Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  And then there was the son of a swordfisherman, who chose the swordfish, and found himself almost paralyzed by his memories of its suspended leaps, and of the courage it had as it fought, snapping its entire length above the water like a spark, giving everything it had in its struggle to stay in the sea. He concluded that the swordfish had to love its life very much to fight so hard against being taken. That in itself was enough for his essay, which, in the pure and assertive language of a child, touched upon the generative powers of memory and the definitions of courage.

  The teacher was pleased with this exercise, and, as she listened to her children, she was eager for Christiana’s turn. She knew that Christiana loved animals, and she knew as well that the child was unusually contemplative. Though the hotel was rarely occupied, and had been failing since Christiana was born, and though this took its toll on her as she watched her father in defeat, it was not a tragedy, for they were not greedy people, and they took their gradual impoverishment well. Christiana was a quick little girl, of deep imagination, and very pretty. But her strength was not derived from things that can be cataloged or reasonably discussed. She had an inexplicable lucidity, a power to see things for what they were. Somehow, she had come into possession of a pure standard. It was as if lightning had struck the ground in front of her and had been frozen and prolonged until she could see along its bright and transparent shaft all the way to its absolute source.

  In the schoolroom with windows crowned by light, it was now Christiana’s turn. She glanced out the window and saw between its pillars the quick passage of a white gull through whirling azure. Gone in a moment, it had crossed almost faster than she could see. She stood to face the teacher. She had her favorite animal, an animal she loved, and she had intended to tell about it. But she found that just the thought of it, or the saying of a few words that would lead to a vision of it in the flesh, moving slowly with wondrous unheard-of strides—just her memory of the day when she had actually seen him—brought her to the point where she had to cry.

  Being practical, and not wanting to disrupt the class, she quickly decided to talk about another animal, and started to tell about a sheep that was tied up on a small patch of lawn in front of the hotel. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t—because for her the depth of things was always at hand, and because she had been made to think of the one event in her short life which had moved her the most. She failed utterly in her restraint, and suffered the embarrassment of painful sobbing. For, try as she did, she was unable to think of anything but the white horse.

  CHRISTIANA HAD been assigned by her mother to bring back blueberries with which to make a pie and muffins, but the real purpose of the trip was to walk among the many miles of heathered hills in June sunshine, solitary, free, and unencumbered but for a light wicker basket. At every turn or rise, she was privileged to see new views—strips of cobalt blue water held in arms of beige sand, green chevrons of forest reaching for the sea, and the sun reflecting off the Sound into flat trajectories. It seemed that each time she blinked, a new glory of landscape appeared and was celebrated by the stiff breezes that pushed in the breakers and crowned the beach with panicked bracelets of foam. In the middle of the morning, when her basket was half full, she heard a crack of thunder in a cloudless sky, and looked beyond the rim of a cake-colored dune to see that something was falling. It left a trail of mist as it plunged into the ocean, like a meteorite dipped in smoke and gold. The birds rose from the bushes, chattering, straight up, the way they do when they hear a shot. And a red fox who had been skulking in the heather froze in his tracks, listening, and held his paw in the air lest putting it down would deprive him of his senses.

  She dropped the basket and rushed to the top of the dune. Shielding her eyes, she looked seaward and saw a circle of white water rocking back and forth on the waves less than a quarter of a mile out. Something surfaced in the middle of the white disc, thrashing about in confusion. It wasn’t a fish (it had legs), and it telegraphed the cold, and perplexed fear of someone or something that was drowning.

  Walking down the silky sides of the dune, her hand still shielding her eyes, Christiana was lost in consideration of what it was and what she should do. At the water’s violent edge (the surf was rough after a gale), she did what no adult would ever have done, except perhaps a strong young soldier recently returned from a war and convinced of his invulnerability. As she watched the thrashing beyond the breakers, she kicked off her shoes and unbuttoned her dress, letting it fall to the sand precariously near the lasso mark of incoming waves. In a silken camisole nearly rose-colored from age and friction, she walked into the ocean, and when the turbulent foam was at her waist and the undertow made her stance uncertain, she dived headfirst into the freezing water and started swimming at the waves, sometimes going over their voluminous crests, and sometimes diving under them into what she had always called the “salt and pepper”—because the sound was so white, and, with her eyes closed, she saw only black. She was good in the waves, having grown up in their presence. Defeating their efforts to push her back, sideways, and under, she was soon swimming in blue water that she knew was very deep.

  The ocean was surging to and fro in a rhythmic fashion analogous to the movement of a violin bow. It left her in windblown blue troughs as thick with whirlpools and eddies as a lake in August is thick with lilies, and it lifted her on solid mountains of water that bent into lenslike plates and then collapsed to become a dozen little flumes. From the high points, she could see all around, as if from an observation tower, and she saw that the current was pulling her sideways. She shifted course and continued swimming, until, almost exhausted by the cold waves, she came to the edge of the foam pool. In its center, a stricken animal was thrashing in panic.

