Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  He was proud that he knew so many influential people, drank expensive wines (and water imported from a frozen spring in Sakhalin), and went to restaurants where a piece of toast (Toast Almondine, Toast en gelée, Toast Safand) was priced at the equivalent of fourteen hours of the minimum wage. He seemed to himself to be genuinely superior. Perhaps for that reason he regularly arranged testimonial dinners in his own honor. Still, Craig Binky and The Ghost were the necessary counterbalance for Harry Penn and The Sun. There could not have been one without the other, somewhere, in some form. As it happened, they faced one another across Printing House Square.

  IF ALL the months and all their days could be like June weather in New York, there would be paradise on earth. Often, in early June, momentous decisions are made, power waxes strong, quick wars are fought, and love affairs are begun or ended. This was apparent even to Craig Binky.

  On a day so fine that the pressmen sat lazily in the sun, watching bees, when tranquil opera music welled up in peaceful, darkened streets, and when trees took the early summer breezes through new jewel-like leaves, a messenger sped in from the airport in a Ghost helicopter. Before it landed on The Ghost roof, the messenger jumped onto the helipad, injuring his leg John Wilkes Booth style, and ran toward Craig Binky’s office.

  He broke past the receptionist and dashed into Craig Binky’s inner sanctum. Alertu and Scroutu locked arms and stood to, barring the door through which Craig Binky was visible addressing a board meeting. Betty Wasky, his secretary, arose from her station and implored the stranger to be patient. “These guys are blind,” the messenger said, sizing up Alertu and Scroutu. “I don’t want to hurt them.” Such strong talk impressed Betty Wasky, who went to fetch her chief. Craig Binky took the messenger into his private office, and emerged five minutes later shouting orders.

  He dismissed the board and ordered up the fleet of corporate planes. “Wind them up!” he shouted. A phone call to the airport readied all of The Ghost’s small air force. The aircraft honored to receive Craig Binky would take off in the lead, with the rest following in an armada of gleaming titanium and screaming engines. When Craig Binky flew, a hundred planes took wing, like the doves that were released to greet a Roman general returning in triumph. In the largest plane of the fleet, a giant commercial craft, he had installed an elevated seat that enabled him to look out from a plastic bubble on the roof of the fuselage. A familiar sight at the New York airports, this aircraft would start out for the far-flung reaches of the Ghost empire, with Craig Binky’s head visible in the bubble.

  That day, the airport was gripped with excitement as a hundred planes rose into the air one after another as if on a bombing raid. They threw the controllers into chaos, for their hastily filed flight plans said they were going to Brownsville, Texas, but they all veered eastward, out to sea.

  “Where the hell is he going?” one controller asked as the armada dipped low and disappeared from the radar screens. He received no answer, because no one knew, except Craig Binky. And Craig Binky wasn’t telling.

  An Early Summer Dinner at Petipas

  ON THE same day that Craig Binky took off for Brownsville and then veered mysteriously out to sea, a group of journalists and managers from The Sun met for an early summer dinner at Petipas. As they sat in the garden, blinded by the white and gold flare of the setting sun, they heard a fleet of airplanes racing across the sky in the distance, and they wondered what it was.

  They had just finished their last task of the day, which was to transfer material to The Whale for reprinting. After an early dinner, a quiet walk, and a good sleep, they would be at The Sun by 6:00 A.M. to start work on the edition that had to be put to bed by 2:30 the following afternoon. After transferring their stories, checking the plates, and organizing the next day’s work, they would usually be through at about 7:00 P.M.

  They liked to meet at Petipas, because it was quiet and airy, and yet they could see river traffic heading down from the north, and hear lonely trucks driving across the cobbles of the deserted market. The sound of the wheels on the cobbles was inexplicably comforting. Best of all were the surprised emotional cries of the tugs and the ferries—the New Weehawken, the Staten Island, the Upper River, the New Fulton—as they echoed around the harbor and off the cliffs of the financial district. Plaintive, foggy, and full of the afternoon, the whistle blasts were unmistakably altered by their multiple courses through the shady canyons. In the east, a thousand golden fires reflected from the windows of loft buildings and brick warehouses the color of oxblood, and illuminated the cake-white municipal towers that had statues, colonnades, and extraordinary nests of detail so far above the street and beyond human view that the stuff must have been intended for birds. Across the river was an eighteenth-century knoll with trees standing upon it like peasant women with arms akimbo, and the spotlight of the sun firing their green tops, while black shadows below suggested a grove of infinite proportions. Harry Penn stared at the dark anchoring of this grove, and saw in the velvet tunneling exactly where he was soon to go. He sensed in the darkness sheathed by brilliant light the compressive presence of the future and the past running together united, finally come alive.

