Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  He had never had a family. But there he was, suddenly, almost a husband and father. Small scenes can be so beautiful that they change a man forever. He would never forget that noontime on a lake of ice, nor would he ever forget her words.

  “Drive hard,” she had said. He would. Things were different. All he wanted now was love.

  THEY SLEPT until evening, Beverly in a specially constructed loggia outside, and Peter Lake in an upstairs bedroom. He awoke in complete darkness and struggled through halls and passageways until he found himself in a huge room, staring at two fires and the Penns, all of whom were wide-awake, including Beverly, who had come in from the cold. Peter Lake announced that he had to go to see his horse, and backed out the front door. The air was a mountain of crystal through which a bright moon shone. He followed the sled tracks to the stable, where he peeked in at Athansor dreaming contentedly under a thick scarlet blanket. Clearheaded, Peter Lake returned to the house, and found that everyone except Isaac Penn was busy in the kitchen cooking up a feast to feed the Huns, the Mongols, and the Eskimos. Isaac Penn was enthroned in a leather chair, staring at the fire, tapping his thin fingers on the heavy arm.

  Peter Lake sat down on a wooden bench next to the fireplace and looked Isaac Penn squarely in the eyes. He expected yet another staring contest, as with Pearly. Peter Lake knew that powerful men could cut people down to size with their eyes, and often did. Jackson Mead and Mootfowl had done it benevolently, but they had done it. Thus, Peter Lake expected to be raked, combed, and shaken down, because Isaac Penn was much more than Pearly’s match. Indeed, to Isaac Penn, Pearly was just a sharp-toothed puppy. This was because Isaac Penn was the man behind the city’s mirror. He had almost supreme power over the city’s conception of itself, and, by small adjustments, could hypnotize and entrance it. If he wished, he could have it flail its limbs in an alarming fit. He could scare it to death, empty its streets, or make it want to hide in a hole. Because Isaac Penn could move New York in such a way that its strength would shame the giants of the earth, or lift the city’s hand to have it flick the dust from a baby’s eye, Peter Lake expected one of those meetings where he was made to feel like an aspiring young gnat.

  What a surprise, then, when Isaac Penn looked him in the eye and said quite sheepishly (he even looked slightly like a sheep, which was probably what accounted for the wonderful expression that so distinguished Willa from other children—Beverly did not look like a sheep), “Um, ah, do you take wine with your meals?”

  “Sometimes,” answered Peter Lake.

  “Good, we’ll have wine tonight. Would claret be all right with you? Château Moules du Lac, ninety-eight?”

  “Oh yes, anything,” replied Peter Lake. “But isn’t it pronounced ‘claray’?”

  “No. Claret. You say the ‘t,’ just as in ‘filet.’”

  “Filet? I thought it was ‘filay.’”

  “No. Filet, just as in wallet. You don’t say ‘wallay,’ do you? You say wallet. Same with filet and claret.” Isaac Penn leaned back in his chair. Peter Lake was beginning to feel at ease. Why, he thought, did I expect anything other than this rather timid old fellow?

  “You know what?” said Isaac Penn.

  “Sir?”

  “You look like a crook. Who are you, what do you do, what is your relationship to Beverly, are you aware of her special condition, and what are your motivations, intentions, and desires? Tell the absolute truth, don’t elaborate, stop if a child or servant comes in, and be brief.”

  “How can I be brief? These are complicated questions.”

  “You can be brief. If you were one of my journalists, you’d be finished by now. God created the world in six days. Ape him.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Unnecessary.”

  “All right.”

  “Unnecessary.”

  “My name is Peter Lake. You’re right. I’m a crook. I’m a burglar, but I’m really a mechanic—and a good one. I love Beverly. Our relationship goes by no name. I have no intentions; I am aware of her special condition; I desire her; I am moved . . . by love. When we drove across the lake this afternoon and Beverly held the little girl in her arms, I felt a responsibility far more satisfying than any pleasure I have ever known.

  “I realize that the child is yours. I realize that Beverly may die. And I am more than aware of my own shortcomings as a father, a provider, and a protector. And though I know about machines, I’m ignorant. I know that I’m ignorant. And I know . . . I know that the strange little family on the sleigh must soon break up. But Willa loves Beverly. Beverly is virtually her mother. And I think that we should help to take care of her for a while, not so much for her sake, as for Beverly’s. Do you understand?”

  “How do I know,” asked Isaac Penn, “that you are not moved merely by vanity or curiosity. How do I know that you aren’t here for the sake of the money in this family?”

  Peter Lake was in full possession of himself. “I was an orphan,” he said. “Orphans don’t have vanity. I’m not sure why, but one needs parents to be vain. No matter what my faults, I tend to approach things with a certain gratitude, and those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful. As for curiosity, well, I’ve seen a lot, too much in fact. Curiosity has no bearing on the matter. I don’t know why you brought it up.”

  “And money? Do you know why I brought that up?”

