by Mark Helprin
Many a time when walking through the city’s magnetic and reverberatory streets, Praeger de Pinto had been overcome by too much light let loose, by a whiplash of energy that thundered through the gray canyons like a snapping cable. And sometimes when the city was so much itself that it shuddered and quaked, his spirit was lifted into the timeless corridors that ran invisibly above and through the streets, close to the blinding frictions that bind together all form. For him, the ferry’s low whistle, that elementary growl, opened corridors and corridors not only through the lacy and enticing fog.
These events were excellent preparations for his inauguration, in which he got what he wanted and lost himself at the same time. The ceremony was much like an execution, though he was not killed. He was, however, removed from normal life and permanently set apart. In other, friendlier eras, the mayor had been just one of the boys. Now he was cloistered by grave responsibility, and his youth flew from him—like the pigeons that, choosing to ignore the traditional proceedings, rose into the blue and carefully threaded their way among the ice-covered twigs that cracked the morning sky into dazzling cells.
The Ermine Mayor came out, dressed in the ermine-clad robes and ruffs, with the ermine cap, the ermine stole, and the ermine muffs. He peered from the mass of purple, white, and black fur, and, looking like an effeminate shell-shocked woodchuck, moved onto the platform to stand sadly next to the mayor-elect.
Turning to greet the mayor, Praeger saw beyond the furry thing that glided up to him a line of bosses sitting on the dais. Behind them was another line of bosses, and so it went all the way back to the cream-colored walls of City Hall, where the reviewing stand came to a halt. Why were all political bosses, with hardly an exception, six feet two inches tall, 225 pounds, with red noses and red cheeks on fleshy faces crowned by fluffy white and silver hair? They were either that or they were short skinny beings with pencil mustaches, hoarse voices, and sunglasses permanently attached to their faces. The big fat red ones had no necks, and the little thin ones always limped slightly. Surely, Praeger thought, this was part of a divine plan.
He was the first mayor ever to be elected without the bosses, and now they and every notable in the city were gathered to hear his speech. They did not know what to expect from him. He might speak about winter’s charm, excoriate the evils of television, or wonder out loud about the city’s destiny. With exactly a month to go before the millennium, he chose in his inauguration address to discourse upon the metaphysical balance that informed all events and was so characteristic of the city as almost to be its hallmark.
“I see a lot of puzzled faces,” he said. “Why? Don’t you understand that this city is a hotbed of the mechanism which keeps things in trim?
“Ah, I know. You have mistakenly called it contrast, looked upon its social lessons, and then turned away. But do you think, really, that the patrician clothed in ermine is more elect than the derelict who sits in a winter doorway slowly dying?
“My mother used to tell me, when I was small, that if I studied jujitsu with the local barber who taught in the loft over his shop, I would be able to throw a big man with only one finger.
“‘How many big men have only one finger, Mother?’ I asked, being literal to the quick. But when I understood what she meant I was not surprised, since I had realized even earlier than that, that adversity has its compensations, that in falling, and in failing, we rise. It is as if there is a hand behind us that sets to right all imbalances. Why do you think the saints seldom had the temporal power that we mistakenly identify with the fruits of justice? Do you think they needed it, or cared?”
The bosses began to sweat in the cold. Not only was this new mayor talking like a man of the cloth, he also made the same churchified gestures. They had always known that the only real threat to their power was theocracy, and not only did they sweat in the cold, but their sweat itself was icy. Conversely, the prelates who were assembled like multicolored cockatoos in the back rows of the reviewing stand grew terribly excited. Could it be, they wondered, that their long-abandoned dreams would be realized by this man who had taken City Hall in a frontal assault through the back door? They itched to know his religion, so as to claim him. With a name like de Pinto, he could have been a Catholic, a Sephardic Jew, even Greek Orthodox. Who knew?
“Do not mistake my views of temporal power and material wealth as a device to protect the current social order. I see the Marxists in row thirty twisting in their seats. Stop twitching. Redistribute wealth, if that’s what makes you happy. I agree, somewhat, with your notions of equalization, though not enough to accept the tyranny that people like you, who have no eyes for grace, would unleash if you were allowed to govern solely according to your mechanical precepts. Since I believe that the curmudgeon in his club chair is just as likely to see beyond the realm of the world as is the derelict of whom I have spoken, I have no objection to maneuvering the derelict in from the cold and letting him have beef Wellington, too. In fact it’s only fair, but it is, in itself, a theology of a very low order.
“Far beyond that, though, is an artful, ever-present, recurring balance. One can see it in nature and its laws, in the seasons, in terrain, in music, and, most magnificently, in the perfections of the celestial sphere. But it is illustrated here as well, in the city.
