by Mark Helprin
The legion of consumptives lay upon the rooftops that night in bitter cold as the wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, out of sight in the square forest of tenements and across the bridges that dipped and shone better than diamond necklaces. They were there, each one alone—as all will someday be—in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light. Ice was everywhere. The river was frozen very deep, the walks and trees brittle, the crust of the snow hard enough for horses. And yet the sleepers on the rooftops blazed on in their quilted coverlets like little furnaces, and when Beverly had had enough love that night from her lovers the stars, she turned quietly and contentedly, and fell asleep buried in her furs and down.
A Goddess in the Bath
IN DECEMBER, all the Penns except Beverly were to leave for the country house at the Lake of the Coheeries, which was so far upstate that no one could find it. Beverly was to join them for the holidays, by which time they were to have seen to the provision of the special sleeping-loggia that she required, and have opened the house to be ready to receive her after the long and harrowing journey from the city. She had in mind writing a telegram, begging to be excused from the winter gathering at the lake, for she was fitful and disturbed, and wanted to be alone. But, as it was, she would go by sleigh, river steamer, a second sleigh, and iceboat to a big house that stood on a small island in a crescent of the lakeshore, there to celebrate Christmas.
Isaac, Harry, Jack, and Willa (in her snowsuit, Willa looked like a cherub with the body of a pillow) were soon to go. Of the servants, only Jayga would remain. But, as soon as the family departed, Beverly would tell her to go home to her people in the Four Points. Beverly knew that Jayga’s father was slowly dying, and she had made Isaac send the Posposils enough money to support them many times over. “But we have a charitable trust,” Isaac had said. “We don’t give away our money. That’s what the trust is for, and it’s entirely independent.”
“Daddy,” Beverly replied, “soon enough Harry will be on his own, and so will Jack. Willa has her own trust, and I’ll be long buried. Tell me, what will you use the money for?” Isaac then gave with a vengeance, although he knew that all his money and all the money in the world could not influence what was pursuing Mr. Posposil, and Beverly, at such terribly close quarters.
So Jayga would leave and for several days the house would be empty but for Beverly, who, for no reason that she could understand, was convinced that something special was about to happen—that she would, perhaps, get well, or run a great and sudden fever that would finally kill her. But nothing seemed to happen. Two nights before they left, it snowed, and the stars were buried. The next night, a driven lace of white cloud hid even the moon. But Beverly had faith and patience. She waited. And then, on the day of departure, it cleared.
PETER LAKE had been thinking so hard about St. Stephen that he became temporarily religious and actually set foot inside a church. It scared him half to death. He had never been in one before, for Reverend Overweary had not let the boys enter the gleaming silver sanctum that he had made them build near Bacon’s Turkish bungalow. And a day could not pass when Peter Lake and his kind would not be denounced from half a thousand pulpits throughout the city. It was the enemy camp, and he was extremely uncomfortable as he padded down the great center aisle, assaulted by a multitude of unfamiliar colored rays wheeling in through the stained-glass windows. He had chosen the Maritime Cathedral, the city’s most beautiful. It was to St. Patrick’s and St. John’s what Sainte-Chapelle was to Notre Dame. Its windows rose upright like fields of mountain wild flowers, illustrating scenes from ships and the sea. Isaac Penn had endowed the cathedral, insisting that the story of Jonah be splayed across its lighted windows. He had killed many whales.
There was Jonah, his mouth open in astonishment as he was swallowed by the whale. And the whale! This was no silly symbolic emblematic whale, with a man’s mouth and the eyes of a hypnotized vaudevillian, but one filled with the beauty of real whales. He was long, black, and heavy, with a monstrous creased jaw. His baleen was yellowed and corrupt, honeycombed like a Chinese puzzle. The huge blue bastard was covered with old wounds and deep gashes. A steel harpoon claw still stuck in him, and he was blind in one eye. He planed water not like a little silver fish in a Renaissance miniature, but like a real whale that can smash and bruise the sea.
