by Mark Helprin
The cigarette that had been thrown onto the road by the stocky guard manning the rampart was a perfect dead end. Adding to this, Harry would drop a sandwich wrapper from a delicatessen in Bensonhurst known to be frequented by Verderamé’s rivals of both low and high status. One wrapper. That was all. Several hundred shell casings. The traces of new weaponry. Footprints here and there, of very large men who wore fancy shoes in the woods. The tire tracks, a gift of coincidence, of a car that had come from the north, stopped at the overlook, backed onto the road, and gone south at high speed. And then, of course, the wreckage of Verderamé’s cars, and the bodies, every single one of them a known gangster, every single one armed. Who would think of an English teacher from Wisconsin, a steelworker from Indiana, an expediter in Union Square, and a former student of the humanities married to an heiress?
Often in France, Holland, and Germany—not in Sicily, where the country was more open, and not when the forests were simplified by a cover of snow—Harry had had to move very fast through branches and brush, or throw himself down without thought of where he would land. Descending by parachute into a forest could be fatal if a broken branch acted as a spear or the edge of a sword, and as they sliced through the trees paratroopers held themselves in odd-looking ways to protect their arteries. In the speed and desperation of battle, sharp cuts and penetrations often went unnoticed for a long time. More than once, Harry had removed his shirt or pants and been surprised by a mass of dried blood that had sealed shut a wound he did not know he had.
His first thought was that the terrible pain in his abdomen was the result of a freakishly sharp, strong, and long broken branch that as he had run toward the road had penetrated as deep into his body as an arrow. He felt for its shaft in case it had broken off in him. Even when he felt no shaft he wanted to think it wasn’t a bullet wound. In France, he had been unaware of the wound in his back because his senses had been monopolized by the wound to his shoulder. Here, there was only one area of distress, but it had to have been caused by just a branch. The shots flying from the chase car had been directed toward Bayer far to the left. With some things of a mortal nature, what one knows and what one wants can exist with equal strength at the same time. Harry knew he was shot, but he also knew it was a cut from a broken branch. It wasn’t a matter of one prevailing over the other in his mind; both were and would be true until in the passage of time fact would assert itself as eventually it always does.
With the checklist on the ground and a penlight in his right hand, he held his left hand over the wound. Detonators. Bayer and Johnson were walking-in the wires. Carbine. Five magazines of ammunition. Penlight. List. Wrapper. Etc. Everything was in order, and he needed two hands to get things into the rucksack for carrying them out. But when he moved his left hand he felt a sharp, almost electrical lash circling his waist. It was bad enough that he cried out. Then he shone the light on his hand and saw that it was red, covered in new blood. The wound, when illuminated, was a round hole. “Oh, Christ,” he said, sitting down to wait for the others. It wasn’t a long wait, but during it he noticed that his right arm had gone almost completely numb. He could move it, and grasp with his hand, but he couldn’t feel it anymore, and, despite the numbness, both hands felt cold.
“Are you all right?” he asked Bayer. “Are you all right? I need a pressure bandage.”
“We’re all okay,” Johnson told him. Johnson was the medic. They were in the boat, halfway across Haverstraw Bay. “We stopped the bleeding. Can you feel your legs?”
“No.” Harry wondered how he had forgotten packing up, descending the cliff, rowing halfway across the river. He was very cold, and there was a wind. Water splashed over the sides of the rubber boat, from the paddles and the waves, and being wet made him even colder. He felt that he had a fever, but just in his head. And he had no blanket. Oh, how he wished for a blanket.
“Look back there,” Johnson said.
On the east bank, high on the bluff, was a chain of lights atop police cars and ambulances. Little white flashes like stillborn lightning, or perhaps fireflies, pulsated on the ground. These were flashbulbs going off as photographers did their work. “We’re almost across,” Johnson told him. “I have to paddle now,” and he went back to paddling.
Harry was in and out. He woke to feel the boat swept quickly as they reached the middle of the shipping channel. Then the boat lightened as armaments, shoes, and rucksacks were tossed into the current. By now the line of lights, even though it had grown longer, had been made by distance to look shorter and more intense. And although Harry, whose head rested on the air-filled gunwale, did not see, and the others, paddling furiously in a race for his life, could not have noticed, for a short moment the tops of Manhattan towers, shining with encrusted lights, were visible over the lower ground west of the Palisades. Foreshortened, they sparked and shone like a crown of fire, and then went dark.
They had driven as fast as they could, with Harry and Johnson in the compartment amidst the hay bales. Johnson had useless tourniquets, pressure bandages, and a suturing kit. The external bleeding had stopped, and his forceps were far too shallow to retrieve the bullet, if indeed it could have been found, so he used morphine liberally and with sadness.
During the several hours in the truck, after he had been carried into the warehouse, and waiting for the surgeon, who had stepped out to get something to eat in an all-night diner near the railyards, Harry could hardly say a thing, but he was eloquent and longing within.
