Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  “Nothing,” replied Peter Lake. “It’s not important.”

  She began to laugh. It was very loud at first, and reminded them that (except for the music) the house had long been silent. He, too, laughed, rather politely, and cautiously. She put her hand to her face, closed her eyes, and sighed. Then she was quiet, with her hand to her face still, until another short burst of laughter. Then she pressed her forehead very hard, and she cried. The tears came terribly fast. Now she, too, was salty and streaked. It was horribly bitter crying, but it was soon over, and when she looked up again, she was drained, or so it seemed.

  Morning sun now made the room as white as sugar, and the drafts and breezes made it cold. “If you’re what I’ve got,” she said, “then you’re what I’ll take.” He might have been offended, but she did not sound in the least sorry for herself. It was as if she knew about him more even than he did. He nodded to say that he understood. Whatever it was, it did not appear to be a marriage made in heaven. For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed. Still, he wanted to embrace her. But that seemed out of the question, and the room grew whiter and whiter.

  Underneath them, in the basement, the automatic furnace switched on, and the entire shiplike frame of the Penn house shuddered. They could hear the rhythmic beating of the oil burner and the bright yellow pounding of the flame. He wanted more than anything in the world to embrace her. But it seemed out of the question.

  Then she turned to him and stretched out her arms. And he went to her as if he had been born for it.

  On the Marsh

  THAT THE river had frozen solid was cause for festivity and alarm. People immediately pitched colorful tents and built dangerous bonfires upon the ice, which, in one short day, became the site of a medieval fair for those who had been drawn out onto the river to see their city, now silent, in heart-filling perspective. Because the ferries had been trapped, the wagoners and produce men were the first out, taking mule trains, horse caravans, and even motor trucks across the new white roads. There were many who said that an ice age approached. They huddled like rats, around their fires and in their flannel beds, despairing, forgetful of the power of spring.

  Traveling one night in a heavy snow, Peter Lake used the ice as a road to the Bayonne Marsh. Though he could see nothing but blinding flashes cascading before him in a void of pulsating blue, he made his way faultlessly by listening to the distant roar of the cloud wall. It was a pure sound, like that of the cutting torch, or of a mysterious choir singing all sounds. It hinted that, beyond the furious barrier, a deep past and a bright and beautiful future were somehow combined.

  In navigating, he used the fully laden sound like a light, and thought that if the sound were alive—a chorus of spirits, somehow animate, perhaps a god—it would not be displeased that he made it a beacon, keeping it always to his left by ten degrees. And he found not only the right path, but a safe one, by listening to the ice, muffled by newly fallen snow, as it resounded under the slow steps of the white horse.

  Most horses, sensing the water underneath, would have been afraid. A fall through splintered ice would have meant drowning in cold black water, itself suffocated under an unyielding white plate and thousands of feet of vibrating blue air choked with cotton. But the white horse was unafraid, and moved as steadily as if he had been on a track. He kept his head up, and followed the sound of the clouds with what seemed to be affection. Peter Lake could hardly see the animal beneath him as white as the thickly falling snow, but he could sense that the horse was on his own ride, relearning what he had known long before. And it was not unpleasant, plodding slowly over the ice, to discover that of all the means to the tranquillity he now sought, a quiet snowfall was the most elegant and the most generous.

  Hours out, when he knew he was on the marsh because the ice rose in long whalish humps over the dunes, and brittle cattails jingled as they were shaken by his horse’s hooves, he sensed that he was being watched. Well he understood how careful the Baymen became when the marsh froze and roving bands could cross over and lay waste their villages. The Baymen remembered the Hessians, and the Indians, and others even before them. Certain that they were watching him, he advanced into the pressure of their eyes as if to the beat of a drum. The horse was alert, trying for silence in his steps.

