by Mark Helprin
“That’s right,” Freddy said. “Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for it the next day.”
“I’ve found exactly that,” the executive said, warming to Freddy and his beautiful wife. “I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I’ll have to look up the Shakespeare section.” He consulted a computer terminal at the junction of the Harridan aisle and the grande allée, and led them on a march that lasted five minutes. At the end of one of the last rows, almost in a corner, was the Shakespeare. Not a single carton was stacked any higher than Freddy could reach. It extended fifty feet or so, and the rest was silence.
THEY ALMOST KILLED THEMSELVES getting back on the train, which when they left the Gippy Hog Vow was moving down the track in a slow acceleration that would begin an ocean-craft-like run across the continent. As it picked up speed headed for the mountains in the blue of evening, they breathed hard and their faces were flushed. Their legs were covered with stinging scratches and clean crimson lines, but the pain was as pleasant as a mild sunburn. Fredericka had never seen Freddy’s face look as it did when he stood in the door of the boxcar watching the countryside flow past the train, and the mountains loom ever more excitingly larger. “What’s happened?” she asked.
Freddy’s eyes moved in answer to her question, but it was only a partial answer. Then he filled it out. “For a thousand years,” he said, “the history of my family has had a single keel. It has been a single work, with a constant aim. For a thousand years, we have lived within a context of expectations that, though often broken, has just as often been restored. And do you know what?”
The train shuddered darkly underneath them. “What?” she asked.
“It’s over. It’s shattered. Let’s say it was a river. Now we have come to the falls.”
“Is that good?”
“No.”
“Is it bad?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s only what it is. It means that even if we find whatever we’re supposed to find, and go back, and I become king and you queen, this is where our story will be, this the place by which we will be remembered. And this is not home. Take it in. You’ll see many beautiful things and many things that are great, but they will leave but a short trace, like the evanescent lines of momentary particles about which physicists talk incomprehensibly, like life itself. Nothing concerning us will any more be properly memorialised except in the eyes of God, which is the way it is and has always been for most people. What you see is what you will get, and then it will be gone, like music that you cannot perfectly remember—which is why you must take it in your heart in full.”
“But I do, Freddy. I always have. It’s all I can do.” She smiled in what appeared to him, to his shock, to be wisdom greater than his own. And then they were taken up by a number of things that filled the world of a summer evening—the sun lacing the tops of the Blue Ridge with a piping of molten gold, rhododendron blooming deep in the woods, the perfume of night air streaming from copses already sheltered in complete darkness, the beautiful rhythm of the rails, and the feeling that in the endless country ahead were things that in their great and lively action could redeem them.
Sleeping in a moving freight car was hardly as pleasurable as riding in it during the day. The floor vibrated like a gravel sorter and the rumbling that otherwise was exciting became a torture. Once they were asleep, however, to stay asleep they had to sleep deeply, and thus when they awakened they were well rested. They awoke after first light, when the land had already begun to warm, in the dryer, less insistent heat of altitude. All around for as far as they could see was a mountainous wilderness. They didn’t know the distance they had covered or in which direction the train had run during the night, but neither did they care, for they looked at things as a bird might, wanting to go this way or that because of a clear alley in the clouds, or because the glint of rock on a distant peak made a bull’s-eye in the light of day, or because the wind turned a meadow on a hillside into an alluring sea of waving grass.
They had a large amount of food left but had used up most of their water, and they wanted to bathe. This made them partial to finding a lake or river, which, in turn, decided their course. Not a single work of man was visible other than what belonged to the railroad. The rest was an endless view of rock, sky, and trees that made a continuous conquest of mountains that ran in corrugated rows, with clearings on the highest slopes and in the widest valleys. Because the train was headed south-southwest, they were able to see in the flawless morning light every leaf to the west and north.
Now and then they would go into tunnels. And because they were high on a ridge, and going down, the train moved slowly. “I don’t want to go south,” said Freddy. “I feel that we should go west. Look there, in the distance,” he said. “You see that line that looks like a thread? It’s probably a rail line, or at least a road, and it points in the right direction.”
“Which direction?”
“North-west, which would take us to the Great Lakes. Their waters are cool and fresh. Have you ever seen them?”
“I’ve flown over them, I think.”
“Right in the middle of the continent there’s an open horizon on a sea of sweet water.”
“That’s where we should go,” Fredericka said. “I’d love to take a long swim in a freshwater ocean. Can you drink it?”
“In the northlands, where the water is pure, I believe so, but it’s too cold there to swim.”
As they were absolutely free to go anywhere they pleased, they determined upon the Great Lakes, and as their timing was all their own they simply jumped off the train at the first grassy bank they saw. It was steep, and they rolled. Had a rock been hidden in the meadow they could have been killed, but though gravity took them and bounced them bruisingly down the hill, knocking the wind out of their lungs, they felt well guided and safe. And when finally they came to a stop, they laughed in relief. The train progressing into the distance made a sound like the ocean, and they lay where they were.