  “Yes, I thought of the money. It excited me.” He smiled. “It really did. I had escalating dreams—of being your right-hand man; of doing all the things that men of power and wealth have occasion to do; of wearing a different suit every day, and clean linen. I became a senator, President. Beverly lived. Our children were great in their turn. The articles on us in the encyclopedia were so long that they took up most of the volume ‘L.’ All around the country there were monuments to me, of marble as white as snow. In the end, I confess, I was flying about the universe. Beverly and I touched the moon, and flew off to the stars. But, mind you, after a few hours of this, there was no place else to go. After just a few hours of walking with kings, I was very glad to be Peter Lake, of whom no one has ever heard, completely anonymous, free.

  “Mr. Penn, the only people who want that kind of stuff are those who are too stupid to imagine it and then be done with it. Now, this may sound strange to you, sir, and it’s new to me (within the last few days, as I see it), but I want responsibility. That, to me, is the highest glory. I want to give, not take. And I love Beverly.”

  “Do you realize—what shall I call you?”

  “Everyone always calls me by both my names.”

  “Do you realize, Peter Lake, that the money, the presence of the money, can erode and corrupt those feelings?”

  “I do, sir. I’ve seen it myself. I feel it within me, too.”

  “So, then, what do you intend to do to prevent this—assuming that you will have that privilege?”

  “I know just what to do. I’m not educated, but I’m not a fool. After . . . if . . . Beverly dies, I’ll disappear. I don’t want any of this.” He indicated with a sweep of his arm the room in which they sat, but he meant, actually, everything in the world.

  “You think I would let you do that? The man that my daughter loves? And she does. She told me so—and she didn’t have to.”

  “It isn’t up to you.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Peter Lake, I would let you do that. My impulse would be to provide for you for the rest of your life, to bring you into the family, to make you one of us. But I won’t. It’s for Beverly. Do you see?”

  “Yes. I see. Of course I see. And, further, Mr. Penn, I was not meant, evidently, to have a family in the sense in which you refer to it. I was not born to be protected, but, I warrant, to protect.”

  “Then we are in agreement. I assume that you will stop being a burglar, and revert to being a mechanic.”

  Peter Lake nodded. “There is one thing, one thing which I will ask. I need your help for it alone.”

  “And what is that?”


  “A child. There was once a child that I saw in a hallway, in a tenement, a long time ago. Of all the things I have ever seen, this I remember best. It has been with me ever since . . .”

  But then Peter Lake was interrupted by the whole troupe exiting from the kitchen, their cheeks red from the heat of the oven, platters of food and bottles of wine in their hands. Before they sat at the table to eat, Beverly sent them all to wash up, not because they needed to (their hands were very clean), but because she wanted to embrace her father and thank him for accepting Peter Lake, as she knew he had, from his expression and that of Peter Lake—and because she had been listening at the door.

  LATE THAT night, refreshed and strengthened by a good dinner and much free laughter, Isaac Penn and Peter Lake sat in the small study, staring at the fire. The heat ran around half a dozen logs that had become red cylinders of flame, changing their colors until they looked like six suns in a black universe of firebrick. Their glow was an invisible wind that irradiated the room and froze the two men in place—like deer in a forest which is burning all around them, who lift their heads to the highest and brightest flames and look into a tunnel of white light.

  “The doctors told me,” said Isaac Penn, as if he were talking to himself, “that she would be dead in a few months. That was almost a year ago.” He glanced at an ice-covered window in which the moon had gone all astray, and listened to the wind coming off the Lake of the Coheeries as it could only there, on a midwinter night, like the roaring jet winds of Mars or Saturn. “It’s a mystery to me that she can sleep outside, in that. She wasn’t supposed to. In winter, she’s supposed to come in. But she refuses, even up here. I can never get used to thinking that my daughter is out there in that caldron of ice. And yet, in the mornings, she comes to breakfast revived after twelve hours in cold that would kill a strong healthy man. The wind and snow cover her, attack her. At first, I used to beg her to come in; but then I realized that doing what she does is what keeps her alive.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder,” said Peter Lake, aware that he was in a warm comfortable place in a vast sea of snow and ice which maneuvered beyond the walls like a wild unopposed army. “I wonder about the others.”

  “What others?”

  “The thousands, the hundreds of thousands, like Beverly.”

  “We’re all like Beverly. She’s early, that’s all.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “What way? Be clear.”

  “The poor should not have to suffer, as they do, in their millions, and die young.”

  “The poor? Do you mean everyone? Certainly you mean everyone in New York, for in New York even the rich are poor. But is Beverly poor according to your definition? No. And yet, what’s the difference?”

  “The difference,” said Peter Lake, “is that small children, their mothers, and their fathers, live and die like beasts. They don’t have special sleeping porches, a hundred pounds of down and sable, marble baths as big as pools, ranks of doctors from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, salvers of roast meat, hot drinks in silver vacuum bottles, and cheerful happy families. I want Beverly to have these things, and would die rather than see her go without them. But there is a difference. The child I once saw in a hallway was barefoot, bareheaded, dressed in filthy rags, starving, blind, abandoned. He had no feather bed. He was near death. And he was standing, because he didn’t have a place to lie down and die.”