  Then they closed with breathless speed, a full circle of them in cowled white robes of thick rabbit fur, their winter dress. The ring they made of their spear points was a mechanical expression of the ineluctable, an absolute zero of escape. How silently they had come, how perfectly they had appeared from the blinding mist, as if they had been part of it. Peter Lake spoke to them in the ceremonial language. They recognized him and brought him in.

  HE ALWAYS took good care of the horse. After all, he loved him. And while he was clearing a space between two enormous dappled Percherons, so that the white horse, who was even bigger than they were, would be warm and comfortable in the thickly reeded quonset stable, Humpstone John pushed his way through the door of felt panels. As Humpstone John grew accustomed to the light that streamed from a brass candle-lantern, he appeared stunned. This was not unusual, for he was a man who was often in the presence of great things. He looked at the horse with tremendous satisfaction. Peter Lake saw in John’s eyes the delight at seeing an old friend, and he saw as well that it was not on account of him.

  The horse snorted. He didn’t know John, that was clear. John addressed Peter Lake in English. “Where did you get him?” he asked.

  “I got him . . . uh, I got him. . . .”

  “Well, where did you get him?”

  “I didn’t really get him. He was just there.”

  “Where?”

  “On the Battery. I had almost had it—the Short Tails. I fell. When I got up I couldn’t run anymore. I thought it was the bucket. And then he came from . . .”

  “From your left.”

  “From my left.” Peter Lake nodded. “How did you know?”

  “Have you named him?” asked John.

  “No.”

  “You don’t know his name, do you?”

  “No. There wasn’t any way to know.” He thought for a minute. “He can jump. Jesus, can he jump. The Dead Rabbits wanted to buy him and put him in the circus.” Then his voice lowered. “John, he can jump four blocks.”

  “Not surprised.”

  “You know about him. Why is that?”

  “Peter Lake, I thought that you might come to no good (and you may yet). And when we sent you across the river, all alone, I had little hope that you would make out decently in that place.” When he said “that place,” he said it with the dread and revulsion that the Baymen had for the city. “I thought that you were gone from us, and would become one of them. . . .”

  “I have,” said Peter Lake.

  “Maybe you have. But that’s not the end of it.”

  “Why?”

  “You remember that there are ten songs.”

  “Yes.”

  “That one learns them, beginning at age thirteen, one each decade.”

  “Yes. I never learned them.”

  “I know, Peter Lake. We sent you away. The first, the song of thirteen, has to do with the just shape of the world. It is nature’s song, and is about water, air, fire, and things like that. I cannot ever sing you any of these, not anymore. But I can say that the second one, the song of twenty-three, is the song of women; and the third one, the third song, Peter Lake, is the song of Athansor.”

  “Athansor?”

  “Yes,” said Humpstone John, “Athansor . . . the white horse.”

  THE NEXT morning, when the snow stopped and the sky became cold crystal, every Bayman from everywhere arrived to view Athansor—that is, every Bayman who knew the song of the white horse. Refusing Peter Lake any information about what the song said, they just gazed in amazement at Athansor, who had had no idea that this was his name, but came to recognize it by noon. Peter Lake was irritated because, as he put it, he want
ed to know what he was driving around. It didn’t take him long to stop wondering, since he thought he would never find out—it was harder to pry a secret from a Bayman than it was to open a sick clam. He went to the white horse and comforted him, and was comforted in turn to realize that the horse’s sudden renown and new name meant nothing. It just doesn’t matter, he thought; he’s the white horse; his nose is still soft and warm; nothing has changed.

  But something had changed, or was changing. Everything always did, no matter how much he loved what he had. The only redemption would be if all the tumbling and rearrangement were to mean something. But he was aware of no pattern. If there were one great equality, one fine universal balance that he could understand, then he would know that there were others, and that someday the curtain of the world would lift onto a sunny springlike stillness and reveal that nothing—nothing—had been for nought, neither the suffering of all the children that he had seen suffering, nor the agony of the child in the hallway, nor love that ends in death: nothing. He doubted that he would have a hint of any greater purpose, and did not ever expect to see the one instant of unambiguous justice that legend said would make the cloud wall gold.

