by Mark Helprin
“I don’t know what to say,” said Arthur, fearfully.
“Say the truth, chucklewit.”
“No, you’re not.”
“We were this morning,” Fredericka said to her husband.
“That’s right,” he answered. “I remember now that, like Achilles, we made our ablutions in the canal.”
“Please don’t hurt us,” Marina begged, holding her hands like an angel at prayer.
“Why would we hurt you?” Freddy asked. “All you are are nouveaux riches who strut about like guinea hens, spending the unimpressive amounts of money you have in the most ostentatious way and without restraint, wasting your lives in senseless competition with other nouveaux riches who must have this and must have that, never realising that no matter what you do to appear higher than others, no one is ever thinking about you, they’re thinking about their own lot. No one is impressed by you, they are impressed only by themselves. What you imagine to be their impression is them begrudging you a meaningless point in a meaningless game. Position means nothing unless it’s an accident of birth, an unwanted obligation. Then it can be a test, and only then. But if you seek it, you cannot be noble.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arthur told them. “I don’t know who you are, what you are, or why you’re in my house.”
“We’re here to appropriate your Swastika 34 Egg,” Freddy said, like a messenger asking someone to sign a receipt, “but, as I have stated, and given that we are subjecting you to duress, we’ll make it worth your while. Would you like a Gainsborough? A Rubens? I suppose I could even spare a Caravaggio or a small Raphael, if he’s finished cooking the squid,” Freddy said, as a joke for Fredericka. “How could you possibly be so stupid as to consider a piece of grocery string and two thumbtacks a work of art?”
“Why would you steal it if you think it of no value?”
“Frankly, we couldn’t care less. The king of the Gypsies wants it.”
“If, because of the schizophrenic delusion that you are directed by the king of the Gypsies, you do this,” Marina told them, “you’ll be running from the police for the rest of your lives.”
“Of late we’ve been running from the police quite regularly,” Fredericka said. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I know how to deal with it.”
“How?” asked Freddy.
“We shouldn’t run away from the police when they chase us, we should run toward them.”
“Why?”
“Remember when Stephen Hawking came to dinner and told us all about Einstein and Lawrence of Arabia?”
“No, Popeel, it was Einstein and Lorentz.”
“Ah!” she said, “I thought it was Lawrence of Arabia. Anyway, if the police are chasing us at sixty miles per hour, and we are fleeing at sixty miles per hour, as Einstein said, we will be frozen in time. The chase could last forever, or they would only have to increase their speed a tiny fraction and they could catch us—or, if we decreased our speed by a tiny fraction, or if we both decreased but we decreased more, or if we both increased but they increased more.”
“Yes?”
“That’s why, the next time we’re chased, we should run toward them. Let’s say we’re going at the speed of light, and they’re going at the speed of light. If we run toward them, when we pass them we’ll be moving apart at twice the speed of light. What better way to get away from someone?”
“I’m willing to give that a try,” said Freddy. “It does have a wavering charm.” He addressed the Clovises. “Don’t you realise that in supporting the destructive currents of modernism you are destroying the world? The only thing that makes art of a bloody piece of grocery string hanging from a bloody fucking tack is the power of coercion. There is such a thing as art, grounded in a universal language derived from all human experience and the absolutes of nature, and when you destroy the limitations and definitions of art by the inclusion—via sterile decree—of absolutely everything, you destroy civilisation. Or didn’t you know that?”
“Are you saying,” Marina Clovis asked meekly, “that Arthur and I are destroying civilisation?”
“Yes,” Freddy said, “I am.”
THE ROYALS FOUND KITTEN, stepped into his car, and disappeared in traffic. Kitten looked grim.
“What’s the matter?” Freddy asked. “We’ve got it.”
“I can’t pay you,” Kitten said. “I was just on the cell phone with Larry’s wife. The FBI arrested him this morning for conspiracy to import prohibited lizards. The deal is off.”
