Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  Athansor broke from the remaining tatters of his harness and smashed through the boards, knocking aside not only Pearly Soames, but a large ill-attired contingent behind him. “That’s right, you marble bastard,” Pearly said as Athansor galloped off into the windy brick lots and the forests of dead and splintered trees. “You find him for me. Take me right to him.”

  IT SNOWED on the twentieth of October, not a raging blizzard, but not a light dusting of the pumpkins, either. The ground was covered with almost a foot and a half of fresh white powder, which did not melt, as it usually would have so early in the fall, but stayed fearlessly in place while a paralyzing dream of absolute zero floated down from Canada and made the winter sky into a brittle blue arch. The street-cleaning equipment was trapped unoiled in its garages, and the streets went unploughed as the Ermine Mayor decreed that no salt or sand be spread on the roads and sidewalks. “Hell,” he said, in a magnificent preelection gesture, “if nature thinks we’re the Yukon, let’s roll with the punch. The snow will be left undisturbed, all schools will be closed for the duration, and city employees other than those in essential services need not report for work.”

  Only partly to satirize the Ermine Mayor’s decree, Praeger de Pinto issued a statement promising that if he were elected mayor the city would enjoy the most beautiful winters it had ever experienced, that white snow and blue skies would be its share for months on end, that sleighs and skis would become the conventional means of transportation, that horses would return to the streets, that every house would have a fireplace, that black nights would blaze with stars, that skaters would have their run of the rivers, bonfires shine in the parks, children’s cheeks be redder than cranberries, and snow fall almost incessantly in dizzying dances and waltzes of winter that would make the population giddy with happiness.

  Stunned at first, then hostile, people gradually began to believe him. They called him “The Apostle of Winter,” “The Snow King,” and “Daddy Christmas.”

  Praeger was anything but greedy. He wanted to win the election, but he wasn’t willing to tie himself in knots to do so. Thus, his campaign became unorthodox, even for the darkest of dark horses. Though Craig Binky was supporting him, the populace was in one of its periodic fits of pique regarding this celebrated publisher, and it mattered little that Praeger’s smiling face was plastered all over The Ghost, or that Craig Binky appeared on the television news programs to declare sanctimoniously, “Just vote your conscience. Vote de Pinto.” Praeger started the campaign with 6 percent of the vote, the independent candidate Crawford Bees IV had thirteen percent, and the Ermine Mayor polled 81 percent.

  Far from discouraging Praeger, this state of affairs ignited him, and he proceeded, in turn, to ignite the voters. Where most politicians, including the Ermine Mayor, were quick to promise things they would never deliver, such as clean streets or the absence of crime, Praeger’s approach was different, and he left the others far behind in his wake. The Ermine Mayor might address a street gathering and say that in his next term he would put 30 percent more police on the streets, step up garbage collection, and lower taxes. Of course, everyone knew that in the next mayoral term, no matter who was in office, 30 percent fewer police would be on the street, the garbage piles would get higher and bigger, and taxes would go up. But they applauded anyway.

  Then Crawford Bees IV would give them another set of figures, and they would applaud politely for him, too.

  But then Praeger de Pinto would rise. He never talked about garbage, electricity, or police. He only talked about winter, horses, and the countryside. He spoke almost hypnotically about love, loyalty, and aesthetics. And just as they thought he was beginning to sound slightly effete, he would get very tough, in his Havemeyer Street way, and lacerate the mayor for conspiring with Jackson Mead. He would throw low punches, where it hurt. He would be terribly cruel (they loved that), and then he would surface again into his world of light to make the crowds sway and daven with longing for the purity of winter. He promised them love affairs and sleigh races, cross-country skiing on the main thoroughfares, and the transfixing blizzards that howled outside and made the heart dance.

  They thought, or so it was generally stated at the time, that if they were going to be lied to, they might as well pick the liar who did it best. Since in describing the world he wanted Praeger could leave them with their mouths open and their hearts beating, he advanced slowly in the polls. The Ermine Mayor panicked and declaimed ferociously about garbage and taxes. Praeger held his ground and raved with unexcelled charm, dizzying the electorate with visions of justice and paradise.