  Covered with furs, he lay in his hut, staring out an open door at Manhattan far across the white and frozen bay. He had spent two decades in the city that sat on the horizon like something floating in the clouds, and now he knew what the gray and red palisade was; he knew its scale, its music, its interior, the sound of its engines, the plan of its streets. Great as they were, the bridges were fathomable. He understood how the new skyscrapers were built. Mechanics built them, and he was a mechanic. For twenty years, he had been on the streets of that city, and he loved it. He was a guide, an intimate. And yet, from a distance, catching the sun in the clear, it looked like nothing he had ever known. Following its brown spine as far as his eye could see, he lifted his head to pass over the spires of tall buildings. A hundred plumes of smoke and steam curled about this sleeping thing, which would not have surprised him had it immediately come alive. Its growing animation was catapulted across the ice, and though it was sleeping in dark chains, he had no doubt that someday it would rise and brighten, like a whale bursting from the sea into light and air.

  It was easy to become lost in vivid memories of such a city, and they assaulted him with the energy and disorder of the streets themselves. Within the traffic of many forms and colors, serene images spoke quietly, but they were as bright as enameled miniatures, and as lovely to recall.

  A family of South American grandees had toured the park one summer day, in a line of four carriages pulled by horses as gray as November. It seemed that they were used to another life in a place that was vast, wild, and full of sun and animals, and as they rode in the lacquered carriages, they carried themselves like knights. The women were more alluring than Spanish dancers at the core of their frenzy: sex gleamed all about them like metal. There were a silent patriarch and matriarch, each of whom had wise old eyes, and hair whiter than the unprinted edge of a postage stamp. Peter Lake had envied them as they approached: though they did not know the city, they were obviously masters of some foreign ground. As they came closer he saw that sitting with the driver in the front carriage was a cretin or idiot—a son, brother, or grandson of those within the scallop of the carriage itself. He was dressed like them, but his eyes bulged, and he drooled from a smile that was far too easy. His hair seemed like fur, and his limbs were loose and dangling. Every now and then the grandmother would stand up in the carriage, steady herself with one hand, and pat him like a dog, while the others talked to him affectionately. For him, it must have been a great thing to ride with the driver. They were not in the least embarrassed by this stroke of fortune. On the contrary, they seemed to benefit from it, as sails flying through bright air benefit from a suffocated keel ploughing blindly through dark water. He was one of them, and always would be. They loved him. The carriages had long passed, but Peter Lake never would forget the boy’s pale moonish face bobbing up and down at the head of the procession.

  Now and then, from the windswept platforms of the Brooklyn crossing, he saw the ranks of soldierly skyscrapers in their tight stone lines. Once, late in spring, he watched them stop a continental sea of cloud and mist, damming it up like the water in a millpond, until it sifted through their fingers and made them individual islands. At night they were a palisade of flickering light. Long after everyone was asleep, they conspired in wind tones and vibrations. They held through the blinding weather, speaking in their strange static, trying to touch across great heights, striving to effect the marriage of heaven and hell to which they were pledged. Watching in a storm, Peter Lake had seen lightning dance across their granite needles in sheets of solid white.

  But no memory, no matter how fine, sharp, or powerful, could match his memory of Beverly. It was electrifying and perfect—except that he could not remember the color of her eyes. They were round, bright, and beautiful, that was sure, but were they green, brown, or blue? Why remember the color of her eyes, when she was dying? But blue-eyed (was she blue-eyed?) Beverly, in a claret scarf, drew him back to her when he least expected and wanted it.