  “I know this,” Isaac Penn asserted. “I’ve seen such things far more often than you have. You forget that I was a poorer man than you have ever been, for a longer time than you have yet lived. I had a father and a mother, and brothers and sisters, and they all died young, too soon. I know all these things. Do you think I’m a fool? In The Sun we bring injustices to the attention of the public, and suggest sensible means to correct inequities where they serve no purpose. I realize that there is too much needless and cruel suffering. But you, you don’t seem to understand that these people whom you profess to champion have, in their struggles, compensations.”

  “What compensations?”

  “Their movements, passions, emotions; their captured bodies and captured senses are directed with no less certainty than the microscopic details of the seasons, or the infinitesimal components of the city’s great and single motion. They are, in their seemingly random actions, part of a plan. Don’t you know that?”

  “I see no justice in that plan.”

  “Who said,” lashed out Isaac Penn, “that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand—until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.

  “No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene has its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent—a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery. We try to bring it about without knowing exactly what it is, and only touch upon it. No matter, for all the flames and sparks of justice throughout all time reach to invigorate unseen epochs—like engines whose power glides on hidden lines to upwell against the dark in distant cities unaware.”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter Lake, confused. “I think of Beverly, and I’m not sure about the golden age of which you speak, which is beyond our lives, and which we will never see. Think of Beverly. How could it be?”

  Isaac Penn got up from his chair to leave the room. At the door, he turned to Peter Lake, who felt cold and alone. Isaac Penn was an old man, and sometimes he became dreadfully grave, as if he were in the presence of a thousand tormenting spirits. His eyes reflected the fire. They seemed unnatural, like tunnels of flame into a soul grown so deep that it must soon leave life. “Have you not yet realized that Beverly has seen the golden age—not one that was, nor one that will be, but one that is here? Though I am an old man, I have not yet seen it. And she has. That is what has broken my heart.”

  THE APPROACH of Christmas had turned the children into excited little dynamos of greed, and Christmas morning saw an impressive trading of loot, in which nothing was notable save Willa’s present for her father, the first gift she had given in her life. She had taken a day and a half to decide, and then Peter Lake had driven across the lake and over to the town of Lake of the Coheeries, where he bought it. Isaac Penn opened his presents last, and, in one big box that had had holes cut into it, he found a fat white rabbit with a tag around its neck that read “From Willa.”

  On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Beverly and Peter Lake went for a ride and took more than half a dozen children with them—Willa; Jack; Harry; Jamie Absonord (who had recently arrived by train and iceboat, and whose heart still throbbed for Jack, though, now, neither would look at the other for any reason whatsoever); and the two Gamely children and Sarah Shingles, plump and whimsical Coheeries youth with perfectly balanced Yankee sharpness, Indian magic, English competence, and Dutch madness. The stocky, cold-proof Gamelys and young Sarah sat in the high back seat of the sleigh, looking like a row of Bavarian wood carvings, ready for anything.

  Since the lake was covered with perfectly flat hard-packed snow, Athansor had at last an endless place in whi
ch to run. When Peter Lake slackened the reins to give him his head, he pointed himself straight down the length of the lake and bolted for the horizon. They picked up speed. Everyone settled in his seat and closed his coat. The horse went faster and faster. He soon exceeded the peak velocity of the fastest horse-drawn sleighs, and he was just loping. Then he really began to run. The wind hit them so hard that they had to bend into it and squint. They drew up even to an iceboat speeding along a cleared track and passed it so fast that it looked as if it were rushing the other way. Next, Athansor lifted his head and took a series of long shallow leaps. The sleigh left the surface and flew through the air. It touched lightly every now and then, but the runners seldom met the snow, and when they did there was a short hiss as it was vaporized to steam. The children were amazed, but not frightened. As they raced west into the setting sun, they saw it stop still, reverse itself, and start to climb. “Dear God,” said Peter Lake, swallowing hard, “the sun is rising in the west!” But no one heard him, for the wind was attacking them with such strength that the world seemed to have turned into a siren. They were moving so fast they couldn’t see anything of the shore except a smooth white streak like an enamel band on a china bowl. Even the Gamelys had to hunker down in the wind and hope for the best. Then Athansor slowed. The runners returned to the ground, the wind grew weaker, the sun had stopped and once again begun to sink, and they could see the shore. When Athansor fell into trotting like any other horse, Peter Lake directed him to the soft early lights of a settlement ahead.

  It was a tiny town somewhere so deep in New York’s western sprint that the local Iroquois were still awaiting Pierre de la Tranche. The village was covered by thirty feet of snow, which made its houses look like the creations of mad architects who built in holes in the ground. But the tavern was in the clear, and its lights shone out upon the lake from a windblown knoll. Smoke exited the chimneys in remarkably thin and solid lines. The children took note of this for their future drawing.