by Mark Helprin
Of this, Praeger de Pinto was convinced. He believed as well that human institutions often show the greatest inner brilliance at a moment when their outward decay is furthest advanced. Thus, he was not overcome by the anarchy or the madness of a city that could not even live up to its seemingly highest aspiration, which was to imitate hell, and so he was determined to plunge into the corruption of city politics like hot steel into water, and to boil it dry. The more the campaign matured, the less he cared about either his original purposes for running or Jackson Mead. Now he saw that the city was headed for a storm, and when, at the millennium, laws would confront laws and rights would confront rights, he wanted to guide the city through its tumultuous passage to the slow water that lay beyond.
If his suppositions were correct, and the coming clash would by indirections find directions out, he had to do the same. This was the logic behind his abandonment of traditional methods and his use of winter as a campaign theme. It would have been quite devious, he reasoned, to win the office by conventional means, and then embark upon an unconventional term such as he envisioned. Instead, he would risk alienating the electorate by telling the abject truth in all its madness.
“Campaign buttons?” he asked his chief of staff. “A waste of money. Here, take this down for the press. ‘This is my position regarding campaign buttons. No de Pinto buttons will be fabricated for this or any other election. Anyone who consents to using his body (without pay) as a walking billboard is a fool who hopes to participate in the disgusting phenomena of mass suggestion and coercion, and I want no part of it. People who wear these buttons are as empty-headed as those women who make capital of their breasts. I don’t want their vote, either of them.’”
“And what shall we say, Mr. de Pinto, about Gracie Mansion?” The Ermine Mayor had almost lost the last election to Councilman Magiostra, after the councilman pledged to live in his hovel in the Bronx instead of in the mansion.
“I don’t plan to live there.”
The chief of staff sighed in relief, because the Ermine Mayor was already moving out his possessions and had rented a prestigious little hovel on Mother Cabrini Boulevard.
“We’ll use Gracie Mansion as a conference center,” Praeger said. “It’ll be nice to have conferences up there, overlooking the Bird S. Coler hospital and that beautiful wicker-basket factory. But I don’t want to live next to any goddamned wicker-basket factory.”
“That’s good. We’ll shoot that horse right out from under the Ermine Mayor.”
“Right. There’s a lot of tax money in this city. The mayor of the greatest city in the world should have a proper place to live, a place that has something to do with the overriding theme of the city’s architecture. We’ll take some of this tax money, about a billion or so, and build a mayoral palace. We can buy the top floors and air rights of four or five skyscrapers, put box girders between them, and then use the platform we’ve created for the base and gardens of a small, aerial, Versailles-type structure. But what am I talking about? We don’t have to buy the skyscrapers, we can use eminent domain, and simply appropriate them.”
“But the real estate trusts! They’ve given us most of the campaign money.”
“To hell with them,” said Praeger. “Give it back. If we’ve spent it already, give promissory notes. These real estate guys are just a bunch of pompous billionaires—especially Marcel Apand. I get so sick of seeing that flag of his, with the gorilla fist, flying from every other building in the city. It’s time someone told the truth about them, Apand in particular. They’re corrupt and venal. Schedule a news conference.”
“But the bankers. We can’t back our promissory notes. You’ve already condemned the bankers.”
“And well they deserve it,” Praeger said. “Those calculating bloodsuckers. I’ll condemn them again.”
“At least that will be populist. The people love politicians who hit the bankers. As long as you don’t get too specific, you may be able to carry it off.”
“Populist? I think that the greedy little horseflies who sell their souls to get wall-to-wall carpeting and color TVs deserve every bit of exploitation that can be visited upon them. They and the bankers were made for each other.”
The chief of staff was much perturbed, and drummed his fingers against his hip flask. “Does this mean that when you condemn the billionaires you’re going to include Mr. Binky, too?”
“Isn’t it time that someone called a spade a spade?”
“Craig Binky is your chief supporter.”
“Don’t overvalue him.”
“Mr. de Pinto, no one’s going to vote for you.”
“Yes they will. They’ll vote for me because I tell the truth.”
“But you don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes you lie like a dog.”
“And they’ll vote for me because I’m the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests in between. When I lie to them the way I do, I’m confiding in them simultaneously my understanding and grief for their condition, my hope for them, and my contempt for the monkey on their back. This makes me one of them. After all, I am one of them. You’ll see for whom they vote.”
“All right, all right,” said the chief of staff. “You know I can’t get philosophical with you. There is, however, a practical matter that I wanted to discuss.”
“What’s that?”
“Your next rally.”
“What about it?”
“Who the hell’s going to show up for a dawn rally at The Cloisters? The purpose of a political rally is to gather together a mass of people so the TV cameras can show them as you speak. I doubt very much that many people will go to The Cloisters, at dawn, in ten-degree weather, to hear you denounce them. Why not make it lunch hour in Grand Central Station, or in Foibles Park?”