Fredericka rested in the meadow, her arms outstretched, her hair somewhat dishevelled, and Freddy saw her as if for the first time. Overcome by the fall of her braid, the curl of her fingers, the depth of her eyes, the sweetness and beauty of her face, he took her in his arms, lifted her toward him, and gently cradled her head in his left hand. Now she nearly floated up to him, because for the first time she was getting what she deserved, and for the first time he was looking at her with love for all she was, even her imperfections, which no longer put him off but drew him in. As the thunder of the freight train echoed in the valleys, softened, and finally disappeared, they were left with the sound of the wind moving through the pines like water cascading through the teeth of a weir, as if the tops of the trees were willow branches dangling in a stream, and the sky were water trailing through them.
THEY DID NOT REACH the base of the mountain until midday, which was surprising to Fredericka, who asked how long it would take to get to the other railway. Freddy replied that this was, by line of sight, about thirty miles distant. Taking into account rest and obstructions, they could travel at about two miles per hour, but these were mountains of insistent corrugation, and therefore the distance would be double that of flat land. “Thirty or forty hours,” he said. “But allowing for sleep, darkness, and troubles, it might take two or three days. In war it could be done in a day.”
“How long would it take in a car?”
“At seventy miles per hour, with Swiss bridges and viaducts, about half an hour.”
“Is this what you do,” Fredericka asked, “when you go off into Scotland, or when you walked from Innsbruck to Venice?”
“To Trento. Yes.”
“Why?”
“I enjoy it,” he said, as they pushed toward the sound of a river, moving through evergreen branches that brushed them like ostrich plumes.
“What’s that?” Fredericka
asked.
“From the cry, I believe it’s a red-tailed hawk, although it’s hard to be sure.”
As they moved through the fragrant evergreens, Fredericka said, “Freddy, this is so lovely; it really is like Eden.”
“You know,” Freddy stated academically, “although he was unaware, Adam loved Eve. He came to know it only after they were thrown out and they had wandered.”
“Oh,” she said.
Then they came to the river.
IT WAS WIDE for a river that ran so high in the mountains, and it ran fast for so late in summer. Fresh water that is channelled between walls of rock and pine runs with a certain rhythm even when it is not rushing, but when the flow is rapid, mists are released in arcs of counterpoint, the surface oscillates in a steady beat, and the water breaking against rocks and leaping over them is the melody. A good river is nature’s life work in song. It winds and cuts through the land, connecting the high places with the low, mountaintops with estuaries, light blue sky with deep blue sea. And always above it is the action of water purifying air, of air giving life to water, and of light lost in rainbows that float above the fast dip of the stream.
They looked at this stream, breathed-in the air above it, and let its sound command their senses. Never had they seen a more beautiful or perfect thing. They leant down on a flat rock and put their faces in, drinking from the heaving flow.
“Now we have to cross the river,” Freddy said. “It’s waist-deep, a hundred yards wide, and running fast. You won’t be swept off the ends of the earth if you’re knocked over, you’ll only be carried downstream. When that happens, avoid the rocks. Keep watch for them, and hit them with both feet if hit them you must. As you flow downstream, continue to work your way straight across. The mistake people make is to swim either upstream or down at angles other than the perpendicular. You must cross as if you’re in perfectly still water. That way you can confound even a great river simply by following your aim. It’s vector analysis. I’ll go first with my pack, make my way back along the bank twice the distance the current will have swept me downriver, and recross to join you, landing probably right here. Then I’ll take your pack, and help you cross.”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“Each time you go in a river like this,” he said, “you’re supposed to shed your sins and be forgiven your trespasses.”
“What trespasses?” she asked.
“For me, more than I can enumerate. As you get older, they accumulate and you acquire the ability to recognise them.”
“Freddy, someday you’ll be the head of the Church of England. You will appoint bishops and archbishops, you’ll take vows. . . . I always thought it would be just a formality, that you didn’t like what they do in the Church.”
“I don’t any more. It’s too goddamned smarmy.”
“But you do believe in God,” she said.
“I do, and so will the bishops I appoint.”
“You do, even in these modern times?”
“Look about,” he told her. She swept her eyes from the river to the sky, and looked up and down the river course and at the curve of the pines that lined its banks like a great wreath.
“The evidence is here,” she said, having understood. “In this river. In this forest. In these trees.”
“Toute la nature crie qu’il existe,” Freddy said, and Fredericka, having been finished in finishing school, understood exactly the meaning of the words, even if she did not know who had said them first. “All nature cries out that He exists.”
FREDDY THREW HIMSELF in without hesitation. He had crossed many a river in Scotland, the Alps, and elsewhere, and knew that when water ran full you had to give it full attention. Once in, there was indeed nothing else but the crest of the waves and the onrush of looming rocks. Sometimes he swam furiously, and sometimes he let himself go, turning to kick off a boulder against which he was thrown, pivoting about after contact, holding still for a moment, and then resuming the downstream slide. Until the next hazard, he would move straight across. In this kind of procession, punctuated by danger and its relief, he made his way to the other side, where he came to rest in a sunny pool that rocked violently at its outer edge and then was made still by walls of granite at the bank. He pulled himself up, shedding water, and placed the waterlogged pack on a dry ledge. Then, he climbed the wall until he was in the forest. He ran the half mile or so back to where he had started, waved to Fredericka, and continued upstream for another half mile. In the water once again and now accustomed to it, he moved with greater assurance. His emergence from the river at the place where he started struck Fredericka as superb.