  “WE CAN’T go to the Coheeries, at least not today. The north roads are blocked, and the railroads shut down because the plough trains are still being overhauled,” Hardesty reported upon his return to Yorkville one wintry Saturday in October, after he had skied from place to place to get information.

  “Who cares about trains?” Virginia said disparagingly. “Or whether the roads are blocked?”

  “How do you propose to get there?” he asked.

  She looked at him as if he were an idiot, and said, “By sleigh.”

  “Sleigh?”

  “Yes. Just because they don’t work in San Francisco doesn’t mean that they don’t work here.”

  “You’ve been listening too hard to Praeger’s campaign speeches. I’ll bet you’re even going to vote for him.”

  “Of course I am,” she returned. “And so are you. Go out and get a sleigh. I’ll get the children ready.”

  “What sleigh? Where am I going to get a sleigh?” he asked.

  “That’s your problem, but don’t forget to get a horse to pull it, and hay, oats, and a blanket for the horse. We may be on the road for several days before we get to Fteley’s.”

  “Fteley’s?”

  “Hurry!” she commanded.

  He returned at dusk in a beautiful sleigh with a supple new harness and gleaming silvery runners. Hitched to it was an elegant mare as black as obsidian.

  “We can’t leave now,” he told Virginia. “It’ll be dark in a few hours.”

  “That’s the way you do it,” she said. “At night, when there’s a full moon, and the world is white.”

  Abby had been listening to this conversation, and she decided that she was not going to have any part of either Lake of the Coheeries or nocturnal sleigh rides. She went to the kitchen, took five rolls and half a pound of baking chocolate from a cupboard, and retreated to the top shelf of the linen closet, where she planned to stay until she had to go to college.

  “Where’s Abby?” Hardesty asked Martin.

  “I don’t know,” Martin replied. Though he knew exactly where she was, he didn’t want to compromise the hideout, since he had invented it.

  For two hours they looked frantically for Abby. They thought that she had fallen from the balcony, but, of course, she hadn’t. They went to the neighboring apartments, to the local stores, and they even looked in the linen closet, but she had burrowed toward the back of the top shelf, behind a rampart of pillows, and didn’t answer when Martin called her—though she knew that he realized where she was.

  Eventually she was starved out, and they caught her waddling from the kitchen with a fresh loaf of dough in her hands. The minute she saw them, she broke and ran, screaming, “I don’t want to go!”

  “Is that why we couldn’t find you?” Hardesty shouted. “You were hiding?”

  “I don’t want to go!” she screamed back, and took refuge under the kitchen table, where she was able to stand without bending her head.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to,” her father said, crouching. “Now come out of there, because we have to get you in your snowsuit and leave before it gets too late.”

  “No.”

  “Abby. Come here!” he said, snapping his fingers. She was terrified, but she refused to move.

  “I’ll just come in and get you,” he threatened, feigning anger this time, because the expression on her face, her litt
le bell-like yellow dress, and the soft intense blue eyes, focused in defiance, moved him a great deal. Nonetheless, he went on his knees and reached under the table. She threw the dough at him, and missed. It slid across the kitchen floor. Then he grabbed her. In two minutes she was in her snowsuit, clutching Teddy—her stuffed gray rabbit with red button eyes and a gingham dress, a present from Harry Penn.

  They packed the sleigh with provisions and presents for Mrs. Gamely, and climbed into the front seat. Hardesty drove; Virginia sat next to him, with Abby on her lap; and Martin sat on the outside, with a buggy whip in his hand and instructions never to hit the horse, but just to touch her on the hindquarters when Hardesty told him to. Abby was bundled up into a melon-sized cocoon of fur and down; her little face showed through a silver-colored ruff like an Eskimo’s, and her eyes darted back and forth in trusting anticipation. Looking like the child of nomads, Martin was dressed in seal leather and coyote furs. His mother was in her sable, and Hardesty was once again in the sheepskin jacket that he had earned in the Rockies. Thick green plaid woolen blankets covered them up to their waists.

