by Mark Helprin
Beverly lay back against the brown velvet and closed her eyes. The heat was beginning to make her tired in a lovely and contentious fashion. Jayga tried to busy herself in the kitchen, but could not resist spying on them, and went every minute or so to the opening over the hunt board to peer down the long dark hall toward the library and its red walls and bright lamps. Mouquin’s moved before Beverly’s eyes in a vision suggesting nothing less than a new world, a mute and snowy Russian Easter compressed within the translucent chamber of an alabaster viewing egg, a sort of miniature paradise which, if entered, might be the scene of miracles. She thought, recklessly, that dancing at Mouquin’s could drive out the disease, flood it with devastating light, and provide a curtain of time and beauty through which she might pass to another side where there was no such thing as fever, and where those who loved one another lived forever. Peter Lakes difficulties with Pearly seemed slight.
“I can’t imagine,” she said, “that Pearly would harm you while you danced with me.”
“Is that so!”
“Yes. I feel very strongly, though I don’t know why, that you are safe with me, anywhere—Mouquin’s included, Pearly’s bedchamber included, the darkest hole in the tombs included.”
Peter Lake was amazed—not only at the presumption that she was capable of protecting him, but because he, for some reason, believed her. “I’d rather not test your powers, if it’s all right with you,” he said, anyway, for safety’s sake.
“I want to go to Mouquin’s!” she screamed so loudly that Jayga jumped up and banged her head on a caldron that was hanging above her. Unable to cry out in pain, she did a long and silent Morris Dance.
“I tell you that no harm will come to you there. It’s more of a risk for me—to go in a carriage in a mountain of stiff clothes, to dance, to drink, to sit in a hot, tense, happy room. Pearly won’t touch you.”
He believed her. When she was tired she was stranger than an oracle, talking in certainties and pronouncements, insistent, selfish, delirious. She leaned back again, exhausted. He could hear only the sound of her breathing, a clock pendulum, and something thumping around in the kitchen. To dance with Beverly at Mouquin’s might very well stand Pearly on his head. And if it didn’t, so what. It would be a fine finish. He would drink plenty of champagne, and all the haut monde, the beau monde, and the low monde freely intermixing at Mouquin’s would see his demise. What the hell, he thought, it’s the quick turns that mean you’re alive.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll go with you to Mouquin’s. But let’s wait until New Year’s Eve, when they’ll be going full blast.”
“Good,” she replied. “That way, we’ll have time to go to the Lake of the Coheeries, where my family is. I want to see my father, and Willa. I want you to meet them.”
She sounded weak, drifting off. He wondered what he would be drawn into by this pretty young girl who often spoke in the manner of a will. He had no idea of where it might lead, but he did know that he loved her.
“To the Lake of the Coheeries?” he asked. “Well then, to the Lake of the Coheeries.”
“I’m glad,” she said, so softly that he could hardly hear her.
A LITTLE pine was lashed to the tall black stack of the Albany boat. Its branches were bent back from steady combat with the wind. But no matter, it was still a Christmas tree. Peter Lake and Beverly drove into a dark hold where Athansor would stay in a comfortable stable with two or three other horses, and where the sleigh was then bolted to the deck. Clear electric lights suddenly came up full as the generator was coupled to newly idling engines. Peter Lake and Beverly, he in his gray coat and she in a smooth fortune of sable, suddenly became brightly visible to one another. He satisfied himself that Athansor was well set, and then took Beverly’s arm to lead her upstairs to their cabin—not that he knew where he was going, although she did. She had occupied that cabin a hundred times.
As they were about to go inside, Peter Lake looked over the rail at the dock below. Vendors were selling hot loaves of bread, chestnuts, tea, and coffee. “I ought to get some bread and tea for the passage. No, tea will cool; beer, I suppose, would be better.”
“It isn’t necessary,” she answered.
“Why? We have to eat.”
“There’s a restaurant on board, and if you want you can summon a steward at four o’clock in the morning and order roast oysters, hot rum, ribs of beef, and everything that goes with anything that strikes your fancy.”
“In that case,” Peter Lake replied, “to hell with chestnuts.”
