Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  Athansor trotted up to the tavern barn and turned to Peter Lake as though to ask if he should bring the sleigh inside. Beverly said no, she would wait where they were while Peter Lake took the children for some hot Antwerp Flinders. Peter Lake protested. She should come in too. Why not? It was not Mouquin’s; they wouldn’t be dancing; she wouldn’t be in a corseted gown; and they might spend all of a quarter of an hour there before the trip back.

  “No,” said Beverly, “I feel especially hot.” He put his hand on her cheek, and then on her forehead. She was thermal equilibrium itself. But she did seem agitated.

  “Beverly,” said Peter Lake, “tell me why you don’t want to go in there.”

  “I told you,” she answered. “I feel feverish.”

  He thought for a moment. “Is it because of me?” he asked. “Because I’m not a gentleman with a sleigh driver and the right clothes?” He gestured toward the inside of the barn, where two dozen rigs and two dozen horses were packed in stalls and wooden ways, and two dozen coachmen were having a party of their own around a forge that had been pressed into social service. This village was a popular destination for many young people who regularly drove into the country to have dinner and drink at a favored tavern. The very rich always went the farthest out.

  “You know it’s not that,” answered Beverly. “I’d much rather have the man who drives the sleigh than the man who is driven in it. I’ll be all right. We’ll go to Mouquin’s. Here,” she said, passing him bright-eyed Willa, who was excited by the unfamiliar blackness of a winter night. “Willa needs a hot drink.” By this time the older children were tumbling over one another in the snow. Peter Lake put Willa on his shoulder and jumped down to join them. He turned to Beverly for a moment, and then walked toward the tavern.

  He and the six children attracted much attention inside. Lovely women came over to talk to Willa, Jamie Absonord, and the delicious-looking and beady-eyed but beautiful little Shingles girl, Sarah. Their escorts smiled approvingly. Peter Lake wanted Beverly to be with him. It didn’t seem right without her, and he was embarrassed by the stares that, with Beverly present, would have made him proud.

  The room was full of the fire, excitement, and ease that come from dancing. It made Peter Lake’s heart spring back in memory of the nineteenth—his—century, when he had grown up, and when things had been quieter, wilder, and more beautiful—although, surrounded by children and dancers at an out-of-the-way inn on the Lake of the Coheeries, he felt that he was in a time when beauty mattered, and he had only to think of Beverly, outside, beyond the tar-black windows, to confirm it.

  “Nine Antwerp Flinders,” he said to the barmaid. “Seven without the gin. Wait a minute. Make that nine Antwerp Flinders—one with an eighth of gin, for this little girl; six with half gin (Jamie Absonord squealed in anticipation of being slightly drunk); one with triple; and one in a closed container to take when we go, double gin. Heavy on the cinnamon, heavy on the lemon, heavy on the cream, lots of minced plum.”

  The Antwerp Flinders arrived boiling hot. Peter Lake and the children drank them as they watched an impassioned quadrille of two-dozen elegant dancers. The seasoned floor planks shook and the fires across the room blinked at them through a snapping gate of silk and taffeta gowns, and swallowtail coats of English gem wool. Not fully appreciative of a dance between the sexes (except for Harry, who was suffering some inexplicable adolescent madness that made him recline against the wall and sleep like a narcoleptic), the children got into a hot and tipsy game of Duck Thumb.

  Peter Lake was still sad that Beverly remained outside. He missed her so much that he became absolutely saturated with love, which made him breathe slowly in painful pleasure and feel a glow throughout his body, which traveled from here to there as it overflowed the containers that contained it. So he nearly vaulted the table, and rushed outside. He made his way to the side of the barn, where Athansor was eating some hay. No Beverly there. He peeked inside. Not there, either. Then he saw some tracks that led around back. He followed them into the darkness, between pines heavily laden with snow, and there he found Beverly standing on the hillside, hands clasped, staring into the tavern. Before she knew that he was there, he saw what she was looking at. It was a nearly silent miniature; a little lighted cube; like a paper house with a candle in it. Distance and darkness converted an ebullient scene full of motion and glare into something sad and whole, and of another time. He saw that Beverly had taken it and clasped it to her, as if it were a jewel in its intricate foil. She had by distance converted it into a painting, or an accidental photograph, that touched her to the quick. She had remained outside because she had never had the opportunity for society, and she was afraid. Innocent things, such as a dance in a tavern, terrified her. He realized that Mouquin’s would be a test of courage more for her than for him.