“Bloody hell!” said Freddy. “We did that for nothing?”
“Don’t worry, you have a distinguished career ahead of you. You were just in the big game, and you sailed through.”
Freddy grumbled.
“At least get us new teeth,” Fredericka begged.
“I’m the king of the Gypsies, not the Tooth Fairy,” Kitten said. “What do Gypsies know about teeth?”
“You’re neither a Gypsy nor a king, and you’ve left us in a most difficult position,” Freddy told him.
“If there’s anything I can’t stand,” Kitten said, “it’s someone who thinks I owe him a living. This was a business proposition that failed. I don’t owe you anything. That’s the law.” He stopped the car at K Street to let them out. “But, here,” he said, handing Freddy a twenty-dollar bill, “get yourself some sashimi. You don’t have to chew it.”
As they emerged from his car into a sea of young lawyers, both male and female, in dreary suits and rushing to and fro, Kitten said plaintively, “You’re taking the string?”
“We stole it,” Freddy stated, “so it’s ours. That’s the law.”
Kitten drove off, they threw the string into a dustbin, and the impoverished couple walked aimlessly toward Pennsylvania Avenue. “What are we going to do, Freddy?”
“Tonight we’ll sleep in the park, and tomorrow we’ll get new teeth, new clothes, a bath, and perhaps some exercise.”
“How?”
“Somehow. Look,” he said, holding up the twenty-dollar bill, “we’re on the right track: we’ve got twenty bob.” But as he finished his sentence a bicycle messenger dressed in metallic green the colour of a fly’s eye flew past them, snatched the bill from Freddy’s hand, and was gone before they knew what happened. “We’re even again. The only direction is up.”
They slept in the aura of a great white temple that looked east over the reflecting pools. Here Lincoln sat, day and night, through the years, in tranquil marble and heroic size, his expression that of a man whose understanding of things ran deeper than his powers to alter them. It was this expression that stripped its onlookers of all pretensions and allowed them to hear in their hearts the song of the Union dead.
At first Freddy and Fredericka did not even see Lincoln. They found a place near one of the monument’s walls, where they lay down on soft earth amidst fragrant bushes and slept for six or seven hours. No one saw them or even came near, and they were safe, being so indigent that not even the robbers of people who sleep in the bushes would have bothered with them. This was an unusual circumstance for two people who had lived in great houses and palaces always under guard, but as one feels less safe when one is guarded than when one has no reason to be guarded, they slept peacefully and well. In England, when Freddy was by himself on the heath, he was identifiable. And even were he not, his kit and rifle were a far richer prize than what he had now, which was nothing. When they went to sleep, the fragrant air that gently swept across them was a perfect temperature, and the ground and walls were warm. It felt like the Garden of Eden.
But in the middle of the night a Potomac miasma, sticky, cool, and perhaps the very agency that addled the minds of politicians, settled over them like the spinnings of a silkworm. Awakened and miserable, neither spoke as the minutes passed, until Freddy asked, “Are you awake?”
“Yes, are you?”
“I just spoke.”
“I’m cold.”
“I am, too, and thirsty.”
<
br /> “And I’m hungry, Freddy, but we have no money.”
“Perhaps we can break into a tea wagon and find a stale pastry, or what they call a hot dog,” which Freddy always pronounced with the stress on the second word.
“Oh, Freddy, I’d love a dog. It would be just what we needed.”
“To eat?”
“No, just to love.” She turned away and said, to the night, “Or a baby.” He didn’t hear.
“How would we feed a dog? We can’t even feed ourselves.”
“Perhaps we could hunt.”
“In Washington?”
“They must have game preserves.”
“I thought you were against hunting.”
“I am, but I’m hungry.”
“Let’s walk about.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Why? We’re the criminals.”
