This
is a story of incredible beauty and love.
It is a simple tale, a parable almost, if reduced to essence. It is a story set in the aftermath of 9-11, a
story of Fitch a construction contractor who gives up all he has to remodel a
house for a young lady who has recently lost her husband in the collapse of the
second tower of the World Trade Center.
You
have to piece of a few details together over the course of the story to get the
full picture. It is January in
2002. Fitch is off to a job on a regular
work day. He comes across a funeral
procession—“the mortuary convoys”—which apparently has become routine since the
tragic event. Fitch stops and covers his
heart in respect. He gets a call on his
cell, and it’s from an old client, Lily, who he had remodeled her kitchen two
years prior. She has sold that house and
is buying a new one in Brooklyn Heights, if not on the Promenade, close enough
to have a view of the Lower Manhattan skyline.
For
those not familiar with New York City, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade is across
the river from Manhattan and has this view.
Of
course that is a post 9-11 picture. What
is missing are the two Twin Towers of the WTC which would have dwarfed those
buildings. Here are people on the Promenade watching the Towers collapse.
Here is another picture with
the new Liberty Tower being built in the location where the towers fell.
Fitch
agrees to look at Lily’s new place, but he knows he doesn’t have the time to
fit her into his schedule. He’s booked
solid for over a year. But out of
professional courtesy to a good, previous customer he will advise her. He wonders why Lily hasn’t mentioned her
husband, and he speculates that they may have divorced. When she gets there with her parents and
reviews the work she wants done, Fitch off handily mentions the dust that has
to be removed from the face of the building.
Fitch
was hungry. He wanted to go home and
eat. He needed to talk to Gustavo and
Georgy. He needed a hot bath. But he wanted to leave with less abruptness
than the sudden silence suggested, so he took a step toward the windows of the
living room, his face lit by the skyscraper light, and said, “On September
eleventh, we were working on Joralemon Street.
When we heard that the first plane had hit, we went up on the roof. Everyone kept on saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus,’ and
we stayed up there, and watched the towers come down. The dust on the windows is from the ‘Trade
Center. It will have to be washed down
very carefully, or the mineral grit will scratch and fog the glass. And it will have to be done respectfully,
because the clouds of dust that floated against these windows were more than
merely inanimate.”
When
he turned back to them, only the father was there. He could hear Lilly on the stairs, and her
mother following. Fitch thought this was
somewhat ungracious. Then her father
moved a step toward him and took him lightly by the elbow, the way men of that
generation do. His tweed coat reminded
Fitch of old New York; that is, of the twenties and thirties, when the
buildings were faced in stone the color of tweed, when the light was warmer and
dimmer, and when in much of the city, for much of the time, there was silence.
“Her
husband was in the south tower,” the father said quietly. “He didn’t get out.” Then he turned and went after his daughter,
walking stiffly down the stairs, like a crane.
As
in many of Helprin’s works, we see here the motif of “light” that punctuates
critical moments in his stories. Fitch’s
face is covered in light from the skyscrapers, and when he has his moment of nostalgia,
he thinks of the city as covered in warm light.
Light in this work will symbolize a moment of idealism, and a moment of
beauty. It is this moment that works
into Fitch’s soul. He will reschedule
all his jobs, even take a financial penalties; he will give Lilly an incredible
deal. He writes up a contract and a
couple of weeks later they meet at an Oyster Bar to review it. He tells her he doesn’t need a deposit.
“You
don’t? What about materials?”
“We’re
coming off other jobs,” Fitch said. “We’re
hardly short of funds. Don’t worry.”
She
had not done enough of this kind of thing to know how unusual this was. Her father would have been—and would be later—very
suspicious, but she was not.
“And
materials, that’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about. We have a warehouse where we store our
materials, tools, and trucks. We do a
lot of expensive projects, and most of the time the clients have no way to use
excess material, so they ask us to take it.
Because we bring particular types of marble, tile, fixtures, moldings,
whatever, from job to job, most of the time this is to our advantage. But if we go to another kind of job where we
don’t use the exact set, we have no room in our warehouse for the things we
might need.”
“So
you want to offload it on me?”
“No. We can sell it back, but with restocking fee
and prices for broken lots, it works out to the same thing as buying new
material at a lesser quality, and it’s an accounting nightmare. After your place, we’re going to the U.N.
Plaza to do two entire floors, and the materials are specific to that job. We’ve got to empty our warehouse so there may
be opportunities for advantageous substitutions.”
This
was totally untrue: his warehouse was too well managed to be overfull. He simply intended to give her, at his own
expense, a far better job than she could afford, and he did not want her to
know that he had done so.
“I’ve
made an extensive list, with cut sheets and full specifications, of these
potential substitutes. It has only
upgrades, as you’ll see. And if you don’t
like anything, we’ll pull it out and go with the original.”
“You
can do that?”
“There’s
no structural work. We can do that.”
“But
you might have to repaint a room, or redo a floor or something. Wouldn’t that injure your profit?”
“No,”
said Fitch, quite honestly, for on this job he would have no profit as commonly
understood. He would have, as commonly
understood, a loss. “You’ll see in the
contract that if any substitution, or all, will not meet your approval, you can
require us at absolutely no additional expense to install the original, to meet
the contract specifications exactly.”
Taking
out a little leather portfolio, she opened its red Florentine cover and, shuffling
the pages, said, “I’m going to be away until Monday, March eighteenth. You might put a lot in, in a month, that I
might make you pull out.”
“Not
to worry,” Fitch told her. “In a month,
we’ll be mainly setting up, doing demolition, the system rough-ins, framing,
and administration—permits, ordering, receiving, inspections, all that kind of
thing. It’s a five month job.”