  “Have we got everything?” Hardesty asked.

  “Yup,” Martin replied.

  Virginia nodded.

  “All right,” Hardesty said. “To the Lake of the Coheeries.”

  He snapped the reins, and the sleigh moved off. The horse was strong and well rested, and she seemed to crave a night journey, especially since, being a horse, she knew how bright the moon was going to be.

  They went through the park, their sleigh bells ringing, and were soon on Riverside Drive, heading north as the last piece of sun vanished behind the Palisades like a melting ingot, fiery hot. The river was choked with blocks and shards of ice. Lights flashed on and fires were lit in apartments along Riverside Drive as the Marrattas passed by in their sleigh, almost silently were it not for the muffled hoofbeats of the horse and the soft wild sound of the bells. After running through the deserted tolls, they crossed the Henry Hudson Bridge and made their way entirely along roads that were empty and white.

  In a diminutive Westchester valley between two low hills, they saw a glow in the sky. The horse picked up her pace instinctively, and when they came out from between the hills into a little prairie of snowbound gardens and small fields, they saw the moon hiding in an orchard, ready to climb through a tangle of limbs until its mild pearl color would turn fiercely white. When the cool globe finally rested atop the delicate black branches, it seemed so close that Abby held out her arms and tried to touch it.

  Then it climbed smoothly to its customary place among the stars, and the Marrattas sped northward through the dark shadows of its white light.

  SOMEWHERE IN Dutchess, when the moon had reached its apogee, and the children were asleep, they found themselves running through hollows and pitch-black places where snowy owls and eagles perched on ramparts of rock and dead trees like the pickets of some lawless mountain stronghold. The way was proving too difficult and steep for an elegant carriage-puller born and raised at Belmont.

  “Go left at that fork,” Virginia directed.

  “Do you know this place?” Hardesty asked.

  “I know the terrain. Its just like the mountains that lead to the Coheeries. A road like this has got to descend to the river. The horse is tired because she’s city-bred and her legs are far too thin for running all night in the hills. Our horses, with their thick frames, can go for a week without stopping, just like the polar bears that swim in the sea for a month at a time, or the seals that migrate from Alaska to Japan. If she’s going to make it through the night, this mare needs some running on the flat. We’ll take her to the river, which will be frozen solid.”

  “Hee-ya!” Hardesty screamed in a manner not exactly characteristic of local horsemanship. With the snap of oiled leather, he flicked the reins, and the Belmont mare veered left.

  It was even darker by the river, the true abode of owls and eagles, a place that was haunted by mysterious loonlike hoots, and the black horse sped through almost on tiptoe, cursing the bells that gave away their position to the leering pumpkin-headed ghosts who lived in the crags. The only way to follow the road was to follow the ribbon of slightly luminous sky between the trees. The sleigh passengers and the horse lifted their heads to see the pale and dusty track above. Had there been a brick wall across the path they would have smashed right into it, but the road was unobstructed, and they were able to navigate successfully its numerous descending switchbacks solely by reference to trees and sky.

  When they came to the riverbank they saw a white highway on the snow-covered ice. Knowing that the ice could hold her, the mare went right onto it, making the slightly airborne transition in a way that bumped the sled and woke the children. Hardesty whistled, and she veered north. Soon she was satisfied and calm, and she found a gait that swallowed the miles. Snow blanketed most of the river, but where the wind had blown it clear, dazzling lakes of silver ice reflected the clockwork motion of the moon. The mountains on the western side stretched into the distance in white ranks that, as the moon sank, seemed to rise to it like a staircase.

  “Look,” Hardesty said to the children, and when Abby didn’t see, “Abby, look there. Those mountains are the stairs that lead to the moon. Would you like to go? All we have to do is turn left before it sinks down beneath the last step. . . .”

  As they considered their father’s offer, the children’s faces were bathed in the light of the moon. Sitting at the top landing of the mountain staircase, it was so voluminous, pearly, and entrancing that they nodded their heads. Yes, they wanted to go. They would give up the earth, which they hardly knew at all, for a round eternal place where everything glowed in cream and silver. They would gladly take the mountain staircase to another world, and were sad when the opportunity vanished, as the moon, ever faithful to its obligations, disappeared behind glacial balustrades that darkened as it left.