Readily and quick, a hundred thoughts, the kinds of things that fill the lives of philosophers, came to him as if from a gun set on rapid fire. As he lay dying, he realized too late that although he might never know the purpose of things he did not have to know if only he could somehow draw as if from life and out of love the city, his times, and Catherine—all destined to vanish into silence. How he regretted that he had not devoted himself to portraying them, and, because he loved them so much, to make an echo, fix them in the light, halt them for a moment in their rush to God knows where.
Sussingham and the surgeon ran across the railyards near the warehouse, jumping rusted tracks covered with weeds and trash. The surgeon was apologetic. And as they were running, beyond their hearing, and before they arrived, Harry was saying, “Catherine, Catherine,” and trying to bring her to him in his senses rather than to think useless thoughts, for what good were they when life was so short and time so limited? If you are dying, what good is thought or speculation compared to love? Love simple and unadorned, that forgives and embraces all regrets and imperfections of judgment, and holds you in its arms as you fall away.
47. In the Arms of an Angel
CATHERINE AWAKENED, AFRAID to look at the time. After so much rain, warmth, and unsettled weather, the city had finally surrendered to fall. The air was clear, and the weakening sun, bright nonetheless, intensified all colors, especially blues. The winds that barreled down Kips Bay, colliding with Corlears Hook and the shoulder of Brooklyn massed awkwardly against the East River, pushed barges and tugs gliding on the current out toward the open sea. Everything glittered or was lost in deep shadow, and things were moving on.
She had slept in a slightly worn satin-and-lace camisole, and when she sat up the straps descending from her shoulders stretched taut and her hair fell about her neck more fetchingly than if it had been carefully arranged. She could not wait to arrive at the Esplanade at eleven, and yet she also wanted time to stop so that she could look forward to it always and never have to be disappointed. But unlike clocks that tell just time, the clock of the city is unimaginably complex, its gears set at all angles, with so many millions of them running off and intersecting and curving back ’round again in a mechanism that transcends all mechanisms. And although now and then the clock stops and time stands still, these are the rarest of moments, and time always begins again, and pulls you out of bed.
Seeking refuge in the shower, she turned her face to the strong stream and the bright light and held in a position that
she knew was prayer, that every Renaissance painter knew was prayer, and that the body, tensed with looking up to receive, knew was prayer. There she stood, naked, gorgeous, and straight, the water cascading over her until she was rose-colored, but, eventually, the capacity of the hot-water boilers notwithstanding, she had to wind down the nickel taps and choke the stream that had seemed to hold her safe as long as she was in it.
Wrapped in a towel, she opened her bathroom door and watched the steam rush out, as white and visible as alpine cloud, to disappear into the colder air of the room as if it had never existed. Steadily and slowly, she accomplished the ritual of dressing. Each movement had been taught to her by her mother, and she honored every one of them. She chose the elegant clothes she had worn at the parley by the fireplace, when Harry hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her—pearl and gray, tight against her body, overwhelming. Yet again, as in the theater, she dressed as ceremonially as a bullfighter, as if what she put on would protect and sanctify her. She had no idea how or why this was so, but the notion was impossible to dismiss. She applied her makeup. She was a grown woman now, an actress who knew how to make up far better than even the women at the continents of counters—veritable Ross Ice Shelves—on the first floors of department stores. She knew exactly, as a stage actress, how to accommodate light strong enough to wash out everything but white, or the dimming of the light almost to darkness. The world was generally more moderate than the stage, but although she was made up more than usual it matched the elegance of her clothing, her mien, and the resplendent sun that day. It had always been her mother’s expert ornamentation, and now it was hers.
The servants were gone, her father had left for somewhere in Asia, her mother for San Francisco, where she would wait for him. Catherine was so alone in the house that she was reluctant to go downstairs: not out of fear but because no one would be there. As a child who spent most of the time by herself, she understood that coming into an empty room was to experience the distant traces of infinite sadness.
Perfectly attired and turned out, moving with the grace and power of the natural-born royalty she was, she walked down the staircase that went by the many windows looking out on the street. The Hales had taken some of the windows from houses they had owned for generations, carefully restoring them, and these filtered every day’s new light through old experienced glass neither so disciplined nor so clear, like modern glass, as to be nothing. Light passing through them was changed, light reflecting from them reinterpreted. When she passed one of these windows, from which house in the past she did not know, her rapidly moving reflection was like the fluttering of birds that had suddenly taken flight. She saw not the picture of a young woman in her prime descending a staircase, but of white doves rising as quickly as the puff of a flashbulb and then vanishing in favor of the motionless façades across Sutton Place.
In the entrance hall, she looked at the tall-case clock, not because she could not have avoided it but because she had decided not to avoid it: 10:23. Breakfast was out of the question, even had she had time.
The strength of the sun seemed such that after walking a little she would not need a coat. She took one last look at the empty house, opened the door, and went out to the stoop. There she hesitated, her hand still on the pull. Eddies of air entered the house. She closed the door and listened to the brass click as the bolt sprang shut. Walking down the few steps, she left her childhood behind. Now she was on the windy street.
This wind combed through the blocks of Manhattan, sometimes gusting cold, sometimes dying down as if to let the sun warm the sidewalks and trees as in spring. Catherine knew that, even in the shade and the wind, as the day progressed she would be glad not to have worn a coat. For the wind would subside, and in walking everything would come right.