“Look,” Praeger said, leaning forward, “you can’t engineer these things. The chips have to fall where they may.”
“But this is one of only three rallies that you’ve scheduled. What a waste to. . . . At least let me arrange a few more!”
“No. I hate rallies. If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s crowds.”
After his chief of staff left in incipient tears, Praeger leaned back on the wooden stool that was the only piece of furniture at his headquarters (he was still undecided about whether or not to install a telephone). He was filled with a profound and deep certainty that he was headed for victory. Had he been running in Chicago, Miami, or Boston, it probably wouldn’t have been so. But New York was like a runaway horse that had been stung by a bee. The only way to catch that horse, Praeger reasoned, was to follow it along its bee-stung course, and better its speed—which is precisely what he intended to do with the improbable city that he wanted to lead because he loved it so improbably well.
The mass rally at The Cloisters was held at dawn on a cold, clear day. Praeger stood for half an hour watching the river come alive in blue and white as the morning sun struck its ice floes and the open water. Attendance was low—as no one had shown up, not even one of his aides or workers, much less any reporters or spectators. In fact, because it was so cold and the sun had yet to war against the lingering shadows among the trees, game-rich Fort Tryon Park had not produced a single squirrel, pigeon, or politicized vole to sit on a wall and listen to the candidate, or to peck through the snow in what Craig Binky would then have reported as a “glorious fundraising breakfast attended by supporters clad in luxurious furs.”
Praeger was entirely alone. Undaunted, he started in on a fine political speech that was not merely rolling and mellifluous, but brilliant in its analysis of a wide range of political problems. This was the speech in which his qualities as technician, statesman, and historian of the present were best observed. Anyone hearing it would have been convinced that a vote for de Pinto would ensure a precise, benevolent, careful, and responsible stewardship of the city’s affairs. The bankers and real estate tycoons would hav
e loved it. It had all the beauties of stability and none of its drawbacks. Here, at last, was the correct synthesis. He spoke neither of winter nor of Armageddon. On that cold and sunny morning, his skills and common sense combined in the kind of political appeal that is both invincible and technically flawless.
When he finished, he was shocked to hear applause. A balding man with an old-fashioned mustache was standing in the snow not too far away. He looked like a yeoman mechanic, which was, of course, exactly what he was. Praeger assumed that he had come to the park to walk his dog.
“I don’t have a dog,” said Peter Lake. “And if I did I wouldn’t take him all the way up here on such a cold morning. I came to see you.”
“You did?” Praeger asked in astonishment.
“That’s right. You made a good speech, as far as I can tell. I’ve liked what you’ve said about winter. I don’t know whether to believe it or not, but it doesn’t seem important whether it’s true, if you know what I mean. Is music true? You can’t say that it is or that it isn’t, and yet we put our faith in it. I do—at least I used to, although I don’t remember when.
“But, lately,” he confessed, “my mind’s been clearing, and I remember certain things—such as, for instance, refrains on a piano. But I can’t remember where I heard them. You know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s as if they’re coming from the past, as if the past is a light coming up in darkness. I feel it strongly, but I can’t see it, I can’t remember. But there’s a piano playing there for sure.
“I’m glad that I caught you alone, sir,” he continued. “You see, what I’m trying to say is very difficult. But things have been clearing rapidly for about a week, and I was wondering if . . . perhaps . . . well . . . let me say it right out. Are you one of us? I mean, are we the same?”
“A Freemason?” Praeger asked, puzzled. “I’m not a Freemason, if that’s what you mean.”
“No, no, I don’t mean that,” Peter Lake said, shaking his head, and giving it another try. “It’s more personal and more important than that.”
“Am I gay? I certainly am not.”
“No, sir. I’m not inquiring about your disposition.”
“Then, what?”
“Where do you come from?” Peter Lake asked, looking right at him.
“I was born in Brooklyn.”
“In what age?”
“In this age.”
“Are you sure? Because, you see, I think I wasn’t. And the way you talk about winters leads me to believe that you weren’t either, because what you describe as the future was once the past. I know. I’ve been there.”
“I. . . .”
Peter Lake held his hand up. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s all right. I’ll be sure to vote for you, although I don’t think I’m registered. I’ll register in the Five Points, that’s what I’ll do, and vote for you a dozen times. I’m very grateful, because after you began to talk about the winters I began to hear the piano—and to see that the past is brightening all around us. I thought that maybe you could help me more, but you’ve helped a great deal already.”
“What is the piano playing?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know even if I could hear it clear.”
“Who’s playing it?”
“I’m afraid, sir, that I don’t have the slightest idea. Whoever it is, though, she’s playin’ it real nice.”
LONELY PEOPLE have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies. Poor Mrs. Gamely had been by herself for years. When suddenly she was confronted by her daughter and a new, full-blown family that was now her own, she could hardly take the shock of it, and she cried thunderstorms.
