by Mark Helprin
Once, her father, passing by, saw his daughter motionless as if hypnotized by the liquor and crystal. “What are you staring at, Catherine?” he asked after a few minutes. She motioned at the blaze of color. “I hope you don’t plan to drink it,” he said. She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a ‘no,’ right?” She found this amusing, because she had smelled the stuff in the bottles and found it truly horrible. Somewhat reassured, Billy left for work in a city delirious with prosperity. Completely unknowing of the difference between riches and poverty, Catherine remained in the library, patiently observing.
Decades later, she was dancing beneath strings of lights that hung in the air like planets. She was embracing and embraced by her husband. She was loving and content, and yet aware that with the movement of time everything was slowly overturning. On how many platforms in mountain ranges overlooking summer plains or the sea in crescent bays or coasts from Maine to Catalina had heaven come down to bless a couple gliding across the floor beneath a string of colored lights? “Am I chasing you? Do I have you?” he asked as they moved together.
“You’re chasing me,” she answered, “and you have me.”
Rice was older than Harry, a lawyer, a superb soldier, but because he preferred not to be an officer, Harry had outranked him. His parents had died when he was young. His first wife had died, childless, in the thirties. Of all of Harry’s pathfinders, Rice knew the most and said the least. He was always good-humored, often taking the lead to spare others danger, and his life before the war had led him to believe that he was not going to come home. Shocked and surprised that he did, he left behind everything he knew except his profession, which he carried out to California when he settled in the great country north of the Sacramento Valley.
He was dancing with a woman almost as tall as he was, and he stood at six-three. Her bearing and dress suggested that she had been born on a ranch, and that she might have been the daughter of the man who owned a great deal of the valley, and the granddaughter of the man who founded the town, and she was, in fact, all of these things. Slightly wavy blond hair fell to her shoulders. Her eyes were blue, and, like Catherine’s, her face was enchanting for its beauty and character. Merely from occasional glances, Harry and Catherine were impressed by and attracted to this couple that they carefully avoided. Many of the other dancers, though they may have enjoyed what they were doing, were burdened with an ineluctable stiffness that was less physical than emotional, and some with obviously long histories danced not only as if they hardly knew one another but as if they did not want to. In such circumstances, an alert divorce lawyer could make a fortune.
After an hour that went quickly, Harry said, “Let’s intercept.”
“You’re not a fighter plane, Harry,” Catherine scolded, but she agreed.
They moved toward Rice, staying close for a few seconds rather than allowing the distance that etiquette demanded, and then, still undiscovered, bumped him. He turned with an irritated look, but immediately recognized Harry. “Who’s that?” he said, referring to Catherine, recognizing the force of her beauty.
“My wife, Catherine,” Harry answered. “Who’s that?” he went on, returning the compliment.
Almost speechless, Rice said, “My wife, Catherine.”
The four of them had stopped in the middle of the floor, and everyone had to find ways around them.
Because the moon had risen just before they left, they could see their way in the dark. Ordinarily, in that they weren’t yet acquainted and were walking two by two, conversation would have been strained as everyone tried not to miss anything and to project so that all could hear. But the two Catherines, immediately comfortable with one another, silently came to the conclusion that they did not have to say anything until they reached home. Because they didn’t have to alter pace or posture to hear, they made good time through the few streets and a little way into the hills, to a large stone house that Rice explained had belonged to Catherine’s grandparents and was built of granite quarried in the Sierra Nevada. This broke open a line of conversation that was continued in the kitchen, where Catherine Rice, without tension or missing a word, began to prepare a light dinner.
Her parents still lived on their ranch. “Which is where?” Harry asked.
“Almost everything you see,” Rice said. “They were farsighted enough to buy land surrounding the town on all sides. Whichever way the town expands, as it will, the land will provide for their descendants.”
Soon after she had started her preparations, Catherine Rice excused herself, saying, “Hulda just beckoned to me.” As soon as her name was mentioned, Hulda disappeared. “She’s shy,” Catherine Rice said. “I think the baby’s up. I’ll go see.”
“Ten months,” Rice said.
In a few moments, Catherine Rice reappeared with the infant in her arms. He turned his head to his father, and then, upon seeing Harry and Catherine, buried his face against his mother’s right shoulder. With a little patting and a few kisses, he was reassured, and studied the new people. Harry looked at Catherine to see if this would be the next step, and to say that he wanted to take it. He expected perhaps a nod or a smile in return, but received far more when he saw that her eyes were brimming with tears that she would not let fall.
Catherine Rice moved forward decisively and placed the child in Catherine Copeland’s arms. No one saw, but a tear dropped on the baby’s gown. Catherine took in a breath through her nose, laughed a little, and smiled. As she began to talk to the baby, the baby took to her. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Gordon,” Catherine Rice answered. “After Jim’s father. Kind of a strange name for a baby, don’t you think? Sometimes when I talk to him and call him by his name it’s as if I’m talking to a lawyer.”
“He’s half lawyer,” Rice said, “and half nurse.” He gestured to his wife.