  He thought at first that it might be easy to lead her inside to the music and dancing. There was, truly, nothing to fear. But she did fear, and it had brought her outside, to a position in which she could embrace the scene and know its spirit. This was not unlike Peter Lakes far views of the city, from which he always learned a great deal more than he would have from within. No, he wouldn’t try to coax her in—even though she might be adored there. He would not bring her in, he would join her on the intense periphery.

  He closed upon her in the snow. She was almost ashamed at being discovered alone amid the pines. But she saw from his expression that he had understood, and she knew that now he was really with her.

  They peered through the windows for a while and watched the children at their table, completely absorbed in Duck Thumb. Harry, sleeping against the wall, looked like an overworked medieval cook-boy. Then Peter Lake raided the place and kidnapped the children, and they were all in the sleigh once again, speeding eastward into the ferocious dark. Beverly drank her Antwerp Flinder. They were content to wrap themselves in blankets and furs and lean back as Athansor pulled the sleigh, not as fast as before, but at least as fast as the pleasing clip of a prestigious through-train.

  Above them, in the cold, was a confused hiss of clouds and stars racing past in islands and lakes. It was such a hypnotic sound that they tilted their heads to stare at the chirping, crackling, rhythmically beating sea of starlight and fast-flowing cloud. On they traveled, on and on, smooth as the wind, gliding selflessly over ice and snow on the strong steel runners.

  Athansor, the white horse, moved in time with the diffuse static from above. Though he had the power and joy of a fast horse heading for his stable, they could sense in his happiness much more than that. They could sense that the hypnotic rhythm in which he moved was that of an unimaginably long journey. He was running in a way that they had never seen. His strides became lighter and lighter, harder and harder, and more and more perfect. He seemed to be readying himself to shed the world.

  The Hospital in Printing House Square

  IN THE same way that certain sections of the city were mortal battlegrounds, some parts of the calendar were always more warlike than others, and during the days between Christmas and the new year all elements seemed to conspire to subdue the soul. Fire, rain, sickness, cold, and death were everywhere spread through the dark as in a painting of hell. People struggled until exhaustion, giving everything they had, and the days were packed with trials and mysteries.

  When the Penns and Peter Lake returned from Lake of the Coheeries they found snow locked in combat with warm humid winds that had come on a raid from the Gulf of Mexico. The atmosphere was full of the tangled gray trails that would mark future battles in the air; and the city’s children, released from school and trapped inside all day by sleet, were at wit’s end. Then events began to speed up, as if an engine were determined to pull the year from its trough and was running as fast and hard as the stokers could lay on more coal.

  The mayor, his wife, and a train of favored flunkies descended upon the Penns one afternoon, all so drunk that their breathing made the house into a vapor-bomb more dangerous than a sil
o in late summer. Included in the party was the commissioner of police. Needless to say, this made Peter Lake skittish, especially because the commissioner repeatedly looked at him and then screwed up his face as if saying to himself, “Who is that?” Several years before, in one of the fits of late adolescence that had followed Peter Lake well into his thirties, he had written the very police commissioner who now puzzled after his identity a series of insulting, burn-the-bridges, flirt-with-self-destruction, challenge-the-devil, vitriolic letters that began with lines such as, “My dear incompetent buffoon of a Police Commissioner . . ., or, “To the pathetic fungus who calls himself Commissioner of Police . . .,” or, simply, “Flea.”