“At every turn, the city presents scenes of triumph and scenes of dejection. It is a kaleidoscope of sunshine and shadow that represents our condition far better than the wheel of fortune, for the wheel of fortune, though correctly polar, does not allow the proper fragmentation of time and events. The perfect simplicity of salvation is broken up upon these rocks that we have built, and scattered for us to ponder and piece together in a test that tries our patience and understanding. We learn that justice may not always follow a just act, that justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected, that a miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.
“Now, let me tell you about the bridge that Jackson Mead is going to build.”
Craig Binky was seated in a prominent place, and none of what follows was missed by a single soul. He clutched his chest and brow like a man suffering a heart attack and a stroke simultaneously, and then proceeded to grimace through a range of rapid-fire facial expressions that would have put Pantaloon to shame. And as Praeger continued, Craig Binky sank to his knees like a penitent, his spastic movements signifying greed and chagrin rather than newfound enlightenment or contrition.
“He showed me the plans,” Praeger said. “In the sketches and elevations that I saw first, the curve of the great catenary seemed able to hold the entire globe in its jeweled and sparkling slope. Imagine my surprise when he told me that this was only a minor approach to the main structure. He then unfolded several dozen blueprints of astonishing bridges, unlike anything we have ever seen, and explained that these would radiate like spokes from the central span.
“Of the central span, there is no rendering. It is to be made of light. He speaks authoritatively of using the sea and the ice as a lens for beams which will be generated by several stations already under construction. Light of all frequencies will be shuffled, husbanded, harbored, held in reserve, magnified, reflected, reverberated, refracted, tuned, arranged, and focused so that it builds on its own strength. The key to achieving a beam of infinite power, I am told, is not the magnitude of generation, but the subtlety of control. Light under flawless tutelage knows no limits, and Jackson Mead proposes to train and tame a flurry of separate rays, escorting them through a complicated maze of development and augmentation, until they combine into a cool and solid beam upon which it will be possible to travel.
“Though one foot of the arc will rest upon the Battery, he would not say where this bridge will lead, preferring to leave that to my imagination—as I will leave it to yours.”
There was an immediate protest from the crowd. Neig
hborhoods would be destroyed, expressways rerouted, and the city’s vital resources channeled into a rainbow bridge that had no end. It would have been easier to get the pimps in Times Square to rebuild Chartres than to get the practical citizens assembled for the inauguration to agree to expend their powers in such fashion. Indignation choked them like thick wads of cotton. Had not Praeger de Pinto’s initial campaigning, before he fooled them into the winter madness, been in opposition to Jackson Mead?
Anticipating this question, the new mayor answered it by stating that he had merely been against the secrecy. “Now, I have ended the secrecy,” he said.
The bosses were enraged, which was, after all, how they earned their salaries. When they got mad, they lit up like flashing signs to signify to their constituents that they were working hard to represent them. The boss gallery was like a row of slot machines that had all hit the jackpot at once, because each boss wanted the people of his precinct to witness the luxury of his indignation. Even the clerics began to wonder if this bridge were not likely to denude their cathedrals after everyone had walked up it and disappeared into the clouds. “The city of the poor won’t take this lightly,” someone said. “They’ll imagine that the bridge is yet another enemy in a world of enemies. It will take a while for them to move, but when they do, they’ll move with a vengeance.”
All that remained of the inauguration was for the council of elders to announce the new mayoral appellation. Praeger was apprehensive, believing that, after devaluing their currency in recent years, they would now have to be stringent. He feared that he was going to be called Pork Mayor, or Tin Mayor, and would have settled for a compromise, such as Bird Mayor. For as long as anyone could remember, there had been bone mayors, egg mayors, water mayors, and wood mayors. After the last bone mayor, the council had embarked upon an inexplicable and exciting trend, naming a Tree Mayor, a Green Mayor and then an Ermine Mayor. Praeger thought that it couldn’t last.
As the clock struck noon and the ice-covered trees rattled like belled tambourines, the Ermine Mayor shed his robes (which were then folded by his deputy), knelt, and presented Praeger with the scepter of office. There were no cheers, for the crowd was angry and confused. Then the council of elders (including Harry Penn) marched in line to the podium. Craig Binky had been summoned, but, having missed the meeting, did not have the courage to appear. The head of the council cautioned the populace to refrain from needless speculation. “What we say here is not necessarily the future. We are not that wise. But we, like you, can dream.” Then he announced that Praeger de Pinto was to be called the Gold Mayor.
The crowd gasped, and the bosses, too. Their machine, it seemed, was breaking apart. They feared not only for their livelihoods, but for their lives, since they knew that a machine coming apart as it runs is like a war unto itself. What, in their great wisdom, did they do? They scurried off the reviewing stand like a routed army and hurried home through the snow-packed streets to lay in stocks of food, firewood, and whiskey.