  He turned from the hypnotic blackness of the trees to his daughter and the others. In their youth, their passions, and their enthusiasms, they were like a group of singers onstage, whose mobile laughter and expressive limbs were dreamlike under strong light. With age, their energies would transform into the powers of contemplation and memory. And the dreams that would bring back to them the people they had loved and the landscapes of thirty thousand days would be more than a match for the decades of youth in which they ran about dodging brewery trucks and trying to make a living. If in another three-quarters of a century they would be like the old man, in the garden at Petipas, who was so delighted by their grace and animation, they would be lucky. For Harry Penn was a happy man, content to remember.

  This dinner was for fifteen. Hardesty Marratta, Virginia, and Marko Chestnut sat at the end of a long table, opposite Harry Penn. Asbury and Christiana were in the middle. (Asbury had caught the halibut that was fragrantly grilling over charcoal.) Courtenay Favat had left his chair to make notes in the kitchen, and Lucia Terrapin blushed every time a burly pressman named Clemmys Guttata looked her way. Acquainted with the Penn tradition, Hugh Close was working intently at table, caught up in a gin and tonic, and a dispatch he was rewriting with the enthusiasm of a symphony conductor. Delighted with a stock market that had closed like Halley’s comet on its upward swing, Bedford looked dreamily at the maroon-and-white tugboats skating slowly over the silver Hudson. Awaiting Praeger de Pinto, Jessica Penn was bent over the menu, studying it as if it were the Rosetta Stone. She was notoriously tight with money. Praeger himself was due to arrive any minute with Martin and Abby Marratta, whom he was to have picked up in Yorkville after interviewing the bedridden mayor. In early June, various pollens always did the mayor in. A waiter put down two enormous platters of smoked salmon, black bread, and lemon. There were the general oohs and ahs.

  Then Praeger de Pinto came in carrying Abby, with Martin bird-dogging him all over the place, since Martin was of the age during which a child cannot sit still. Praeger handed Abby to Virginia, like a package. Abby, who was not yet three, looked with great disapproval at the adults, wiggled out of Virginia’s arms, and went in a postnap ill-temper to stare at the charcoal glowing under slabs of gently sizzling fish. Martin soon joined her, to demonstrate how leaves of grass burned on the grill.

  “Did you hear?” Praeger asked. “This afternoon Craig Binky got a bee in his bonnet, rushed to the airport, and took off in all one hundred of his planes without saying where he was going.”

  “He doesn’t usually do that,” Harry Penn commented. “What’s on the wires?”

  “Nothing, absolutely nothing, a lot of repetitions and human interest stories. You know. A woman in St. Petersburg was bitten by a rhesus monkey.”

  “Maybe,” Hardesty speculated, “that’s the
story Craig Binky wants to get.”

  “Craig Binky doesn’t sacrifice a June weekend in East Hampton for anything,” Bedford asserted.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing on the wires?” Harry Penn asked again. “Phone the office and check. If there’s some real news, I don’t want to have to find out about it in The Ghost. Something must be going on. Virginia, would you call the air traffic controllers? Hardesty, please call The Ghost and ask them point-blank—maybe they’ll tell you.”

  As the calls were being placed from the restaurant’s lobby, Harry Penn jumped up to pace the narrow row of flagstones between the table and the grills. Hands behind his back, head bent, swinging at the turns like a tiger who always brushes against the exact same spot on the bars of his cage, he caught Abby’s fancy, and she began to follow him, mimicking his pace and posture. And when he spoke, she mimicked his words but since she was unused to speaking in long sentences, her version of what he said was incomprehensible.

