The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin Page A

hold it, stayed and developed within as he read, pondered, and learned, and as the work of his intellect perfected neither article nor book but only his soul. That is not to say that he was comfortable with this, but that he had no choice in the matter.
    “You’re Fitch?” asked Lilly’s father.
    “I’m Fitch,” said Fitch, with no choice in the matter. The way he said it was a signal to Lilly’s father that he, Fitch, was never going to take advantage of her.
    A FTER THE HEAVY DOOR had been pulled shut by its spring, they stood for a moment, listening to a faulty radiator valve. Someone once had tried to close it and broken it further, and as it rattled and hissed it made the pipes knock with the lonely sound that haunts the winters in New York and echoes from floor to floor of apartment buildings and tenements like the complaints of a dying man. The air was hot and dry, as it will be in most empty apartments in winter, but Fitch refrained from opening a window, for he was a guest, even if, just having taken possession, Lilly, too, moved as carefully as a stranger.
    Had the place had a soul it might have been offended that its owners had abandoned it and left it dirty. Dust lines on walls and floors betrayed wherefurniture had been and currents of air had run along its edges. The wall behind the stove was almost blackened, the exhaust fan covered by dust and grease with the texture of velvet. Porcelain had yellowed and chipped, light fixtures in bathrooms and in the kitchen were the mass graves of hundreds of desiccated flies, and the windows were anything but clear.
    They took creaky stairs to the upper floor. In each bedroom and in one of the bathrooms the previous occupants had left telephone books, hangers, and dead lightbulbs. In one bedroom window, one of the panes had been replaced with cardboard from a frozen-dinner box. The only illumination on the second floor was the mysterious glow, as if from an astronomical photograph of distant galaxies, of the office buildings across the river in Manhattan. It was wind-whistling and bleak, but beautiful nonetheless—white, tranquil, and deep.
    Aided by her hands moving like those of a policeman directing traffic, Lilly explained to what extent she wanted to enlarge one bedroom at the expense of the other, and that she wanted to change the hall so that one entered the bathroom from the enlarged bedroom.
    “Do you want to keep the skylights?” Fitch asked with professional detachment, almost brusquely, looking up.
    “Yes,” Lilly answered, bewildered. “The roof garden is mine alone.” The skylights were of opaque glass, and privacy would have been assured even had she not been in sole possession of the roof garden.
    Fitch had asked about them not in view of privacy but because the roof garden was accessible from the roofs of adjacent buildings, and skylights were a common means of forcible entry. Had she seemed less vulnerable, he might have gone on to reinforcement and alarms, but he was silent, unhappy that she might be thinking less of him because it seemed that he was unable to appreciate the even and filtered light that opened up the rooms beneath the roof to something more than simply day.
    On the roof itself the wind forced its way through their coats and chilled them as much as they had been overheated moments before. The office towers of lower Manhattan, cold and brilliant, loomed up like an immense cliff. Red lights at their tops blinked arrhythmically. One could see even the flow of the river marked by the movement of its speeding and broken ice, and thetraffic on the bridges looked like sequins on an evening dress. Snow was left on the roof, and the wind would pick it up capriciously and move it from place to place, sometimes blowing a sparkling veil of it over the parapet and into the night. The roof was three quarters covered by a deck, and Fitch had noticed that the ceilings of the floor below were stained. The deck would have to be replaced and