And
so we get the name of the story, “Monday,” because Fitch doesn’t just do a six
month job in five as he promises, he will have it done in a month by that
Monday, March 18th. He will
have his crew work around the clock and at a great loss to have it done by that
Monday. I searched around to see if
there is any significance to the March 18th date. The only thing I could find was that was the
date the United States countered the 9-11 attacks with an invasion of
Afghanistan. I don’t know if that was
intentional or if it has any significance to the story, but it’s an interesting
fact.
Lilly
then questions Fitch’s generosity. She
says,
“It
sounds so disadvantageous to you. It
makes me nervous. Do you understand?”
“Of
course I do. Look, I don’t know what
happened to this country, but everybody tries to screw everybody else. More so than in my father’s day, more so than
when I was a child, more so than when I was a young man, more so than ten years
ago…more so than last year. Everybody
lies, cheats, manipulates, and steals.
It’s as if the world is a game, and all you’re supposed to do is try for
maximum advantage. Even if you don’t
want to do it that way, when you find yourself attacked from all sides in such
a fashion, you begin to do it anyway.
Because, if you don’t, you lose.
And no one these days can tolerate losing.”
“Can
you?” Lilly asked?
“Yes,”
he said.
“Tell
me.”
He
hesitated, listening to the clink of glasses and the oceanlike roar of
conversations magnified and remagnified under the vaulted ceilings of the dining
rooms off to the side. “I can tolerate
losing,” he said, if that’s the price I pay, if it’s what’s required, for
honor.”
“Honor,”
she repeated.
“Honor. I often go into things—I almost always go
into things—with no calculation but for honor, which I find far more attractive
and alluring, and satisfying in every way than winning. I find it deeply, incomparably satisfying.”
And
so we find the core of Fitch’s character.
He has been moved to redeem her loss and his integrity wants to bring whole
the situation. Ultimately he tells her
he wants her to be happy.
Moved
by this, for many reasons, some of which seemed even to her to be mysterious,
Lilly looked away—at the long sweep of the bar at which they sat, and the blur
of waiters and barmen in white, moving like the crowds in Grand Central, even
busier, and the noise like that of water and ice flowing in a rock-strewn brook.
“Tell
me why you value honor,” she said.
“I’m
fifty-three,” he answered with analytic detachment. “My father died at fifty-nine. What good is money? If I have six years left or thirty, it makes
no difference. My life will be buoyant,
and my death will be tranquil, only if I can rest upon a store of honor.”
“There
are other things.”
“Name
them,” he challenged.
She
met his challenge. “Love.”
“Harder
than honor, I’m afraid, to keep and sustain.”
This
startled her into silence.
At
one point in the story we learn that Fitch is divorced; his wife had left
him. When he speaks about love being
harder than honor, he speaks from experience.
But while it is true Fitch is an honorable man, what he does goes beyond
honor. One doesn’t have to work for a
loss to be honorable. What he does for
Lilly is for love, not romantic love, but love for a fellow human being. He tries to explain it to Gustavo, his
foreman.
“We’ll
finish here in less than a month?
Gustavo was stunned.
“I’m
going to call in as many subcontractors as we need, pay overtime, work day and
night myself. It’ll be done by that
date. When she returns from California
she’ll come back to the most beautifully done space she’s ever seen—in pristine
condition, clean, quiet, safe, complete—with a Fitch Company bill that says, ‘No
Charge.’ That’s what I want.”
“Why?”
Gustavo asked. And, when Fitch was not
forthcoming, Gustavo commanded, “You’ve got to tell me why.”
“If
you could see her…,” said Fitch.
“I
saw her when we did the kitchen. She’s
pretty. She’s beautiful. But she’s not that beautiful.”
“Yes,
she is,” said Fitch. “She bears up, but
I’ve never seen a more wounded, deeply aggrieved woman. It’s not because she’s physically
beautiful. What the hell do I care? It’s because she needs something like this,
from me, from us, from everyone. Not
that it would or could be a substitute, but as a gesture.”
“A
substitute for what?” Gustavo asked.
“Her
husband.”
“Her
husband left her?”
“Her
husband was in the south tower when it came down,” Fitch said. “For Christ’s sake, they’ll never even find
the bodies. Vaporized, made into
paste. What can she think? What can she feel?”
And
so the narrative follows to its fabulous conclusion. The men work to extraordinary strength and
endurance to make right in one small person a deep wrong, a deep experiential
hurt. What was knocked down from hate, a
rebuilding in love follows. A wound from
experience is healed by returning her to innocence. The idealism overcomes the cynicism. And ultimately Fitch too in his endeavor is
healed. The extraordinary effort becomes
mystical, religious.
A
lapsed but believing Catholic, [Fitch] had not been to mass since mass had
lapsed out of Latin, but what happened in the weeks of February and March made
up for the thousands of masses he had missed.
The mass existed, in his perhaps heretical view, to keep, encourage, and
sustain a sense of holiness, and to hold open the channels to grace that, with
age and discouragement, tend to close.
Witness to those who had little sacrificing what they had, to their
children contributing to the work in their way, and to the fathers’ pride in
this, Fitch felt the divine presence as he had not since the height of his
youth. The less he had and the closer to
death he felt, the more intense, finer, and calmer the world seemed. It had been a long time since he had been on
the ocean on a day of sun and wind, but now he and all his men were lifted and
traveling on the selfsame wave.
When
the day comes and Lilly steps inside to find “ a work of art” that “was a
beauty that arose from love” she is stunned back into innocence. This was a a moving story, a story worthy of
our Thanksgiving Holiday. Perhaps having
lived through September 11th myself, the story was particularly moving
for me. You can find the story in
Helprin’s collection, The Pacific and Other Stories.
Happy
Thanksgiving.
