"Written on Water"from WSJ Dec 27

[T Concannon]

Marc, Glenn, brats , warbabies.. this from Wall St Journal ...
copied it so you'd see no bugs, virii , etc.. Wonderful story .. and we
gotta get Mark Helprin aware of brat org !!! A rare treat ...g E-MAIL
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WRITTEN ON WATER
Reconstruction
A short story.
BY MARK HELPRIN
Wednesday, December 27, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST
The most difficult of the dinner parties I ruin are usually around
Christmas, and always those of the younger members of the firm, who, no
matter how well they have done, have yet to find their place because
they have yet to fall from grace and restore themselves. They know I
have built and rebuilt, that, quite apart from my military history, I
have, in corporate terms, come back from the dead. That very thing,
though I did not ask for it, is what they fear the most to get and fear
the most in me.
It is why, while I sit still and merely smile, they hold forth in a
volume of words that would blow up a tire. You would think that because
they talk as enthusiastically as talking dogs, they would win. While
they say everything, I say nothing. I am shown the second-tier
paintings, and harried children who can play Mendelssohn, and from the
corner of my eye I see the ineluctable Range Rovers, the Viking stoves,
and the flower boxes perfectly tended by silent Peruvians with broken
hearts.
Still, I win, they lose, and I couldn't throw the game even if I tried.
They just don't know. They're younger than my sons and daughter. I find
their claims embarrassing: I don't care where they went to college; I
don't even care where I went to college. I want only to spy the youthful
graces they cannot see in themselves, and encourage them to do well and
spend more time with their children than I spent with mine. They won't.
I didn't. They can't. I couldn't.
"We've just come back from Venice," said the lady of the house, the wife
of one of our foremost earners. He is less than 30 years old, and she is
stunningly beautiful and looks 18.
"He knows," her husband said, "he sent me."
Her answer to this cruelty was "oh." But that was not the end of it.
Thinking that something was sure to follow, I sat there like the Sphinx.
Unlike the Sphinx, however, I acknowledged with my eyes that she was
alive.
"Do you know Venice?" she asked. I saw that I was now a strategical
point in her troubled marriage. "What with the dollar so high, it's like
Disneyland. There are more Americans than in New Jersey."
"Americans don't live in New Jersey anymore," her husband added, "and
they actually wear mouse ears. I saw them."
"Sometimes," she qualified. "Sometimes they wear mouse ears, some of
them. Have you been there?" she pressed, turning toward me as slowly as
the aft turret on the Missouri.
"Yes, I have."
"When?" she inquired, as insistently as the Bronx District Attorney.
Thinking of the bayonet that had once been at the end of my rifle, I
picked up my butter knife, and then returned it to the damasked table
cloth. "Right after the war."
"The Gulf War?" she asked.
I must have looked incredulous that she would not understand which war
"the war" was.
"Vietnam?"
"I don't think so."
"What war?"
"Alicia," her husband said severely, because she had had three glasses
of champagne, and because, of the long list of names by which the world
knows our firm, mine is the only one that belongs to someone living.
"I want to know, Jared." When she pronounced his name she did so as if
she didn't care for it, and then she looked up at me like a woman with
whom you have been arguing and whom you are about to kiss, and she said,
"Which one, babycakes?"
"The Second World War," I answered. "World War Two." I did want to kiss
her.
"Well you can't possibly remember the Second World War," she said. "How
old are you?"
"I was born in nineteen forty-two," I told her. Here I was, talking, I
who am famous for sitting through social engagements like a ghost. "I
was in Venice in forty-six, when I was four, and I remember everything.
I remember the weave of the towels in the bathroom of the hotel. I
remember the color of the paint on the iron chair on which I sat one day
in the Piazza San Marco--it was green--and the shape of the dish in
which I had yogurt and sugar. I remember the pigeon that lit upon the
balcony, the slate gray and iridescent purple of his neck feathers. His
eyes jumped when an ocean liner just outside the Grand Canal blew its
whistle and scattered every bird in Venice but him. He stayed put,
strutting like a pigeon. I wore a compass on a lanyard, and carried a
rubber hunting knife in a cardboard sheath, in case there were any wild
animals."
Just as I realized that I was really building up to something--and I
really was--my wife broke in with her accustomed diplomatic skill and
turned the conversation to the reconstruction of Venice, to the floods
in Florence, and to the restoration of wetted works of art in general.
To make the break invisible she informed them of my ability to pull from
the past the most extraordinary details of memory, saying with no
apparent bitterness, "That's the part of his life that is most vivid. If
you lose him in your conferences, look for him there." Now these people
had become strategical points in our marriage, and though I cared, I
drifted. I lost them, they lost me, voices faded, and the room became
pale.