The cabin was on two decks. Downstairs were a large dining table over which hung a gimballed oil lamp (left, after electrification, at Isaac Penn’s request), captain’s beds, bunk beds, a desk, a settee, and a complete bathroom. Upstairs were another sea bed, and a few leather chairs facing a plate-glass window that looked out to starboard. Since the boat left at noon to go upriver, the starboard view showed all the intricacies the sun could illumine.
“This is our cabin,” Beverly said. “The Brayton Ives carries newsprint for The Sun down from Glens Falls. The line does well on account of the paper, so they keep this cabin for us whenever we want to use it. We have to pay, but at the rate for a regular cabin. They’re small, but they’re all right. Once, when we were children, Harry and I stayed in one, because there were so many Penns going to the lake that all the beds were taken.”
The boat cast off and moved into the ice-free channel. Without removing their coats, they fell back on one of the beds and kissed all the way to Riverdale. Even above the throb of the engines they could hear brass bands on the Upper West Side, and faint choirs from within the smaller churches. But they didn’t get up until Riverdale, when they went out on deck and saw a wilderness. Whitened palisades, rolling hills, glimmering iced trees, and the Tappan Zee miles ahead broadening like a route to the poles were their Christmas, and the hot drumlike sounds of the engine their Christmas music.
At Tarrytown, the setting sun made steeples, towers, and brick buildings on the hill as red and orange as tropical fruit. By the time they passed Ossining, dusk had fallen and the snow-covered fields were blue and violet. All the houses of Ossining, ranged upward on the hills, glowed like fireflies from light within as happy families and unhappy families, and those that were neither and both, gathered around pre-Christmas dinners in the Dutch style. And, undoubtedly, there were a few boys still on the ponds, racing in near-darkness down the narrow cleared lanes which ran like cold canyons through walls of oak and cattail. The river at Ossining was so wide, beautiful, and still, the shelf of ice on Croton Bay so endless and arctic, the mountains to the north so mountainly, the woods on the east bank so lovely, the fields and orchards so beckoning with the lights of fine houses at their edges or in the hollows of hills, that Peter Lake and Beverly stayed on deck though the wind made their faces frozen and numb.
Haverstraw Bay was mainly open, but the channel was littered with enormous blocks of ice against which the iron-sheathed prow of the Brayton Ives smashed on the downstroke. Each time this happened, it was as if ten thousand bells had been rolled down a great staircase. This combined well with the great pressure of the wind, the straining of the engine, and the miscellaneous blasts of the steam whistle. Peter Lake and Beverly, faces stoked to fire by the north wind, watched the ship charge one white slab after another and crush it into floating confetti or simply crack it in half.
The mountains into which the river wound, now whitened by winter, were, in summer, green and rolling hills, or high brown ridges covered with lightning-killed trees in which armies of eagles had their enormous nests. Not even half a day out of New York, were shadowy valleys so dark and deserted that they might have been on the frontier. No lights could be seen north of Haverstraw, and Verplanck, where iceboats reigned, was all in bed or by the fire, with lamps extinguished. The hills were barren, the water black, the ice thickening with each sally of the Brayton Ives. But she kept on smashing into it; and the rougher it got, the more she fought.
They slept through a night of charging and pitching, and dreamt of circling the earth like angels, with hands outspread to guide their flight. Smoke sometimes curled in the open window and burnt their sleeping eyes, but it soon curled out again, and they found themselves high above the sea, or whistling over some dark range of mountains deep in central Asia. Then, feeling as if their lives had been spent charging the ice, they awoke to a subzero dawn and a great commotion on deck.
“What have we got to burn?” the captain screamed from his wheelhouse.
“Oak and pitch pine, sir,” answered a deckhand from the ice-cluttered forecastle. “And a shipment of mahogany,” he added as an afterthought.
“Start with the pitch pine. Cover that with oak. If we don’t have full steam, throw in the goddamned mahogany. We’ll pay for it.”
The Brayton Ives had come to Conn Hook, where the river was so narrow that the ice seemed like a straight marble road. They had to drive themselves up on the brittle shelf (as if the ship were a mechanical duck flippering out of a pond) and break it with the side-wheeler’s enormous weight. This was no mere river navigation; it was winter war.
