Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  He had carried her from the piano, not to the reception room nor to her father’s study, but to a bedroom. There, he put her down on cotton sheets as fresh and cool as silk, and watched in amazement as she removed the clasp from the towel that was wrapped about her, and, while leaning back on the pillows as if she were about to suffer a medical examination, undraped herself. She breathed heavily—the feverish breathing—and stared straight ahead. Then she forced herself to look at him, and saw that he was more frightened than she.

  She took a deep breath and moistened her lips. Then she exhaled, and said to the man standing by her bedside, “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Done what?” answered Peter Lake.

  “Made love,” she said.

  “That’s crazy. You’re burning up. It’s too rough,” Peter Lake said almost all at once.

  “Go to hell!” she screamed.

  “But, miss,” he said, “it’s not that you’re not beautiful, it’s that I . . .”

  “You what,” she asked, half imploringly and half in disgust.

  “I broke into the house.” He shook his head. “I came to steal.”

  “If you don’t make love to me,” she said, “I don’t think anyone ever will. I’m eighteen. I’ve never been kissed on the mouth. I don’t know anyone, you see. I’m sorry. But I have a year.” She closed her eyes. “Maybe, according to the doctor who came from Baltimore, a year and a half. In Boston they said six months—and that was eight months ago. So I’m two months dead,” she whispered, “and you can do with me whatever you want.”

  Peter Lake, who was both decisive and brave, thought for a moment. “That is exactly what I will do,” he said as he sat down on the bed to gather her in his arms. He pulled her in and swung her over and began to kiss her forehead and her hair. At first she was as limp and shocked as someone who has begun to fall from a great height. It was as if her heart had stopped.

  She had not counted on affection. It startled her. He kissed her temples, her cheeks, and her hair, and stroked her shoulders as tenderly as if she had been a cat. She closed her eyes and cried, much satisfied by the tears as they forced their way past a dark curtain and rolled down her face.

  Beverly Penn, who had the courage of someone who is often confronted by that which is gravely important, had not expected that someone else would be that way too. Peter Lake seemed to love her in exactly the way that she loved everything that she knew she would lose. He kissed her, and stroked her, and spoke to her. How surprised she was at what he said. He told her about the city, as if it were a live creature, pale and pink, that had a groin and blood and lips. He told her about spring in Prince Street, about the narrow alleys full of flowers, protected by trees, quiet and dark. He told her about the colors in coats and clothes and on the stage and in all kinds of lights, and that their random movement made them come alive. “Prince Street,” he said, “is alive. The buildings are as ruddy as flesh. I’ve seen them breathe. I swear it.” He surprised even himself.

  He talked to her for hours. He talked himself dry. She leaned back on the pillows, pleased to be naked in front of him, relaxed, calm, smiling. He talked hills. He talked gardens. What he said was so gentle, strong, and full of counterpoint and rhyme, that he was not even sure that it was not singing. And long before he was all talked out and exhausted, she had fallen in love with him.

  Her fever had subsided enough so that she could feel the coolness of the room. After a comfortable moment of silence and ringing in the ears, he bent over, and, in kissing her breasts, was overcome by a graceful, mobile desire. She was cool to the touch, and though she had imagined with stunning accuracy everything that they did in their rush to find one another out, she had not had the slightest idea of the power and abandon with which they united. It was as if they had been kept from one another for a thousand years and would not come together for yet another thousand. But now, chest against chest, arm cradled in arm, hallucinatory and light, they felt as if they were whirling in a cloud.

  How would he explain to the airborne Mootfowl that, when her fever returned and she grew delirious and begged Peter Lake to marry her, he thought to do it quickly, so that she could not change her mind. She wouldn’t live too long, and he was thinking of the money. Then he had wept. Half asleep, she hadn’t even known. The next morning, when he left, she stood at the back of the stairs, shorn of all her powers, which he carried away in complete indifference as if, in the large white bed, they had traded substance and spirit. He knew that she had given him everything she had, and as he left her he was thinking about lathes and machines and complicated measurements, and things that were precision-milled with surfaces as smooth as glass or polished brass.