  After an hour in which the temperature dropped to the crystalline realms and the river unwound into a long straightaway that promised to deliver the northern lights (if only they would follow it), they were contentedly listening to the hissing of the runners over ice and snow, thinking that all that remained was to find the turn-off, sail past Fteley’s, and hope that they might penetrate the invisible geographical cask that held the Lake of the Coheeries. But no one had ever come easily to the Lake of the Coheeries.

  They approached one of the tributaries of the Hudson that came from so high in the mountains and fell so fast that it never froze. They could hear it from miles away, and as they drew close they saw it tumbling down in a long angry string of white water. They could hardly take their eyes from it, and did not see that its upwelling had made open lakes in the ice. Unsuspecting, they galloped at full speed right into one of these narrow straits.

  The horse broke the water into two white wedges that fled from her, and the sleigh followed with a percussive thump. Both horse and sleigh stayed upright and buoyant. Her forward momentum and her inbred sense enabled her to get her forelegs up on the ice. She pushed with everything she had, rising onto the shelf in front of her, and it held.

  But she didn’t have the strength to pull the sleigh across the ledge, though she strained to do so. As the sleigh began to take on water, Hardesty was about to throw everyone out onto the ice and then try to unharness the mare before she was pulled by the waterlogged sleigh back into, and under, the river, when he heard the ice thundering behind him. Before he had time to turn, something huge sailed over his head, and landed next to the struggling mare.

  An enormous white horse had come from nowhere, and pulled the mare forward with him as if she were entrapped in a magnetic field. The sleigh hopped onto the ice before Hardesty even knew what was happening, and then they started a wild race. Running in tandem with the stallion, the mare was able to pull the sleigh like a rocket. The Marrattas bent forward into the cold wind as the two horses, almost an illusion of white and black, attained unnatural speed. The steel runners
glowed with heat and watered the track underneath. The horses were going so fast that they seemed close to shattering the sleigh, which vibrated and rattled until Abby was frightened out of her wits.

  Then, without a signal, they turned left into the mountains, roaring past Fteley’s and blowing the doors off their hinges as they went by, traveling up the high road as if they were hurtling down it, leaving great rooster tails and washes of loose snow as they rounded the high desolate corners of the mountain track.

  They crested the highest divide, and flew down onto the endless plain of the Coheeries. Virginia was overjoyed to see in the distance a lighted string of tiny pearls—the villages along the lake, their fires and lamps burning in the very early morning just before the sun came up.

  Their horses took to the plain and bounded ahead on the straight road. Surely, they thought, the white horse was an illusion of the cold and the swirling stars, because, when he parted from the mare, he banked up and to the left in a blaze of white. Even after he was gone, the mare kept up the race until sunrise, when she gently led the Marrattas across the rolling ocean of snowfields that bordered the lakeshore of the Coheeries.

  They entered the village the way travelers from the outside often did—shaken, exhausted, elated. Just before turning off for Mrs. Gamely’s house, they passed Daythril Moobcot, who was pulling a sled piled high with cordwood.

  “Daythril! How’s my mother?”

  “She’s fine,” Daythril shouted back. “I hope you brought your dictionary.”

  NEW YORK had always been a city destined for the rule of dandies, thieves, and men who resembled hardboiled eggs. Those who made its politics were the people who poured gasoline on fires, rubbed salt into wounds, and carried coals to Newcastle. And its government was an absurdity, a concoction of lunacies, a dying man obliged to race up stairs. The reason for this condition was complex rather than accidental, for miracles are not smoothly calculated. Instead, they are the subjugation of apparent anarchy to a coherent design. Just as music must be like a hive of bees, with each note that strains to go its own way gently held to a thriving plan, a great empire depends for its driving force upon the elements that will eventually tear it apart. So with a city, which if it is to make its mark must be spirited, slippery, and ungovernable. A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls—whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.