by Mark Helprin
Surely she would not now be brought down by the most unlikely chance. It was the kind of thing that could happen, but, to her, never had. It wouldn’t. He would be there, as promised, and the fear and despair that almost brought her to a halt, that made her want the ground, and to lie down scandalously on the sidewalk somewhere in the Sixties between Park and Madison (it had probably never been done), would serve only to bless the joy of the moment with contrast and relief. Had anything happened, they would have contacted her by now—if it had been in the plan, if they had known how, if the timing had been right. Perhaps the phone was ringing at that very moment in the empty house.
She resolved to banish such thoughts and move forward. The Esplanade was not far, either in time or distance. The Esplanade, between the castle and the town, once a battleground, now a place of ease, was where war and peace conjoined, each colliding with the other and sinking back, like two waves, into still water that vibrates with the power of both. This was the Esplanade, where everything came together, and the story came to its close.
In the midst of her fear and uncertainty, she thought of how close she was to Harry in feeling and in thought, and that this would never depart. They both had had a vision of the ferries on a summer’s day, the women in white, the men in boaters, hats everywhere like moths in a meadow. And together they had once seen a woman in Grand Central as they walked through the south waiting room, a deeply troubled, elegant woman, with a sadness they could not name, trapped in a beam of light, her chin resting on her hand, her eyes fixed upon a horizon far beyond the walls. Perhaps from some wound or incident of childhood, or by inheritance or accident or ineffable command, both Harry and Catherine had a deep and abiding love for all those who have been and vanished, who were left behind, expectant and surprised, trapped in time that will not die and is lost to a blind world yet as full as our own because it is our own, or soon will be.
Within sight of the park, on a street of many mansions of the type that were being felled by the wrecker’s ball to make way for more efficient high-rises, Catherine passed the small garden, soon to be buried beneath layers of steel and brick, of a house that seemed almost uninhabited, so resigned and faithful was it to the beauties and emotions of an age that had passed.
She stopped so suddenly, it was as if she had walked into a street lamp. In the garden, illuminated by morning sun that reached back into a deeply shadowed place, was a bronze relief, almost life size, a memorial of the First World War. A soldier, his life gone, his rifle and bayonet cast aside, lay motionless in the arms of an angel. Winged and strong, she looked upward, undisturbed, about to rise. For soldiers need angels to comfort and carry them up, and if they are lucky, the angels will be sent to them early, so that in one form or another they will know them for all the days of their lives.
This could only have been a cry and a prayer occasioned by the death of a young man who as a boy had played in that garden beneath the watchful and loving eyes of his mother and father. It was the truth of the world, that all the world’s busyness could not subsume, that all the world’s illusions and beliefs could not override or dim. Catherine could hardly breathe. For a moment, she managed only the short gasps that come to small children after they have cried, a breathlessness that though it should have a name, does not.
She crossed Fifth Avenue and went through one of the entrances into the park. The stone wall was black with the soot of a century, for some of the smoke of a hundred million fires, risen to be carried away with the wind, had curled long enough near the ground—perhaps on a winter’s night many years before Catherine was born—to leave a part of itself before it disappeared. From the playing fields near the Sheep Meadow, to which private schools marched their elementary and middle school students, children’s voices rode on the wind, sharp, distant, and gentle. Once, Catherine had been marched there as well. Soon, on the Esplanade, she would tell her husband that she was carrying their child.
From its south end, the expanse of the Esplanade is both majestic and comforting. The trees in their raggedness and imperfect perfection are far more beautiful than the precise columns of a temple. They lean over the center, the branches on high reaching one for the other and sometimes succeeding, like clasped hands soon to be pulled apart. Their leaves were down, golden and red, playing in the whirlwinds that had dried them, and though the long walk was empty, the time was not yet eleven.
As she waited, it was as if her life were draining away. Why was no one on the Esplanade but she? Why were no latecomers on their way to midtown to work, no cops walking toward the precinct in the park, no nannies wheeling babies, and no Harry? Still, it was only a quarter after eleven.
She stiffened with courage. He had been late before. And when he came, she knew, he would not quite understand why she would cry. He would be philosophical, and she would forgive him. He would come up with something like what he had once said to her, out of the blue, in front of a restaurant—“There’s so much I look back upon with affection, but when I was there, I couldn’t quite grasp it. I didn’t love enough”—and she would guide him to look ahead, happily. What would they do now? How would they live through midcentury and beyond?
“You’ll see what comes,” she would say, generations of confidence and calm reaching out to heal a man wounded by war, elevating him, as if in the embrace of an angel, to float and glide slightly above the Esplanade, when walking was somehow a thing of the past, and to love him, and carry him up.
She thought of the relief, set into the garden wall, a soldier in the arms of an angel. “You’ll do what you’ve always done,” she would say. “We’ll do it together.”