  He was in love with her, he was not unmoved because she was Isaac Penn’s daughter, and the two factions were much at war. In the painting’s bright corner, Mootfowl seemed amused, which surprised Peter Lake, who had thought he was guilty of a great transgression. But the laughter and color in the bright window at the periphery of his vision suggested that this was not so.

  And then he saw a strange white cloud moving across the now golden face of the city’s cliffs in the sunset. It changed shape and form as it flew about the towers like a whimsical ghost. He realized what it was—pigeons, millions of pigeons, in a cloud electrified by reflection. They wheeled across the skyline like particles of smoke in Brownian motion, caught brilliantly in a dark chamber by a clear stroke of light reverberating between a sky and floor of yellow brass. Next to the bodies of the buildings they were like mites, or snow, or confetti, or dust . . . and yet they were one single flight, rising like a plume in the wind. Peter Lake knew from this that the city would take care, for it was a magical gate through which those who entered passed in innocent longing, taking every hope, showing touching courage—and for good reason. The city would take care. There was no choice but to trust the architect’s dream that was spread before him as compact as an engine, solid and sure, shimmering over the glinting ice. He lay back, resigned until he saw her again not to know the color of her eyes.

  And then he was suddenly overwhelmed. It was as if a thousand bolts of lightning had converged to lift him. All he could see was blue, electric blue, wet shining warm blue, blue with no end, everywhere, blue that glowed and made him cry out, blue, blue, her eyes were blue.

  Lake of the Coheeries

  IN WINTER, the Lake of the Coheeries was the scene of a siege. No Renaissance engine belching fire or hurling stone could keep pace with even one white clap of a New York winter, and winter there clapped as endlessly as a paddlewheel on one of the big white boats slapping across the lake in seasons gone by. Battalions of arctic clouds droned down from the north to bomb the state with snow, to bleach it as white as young ivory, to mortar it with frost that would last from September to May. Lost in this white siege was the town of Lake of the Coheeries, which in comparison to the infinite, dazzling, never-ending lake that terminated, some people said, in China, was about the size of a shoebox.

  The lake itself ate up all the snow until mid-December. Then, after it froze over, the snow swept across it in drifts and made a maze of corridors wide enough for cargo iceboats, with walls of snow higher than canal banks. Iceboat masts could be seen running along the tops. Sometimes a brave soul would go aloft in a balloon to direct a snow-shoveling crew in cutting the walls of the maze so that the iceboats would have a straighter path from one side of the lake to the other. But within a week or less, the maze would be restored by shifting winds and drift-filled cuts, and the iceboat men once again had to guess, call out to one another, and sometimes halt to climb a bank and peer around. And then when winter really came, in January, the snow completely covered the lake, and transportation across it required horses and sleds.

  That December the ice was empty and unmarred, as perfect as a mirror, and iceboats were able to wing about like martins and kingfishers. They tracked their ways across the flawless glass like glaziers’ cutting wheels. The Penns had crossed the lake at e
ighty miles per hour. Willa was dumbfounded. As he had held her on his lap, in the wind, Isaac Penn explained. This was Dutch—as if saying so could account for the speed, the sliding, the great knives on the slick ice. But Willa accepted it without question. It was Dutch. That explained it. No need to wonder anymore. The idea was within its warm wool sock. Giddiness, speed, sea horizons, and azure ice were Dutch, and the child held tight to the magic of the word.

  Not so the telegraph man who climbed aboard his flyer with a message for Isaac Penn and shot across the ice in the dark, heading for the eastern shore, where a cluster of lights marked the Penn summer house ablaze with the festivities of Christmas. The telegraph man held his lines tightly in gloves of fur and leather. His hands were cramped with exertion, his arms near to falling off, his face knotted up to trace the shortest path across the black ice. At first the lights appeared not to get closer. Then they gradually got bigger until, at the end, he seemed to be speeding toward them faster than light itself. He had to whoa his iceboat like a horse—slackening the sail, dragging the brake, then lifting the brake, and coming about. He made the flyer creep and crawl the last half-mile to the Penns’ dock, and every now and then he patted the telegram to summon in its yellow crunch the assurance that it had not been blown out of his vest.