“I was a nurse,” Catherine Rice said, “during the war.”
“And Catherine,” Rice said to Catherine Copeland, “you’re so young . . . I hesitate to ask.”
“I’m a stage actress,” Catherine replied rather painfully, remembering every bad review and every review that should have been better, and every review that might have been written and was not.
Rice could see her shame, and didn’t know what to say, but Harry immediately filled in. “She has a good part, a strong part, in which she sings beautifully. The play’s been running for almost a year, with no end in sight.”
“Where?” said Rice, hoping that it would not be someplace like Trenton but assuming that it would. “I don’t even know where you live.”
“It’s a Broadway play,” Harry told him. “We live in New York.”
Relieved, Rice said, admiringly, “That’s really something.” The conversation continued, until Catherine Rice served the dinner, and, conquering her shyness, at the sound of plates being set upon a marble table in the center of the kitchen Hulda appeared and took Gordon, now fast asleep, from Catherine Copeland’s arms. It was hard for Catherine to let go.
“This was a baking surface,” Rice said. “You spread flour on it and it’s possible to roll dough without it sticking. They did a lot of baking then. We still do, if not as much, and we eat most of our meals right at this table. I put that light in.” He pointed to a translucent cone of green glass, lined with nacreous white, from which came the light of a shielded bulb. It hung over the table and lit the marble without glare.
Catherine Rice served a dinner that although it was centered around slices of the steak ubiquitous in the ranchlands, was otherwise Southeast Asian, with dipping sauces, rice, and some things that neither Harry nor Catherine could identify. The hostess explained. “I was in the South Pacific,” she said. “Most of the time we set up in villages at some remove from the battles, where we had the local foods as well as our own.” This was familiar to Harry. “When we had them, theirs were fresher, and we learned not only how to cook the way they did, but how to treat what we were issued as they would. So what you have here is a mixtur
e.”
“Not Chinese,” Rice added, “although people think it is.”
“How long were you there?” Catherine asked.
“Late ’forty-two through May of ’forty-five, the whole time: it was too far away to come home. We started in Australia and went almost to Japan, and never knew whether we had a lot of rest punctuated by war or a lot of war punctuated by rest. I was quite young when I went in, and not young at all when I got out.” She said this with an air of deep, earned authority, and ruefully. As if to set a seal on this, as Catherine Copeland moved her hands her woven bracelet with the jeweled signets clinked and reflected the light that Rice had hung above the table.
The war had not really touched Catherine. She had been young and safely far from combat. Hardly unaware of the loss, she had not, however, been damaged by it, and here she was the only one of the four who had not been on a front. “What kind of work did you do?” she asked the other Catherine, hoping that the answer would be that it had been something auxiliary and removed from the fighting, not too much unlike what Bryn Mawr girls did when they rolled bandages.
“Recovery,” Catherine Rice answered. “After surgery, they were sent to us. Although there had to be triage, we were generous with surgery even for those for whom surgery was just a gesture. Because there were supply ships right offshore and we were never far from the coast, we could afford to be less frugal than the field hospitals in Europe, and for the most part we were. When the surgeons tried to save those who could not be saved, we had to struggle to keep them alive, though we knew they were not going to live.
“The surgeries were often very fast, and then it was up to us—doctors of course, but mainly the nurses—to see them through. And so many of them didn’t come through. This lasted, periodically, for more than three years. There was so much death the hospitals were churches. I feel very bad because I can hardly remember their faces, and there were thousands, and each one. . . .” Here she stopped, overcome, but she recovered.
“Each one . . . was a soul. Each one had been a child. Each one was loved. Perhaps coarsely, perhaps not well, but loved. And they died out there, without their mothers, their fathers, their wives and children. Not a single one wanted to go. Everything was regret, I saw so much regret. If only they had been near their families: they missed them so much. Especially for those who died on the battlefield, something was opened that can never be closed.
“Every time a soldier died, we were taken, for a moment that seemed never to end, on the very same wave. In Australia, before it all started, I used to swim in the surf. Sometimes it was so powerful, the waves so fierce, that you couldn’t move your arms or legs to try to guide yourself. That’s what it was like at each death. Defeat. You cry, you hang your head, your heart breaks, you see what we are, and it shows you that the only thing we have, though we may imagine otherwise, is love.”
Though stunned and moved, Catherine, the daughter of many generations of brave men and women, maintained her composure, as did Catherine Rice. “Did they fall in love with you?” Catherine asked. “You’re a beautiful woman.”
“They were going to die. They were apart from their families. And I was the woman who was there. Because of childbearing, a woman is more than half of life. Their strongest impulse was not to survive, but to love, so that even as they died they might live. They would come to us by scores and hundreds, and when they became conscious and in not too terrible pain, they would fall in love so strongly and purely, each and every one of them. And then they just vanish. They’re gone. They don’t appear again, or write letters from beyond. Silence. And then forgetting.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t ask this,” Catherine said. “Forgive me. But did you fall in love with them?”