IT DIDN’T seem fair that Abby Marratta should be confined with dying old men, or that she should pass them in the corridors as she was wheeled from place to place on a long bed over which hung bags of blood and saline. Even the old men, who were adept at making their own misery their guard of honor, forgot about themselves entirely when she passed by. They were terribly moved to see that the bed was largely unused, and that the child lay on only a small part of it in the center.
At first she was taken from one place to another by orderlies who arrived at all times, even in the middle of the night, as if her survival depended on how many rooms she visited and how many different people she encountered. These long and frequent journeys down hallways as clean as bone angered Hardesty and Virginia, until the journeys stopped, which angered them even more. She was now confined to her room, abandoned by most of the specialists and technicians, alone except for her parents, one or two nurses, and a young red-haired doctor, who cared for her, in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Abby would often wake up, and when she did they had the difficult task of lifting her halfway into their arms and holding her as if the forest of plastic tubing that tangled around them were not there.
Then there were the specialists, half a dozen of them—no, a dozen. They came highly recommended, and the names of physicians to trust flew about like parchments in a prayer wheel. Hardesty had so many slips of paper with the telephone numbers of doctors written on them that the long list he typed out to keep them in order took up an entire page. Each of the listed specialists was supposed to have been “the very very best.”
After only a week of being worn down by changing faces and guarded opinions, Hardesty guessed the worst. No one offered any hope. They simply referred him on, until the last man he consulted took pity on him and told him the truth.
There was no greater authority, for he was the chief of the chiefs of the most prestigious medical institution in the city. Friends of his had forwarded the records, he had studied them carefully, and visited Abby not once, but twice. He invited Hardesty to his office overlooking the East River because he knew that the majesty of the place, the painting of Lavoisier, the heavy furniture, the quiet, and the snow-covered gardens outside would make it easier for Hardesty to believe what he was going to be told.
“The best thing in the world,” the doctor said, “is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner.”
Of course, he needn’t have said anything else. Hardesty fought back tears.
“Make your daughter as comfortable as possible, save her from pain, and don’t let her know what is going to happen. You do have other children, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Hardesty answered.
The doctor nodded, and stared at him, smiling just slightly.
Hardesty blinked his eyes, breathed in, and went to the window. First he saw the gardens, covered in snow. Then, beyond them, the river. The wind blew across the ice, bringing with it the bellows and whistles of ferries and tugs trapped at their docks like hounds confined by deep snows. Though afternoon had not ended, lights came on along the riverside, and in Queens the thin skeins of smoke issuing from many chimneys betrayed many early fires. Perhaps nothing is as sad as dying light in a quiet city.
“MY MOTHER died when I was a child, and when my father died,” Hardesty said, staring at a light and persistent snow that descended past the window of Abby’s room, “I was too young to take care of him, even though I was a man. It wasn’t my place. I suppose I could have taken charge and made him rest more, or eat differently, or do whatever he had to do to prolong his years, but the months he might have gained would have been all wrong. He was my father, and I had no right to father him.
“I didn’t know what to do as I saw him getting weaker and weaker. I was paralyzed. But he took that as a good sign. He said, ‘You save your strength to care for your own children. That’s the best you can do for me. Only a fool would waste his energy on a man as old as I am, and I’m glad to see that you know enough to conserve your courage for when it’s really needed.’ He left me with the sense that I hadn’t failed him, and he taught me how to die properly.
“But, you see,” Hardesty said, in controlled rage, his face tightening with determination, “I can’t let this happen to Abby. It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s wrong. I don’t just mean that it’s unpleasant, or that I don’t want it. I mean that it’s wrong. It isn’t her time yet. She’s too young.”
When Virginia asked, “What can we do?” it was not entirely in rhetorical fashion. She was willing to believe that something could be done, and that it was their responsibility to do it. Everyone had cautioned them against this, saying that, afterward, they would never forgive themselves for imagining that intervention was in their power when it was not.
“But who says it isn’t?” Hardesty asked, remembering their words. “Surely, more miraculous things have occurred. We hear about entire armies that are resurrected, or saved by a closing sea. Pillars of fire arise in the desert, thun
der and lightning rage, and hills skip like rams to protect those who believe from fierce and vicious enemies.”
“Do you believe,” Virginia asked, “that a pillar of fire actually rose in the desert?”
“No,” Hardesty answered. “I don’t believe that. I believe that the account of the pillar of fire was merely a metaphor, but for something so much greater and more powerful than just a pillar of fire, that the image, for all its beauty, doesn’t even begin to do it justice.”
“Isn’t it vain to imagine that we can tap that same source by an act of will?”
“I don’t think so,” Hardesty said. He seemed to be piecing something together. “I think it would be vain to imagine that we could be favored without effort. As I understand it, miracles come to those who risk defeat in seeking them. They come to those who have exhausted themselves completely in a struggle to accomplish the impossible.
“I held back when my father died. He said it was my duty, and that I was right. His last wish was that I save myself for a battle I would not understand. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.’”