  Isaac Penn was known for lugubrious depressions, deep melancholia, moments of heavenly equilibrium, and mad flights of happiness and joy. His moods infected everyone around him. When Isaac Penn was down, the world was grayer than London’s rainladen trees. When Isaac Penn was up, it was every room bursting forth with tympanums and brass; a medieval street fair of the heart; the Midwest in May; flights of soaring birds; it was Willa’s laugh rolling about, as capricious and dependable as the surf. That night in the Lake of the Coheeries the summer house was as bright as a candle in a paper cup. It was the evening before Christmas Eve, and Isaac Penn pranced about like a mad goat. He danced with Willa, stooping way down; he boxed with Harry; they did reels in front of the fire, with the rug rolled back—the servants, too, and the closest neighbors, the Gamelys. Knees flew into the air, followed by dancing hose and puppetlike legs. Dresses twisted in light yellow overjoyed with torque and pitch. Rum, champagne, cakes, and roasts were everywhere. (Well, not everywhere: they weren’t in the fireplace, or on top of the harp, or pasted on the ceiling.) The house was warm and bright. Even the cats danced.

  The telegraph man knocked at the door. When they opened it, there he was, covered with snow and ice, a bush in winter. When he entered, he shielded his eyes against the light, which came at him throbbing like a drum, and he walked around as if he were a cinch bug, making little circles, stopping short stubbornly. They gave him a cup of daffodil punch, and as his mustache icicles melted into it and the great big standy-up circus organ played “Turkey in the Straw,” he said, “Telegram.”

  My, but he was surprised—even scared—by their reaction. They danced and applauded like a bunch of lunatics. “All I said was ‘telegram,’” he protested, “not ‘the second coming.’”

  “God bless you!” they screamed, and applauded once more, stunning the man who had just spent a dark hour fleeing like a spirit over the floor of ice. “A telegram! A telegram!”

  Lunatics, he thought to himself, typical downstate lunatics. Then he gave them the telegram.

  Harry read it: “‘Cannot come Lake of the Coheeries Christmas. Will spend Christmas dancing at Mouquin’s with Peter Lake. I love you all. My life is ablaze. Kiss Willa especially. Beverly.’”

  As Isaac Penn stood in the middle of the floor, puzzled, the dance music played on. Mouquin’s? How could Beverly dance at Mouquin’s? It was hot and crowded. What was she going to do to herself? And who the hell was Peter Lake?

  PETER LAKE was all fear, when, shortly before Christmas, he took himself and the white horse (or, as he now called him, Athansor) up to the Penn house high on the cloudy park’s northwest flank. He remembered Beverly best not for the dazed moments in love, and not for the way she had changed him when he saw her at the piano, but for the way she had looked when he left. She was standing at the back of the stairs, in a harsh northern light that softened in the golden mist of her disarrayed hair. She looked at him with unmatchable simplicity. Her expression said nothing, reflected nothing; in it was no ambition for him, no snare, no plan. Not even affection. Perhaps she was too tired to do anything but gaze at him without a thought. There were no barriers between them then, and he would always remember her standing alone at the foot of the stairs, about to ascend into the cold crest of light which broke like surf against her hair. That was Beverly.

  The house she lived in was unsuited to such ravishing simplicity, for it was an essay in whimsy, ingenuity, and laughter. It was stronger than the upturned hull of an ark, bristling with impediments, and as inviting as the round green wreath that hung on the front door. The front door itself was pale blue, almost gray. Had Pearly passed by, he would have stopped. “I know how these things work,” Peter Lake said under his breath, addressing the wreath. “It was too fast, too fast. Such a rapid conversion is bound to have a middling end. She’ll be embarrassed to death just to see me. She won’t be able to look at me. Then she’ll get mad. Four minutes after that, I’ll be back on the street.”

  The door swung out at him, which was quite a surprise, for front doors usually opened in. The surprise was evident on his face, so Jayga said, “Mr. Penn says that doors should open out, like the breach on a parrot or something. He says that he likes to pack people into the house as if he was loading a doll glenn. I don’t know what he means by it, but the doors swing out. What’s your business?” She gave him a quick up and down. “We don’t have no trade entrance.”