Peter Lake was quite surprised to find in this cathedral a hundred beautiful models of ships, sailing through nave and transept as if they were at sea on the major routes of trade. If this was what one found in a cathedral, then this was what one found in a cathedral. He had wanted to see what religion was, so that he might become like St. Stephen, and so that he might pray for Mootfowl. Although Mootfowl’s death had long been forgotten, anyone who did remember it thought that Peter Lake had killed him. And he had, but not really. Mootfowl had killed himself—in a strange and peculiar fashion that tied Peter Lake to him forever. Why had Mootfowl been so dejected? Jackson Mead had remained for a few years, half-celebrated, half-obscure, while he built a great gray bridge across the East River. It was high, graceful, and mathematically perfect. Mootfowl would have loved it. But there were other bridges to be built, and Jackson Mead had vanished as inexplicably as he had arrived, disappearing with his train of reclusive mechanics, not even bothering to be present at the dedication. It was said that he was putting up bridges on the frontier—in Manitoba, Oregon, and California. These were, however, only rumors.
Peter Lake wondered how to pray. Mootfowl had often made them pray, but they had just knelt and faced the fire, staring at the suns and worlds that danced within it. That had been enough. There was no fire in the Maritime Cathedral, just the pure cold light that washed the great weeping colors from the windows. Peter Lake knelt. “Mootfowl,” he whispered, “dear Mootfowl. . . .” He did not know what to say, but his lips moved in silence as he thought of the forge reflecting in Mootfowl’s eyes, of his Chinese hat, the strong thin hands, and the absolute devotion to the mysterious things that he believed he could find in the conjunction of fire, motion, and steel. His lips moved, saying something other than what he thought. He had wanted to say that he had loved Mootfowl, but that had proved too difficult and inappropriate. So he backed out of the cathedral feeling as irresolute and frustrated as when he had entered. Who were those who found it so easy to pray? Did they really talk to God as if they were ordering in a restaurant? When he himself knelt down, he was tongue-tied.
Peter Lake sat on the horse, high above the sidewalk. He often felt that the horse was a heroic statue, a huge bronze whose job was to guard some public field without moving. But then the horse warmed to motion, and they cantered in slow and easy strides until they reached the park. Peter Lake had wanted to case some mansions on upper Fifth Avenue, but the horse leapt the lake at its narrow waist near the Bethesda Fountain, and took him to the West Side, to Isaac Penn’s house, which he had never seen. Standing in the snow, he saw Isaac, Harry, Jack, Willa, and all the servants except Jayga, mounting three large sleighs, one of which was piled high with luggage. They pulled away in a ringing of bells and snapping of whips. The horses were harnessed in troikas. Peter Lake stood next to the white horse, and watched the house until nightfall.
The white horse sat down on his haunches, like a dog, and watched too. Within an hour, darkness closed over the city as if someone had slammed shut the door of an icehouse, and powerful winds began to move through the park like big trains long overdue from Canada. Peter Lake was hopping from foot to foot. He turned up his collar, acutely aware that his tweed jacket was whistling as the wind coursed through it. He turned to the horse, but the horse was still on his haunches, staring contentedly at the house. Peter Lake began to mumble complaints. “I’m not a horse,” he said. “I get cold a lot faster, and I don’t sleep standing up.”
But the possibility of slowly freezing to death did not compromise his professionalism. He not
iced that, of the seven chimneys, five had been smoking when the family got itself and all the luggage on the sleighs. Now only three were bending stars and sky with their viscous ribbons of heat. He suspected that they would soon shut down. But they didn’t, and at about six o’clock a fourth began operation, and then a fifth. “Maybe it’s oil,” he said out loud. “An automatic system. But no, not even a house like that would have five furnaces. Maybe two, and two hot-water boilers, at the most. Those are fireplaces. Ah, I can smell ’em. Someone’s in there.”
At six-thirty, a light went on in one of the windows. After all the darkness he had been in, Peter Lake was blinded. He felt vulnerable, and stepped behind a tree. It was extremely cold, but he was right to have waited. The light was in the kitchen. A girl came briefly to the window. “They left a servant. It figures.” But he waited still, for he was of that class himself (lower, in fact), and knew very well that when the master was away all kinds of things could happen. “It’s a girl,” he said to the horse. “I’ll bet she has a lover. I’ll bet he comes and they go on a six-day drunk. That would be fine with me. While they’re sleeping naked in the master’s silken bed, I’ll go in and requisition the downstairs valuables. Now all we have to do . . . is wait for the lad to show.”