  Harry Penn turned to look at her in delighted amazement. “You’re a brave little lass, aren’t you?” he asked. Then he swung around and they both resumed the pacing.

  “What’s on the wires?” Harry Penn asked Praeger as he came onto the terrace.

  “Nothing.”

  “Still nothing?”

  “I checked and rechecked.”

  Hardesty returned. “The Ghost says, and I quote, ‘Mr. Binky is away for the weekend, researching an article on political pleurisy.’”

  “The FAA claims that Craig Binky filed a flight plan for Brownsville, Texas, but that his planes veered out to sea and ducked below the radar. They’re furious, but they’re always furious,” Virginia added as she came in from the lobby.

  Just then, the very last piece of sun disappeared behind the dark hill, and all the pleasant and enticing tunnels under the trees turned into a single threatening mass unrelieved by any light. Deep in thought, Harry Penn didn’t even look. They all began to eat the smoked salmon and black bread (Martin grilled his), and to speculate, in evening shadow, about the news that they suspected they were missing.

  “Patience,” said Harry Penn. “Binky might have heard that the President lost a golf ball in the rough. And if it is a real story, he’s likely to misinterpret or ignore it. I remember, a long time ago, when Tito died, and The Ghost headline read, ‘Pope Finally Hits the Road.’ And I’ll never forget the front page of The Ghost when a Brazilian mental patient assassinated the President of Ecuador: ‘Brazil Nut Zips Ecuador Biggie.’ Besides, there’s nothing more that we can do.”

  They ate silently, and the dusk came in from the east like an ocean tide. Dozens of thick halibut filets, basted with soy and retsina until they burst into flame, were lifted off the grills and delivered to the table. The vegetables steaming in seawater had a way of filling the air. And the smell of fresh fish sizzling over hickory was spread throughout the darkening neighborhood on clouds of white flashing smoke.

  After the children had been instructed in what they were eating and how to eat it, and after candles had been lit, Christiana looked up, and was suddenly startled. She dropped her fork on her plate, and it rang like a bell. They followed her gaze to the wrought-iron garden fence. A derelict was leaning against it, looking at them with a strange, powerful, slightly irritated expression. One and all, they stopped eating.

  His was not the imploring stare of someone who wants something (although it was likely that he was hungry and had been drawn there by the aromatic smoke). Nor was there any hostility in it. Nor did he act like one of the many men of the street who were caught up in hopeless lunacy. To the contrary, raggedly dressed, sun- and windburned, both gaunt and strong, he looked at them without a blink, in the chilling fashion of a man who is trying to place familiar and haunting faces that he knows he cannot identify. Rising and falling in intensity like pulsating stars, his eyes fixed precisely on Jessica Penn, and seemed to be sweeping over her like harrows. She, who had been onstage a thousand times in the high pressure of strong lights and unforgiving stares, who was used to crowds on the street turning almost in unison as she went by, was reduced almost to breathlessness by the intensity of Peter Lake’s searing examination.

  They were so stunned by him that they couldn’t move. He looked at Virginia for a moment, but then returned immediately to Jessica, who thought she might faint. Though frail with age, Harry Penn stood to meet the derelict’s gaze, and managed to return it. But for the differences in age, weather-beatenness, and fortune, they looked almost like mirror images. Harry Penn methodically scanned every detail of the man opposite him, and this seemed to dampen the strange fire in the interloper’s face. The smoke wound through the wrought iron that he gripped in his fists, and wrapped about him. Harry Penn felt a terrible sadness, and was sorry that he had taken it upon himself to rise. He felt as if he were being dragged back through time to a moment in childhood when he had had no learning or wisdom, when there was only the future, and his own vulnerability.

  No one knew how to break the stalemate. They thought that the impasse would hold them forever.

  While they were transfixed by the sight of Peter Lake straining to make sense of what he saw, Abby wandered to the fence and stepped right through it. She slipped easily between the bars of a forged gate that would have contained a dozen of the world’s strongest men even had their lives depended upon breaking it. When her parents saw that she was on the other side, they called to her. But she didn’t hear, and they were reduced once again to racking passivity. Now the tables were turned. Theirs was the world of silence; they were the lost ones looking in; Abby had crossed over, and was with Peter Lake.

