A Dove of the East by Mark Helprin

She did not answer.”
    Biferman looked up, his eyes closed, and said quietly, “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my bride.”

SHOOTING THE BAR—1904
    M ICHAEL HAD been to London, and Paris too. Suzanna had no solid idea of what these places were like. Casco Bay had surrounded every instant of her life with its mists or its waves, or its storms that brought the angry Atlantic almost to the door of her house, which she locked at night if Michael were still out at sea. Suzanna had the most beautiful face in all of Maine, perhaps in all the world. It was a clear face which seemed to make its own light; its features were light and did not seem to depend on each other. When Michael first saw her he imagined she might be easily capable of walking through walls, so fresh and energetic was her manner. “She is sunlight,” he said.
    She loved the Bible, “because it is beautiful,” she said, and she read it every morning. She dreamed of the places Michael had been, imagining herself a captains wife, or perhaps a contemporary princess of Russia, one whose life went from peak to peak, operatically encountering dozens of carpeted stairs lined with mirrors as she ran to the high heat and noise of a ballroom. How many times had she been carried by imagination from the beach to an open carriage. The horses were white and perfectly clean, the path straight and arched by French trees. Musicians were everywhere in the park, playing Brahms by bronze fountains that splashed in the day and would splash in the dark. Bright colored leopards and lions in zoos paced gracefully in front of her, and by her side was Michael with his strong face, somehow as a European, dressed and looking as if an artist had painted him, which was how she thought all Europeans were.
    Suzanna was Mrs. Ashely, something that for the several years of its existence had never ceased to surprise her. She wondered if she ever would or could feel like her mother, who was purely Mrs. Tyler, and seemed to have been always the wife of Suzannas father, Suzannas mother, and the mother of Suzannas brothers. At church when Tom had come back from whaling and said, “Suzanna Tyler,” Michael said with great authority and delight,
“Suzanna Ashely,”
and Tom, who had always been in love with her, turned very red and rotated back in his pew. The preacher preached to all the brown eyes focused on him like a diagram in optics. If the eyes had had half Suzannas radiance the preacher would have burned. She had always been special and strange.
    Michael was once a thin boy who wore gold-rimmed glasses and loved books. He was best with boats, always managed to catch more fish than could his friends, and he spent so much time in the dunes and the pines reading or walking or feeling October, that when he came into town it was as if he had come back from the sea. People asked him questions, and he told them stories full of lies that were true.
    After graduation Suzanna had become a teacher of little children, and Michael had gone into the navy, for he changed. He began to hate Three Mile Harbor, and he brooded all day in the woods or at work lifting heavy barrels at the wharf. As his face began to take shape and become less boyish, he wished for new scenery and a place to answer or drown his questions, so he left on a frigate from Portland, and went around the world. In his youth he touched the shores of Egypt and Arabia, marched into Peking, tried to fake familiarity on his first trip to Paris, loved Rome, spent more hours than required on his watch straddling the bowsprit looking at the Wedgwood-colored clouds and sky.
    After a year he began to think of Suzanna, and found that he could not stop thinking about her, nor did he want to. Every city, every stretch of sea, every special storm, strange sailor, oddly draped dwarf, beautiful bridge, or full and luxuriant tropical tree he saw, was captured in his mind as a present for her. He talked to