Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin

Author:Mark Helprin [Helprin, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2005-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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