The ship backed a quarter of a mile through the shattered plates it had just broken, and rested as the wood moved on a chain of hands into the mouth of the boiler. The furnaces screamed with summer, and could be heard throughout the fields. Pressure mounted. The chief engineer squinted at his gauges, watching them climb. Three columns of colored water passed warning bands of red. He held his breath—1,750—1,800—1,850—1,900—1,950—1,975—2,000! He shifted the boat into full speed, wondering if the machinery would tolerate the strain or provide yet another fatal explosion on the river.
Gears and decoupled governors spun into invisibility. Viscous oil thinned. Shafts began to smoke, even though cabin boys doused them with buckets of cold water. The paddles began to spin, digging a trench in the river water and vaporizing it like a saw. The Brayton Ives ran its quarter-mile as fast as a cannon shell, and hit the ice. In slow but unstoppable motion it climbed the shelf and keeled its way for a thousand feet. Centered in the channel as before, paddlewheels chipping the ice like milling machines gone mad, the Brayton Ives had skidded so far out of the water that crew members and captain, and Peter Lake and Beverly now standing on the listing third deck, weren’t sure what had happened or where they were.
“Explode!” said the chief engineer as he pulled the safety valve and a rush of steam shot high over the Hudson with a whistle that could be heard at the northern end of Lake Champlain. As the whistle grew weaker, they found themselves listing high and dry on the ice. The wheels had stopped turning. The open water from which they had sprung was so far back that they couldn’t see it. The Brayton Ives looked like a toy ship in a winter window dressing.
A man near the bow started to move, but the captain gestured for him to stop. Like everyone else, the captain was listening. Eyes darted from the white river to the ship’s master standing with raised hands. A minute passed, two minutes, three, and four. After five minutes, the nonbelievers were sure that the captain had put the ship out of service until a caisson of dynamite could be brought from West Point. But the captain remained on the open bridge, his hands still in the same position, listening.
“Look,” said Beverly, “he’s smiling.” He had broken into a satisfied smile, and his arms had dropped to his side. The deck crew thought that he was taking the defeat with humor, and they began to laugh. He shook his finger at them, and looked over their heads.
Every eye on the ship turned to the north, from which a noise like the sustained crack of a whip echoed down the valley. A black line dividing the ice spread toward them. The captain had known what was going to happen long before anyone else (which was why he was the captain). Then the world seemed to collapse as the solidified river split in two for miles and the ship fell with a roar into a chasm of liberated water. A way was open before them as clear as a slip between piers. They got up steam and proceeded calmly to the north—where there seemed to be no people, but only mountains, lakes, reedy snow-filled steppes, and winter gods who played with storms and stars.
JAYGA HAD watched as Peter Lake and Beverly packed the sleigh, hitched up Athansor, and drove off, bundled in furs. Then, a minute later, she had run to the police station to deafen the desk sergeant with a tale from one of the pieces of Shakespearean tragedy that she had seen declaimed in the beer halls. It was a loose cross between Othello, Lear, Hamlet, and When We Were Young in Killarney, Molly, delivered with a combination of speed and thunder which came too thickly to admit of much grammar.
“The young miss and her swan done canteloped,” said Jayga to the desk sergeant. “I knew he weren’t no quality. Bezooks, he hangs around all night, he does. Lend me your ears! Fourscore and twenty-nine years ago, I did remember from the prick of tails what when he was loft to give and crovet with sateen robes and silken duvets. Hath thee no grime?”
“What was that?” the sergeant wanted to know. “Are you here to report a crime?”
“Bezooks I am! Damn your face, piebald strumpet!”
She thought that if she were to talk to the police on behalf of the Penns, this was the way to do it. And so it went, as Jayga manufactured details that drew the sergeant toward her until his stomach smothered the police blotter like a small hippo reclining upon a pocket Bible. Peter Lake had strange red eyes. Lightning danced from his whip. The horse could fly (she had seen it in the air, circling the house while its master was inside). Begging her mistress to stay, she had clutched at her heels and thrown herself in front of the sleigh, but to no avail. After half an hour of shrieking, when the tale was told, Jayga exclaimed, “Oh! I left my biscuits in the oven!” and disappeared from the station house so quickly that the police thought they had dreamed her.
Telegrams sparked to and fro between The Sun and the Lake of the Coheeries. The telegraph man worked harder that Christmas than ever before, and made an iceboat track across the lake straighter than the barrel of a Sharps rifle.