Without comment, because he saw that she was apprehensive, he shouldered Fredericka’s pack and said, “Into the river.” Once she was in, she would have neither time nor space for fear. The water seized them in its delphinine curves and silver flow, and for five minutes they used every sinew and every nerve to keep alive. Freddy lent her his strength and experience, shouting now and then what to do, which she accomplished well. In the peculiar moment when the current twirled them around after they hit their first boulder feetfirst and were accelerated once again into the stream, they were united in fear. It all went so quickly that before they knew it they were in the slowly rotating pool.
Twirling in the sunlit caldera, they held together and could not take their eyes from one another. With the water-darkened pack straps pressing against his muscular shoulders, Freddy no longer had the face of a ridiculous man. Sunburnt and unshaven, his eyes clear alight, he had the nobility he had longed for and that his grandfather had had in that great moment in the desert when the troops had come up from the beach and sung “God Save the King” entirely unbidden. All the foolishness that had been impressed upon him by the conscious and unconscious wishes of scores of millions, and the distorting burden of being so close to and put upon by a role in history, were gone. He was just a man, and she loved him.
He held her, she held him, and they floated. Who was this now so close to him, with her broad back, her nose that jutted out and was too big but ravishingly beautiful nonetheless? In her expression and in her eyes he saw a woman he had never known. He didn’t understand why he was shaking but he knew he wasn’t cold. Her hair was wet, and in the French braid it looked as if it had been made to drip with the water of rapids. Perhaps he had slighted her. Perhaps he had underestimated her. Perhaps he had not been patient enough in seeing her come along. But now she had come along, and in pure water and bright sun, with speech made impossible by the thundering of the river, they embraced and rocked slowly back and forth not like the Prince and Princess of Wales, but like an anonymous couple locked in embrace on a dance floor long after the music has stopped. And, like that couple, had their lives ended there, their lives would have ended in perfection.
III.
MANIFEST DESTINY
ANGLO-SAXON TIMES IN CHICAGO
THE MAN WHO LIVED on the floor above—which is to say the ground floor, because they lived in the basement—had a scratchy voice that went well with the four hundred and fifty pounds that were the rest of him. Throughout the winter, even when the temperature fell to fifteen below, he wore a Hawaiian shirt. His most prepossessing trait, however, was not the way he dressed but the way he sang, and he never was without song except when he slept, except that he sometimes sang in his sleep. And why not? He sang when he ate. He sang, bien entendu, in the shower. He sang when the fire engines roared by, as often they did, because the fire station was next door, and he sang when they didn’t.
And he sang only one kind of song, those about the city of his birth, the city he had never left, that he loved, and that was, for him, the world. “My kind of town,” he would scrape out from the chalk, “Chicago is . . . my kind of town,” and this he would repeat over and over because it was the only part he knew. Then he might switch to, “Chicago, Chicago, that wonderful town, that wonderful town, Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around. Bet your bottom dollar you lose the blues in Chi
cago, Chicago, the town that Billy Sunday could not shut down,” and that was it, repeated ad infinitum, because he did not know the verse about State Street that great street.
Freddy’s favourite was, as it was rendered upstairs: “In Chicago, in Nebraska, go go Pogo. In Milwaukee, in Alaska, go go Pogo. Virginia to Virginia, with everything that’s in ya, you can even get as far as New Mexico. Oh! In Chicago, in Nebraska . . . ,” and so on. When the royal couple sat at dinner, their faces half hidden in the kind of headgear that is called a Chicago hat and is worn only in Chicago, the Gulag, and adult homes, they would look up at the vibrating ceiling and a swaying bulb at the end of a frayed cord—Freddy had wrapped the bulb in a slowly oxidizing cone of saffron-coloured foolscap—and let the rhythm envelop them like a Tibetan chant.
It was not only the rhythm of his gravelly, unconscionable bass, but that of the house shuddering both as he danced and at the behest of the navy blue wind that came off the lake and froze solid anything unheated by flame or glow. If you looked north, before your eyeballs iced over you could follow a line that stretched in the dusk across the solid white top of Lake Michigan, the rock-cold Canadian ground, and the Arctic ice, a line that, without tarrying in a single firelit domain, stretched all the way to the pole itself. With the possible exception of the Navy Pier and the jetty, no bulwark against the absolute existed for Chicago. The city’s parlours, offices, and institutions, its banks, kindergartens, and intimate restaurants, its libraries, bedrooms, and all the rest, were the first wall against which broke the snowy wave of polar winter that knew nothing but the black of starlit space and an ocean of tundra covered in a death shroud of white.
Buildings of stone and glass—gold and grey, black and silver, sometimes amber—were the first breastwork hit by the wind. Freddy said it was as if the Palace of Westminster had been constructed atop the last wet rock at the tip of Land’s End, so that as legislation was crafted inside, the sea could thrash against the windows. “What a place to put a city,” he declared, “right on the front line of absolute zero. No wonder a cow burnt it down.”