Just after leaving the house, she went west through streets that seemed by law to be open only to maids and to old ladies in mink. The maids walked half as fast as they might have had they been happy, and seemed never to look up, to the side, or far down the street. They were shopping for foods of which they would eat the leftovers, and flowers that would not show up in their minute quarters until they had wilted. And, as Catherine knew, because she had once been a little girl who had eaten with them and listened to their stories and complaints, they bore the burden, entirely within themselves, of reconciling a true affection for the employers whom they knew so well and who treated them, almost, like family, and the natural desire to steal their jewels and slit their throats, or at least to walk out, slam the door, and run to children and families just as precious, just as holy, just as deserving, with whom they could not be, for the sake of others whom they were serving.
The old ladies in mink were equally to be pitied as they walked slowly and looked down to guide their timid steps. Bent with age, they could not fight the cold with bodies that could no longer grow hot. Catherine felt the strength of her own body, its extraordinary balance, the straight shot from the top of her head down to the sidewalk, every muscle, tendon, and joint in perfect order, yearning for strain and challenge and overflowing with energy. Her breathing was slow and deep, her stride long, vision sharp, voice strong.
She might grow old, but, like her mother, she would swim, she would strain, she would walk great distances, lift things that were heavy, and dig in the garden. Even were she to die early because of the physical discipline to which she had been bred, she would never abandon it. Struggle was necessary to self-possession. Even from a wheelchair it was possible to struggle against the natural forces that eventually always win. “Spit in their eye,” Evelyn had said, cheerfully but with the tranquil acceptance of her own fate. “Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as He would, with neither fear nor respect.”
Once, when Catherine was eight or nine, they had gone to a Long Island beach club as the guests of friends of her parents, people whom she had never met. They were very famous and owned a movie studio, and had arrived in a chauffeured limousine with their daughter, who was a few years older than Catherine and who ignored her and spent the hours of the visit with a gymnastics coach who looked at Catherine, sized her up, and then turned away as if she didn’t exist. Catherine went swimming, played in the sand, and was left lonely enough to go sit with the adults. She remembered nothing of the conversation except one thing that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Speaking to his friend, or, perhaps better, acquaintance, her father got up from a cushioned wicker chair, went over to her mother sitting opposite, and said, “Look.” He traced the gracefully curved line between the top of Evelyn’s neck and her shoulder. “I believe this is called the trapezius muscle,” he said. “In some people, it hardly exists. In Evelyn, who swims, it’s so beautiful. Isn’t it, Catherine?”
At that moment, the daughter of the other family was exercising on a motionless trapeze. Billy had been aware of how Catherine had been treated, and now he was defending her. He was telling her that she would be like her mother, that in time she would grow into a splendor that would far overshadow what she felt now of powerlessness, awkwardness, loneliness. This she remembered as she walked through the quiet, tree-lined streets of the Upper East Side, because Billy, after delicately and provocatively holding up Evelyn’s strength and beauty as a challenge, had kept his eye on Catherine, never looking away, speaking to her rather than the somewhat stunned couple he was addressing: lovely in remembrance, perfect in execution. She had received a lifetime of confidence almost as if by magic.
It was different for Harry. Although he did his best to ignore the many ways in which he was broken and weakened, he had lost his mother early, he had lost his father and not been there to bury him, he had been forced away from his studies enough times to make it for good, into a business that he was not born for, and a war that no one had been born for. She could only imagine what he had seen and done, and she knew that he had carried into it not only the strength of a man but the delicacy of a child.
Where she herself had observations, visions, and ambition, he had unanswered questions and sorrows. That he forged ahead as he did, and had in the face of death all around him come out with his ability to love unbroken, was perhaps why she loved him so much.
She knew that all the busyness of the world, its infinite mechanical actions in city, in surf, in molecules rising in light, in machines and speech and clouds of sparkling dust, and trains and sounds and crowds and blades of grass that dance in the sun, all pass into silence, leaving only the soul, which cannot be proved and cannot be seen. And she knew that the brightness of day and the passions that flare within it are just a flash of light to fix the soul into an afterimage that will last forever.
This she had known, without knowing that she had known it, since infancy. It was what she was supposed to see in the play when she emerged from the station, the source of her breath and her astonishment. And it was what she was driving toward—walking in such a way that it turned men’s eyes to her magisterial beauty so that some of them would never, for the rest of their lives, forget the sight of her as she made her way to the Esplanade.
Crossing Lexington Avenue, she had seen arrayed in front of one of the little green huts that served as newsstands a fan of papers, each and every one announcing what she knew Harry had done the night before. She could hardly bring herself to look, but could not help but read the huge headlines in the tabloids. “Gang War,” was what they thought. There was a photograph, on one front page, that she had seen from the corner of her eye. Though she had quickly averted her gaze, what she saw was horrible enough to make fear rise from the places where she had forced it to wait, and now Catherine’s gait was not quite steady, and she felt, though her body had warmed, the sun had strengthened, and the wind had lessened, a coldness rising within her from just above her waist all the way through to her shoulders and back.