BEVERLY MISSING STOP JAYGA SAYS ELOPED WITH SEER STOP
ADVISE STOP
WHAT QUESTION MARK EXCLAMATION POINT FIND HER STOP
CHECK THE ROOF STOP LOOK EVERYWHERE STOP
EVERYONE LOOKING EVERYWHERE STOP CANNOT FIND HER STOP
ADVISE STOP
LOOK HARDER STOP
STILL CANNOT FIND BEVERLY STOP
LOOK EVERYWHERE STOP
WHERE IS EVERYWHERE QUESTION MARK STOP
DO YOU WANT SPECIFICS QUESTION MARK STOP
YES STOP
HOSPITALS HOTELS WAREHOUSES RESTAURANTS BAKERIES ROPEWALKS STABLES CARGO VESSELS DAIRY BARNS PRODUCE TERMINALS BREWERIES GREENHOUSES ABATTOIRS BATHS POULTRY MARKETS GOVERNMENT OFFICES RETAIL ESTABLISHMENTS WELDING LOFTS INDUSTRIAL GARAGES GYMNASIUMS FORGES SCHOOLS ART STUDIOS HIRING HALLS DANCE PALACES LIBRARIES THEATERS OYSTER BARS POTTERY BARNS SQUASH COURTS PRINTING HOUSES AUCTION PLACES LABORATORIES TELEPHONE EXCHANGES RAILROAD STATIONS BEAUTY PARLORS MORGUES PIERS ARMORIES COFFEE SHOPS CLUBS KILNS MUSEUMS POLICE STATIONS BICYCLE TRACKS TANNERIES JAILS BARBERSHOPS REHEARSAL ROOMS BANKS BARS CONVENTS MONASTERIES SALAD KITCHENS STEAMSHIP TERMINALS CHURCHES GALLERIES CONFERENCE CENTERS WHOREHOUSES MUSIC SCHOOLS AEROPLANE HANGARS AND OBSERVATION TOWERS STOP
DID YOU LOOK IN THE BASEMENT STOP
YES STOP
The Brayton Ives halted at the foot of high mountains along the river’s west bank, and a ramp was put down onto the ice. All was serene as engines idled and hissed, and no movement could be sensed. And then Athansor came bursting out of the side of the ship, his hooves thundering on the ramp, pulling behind him the sleigh with Peter Lake and Beverly. Before the sailors could haul in the planks, Athansor was galloping on the white roads that led into and over the mountains. There were no railings at the thousand-foot drops, but only ice-clad trees and evergreen bushes long encased in thick sarcophagi of snow. They went up and up, ricocheting left and right in terrifying skids, crossing the frozen mountains under a cloudless
polar sky. Finally they halted in a small notch and looked west at the greatest plain Peter Lake had ever seen. It stretched for hundreds of miles in three directions, and was covered with forests, fields, rivers, towns, and the Lake of the Coheeries—twenty miles distant, silent, snow-covered, wider than the call of a French horn, shimmering on its horizon with white illusory waves, a separate kingdom of the unrecorded frontier. They almost flew down the mountain, and then Athansor ran at ferocious speed along a wide, straight, and snowy road that led to the lake.
He was galloping like a fire horse, on the sleigh path that paralleled the iceboat road, when Beverly stood up and said, “That’s my family!” indicating an iceboat zipping toward them in the trench. Isaac Penn recognized his own sleigh, and released the sail as he pushed the brake into the ice, sending up a rooster tail of glitter. In the sound of the horse’s deep breathing and the luffing of the sail, the Penns stared at Beverly and Peter Lake, and they stared back. Though no one could think of anything to say, Willa leaned over and reached for Beverly—her favorite, her darling. Peter Lake jumped from the sleigh and lifted the child into Beverly’s arms. Willa seemed like a little bear frisking with its mother, because both she and her sister were clothed in shiny black fur, and Beverly held her as if she would never let go.
Willa closed her eyes and slept contentedly; the iceboat was pivoted around; Peter Lake cracked the whip; and they raced to the house on the lakeshore under a sky of solid delft azure. “Drive hard, Peter Lake, drive hard,” said Beverly, holding the child.