In its stead, reconstituted before my eyes as if it actually existed,
was a glass of amber-colored scotch, what I now know to be a double, on
a white tablecloth next to my father's dinner plate. We were in Venice,
in a restaurant where everyone had to shout. In October 1946, my chin
just cleared the table. I looked up like a cat at the glasses and
plates, at the dishes and bowls and bottles that arrived or were taken
away with surprising speed and a musical clinking. The room was bright,
hot, and full of smoke, and women at other tables wore shoulderless
gowns in what seemed to be a cloth of gold.
I can put the scene in order now from what my father told me long after
and from what I have come to know myself. Although he was relatively
young and worked for someone else, he and his friends were bankers and
money men, American, English, and French, not long separated from their
wartime units, investing in broken enterprises that they chanced would
revive. My father put everything we had, which wasn't a lot, and much
more of other people's money that, were it lost, would have dragged him
down for the rest of his life, into businesses that had suffered the
destruction of their plant, the death and dislocation of their workers,
and the disappearance of their markets. "They have no factory," he would
say. "The railroad was destroyed. The roads were bombed. And the canals
are full of explosives. But what is important is their habit of mind.
What is important is the high probability that civilization, having come
undone, will repair itself." Though at the time it hardly seemed
possible, he believed that Europe must be restored.
We had driven to Venice through Germany, Austria, and the Veneto.
Because of that drive I thought that Paris, where we lived, was an
island in a world of rubble. Whole cities were represented merely by
blackened chimneys standing like fired trees on a savannah of brick and
broken stone. And the few buildings that remained were like wounded
animals, pockmarked and cracked, their balconies hanging by what seemed
like threads. Refugees choked the roads, and military convoys passed
with precedence.
My father and I were alone and had left my mother at home, the object of
this being that I would by knowing my father gravitate less toward
protecting my mother from him after, having invaded Europe, he had
invaded our household. I met him only when I was three and had grown
quite comfortable with the idea that he was a symbolic figure. This was
our first time alone, and though I liked him I was convinced neither of
his value nor his legitimacy. When he kissed me his beard was like
sharkskin and his mustache like thorns. Although my mother may have
been, I was not impressed that he looked like Ronald Colman. That my
parents had had their difficulties was not surprising: they had not been
able to touch or speak from February of 1942 to December of 1945, just
short of four years. Without knowing it, I was the reason for the
continuance of their marriage, and had become its strategical point.
Evidently, a marriage without a strategical point is like a rhinoceros
without a horn.
Late for me, perhaps at ten or so, the end of the dinner ended a torrent
of words about business and politics that I could not fathom even though
they were English, and my father and I broke out into the night air. The
sky in Venice is too often the color of the Financial Times, but that
night it was laden with stars. A wind blew steadily over the Adriatic,
lifting it, swelling the cloudy melon-green waters until they lapped at
the doorsteps. In the Piazza San Marco hundreds of people were walking
about or had gathered around a little orchestra of the kind that plays
concert waltzes on the terraces of expensive hotels. Sheltered beneath a
canopy while the water rose in the piazza, the musicians were playing as
if they were the orchestra of the Titanic. I was amazed by the river
that was upwelling on the north side, with starlight broken in
reflection on its streaming wind-blown waves. I wanted to go to an
island, between ranks of abandoned cafe chairs, that it had not yet
covered, but I did not think that possible. My father asked why.
"Because of the water," I said.
"Why would that stop us."
"Our feet would get wet." Children are mystically upset by water out of
place.
The island seemed ideal, and I yearned for it. God knows what I would
have given to stand on its dry surface, surrounded by the rough and
rising sea. This must have shown in my face, so, just as the orchestra
had finished a song, he picked me up and, holding me in the crook of his
left arm with his right hand pressing lightly against me to keep me in
balance, he began to walk toward the ribbon of water.
I bent my head upward, blinking in the wind. More exciting than the
island itself was the casual, unhesitating way my father walked into the
water. Soon it covered his English shoes. The pants of his pinstriped
suit disappeared almost to the knees. Although it was October and the
water must have been cold, he seemed to enjoy it. He had crossed many
rivers and streams in the four years that had just passed, in conditions
that made this a blessing. He waded through without wincing or betraying
concern. He wanted to show me who he was, and what I could be.
And by this action, he did. When he put me down on the island and I ran
and jumped about near the waves we had just crossed, I was shaken by new
thoughts I could not put into words. I did not have to, for the music
began again. They had begun to play "La Vie en Rose": a beautiful
phrase, not quite translatable, the song of the Liberation. I knew it
well and was not surprised to hear it. Perhaps because I had lived in
France for almost a quarter of my existence, in an ordinary neighborhood
in Paris with people who had lived through the occupation, even at four
I was deeply moved by it. Or perhaps this was due just to the nature of
the song, which, in minors and majors, perfectly expresses both the
great joy and unspeakable sadness of having come through the war. No
song I have ever heard has its depth and complexity. No song I have ever
heard unites strength so great with beauty so shy. And this is what I
knew, when I was four, having come to Paris more than two years after it
was redeemed. By necessity my father knew much more.