  Treading water, she looked at it carefully, and saw that it was a white horse twice as big as the draft animals that pulled ploughs in the potato fields, but with the lean look of a Southampton hunt horse. Though she had never seen either a cavalry mount or a battle, she knew from its motions that it thought it was in a fight. It was not drowning, but, rather, enmeshed in some sort of dream. Its front hooves left the water like leaping marlin, and smashed down into imagined opponents, cleaving the surface into angled geysers. It neighed the way horses do in a fight, in self-encouragement, and its legs never ceased flailing as it tried to trample down the brine.

  If she were to approach it, she would surely be crushed, and if not, held in the vortex that it was slowly carving, and dragged under to drown. Even so, she swam into the ring.

  The water there was far less substantial and less buoyant. Sometimes she went down in this rapids, and surfaced in a different quarter. But she kept swimming until she was literally upon him—half floating, half resting on his broad back. She put her arms around his neck as far as she could (which was not very far), and closed her eyes in anticipation of the detonation to come.

  If the white horse had expected anything, it was not the sudden embrace of a young child in a silken camisole, and, unable to see what was on him, he went wild. First, he jumped out of the sea like a St. Botolph’s Charger, and seemed to fly in the air. Then, four legs extended, he went under, hoping to shed his rider in the gales of water that would sweep over his back. He went as deep as he could, and rolled, and kicked in the noiseless brine, but she, lungs dying, did not let go.

  When he came to the surface she was with him, and, though he continued to thrash, he seemed now to want a rider. She had to be brought to land. She was a frail child with thin arms and wet hair that streamed over her face, and despite the fact that she had come all the way out there, mounted him, and hung on, she was shaking from the cold and seemed not to have the strength to engage once more the surf and its undertow. She touched his neck, urging him toward the beach, and he began to swim the way a horse swims when it fords a river—with complete concentration and single-mindedness.

  On the back of the white horse, Christiana had the impression that he might easily have headed in the other dir
ection and been able to spend the next few months at sea, like a polar bear. He seemed to have limitless power.

  As they broke through the surf he began to go faster, as if he were waking up or getting his wind back. Momentarily confused by the undertow, he took several great strides which nearly threw his rider, and was soon standing on dry land. Not realizing how far she was from the ground, Christiana slid off and hit the sand so hard that she fell backward into a sitting position. It was difficult to believe that he was so high. But she could easily walk under his belly without bending her head. She weaved in and out of his legs, passing her hand across them as if they were tree trunks. She walked through the forelegs, under his chin, and out to where he could see her. Except for his wounds—the slashes and cuts, some of which still bled—he appeared to be a public monument come alive.

  He tilted his head and looked at her in parental fashion, as if she were a colt or a filly. Then he lowered his neck and nuzzled her on her stomach, and then on her head, pushing her a little one way and back again, pressing her hair enough to make salt water come dripping out of it, and yet not hurting her at all. As long as he was looking at her, she could not turn away from his perfectly round, gentle eyes.

  After she had run to get her clothes, and after she and the horse were made warm and dry by the wind and the sun, she saw him glance up and search the sky. He followed gulls wheeling on thermals miles aloft, but did not seem to find what he was looking for. Then, as she watched, he galloped up and down the beach; he pranced about in a circle; and, shaking out his mane, he reared onto his hind legs. Satisfied with this, he made a single leap that, to Christiana’s astonishment, took him over the high line of dunes which faced the ocean. By the time she followed, he had already taken to galloping and jumping in tremendous bounds over the duneland, the walls of scrub, and the ponds. She watched him during this exercise, wanting him to sail farther and farther at each jump—which he did. And he was not unaware of her, either, for he always stopped and looked back to see if she were still there. She was just young enough to clap each time he extended the distance of this soaring, and it made her own heart fly to see him rise into the air.

  But finally he looked toward the dune where she was sitting, and raised his neck and head. Shaking them back and forth, he whinnied in the deep and beautiful way that horses can whinny when they are moved. Then he turned toward the sandflats and the Sound, and started his run. The earth shook, the beach grass trembled, he propelled himself forward, and he flew.

  STATELY, PLUMP Craig Binky often sat in an exhausted daze, staring at the flickering breaker light that reflected into the living room of the illustrious East Hampton retreat which he called the “Rog and Gud Clug.” His father, Lippincott “Bob” Binky, had built the club and opened it to all white gentiles of English descent. Nonetheless, the club members were not particularly fond of the founder’s son. They did not like the way he pronounced things, his large entourage, the many senseless regulations that he proposed at their meetings (girls between ages nine and ten must wear waterwings at all times), or the blimp that he moored over the golf course. He called this blimp the Binkopede, and used it to cover funerals. As the deceased was being lowered into the earth, a blimp shadow would enshroud him, and the Ghost photographers would catch the mourners in the unusual pose of looking straight up.