  As Jayga and Leonora served hot lemon tea and steaming scones, Peter Lake hung in the corner, swallowing a lot but not eating. Every now and then, the police commissioner glanced in his direction. Peter Lake’s portrait was in the Rogues’ Gallery. At the time he had posed for the police photographer, he had been something of a dandy, and was pictured as two black marbles staring from a mass of sealskin lapels, a sealskin hat, and mustaches from which artisans might have taken inspiration for their work in wrought iron. He was then known as “Grand Central Pete, Bunco and Confidence,” which was how he had signed his letters—title and all. Not daring to upstage the mayor, the police commissioner was quiet and had much opportunity for reflection. As he sobered up, he began to recognize Peter Lake, who excused himself and went up to the roof. There, sheltered from a cold gray rain, Beverly was sitting in her tent, reading a National Geographic article entitled, “The Gentle Hottentots.”

  “Think of something!” commanded Peter Lake after apprising her of the danger.

  “At the moment, all I can think about is Hottentots,” she said, but then knitted her blond eyebrows and concentrated. Peter Lake did not know why he had come to her for a way out, when he was the one so well practiced in schemes and escapes. He thought that it might be that, more than wanting to elude the police commissioner, he wanted to watch Beverly engaged in a problem.

  “He knows by now, doesn’t he?”

  “No, but he’s at the brink.”

  “Then we’ve got to drive him from it. I know. We’ll show them the painting. My father said he wanted the mayor to see it anyway.”

  “What painting?”

  “There’s a painting in the basement. You don’t know about it.”

  As they entered the reception room, Isaac Penn was saying, “The oddest thing about the elite—of which, I suppose, I am now one—is that they rule so . . . daintily. The great mass of people, in which one finds brave soldiers, firebrands, geniuses, and inspired mechanics, is paralyzed in the face of these human delicacies with their garden parties, their unprotected estates, their inebriated stumbles, their pastel clothing, and their disempowering obsessions with disempowering things. When a workingman moves among them, he is most amazed: amazed at how small they make him feel, amazed at their frailty, amazed that they are yet invincible, amazed that he, a bull, is ruled by a butterfly.”

  “Yes,” said the mayor, too drunk to get the point. “Isn’t it funny the way poor people dress like clowns? The poorer they are, the more ridiculous they look. It’s as if the circus is their Brooks Brothers. And they’re so ugly.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” interjected Peter Lake from the doorway, where he was standing arm in arm with Beverly. “It’s not just the poor who make themselves look like clowns. The rich do it, too. After all, look at their fragile and preposterous formal clothing: they might as well wear feathers. In fact, they do. And then there’s the fashion, among the high elite, of tattooing things across their bue-tox. I’ve heard,” continued Peter Lake, staring directly at the mayor, “that certain socially prominent women of this city actually have maps tattooed across their bue-tox.”

  Everyone except the mayor and his wife laughed into his tea, and the flunkies said things like, “Nonsense!” or “Fiddle-de-diddle!”

  “Oh no, not fiddle-de-diddle,” lectured Peter Lake, gliding with Beverly into the center of the room, like two ships of the Great White Fleet. “Not nonsense either. Mr. Mayor,” he asked, giving the mayor a start, “surely you, in your position, have heard of such things?”

  “What things?” the mayor replied, nervously.

  “Maps on the bue-tox. Maps of Manhattan on one bue-tox. Maps of Brooklyn on the other bue-tox. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.”

  “Well . . .” said the mayor. “Actually . . . I sort of . . . yes, yes . . . I have!”

  Peter Lake bowed, and then dazzled all the drunks by introducing them to Beverly. They had heard that she was beautiful, and an invalid of some sort, and they had assumed that she would waste away until her wedding night and then quickly recover the way so many young women did when they found out that they had taken pleasure for peril. They did not know and could not apprehend by appearances that she had tuberculosis of lung and bone.

  “Didn’t you want to show the mayor the painting?” she asked her father.

  “Yes, I did,” he answered.

  “Oh, a new painting?” the mayor asked, glad to change the subject.

  “Relatively new.”

  “Who did it?”

  “The man who painted it doesn’t want to be known. He only wants to know.”

  “Come now!” someone said.

  “It’s quite true,” replied Isaac Penn.

  “Let’s guess from his initials!” offered a woman who spent most of her time drinking liqueurs that were too sweet and playing card games that were too simple.

  “M.C.,” said Isaac Penn. “Guess all you want. You’ll never know.”