“I did,” Catherine Rice said weakly, and bowed her head.
“You helped them,” Catherine asserted. “You did help them.”
“Yes, I did.” She lifted her eyes to the others. “On Guadalcanal the Pacific is turquoise and blue, and the tents of the field hospitals were dark green, with red the only occasional contrasting color. It was way too heavy, a lousy way to die. There was a boy, a marine, and he was just about to go. I could see that he was oppressed by the heaviness of the canvas, and the red was no good—the red crosses that were on a lot of things. So I said, Would you like to see the Pacific, the blue? And he moved his head to say yes.
“I rolled up the sides of the tent and turned his bed around. You could see the sea straight out, empty except for warships riding at anchor, which looked very small. Beyond the surf, heat waves welded the sea to the sky in a kind of border. He stared at it. It was where he was going, and he felt no fear, as if he had said to himself, That’s where I’m going, it’s beautiful there, and there’s nothing to be afraid of. It was so much better than some shitty olive-drab canvas that in the shadows inside is so green it’s almost black. I opened the flaps and turned the beds whenever I could. We all did. The blue comforted them. They went with less suffering, less fear, when the sea took them. That’s what I did. That’s all I did.”
Catherine then embraced Catherine Rice, resting her left elbow on the smooth white marble, as Catherine Rice did the same with her right. “Now I have a baby,” said Catherine Rice, “a husband and a baby.” She took a sharp, involuntary breath in.
Harry had already had a bond with Rice that could never be broken, but now they were all united in a way that time and distance could not defeat. After a long evening easily talking about everything, Rice insisted upon driving them back to their hotel, until they stepped out of the house, and the moon was so huge and close, the air so perfect, that he said driving them would be a sin. After they parted, Catherine and Harry walked down the road toward the lights of the town.
“We could move here,” Catherine said. “They’re wonderful people. They would be our friends. We’d have them; we could buy a ranch; San Francisco isn’t that far: for pearls, books, and ocean liners to Japan. After a war you have the right to start fresh. You can leave everything behind and make a new life.” She paused. “You didn’t ask Rice, did you?”
The two men had been alone for a while, looking over maps of the valley that Rice was someday to own with his wife.
“No. Married, with a newborn?”
“We’re married.”
“Catherine, the time for something like this comes, and this is mine.”
“It was yours during the war,” Catherine argued, thinking about the baby she had cradled. Now she could almost feel his weight, and the sad lightening of her arms when she had given him up.
“I know.”
He stopped and pulled her close. They always came together easily. With building affection he felt her hair and breathed the sweet air that rose from her body. “Look at that,” he said, meaning the town resting on the silvery ridge, its strings of lights still glowing.
The wind was soft, and they were happy and unafraid. Then the strings of colored lights over the dance floor were switched off. The moonlight brightened, the town receded, and in the quiet on the silvered black road, Catherine said, “Just like the theater, except that in the theater there was never so much art.”
43. The Letter
JOHNSON WAS THE first to arrive, on Tuesday, the twenty-first of October. Compared to Wisconsin, New York was like Miami, and when he stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central he had to remove his coat because the air on the platform was so humid and hot. By the time he got to the cavernous great hall, he was sweating as he hadn’t since summer. Crossing the marble floor at speeds so high it seemed as if they were being chased were the first New Yorkers he had seen in their native habitat. They put their feet down like campers stamping out a fire, launched themselves forward like divers off low boards, and seemed not to see anything, by reason of having seen it before. It was as if they possessed such a dense registry of memories that they could fly through reality on instruments, thinking their thoughts, solving their puzzles, and doing their sums while seeking Lexi
ngton Avenue on autopilot.
He stood in the middle of the floor, slightly east of the information booth, astounded by a room so big it had its own constellations. The sky is not green. How did they know that virtually no one would say, “Why is the sky green? Because it isn’t.” He could hardly believe the speed at which everything moved. The lines at the ticket windows advanced and spit out ticket holders the way Coca-Cola plants put the caps on bottles. The stairs from Vanderbilt Avenue were like a waterfall down which people cascaded long before rush hour. In Chicago’s Union Station, the biggest he had previously seen, early afternoon was a mausoleum. But in Grand Central it was as if someone had set off a thousand rockets and they were bouncing crazily against the walls.
As he had on the train to track things of interest as they flew past, he fastened now on a woman who was almost leaping over the people ahead of her on the stairs. He stuck with her so tightly that the rest of everything became a blur. You could not say she was pretty, but she had a strong face, with a thrust-out nose that matched her thrust-out breasts, except that her nose was not restrained by a brassiere and the top of a dress striped like a candy cane in white and off-white. A belt around her waist was as thick as a cummerbund and at the back it was a bow. Her hair was chestnut, swept from her face, shoulder length. She wore wire glasses, her heels clicked on the travertine like a machine-gun belt ejecting links, and her crazed forward motion, like someone running after an escaped rabbit, was stabilized royally by a disc-like, aerodynamic, white hat three times the size of a pie plate.