Virginia embraced her mother, and she cried too. Then the children began to wail like young cats, although they didn’t know why. Even Hardesty, touched by the love between mother and daughter, remembered his own parents, and had to hold back the tears.
But the wailing continued long after Hardesty’s eyes were dry, and as the clock struck the quarter-hour (even the clock bells pushed the weeping women and children into further squalls of tears), he paced back and forth impatiently, waiting for them to finish. “What is this?” he asked. “What is this, a waterworks?” And then, seeing Virginia’s charcoal-gray suit within the folds of her coat, he was taken so by the versatility of the city journalist in a well-tailored skirt and jacket, and the Coheeries daughter thoroughly at ease in the countryside, that he put his arms around her, stroked her hair back from her tear-reddened face, and kissed her with such affection that Mrs. Gamely’s heart rose like a weather balloon.
That night the children could hardly sleep. Their anticipation of awakening to see the Lake of the Coheeries in full daylight was stronger than their anticipation of a Christmas, and as they expected, they were soon lost in the beauty of the lake’s wintry blue days and cold nights that knew no beginning and no end. A good sailor, Hardesty was quick to learn iceboating. They often took the Katerina, the biggest and slowest of the boats, filled it with provisions and quilts, and set off at dawn into the limitlessness of the lake. The children would sleep on the women’s laps until the sun was strong, and when they awoke they would be amazed to see nothing but blue sky and mirror-smooth ice across which was blowing a nearly invisible sandstorm of snow. The high velocity of the wind had shorn the snowflakes of their ornament, and they shot by like bits of shining glass, in a mist that seemed like a fallen banner.
On these expeditions they glided across the ice for hours, until they were so isolated from any point of land or any boat that they might well have been the only people in the world. At noon they would let down the sail and dig in the double ice brakes. With the Katerina between them and the north wind, and the sun in their reddened faces, they would make a fire in a box full of sand and cook up a caldron of boiling stew. This they would eat with hot buttered rolls and Algonquian steam tea. They might skate for a time (Hardesty and Martin played an informal game of hockey and discovered that Virginia could easily take the puck away from both of them and keep it in her possession as long as she wanted), or drill through the ice so that in ten minutes they could pull up as much salmon, bass, and trout as they wanted, to be stacked perfectly frozen in a bin on the Katerina’s outrigger. Or they might simply sail into infinity, perfectly content to travel hundreds of miles into a seductive world of ice and sun that was theirs for the taking. Usually, on the day following their departure, having spent the night wrapped up in the softest quilts and blankets, they would make their way home after dark—drifting aimlessly across the starry ice. The Milky Way was so bright that Mrs. Gamely warned them not to stare at it for too long. “Daythril Moobcot’s grandfather,” she asserted, “old Barrow Moobcot, went blind that way. And tonight, if the moon comes up, we’ll need smoked glasses.”
They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance. The days and nights on the ice changed the children forever. Lake of the Coheeries Town would rise over the ice horizon as a chain of lights embedded in white hills that lay next to the lake like a stallion prone on the hay. Then Hardesty would point the Katerina to the brightest light, and race for it. Though the children loved the race home, they wanted to stay on the lake forever.
As time rolled forward and took up golden day and silver night to weave them in a braid, they skied and sledded into the hill forests of spruce and pine, they went to the inn to dance the Grapesy Dandy and the Birdwalla Shuffle, they made traditional Coheeries maple candy in the shape of a crescent moon, and they sat for many hours as the real moon, the planets, and the stars set the time, and wood burned brightly in the stove. Mrs. Gamely’s rooster, Jack, came very close to learning how to play
checkers with Martin, but he was never able to understand the idea of making a king.
One evening it grew unusually cold. An arctic wind descended from the north and placed the village in a vise of frost. As Mrs. Gamely’s house accommodated to the sixty degrees below zero that controlled the outside world, it creaked as if it were a ship at sea. The house was well caulked, but a pinhole-sized river of air was enough to chill an entire room. They stoked the stove until it flared like the firebox of a racing locomotive.
Abby and Martin were building a house of dried corncobs. Dressed in robes and down booties, they sat in the middle of the floor between the stove and the fireplace. Mrs. Gamely rocked back and forth, watching her grandchildren. Virginia, wrapped in a shawl, was reading the old 1978 edition of the Britannica. Hardesty was at the window, ostensibly because the thermometer was there. That it kept dropping steadily, and was well below minus sixty, was for someone of his temperament an irresistible attraction. But really he was at the window to look at the stars. In the cold, away from city lights, they burned like white phosphorous.
There was a great deal of motion in the stars that night, and the comings and goings made it seem as if the space between stars and earth were a busy harbor crowded with launches. Flashing lines that might have been meteorites ended in fading white bursts that cascaded softly, the way the ice flies from the brake of an iceboat. These little showers of light bloomed and then were gone. Hardesty remembered how the white horse had parted from them on the plain, climbing into the predawn sky in a curved needle of white light that had dissolved with a faint hiss.