Stepping from a C-47 into a void over Normandy, with rifle, pack, and a
heavy load of ammunition strapped to his leg, he felt the rush of breath
and blood subside as his parachute opened in magic air, as white as a
cotton ball. A major and pathfinder of the 101st, he floated down to
what could very well have been his death, and prayed as if his last,
thanking God for his full life to that moment, for the blue morning, for
his near-silent flight, and for the seconds as they passed.
He landed in a quiet and empty field, completely alone, and lived to
become part of the greatest conquering army the world has ever seen, an
army that, as it pressed toward Germany, was bent by the massive gravity
of Paris, and, contrary to plan, rushed toward this city of light.
Because he was French-speaking, he was put in the front of the Fifth
Corps, and entered Paris with the French 2nd Armored Division.
"Until that day," he told me when he was old, "I had not seen gratitude,
or joy, or grief. If God, in remembering His work, had decided to
replicate the glory of the Creation, He might have done so in the
liberation of Paris. That's what it was like. That's why I took you and
your mother there. Because it was as if the whole world was born on that
day. And I thought, we can do the same."
Quite so. History had never been nor would it be so buoyant as in a
single day to rise from such darkness to such light. Many of the people
who, at the end of August, surged across the Place de l'Etoile, running
to follow flags, were in white. When seen from above, they were like the
foam of a rising tide, their mass unlike the normal mass of crowds,
being as quick as driven cloud. That they could move on that day almost
as airborne as angels was because the idea that France would be free was
more beautiful even than the idea of France itself.
Just to hear "La Vie en Rose" as we stood amid the windblown water was
enough to make my father cry. Seeing this, I embraced his leg, perhaps
not so tightly as the bag of ammunition once strapped to it, and when he
picked me up I put my arms around his neck. I did not know what he had
seen or what he had come through, but my father was moved by the
resurrection of a shattered world, and this I understood well enough.
Then came our own rush, a breathtaking run through the darkened streets
of Venice, that I will remember for the rest of my life. I don't know
why he ran. He was astonishingly strong, but he could have walked. The
passages through which we coursed at great speed were in renovation, and
half the time scaffolding blocked the sky in alternating segments. We
would run through terrific darkness, and then the boarding above us
would disappear and we would emerge again to see the stars. I cannot
forget that alternation of darkness and light, which is the way it has
been ever since.

At the dinner party, because of my silence, they thought I was thinking
about them. And so I did begin to think about them, which broke the
spell and brought me back. Also, my wife kicked me.
I nodded, as I do when I'm brought back. I said something, I don't know
what. You see, they imagine that I have everything I want--cars and
pools and appliances and Picassos--only because I have what they want.
But what I want I cannot have. I cannot have so much time ahead of me
that it is seemingly without limit. I cannot any longer be quite so
deeply in love with the world now that I know that my love for it is
unrequited. I cannot ride in my father's arms. I cannot know any of the
great store of his memories that he did not tell me. And I cannot change
the fact, as I am the last one who remembers him, that all he saw, and
learned, and loved, will have a second death when they die with me.
That is why, for me, reconstruction is so urgent and its appeal so
strong. Floating down, in the last quiet seconds, it is indeed possible,
with precise and joyous recollection, to return to life the roseate glow
that once it brought to you. This I have tried to do, even at risk of
smashing up a dinner party, or two. And when we left that night, I
kissed Alicia, and we embraced for a second or two longer than anyone
expected.
Mr. Helprin is a novelist, a contributing editor of The Wall Street
Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute.

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[STEAM GENE]

Thanks Gail. I managed to delete it from message to Ann's group before I
finished reading it. Nice read. His father left the U.S. the same month mine
did. Mine didn't return until 46.

Gene
ABV61-1043.001.HCB
<A HREF="http://www.tckworld.com/opfoot">http://www.tckworld.com/opfoot</A>

[Levin Tull]

Wonderfully evocative prose...Thanks for the story

--
Levin Tull
AAC/AAF/AFBV72.0854TX