They went around the steps of the memorial and looked at the statue of Lincoln. Then they walked inside. “You know, I’ve been here before, with the president-before-this-one, but it was in daylight, we faced outward, and I had to give a speech. I didn’t really see. Look at his face. Of all the kings of England, none was half as noble. Nor Nelson, nor Wellington, nor Marlborough, nor Churchill.
“In the middle of this crazed, materialistic, common country, where the lowest of the low is turned up by the strong currents of progress and rides upon the glittering surface of national life more buoyantly than an aristocrat; in the midst of all this that I thought so unimpressive—Gypsies, Cadillacs, houses with flat roofs—we have been outdone by the visage of a peasant, a soul speaking through marble, in a history not our own.”
“Who is that?” Fredericka asked.
“Lincoln.”
“He’s the one who shot Kennedy?”
“No, no, Fredericka. He himself was assassinated, a century before Kennedy. He freed the slaves.”
“Is he a big deal, then?”
“Look at him, Fredericka. He suffered and died for an undeniable principle. They had a great war here, and lost their sons. He lost his, too, though not in the fighting. It shows in his face: love that is ever awaiting.”
“Oh, I know about that,” she said.
“You do?”
“I do.”
“I see,” said Freddy, looking down at his feet. He always regretted that he hadn’t come to love her. She had a good heart, she was beautiful, her eyes were blue. She was willing to walk in the mountains, sail into a gale, and propel her long frame alongside him in running or in the waves. The problem was that she appeared to have no sense of what was noble or sacrificial. Were that so, and he was not absolutely sure that it was, how could he live with her forever? Strong, facile, powerful, and at his peak, he wanted a woman who, though she might grace the cover of a magazine, was also able to lose herself between the covers of a book and feel the tide of serious things. This was his dream, and had been all his life. Occasionally Fredericka did show flashes of wit and understanding, but these flashes were for Freddy like the lightning storm over Tunisia that once he had seen from a mountaintop in Sicily: silent, dim, and achingly remote. And though physically she was nearly perfect, she was ill-educated. Just as he was determining to ignore that, for, after all, she was his wife, she asked, “Did they have World War One to free the slaves, or World War Two, or both?”
“The War Between the States,” Freddy answered.
“There are so many states, more than a hundred. How did they keep track of which ones won and which ones lost? It must have been confusing.”
“They were organised into two opposing camps.”
“That was a good idea, but how did they decide who would be on which side?”
“It was the South versus the North, the slave-holding states versus the free states.”
“They’re very creative, aren’t they, those Americans. They’re so organised. I wish my wardrobe was half as organised as their country. Freddy, how are we going to eat? How will we get clothes? How will we replace our teeth?”
“We’ll have to work.”
“But who would hire people like us? We’re so dirty and strange.”
“YOU GET ROOM and board for a week, a voucher at the thrift shop, haircuts, referral to a dental clinic, and delousing,” a Salvation Army major told them. “In return, you will behave in a civil fashion, neither smoke nor drink nor fight, attend chapel twice a week, and work in the job we send you to so that you can begin to pay your own way. If all goes well, you’ll gradually move up to full payment for services, and, eventually, God willing, you can move on.”
“I’ve always contributed to the Salvation Army,” Freddy said. “My entire family has. We were right to have done so.”
“Thank you,” said the major, a kind of Irishman. “We appreciate that.”
After they were deloused—though they had had not a single louse on them—they were shown to a shower room where, because they were married, they would be allowed to be together. Green operating-room clothing and plastic slippers awaited them when they finished. They had stripped off and thrown away their clothes, and stood now without anything of their own, not a single thing, not even an earring or a ring. And yet they felt confident and strong, perhaps because, though they could easily have fallen further—at this point they hardly knew difficulty or degradation—they thought they had reached the bottom. They had nothing and so could not have had less. They stood with no accoutrements, props, or illusions. To reach this state is worth an earldom or two, in light of what it does for you, and after the addition of such a thing to the princely qualities that had been Freddy’s since birth, it was not surprising that for the first time in his life he actually felt like a king.