At seven, there was a flash against the sky. Peter Lake thought it was a shooting star, or a rocket summoning a river pilot. It was neither, but, rather, Beverly opening the door to the spiral stairs which led down from the roof. Some other lights went on. She’s turning down the covers, thought Peter Lake. Soon he’ll arrive at the door, cast a few glances, and be whisked in like the milk.
Beverly descended to the kitchen. There, she ate with Jayga, who was already dressed for the street. They said few words. Both were women in love with men who did not exist, and they shared the resigned sadness that comes from too much dreaming and longing. They were used to imagining that when they were alone they were observed in their graces and beauties (in Jayga’s case, these were to be found in the eye of the beholder) by a man who stood somewhere, perhaps on a platform in the air, invisibly. And when they did whatever they did, sewing, or playing the piano, or fixing their hair in front of a mirror, they did so with tender reference to his invisible presence, which they loved almost as if it were real.
As Jayga cleaned up, Beverly got ready for bed. No piano playing, no chess or backgammon, no games with Willa and her dolls. She missed Willa already. The child looked just like Isaac. She was not really pretty yet. But she was loved by all who saw her for her fine quality of face. Such a sweet little girl. And a shrieker! And a giggler! It was the first time that she would be able to remember a Christmas at the Lake of the Coheeries, and, because of that, Beverly thought not to send a telegram after all. She turned the white handle of the faucet to shut off a thick stream of hot water. In the morning, when no one was in the house, she would spend an hour in her father’s wonderful bathing pool. But now she was tired. She said goodnight to Jayga, told her that she would expect to see her in a few days, and went back upstairs.
Peter Lake did not notice the second flash, when the roof door opened, because he was watching lights in different rooms as they went out one by one during Jayga’s processional through the house. And then the kitchen light was extinguished. Jayga stepped out the front door and put a suitcase on the steps. She double-locked the door and shook the handle to see if it were tight. Peter Lake was overjoyed to see a servant girl in her heavy coat and scarf, carrying a suitcase. After Jayga scurried down the street, he looked up to see that only three chimneys were now ribboning out heat, and even these were failing.
That’s that, he thought. At four in the morning, the five cops on duty in Manhattan will be sitting around a wood stove in a whorehouse somewhere, looking out for the sergeant (who will be upstairs, unconscious, snoring into a pink feather boa, his knees curled up into the buttocks of a poor young girl from Cleveland). I’ll hit the place at four and be out by five-thirty with the silverware, the cash, and half a dozen rolled-up Rembrandts.
He wondered, though, how such a prize could be left unprotected. Certainly they had intended to have the servant girl stand guard. That was it. She was ducking out. Of course they might have electrical alarms and other gadgets, but that only made it more fun.
He shivered. He had to have some roasted oysters and hot buttered rum or he would die. The horse had to have some oats and some hot alfalfa horse tea. They dashed through the night toward the music and fire of the Bowery, gliding swiftly over the park’s snow-covered trails.
YOU COULD hear people eating in the roast oyster place from five blocks away. There is something about a roast oyster, a clean stinging taste of the blue sea, hotter than boiling oil, neatly packaged in its own bone-dry kiln, that makes even the most refined diners snort, sniffle, and hum as they eat. Peter Lake got the horse his due and then sailed into the oyster place at the peak of the dinner hour. It was a vast underground cave between the Bowery and Rochambeau. The walls of stone were gray and white throughout half a dozen grand galleries. Arches like those of a Roman aqueduct touched the floor and then bounced away. At seven-thirty on a Friday night, no less than five thousand people dined within this subterranean oyster bin. Four hundred oyster boys labored and cried as if they were edging a great ship into port, or rolling Napoleon’s cannon through Russia. Candles, gas lanterns, and, here and there, clear electric lights illuminated paths between rumbling little fires.
The background noise was not unlike the famous record that Thomas Alva Edison had made of Niagara Falls, and the trajectories of the flying oyster shells reminded some old veterans of the night air above Vicksburg.
A poor harried oyster boy appeared before Peter Lake, knitted his brows, and asked, “How many are you going to have?”
“Four dozen,” said Peter Lake. “From the thyme-hickory fire.”
“To drink?” asked the oyster boy.
“No,” said Peter Lake. “To eat, boy. To drink, I’ll have a knocker of buttered rum.”