In a generation or two, we vanish without a trace, and if against all odds we manage to engrave a line in the stone, to impress upon history an act or deed, we become it and nothing more, and so depart according to the original premise. This is why Catherine’s singing was so brave, and why Harry loved her for it so much. Day after day she went onstage and played her part, devoting herself to a song that disappeared even as she sang it, like the wake of a ship, a brilliant stroke that shines and sings and gently falls back into the quiet of the sea.
She knew he was gone, but he was there as well, as if he were with her, for everything within her called him forth, and for a precious minute or two that the practical might call hallucination and the faithful might call love, she pulled him back from the blind world and he appeared.
Neither spoke even the other’s name. Alone on the Esplanade, when they met they linked hands, turned, and began to walk north, whence he had come. It was a dream they had had since they were children, dreamt in loneliness and in war, in their best times and in their worst, when with others and when not, while flying through the air beneath the pillars of the El, or falling into the Battle of France, while riding in her parents’ car, powerless except to dream, or when onstage singing into the darkness. It was what gave him hope and courage and made her song searing to an honest heart, and now that they had it they would need nothing more.
Although she had not known it was Harry she had seen swinging beneath the El, she had fallen in love with him then. For most of her life she had been waiting even when she had not known that she was waiting. And now she knew, she remembered, and when she realized that, then as now, she loved him most when he was flying away from her, she shuddered, and in astonishment and grief she took in the short, involuntary breaths that she took onstage.
Had the story come full circle in the way that stories end, they would have walked quietly, Catherine and Harry, into the rest of their life, knowing that in the end the whole world is nothing more than what you remember and what you love, things fleeting and indefensible, light and beautiful, that were not supposed to last, echoing forever—golden leaves swept across the Esplanade, wind-polished bridges standing in the winter sun, the sound of Catherine’s song.
Epilogue
SOMETIME BEFORE THANKSGIVING, Catherine returned to the apartment. In the weeks that had passed, the heat had
gone on and despite newly cold nights the air inside, freshened because the window had been left open, was as warm as if no one had left.
The doorman, who didn’t know that Harry was dead, smiled at Catherine, who smiled back and tried not to cry. With exemplary control, she rode up in the elevator, but could not help feeling as she ascended that when she opened the door Harry would be there. Although she knew it could not be so, she believed it because she so wished it, and as she turned her key in the lock, she felt hope, excitement, expectation, and love.
It was a lovely thing, the turning of a key, the brass tumblers as they snapped to attention, the sound of someone coming home. When she opened the door, the silence and desertion hit her hard, and her grief rose all over again. But then she heard the shade-pull tapping against the window frame. Lifting her head sharply and looking toward it, she said “Oh no!” and ran to the living room, expecting a miracle, believing the impossible. And there in the living room, when she saw the pull and the cord swaying in the wind, she cried until she could cry no more.
When she was done, she walked back to the hall, where she stood, almost insensibly, until she became aware of the bracelet. She instinctively clasped it to her wrist, as if to ratify her love for Harry forever, and then she saw the note, on musical notation paper from her first year in college.
Before she opened it, she touched and held it as if it were part of him. Before she opened it, she knew she would keep and read it until someday it was yellowed and brittle, and that she would keep faith to it until the end. Before she opened it, she knew it would be full of heartbreaking instruction. And then, because she knew that this would be the last, and that whatever was left of him was about to depart, she slowly unfolded it, and with all her courage, she read.
In it, Harry told her that, because she was so young, she had to marry, and that he wanted her above all to live to the full. He told her that for her the world would start again, imperfectly, but that it would start nonetheless. This he knew. He told her how much he had loved her, more than anything in life, and that even were he to die, and except that he wanted more time with her, she had been enough, she had been much more than enough, and he would die well.
He left no message for his son—who would hunger for such a message all his life, for it was not just Catherine who had been left—because he did not know he would have a child. And at the end, after bidding her once again to marry, he wrote: “I thought I had come through the war, but apparently have not. If that’s so, and I’m one of the later casualties—the hospitals are full of them, and in other ways the war will continue, in silence, far longer than anyone may now imagine—you must not fall with me. Catherine, I beg of you not to withhold the smallest part of your love from your husband and your children. I know you will think of me now and then, but with time I will leave your memory except in symbols and traces. Let them be enough for you. Let me pass into the things we love: the motions of the city; its whitening sunrises; the ferries that glide across the harbor, trailing smoke; the avenues where once we walked toward an open horizon, holding one another comfortably pressed together at the hip; the bridges diamond-lit and distant; and all the millions, who should never be forgotten, and never go unloved.”
And this she did, she married again, and fulfilled his wish, but when she thought of him it was not just as he had asked. For although she could not see a ferry lonely in the distance moving smoothly and silently toward the Narrows, or a snowfall that muted the streets, or any other such beautiful thing without thinking of him, she thought of him most of all as she had seen him first, swinging beneath the El, rising and falling, rising and falling, rising and falling through another time permanently set within her heart.
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About the Author
Mark Helprin is the acclaimed author of Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works. His novels are read around the world, translated into over 20 languages.