They stepped into a shower stall of enamelled tin and pulled a plastic shower curtain across the gap. Above them was a fluorescent light, and a new bar of white soap rested in a cheap plastic holder. When Freddy turned the taps a strong stream of hot water issued from above like a waterfall in the mountains. Produced in an industrial boiler, it would last as long as they wanted.
In fluorescent light, Fredericka’s body was like an Elgin Marble. Unadorned and perfect, she was now her essential self. When she took her turn in the stream of water and pulled her wet hair back, and the stream beat against her breasts like the overture of a Wagnerian opera, Freddy was not unmoved. For all her faults, this was she. Her bones, her flesh, her teeth (that remained), the musculature that allowed her to stand nobly straight, this was Fredericka, with not a thread of fashion and no place in any order but that of nature. This was Fredericka, the wife whom he had never loved, and she was royal not in the royal way but in the way of things that exceed and confound hierarchy and privilege. She was something that could have lived in and mastered the sea. She was the centre, and vital, as lithe as a porpoise, with blue eyes like sapphires, and the shoulders of Aphrodite.
THEIR ROOM for the time it would take to save them was three or four storeys above the street, just beyond the crowns of trees that protected them from the heat as a jetty holds back the waves. Even the trees that were rooted beneath the sidewalks shimmered in daylight, were reservoirs of cool shadow, rustled at night with every breeze, and early in the morning were luminous green hives for birds. Just over them was the top of a stone building across the street. Its roof was flat and undistinguished, but undulating in the air above it were the mirage-like images of whited sepulchres—domes, pediments, friezes, roof lines like the Parthenon’s—real buildings as bleached as bone, floating in the blue as if on the ocean on a summer day.
Two twin beds, a white laminate desktop between them, two graceless metal chairs with vinyl cushions, a lamp, a sink, a mirror, and a parchment-coloured window shade that moved to and fro in the wind, were all they had other than their operating-room pyjamas and a small pile of clothing they had purchased with their coupon in the thrift shop. For most of the first afternoon of their salvation, Fredericka lay on her bed, listening in the heat to the wind as it argued with the shade, to traf
fic flowing down the street, and to the sound of Freddy sewing industriously on the bed across from her.
Sewing is quiet, but not silent. If you listen closely you can hear the cloth as it is pulled and flopped over and even as it is bunched. You can hear a strange sound, a cross between breathing, talking, and distant singing, as the tailor attends to his task. You can hear the thread as it is pulled, and sometimes, if the world is still, the needle as it pierces.
“I didn’t know you could sew,” she said. “I’ve never even threaded a needle.”
“It’s a military virtue.”
“But it’s feminine and tranquil.”
“Feminine or not, when your clothes are torn in the field you have to repair them, and you must also be able to sew up a wound. Then there’s sailing, where you must sew, so I’ve had three reasons to be a tailor, and at the moment I must say it seems a lovely occupation. Do you hear the birds? There are not that many lines of work in which you can listen all day, intently, to songbirds.”
“I’ve been listening.”
“I’m almost done. They said they’d come at three to get us for the dentist. Very kind of them, really, and impressive that they understand that people like us don’t have watches.”
“You mean royalty, or paupers?”
“Take your pick. We didn’t need to wear watches—though goodness knows I have quite a few—because we had our staffs. I must say I hated it when rather than just being able to wander I was driven, escorted, and timed. All those poor secretaries and pages thought we wanted to blast through the traffic lights and have doors held open for us, when we had, in fact, an insatiable desire for the ordinary frictions of the world. They aren’t imaginative enough to understand,” Freddy said, finishing the button on a dusty-rose polo shirt for Fredericka, “that potatoes have much more staying power than caviar.”
“If you put them in a cool dark place,” said Fredericka.
“I mean that our diet in all things should not be as rich as everyone imagines.”
“I thought one of your favourites was caviar on a baked potato.”