“Rum’s out,” said the boy. “We have hard cider.”
“That’s fine. And, oh yes, have you got a nice roasted owl?”
“A roast owl?” asked the oyster boy. “Don’t got no roast owls.” Then he disappeared, but was back in less than a minute with four-dozen roasted oysters hotter than the finest open hearth in all of Pittsburgh, and a flaming quart of hard cider. Peter Lake reacted to all of this like a Bayman, and for an hour his eyes saw straight without a blink while he grunted and hummed, alongside those with pink skulls and dangling powdered wigs, in disgusting disarray amid a thousand loose and distended oyster bellies hanging by cords of white sinew.
“I like to relax myself before a burglary,” Peter Lake said to a nearby barrister as they both stared over the horizons of their swollen stomachs, picked their teeth, danced with the orange tongues of fire, and partook of steaming hot tea in pewter mugs with hinged lids. “It makes sense to be slack before great exertion, to lose control in advance of a big job, don’t you think?”
“I certainly do,” said the barrister. “I always get drunk or go whoring the night before a big trial. I find that wildness of that kind clears my mind and makes of it a tabula rasa, so to speak, able indeed to accept the imprint of pytacorian energy.”
“Well,” answered Peter Lake, “I don’t know what all that means, but I suppose that you must be a good lawyer, talking like that. Mootfowl said that a lawyer’s job was to hypnotize people with intricate words, and then walk away with their property.”
“An attorney, this Mootfowl?”
“A mechanic. A master of the forge. I loved him. He was my teacher. He could do anything with metal. He would beat it up into a darling frenzy, charm it into motionless white windings and red helixes of flame, and then strike it into just the shape willed by his mighty eye.”
“Lovely,” said the barrister.
Peter Lake floated up into one of the many clean white rooms and there slept a refreshing sleep until three in the mo
rning, when he arose with an unusual sense of well-being and a great deal of energy. He washed, shaved, drank some ice water, and went into the cold. Moving through the deserted streets as if it were early summer, he was warm inside, wound up like a spring, happy, full of affection, and strong. And what a nice surprise it was to arrive at the stable and find that the horse, too, was awake and bright-eyed, bursting with energy, eager to set out.
ALMOST AT four sharp, Beverly’s eyes opened upon a spring scene in the stars. So pleasant, peaceful, clear, and calm were they, with human attention at the nadir, that even the winter air above her seemed warm and gentle. She saw no spirits, no open roads, but, instead, a summer sparkling of winking little stars that might have been the backdrop of a deliriously happy musical play.
Beverly smiled, delighted at how the universe suddenly seemed to have become an artifact of the Belle Epoque—navy blue, dazzling, light, full of grace and joy, and as wonderful as the lucid moments before a rainstorm. She couldn’t sleep, so she sat up, and then she rose to her feet without the customary effort. The stars were now all around her, and she hardly dared to move or breathe, for the air was still fresh and warm and she felt no fever. Could it be? Yes. There was no overheatedness upon rising, no deep labored breathing, no trembling. She pulled off the glistening sable hood and felt the benevolent air. Could it be, really? Yes, but she would have to be careful. She would go inside, bathe, take her temperature, and then see if, after a few hours, she still did not send the silver column soaring like a gull gliding on a summer thermal.
Peter Lake had arrived downstairs and begun to stalk around in the moonlight. All the nonacrobatic entry points were heavily barred. But that was hardly a problem: in his bag he had a portable acetylene torch that could slice through iron rods as if they were sausages. He was about to spark the torch, when he had a second thought. He rummaged in his knapsack and pulled out a voltmeter. There was a current running through them. They were so thick that, to bypass them electrically, he would have needed conductors of similar diameter to mimic their low resistance. He thought for a minute to get some—the Amsterdam Machine Works were not too distant, and he often went there at night, because they didn’t keep a careful inventory and he had a key to the front door—but he saw that the bars were of varying thicknesses. When he examined them carefully he was astounded to find different strips of metal incorporated into them in complex helical patterns and inlaid crosshatchings. It would take a day at the blackboard just to figure out the theory of this alarm system. He had no hope of controverting it in the dark at six degrees above zero. Impressed and even delighted, Peter Lake went around the side of the house and climbed onto the broad ledge of a window.