  In slow strides that lifted her from the ground ever so lightly and allowed her to sail toward him in slow motion, she skipped to Peter Lake as if she had known him for an eternity. And then she seemed to fly through the air (though perhaps it was a trick of the light), her arms outspread, until she rose into his arms. He embraced her, and when she was settled, she put her hands on his shoulders, rested her head against his chest, and quickly fell asleep.

  Hardesty approached the fence, and looked into Peter Lake’s eyes. There was nothing to fear. The man’s distress and dereliction were of little meaning in a world in which other worlds were always looking in. And as Peter Lake handed the sleeping child through the bars to her father, Hardesty felt a strong desire to see what Peter Lake had seen, to go where he had gone. Hardesty Marratta, a prosperous family man, a man with all the proper joys and privileges, was nearly about to pledge himself to a lost derelict. It made no sense, unless one were to consider an eternity of things that fly in the face of the proper joys and privileges. Though Peter Lake was of the world of shadows, and Hardesty was of the solid world, they were in need of one another. The child had brought them together for an instant, but then Peter Lake stepped back into the darkness, and disappeared, as if he had never really been there.

  They let the food get cold. Virginia held Abby on her lap, and Hardesty vacantly tapped a knife against the table. When ten minutes passed during which no one said anything, Harry Penn took the responsibility for breaking the silence. “All right,” he said, as if reassuring not only them but himself as well, “things like that happen sometimes, and the world remains the same after all.”

  They looked about. Ordinary and familiar sights were a great comfort. “The world remains the same after all,” repeated Harry Penn. “It isn’t yet due for any miraculous changes. I imagine that the man we just met was ahead of his time, as are, perhaps, all men like that.”

  Marko Chestnut smiled. Though they had hardly known it, the tension had been immense. Now they found relief in the fire’s white smoke and glowing coals, the dark cliffs beyond the river now silvery blue, the ramparts of high buildings that had become translucent with evening and seemed to be releasing pent-up inner light, and even in the expression of Tommy the waiter, who, because no one was eating or talking, feared that the chef was drunk again and had put something awful in the food. These th
ings told them that the world was the same after all.

  But they were not to finish the broiled halibut, steamed vegetables, and retsina, and that night they were to remain hungry, although they would hardly notice—because the world, in fact, was not the same.

  Sitting calmly and thinking that she had recovered, Virginia saw it first. The hair on her neck stood up, and she shuddered. “Oh God,” she said. They raised their heads and saw what she had apprehended.

  Half in light and half in shadow, the land across the river had the look of farmland, fields, and orchards. Because a power plant in New Jersey had failed, they could see neither buildings nor lights on the riverbank opposite them. Though most of New Jersey had had to watch the sunset from pastoral darkness, the power failure was merely a coincidental backdrop to what they witnessed from the garden at Petipas. For the illusion of fields and orchards across the water, and the light western sky itself, were slowly and steadily obliterated by a wall that traveled sideways, the prow of a ship that moved slowly up the Hudson, a massive guillotine, the lid of the world, closing from south to north.

  They were a quarter of a mile away from it, or more, and they had to bend their necks and lean back in their chairs to see the top deck. It was centered in the channel, as well it had to be, for it took up the whole thing, and was so big that it seemed like a part of the landscape itself.

  This ship which glided up from the south and seemed to emerge from a garden wall that cut off the southern view, was among the largest structures they had ever seen, rivaling the new giant towers that recently had been built to overshadow the old skyscrapers—and only its prow had cleared the wall: the rest was yet to come. The ship moved on, curling great volumes of water gently before it, shaping them into slow whitened coils that unwound in exhaustion. Then the superstructure came in sight. Ten thousand pure lights rode parallel to the long lean city they resembled, and lit the blackened water into an icy glare. Slanting towers and castled walls rose twice as high as the prow. The Sun staff at Petipas leaned farther and farther back, in awe of the marvelous conspiracies of size and complexity which are the elements of cities themselves, and which lead the spirit in a chase that the eye can seldom follow.