  “Beverly.”

  Jayga looked this way and that, and then said, “Oh Lord!” Thinking that she could turn back the clock, she asked, “What’s your business? We don’t got no trade entrance.”

  “Beverly,” Peter Lake answered calmly.

  “Beverly who?”

  “Beverly Penn.”

  “Miss Beverly Penn? The Miss?”

  “Miss Beverly Penn,” Peter Lake echoed, “the Miss.”

  “You?” Jayga asked in astonishment. “You don’t look like no Harberd boy.”

  “Me. I’m not a Harberd boy. I’m just like you, ya folla?”

  Tremendously disturbed, Jayga took him up to the roof, where Beverly lay on a deck chair, her face to the clouds. It was almost warm in the protected enclosure, and she seemed more rested, and stronger, than she had been when he had met her. In fact, she was a study in equanimity, as tranquil as the steady subdued gray of the low roof of clouds. How beautiful she was. She suggested to him the qualities of strength and sureness which he, a man always on the run, longed for most. She made him feel as if his battles were behind him, and she excited in him, for the first time, the desire to be married. He enjoyed the thought of the handsome couple he imagined they might be. This, and more, followed from just a glance.

  Jayga went downstairs, all stirred up, as servants often are on behalf of their masters. Peter Lake sat down on an uncushioned deck chair opposite Beverly’s. His charcoal-colored coat made eaves and dormers about his knees. If he had had a hat (he didn’t wear a hat), he would have taken it off. The city was preparing for Christmas. Though they both could feel the oncoming tension, there was peace.

  Then occurred a rare thing about which men and women sometimes dream. They carried on a full conversation in complete silence, discerning feelings, plans, exclamations, jokes, opinions, laughter, and dreams—rapidly, silently, inexplicably. Their eyes and faces were as mobile as changing light upon a mottled sandbar when clear water agitates above it. Peter Lake sometimes stole big horse-choker diamonds; white, yellow, or rose. And during the lovely hours before his rendezvous with the fence, he spent much time entranced by the light dancing through them. They, like Beverly and Peter Lake, seemed to be able to speak in silence.

  Much that was strange, not for its substance, but for t
he way in which it was communicated, passed between them without resistance. Yes, they were delighted by one another’s image in daylight, outside. He was handsome and she beautiful, and it was a pleasant surprise to receive a gift greater than even memory could give. They confided in one another that they were in love. Marriage seemed to be an excellent idea, for what had they to worry about in the way of unseen hurdles when it was likely that she would not last another year?

  “Mouquin’s?” Peter Lake asked, breaking the silence. “I can’t go to Mouquin’s.”

  “But I want to,” said Beverly, with complete disregard for Peter Lake’s objection, chattering away selfishly as they descended the stairs. “I can wear my mother’s gown. The clothes that she had are now at the peak of fashion. I have her blue-and-white silk dress.”

  “That’s fine,” said Peter Lake. “That’s just fine. But . . .”

  “And Mouquin’s, they say, is a yellow wooden building that, on the outside, seems to be an ordinary boardinghouse, but is like a French dancing hall inside, with balustrades of marble, banks of ferns, an orchestra, and people coming, and going, and dancing. They dance as if no one else is there—the people who are in love. And everyone is dressed to the nines, my father said. He said that what makes the place so wonderful, so happy, is that it has a sad edge.”

  “A sad edge indeed,” said Peter Lake, settling back into a brown velvet couch in the library. “A sad edge indeed, especially for me. I can’t go to Mouquin’s. Mouquin’s is where Pearly Soames practically lives.” Then he told her of how Pearly had vowed to drive a sword into him, and that, despite Pearly’s clumsiness and banality (Pearly often hit his head on things, tripped, and closed doors on his fingers), he honored his promises and was capable of achieving the most extraordinary ends. “I’ve been to Mouquin’s, you see, and it isn’t that great. At least it doesn’t seem to be worth dying for.”