  As they wound down a long spiral of bronze stairs, deeper into the rock than some of the ladies cared to go, the mayor spoke up. “Why do you keep it down here?”

  “This is the biggest room we have,” answered Isaac Penn, “and the painting is rather large.”

  “When you want to exhibit it, you’ll have to roll it up to get it out of here.”

  “No,” said Isaac Penn. “It doesn’t roll up.”

  “Really,” said the mayor, somewhat nervous himself about the great number of stairs, “I hope this isn’t solely on my account.”

  “Mr. Mayor,” answered his host, “in this infinite universe, whole worlds have been created for the instruction and elevation of a few simple souls. Believe me, it’s no trouble for me to show you this painting, which, as far as I am concerned . . .” Here Isaac Penn was drowned out by a sound that rose from beneath them as if it were a thick misty cloud. Peter Lake immediately recognized it as the crackling static of the stars and the white wall. It grew louder and louder, until, finally, they came to the bottom of the stairs, and faced the painting, from which the sound was coming.

  They stood motionlessly, clutching their sides, struggling to keep their balance; that is, everyone but Isaac Penn and Beverly—and Peter Lake, who was not afraid of heights. They were in a room of astounding proportions where the only illumination came from the painting itself, which was easily thirty feet high and sixty feet long, and unlike any painting they had ever seen, for it moved. It sent changing images, moving light, and the static of clouds and stars speeding in a tidal wave toward its viewers, who felt as if they had discovered a hidden underground sea.

  “What technique is this? What colors?” asked half of them at once.

  Isaac Penn replied, “A new technique. New colors.”

  The painting was of a city at night, as seen from above, and though they recognized some things they knew, most of it was unfamiliar, because there were lights by the billions, actually sparkling, moving along distant roads in thick concentrations the likes of which the viewers had never imagined, moving along the rivers, and through the air. The city they saw looked real, of inconceivable scale, and frighteningly like their own.

  “Move closer,” urged Isaac Penn, and they were able to see more and more as they did. The liqueur-and-cards woman nearly fainted when, upon close examination, she saw a tiny pair of
legs scurrying along under an open umbrella. They were able to see in perfect detail. The bridges, of which there were hundreds, had lighted and glowing buildings suspended from their catenaries and stacked upon the roadways as on the Ponte Vecchio. The view changed, as if they were flying past it, and they felt like birds gliding above quiet streets and deep canyons that were mysteriously three-dimensional. They experienced a pleasurable vertigo like that of walking on a country road in fall as torrents of leaves float in a rush of wind, flooding the air with new depth, putting the scene under water, and banishing gravity.

  This city enabled anyone who looked at it from afar to soar above it, to rise effortlessly, to know that despite its labyrinthine divisions it was an appeal to heaven simpler in the end than the blink of an eye. It was, like New York (and certainly it must have been New York—after the tribulations of the present had long been forgotten), a city of random beauty. Anything within it that was beautiful was beautiful in spite of itself, and would come to light surprisingly, apart from all expectations. Everything that moved was seen to move with a slow and unworldly grace. Flying machines moved across the sky like lucid planets in ascension, but they did not rocket away, they rose slowly—without shock, in full confidence.

  “What city is this great city?” the mayor asked, clearly moved. “Is it New York?”

  “Of course it’s New York,” Isaac Penn replied. “Look at it. What other city could it be?”

  “But can it be?”

  “What do you mean?” said Isaac Penn. “It’s right in front of you."

  Peter Lake was convinced that Beverly was the key to these scenes. She was so marvelous that, when he tried to think of her, her description rolled away from him like a dropped coin, and all that was left was a feeling of joy. Nevertheless, he noticed that she was acting like a bored caretaker, behaving as if she were a dutiful daughter hearing for the ten-thousandth time her father’s description of his collected art, and dreaming what young girls dream in the presence of their parents’ aged friends. She climbed a little fixed ladder onto the raised platform over which the painting was hung, and sat with her head in her hands, facing the guests. Nearly inside the living view, almost as if she were on a windy precipice high in the air, she looked toward the back of the room and now and then glanced at Peter Lake.