  He tried to distract himself. Remembering a string of fortunate summers, he summoned from his bed on the windswept ice a picture of Manhattan reverberating with heat. There he was, bobbing and floating on rafts of color high above the streets: silvered canyons and warm red brick, the lisp of a huge broken clock, trees like bells shuddering sound in green, silent streets as dark and elegant as mirrors in dim light, a thousand paintings left and right—islands in the stream cascading from above, the heat of pale stone, merchants forever frozen who never ceased to move, cooing purple pigeons shaped like shells, an arsenal of roses in the park, streets that crossed in forks and chimes, leopard shadows, dappled lines. But what was it without green-eyed (was she green-eyed?) Beverly in her claret scarf.

  He might hide deep in the city, and lose himself in the blurring colors, the violent action, the wavering summer furnaces of air at the end of every street. But then, enjoying the pleasure of being lost, he would turn to find that he had been followed, and changed. Brown-eyed Beverly (was she brown-eyed?), in her claret scarf, could easily pull him from his contemplations. A young girl, a frailty, simple and true, who had been unable to stand up from the piano and had had to be carried; a girl half his age; a girl who could not shoot a gun, had never been in an oyster house, atop a tower, or under the wharves; a girl hotter always than noon in August; a girl who knew nothing; had thrown him so hard that he would be out of breath forever.

  The city took lives in an instant, by the hundred, without a blink. She would be quickly overwhelmed amid the tenements, she would vanish and disappear, she would melt on the barriers, she would be lost, exhausted, unable to follow as he made his way through the bladed maze. And yet, those green, blue, brown eyes followed him down all streets, on all paths, everywhere, effortlessly.

  The best thing to do was to stop it while he still could, since it was something that would lead nowhere, painfully. There was no shortage of women for him in that sea of architecture that lay across the ice. The women there, in seemingly infinite number, were as startling and beautiful as a quiet green square at the exit of a wildly busy street. They could clasp him tight in their speech, keeping him like a pearl in a stiff silver mount, because it had always been easy for him to fall in love with just a voice—a source of endless trouble when he used the telephone. One woman had been so consumed with jealousy that she tried to shoot him as he was standing at the bar of an oyster house. A bullet lodged in mahogany, another killed a clam, and yet another drilled a hole in the blade of a slicing machine. Peter Lake turned to her, and asked, “What does this have to do with romance?” She and all the others were quickly fading as Beverly took hold. Beverly. This one young girl colored his mind and memory as if he had been dragged through a trench of dye.

  How could he explain this to Mootfowl, who was always present, in the air, as if Pet
er Lake lived in a painting and Mootfowl were a figure in a painting within the painting. Sitting high up in an arched window in the sunlight, staring into the chapel of Peter Lake’s life, Mootfowl was always willing to forgive, but he had to hear the truth. And the truth, as Peter Lake saw it, was that the girl was consumptive—not just consumptive, but near death. He knew of such things from a lifetime among the dark or glowing souls ready to depart the plain of tenement rooftops and sail through the air. The child in the hallway was by no means the only one he had seen about to cross worlds. They were as numerous as flowers in spring and could be found by the row in lofts full of iron beds, or overflowing into the neglected gardens of hospitals for the poor. As they drifted upward, ghosts, they could not even cry out.

  She would soon join the disappearing souls, faintly glowing, gossamer. How could he trust that he loved her? She was rich, and there was much to gain. The rich died, too, disappointing all those who thought that somehow they didn’t. Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking. Though Peter Lake was, by his account, a fortunate man, he was not wealthy. That was something else entirely, which depended solely upon things like gold, silver, and commercial paper (he had stolen a lot of commercial paper from banks: it was hard to fence). Beverly was an heiress to the kind of fortune that altered one’s character in contemplating it, the kind of fortune that was like an injection of stimulants directly into the bloodstream. His heart pounded when he thought of the millions, the scores of millions, the hundreds of millions.

  How could he explain to the airborne Mootfowl that what had overtaken him was love and not greed. She was soon to die, and he would love other women who had, as Mootfowl used to say, a faster grip on the world. And how would he explain to a clerical spirit in a lighted window that his lust and love had finally converged, undiminished.