one another’s hand, which would make them feel levitated.
“Tomorrow,” said Harry, “I’m going to meet someone at the Niagara, the fisherman we almost ran over.”
“Did you ever find out his real name?”
“If I find out too much about him, he won’t help me.”
“Help you do what?”
“The Niagara’s on Wall Street,” he said, not answering the question. “I know. I’ve been there. Have you?”
“No.”
“Oh, well, you’ll see. In the center is a huge waterfall twenty feet high and fifty feet long. It’s almost impossible to converse if you sit near it, and there’s so much noise and activity you can’t hear anyone else’s conversation or keep track of who’s there. They do business deals there so they can speak privately and still be in a restaurant. Help you do what?”
“We’ll talk under the noise. It works, I’m told. That’s probably why he chose it.”
Catherine stood up next to the window seat, put a thumb and a forefinger next to one of the windowpanes, then turned, took a step toward the middle of the living room, and pivoted back toward Harry. “You really are going to kill Verderamé.” She didn’t have the gallant though half-serious air she had had when, at times, she had petulantly argued for it. Now it was real. “That’s it?”
“It is.”
“Then I’ve got to be involved.”
“No, you’ve got to be uninvolved.”
“That’s not true. I’ve got to share the risk.”
“I’m expendable,” he said. “You’re not. What would be the point if something happened to you? You’re the future. It’s my job to protect you.”
“And what about me protecting you?”
“To put it as simply as I can, if I die, you can have and raise our child.”
“But I’m not pregnant.”
“Not even after what we did last night?”
“Well, maybe.”
“But if you die, Catherine, everything stops dead.”
“You could marry someone else.”
“I don’t want to marry someone else.”
“Look,” she said, “this man has no idea you’re going after him, not in a million years. Otherwise, you couldn’t even begin: you’d already be dead.”
“That’s right.”
“So, in the initial stages, when he doesn’t suspect. . . .”
“He can never suspect.”
“Let me be more precise, then: when it would not be possible for him to suspect.”
“Okay.”
“Then I can help. Afterward, I’ll go live with my parents until it’s safe. You can decide when I leave and when I come back, but you must let me help. You’re not the only one with dictates. If I don’t share in the risk I become nothing, just as you would. We’re going to die anyway. If you hold as tightly to life as you propose, you’ll smother it. For richer or for poorer, as one. We took an oath. The man is a killer. He’s killed our own and he almost killed you. The law is paralyzed. He threatens our future. Look, I’m like you.”
“How do you mean?”
“I wasn’t born to run.”
With this they stepped onto a higher and more dangerous plane, but she was right. He asked what she might do.
“You’ve made a plan, or you will have made a plan. You’re not going to just charge in with guns blazing, are you?”
“A surgery, Catherine, would not be better organized.”
“You’ll need surveillance.”
“Yes.”
“And who would have done it? You? One person? Don’t you think that might be noticed?”
“Not if it’s done very carefully, over time.”
“Patterns change with time. You can’t age surveillance, I would imagine.”
“Granted,” Harry allowed, “and that with you it would halve the chances of discovery.”
“No, reduce them by much more than that. I’m a woman. I’m an actress. I can speak in dialects and accents and I have closets full of clothes. I know costumes and makeup. I can be many different people. Someone like Verderamé looks at women only for sex. . . .”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll bet. For him, a dame is not someone he has to worry about.”
“But we don’t need that kind of thing. It’s more straightforward.”
“But what if you do? Do you know where he lives?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you know where he takes a walk?”
“I doubt he does.”
“Do you know his routes when he travels?”
“Not at this point.”
“Well, then, it’s pretty clear,” she said with irresistible authority, sounding so much like a Hale, “that I’m in.” And she was.
38. Counsel and Arms
NEW YORKERS OFTEN FORGET, and some may not know, that theirs is a state of truly vast forests, spectacular rivers, fjords, and lakes, long pastoral valleys, and a huge, vertiginous fall of water that through a single spigot drains an area the size of Western Europe. And sometimes they remember, which is why Harry was able to wait for Vanderlyn in front of the Niagara, where hundreds of people were eating or serving lunch, and the noise befitted the name. Intermittently but unceasingly the front doors flapped like elephant ears as people entered and exited. From the hard-working, blue-jacketed Wall Street runners in white bucks half constructed of cardboard, to the top, pompous, stately, plump investment bankers in Florentine leather shoes, people came for the broiled fish, the mulligan stews, raw shellfish of fifty types and twice as many cocktails and beers, including beer from Mongolia, Anatolia, and the interior of Nigeria. The floor was made of little white tiles, the same mosaic found in millions of New York bathrooms, but here they were covered in sawdust that twice a day busboys swept up and dumped into the harbor. According to tradition, one threw one’s oyster and clam shells aside. This started in the eighteenth century, no one had ever thought to stop it, and now, close to midcentury and after two hundred years, the discarded shells still hit the floor like bullet casings.
As Harry waited, he looked through a window into the restaurant. The thin mistresses of fat men; the fat mistresses of thin men; secretaries in mouton; waitresses with strong, straight backs, because they carried heavy trays; and other women, business women, wives, college girls who had drifted downtown, God knows who from God knows where, were inside, working the fields of force that directed the actions of men, who could, without seeing, feel the presence of a woman walking by or sitting near them, and who adjusted their glances, positions, and thoughts accordingly, their breathing involuntarily, and their behavior summarily. The presence of a woman was such that if she walked into a restaurant and sat down at a table, the vital signs of every man who could see her would change in proportion to the inverse square of the distance between them, and some might even die. This was the subtext not only of restaurants but of the world, a metaphysics that would forever overlay everything.
Harry scanned the room. Each of the five or six hundred people within seemed intent and absorbed, on fire with ambition, dreams, memories, resentments, and thought on many levels: how much horseradish to add to the cocktail sauce or which oyster to eat first; would there be time after lunch to go to the bank; how to pay for college; why the head of the foreign curre
ncy trading desk had cast aspersions; what movie to see on Saturday; was Dewey going to run in ’48; ah, the girl in high school, with the spectacular red hair; how could God have allowed children to have been blown to bits in the war; Rhapsody in Blue echoing without cease in memory; let a shoeshine seat be open at the stand in the Schlumberger Building after six (if you could say it); who was right, Hamilton or Jefferson; I wish my father were alive, sitting next to me now; do birds have nightmares; two days ago, above Central Park, a skywriter wrote “I love you, Jill”; how much will it cost to rent a summer house for a week on Lake Winnipesaukee; how the hell can a grasshopper jump so far; he (not a grasshopper) makes more money than I do, or anyone else in the department; Cleopatra’s Barge; here comes the check; if nothing is the absence of something, then nothing is something; I wonder if I will die in a hospital, and will it be on a beautiful day in September; what the hell, exactly, is a prairie dog, is it a dog, how could it be—and so on, all proceeding at a fantastic rate, interweaving as much as the sound of voices, cutlery, crockery, and china, rising to hang in silence like the smoke of a waterfall, leaving only a frozen picture of five or six hundred people eating lunch or bustling about, their hands busy in reaching, their eyes reflecting, their souls invisibly weeping.
Then Vanderlyn touched him on the right shoulder. Not tapped, which would have been too low for Vanderlyn. “Hello,” said Harry, taken by surprise. (How did Vanderlyn get right next to him without his knowledge?) “I don’t want to go in there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