  Craig Binky and his friend Marcel Apand (a lecherous, candle-colored, rat-eyed real estate tycoon, whose name was pronounced “ape hand”) believed that the job of the very wealthy, and therefore their job, was to find dazzling beaches and shaded groves humming with bees, to sit in a garden close as the trees swayed, and to watch the sea from well-kept summer houses as big as hotels. One afternoon, while a dozen waiters were laying out the cutlery and china of the Rod and Gun Club, Craig Binky and Marcel Apand were arguing over the former’s assertion that seven plus five was thirteen. Winding through crowds of sunburned men and women, the director of the club interrupted this mathematical dispute, calling his guests’ attention to the lobsters that were boiling not so far away in large steam kettles full of sea water and fresh dill, and then—anticipation of dinner having banished the argument—proceeded to ask a favor of Craig Binky.

  He knew that Craig Binky’s house in East Hampton had forty-five rooms, and that the double townhouse on Sutton Place had sixty, and he was aware of a great many other unused Binky habitations all over the world—a garden apartment in Kyoto, for example. He wanted to know if Craig Binky, or Marcel Apand for that matter, had an extra room to lend for a week or two. A young kitchen maid at the club needed someplace to stay in the city while she looked for a job. The club, of course, closed down promptly on the first of October. This year she had no place to live, because her father had died shortly after his old hotel—in the middle of the potato fields out toward Springs—had burned down during a terrible electrical storm. Her mother had gone back to Denmark.

  “I don’t know if I have room,” Craig Binky blurted out, his eyes darting from place to place the way they always did when people asked him for favors. “Uh . . . the billiard room is being redone.”

  “Oh, that’s perfectly all right,” the director said, rising. “It doesn’t matter.”

  But Marcel Apand was listening intently. “Wait a minute, Craig,” he said. “Don’t you want to get a look at her?”

  Not long after they got a look at her, she found herself on Marcel’s yacht, the Apand Victory. Moving through the ten thousand mothlike sails on the Sound, she felt as if she were riding on the shuttlecock of a loom that was weaving a tapestry of summer. The trip to New York by boat took two days. They stopped for the night at Marcel Apand’s estate in Oyster Bay, where, in her estimation, he behaved strangely and was much too forward and direct about the kind of things that people on the tip of Long Island did not talk about in the presence of new acquaintances. But by the next day, the Fourth of July, she had generously forgiven his gracelessness, and the hot blue mist that covered the approaches to the city took up all her attention.

  She had never been to New York. She had been told of its stunning size, and had made a few deductions of her own by contrasting the power and wealth of the city people with that of the islanders whom they annually overwhelmed—but she hadn’t successfully guessed the half of it.

  They sailed under the dozen bridges that spanned the Sound. Looking at them even from below gave her vertigo. From afar they were lovely arches and upright pillars. Like the moon and the sun, summer and winter, and all the many other things that she knew were in complementary balance, they suggested the existence of a greater and more perfect design. She could hardly believe that there were hundreds of these bridges, and their names were a delight to hear as the captain recited them for her along with the names of the rivers, channels, and bays they crossed.

  At Hell Gate, when they came around the corner and saw the darkened cliffs of Manhattan, she learned that (as fine as villages may be) the world is infatuated with its cities. The view downriver into Kips Bay was crowded with unforgettable gray canyons, and there were bridges everywhere, knitting together the islands by leaping currents that ran as fast as racehorses. Their spidery metalwork soared, and their catenaries rolled like the swells off Amagansett.

  LIKE A rusty, bashed-up harbor tug attached to a sleek new liner, Marcel towed Christiana from one party to another. He had her by his side, turning heads, at two dozen affairs a week. When they had left the yacht on the Fourth of July and taken a taxi through a mile and a half of canyon walls of blood-red brick and mirrored glass, they had seen three or four people where normally there would have been thousands. Because no windows were open and the air was so still and hot that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead. Had she driven in from Long Island, past the prairie full of tombs, the impression might have been strengthened. At Marcel’s parties, it was confirmed.

  They were the price for living in a small palace with
a garden that overlooked the East River. Most of the time, Christiana had the carefully decorated reception rooms, the libraries, whirlpools, saunas, and sunny balconies to herself. Marcel was almost always at his office, but when he returned he expected her to be waiting for him, ready to go out, fully made-up, dressed in expensive silks or in gowns covered with flashing scales.

  At first, she looked for work, and would have been happy to have become a salesgirl at Woolworth’s or a cleaning woman in a bank. At the parties, benefits, and testimonial dinners, she was offered jobs as if they were the things that servants carried around on trays. Though these jobs paid enormous salaries, they demanded that she make herself available in the same way everyone assumed she did for Marcel.

  The young men who caught her eye turned out to be either Apand employees loyal to their chief, or voracious creatures not unlike him who always managed to ask her to call them in secret. And the men who put up the tents and hauled the food and dishes were different from the fishermen in Amagansett who did similar work in their spare time. They didn’t dare look at Christiana, and she was ashamed to look at them. It saddened her to remember when she had passed out food to the Scandinavian families that came to the hotel when she was a girl, while a player piano banged out Danish songs from fifty years before, and she and the sunburned little blond boys blushed almost to ignition at the thought of dancing or touching.